When people think back to the 2001 World Series, many remember this scene: a game-tying home run with two outs in the ninth, and a pitcher collapsing on the mound. The man at the center of that moment was BK, Byung-hyun Kim. That year, he was the closer for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He took responsibility for finishing games in both the Division Series and the Championship Series, helping Arizona reach the World Series. In Games 4 and 5, he gave up two home runs. The series went all the way to Game 7, and in the end, the team won the championship. Kim became the first Korean player to appear in the World Series and experience winning it.
Byung-hyun Kim made his professional debut at twenty. At twenty-two, he was entrusted with the ninth inning of the World Series. His pitches, rising sharply from a low release point, felt unfamiliar to hitters. That unfamiliarity was his weapon.
BK sitting down on the mound after recording a blown save
A personality that stood out even more in the conservative culture of Korean baseball
Although Kim was an exceptional talent, the trait that made him even more famous in Korea was his “bad boy” image. In 2003, while playing for the Boston Red Sox, he was heavily booed by home fans and responded by raising his middle finger toward the stands, instantly causing controversy. He later apologized publicly. MLB media at the time also criticized the act as “unprofessional.” Still, after the apology and the club’s disciplinary action, the issue did not grow further there.
In Korea, however, the image lingered strongly. Even now, it is still remembered as the “beop-gyu incident.” The nickname grew out of the similar sound between the English swear expression and the Korean word beop-gyu meaning “regulation,” along with the trivial fact that he had studied law. It eventually became one of Kim’s best-known nicknames.
In one entertainment program, Byung-hyun Kim revealed the World Series ring he had found at home
His choices after retirement, and an extension of his MLB experience
After retiring, Byung-hyun Kim entered the food business. It began with a sushi restaurant in San Diego. Later, he opened “Gwangju Jeil Hambaego” in Gwangju. His decision to focus on hamburgers goes back to his playing days. He said that when he visited Boston in 1995 for the World Youth Baseball Championship, he walked into a Burger King for the first time. That experience became one of the sparks, and he has said that the food culture he encountered while living in the United States also shaped his business ideas.
The idea of opening a restaurant inside a baseball stadium was something he had carried with him since his days with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He explained that he was inspired by Gonzo’s Grill at Chase Field. Seeing a stadium restaurant named after a player made him want to open a burger shop inside a ballpark using the name of his alma mater, Gwangju Jeil High School. His stores later opened in places such as Gocheok Sky Dome and Changwon NC Park, and at one point expanded to five branches, though only the main location is currently operating.
Later, he adjusted both the menu and the direction of the business. He now runs Metz Hannam, a German-style sausage restaurant in Hannam-dong, Seoul. To make sausages, he learned the process from a sausage meister in Korea. Afterward, he participated in a sausage competition held in Germany. The sausages he made received awards from the German Butchers’ Association.
He said, “Baseball was my world, and I poured all my passion into it. After retirement, there was an emptiness. So I started working in food service, and now I am pouring my passion into that work.” Even after retirement, he has continued baseball in another way.
He won six gold medals at a sausage competition in Germany
Past that era, now in a place where he talks about MLB
Recently, he has been appearing on the MLB Korea talk show Meritalk. The program was created to introduce Major League Baseball to Korean baseball fans. Joining him are Johnny of the K-pop group NCT, Dustin Nippert, former Arizona and Texas pitcher, and Sun-woo Kim, who played for Montreal and Washington.
Although it is an entertainment program, it also covers how former MLB players adapted to the minor leagues and the major leagues, as well as the cultural differences they experienced.
Byung-hyun Kim moved to the United States at twenty. At the time, he was only the third Korean player ever to reach Major League Baseball. There was also very little environment for receiving advice on adapting to life and competition in another country. Looking back on his MLB days on Meritalk, he says this:
“MLB is not a system where someone takes care of you. If you set a goal, you have to fight for it yourself until the end. But rather than trying to force quick results, it is more important to adapt to the system first. English matters as much as baseball. You also should not isolate yourself, and it is important not to compare yourself with others.”
His advice mentions adaptation before baseball skills. It is the perspective he gained from experiencing the major leagues at a young age. Now, drawing on that experience, he shares entertaining stories that help Korean fans understand and enjoy Major League Baseball more deeply.
The talk show “Meritalk,” where K-pop stars and baseball figures introduce MLB together, has been receiving a positive response from a wide range of viewers.
In many sports, the journey doesn’t end when you win your national championship. Continental, or sometimes even intercontinental glory beckons for the strongest and most ambitious teams. Look at the success of the UEFA Champions League, the Copa Libertadores, and the other continental trophies in club football. Look at EuroLeague basketball, which is far more prestigious than any domestic league in Europe. The idea of competing against teams from outside your own league is an appealing one. There is both excitement in reaching an even higher level of competition and also a novelty in playing new opponents. High level baseball leagues have largely never embraced this idea, with the most notable exception being the Caribbean Series for top winter league teams, but even that is somewhat of an all-star series when you dig into the roster rules and circumstances surrounding winter league ball. The Caribbean Series is awesome, but I don’t think it is quite the same thing as a “Champions League” type tournament between full-length season national champions. The WBSC has recently organized an Americas Champions League and found minimal success so far. There has basically been one honest effort at a “Champions League” style tournament as we generally understand the idea, and so I would like to look back at the now-defunct Asia Series.
The first Asia Series was in 2005, but the lineage can actually be traced back a decade earlier, to a 1995 tournament sometimes known in English as the “Asia Pacific Super Baseball Championship” or the Asian Pacific Cup. This was a tournament hosted by the Daiei Hawks, who came in 5th place in the Pacific League that year. They invited teams from Taiwan, Korea, and Australia to participate in a two-day single elimination tournament. The Hawks were upset in the first round by the Uni-President Lions (CPBL) and wound up in 3rd place. The Hanwha Eagles (KBO) defeated the Australian League All-Stars in the other first round game. The Lions would go on to win the title, though only a few Lions fans seem to remember or care these days. This tournament received limited media coverage at the time and is largely forgotten today, but it is worth mentioning as an early foray into continental competition.
A decade later, baseball executives decided to try the idea again in a more official capacity. The Asia Series was created for the 2005 season with Konami announced as the title sponsor, making the official name of the competition the Konami Cup Asia Series. The Chiba Lotte Marines, the tournament favorites, won all of their games without too much difficulty and capped it off with a 5-3 victory over the Samsung Lions in the final. The event, hosted at the Tokyo Dome, produced mixed crowds. When the Marines were playing, fans showed up, including over 37,000 people at the final. When the other teams were playing, attendance was paltry. Only 6,340 were on hand for the decisive group game between the Sinon Bulls and Samsung Lions that would determine who advanced to the championship.
In 2006, with the tournament once again at the Tokyo Dome, attendance dropped sharply as NPB was represented by Hokkaido rather than the more locally based Chiba. This edition saw the favorites threatened for the first time, with Taiwan’s La New Bears losing to Hokkaido by just one run in both the group stage and in the final. And in 2007, the breakthrough was finally made when the KBO’s SK Wyverns beat the Chunichi Dragons in the group stage, handing NPB its first loss in the Asia Series. Chunichi would go on to get revenge over the Wyverns in the final, 6-5. Attendance remained closer to 2006 levels rather than the heights of 2005.
While these tournaments produced some good games, there was also an inherent problem with this format. Though there was a vast gulf in talent between the three premier Asian leagues, they were still all stocked with professional players and the weaker teams were still capable of competing with the stronger ones over a short tournament like this. The same cannot be said for the China Stars, who were a representative all-star team from the Chinese Baseball League. The CBL was not a professional league and was of such inferior quality to the other three leagues that even an all-star team proved completely uncompetitive; the China Stars played nine games in these three years and lost all nine, mostly by very large margins. In 2008 the CBL sent the champion Tianjin Lions rather than an all-star team, and the Lions also went 0-3.
