◀ Anchor ▶

Does anyone remember this play?

It’s the frog bunt from the Korea-Japan game 41 years ago.

At the Under-18 Baseball World Cup, Korea’s players pulled off another spectacular frog bunt to win a thrilling come-from-behind victory.

Park Jae-woong is the reporter.메이저사이트

◀ Report ▶

It’s the bottom of the sixth inning, tied 1-1 with Mexico.

With one out, Cho Hyun-min is up to bat on third base. One pitch, two pitches, three pitches.

He lets them all go by.

Then, on the 4th pitch, he suddenly gets his bat short and leaps up to bunt, bringing home the runner from third.

An unexpected and fantastic “frog bunt”.

The ball was well out of the strike zone, but Hyun-min managed to get the bunt down and score the game-winning run to win the game 2:1.

[Lee Young-bok/U18 National Baseball Team Head Coach]
“You have to bunt it, even if it flies, you have to bunt it. If we don’t bunt, we don’t score. I trusted Cho Hyun-min 100 percent in that situation.”

The scene summoned the original Frogbunt, 41 years ago.

Trailing Japan 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth inning, Kim Jae-bak’s bunt surprised everyone and tied the game at 2-2, and Han Dae-hwa’s subsequent game-winning home run created a classic moment in Korean baseball history.

[Lee Young-bok/U18 National Baseball Team Manager]
“I thought the same thing, that everyone here was bunting like Kim Jae-bak, but my kid bunted better (compared to Kim Jae-bak’s bunt at the time), haha.”

Lee Yong-kyu in the 2009 Korean Series.

In 2019, Yong-kyu’s surprise squeeze bunt was the talk of high school baseball in Japan.

After a first-round loss to Chinese Taipei, the team won three straight games to advance to the Super Round.

MBC News’ Park Jae-woong.