Lee Yong-kyu and the Art of Making a Pitcher Throw One More

2025-12-26

How a batter takes control of the pace
The at-bats fans called Yong-gyu nori

Lee Yong-kyu spent much of his career near the top of a batting order, where his speed and ability to get on base were easy to appreciate. A different quality shows up when you watch him foul off a pitch with two strikes, then do it again. You can see one batter change the work a pitcher has to do in an inning.

Korean fans call it Yong-gyu nori, roughly “the Yong-kyu game.” The name belongs to a recognizable sequence: the pitcher throws a pitch that could end the at-bat, Lee keeps the ball foul, and the count stays where it is for another round.

The work of a leadoff hitter

Lee was a leadoff hitter rather than a home-run threat. An early plate appearance could give him a chance to get aboard and the rest of the lineup a chance to see what the opposing pitcher was working with that day.

He could let a ball go, spoil a borderline strike and force a pitcher to try another pitch. It is easy to wonder, a few fouls in, why he would keep going like that. One answer is that all the waiting and effort add up for the person on the mound.

Lee could make a plate appearance a longer problem for the opposing team even when he did not reach base.

What happens after two strikes

With two strikes, a routine foul keeps the batter alive. Lee’s short swings could put a difficult pitch out of play. The object was to earn one more delivery.

As the at-bat gets longer, the pitcher may have to show another part of the repertoire. Teammates have more to look at before their own turns. A long exchange can also bring a reliever into the game sooner than the other team had planned.

That is the joke in calling it a game. The same small event keeps repeating, and each repetition has a consequence. Once fans knew what to look for, they could spot it even in an at-bat that stopped well short of a record.

The 20-pitch at-bat

One meeting in Gwangju put a number on what fans had been seeing.

On August 29, 2010, the KIA Tigers’ Lee faced Nexen Heroes reliever Park Jun-su, later known as Park Seung-min, in the bottom of the eighth. The plate appearance went 20 pitches and ended with a flyout.

The result in the box score was an out. The sequence before it set a KBO record at the time for pitches to one batter, surpassing the previous mark of 17.

Lee had other unusually long at-bats, including a 17-pitch encounter with Yang Hyeon-jong in 2015. Repetition is what made this part of a batting style, even if a twenty-pitch exchange takes two people and some unusual circumstances to produce.

What an out can leave behind

An out still costs the batting team a chance to score. A long at-bat can leave something useful behind even when that is how it ends. The other hitters have had more time to see the pitches, and the pitcher has had to throw all of them.

How much that matters depends on the inning and the game. In a close one, the extra work can bring a decision about the bullpen closer.

The box score gives you the out. A full replay also lets you see the repeated decisions that led to it.

Two long at-bats in the majors

Major League Baseball has a few famous exchanges like this one.

On May 12, 2004, the Dodgers’ Alex Cora took the Cubs’ Matt Clement to eighteen pitches and ended the at-bat with a home run.

In 2018, San Francisco’s Brandon Belt faced twenty-one pitches from Jaime Barría of the Angels in the first inning before flying out. That set the major-league mark for the pitch-count era.

The box score gives those two plate appearances very different outcomes. The persistence is the part they share.

Why the name stuck

Yong-gyu nori gave fans a way to talk about what a plate appearance can do apart from producing a hit. They could watch the pitcher and the lineup as well as the batter.

Lee’s longer at-bats could be awkward to watch. There was no clean break in the action, only another chance to see what the pitcher tried next. Once fans gave the sequence a name, the wait itself became a reason to pay attention.

One more pitch

The appeal is easiest to see one pitch at a time. Every foul buys another attempt and asks the pitcher to find another way to end it.

The player who can keep a plate appearance going is doing work a team can use, even when he walks back to the dugout empty-handed.

Once you have seen twenty pitches end in a flyout, it is hard to watch another two-strike foul quite the same way.

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