2008 marked a big turning point for the competition. Evidently unhappy with how things were going, title sponsor Konami ended their partnership with the tournament, leaving the name as just the Asia Series. Other sponsors followed suit. And perhaps most importantly, in Japan the tournament was moved off of terrestrial television to satellite channels with a much smaller reach. The competition had never been on the firmest financial ground, but now it found itself in an untenable situation. Amidst further declining attendance despite the presence of the Saitama Seibu Lions, the tournament produced some gripping baseball including a nailbiter final in which Seibu walked off the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions in the 9th for a 1-0 victory. And so despite the 2008 edition ending on a high note, the tournament’s future looked bleak.
In 2009, due to lack of funding and willing sponsors, the Asia Series was cancelled. The general understanding around the industry seems to have been that this was a temporary cancellation rather than a permanent one, and there was clearly still some appetite for the idea. That year administrators organized the NPB-KBO Club Championship, a single game winner-take-all replacement for the Asia Series to be held in Nagasaki. A half-filled stadium watched the Yomiuri Giants beat the Kia Tigers 9-4.
In 2010, though there were originally plans to revive the Asia Series in Taiwan, this idea was shelved due to a conflict with the 2010 Asian Games. But the interleague clashes continued. This time the KBO Champion SK Wyverns tied a two-game series 1-1 with the CPBL’s Brother Elephants. No game three was scheduled. Then the Wyverns headed to the Tokyo Dome for another NPB-KBO Championship where they were blanked by the Marines. These games were once again moderately but not overwhelmingly successful, and as shown by the scheduling of a two game series, were thought of closer to exhibitions than to any serious continental competition.
In 2011, the Asia Series made its formal return, back to the original format with four teams. Gone was the Chinese League, having been replaced by the previous champion of the Australian League. The tournament was hosted in Taichung and Taoyuan and once again saw limited attendance outside of when the home team played. Just 4,000 people showed up to watch the Samsung Lions defeat the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks to become the first non-Japanese team to win the competition. The theory that Taiwanese fans would come out in big numbers to watch NPB teams seemed to have been proven wrong. But still, the tournament trudged on, expanding to six teams in 2012.
That expansion led to a new format with two groups of three. Participating teams were the champions from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia, as well as an extra team from Korea (the Lotte Giants, who qualified as hosts) and the return of the China Stars. The Lamigo Monkeys and Yomiuri Giants topped the groups, with the Giants winning 6-3 in the final.
The 2013 Asia Series would be the last, and kept the six team format, though the China Stars were replaced by an Italian club, Fortitudo Bologna, who were the reigning winners of the European Cup. This time Taiwan hosted and thus received two bids rather than one. The Italians performed as expected, but the shock came when neither Japan nor Korea were represented in the final. Instead, it was the Canberra Cavalry who claimed the first trophy for Australia, defeating the Uni-Lions in Taichung.
The tournament ended on a strange note, with Canberra player Matt Blazynski claiming that he had been offered money to throw the semifinal match against Samsung. The CPBL and Taiwanese police investigated the claim and determined that Blazynski’s story was full of inconsistencies, and the CPBL released a statement calling it “a fabricated lie.” Without really having any details we can only speculate, but the CPBL does have a long history of match-fixing scandals, and it seems like an unusual story for a player to lie about. On the other hand, athletes do tell strange lies sometimes. Ryan Lochte comes to mind. In any case, Blazynski didn’t even play in the tournament and obviously Canberra, the eventual champions, did not throw any games. We didn’t know it at the time, but this saga was basically the end of the Asia Series. The tournament did not return in 2014, and has not been played again since.
So where does that leave us? Undoubtedly the idea of the Asia Series sounds neat in theory, so why didn’t it work? I think there are quite a few reasons we can point to. The fourth league (after NPB/KBO/CPBL) was never a perfect fit. China (and Italy) simply didn’t have the quality to be competitive, and Australia has the problem of being a winter league and thus the tournament takes place at a strange time for them. A European invite does not move the needle, though there were rumors of eventually inviting teams from stronger leagues such as Mexico. The calendar also became too crowded with other events. We saw one tournament cancelled to make room for the Asian Games, and NPB at this time was still playing their exhibition series against MLB All-Stars in some years. Nowadays we have the Premier12 in this window sometimes. All of those events are higher profile and much more lucrative than the Asia Series.
All that said, obviously if viewership was booming the powers that be would have found a way to make it work. The number one reason that the Asia Series is not around today is that not enough people watched, not enough people cared, and not enough money was made. Fans I heard from all gave me a variation of the same answer: The tournament was a cool idea, but we (the fans) only *kind-of* cared and the teams and players only *kind-of* took it seriously. Undoubtedly, there were great moments. Look at the scenes of Chiba clinching the 2005 title and it is obvious that the result mattered to people. But despite the highs, the tournament was never truly elevated to the place of being a serious trophy on par with winning your domestic league. Major media outlets didn’t give it much credence. Attendance was not great. Some players and managers gave good PR answers when asked about the competition, while others were open about the fact that they weren’t interested.
And so the natural follow up question: Could this type of tournament work in the future? Never say never, but for now a return seems unlikely. National team baseball is a much more financially sound usage of that calendar space and there isn’t really a lot of clamor for another Asia Series outside of the hardcore baseball nerd demographic. I would love to see it but it’s really hard to pull off as you need full buy-in from players (especially pitchers) and organizations and fans. If everyone involved doesn’t treat it as a serious continental championship, then it becomes nothing more than a glorified exhibition. So you’d probably need a lot of prize money and a lot of prestige associated with the tournament to get everyone to care. Maybe that prestige comes over time as you host the series and it gets slightly more and more important with each passing year, but you need to be able to survive that build-up period without folding. And as we saw with the Asia Series’ original run(s), that is the tricky part.
Su-hyeok Lim was a catcher who played for the Lotte Giants in the 1990s. As an offensively capable catcher, he played an important role in the middle of the lineup. In 1995, he hit 15 home runs, and in 1996, he posted a .311 batting average, firmly establishing himself as the team’s starting catcher. At the time, Korean professional baseball was a league dominated by strong pitching, so a catcher who could produce that kind of offense was rare.
He is also remembered as a player who came through in big games. In the 1995 Korean Series, he drove in the winning run, and in the 1999 playoffs, he came in as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning and hit a game-tying two-run home run. For Lotte fans, he was the kind of player who inspired hope in decisive moments.
He was also a special presence to his teammates. Gi-moon Choi, who played with him on the Lotte Giants, remembers Lim as the senior teammate who first helped him adjust to the club. The two had been roommates during their time with the national team and the military team, and they also lived together in Lotte. As fellow catchers, they could have become rivals, but Lim looked after his junior teammate with unusual care instead. Choi later recalled that Lim helped him in many ways so he could settle into the new team.
Su-hyeok Lim as remembered by his teammate Gi-moon Choi
Lim had shown warning signs about his physical condition even before the incident. Choi said he once saw Lim suddenly sit down on the bench during running drills and check his pulse. His heartbeat was irregular, stopping for a long moment before starting again. Lim himself would smile brightly and say, “I guess I need to rest a bit,” but the people around him did not fully grasp how serious it was.
On the night before the game against the LG Twins at Jamsil Baseball Stadium on April 18, 2000, the two sat in their room at the team lodging, talking while sharing corn. Lim had handed it over saying, “My father grew this at home.” For Choi, that ordinary moment became their final everyday memory. The next day, something no one expected happened.
