Matt Davidson of the NC Dinos celebrates after hitting a two-run home run against the Doosan Bears during a Korea Baseball Organization regular-season game at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul on June 19, 2024. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, Jun. 21 (Korea Bizwire) — Matt Davidson, first-year slugger for the NC Dinos, is leading the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) with 22 home runs this season through Thursday. Somehow, the process-oriented player isn’t entirely pleased with the state of his game.
“To be quite honest, I don’t feel like I’ve loved my swing all year for the most part,” Davidson told Yonhap News Agency on Thursday, before the Dinos played the Doosan Bears at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul. “So just trying to tinker with it and just kind of get it to where I want and I feel like I’m getting a little bit closer with it. And also, just seeing the league and seeing the pitchers a couple more times, I think helps for sure.”
Though Davidson himself may feel he has more to give, a lot of players would love to have his numbers now.
He has launched a KBO-best nine home runs in June, with three multihomer games. He is fourth overall with a .590 slugging percentage.
Davidson, who had 20-homer seasons with the Chicago White Sox in 2017 and 2018, said his KBO numbers, as gaudy as they may be, don’t mean much to him.
“Honestly, I never really think about that stuff. I try not to think about that at all,” Davidson said. “I try to focus on how my swing feels and mechanically how it’s looking and how it’s working. And then I know if it’s working well, I will have good results. So I try not to chase the results and I just try to focus on the process of that.”
Davidson has spent almost the entire season batting cleanup, with 277 of his 282 plate appearances having come from that spot. He has mostly hit behind three players who own the three highest lifetime batting averages among all active players with at least 3,000 plate appearances: leadoff man Park Min-woo (.320), No. 2 hitter Son Ah-seop (.321) and No. 3 Park Kun-woo (.328). Son became the KBO’s career leader with his 2,505th hit Thursday.
In this file photo from May 19, 2024, Matt Davidson of the NC Dinos hits a single against the Kia Tigers during a Korea Baseball Organization regular-season game at Changwon NC Park in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
“It’s awesome having those guys, watching them hit and then just seeing what they do with the pitchers,” Davidson said. “I’m very lucky to be able to play with them. I hope to learn from them. You definitely see the pitchers try to lock in and try to do their best against them. So you kind of see their best pitches, what they’re trying to do. That obviously helps me, too.”
Before joining the Dinos, Davidson logged 306 games in Major League Baseball (MLB), 242 of them with the White Sox. He spent the 2023 season with the Hiroshima Carp of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), where he had 19 home runs in 112 games along with a .210/.273/.425 line.
Those numbers aren’t exactly what you’d expect from a slugger with a couple of 20-homer campaigns in MLB on his resume. But Davidson said he still learned a lot from playing outside his native United States for the first time and he is applying those lessons to his first season in South Korea.
Davidson listed playing in a different time zone than the U.S. and facing the language barrier, something team interpreters can only do so much to help address, as challenges that come with playing overseas.
“I think it is difficult just in general playing overseas and doing it for the second time obviously helps being overseas,” he said. “I think last year, just going through that full season and experiencing it definitely helped me for this year, for sure.”
Matt Davidson of the NC Dinos celebrates after hitting a two-run home run against the Doosan Bears during a Korea Baseball Organization regular-season game at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul on June 19, 2024. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
Dealing with crafty NPB pitchers also helped Davidson find his footing early in the KBO.
“I think they’re definitely similar to Japanese pitchers,” Davidson said of South Korean pitchers here. “They use a lot of pitches. They throw a lot of offspeed (pitches) and throw balls all over the zone. In the States, it’s maybe two pitches, especially in the bullpen. Here, they might throw four or five pitches.”
Whatever challenges he has dealt with on and off the field in the new league and new country, Davidson has been putting up strong numbers. He is one of four players to have homered against every team this season.
He has 22 homers after playing in 64 of the Dinos’ 73 games. With 71 games remaining, he is on pace to top 40 home runs.
No Dinos player has reached that mark since Eric Thames tied for the KBO lead with 40 dingers in 2016. The year before that, Thames launched 47 homers en route to his MVP season.
“He was a legend over here,” Davidson said of Thames, his occasional opponent in the U.S. “He was awesome. That’s a good name to be after.”
(Yonhap)
