How the ball stayed in the park

KBO remains fish in the puddle

Shane Youman

Kim Tae-kyun

By Jung Min-ho

Coming off its greatest season ever in attendance, the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) has so far found 2013 to be a letdown. It took 255 games to break the 4 million mark in ticket sales last year, but nearly a 100 more games this year.

The growth of the domestic league in past years had been fueled by Korea's impressive showing in international events like the Olympics and World Baseball Classics (WBCs), which convinced fans they were paying to watch a world-class product. So Korea's listless exit in the recent WBC in March subdued the excitement for the new KBO season to a certain extent.

It could also be said that some of the damage to the league's attractiveness has been self-inflicted. Its teams and players continue to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.

There were players suspended for drunk-driving, umpires demoted for blown calls, a player dumping water on an on-field reporter and facing the wrath of Twitterverse. And of course there was Kim Tae-kyun, the beefy Hanwha Eagles slugger and one of the most high-profile players of the league, making racist remarks about Lotte Giants' African-American pitcher Shane Youman.

While these incidents pretty much sum up the first-half of the season, it's also obvious that the league will probably recover from these errors, if it hasn't already. But some problems go deeper, including the league's mighty struggle to present a globalized product.

The international interest in the games and the players has never been greater since the KBO's founding in 1981, with ubiquitous Internet connectivity blurring geographical boundaries and the number of foreign residents increasing as Korea becomes more integrated in global business.

However, the KBO has been woefully ill-prepared to embrace the new era. Basic information on game data and ticket purchases aren't provided in English. The league doesn't even have an English website. And in its reaction to Kim's brain-dead comments on Youman, the league exposed itself as clueless in handling the issues of racism and cultural differences, although foreign players have been playing here for more than a decade.

The international fans of Korean professional baseball aren't hesitating to express their frustrations over the KBO's ineptitude.

Comedic lack of English policy

Since the KBO doesn't have an English website, American fan Dan Kurtz took the liberty of making one himself.

"MyKBO.net started out as a simple message board back in 2003. During my time working and living in Korea, I had found that there was not a lot of information about the KBO in English," he told The Korea Times.

"Now, 10 years later, there's still not a lot of information in English about the KBO."

He said there is an increasing demand for information about the KBO and other Korean sports leagues from overseas.

"The foreign player signings in the KBO have seemed to become a bit higher profile over the past decade, thus making fans of those players look for information about them while playing in Korea," Kurtz said.

"The success of the Korean national team on international stages such as WBC or the Olympics has also led to an increased curiosity about the players and the KBO."

Kurtz states the obvious when he says the KBO is doing a disservice to its fans outside of Korea who aren't fluent with the Korean language.

"While this lack of information in English about the league has helped my site attract visitors, I would like to see the KBO recognize that there are baseball fans, who may not speak/read Korean but want to know more about the league, in Korea and all over the world."

Ted Smith, who calls himself an "Unofficial Away-Game Cheermaster" from Canada, agrees, saying that the KBO is "doing nothing" to address the growing interest in Korean baseball from overseas.

"Many of my friends back stateside are constantly asking me questions about the league and the quality of the play," Smith said.

"The KBO is missing an enormous opportunity. Foreigners, both in Korea and outside of Korea, not only represent a financial opportunity in terms of ticket sales, television revenue, and merchandizing; but also to sell Korean talent to major league teams."

He believes that, in the KBO, there are plenty of players who are capable of playing overseas as the quality of competition and the depth of the talent pool have improved significantly in recent years.

"But they are being overlooked because there is not enough information on them available to Major League Baseball scouts. The KBO needs money to grow and the best (or at least fastest) way to get that is to globalize the league."

Of course, the most frustrated foreigners are those who actually live in Korea.

"The number one complaint I hear from foreigners who want to see Korean baseball is that they don't know how to buy tickets. Most teams don't sell tickets on their website (Lotte is the one exception) and sites like ticketlink don't have foreign language options," Smith said.

"If you don't speak Korean or don't have a Korean friend to help you, it's almost impossible for foreigners to reserve tickets online. Also, these websites require a social insurance number so foreigners living outside of Korea can't use them."

Ignorance on racism

When the Eagles' Kim commented to journalists that it was hard to hit balls thrown by Youman because "his teeth were so white and skin was so black," it brought forth an issue KBO had no idea how to handle.

After Giants fans filed a petition to the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK), the commission demanded the KBO prevent the recurrence of such incidents in the future.

It is unclear if the KBO took any action to fulfill the request, not even having players sit through some 30-minute lectures. The league didn't have a policy to govern the conduct of coaches and players regarding race and cultural issues, and even after the Kim-Youman incident, still does not have one.

"I was very disappointed in Kim when I heard about that. But I was more disappointed in the league and teams' reaction to the issue," Smith said.

"In any other professional league, he (Kim) would have been (at least) fined and suspended."

"Change isn't change until you change," said cultural consultant Avery Atkinson from the United States.

Atkinson said there should be a systematic change in the KBO to handle the racism issue, which has already affected the sports leagues in other countries.

"There is no place for ‘one-blood' thinking in sports. Professional competition, like baseball was brought into this country; as was English, pop culture, movies and several other facets of western life that Koreans as a whole enjoy and benefit from," she said. "Still, mimicking the outside world without embracing its frame of thinking can backfire."

It is not just players. Foreign fans claim they have also experienced a sense of racial ignorance from the KBO.

Krystal Hampton, an English teacher from the United States, found it very odd to end up sitting with other foreigners, every time she visits a stadium in Gwangju to watch sports.

"Whenever there is a special event where tickets are given, the event worker put me in a certain area by the number on the ticket. And we always, despite what method we got our tickets, even individually, end up sitting with big groups of other foreigners," Hampton said.

"We are also given zoom-in shots from cameras showing what our facial expressions look like on the big screen. This is really embarrassing."

She said the "special treatment" for foreigners can be taken as racism.

"For sporting events in America, they aren't the same. Regular people, who are not celebrities, sit in seats mixed with everyone else. There isn't any separation between the races," Hampton said.

"The big screen always zooms in on our area. It does make us feel nervous and different."

A lack of awareness of racism is the most serious problem itself.

"I don't think Kim Tae-Kyun is a bad person. He was probably just trying to be funny, but it wasn't funny to Youman and he needs to understand why," Smith said.

He said that is not just a domestic issue, either.

"This story has now made its way over to the United States, and people see that Kim made these remarks and was not punished for them," he said.

"And now people gain the impression that racism is something that's widely accepted in Korea. Do Koreans really want to have that reputation among people abroad? The league has to take a stronger stance against this."

With a new team poised to join the league in 2015 and the declining ticket sales, the KBO is going through a critical stage.

The KBO surely can improve but only by showing its will to improve, because clearly, the problem is there's not a shortage of things to do.

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