Cardiac arrest during the game, and a stadium that was unprepared
During the Lotte Giants’ turn at bat, with Seong-hwan Jo stepping into the batter’s box, Su-hyeok Lim, who was on second base, suddenly collapsed. He lost consciousness and fell to the ground with his legs trembling.
Su-hyeok Lim suddenly collapsing at second base, and the field turning tense
The team trainer ran out in a hurry, but the scene was chaotic. There was no properly established emergency response manual, and CPR was not performed immediately. The players and trainers could only wait for the stretcher to arrive. The situation was very different from today’s stadiums. Now, professional baseball stadiums have ambulances from partner hospitals on standby and emergency medical staff on site. But at the time, there was no ambulance immediately waiting, and the emergency medical system was not fully in place.
Lim was carried on a stretcher to the dugout and then transported to the hospital. His pulse and breathing were restored with difficulty, but he never regained consciousness. He was ultimately diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. The cause was arrhythmia. His heart beat irregularly, cutting off blood flow to the brain and eventually leading to cardiac arrest.
The incident left a deep shock on Korean sports. At the same time, it raised a painful question: was the stadium truly prepared to protect a player’s life? After the accident, criticism grew over emergency response systems at sports venues, and professional sports began strengthening safety systems, including keeping ambulances on standby and assigning medical staff on site. Beyond sports, schools and public institutions also expanded CPR and AED training, and public awareness of emergency response gradually increased.
Solidarity and change in the sports world after the accident
Hae-young Ma and Seung-yeop Lee of the Samsung Lions taking part in an event to help Su-hyeok Lim
Right after the accident, the baseball world and the wider sports community began organizing efforts to help Lim. The KBO held fundraising events, and players also participated in raising money for his medical expenses. During the All-Star Game, part of the prize money was donated for his treatment. Athletes from other sports also joined in. Football player Byung-ji Kim donated prize money, and many other athletes and clubs contributed donations. The Hyundai Unicorns players’ association even sent part of its monthly dues to support treatment costs. Later, the Heroes club also continued fundraising events in Lim’s memory.
In December 2002, Chan-ho Park, who was then playing in Major League Baseball, also joined the effort. Wishing for Lim’s recovery as he battled a brain tumor, Park donated his Rawlings glove and a signed baseball to a charity auction. The items were sold for 4.68 million won (approximately $3,200), and the proceeds went toward medical expenses. Park also visited Lim’s hospital room in person, comforting the family and wishing for his recovery.
In Busan, the Lotte Giants players’ association took the lead in continuing events to help Lim. These were usually held at a barbecue restaurant run by Seong-beom Ko, a former Lotte Giants player who operated a chain in the Busan and South Gyeongsang area. Players welcomed local residents, served food themselves, and spent time with fans. Some events also took the form of one-day beer hall fundraisers for adult fans. At the venues, memorabilia such as signed baseballs and uniforms were sold, and time was set aside for photos.
This was before the ideas of club social contribution and charity events were as widely used as they are today, but the events naturally became a way of connecting the local community with baseball. A wide range of people took part, from children and students to adult fans, and it became a special chance for players and fans to meet in the same space and talk directly.
From 2000 to 2013, Lotte Giants players continued leading events to support Su-hyeok Lim’s family
The legacy Su-hyeok Lim left behind
Lim’s accident did not end as the tragedy of one player. It became a turning point that changed the way Korean sports looked at player safety.
That change ended up saving lives. In 2011, football player Young-rok Shin collapsed from cardiac arrest during a match, but thanks to CPR and an AED, he regained consciousness after 50 days. It was a case in which the strengthened emergency response system, built in the aftermath of Lim’s accident, worked. In 2017, during a youth national team match, Tae-wook Jung also collapsed, but his teammates responded quickly and saved him. Central defender Sang-min Lee secured his airway, and the other players followed the manual as well, preventing the worst-case outcome.
Players securing the safety of a collapsed teammate
His name still remains on the field. Number 20, the number Su-hyeok Lim wore with the Lotte Giants, remained unused for a long time after he was placed on the free agent release list. A few players later wore it, but since 2016 it has once again remained unused. After it became known that the club rejected a player’s request for the number, saying, “That is Su-hyeok Lim’s number,” it has effectively been managed like a semi-permanently retired number. Even now, as time has passed, his name and number remain as a memory that calls to mind the safety and responsibility sports must protect.
In 2005, fans cheering while holding “Come Back, Su-hyeok Lim” support cards
Since the latest shakeup of the MLB playoff format that created the first-round bye in 2022, there has been discussion every fall about byes, rust, and time off. There are many people who are absolutely convinced that a bye is actually a negative for you, because it causes your bats to go cold and hurts your chances in the following round. When teams with byes struggled in 2022 and 2023, this position was (supposedly) vindicated. And even without a bye, there was a lot of concern and comments about the 2025 Dodgers being rusty following their long layoff after the NLCS. Of course, that worked out fine for them in the end.
After four years of this new format, we still do not really have a large enough sample size to draw any firm conclusions. However, something that often goes unmentioned in this discussion is that we have other top level professional leagues to look at. We have decades of data from the KBO, which makes heavy use of byes in their playoff system. (NPB and Taiwan’s CPBL also use playoff byes but they come with additional caveats and it wouldn’t be fair to compare them to MLB.) Throwing in the last 20 years of Korean baseball, we actually do have a reasonable sample size. Here’s what we’ve got:
In MLB, teams with the first-round bye are 9-7 so far. That’s obviously a positive record, but it’s a small sample and nothing definitive.
In the KBO, however, we have a much more telling story. The league uses a stepladder style playoff where the #3 seed gets a single bye, the #2 seed gets a double bye, and the #1 seed gets a triple bye straight to the finals. Over the past 20 years, teams with a triple bye are 9-2 (the triple bye was added 11 seasons ago), teams with a double bye are 15-5, and teams with a single bye are 11-9. If you want to reduce that to a binary bye/no bye, then teams with byes are 35-16. And when combined with MLB results, they are 44-23.
What this tells us overall is that byes clearly are an advantage; in raw numbers, teams with a bye are far more likely to win a series than those without. The team that had a bye straight to the Korean Series is 18-2 in the last 20 years. This seems to go against our intuition that a bye would not help your performance. In say, American football, it makes perfect sense that being physically rested and having an extra week to prepare your X’s and O’s would be a sizable advantage, but in baseball nobody really believes it works that way. And I don’t think that’s actually what the data is telling us here. Don’t forget that the higher seeded teams that earned the byes are, naturally, the best teams. In other words, the best teamin the KBO is 18-2 in the last 20 Korean Series. I don’t interpret this excellent record of teams with byes as proof that they make you play better; rather I interpret it that byes have more or less zero impact on your play and thus the series usually just goes to the better team regardless of byes, time off, or alleged rust.
As an aside, I’d also like to posit that even if rust proved to be a real statistical concern, it is still almost certainly advantageous to have a first-round bye. Real playoff series are not a coin flip, but for simplicity’s sake we will call playoff series 50/50 in this example. Let’s say that “rust” knocks your chances of winning the Division Series from 50% down to 40%. That’s still a 40% chance of reaching the LCS. If you do not have a bye and have to play the additional round, you have a 50% chance to reach the DS and then a 50% chance to reach the LCS from there, which is only a 25% chance to reach the LCS overall. So, unless you think rust is an almost insurmountable disadvantage, you’d still try your luck with the rust over having to play an extra round.
