Cho Sung-min
South Korean baseball player (1973–2013)
Cho Sung-min (Korean: 조성민; April 5, 1973 – January 6, 2013) was a South Korean professional baseball player with the Yomiuri Giants of Japan and the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO League. He also received media attention for his much-publicized marriage and divorce from actress Choi Jin-sil.
Career
Cho Sung-min dominated the baseball amateur league in the 1990s, and with his attractive looks and top-class pitching skills, he had many female fans in Korea and Japan. He pitched for the South Korea national baseball team in the 1994 Asian Games, when South Korea finished with a silver medal.
Cho joined Japan's Yomiuri Giants in 1996, and his best years as a pro-baseball player were 1997-1998 when he was named an All-Star pitcher for the Central League after racking up a record of seven wins, six losses and a 2.75 ERA in the first half of the 1998 season.
But after peaking his career soon went downhill, with a prolonged slump due to ankle and elbow injuries. He left the Yomiuri Giants in 2002.
He returned to the Korean baseball league in 2005 to play for the Hanwha Eagles until October 2007, but instead of making an impressive comeback, he had to leave the team in 2007 with a disappointing performance.
He briefly worked as a TV commentator, before joining the Doosan Bears in 2011 as a coach of one of their minor league teams. He refused to extend his contract with the club in November 2012 when his term ended.
The public source identifies “Cho Sung-min” as south Korean baseball player (1973–2013). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sung-min, South and Korean.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Cho Sung-min”, the useful work is to connect “south Korean baseball player (1973–2013)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q626073. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 2013, 1994 and 1996.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cho Sung-min” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.