NC is waiting for the opening of the 2023 season with many changes.
One of the most noisy teams during Stove League was NC. Seven players, including ‘Maximum Fish’ Yang Eui-ji, declared free agency (FA) qualifications. After missing Yang Eui-ji, who worked the most, Noh Jin-hyuk also said goodbye to the team. Since the main players have left, there is no choice but to change the team color.
In the meantime, NC has not yet finished the composition of foreign players. The biggest variable is the failure to renew the contract with Drew Luchinski. Luchinski strongly expressed his intention to enter the major leagues and eventually re-entered the big leagues by agreeing with Oakland for 8 million dollars (approximately 10.3 billion won) for 1+1 years.
NC, who brought in Jason Martin, who hit 54 home runs in Triple A as a new foreign hitter, raised expectations by bringing in Eric Peddie, who played an active role as the fifth starter for the 2019 team that Washington won the World Series, as a new foreign pitcher. The foreign pitcher who will work with Peddy has not yet been decided. While 9 out of 10 clubs have completed the formation of foreigners, NC is carefully trying to fill the remaining vacancy until the new year.
NC’s foreign selection system was once one of the team’s pride. We recruited players based on detailed data, and most of them were successful. 안전놀이터
There were many success stories, especially in pitchers. Eric Hacker played for one team for five seasons from the first year of entering NC’s first team and played an active role as a long-lived outsider of the team. In the 2018 season, he succeeded in ‘re-employing’ as a substitute foreign pitcher for Nexen (now Kiwoom). Zach Stewart, who was brought in as a substitute foreign pitcher in 2015, also recorded 8 wins and 2 losses with an average ERA of 2.68 that year, and the following year, he played an active role in winning 12 wins and once again raised his faith in NC’s foreign selection system.
Luczynski was also one of the foreign pitchers following the success story. In the 2019 season, the first year of his debut in the KBO League, Luchinski failed to win 10 games with a 3.05 ERA of 9-9, but he succeeded in renewing his contract by raising his detailed record. And in the 2020 season, the team won the regular season with a 19-5 loss average ERA of 3.05, as well as the bullpen in the Korean Series, and contributed to winning the series with 2 wins and 1 save and an average ERA of 0.69 in 3 games.
Starting in the 2020 season, Luchinski served as a pillar of the starting lineup, posting double-digit multipliers for three consecutive seasons. For this reason, it is emerging as one of the big concerns about who NC will bring in the other foreign pitcher. Peddie also boasts a brilliant career, but the new ‘one-two punch’ to the rest of the foreign pitchers must meet expectations so that NC’s starting lineup can quickly stabilize. Who will come as the last foreign player in the KBO League?