Daejeon: Few, if any, of the 16,470 fans packing Daejeon Hanwha Life Ballpark on Saturday would have seen this coming: Hanwha Eagles ace Cody Ponce getting knocked around early and often. Ponce labored through six innings and gave up his season-worst six runs on seven hits, including a home run, but his Eagles hung on to defeat the Samsung Lions 9-8 in Game 1 of the second-round series in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) postseason.
According to Yonhap News Agency, Ponce, the Triple Crown winner as the KBO leader in wins, ERA, and strikeouts, had blanked the Lions in his only regular-season meeting against them in the summer, but it was a much different story come playoff time. Looking back on his start Sunday in Daejeon, Ponce defiantly said he hadn’t pitched poorly. “I think I made a lot of great pitches. They just made better swings on those pitches,” he said. “I think that I performed as best as I could last night. I think that Samsung did very well with hitting and they had a great approach and they made good hits on good pitches and that’s all I can kind of tip my hat to.”
Ponce said he will be ready if he has another chance to face the Lions. “It was only my second time facing them this year,” he said. “So moving forward, if I do have another opportunity to pitch against them, I think I’ll have a little bit more information.” As things stand, Ponce will only take on the Lions again this year if this best-of-five series goes the distance. In that case, Game 5 will be back in Daejeon on Friday. The winner of this series will advance to the Korean Series.
“I don’t really have a preference. I do want to win this series,” Ponce said. “So whether that’s me going pitching whatever game it comes down to would be great. But as long as we win this series and move on to the Korean Series, I think that’s our main goal.”
During Saturday’s game, Ponce also had a tense moment with Lions slugger Koo Ja-wook in the box in the top of the third. With Ponce taking his time on the mound before delivering his pitch, Koo called multiple timeouts and stepped out of the box. Even though there was time left on the pitch clock, umpires asked Ponce to speed things up. “I was just using the pitch clock to my advantage because that’s in my right,” Ponce said. “So I just try to use a bunch of time because I’m playing the game within the game. According to the rules, the pitch clock is supposed to be used to make sure that I can make any pitch that I want in the allotted amount of time.”