Overseas Leagues Start to Play Ball

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It will be a long way from home and it’s going to happen in the middle of the night, but baseball will take a noticeable step towards normalcy this week. Just after midnight on Tuesday morning the Korean Baseball Organization will take the field to begin their 2020 regular season and, with all due respect to Taiwan’s CPBL, they’ll become the most prominent sports organization to resume play.

Brewers fans may not be familiar with the KBO but they’re likely familiar with at least two of its exports: Eric Thames spent the 2014-16 seasons playing for the league’s NC Dinos before returning to MLB with the Brewers in 2017 and more recently Josh Lindblom won Korea’s version of the Cy Young Award for the Doosan Bears in 2019 before signing with the Brewers this winter.

Korean teams are allowed a maximum of three foreign-born players and their Opening Day rosters will feature a few players with Brewers ties:

• Infielder Tyler Saladino played for the Brewers in 2018 and 2019 and is perhaps best remembered for hitting grand slams in back-to-back games last July. He’s playing for the Samsung Lions this season.
• Pitcher Aaron Brooks spent parts of the 2017 and 2018 seasons with the Brewers’ AAA affiliate in Colorado Springs before making 29 MLB appearances with the A’s and Orioles in 2019. He’s pitching for the Kia Tigers in 2020.
• He’ll be joined on the Tigers by pitcher Drew Gagnon, who the Brewers drafted in the third round in 2011 and later traded to the Angels. Gagnon pitched in the majors in 2018 and 2019 with the Mets.

It remains to be seen if American fans will be able to watch KBO games on TV in the weeks ahead, but at least one Wisconsinite will be following the games closely: Stats Perform datacaster David Schultz has been covering the league from home for several years and will be back at his desk for Tuesday’s games. We caught up with him to talk about the start of a new season and some of the changes the KBO has made in light of global events.

KL: What are some of the new rules and procedures in place for the 2020 KBO season?

DS: I think the major one, and this something they adopted in the offseason that was not COVID-related, teams have always been allowed to have three “import” players but only two could play per game, which is why teams for the most part had two pitchers and one position player. Towards the end of last year the Samsung Lions picked up a second position player. What happened then, is when they used their import pitcher they would in effect be playing one man short, having to bench one of the import players and have them not even be eligible to pinch hit.

This year that limit is off: You can use your entire roster, all three import players. And the bullpens in KBO are, historically, not good. They’re overworked, and you’ve never seen an American or another import player used as a bullpen pitcher or closer. I think eventually they may adopt that, where they might want to make one of the pitchers more of a bullpen guy, since they can use both import pitchers and a position player in the same game.

They’ve also made some roster adjustments on the fly. They’re going to have 28-player rosters, with 26 players being active. And as far as their expanded rosters, they’ve pushed that up. It used to match MLB where on September 1 you could go to expanded rosters. This year they’re moving that up to mid-August, and I think that goes along with the fact that they’re going to be compacting the schedule. They still plan to get a 144-game schedule in. The original end of the schedule was October 18, but with KBO they don’t make up rainouts during the season, they extend the regular season. In the last four years there were over 40 rained out games to make up. Generally it takes about three weeks.

What they’ve decided to do with the postseason is, any postseason game played November 15 or later will all be played in the Gocheok Sky Dome, which is the only domed stadium. Up until that, and it can get a little chilly for some of those games, they’ll still play at the home fields. But November 15 and later they’ll all be played at the home of the Kiwoom Heroes. They’ll have homefield advantage but could also serve as the visiting team in their own ballpark.

KL: The KBO has a reputation for having a raucous environment, more like a college football game than an American MLB game. This year, however, they’ll start the season in empty stadiums. How different do you think it’s going to be?

DS: I’ve put some thought into that, and it’ll take some getting used to. I’ve really enjoyed the atmosphere. I sort of liken it to a soccer venue. There’s constant chanting and cheering. It will be an adjustment. It’s going to be like watching spring training games decades ago, before those became popular and there were very minimal fans. But there won’t be the interaction.

They’re very loyal fans in Korea, too. They stay to the end of the game, no matter the situation. So I know that, in some of the articles I’ve read the players have talked about how different it is not to have that atmosphere, but I think once you get into the game as a player, it’s just the game and they carry on.

KL: One of the big stories last season in the KBO was a change in the baseball that led to a significantly dampened offensive environment. Have you seen anything this spring to suggest that change is permanent, or might offense resume to its 2018 levels again this year?

DS: The only thing I really have to go off of is the scores of the games, and they’ve been pretty normal, for lack of a better term. I know there was a game on the last day of preseason games that ended 15-13. But otherwise the scores have seemed fairly normal to me. There’s not many double-digit scores at all.

It was interesting how everywhere else it seemed like the ball was juiced up but Korea actually scaled it back. I kind of think they were pretty happy with how the season went last year. Pitching staffs, as I mentioned earlier the bullpens have really taken a lot of heat for not being all that good. With the scores going down the perception was that maybe the pitching was a little better than it has been in the past.

So I haven’t noticed anything in the cursory look I’ve been given, and I haven’t read anything about it one way or the other. We’ll just have to see what happens the first few weeks of the year.

KL: So if Brewers fans and American baseball fans in general get an opportunity to watch KBO games sometime in the next few weeks, who are some of the players or teams they should watch out for?

DS: As far as import players go, the one that’s most recognizable will be Tyler Saladino, who will be playing for the Samsung Lions. So that’s a name that would at least be familiar to Brewers fans. There’s also ByungHo Park, who played for the Twins, he’s with the Kieboom Heroes. My favorite player is the right fielder for the Lotte Giants, Ah-Seop Son. I just really like watching him play. There’s a left-handed pitcher for Kia, Hyeon-Jong Yang, he’s one of my favorite pitchers. (Former MLB manager) Matt Williams signed a three-year deal to manage the Kia Tigers, so again that’s a name that’s out there and recognizable.

If you’re looking for unpredictability KT Wiz is a team that’s all over the place, and the Hanwha Eagles are another team that for the most part is kind of exciting to watch. Not necessarily as a really good team, either KT or Hanwha, but they’re very entertaining. They play higher scoring games and you never know what to expect.

But one thing I want to caution people about, if they do get an opportunity to watch games, is to give the league a chance. It’s not on a level with Major League Baseball, the strategy is different, it’s a lot of bunting at some points. You’ll see baserunning mistakes, teams giving up outs on the basepaths. But give it a chance. It’s entertaining. Baseball is baseball, and some of the best baseball I’ve seen in my lifetime are games at the (NCAA Division 3) World Series in Appleton, and some outstanding semi-pro games. So don’t expect too much out of KBO, just sit back and accept and appreciate that it’s live baseball.