LG Twins end 29 years of hurt with Korean Series win

The LG Twins celebrate after beating the KT Wiz in Game 5 to win the 2023 Korean Series 4-1 at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul on Monday. [NEWS1]

Twenty-nine years of waiting ended on Monday night as the LG Twins beat the KT Wiz to claim the Korean Series title at home in southern Seoul.

The long, long road to victory for the Twins culminated in a quick 6-2 win for the Seoul club, capitalizing on a good third and fifth inning and a strong performance on the mound to shut down the Wiz and take their fourth straight win in Game 5 of the seven-game series.

Twins’ ace Casey Kelly gave up one run in five innings of work, allowing his club to take an insurmountable lead to lock in the final game for the Korean Series title.

Twins captain Oh Ji-hwan was named Korean Series MVP with three home runs and eight RBIs. Oh became the first player ever to homer in three straight Korean Series games earlier in the series.

The Twins started the Korean Series off on the wrong foot, losing the opener 3-2 on home turf at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul. They bounced back in the second game, winning 5-4, and then took that momentum on the road to beat the Wiz 8-7 in Suwon on Friday before a big 15-4 blowout win on Saturday.

Monday’s win snaps the second-longest run without a championship title in the history of the KBO. The Twins had not earned the championship title since they defeated the Pacific Dolphins — later the Hyundai Unicorns and now nothing but history — in 1994, enduring the second-longest drought of all the teams in the KBO.

A sellout crowd of 23,750 fans attended the game at Jamsil on Monday as temperatures dropped close to zero degrees Celsius. The parties are likely to be in full swing across Seoul tonight, with the busy workday tomorrow unlikely to be much of a deterrent for LG’s committed fanbase.

The Twins are one of the five remaining teams that founded the KBO back in 1982, although at the time they were owned by broadcaster MBC and played as the MBC Chungryong.

Alongside the OB Bears (now the Doosan Bears), the Haitai Tigers (now the Kia Tigers), the Lotte Giants, the Samsung Lions and the now-defunct Sammi Superstars, the Twins were there from the very birth of the KBO — although they finished third in that opening season.

Over the years, the Twins have seen little success when it comes to silverware.

Although they saw some results when the KBO played with different formats — in 1983 they won the second half split and in 2000 they topped the Magic League, one of two four-team leagues at the time — the Twins have only actually topped a full-length, all-team KBO table twice, in 1990 and 1994.

On both occasions, the Twins went on to win the Korean Series title as well, adding the championship to the pennant for the only four major trophies the club has ever won.

Since 1994, the club has increasingly found itself playing second fiddle to the Bears, a rival that Twins fans still see as a usurper to the Seoul baseball crown.

While the Twins were founded in Seoul in 1982, the Bears started their life down in Daejeon, moving to the capital in 1985 and eventually joining the Twins at Jamsil Baseball Stadium a year later in 1986, the two teams sharing a home ever since.

The Kiwoom Heroes, the third Seoul team, was not founded until 2008, leaving the Twins as the original Seoul club — even if a lot of people that aren’t LG fans have already forgotten the fact.

But despite LG’s pedigree, it was the Bears that shone. Since that 1994 Twins pennant, the Bears have topped the table four times and taken the Korean Series title five times, missing out on the playoffs just three times between 2004 and 2021.

This year the Twins have reclaimed their title as the real kings of Seoul, taking both the pennant and the Korean Series trophies back to Jamsil — and this time on the Twins side of the stadium.

BY JIM BULLEY [jim.bulley@joongang.co.kr]