Hun-jae Choi

Hun-jae Choi (최훈재)

• Bats Left, Throws Left
• Height 5' 10", Weight 172 lb.
• School Dankook University
• High School Central High School

• Born January 21, 1967 in Seoul South Korea

BR register page

Biographical Information

Hun-jae Choi played for the South Korean national team (including in the Olympics) and played and coached in the Korea Baseball Organization.

Choi won Silver with South Korea in the 1986 Amateur World Series and was with them for the 1987 Intercontinental Cup. He won Bronze in the 1987 Asian Championship. He hit .273 for them in the 1988 Olympics, going 1 for 2 with their lone RBI in a semifinal loss to Japan and 0 for 3 in the finals.

The MBC Blue Dragons made him their second pick of the 1989 KBO draft. He hit .289/.376/.396 for MBC in 1989. The team became the LG Twins in 1990 and he batted .250/.386/.472 as a bench man (44 PA in 31 G). In 1991, he hit .240/.308/.465 with a team-high ten homers in 200 at-bats. He barely played the next year, though, going 0 for 7 with 3 strikeouts.

Back in semi-regular action (222 PA, 92 G) in 1993, he posted a .207/.285/.308 batting line. He had a career year (.324/.400/.500, 5 3B in 90 G) in 1994. Among players with 200+ AB that year, he was 3rd in the league in average, 3rd in OBP (behind Jong-beom Lee and Ki-tae Kim) and 3rd in slugging (behind Kim and Lee). He tied for third in triples, one off the pace. He fell to .221/.285/.352 in 1995 and .230/.329/.383 in 1996.

He was then traded with Hyun Cho to the Haitai Tigers for Bong-cheol Dong, Hyung-nam Choi and Yu-seok Song. He hit a career-best 12 homers, had a career-high 70 RBI and batted .292/.359/.469 in 1997. He missed the top-10 in RBI by two. Haitai went on to win the 1997 Korean Series (he had won the 1990 Korean Series and 1994 Korean Series with LG). He slipped to .264/.333/.377 in 1998. He was then dealt again, this time to the Doosan Bears.

With Doosan in 1999, he hit 24 doubles and batted .279/.344/.419. He struggled in 2000 (.191/.242/.322) and ended up with a .244/.338/.315 line in 2001. He had played 1,056 games in the KBO over 13 seasons, batting .260/.335/.403 with 327 runs and 368 RBI.

He then became a coach. He was Doosan's hitting coach from 2003-2010, a minor league coach for the NC Dinos (2012-2016), hitting coach for the Kt Wiz (2017), outfield and 1st base coach for the Wiz in 2018 and then a minor league coach for kt.