Kim Tae-kyun

This article is about baseball player Kim Tae-kyun. For other people, see Kim Tae-gyun .

Korean spelling
Hangeul	김태균
Hanja	金泰 均
Revised Romanization	Gim Tae-gyun
McCune- Reischauer	Kim T'aekyun
See also : Korean name

Kim Tae-kyun (2010)

Kim Tae-kyun (born May 29, 1982 in Cheonan , Chungcheongnam-do ) is a South Korean baseball player on the position of first baseman . From 2001 to 2009 he played for the Hanwha Eagles in the South Korean League , then from 2010 to 2011 for the Chiba Lotte Marines in the Japanese Pacific League . With the national team he won the bronze medal in 2006 and the silver medal in 2009 at the World Baseball Classic (WBC), in which he was also nominated for the All-WBC team in 2009.

Kim attended Bugil High School in Cheonan's Dongnam-gu and was a member of the South Korean team at the IBAF U18 World Junior Championship in Canada in 2000 . In the 2001 draft , he joined the Hanhwa Eagles in the first round, where he had 88 appearances in his 2001 rookie season: with a batting average of .335, an on-base percentage of .436 and a slugging percentage of .649 Kim was named Sininwang , the league's Rookie of the Year . With almost 100 appearances per season, he was then part of the core line-up of the Eagles and regularly hit with averages above or just below .300. As a fielder, he received the Golden Glove twice as first baseman , in 2005 and 2008 . In 2008, when he led the league with 31 home runs , he finished third in the MVP vote .

After the 2009 season, Kim became a free agent and the league gave the Chiba Lotte Marines permission to negotiate a move to the Japanese league. He signed a two-year contract (with club option) for 150 million yen annually . In his first season with the Marines, he had 141 missions (in 144 games in total) in the regular season and then reached with his team the 2010 championship series , which ended with a 4-2 victory over the Chūnichi Dragons. During the 2011 season, Kim returned to Korea in June for treatment for a back injury; in July he announced after only 31 season deployments that he wanted to leave the Marines in 2011 and is free agent in the Korean league again in the 2011 offseason.

In the Japanese league he was registered with his full name as 金泰 均 , but his Latin jersey label in the Marines was only his first name as TAEKYUN . He wears the shirt number 52, which he wore during his career with the Eagles.

Kim is, as he publicly announced in 2010, engaged to Kim Seok-ryu, a baseball presenter from cable broadcaster KBS N Sports.

Web links

• Nippon Puro Yakyū / Nippon Professional Baseball: player profile (Japanese)
• Chiba Lotte Marines : player profile

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wyverns' Kim Wins MVP. In: The Korea Times . June 11, 2008, accessed October 27, 2010 . 
2. ↑ Marines, Korean slugger reach deal. In: The Japan Times . November 14, 2009, accessed October 27, 2010 . 
3. ↑ Slugger Kim has high hopes for 2010. In: The Japan Times . January 6, 2010, accessed October 27, 2010 . 
4. ↑ ロ ッ テ の 金泰 均 、 今季 限 り で 退 団 へ . (No longer available online.) In: MSN / Sankei News. July 28, 2011, archived from the original on July 28, 2011 ; Retrieved November 17, 2011 (Japanese). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Kim, Marines to go separate ways. In: The Japan Times . July 28, 2011, accessed November 17, 2011 . 
6. ↑ Record-high free agents to enliven winter. In: The Korea Times . November 9, 2011, accessed November 17, 2011 . 
7. ↑ Korean slugger Kim Tae-kyun to marry. In: The Korea Times . March 8, 2010, accessed October 27, 2010 . 

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Kim is the family name here, Tae-kyun is the first name.