The KBO data strongly suggests that the “rust disadvantage” is nonexistent. But what about the former and current players who have complained about rust and are adamant that it is a real disadvantage? Are we supposed to just ignore them because math says so? I don’t think this is a healthy approach to any baseball problem. Instead, we should consider the differences in approaches between the KBO and MLB. In Korea, teams play practice games during their layoffs. And if you have a 20-day long triple bye, you might play a lot of practice games and run an almost mini-Spring Training during that time. The pitchers keep their arms loose and the hitters maintain their rhythm by playing in exhibitions and having more in-depth practices than what you would normally do during the regular season. I don’t know what goes on inside a KBO team, or an MLB team, but I know that whatever the Korean teams are doing to prepare during a bye is working, and it’s also nothing that can’t be replicated in North America.
Major League Baseball is no longer insulated the way it once was. All thirty clubs have contacts in the KBO and could find out all they could ever want to know about what a typical KBO top seed is doing to battle rust. It is worth noting that since the original furor of those first two years, most MLB teams have started scheduling their own practice games during byes, and so far it seems to be getting the job done. But as long as the concerns exist, particularly among your own players, clubs should be looking to do more preparation to fully eradicate those concerns. That might mean more physical prep, or it might mean literally showing them the data and convincing them that it’s not worth worrying about as long as they prepare properly.
In the end, the case against the bye is dead in my mind. It is something that is very much worth playing for in the regular season, and any concerns about rust can be fully mitigated with proper preparation. If I were a team in the Dodgers’ situation where you have a full week off after the LCS, I would consider trying to play some practice games during that time too. There is no need to use any real pitchers, but you can keep your bats, gloves, and brains in rhythm against minor leaguers. To me, this is a case where both North American fans and teams would do well to pay attention to the wider baseball world. For the curious fan, this debate about playoff rust is a question that has already been answered abroad. And from a team’s perspective, it is a problem that has already been solved by somebody else.
The baseball film Moneyball depicts a moment when one club tried to understand baseball in a completely different way. The 2002 Oakland Athletics questioned the conventional wisdom that permeated the baseball world. By acquiring undervalued players through sabermetrics, they redesigned their team. Similar attempts did not appear only in the United States.
In Korean baseball history, the 1990s were a time when even the word “data” was unfamiliar. Even in this environment, there were people who questioned an operating style that relied on intuition. The starting point was not a front office meeting or a research report. It was a single book written by a baseball fan.
Lotte at the end of the 1980s, having lost its direction
In the late 1980s, Korean professional baseball still remained a “people’s game.” A manager’s experience and instincts, trust in veteran players, and internal organizational inertia were the standards for team operations. When results were bad, the manager was replaced, and when momentum was good, existing methods were maintained. Long term development and structural reform were always pushed to the back. The Lotte Giants, who finished last in 1989 and stayed in the lower ranks in 1990, were likewise a team that had lost its way amid this inertia. The fandom was overwhelming, but the team had no explanation for why it was losing.
A perspective formed outside baseball
Around this time, there was one person who looked at the team from a completely different angle. His name was Jeong-gyu Song. He was born in Busan and studied at Korea Maritime University, which trains navigators. He then began his career as a deck officer on merchant ships. Later, he was promoted to captain at a U.S. shipping company, making the sea his workplace. Baseball was not his profession, but his interest ran deep.
Baseball fan Jeong-gyu Song (front center), who chose the path of a navigator under the influence of his father, a professor at Korea Maritime University
Long voyages gave him time to study baseball. Through Japanese professional baseball newspapers, American sports magazines, and Major League related books, he naturally came to place Korean baseball alongside overseas baseball and compare their structures. The differences became increasingly clear. At the time, player usage in Korean baseball relied excessively on intuition, and team management lacked a consistent philosophy. There was no system to systematically develop prospects, and responsibility for poor performance always fell on the field staff. Jeong-gyu Song began recording and accumulating the problems he felt while thinking about the Lotte Giants.
Choosing records instead of protests
Jeong-gyu Song did not initially intend to write a book. He called the club several times to explain the team’s problems. However, the opinions of an “ordinary fan” were repeatedly brushed aside. Deciding that conveying things verbally no longer worked, he chose to organize his thoughts and leave them as a written record. After seven months, during which he even set up his own publishing company, The Winning Formula: Lotte Giants’ Top Secret was released into the world.
A book that is still talked about among Korean baseball fans today
It was self published, and sales were not high. However, the contents were concrete. The role of the front office, standards for player usage, and the necessity of a long term development system were organized by topic. From today’s perspective, these are not unfamiliar ideas, but at the time they were novel problem statements in Korean baseball. The book gradually spread by word of mouth. Unexpectedly, it reached the hands of Lotte owner Jun-ho Shin.
Becoming a general manager with a single book
In 1991, the Lotte Giants made a radical choice. Jeong-gyu Song was appointed general manager. Former sailor, late 30s, no practical experience in baseball team operations. In the front office culture of the time, it was a highly unusual appointment. Internal reactions were cold. Open turf battles and exclusion followed, and there were even times when, because budget cooperation was not provided, he had to go out personally to look for sponsors.
Jeong-gyu Song greeting the players after taking office
His operating philosophy was also different. He spoke about statistical analysis, the strong number two hitter theory, and the need for a development system. Concepts that are familiar now were met then with reactions like “that sounds like baseball comics.” However, change quickly appeared in results. In his first year, 1991, Lotte rose to fourth place and advanced to the postseason. They surpassed one million spectators in a single season for the first time in professional baseball history. In 1992, they even won the Korean Series.
The experiment ended, but the questions remained
The championship was not the end. Internal conflicts still remained. An assessment arose that he “damaged organizational harmony.” This evaluation was reported to club management. Jeong-gyu Song, who encountered this while on his honeymoon, resigned voluntarily after returning home. Since then, Lotte has gone more than 30 years without another championship.
He is also known as Korea’s top expert in the field of maritime economics, combining practice and theory
He returned to the shipping industry. Afterward, he continued working in key positions in shipping and port related organizations. Even after mandatory retirement, he has continued to advise on and contribute to major issues in Korea’s shipping and port sectors. His distance from baseball grew, but his perspective remained sharp. In 2024, he appeared on a Busan regional radio broadcast and became a topic of conversation again after predicting Lotte’s preseason ranking with considerable accuracy. Decades have passed, but he left the impression that his eye for the team had not changed.
The Winning Formula: Lotte Giants’ Top Secret is now an out of print book. Rather than a theoretical text, it is closer to a record of one fan asking questions and working through the answers. Attempts similar to Moneyball clearly existed in Korean baseball as well. However, they did not take root as a successful management strategy, nor did they expand into a popular narrative. Even so, this attempt showed a brief but meaningful possibility in Korean baseball.
Women’s baseball exists in Korea across a range of organizations, but finding clear information, especially in English, can be difficult. Teams, tournaments, and national-level activities are often managed through different baseball bodies, and women’s baseball is not always easy to distinguish from men’s or softball programs.
This list pulls together some of the leading organizations connected to women’s baseball in Korea as a basic reference point. It’s meant for people who are curious about how women’s baseball is organized, where events and national teams are managed, and which institutions are involved, particularly readers outside Korea who may not be familiar with the local baseball landscape.
Korea Baseball Organization (KBO)
Korea Baseball Organization, which operates the KBO League. As part of the Amateur Baseball Week initiative, it organizes and broadcasts the Women’s Baseball All-Star Game.
It oversees student baseball, women’s baseball, amateur baseball, softball, and other baseball leagues outside the KBO League. It is also working to identify and develop women’s baseball players, including hosting a softball camp in 2025.
