1 postseason spot up for grabs as KBO regular season winds down

As the regular season in South Korean baseball heads toward the finish line, just one postseason spot is still up for grabs, with two rival clubs trying to earn a bye to a playoff round.

In the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), the top five teams at the end of each regular season advance to the postseason. The pennant winner earns a bye to the Korean Series, and for this year, it will be the KT Wiz, who secured the best record in the regular season Monday with four games to spare.

The Samsung Lions are locked into the second spot, which will give them a bye to the best-of-five second round.

A loss to the LG Twins on Wednesday meant the Doosan Bears will finish in fifth place, as their slim hope of climbing further up the standings evaporated. The Bears will be the visiting team in the wild card round starting next Wednesday.

This leaves the Twins and the Kia Tigers fighting for the No. 3 seed and a bye to the best-of-five first round.

The team that finishes in fourth place will be the host of the wild card round, where it will only need a win or a tie in two attempts to advance. The Bears, though, must win two straight games to move on to the next phase. A No. 5 seed has won a wild card round just once since that phase was added to the postseason in 2015.

The Tigers, at 76-62-2 (wins-losses-ties), have four games left. After a day off Thursday, the Tigers will visit the NC Dinos in the southeastern city of Changwon on Friday and then will close out the season with three straight games at their home in the southwestern city of Gwangju against three different opponents -- the SSG Landers on Saturday, the Lotte Giants on Sunday and the Twins on Monday.

The Tigers have lost 11 of their 15 meetings against the Dinos this season, but have a winning record against the three other foes coming up, including an 8-7-0 mark against the Twins. The Tigers swept the Twins in their three-game series in Seoul from last Saturday to Monday.

The Twins will visit the Giants for two games in the southeastern city of Busan on Friday and Saturday. And then the meeting against the Tigers on Monday will be their final game of the season. The Twins have gone 8-6-0 against the Giants this year.

Depending on how their earlier games play out, that Monday showdown in Gwangju will have massive postseason implications.

The Twins are just emerging from an eight-game losing streak, while the Tigers have won four of their past five games.

The difference between finishing third and fourth is significant, because the KBO's postseason structure inherently favors teams with better regular-season records,

The third seed will have four days off between the end of their regular season and the start of the first round in the postseason, which will allow the team to set its starting rotation so that its ace will be ready to pitch in Game 1. The fourth seed, though, will only have one day of break before the wild card round, and it will have to burn its best starter for that game.

And if the fourth-ranked team needs two wild card games to fend off the fifth-ranked opponent, then it will only have one day off before the start of the next postseason round and will not have the services of its two best starting pitchers until Game 3 at the earliest.