Those craving live baseball can soon get a fix.
ESPN announced Monday an agreement with Eclat Media Group to televise six live Korean Baseball Organization games per week. KBO Opening Day [was] Tuesday and ESPN [began] its telecasts then, with a midnight game between the NC Dinos and Samsung Lions.
Former Astros outfielder Preston Tucker is among the handful of American-born players set to start his season. Tucker’s Kia Tigers will play at 4:30 a.m. Friday against the Samsung Lions on ESPN. KBO games will not have fans.
ESPN’s deal includes the KBO postseason and best-of-seven championship series. ESPN’s familiar crew of broadcasters and analysts — Jon Sciambi, Karl Ravech, Eduardo Perez, Jessica Mendoza and Kyle Peterson — will call the games remotely from their home offices.
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In an interview last month, Tucker detailed the many steps taken by the KBO to get its season back. Tucker must take his temperature in the morning, at night and before he enters the ballpark. Any player or staff member with an elevated temperature is not allowed to enter the facility.
The KBO issued new regulations and guidelines that included a ban on spitting and cautioned against high-fiving or handshakes. Tucker said players have been advised not to go to malls or movie theaters, but are permitted to go out to dinner or take walks around their home city.
“If you’re on the field, they’ve checked you out 100 percent that you’re at least not sick and not running a fever,” Tucker said. “If you make it into the stadium, they’ve pretty much cleared you if you’re healthy.”
FanGraphs has the first week’s schedule and a bunch of links to acquaint yourself with the league. The times are not great for an American audience, but that’s why God gave us DVRs. You’ll want to check out My KBO and its Twitter feed for English-language stats, history, highlights and more. The one thing my wife and I didn’t get to do that I wanted to do when we were in Seoul about 20 years ago was see a baseball game there. (We did get to see a game in Tokyo on that same trip, which was a phenomenal experience.) It’s been a wish list item for me for awhile now. I’ll probably tune into some games on ESPN, which among other things will help me see how weird this experience will be without a live crowd, since that will probably be what we get when one of the crazy plans being floated gets adopted.
I should note that the KBO is not the only game going on – the Chinese Professional Baseball League, from Taiwan, is also playing games. There are no English language broadcasts of the CPBL that I am aware of, but they will soon have live fans at the games. I’m glad for them, and also super jealous. I’m so ready for baseball here as well.