Korea Women’s Baseball Federation, which oversees the women’s national baseball team and nationwide tournaments. The largest women’s baseball tournament in Korea, the LX Cup, is also announced and managed through this organization.
To learn more about women’s baseball in Korea tune into SABR Asian Baseball Research Committee’s zoom interview with Hyeonjeong Shim, a former pitcher with the Korean National team.
Kiwoom Heroes are a club with a unique character within the KBO League. In their history, they are the only self-sustaining team in the KBO without a parent corporation. Even so, they have produced as many as five Major League players in a short span of time. This article introduces Kiwoom Heroes and tells the stories of how they sent their core players to the big leagues.
A Poor Club, the Heroes
In 2008, the Heroes were newly formed by taking over the players and coaching staff of the “Hyundai Unicorns” baseball club, which had been dissolved the year before. On paper they were a new expansion team, but people in the baseball world and the fans regarded the Heroes as the successor to Hyundai. The Heroes based themselves in the capital city of Seoul, but the fan base of Seoul was already shared between two founding year clubs from 1982, the LG Twins and the Doosan Bears. Because of this, the Heroes’ fan base came to be made up mainly of underdog oriented fans whose loyalty was not tied to the home region and fans in the southwestern part of Seoul, such as Guro District, Geumcheon District, and Yangcheon District, which are relatively close to the home stadium.
Mokdong Stadium, the former home ballpark of the Nexen HeroesGocheok Sky Dome, the current home ballpark of the Kiwoom Heroes
Other KBO baseball clubs are operated as subsidiaries of large corporations. Even when a club takes a loss, the parent company adds hundreds of billions of won each year to the team’s finances as support. By contrast, the Heroes operate as a business entity themselves. Therefore, the club must gather its operating funds by recruiting sponsors from various companies. The fact that the Heroes have no parent company has, in an ironic way, made it easier for them to sign large-scale sponsorship contracts. For example, large corporations like Lotte or Samsung, which have many subsidiaries in a wide range of industries, are reluctant to have companies that compete with their subsidiaries appear as sponsors of their baseball clubs. The Heroes, however, have been able to recruit partner companies from a variety of industries as sponsors. The club divides its sponsors into six tiers, including Main Partner, Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and General Partner. Depending on the tier, sponsors receive priority in placing their advertisements in visible spots such as on helmets, jerseys, and caps, and on the outfield fences of the ballpark. As of 2025, 49 companies are participating as sponsors of the Heroes.
2025 Kiwoom Heroes sponsorship status from the Heroes official website
The largest source of income for Kiwoom is its naming sponsorship agreements. The sponsor at the very top tier, the Main Partner, fills this role. Over the years, many companies have provided funds and promoted their brands by entering into naming sponsorship agreements. Woori Tobacco in 2008, Nexen Tire from 2010 to 2018, and Kiwoom Securities from 2019 have each represented the club with their names. The reason the team is currently called Kiwoom Heroes is that Kiwoom Securities agreed to pay the club fifty billion won over five years. In this way, the present-day Heroes stand in a situation that is completely different from the days when the Hyundai Unicorns, backed by the support of the large Hyundai conglomerate, were one of the most powerful teams in the league.
Nexen-Kiwoom Heroes uniforms
The Background of Producing Major Leaguers
Even so, compared to other clubs, the Heroes’ financial condition has not been good, and they have had to tighten their belts every year. The easiest method for the club to secure cash has been selling players. From the early days of the club, the Heroes sustained themselves by transferring starting players through trades or free agency and using the transfer fees and compensation money they received. For example, when they sent away prospects Won-sam Jang, a left-handedpitcher drafted in the Hyundai Unicorns era, and Jae-gyun Hwang, a right-handed hitting infielder, the Heroes received transfer fees of three point five billion won, and two billion won, respectively.
In 2015, when right-handed hitting outfielder Han-joon Yoo, who had hit 20 home runs the year before, and right-handedrelief pitcher Seung-lak Son, a former saves leader, moved as free agents to expansion team KT Wiz and the Lotte Giants, the Heroes received a total of two point four billion won in compensation from those two teams. The club gained revenue, but Heroes fans had to watch their own players display their talents for other teams, which left a bitter feeling. In the end, the production of Major Leaguers was also not a matter of choice but a necessity for the club to survive. Posting fees for overseas transfers are much higher than domestic transfer fees. Because of that, the club encouraged its players all the more strongly to go to the United States. The vacancies left by departing starting players were filled by new players, and the club chose a strategy of “developmental rebuilding,” in which they raised these players as starters and then transferred them again. A representative example of this is the line of shortstops that the team has produced in order, from Jung-ho Kang to Ha-seong Kim to Hyeseong Kim.
The fact that the club gave many opportunities to rookies and maintained a relatively free team atmosphere also contributed greatly to the production of Major Leaguers. In fact, when Jung Hoo Lee won the KBO Rookie of the Year award in 2017, he said in an interview, “I am grateful to the manager for giving many opportunities to someone like me who was lacking.” When Ha-seong Kim received the Golden Glove Award in 2019, he said, “I am grateful to the club for creating an environment where rookies can run around freely.” After the 2025 season, one of the team’s core players, infielder Sung-mun Song, also declared that he would attempt to move to the United States, and the Heroes are now taking on the challenge of producing their sixth Major Leaguer.
Jung-ho Kang, Byung-ho Park, Ha-seong Kim, Jung Hoo Lee, Hyeseong Kim (Posting fees and contract amounts were four years, 11 million dollars, four years, 12 million dollars, four years, 28 million dollars, and a three-plus-two-year deal worth 22 million dollars, respectively.)
The Shadow of the Heroes
However, behind this virtuous cycle, there have also been controversies. Although the departures to MLB were presented as success stories, the fundamental way the club operates has not changed significantly. Instead of reinvesting the posting fees in the club’s infrastructure, the Heroes have often cut spending further and chosen cheaper methods, even when signing players. In many cases, they have filled spots that could not be filled with their own prospects by signing players who had been released by other teams. Among such acquisitions, only a few, such as left-handed hitting outfielder Yongkyu Lee, who had been with the Hanwha Eagles, right-handed pitcher Changmin Lim from the Doosan Bears, and right-handed hitting infielder Sunjin Oh from the Lotte Giants, managed to play meaningful roles. The club’s philosophy has also shown itself clearly in the recruitment of foreign players. The Heroes signed left-handed pitcher Andrew Van Hekken for $250,000 in 2012, right-handed pitcher Jake Brigham for $450,000 in 2017, right-handed hitting outfielder Jerry Sands for $100,000 in 2018, and left-handed pitcher Eric Jokisch for $500,000 in 2019, all on relatively low-costdeals. By good fortune, these players became among the best in the league, but not all foreign players turned out that way. Many of the foreign players signed by the Heroes were frequently replaced because of injuries or poor performance.
Even after the club’s finances returned to the black, the Heroes still showed a stingy attitude toward investing in players, and some fans, tired of this, have steadily turned away from the club. On top of this, the Heroes have tried to scoop up even talented amateur players. Since the 2020s, it has become common for the club to trade mid-level players in order to receive draft picks. Through this, the Heroes have obtained more rookies than other teams. However, many Heroes fans express dissatisfaction with the attitude of sacrificing the present while looking excessively only to the future. Then, is the development of the prospects they acquire going well? Recent moves suggest that this is not the case. Right-handedpitcher Jae-young Jang, who joined the club with a huge signing bonus of 900 million won, an unusually large amount for Kiwoom, eventually converted to hitting due to control problems. Yun-ha Kim, known as the nephew of former Major Leaguer Chan Ho Park, has recorded only one win in two seasons and is struggling in the first team. Catcher Dong-heon Kim, who was drafted with a pick obtained by sending away the team’s starting catcher Dong-won Park, missed an entire year after undergoing elbow surgery.
