You can’t sleep on KBO if you’re as horny for sports as I have been. Being a sports fan is its own form of voluntary jet lag. I live on the East Coast, so I know all about the NBA, the NFL, and Major League Baseball starting prime-time games too late and deliberately impinging upon my dad hours.
On sportsless days, I’m in bed by 9:30 and asleep by 10. It keeps me beautiful. When sports are around, I violate that self-imposed curfew, because, like LeBron James, I will die for sports in general, which is neat, because American team owners are about to ask their players to do just that. But there haven’t been any sports around these parts for months now, and thus my sleep schedule has gone uninterrupted for the longest stretch of my middle age…
Until Saturday night.
On Saturday night, I resolved to stay up and watch the LG Twins and NC Dinos go at it in the Korea Baseball Organization. KBO began its season a week ago, with ESPN broadcasting the games live for a nominal rights fee. (ESPN demanded the rights for free at first, and the KBO told them to go suck a used Covid mask.) I would watch this game. What’s more, I would watch it while really, really high. After all, I wouldn’t be a real sports fan if I watched a game SOBER. So I grabbed my vape pen, got stoned off my balls, and settled in to wait for the first pitch.
I hate MMA almost as much as I hate mayonnaise, but I gave the UFC undercard on ESPN a shot while I waited.
It would be a long wait. I watched half of Fellowship of the Ring while I waited. I could have watched the rest of it, plus the entirety of The Two Towers, before being in any danger of missing the action. But then I clicked over to ESPN and realized there were also real sports happening HERE in America on this Saturday night. UFC was holding a full card! Live from Jacksonville! Including disgraced former NFL player Greg Hardy! WHAT A TREAT. And the American Cornhole League was on! Yes, cornhole! Here! Fully sanctioned!
I hate MMA almost as much as I hate mayonnaise, but I gave the UFC undercard on ESPN a shot while I waited. Trainers wore masks while HUGGING their own fighters. After one fight, a dude in the ring pulled down his mask to get a selfie with a sweaty fighter who almost certainly had a disease if he didn’t have the disease of the moment.
I flipped over to the Johnsonville Bratwurst Cornhole Championships, which were somehow being staged in a much more responsible manner despite being held in South Carolina. All the cornholers and cornholing officials wore masks. As they competed, they gave each other phantom forearm bumps and high-fives.
Two of the contestants were wearing Crocs. The ACL’s motto is “Anyone can play, anyone can win,” which was very much NOT what I wanted out of a sport right now, but this would do anyway. After three minutes, I realized I had no idea how they scored professional cornhole (or amateur cornhole, for that matter, I guess). I saw players MAD at their bag going in the hole, and I was slightly perplexed. And I’ve played cornhole, mind you.
To my great sadness, none of the players held beers as they tossed. These were men who had bodies built for darts, so a beer would have finished off the ambience perfectly. Would have been hard to drink through a mask, but athletes are men of indomitable will. ESPN teased a “top 10 shots of quarantine” segment coming after the break, featuring amateur cornholers doing their best trick shots from home, and holy shit it delivered. Dudes nailed shots OVER a house and clean through a moving van that had its side doors open.
Back in the pro competition, one dude vaped through his mask. Hell yeah. Anyone really CAN play. One player got awfully close to his teammate’s bag to yell out strategy to him. An official cleaned up the bags and stacked them while wearing gloves. Why can’t the players stack their own? This is where we are as a nation in 2020. We gotta socially distance from fucking beanbags.
At 10:30, the cornhole broadcast was cut off midstream for a rerun of a KBO game between the Samsung Lions and the Kia Tigers. Branded team names are our future as a species. I didn’t wanna spoil my KBO fix before the live action began, so I hopped over to NBC and watched the season finale of SNL at Home. That episode featured one of the best SNL sketches I’ve seen in ages, plus Alec Baldwin doing his whole “Isn’t Trump so SILLY?” act when 75,000 people have already died thanks to the president’s willful neglect. There was no in-person laugh track to bail out Alec this time. Colin Jost had a beard. It did him no favors. The SNL cast now consists primarily of old roommates you hated.
I saw players MAD at their bag going in the hole, and I was slightly perplexed. And I’ve played cornhole, mind you.
I turned off SNL, smoked more weed, and watched the pier kiss scene from Outer Banks on a loop, because it makes me happy. That kiss is the best thing I’ve seen on TV all year. My taste in pop culture has gotten worse over the years, and I honestly couldn’t be happier about it. And now I was about to watch baseball, live. I do not have a man cave at home. There’s a kid cave in the basement that I’m sometimes ALLOWED to use when I wanna play Madden, but that’s it. But now everyone else was asleep, and I had the TV room all to myself. It had all the trappings of a Guy Night. I was watching sports and NOT sober. All I ever wanted. I felt normal again.
Time for more weed! Earlier in the week, I’d applied for a medical marijuana card in my home state of Maryland. The marijuana commission’s website included the following disclaimer:
MMCC Patient Registry is experiencing very high volumes of applications for Medical Cannabis Registration. Please do not call or email the Commission unless it has been more than 45 days since submission of your initial application.
I could wait them out. Wouldn’t be a problem. I had already waited until 1 a.m. for some fucking KBO, had I not? I had the power. [PSA voice] We’re all in this TOGETHER. For weed.
So now, a quick primer on this game. The NC Dinos were the home team, hosting the LG Twins at Chongwen Park. Being a lapsed Minnesota Twins fan, I decided to adopt their Korean namesake team as my own. The ESPN broadcast crew of Jon Sciambi and Jessica Mendoza immediately noted that the Dinos were unbeaten and that the Twins were, well, shitty. I ride some dubious horses, people.
