The Hanwha Eagles have gone back to being their old selves in the Korea Baseball Organization, and it's not a good thing, if you know the recent history of this club.

The Eagles have lost five straight games to drop to 2-11 in the young season, easily the worst record in the 10-team league. They lost the first two games of the season in extra innings and had a four-game slide earlier this month before dropping five in a row over the past week.

To their faithful, the Eagles' woes early this season serve as a painful reminder of some awful seasons of the recent past. They posted the KBO's worst record in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2014, winning more than 50 games just once out of those four seasons.

This year, only four games separate the first-place Doosan Bears and the ninth-place Kia Tigers. The Eagles are sitting 7.5 games back of the Bears.

Their counting stats have been predictably dismal. No team has scored fewer runs (47) and given up more runs (103) in 2016. They've allowed 10 or more runs in three games already, including the back-to-back losses to the Bears and the LG Twins last week by 17-2 and then 18-2, respectively.

The Eagles opened the season with some key pitchers on the mend, including No. 1 starter Esmil Rogers, who experienced some elbow issues in spring and isn't expected back until May.

Those who have been in the rotation have failed to fill the void. As a team, the Eagles have a 7.00 ERA, and the mark jumps to 9.00 when you look at the first three innings alone. And their starters collectively have an 8.86 ERA.

It has forced the hand of manager Kim Sung-keun. He is infamous for his impatience with starting pitchers anyway, but to his credit, he hasn't had much of a choice as his starters have been spotting the opponents an average of three earned runs per game over the first three innings.

Kim has taken out his starter before the fifth inning in nine out of 11 games this season.

Starters' struggles have naturally put a burden on the bullpen, which has posted the league-worst 5.91 ERA.

Their offense hasn't been much better, with a league-low .212 batting average with runners in scoring position. They have hit just five home runs, while league-leader Luis Jimenez of the Twins has five all by himself.

That 17-2 loss to the Bears last Thursday was a low point of the season for the Eagles.

The Eagles were touched for 13 runs over the first three innings, and then in the sixth inning, Kim, their 73-year-old manager, went AWOL.

Umpires only discovered Kim's absence at the start of the seventh, and Kim had failed to designate his replacement before he disappeared. It wasn't quite the Houdini act -- the club later explained that Kim had gone to a nearby hospital to get treated for dizziness and general sickness.

Managing a baseball team -- especially a team playing as poorly as the Eagles -- is surely a stressful job, but even loyal fans of the club expressed their displeasure with the timing of Kim's sudden departure from the game.

The Eagles were down 16-2 at the time. The team's second pitcher, Song Chang-sik, had been left out on the mound while giving up 12 runs -- two unearned -- on nine hits and four home runs in 4 1/3 innings. The right-hander threw 90 pitches.

Leaving Song in to absorb the beating was a curious decision by Kim, who often uses multiple relievers to get through just a couple of innings in blowouts.

Fans speculated that Kim was mercilessly punishing Song, but the manager was defiant in the face of such criticism, saying he wanted Song to "get his feel back" and he'd ordered the pitcher to stay in the game until the fifth regardless of the score.

To shake things up in the dugout, Kim went the old KBO route of swapping his first-team coaches with minor league instructors. Their pitching coach from Japan, Seiji Kobayashi, was assigned to the minors on Wednesday, but he resigned instead.

Kim had cited "communication problems" when he demoted Kobayashi, and the outgoing coach reportedly complained about how the team was being run.

Over his managerial career spanning three decades, Kim has been a polarizing figure. He's notorious for running hard practices and sending even seasoned veterans into the batting cage for extra sessions after games. He runs his relievers into the ground -- last year, Kwon Hyuk and Park Jung-jin were first and second among relievers with 112 innings and 96 innings pitched, respectively.

Kim's "win-at-all cost" mantra and "my way or the highway" philosophy may be just fine when his team is winning, and Kim did win championships with the SK Wyverns in 2007, 2008 and 2010 running the team much the same way. Yet in a season like this, Kim comes across as a heartless leader with little regard for the well-being of his players.

Kim is also known as a control freak of sort who has the final say in all player signings and transactions. It has created a situation where coaches like Kobayashi constantly have to look over their shoulders for their authoritarian boss.

Kim was hired before the 2015 season to restore respectability for the once-proud franchise. The Eagles were in playoff position in fifth place at 44-40 at the All-Star break, but they had the league's worst record in the second half at 24-36, slowed in part by the heavily taxed bullpen.

They're off to a much worst start in 2016. Winning can solve or at least mask a lot of the problems, and Kim said he can actually see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Aside from Rogers, the Eagles are also waiting on right-handed starters Lee Tae-yang, Shim Soo-chang and Ahn Young-myung to return soon from offseason injuries.

"Once these pitchers return, then I'll actually be able to do some managing with the rotation, and that's a positive sign," Kim told reporters last Friday. "We had more wiggle room with the rotation last season, but this year, we can barely find someone who can make a start."

Kim said Lee, who had elbow surgery last April, threw a solid bullpen session last week, and Shim acquitted himself well in a minor league rehab appearance, throwing three shutout innings last Friday.

"Our goal was to win 10 games in April, but we're behind the pace," the manager added. "But there's still time to turn things around. (Yonhap)