The pillars of the team have left, and as lineups have been filled with players lacking experience, the team’s overall strength has weakened. An even bigger problem is that the second team, which should be the channel for developing players through systematic training, is also weak. The strategy of using rookies immediately in the first team has, in an ironic way, become a cause of weakening the second team, which is responsible for player development. The Heroes often use rookies in the first team in the same season they are drafted. For rookies, it may feel good to get immediate opportunities, but problems of overuse, injuries, and game quality inevitably follow. Even so, with no clear alternatives, a system in which players are developed “by force” in the first team has become fixed.
In the 2025 opening game, eight rookies were registered on active rosters across the ten teams in the league, and three of them belonged to the Heroes. The fact that the Heroes neglect their second team has become known not only to insiders but also to fans. The Heroes’ second team has changed its training base three times, leaving the old Goyang Wondang Baseball Stadium used by the Hyundai Unicorns second team, moving to Gangjin in South Jeolla Province from 2010 to 2013, then to Hwaseong in Gyeonggi Province from 2014 to 2018, and finally returning to Goyang in 2019. In particular, the Gangjin Baseball Stadium in South Jeolla Province, which served as the second team’s training ground from 2010 to 2013, is about 400 kilometers, roughly 248 miles, away from Mokdong Baseball Stadium in Seoul, making it the height of inefficiency. The poor conditions of the stadium and the inadequate meals for second team players became recurring sources of controversy.
In recent years, as KBO clubs have realized the importance of their second teams, they have begun to build new ballparks and invest heavily in player development. The Heroes, who have lacked sufficient financial resources from the beginning, have not been able to even consider such investments. A club that barely has enough to operate the first team has no room to pay attention to the second team, and in the second team, there are no players ready to be called up to the first team, creating a vicious cycle. As these various problems piled up, the Heroes have finished in a distant last place for three consecutive years since 2023. The limits of the low-cost, high-efficiency baseball that the Heroes pursued are now being exposed. Even so, the club is in a situation where it puts its energy only into trading players and collecting prospects, instead of investing in the reinforcement of the roster. Recently, KBO clubs have discussed revisions to the salary cap system. The subject was to create not only an upper limit but also a lower limit in order to induce a certain minimum level of investment. At the KBO board meeting held on September 23, 2025, the league decided on a maximum lower limit of 6.06538 billion won and plans to implement the system beginning in 2027. Many see this as a measure aimed at the Heroes, who invest relatively little. Despite many disadvantages, such as being a self-sustaining club and having a shallow fan base, the Heroes have reached the Korean Series three times and have become the original club of five Major Leaguers. Free from the need to consider a parent company’s interests, the Heroes once created miraculous stories and brought a fresh breeze to the league. Now, however, the Heroes are closer to being the “ugly duckling” of the league than to their past glory. The club’s other nickname, the MLB Academy, can be read as a survival strategy that has been turned into marketing rather than a pure badge of honor.
Gwangju Jeil High School, known as Gwangju Ilgo, is located in Gwangju Metropolitan City in the southwestern region of Korea and is the school that has produced the greatest number of Major League Baseball players in the country. In the early 2000s, Jae Weong[c1] Seo of the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers, Byung-hyun Kim of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Boston Red Sox, and Hee-seop Choi of the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers reached the MLB stage one after another. Although the three played for different teams, they shared the distinction of being Gwangju Ilgo alumni, and they were called the Gwangju Ilgo Trio as they demonstrated the international competitiveness of Korean baseball. In the mid-2010s, Jung-ho Kang of the Pittsburgh Pirates became the first KBO hitter to move directly to MLB, opening a new path. In 2025, Kim Sung Joon signed with the Texas Rangers as the next emerging player. A total of five Gwangju Ilgo alumni have signed with MLB organizations, the most among Korean high schools. The school also ranks among the highest domestically for producing KBO league players, with 119 Gwangju Ilgo graduates appearing in first division games as of 2024.
1924, The Spark of Anti-Japanese Spirit That Began on a Baseball Field
Baseball at Gwangju Ilgo was not simply a sport from the beginning but a symbol of resistance and pride. The baseball team, founded in 1923, is one of the oldest in Korean high school baseball. In June of the following year, the baseball team of what was then Gwangju Higher Common School defeated a Japanese select team called Star by a score of 1 to 0 in an exhibition match. In colonial Korea, the victory of Korean students over a Japanese team was a rare moment of national joy. The field filled with cheers as players and spectators celebrated together, shouting manse. The atmosphere changed abruptly when Star’s manager, Ando Susumu, stormed onto the field in protest, causing chaos as spectators and players clashed, and the Japanese cheering section also joined. Japanese police intervened, and Ando claimed that he had been struck in the forehead by a spike, identifying nine Gwangju players as the attackers. They were immediately detained. Outraged students launched a schoolwide strike that lasted three months. This incident marked the first organized student protest against colonial rule and served as a catalyst for the 1929 Gwangju Student Independence Movement. A monument to the movement still stands on the school grounds. Before national tournaments, Gwangju Ilgo players bow their heads before the monument, renewing their resolve never to give up. This tradition grew into the team’s philosophy, and their strong fundamentals and concentration reflect this spirit.
Gwangju Ilgo students reenacting the starting point of the Gwangju Student Independence Movement
1980, The Silent Time That Baseball in Gwangju Protected
If Gwangju Ilgo in the 1920s contained an anti-Japanese consciousness, then its baseball in the 1980s walked alongside the era of democratization. In the spring of 1980, citizen protests for democracy against the military regime took place in Gwangju. This event, which is called the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, became a major turning point in modern Korean history. At the time, some Haitai Tigers players were still students, and that generation experienced up close the confusion and sacrifice that engulfed the entire city. The atmosphere of that time, when soldiers fired guns at citizens, left a deep impression on the team’s attitude. The more their home city, Gwangju, fell into turmoil, the more the Haitai Tigers players banded together and comforted the hearts of citizens with strong teamwork and hustle play. Former Haitai Tigers player Chae-geun Jang was in Gwangju on May 18. He remembers it as follows. “There were helicopters, soldiers, and the sound of gunfire. At night, we turned off the lights and stayed quiet. I even remember seeing bodies on the street.” Jang said that when May came, fans and players naturally spoke about those memories. For several years afterward, due to political instability, home games were not held in Gwangju around May 18. The government, concerned about large crowds in the Gwangju area around the May 18 memorial, requested that the Korea Baseball Organization adjust its schedule. As a result, throughout the 1980s, the Haitai Tigers had to play games in other regions around May 18. Only in 2000, the twentieth anniversary of the democratization movement, was a home game in Gwangju finally held again on May 18.
In 1986, the military regime instructed the KBO to move the May 18 game in Gwangju to another region
Even so, Haitai did not waver. Beginning with their first Korean Series championship in 1983, they went on to win four consecutive titles from 1986 to 1989, five championships in the 1980s, and four more in the 1990s, establishing what came to be called the Haitai dynasty. At the center of this dynasty were core players from Gwangju Ilgo such as Dong-yeol Sun, Lee[c1] Kang-chul Lee, and Jong-beom Lee. With solid fundamentals and concentration as their weapons, they led the team and helped raise the overall standard of Korean professional baseball. In this way, baseball in Gwangju took root as a source of regional pride.
