The Kang Jeong-ho School was one of the hottest topics this past offseason.
Jung-ho Kang garnered a lot of attention when he resurrected NC Dinos Son Asup in 2023.
After a disastrous first year in free agency, Son looked to Kang for a breakthrough, and he had a spectacular resurgence, leading the league in batting average (3-for-3) and hits (187) and winning the Golden Glove as the designated hitter. Son has publicly thanked Kang several times, and Kang himself has turned around his languishing baseball career by studying and explaining the hitting form of Korea's top hitters on YouTube.
This led to a huge success last winter, when several KBO players visited his academy in Los Angeles to learn from him. In addition to Son Asub and Lee Dae-ho of the Lotte Giants, Han Dong-hee and Jeong-hoon of the Lotte Giants, Kim Jae-hwan of the Doosan Bears, Hwang Jae-gyun of the KT Wiz, and Park Se-hyuk of the NC, among others, received coaching from Kang Jeong-ho.
This year, however, 스포츠토토 the results have been less than stellar. Looking at the players' performances through April, it's hard to see anyone who has clearly improved from the previous season.
Son As-seob, the team's leading hitter, is struggling with a batting average of 2.770 with a 0.645 OPS (on-base percentage + slugging percentage). Han Dong-hee, whose “million-dollar swing” was praised by Kang Jeong-ho, suffered a obliques injury shortly before the start of the season and was dropped from the first team after batting 1-for-6 (3-for-18).
Hwang Jae-gyun is also facing a career-low with a .582 OPS in 2-for-5 at the plate. Park Se-hyuk has been backing up the starting catcher Kim Hyung-joon and is posting a similar OPS to last year (0.654 to 0.662) in 40 at-bats.
Jung-hoon has been the anchor of Lotte's batting order, improving his batting average from last season (2.779 to 2.949), but his OPS has dropped (0.796 to 0.763) as both his on-base percentage and slugging percentage have dropped. “There was a point where Kang Jung-ho told me to fix it, but I said I would just hit it as it is,” Jung-hoon said.
Kim Jae-hwan was the only other player to rebound. His batting average isn't great at 2.4-for-3, but he's been hitting seven home runs in a month and has a 4.8-for-7 on-base percentage, showing his strengths.
Until now, Kang's main content on YouTube has been analyzing players and meeting with major leaguers. His videos with Kim Ha-seong and Choi Ji-man have been a hit, with over 200,000 views, and his analysis of Han Dong-hee's batting form has over 400,000 views.
Kang Jeong-ho has also shared the training process of the players who visited the academy as well as talk show content with them on his YouTube channel. Other players who have visited the academy include Lee Dae-ho (over 400,000 views), Kim Jae-hwan (over 200,000 views), and Hwang Jae-gyun (over 200,000 views).
Kang Jeong-ho was once one of South Korea's leading major leaguers. He was the first Korean hitter to go straight from the KBO to the major leagues, and in 2016, while playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he hit 21 home runs with an OPS of 0.867, sparking the so-called Choo Gang Dae-Yeop controversy (meaning that the best Korean hitters of all time are Choo Shin-Soo, Kang Jeong-Ho, Lee Dae-Ho, and Lee Seung-Yeop).
However, his popularity plummeted in the winter of 2016 when it was revealed that he had been banned from leaving the United States for a third time for drunk driving. As is the case with most drunk drivers, his luck ran out. He tried to make a comeback in Korea through the Kiwoom Heroes in 2020 and 2022, but public opinion prevented him from doing so, so he naturally retired.
He then began his baseball coaching career in the United States, but for a while, he was an unmentionable name in the Korean baseball world. But with the resurgence and rave reviews of Son, a veteran of the league and a man synonymous with consistency, his name began to circulate again, and he was instantly recognized as a superstar coach.
And the season only ended in April. Most of the players who have been coached by Kang are experienced veterans. Most of them saw him as their hope and breakthrough after a long slump. Will the Kang Jeong-ho craze be a one-off, or will his name echo in the year-end awards ceremonies once again?
