‘0.205→July 0.375’ Jose Salin’s ‘Receiving Magic’: The National Hitters Knew…
“I know you had a dedicated coach while living abroad during your active career….”
The Doosan Bears recently invited Lee Young-soo, formerly of the Futures, to accompany the first team. While helping the first-team squad with batting practice, the coach focused on one player in particular: foreign hitter Jose Rojas.
Rojas was Doosan’s biggest problem at the start of the season, batting 2-for-5 until he was removed from the roster on April 11. It was a slight improvement after a 1.1 percent batting average in the month of April.
He had 10 home runs, but his inaccurate hitting didn’t help his team much. He was sent to the Futures League to rebuild.
The coach took on the “Rojas Revival Project” in the Futures League. After returning to the first team, Rojas didn’t show any significant changes. “We’ll see what happens in the first half,” Lee said. It was patience and a virtual ultimatum.
Lee joined the first team, and in July, Rojas began to change. He became Rojas’s full-time coach. In July, Rojas was clearly different. In his first eight games in July, Rojas showed a more refined approach, batting 3-for-7 with five RBIs. It was the kind of steady hit production Doosan was looking for.
It was Lee’s experience as an active player that led him to hire the coach. After the 2003 season, Lee tried his hand at Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), where he played until 2011.
When Lee was struggling in the NPB, Kim Sung-geun and Kim Ki-tae were his coaches at the time.
Upon the Rojas’ resurgence, Lee said without hesitation, “I got better when Coach Lee Young-soo took over.”
The coach looked for the cause in ‘psychology’ rather than technique. “I know that the coach was living abroad when he was playing and was helped by a dedicated coach. I think that’s why he asked me to take on that role.”
“Baseball players are human beings, after all. A lot of people look at technique as the problem with an underperforming player, but personally, I think it’s a psychological issue. “When Rojas came down to Icheon, and when I came up to his room, I could tell that he was psychologically shaken. I came up and we talked for 20 minutes. We talked about a lot of things, like, ‘How big of a deal is it for the rest of your life that you can’t hit right now. There are a lot of things in life that are harder than baseball. If you get through the day healthy, it means you have a chance to try again. Thankfully, I think it came across well.”메이저사이트
Rojas was equally grateful to the coach. “Since Australia and Icheon, we’ve been talking a lot about the mental part more than the technical part,” Rojas said. “In the end, I think my technique was shaky because of the mental part, but Coach Lee has been talking a lot about that and giving me a lot of confidence, so it’s helping.” “I feel like I have a lot of balance and I can see the ball well, so I hope to keep it up and contribute a lot to the team,” Rojas said.