Ex-KBO MVP heating up after adjusting to new strike zone

Here’s bad news for pitchers across the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO). Mel Rojas Jr., an MVP-winning slugger for the KT Wiz, is heating up with the calendar about to flip to May.

Rojas Jr. drove in a season-best four runs to help the Wiz past the Doosan Bears 8-3 at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul on Wednesday. The switch hitter slapped a two-run single from the right side in the first inning and then smoked a two-run homer from the left side in the seventh inning.

“I didn’t know that. I wasn’t really thinking about that,” Rojas Jr. said with a smile afterward. “I was just focused on doing my job.”

The job is to put up big offensive numbers, and few have been as productive as Rojas Jr. in recent seasons.

After winning the regular-season MVP here in 2020, Rojas Jr. spent the following three seasons overseas before returning to South Korea for 2024. He put together yet another MVP-worthy season, with 32 home runs, 112 RBIs and a .329/.421/.568 line while playing all 144 games.

But the 34-year-old got off to a slow start in 2025, collecting just three hits in his first 27 at-bats with zero homers.

Rojas Jr. admitted he had trouble with the new strike zone under the automated ball-strike (ABS) system. The KBO lowered the zone for this season without making changes to the size, but Rojas Jr. said he felt the zone had become tighter horizontally, too.

That the zone seems to be different in every stadium hasn’t helped the matter.

“I go out there to get a pitch that I can hit for a home run or a double. I don’t focus on just trying to put the ball in play,” he told Yonhap News Agency. “I feel like I have a good recognition of the zone. So when they call pitches that are not in my zone and that I know are not strikes, it affects me mentally because I lose my aggressiveness.”

In recent games, though, Rojas Jr. has proved those early woes are well behind him. He closed out April batting .400 with 10 RBIs in his final seven games.

He is still batting just .261 after 31 games, but he raised his average by 150 points in April.

“I feel like I’m more aggressive now,” he said. “If it’s a strike I can hit hard, then I’ll try to.”