The Characteristics and Development Environment of the Gwangju Region
The intense baseball passion in Gwangju began during the golden age of the Haitai Tigers in the 1980s and 1990s. Haitai’s repeated championships became a source of pride for the region, and baseball took firm root as Gwangju’s representative sport. From this period on, parents increasingly tried to raise their children as baseball players, and Gwangju came to be recognized as a city where one could succeed through baseball. Gwangju is a mid-sized city with a population of around 1.4 million. In general, in a city of this size in Korea, maintaining elementary, middle, and high school baseball teams in a stable way is difficult, but Gwangju is an exception. Baseball teams at schools across the region operate on a steady basis, and youth baseball teams are also active. This environment has led to a youth baseball culture in which many players set Gwangju Ilgo as their target school. In addition to Gwangju Ilgo, there are other prestigious baseball schools in the city,such as Jinheung High School and Dongseong High School, the former Gwangju Commercial High School. These schools also have experience winning national tournaments, but in terms of the concentration of player resources and students who hope to advance, Gwangju Ilgo stands at the top. Former KBO technical committee chair In-sik Kim evaluated the situation by saying that while Busan divides its talent between Kyungnam High and Busan High, in Gwangju, the player pool is concentrated at Gwangju Ilgo. Gwangju Ilgo recruits players not only from Gwangju but from all across South Jeolla Province, and promising prospects from middle schools in the area, such as Mudeung Middle School and Chungjang Middle School, as well as nearby cities including Naju and Suncheon, also join the program. As a result, internal competition becomes very intense, and players who pass through that competition show a high level of fundamentals, physical conditioning, and game focus.
Founding members of the Haitai Tigers
Industrialization and economic growth in Korea have taken place mainly in the capital region, meaning Seoul and Gyeonggi, and in the Gyeongsang region, including Busan, Daegu, Ulsan, and the surrounding provinces. In contrast, the Honam region has had a relatively weaker economic base. Because of this, baseball has been seen as a realistic career path through which one can raise social status by effort and performance. In such an environment, when parents made decisions about their children’s future, they often favored sports, especially baseball. This culture has continued across generations up to the present. Gwangju Ilgo still supports the roots of Korean baseball today. Even as generations change, the philosophy of valuing fundamentals and mental strength has not changed. From its founding in 1923 to MLB advancement in 2025, Gwangju Ilgo has been both the place that has created the present of Korean baseball over a century and the site where its future is being prepared.
Professional sports in Korea began in earnest in the 1980s. At the time, Korea had industrialized, and the economy was more stable than before, but the country was still under military rule. Before the voices for democracy and press freedom grew stronger, President Chun Doo-hwan’s government fostered the sports industry to divert public dissatisfaction (along with films and the sex industry, this was called the “3S Policy”).
The government encouraged major corporations, which played a large role in the Korean economy, to establish professional baseball teams. Responding to this, corporations formed teams. On December 11, 1981, the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) was founded. Soon after, in March 1982, the Korean Professional Baseball League (KBO League) opened. From then on, Korea’s international baseball exchange began to center around the KBO League.
Sammi Superstars – based in Incheon/Gyeonggi-do/Gangwon-do/5 provinces of North Korea
Lotte Giants – based in Busan/Gyeongsangnam-do
Samsung Lions – based in Daegu/Gyeongsangbuk-do
Haitai Tigers (now KIA Tigers) – based in Gwangju/Jeolla
OB Bears (now Doosan Bears) – based in Daejeon/Chungcheong
In 1985, the OB Bears relocated to Seoul, and Binggrae Eagles (now Hanwha Eagles) filled the gap. In 1990, the Ssangbangwool Raiders (disbanded in 1999) joined, starting the true 8-team structure of the 1990s. However, during the 1997 financial crisis, ownership changes and team dissolutions created a turbulent history. Despite this, baseball’s popularity grew, leading to the creation of more teams. The current 10-team system was completed in 2015 with the founding of the Suwon-based kt wiz.
From its start in 1982 until the mid-1990s, the KBO League consisted only of Korean players. International exchange was minimal, and overseas Koreans or Koreans with Japanese pro experience filled the role of “foreign players.” Notable examples include pitcher Myeong-bu Jang (Japanese name: Hiroaki Fukushi) and player-manager In-chun Baek of MBC Blue Dragons.
At that time, the gap between Korean and Japanese baseball was far greater than today. In-chun Baek’s record of a .412 batting average in 1982 (still the KBO’s only .400 hitter) and Myeong-bu Jang’s 30-win season in 1983 both reflected that disparity.
In 1998, Korea finally introduced its foreign player system, about 15 years after the league’s founding. Since then, players from Japan, the United States, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Curaçao, among others, have joined. With superior physical ability, they brought powerful batting and dominant pitching.Korean players, competing with them, raised their skills to international levels. This led to global success: silver medals in the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classic, and a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, proving Korea’s competitiveness in world baseball.
From the mid-1990s, more Korean student athletes also challenged foreign leagues. Some skipped the KBO and went directly abroad after graduation. In 1994, Chan Ho Park became the first to enter Major League Baseball. After him came pitchers Jin-ho Cho, Byung-hyun Kim, Jae-weong Seo, hitters Hee-seop Choi, Shin-soo Choo, Ji-man Choi, and others.
Meanwhile, many KBO players at that time went to Japan first instead of the U.S. Legends such as pitcher Dong-yeol Sun, shortstop Jong-beom Lee, pitcher Sang-hoon Lee, pitcher Dae-sung Koo, and slugger Seung-yeop Lee all advanced to Japanese baseball.
Direct movement of Korean pros to the U.S. began in the 2000s. Players like Hyun-jin Ryu, Jung-ho Kang, Byung-ho Park, Ha-seong Kim, and Jung Hoo Lee used the posting system to reach MLB. Student athletes also continue to pursue MLB directly after high school, examples include Hyun-il Choi, Jun-seok Shim, Ji-hwan Bae, Hyeong-chan Eom, and Won-bin Cho.
Recently, a unique trend has emerged: foreign players who played in the KBO return to MLB, a phenomenon called “reverse export” in Korea. Merrill Kelly, now a pitcher for the Texas Rangers, is a prime example. Others such as Chris Flexen, Erick Fedde, and Mike Tauchman also polished their skills in Korea before resuming MLB careers.
In the past, the KBO was just an option for players who failed to adjust in MLB. Now, it is positioned as a springboard for returning to MLB. Seeing these “reverse export” successes, many foreign players knock on the KBO’s door before directly attempting MLB.
Thus, the KBO has become not only a field of opportunity for Korean players but also for foreign players. Through this cross-border exchange, the league has become a stage where new baseball stories continue to unfold.
SABR’s Asian Baseball Committee is excited to host former Korean Women’s National Baseball Team pitcher Hyeonjeong Shim for a Zoom chat on November 21, 2025, at 9pm EST. The program will begin with a short presentation and a live interview hosted by Zac Petrillo, followed by a Q&A session with viewers. You must sign up below to attend.
Hyeonjeong Shim is a former pitcher for the Korea Women’s National Baseball Team (2022) and has appeared on YouTube’s Pro Neighborhood Baseball (PDB) as well as in multiple media interviews. She is currently a Public Relations Intern at the Korea Anti-Doping Agency and a student at Kyung Hee University, majoring in Physical Education and Cultural Entertainment. She was also a member of the winning team at the 2023 KSPO Olympic Academy.
Hyeonjeong Shim will talk about her journey/experience in women’s baseball in Korea, some background/history of women in baseball, her experiences on the national team, how she interfaces with the KBO, and what she is working on today/plans to do in the future.
