Last week, a radical plan to save the Major League Baseball season was floated.
What if all 30 major league teams returned to their spring training facilities in Florida and Arizona? There they could play other teams training nearby, without fans in the stands but with stripped-down broadcast crews beaming the action into our splendid isolation. We'd throw out the traditional American and National League structure, re-organizing the teams into the Grapefruit (Florida) and Cactus (Arizona) Leagues. An abbreviated season could start in mid-May.
Seems hard to imagine, but it's also hard to imagine we will be allowed to pack together in stadiums anytime soon. Or to think that the leagues will want to kick back television revenues to the ESPNs and Fox Sports of the world, who, in turn, would have to find some way to make good with those corporations who have bought blocks of advertising. So if they have to establish an athletic ghetto to get games on TV, it's conceivable that they will.
In the meantime, I don't know why no one has snatched up the North American broadcast rights to one of the Asian baseball leagues, like Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), or the Taiwan-based Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL), which opened its season last weekend.
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You might have heard about the CPBL because, although no fans are being allowed into the stands, the league's defending champs, the Rakuten Monkeys, are putting 500 mannequins dressed in team colors in the stands, some of which are automated robots. (500 is a significant number in Taiwan because, as the island recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, public gatherings are limited to that number.)
You can watch the CPBL games if you're willing to do a little research. The best place to start for English speakers is at the league's website cpblstats.com/online-stream/, which is constantly being updated. This site is in English and offers links to the English version of several other helpful sites, including one that provides an English guide on how to sign up for a $35 annual subscription to CPBL TV, a paid service that offers access to all live and many archived games on demand.
As anyone who pays even casual attention to the annual Little League World Series might expect, the quality of baseball in the CPBL is pretty high, although the league isn't on a par with Japan's NPB or the (South) Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). Part of this might be due to the fact that Taiwan is a country of 23 million people, only slightly more than live in the state of Florida, and the economic structure of the league (with no unrestricted free agency for players; one-year contracts that favor team ownership are the norm) leads most of the leagues' best players to eventually leave for better-paying leagues in Japan, Korea, Canada and the United States. (No former CPBL player has yet made it to Major League Baseball, but several players have signed with teams and are in MLB farm systems.)
Still, the level of play is roughly equivalent to our A or AA minor leagues — the players are generally fundamentally sound, though the pitching and defense is markedly inferior to MLB levels. A typical Arkansas Travelers team would dominate this league, but on any given day one of these teams could step up and beat an MLB franchise. (Sometimes college teams beat world champions in meaningless exhibition games. In April 2009, the Manatee Community College Lancers baseball team beat the minor league Pittsburgh Pirates 6-4 in an annual game played for charity. A couple of years ago, Jeff Sullivan of the FanGraphs blog wrote an interesting piece about the phenomenon. You can read it here: blogs.fangraphs.com/when-college-teams-face-the-pros/.)
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A slightly better brand of baseball will be available when the Korean Baseball Organization, the highest professional baseball league in South Korea, belatedly opens for business. Currently, it's planning to have opening day on Tuesday. (The league was originally supposed to start on March 28, and there is still some uncertainty that the games will start on time because while South Korea seemingly had the coronavirus contained, there's been a slight increase in cases recently.) Right now, KBO teams are playing intrasquad games, which are allegedly being streamed live online, although I couldn't find them. Allegedly you can access the games through Naver, a South Korean online platform that you can download as IOS or Android app.
I downloaded the Naver app and — because it's a Korean app meant for Koreans and written in Korean — I couldn't make any sense out of it. But apparently it's a web portal with its own search engine and through it, you can stream KBO games free and legally. Or, you can go to the individual KBO teams' YouTube pages and find archived games there.
My favorite KBO franchise is the Kiwoom Heroes, who you can find at www.youtube.com/channel/UC_MA8-XEaVmvyayPzG66IKg.
The Heroes history stretches all the way to 2008 when they joined the KBO as an expansion team. Their mascot is Teokdori, or "Mr. Jaw," who, with his gunmetal blue complexion and Jay Leno chin, looks like a Spectreman villain. (I understand Spectreman was a Japanese tokusatsu, and that the differences between Japanese culture and Korean culture are probably at least as pronounced as those between U.S. culture and Canadian culture. Teokdori looks creepy.)
But Teokdori is a good guy — gallant, even. A few years back, the K-Pop sensation Subin threw out the first pitch at a game between the Heroes and the LG Twins. Lefty-swinging Teokdori stood in the batter box as she wound up because I guess they have the mascot stand in the batter's box when a celebrity throws out a ceremonial first pitch in Korea. Subin uncorked a pitch that bounced behind Teokdori, then aggressively rushed toward the plate demanding a hug from the mascot. Who refused, on the grounds that he was a gentleman and she was only 18 years old.
