LG and KIA meet for a third straight day at LG's home park, and LG lost both of the first two in the ninth inning: tied 4-4 in the first game, they gave up one; up 5-3 going into the top of the ninth in the second, they gave up three. Put that next to the SSG series just before it, where LG carried a 3-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth and lost 4-3, and three of LG's five straight defeats have been decided in the final inning. With the two clubs separated by a single point of win percentage for third place, .548 against .547 on our table, the opening innings of this one may tell you surprisingly little.
Why third matters: on our standings feed, third goes straight to the semi-playoff while fourth is tagged for the wild-card round, with Doosan sitting fifth at .526. So the stakes cut both ways. KIA can put real distance between themselves and the wild-card game, and LG can still flip it.
What I find interesting is that LG's problem hasn't been getting into games. In those five losses they scored 1, 3, 5, 4 and 5, and in the two home games against KIA they were out-hit by just one each time (9 to 10, then 7 to 8). The runs that beat them came in late clusters: KIA's three in the ninth, SSG's four in the ninth. KIA, for their part, came into this series off three straight home defeats to KT and turned it around with two one-run wins, so it's their late offence that has been working here, not some broad upswing in form.
The piece I can't see from our data is bullpen usage. I don't have pitching lines for these games, so I can't say which LG relievers were on the mound in those ninths or how much they've thrown across three days in a row. That's what I'd check before this one starts. If the same late arms are going again, the ninth-inning pattern has a mechanical reason behind it; if LG hand the end of the game to someone fresh, it's just a pattern, and three late collapses don't make a fourth certain.
One more caution about reading the losing run as a verdict: LG's season run differential is +1 against KIA's +89, yet LG have one more win. Over 138 games they've been winning the close ones; this past week they've been losing them. Close games swing both ways, which is exactly why I'd watch the late innings here rather than the streak.
