Kwak Bin, the ace of South Korea's national baseball team, threw 111 pitches in the final against Japan to lead the country to its fifth consecutive Asian Games title. The outing also erased the frustration of the Hangzhou Games three years ago, when a back muscle strain kept him off the mound for the entire tournament.
Kwak allowed one run on four hits and two walks while striking out nine over 6⅓ innings against Japan in the baseball final of the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, held on the 27th at Toyohashi Municipal Baseball Stadium in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. South Korea beat Japan 3-1, extending its streak of Asian Games baseball titles to five, dating back to the 2010 Guangzhou Games.
Kwak overpowered Japanese batters from the opening innings with a fastball that approached 155 kilometers per hour at its peak. After escaping a two-out, runner-on-second jam in the bottom of the first without damage, he struck out three straight batters in the second while holding a 1-0 lead. His ability to work out of trouble showed again in the fifth. He gave up a double to leadoff batter Shohei Mizutani but retired the next three batters to avoid a run.
He did not allow his first run until the seventh, by which point his pitch count was nearing 100. With one out and a runner on first, he gave up a hit to Mizutani, followed by a run-scoring single to left by Yuki Sato that tied the game at 1-1. Kwak then handed the ball to Cho Byeong-hyeon. His 111 pitches were just two short of his season high of 113 in the KBO League this year.
After Kwak left the mound, South Korea scored two runs in the eighth to decide the game. His performance — more than six innings that kept Japan from adding runs — set the stage for the late rally.
Kwak fully lived up to his role as the team's ace at this tournament. In the opening group-stage game against Taiwan on the 21st, he threw six no-hit innings with two walks and 10 strikeouts, giving up no runs behind a fastball that topped out at 157 kilometers per hour, as South Korea won 5-0.
It was the opposite of his experience at the Hangzhou Asian Games three years earlier. Kwak developed a back muscle strain ahead of the first group-stage game then and never took the mound during the tournament. He received a gold medal when South Korea won the title but was left with the regret of never having played.
This season he has grown into one of the KBO League's premier starting pitchers. In 26 games he went 11-7 with a 2.26 earned run average and 186 strikeouts, leading the league in both ERA and strikeouts. National team manager Ryu Ji-hyun selected Kwak as a wild card and handed him the demanding assignments of starting against Taiwan and in the final against Japan — a decision that made him the central figure in the fifth straight Asian Games title.