(One way in which Korean culture is different from Japanese culture is that, when it comes to public displays of affection, Korea is much more modest. While Japanese TV shows routinely air sexually explicit and violent scenes, most South Korean TV programs self-censor, rarely showing anything that would be given anything harsher than a PG rating here. This makes South Korean TV programs popular in a lot of third-world countries where the government polices what their citizens can see — the Korean programs are basically pre-censored. On the other hand, South Korea's genre-bending cinema produces some of the most interesting movies in the world. See Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, which in February became the first non-English-language movie to win a Best Motion Picture of the Year Academy Award. It also won the Best International Feature Film.)
Anyway, though Teokdori rebuffed Subin's advances and turned to head off the field, she would not be denied. She chased after him and gave him what the media uniformly described as a "deep kiss." Later Subin posted about the incident on her social media: I met someone very honorable for the first time in the 18 years I've been alive. Nice to meet you. My first kiss. Chin-dol??? So shy??
How sweet.
Meanwhile, the Phillie Phanatic is suing to become a free agent.
The Heroes have never won a championship, but last year they went all the way to the Korean Series, where they were swept by the Doosan Bears who, with six Korean Series titles to their credit — three in the past five years — have been the dominant KBO franchise. But the Heroes have one of the league's best pitchers in former Atlanta Brave Jake Brigham, and one of the league's best shortstops in 24-year-old Kim Ha-seong. Plus they added former Rays/Mariners/Twins infielder Taylor Motter in the off-season.
Since KBO teams can have only three foreign players on their roster, Motter effectively replaces former Dodger/Rays/Indians/White Sox outfielder Jerry Sands, who was one of the best players in the KBO in 2019, the only one in the league to hit .300 with 20 home runs, 100 RBIs and 100 runs scored. (The other foreign import on the roster is former Cub Eric Jokisch, the team's No. 2 starter behind Brigham.) The Heroes also have one of the most beloved players in the KBO in Byung-ho Park, who won the league's Most Valuable Player award with the team in 2012 and 2013. Park spent the 2016 season with the Minnesota Twins but re-signed with the Heroes after the 2017 season. Last year, the 33-year-old hit .280, with 33 home runs and 98 RBIs.
While the KBO certainly isn't the same caliber as MLB (and it's probably a step behind Japan's NPB, to whose Hanshin Tigers Sands defected), it is an exciting, offensive-minded brand of baseball, with plenty of home runs and bat flips. (The league is famous for its bat flips. See youtube.com/watch?v=DKQskUmD_eY) If you are nostalgic for baseball as it was played during MLB's infamous "steroid era," then the KBO is for you.
Maybe the best introduction to the wonderful weirdness that is the KBO is the 2013 film Mr. Go (available for streaming on Amazon Prime). It's a South Korean-Chinese co-production, the first South Korean film to be shot in 3D, about a 15-year-old girl born into a circus family whose only friend is a 45-year-old gorilla named Ling-Ling. When the girl's grandfather dies, leaving the circus in catastrophic debt, Ling-Ling becomes a designated hitter for the Doosan Bears in the Korea Baseball Organization. As you might imagine, he becomes a sensation.
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While Japan's NP is considered the second-best professional baseball league in the world, it looks like it will be a while before it gets underway again. Originally scheduled to open play on March 20, the league re-scheduled to an April 24 start date. But on April 1, three players on the Hanshin Tigers tested positive for covid-19 despite having been quarantined, with the team taking the temperatures of all players, staff and media that they permitted in their facility.
Then, on April 7, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a national state of emergency. Now, the earliest possible start date for the league is late May, and it has been reported that some NPB executives don't expect the league to start before late June. Maybe after MLB has started.
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The CPBL, KBO and NPB are still not MLB.
Neither is Strat-O-Matic's first-ever daily simulation of what might have been the 2020 MLB season, but those of us who are missing box scores and stats might take solace in the project. The Strat-o-Matic simulation, which is based on the venerable (they've been around since 1961) tabletop game's individual player cards which seek to assign values to the player's offensive and defensive abilities, is playing out the 2020 season as though the virus never happened and spitting out intricately detailed daily results as well as anecdotal descriptions of the games.
And, until the board game version, the computer simulation updates player values daily. You can follow the progress of the mythic 2020 season at strat-o-matic.com/2020-season-simulation/. The site is updated daily at 1 p.m. CDT.
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Style on 04/19/2020