Doosan Bears extend winning streak to club record 11 games

The Doosan Bears beat the Lotte Giants 8-5 at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul on Tuesday, extended their winning streak to a new club record 11 games.

From left: Yang Eui-ji, Kim Jae-hwan and Heo Kyoung-min celebrate after Kim hit a two-run home run in a game against the Lotte Giants at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul on Tuesday. The Bears beat the Giants 8-5 to extend the team's winning streak to a club record 11 games. [YONHAP]

The Doosan Bears beat the Lotte Giants 8-5 at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul on Tuesday, extended their winning streak to a new club record 11 games.

Doosan made short work of the Giants, hammering in four runs in the third for an early lead, adding a pair in the fifth and singles in the sixth and seventh to cement their leads. The Giants attempted to rebound in the late innings, but could only get five runs across.

Doosan’s Kim Jae-hwan hammered in a two-run homer in the third inning to kick off the offensive, with Yang Suk-hwan adding another solo big fly in the seventh to round off the onslaught.

With the win, the Bears extended their winning streak to 11 games for the first time since the team was founded in 1982.

The Bears, one of the KBO’s founding clubs, have managed a 10-game winning streak twice, in 2000 and 2018, but have previously always fallen in the 11th game. Despite a lot of changes in recent years, the lineup at the heart of Tuesday’s win was still filled with a lot of familiar faces.

Outfielders Kim and Jung Soo-bin, infielder Heo Kyoung-min and catcher Yang Eui-ji were all core members of the Bears starting lineup that dominated the KBO in the middle of the last decade, including during that 10-game run in 2018. Yang left the team the following season but returned this year as the Bears partially rebuilt a very familiar lineup.

But while the roster may look fairly familiar to Doosan fans, the big change is in the dugout.

Doosan Bears players spray manager Lee Seung-yuop, left, and captain Heo Kyoung-min with water after beating the Lotte Giants 8-5 at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul on Tuesday to extend the team's winning streak to a club record 11 games. [NEWS1]

Doosan new manager Lee Seung-yuop to lead the Bears this season, a controversial appointment at the time due to his lack of managerial experience and his close ties to rivals the Samsung Lions, where Lee spent this entire playing career.

But Lee, the KBO’s greatest-ever home run hitter, has so far proven the critics very wrong, leading the Bears from a ninth-place finish last season to sit in a comfortable third place with a record-breaking winning streak and still time to break into the top two.

In fact, things have changed so much that on Tuesday night when the dust settled on Doosan’s 11th-straight win, it wasn’t Kim, Jung, Heo or Yang’s name that the Doosan crowd — it was one-time enemy Lee “the Lion King” Seung-yuop.

“I realized it was 11 straight wins while I was congratulating the players,” Lee said after the game. “It feels good. It has been less than a year since I took over as manager. I’m not good enough yet, but I’ll get better little by little as time goes on.”

As of press time Wednesday, Doosan were set to face the Giants again that evening and again on Thursday. To top off an exciting weak, the Bears will then take on rivals and league leaders the LG Twins as the Jamsil Derby returns over the weekend.

With the Twins currently riding a four-game losing streak as of press time, the weekend series could be a chance for Doosan to upset the standings even more.

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