When a professional baseball player from another country makes the jump to Major League Baseball, fans in his home country take notice. In Baltimore, we saw this with Wei-Yin Chen seemingly having a small contingent of Taiwanese fans at every one of his starts, and now, with Hyun Soo Kim coming over from South Korea, it’s happening again.
Orioles games, or at least some of them, are even broadcast in Korea with Korean announcers commentating over the MASN video feed. And when Kim does something good - which for a guy who has an .889 OPS and seems to be an on-base machine, is often - that gives the broadcasters a chance to get hype.
In the fourth inning of Tuesday’s game, Kim launched his second home run of the season, showing the power stroke that helped him hit 28 home runs in Korea last year. Korean announcers were calling the game, and well, they got hype:
For my #Orioles fans: here's a Korean broadcast call of Hyun-Soo Kim's home run. These things are fun #MLB pic.twitter.com/keGPN0ZTbI
— Sung Min Kim (@sung_minkim) June 29, 2016
No idea what they’re saying here, but “Kim Hyun Soo!” and the level of excitement require no translation. May they have many more Kim home runs to call over this season and beyond.