Asian Baseball Committee Meeting
When: Nov 21, 2025 09:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
It’s been over 40 years since professional baseball took root in Korea. It’s now gone beyond being just a sport and has deeply permeated Korean daily life and culture. Traces of baseball can be found not only in the cheers and songs at the stadium but also in everyday scenes outside the ballpark. One such example is the sight of students on university campuses wearing matching jackets as a group. This jacket, called the “gwajam,” actually originated from the “baseball jacket,” and today it has become the uniform of youth. More than just a fashion item, this jacket has found its place in Korean society. But how did it get there?
A Tradition Born with the Harvard Baseball Team
The roots of the baseball jacket trace back to 19th-century American college baseball traditions. At the time, Harvard’s baseball team awarded its starting players sweaters embroidered with the school’s initials. These were known as letterman sweaters. They weren’t just for warmth, they were symbols of honor, proof of one’s baseball skill and achievement.
Over time, the tradition evolved into a more practical jacket: wool for the body, providing warmth, and leather for the sleeves, offering durability against friction and wind. This combination was perfect for athletes braving cold weather on the field. At the same time, the two-tone design of wool and leather created a bold look that expressed school colors and identity. With its blend of function and symbolism, the “varsity jacket” became an iconic symbol of American college sports.
Early Harvard baseball team in the 19th century
The Birth of the “Baseball Jacket” in Korea
This jacket entered Korea in the 1980s, coinciding with the launch of professional baseball. The two-tone design of wool body and leather sleeves resembled the thick warm-up jackets worn by players in the dugouts. In fact, players from the MBC Blue Dragons, one of the founding teams, were often seen wearing such jackets with their blue uniforms. This became a familiar sight to fans.
When combined with the popular image from American dramas and movies, “baseball teams wear varsity jackets,” Koreans naturally began calling this unfamiliar jacket yagujamba (baseball jacket). Unlike its difficult English name, the simple and catchy Korean nickname stuck instantly with the public.
By the late 1990s, university sports teams and clubs began adopting baseball jackets as group uniforms. It’s said that Seoul National University’s rugby team was the first to make them, which is often cited as the origin of the Korean-style gwajam (short for “gwahak jamba,” or “department jacket”).The trend soon spread to academic departments, and the naming system took hold: school/department name on the front, and name/student ID/graduation year on the back. So widespread was the practice that almost every Korean university student came to own at least one. More than showing belonging, gwajam became a symbol of youth itself, carrying memories of that time.
Over time, the gwajam branched out into more variations beyond the original baseball jacket: long padded coats for winter, hoodies for mobility, and custom jackets for individuality. Though the forms changed, the core remained the same: wearing the same jacket together to affirm belonging and share memories. Just as baseball teams express identity through uniforms, the gwajam became another kind of uniform showcasing the collective bonds of students.
Another Legacy Left by Baseball
In the U.S., the varsity jacket symbolized the achievements of outstanding athletes. In Korea, however, the gwajam was reborn as an expression of group solidarity. Though its direct link to baseball seems small, the survival of the name “baseball jacket” owes much to the cultural symbolism of professional baseball in Korea.
Baseball did not end at the stadium. Its name carried over into campus life, becoming part of the landscape of youth. Years later, when one pulls out a gwajam from the closet and wears it again, the cheers, laughter, and time spent with friends come rushing back.The name borrowed from baseball isn’t just a label, it’s proof that Korean baseball culture has deeply embedded itself beyond the game, into everyday life and memories of youth. That’s why even today, the baseball jacket remains the uniform of youth, a testament to the enduring power of baseball culture.
At the end of 2007, the Lotte Giants needed a breakthrough to end their long slump. The team’s performance was declining, and fans’ frustration was mounting. At that time, Bobby Valentine, who was managing the Chiba Lotte Marines in Japan, was asked by Lotte’s ownership to recommend a new manager. Without hesitation, Valentine introduced his longtime friend, Jerry Royster.
Arriving in Busan, Royster became the first foreign manager in KBO history. A utility player who spent 16 years in Major League Baseball moving between the infield and outfield, he took on the Korean stage after retiring as a player and working as a coach and minor league manager. At that time, the idea of a foreign skipper was almost unthinkable, and the Korean baseball world viewed it with both curiosity and concern.When the 2008 season began, a new scene unfolded at Sajik Baseball Stadium in Busan. With the slogan “No Fear,” Lotte declared an aggressive brand of baseball under its new manager. Fans quickly embraced the American leader, calling him simply “Royster” instead of the formal “manager.” Beyond nationality, the very fact that a foreigner was officially holding the reins of a KBO team was a symbolic milestone.
Royster stayed in Korea for only three years, but in that short time he left an indelible mark on the team and its fans. For years, Lotte had been mockingly nicknamed “8888577.” This number string represented their final standings from 2001 to 2007, mostly finishing dead last (8th place) in the eight-team league. Among fans, “8888577” became shorthand for failure and despair.
But everything changed after Royster took over in 2008. Though Lotte never won a championship under him, the team reached the postseason three years in a row. A club long accustomed to losing now had the confidence that “we can win.” At a time when team identities in Korean baseball were fading, Lotte regained a strong identity: a team that fought until the last out, one that played bold, attacking baseball.
After contract renewal talks broke down in 2010, Lotte fans raised funds themselves to publish a newspaper ad supporting manager Royster: ‘Why Not Royster?’
The Philosophy of Fearless Play
Royster’s baseball philosophy could be summed up in two words: “No Fear.” He valued bold attempts over results. Hitters were encouraged to swing aggressively, runners to take the extra base, and pitchers to trust their decisive pitch without shrinking back.
This message, “don’t be afraid of failure,” stood in sharp contrast to the conservative, risk-averse approach typical of the KBO then, leaving a strong impression. Players experienced new freedom, and fans delighted in the refreshing style of play. “No Fear” became more than a slogan; it fused with Busan’s passionate cheering culture and grew into a symbol.
His leadership also broke from the authoritarian style common in Korea. He shared emotions with players in the dugout and greeted fans first after games, rare sights in the KBO then. Rather than stressing authority, he emphasized communication and empathy. Asked “Who is the best player?” he always answered, “Every player is a good player.”While ordinary in the U.S., this philosophy was a fresh shock in Korea. In a culture of hierarchy, his trust-based, autonomy-driven style gave players a sense of ownership. That’s why players like Sung-hwan Jo, Dae-ho Lee, and Jae-gyun Hwang later called him a “mentor.”
Royster became more than a figure in the dugout, he was tied to Korean society. Even after he left in 2010, whenever a managerial change loomed, the phrase “like Royster again” resurfaced in media and fan discussions.
The “No Fear” mantra became a cultural keyword shared across Korean baseball fandom. Even today, his name resurfaces in charity games, broadcasts, and YouTube interviews. At the 2024 Hope Plus Charity Baseball Game in Sajik Stadium, he returned as honorary manager, greeted with roaring applause as he once again shared the “No Fear” spirit. For fans, Royster remains a living presence, not just a figure of the past.
Royster’s presence also influenced Korean society. Until the late 2000s, racially discriminatory expressions against Black people were often used casually in Korea. In 2008, a player posted a racial slur aimed at Royster on his personal SNS, which immediately sparked backlash. Unlike in the past, when such things might have been brushed aside, this time the player had to issue a public apology, because Royster was respected not just as a coach but as a leader.
From that moment, such remarks were no longer tolerable. His presence became a real-life lesson for Korean baseball in diversity and respect, fostering an attitude of evaluating a leader beyond race.
Royster’s impact continues today. Lotte has gone through many managers since, but every era is still compared to “the Royster years.” A style of baseball where players and fans breathe together and play fearlessly, that philosophy lives on as a benchmark beyond wins and losses. His name remains a reminder not of mere nostalgia, but of the direction Korean baseball should strive toward.
SABR Asian Baseball Research Committee Blog 