The rules. In KBO, games are declared a tie after 12 innings. Foreign players are capped at three per team. The designated hitter is universal, as it likely will be in MLB soon after its return. Sciambi and Mendoza had to call the game from isolated locations, with only the live feed from Korean network SPOTV2 to guide them. Mendoza, you may recall, was demoted by ESPN after she all but called Oakland A’s pitcher Mike Fiers a snitch for blowing the whistle on the Houston Astros flagrant signal-jacking. (Fiers was with the Astros when they were banging on trash cans to tip pitches.) But time, Covid, and ESPN’s pliable ethics had a way of rendering that demotion irrelevant. So here Mendoza was, presiding over the only game in town. That would prove to be fortunate, because she turned out to be fucking great.
This was easily the sportiest day of my quarantine, so I took another hit off the pen and exulted.
I spent the majority of the first inning pensively observing the atmosphere. The umps and coaches and cheerleaders (yep, there were cheerleaders) all wore masks. The players did not. Two out of the four mascots, one of which included Baby Shark, wore masks even though a mascot head is its own mask when you think about it. Behind the plate was a billboard that read, “Hello USA welcome to Korean style of play!”
There were no fans in attendance, unless you counted the fans watching from neighboring parking garages. Sciambi told viewers that KBO hopes to have stadiums at 20% capacity by the end of its season (November), which is probably on the optimistic side given that South Korea has had a flare-up of Covid cases since easing quarantine. There were cutouts of fans sitting in the seats behind home plate. Kinda looked like a game of Guess Who. Fans could pay to have their respective likenesses printed onto these cutouts. No one tell Marlins Man this. Some of the cutouts featured fans wearing masks, which was a nice show of solidarity but also seemed needlessly redundant. During the top of the first, one of the cutouts tipped over. Stadium ushers straightened it back up during the break.
You might think watching a game with no crowd is weird, and it is. At first. There was noise in the stadium, but it was just ambient city noise. The empty seats weren’t a big deal, because it ain’t like every MLB stadium is jam-packed every day of the summer. I’ve seen these empty seats before. You have to if you’re a Tampa Bay Rays fan. (You are not.)
But the lack of real, discernible crowd noise — even if it had been a scant crowd — was jarring. You’re rooting blind without a crowd. A double and a putout garner the same reaction from empty stands. Having Mendoza and Sciambi work the game remotely also disrupted the fan rhythm, because normally the broadcast crew up in the booth can see the play develop a split second before you can, and you take your cues from them. If the announcer’s voice rises after the ball is hit, you know to sit forward a bit. But Sciambi could only see what we saw on our screens, so his reaction was on something of a time delay, leaving me to read and react to hits and pitches on my own. The crowd and the booth guide your expectations as you watch. Without them, you gotta mentally fill in your own crowd noise.
I did. I had stayed up way past my beddy time for this, and it was worth it. I was watching real-ass baseball. The sun was shining over there. I could FEEL the sun through my TV. Players in the dugout were high-fiving for real. “No Rain” played on a loop in my head. I felt like I had just walked out of prison. In ambience and procedure and spirit, KBO felt righter than UFC. Righter than cornhole, too, for that matter. (Why hold a cornhole championship INSIDE?) This was easily the sportiest day of my quarantine, so I took another hit off the pen and exulted.
My Twins started Casey Kelly, an American, on the mound. Kelly would have been the opening-day starter, but he was still in mandated quarantine when that game, an 8–2 victory over the Doosan Bears, was played. I’d tell you that Kelly has to be living the dream, because, unlike current MLB players right now, he gets to freely play the sport he loves in a relatively safe environment. But he got immediately fucking pummeled as the Dinos tallied four straight hits to lead off the first. Poor Kelly was now quarantined in this half-inning, perhaps unable to ever leave it on his own. A double play mercifully ended the rally, but not before the game was 6–0 and stillborn after just a single inning. These games are not allowed to be shitty, dammit. I started to think about playing virtual slots. Not for money, just for kicks.
Despite the fact that they purchased the rights to air KBO games, ESPN doesn’t seem terribly invested in them. They don’t lead off SportsCenter with KBO highlights. They don’t wallpaper the dot-com with KBO news and box scores. I’m sure the late-night game times factor into the equation, but I’m also sure that a combination of snobbery, xenophobia, laziness, and lack of financial interest are the more decisive factors. I’m sure ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro has all kinds of ratings charts and focus groups of conservative sports fans that outline why this negligence is warranted, but fucking REAL SPORTS are happening right in front of these people, man. You’d think they would give more of a fuck. You’d think they would KILL to make one of their cheapest assets one of their most desirable, but I guess that would be un-American.
During an inning break, I ate peanut butter and Nutella together on a big spoon. Felt right.
Keep in mind that ESPN is sports right now, especially with every other sports media outlet withering in the face of the pandemic. If ESPN wanted to make Korean or Taiwanese baseball a big fucking deal, they could. They just got tens of millions of people to watch old Bulls highlights. They could make KBO into more than just token programming. But at the outset, Sciambi and Mendoza only seemed interested in this game in fits and spurts. They went a whole inning just shooting the shit with fucking Trevor Bauer and barely paused to acknowledge the game’s first dinger, hit by Roberto Ramos. Mendoza noted that the game had a “spring training feel” due to errors, and for once I wanted an ESPN announcer to NOT tell me the truth.
ESPN was missing out, because the KBO television product requires no sympathy viewing to be entertaining. The players are appropriately beefy. The umps are recognizably shitty. The style of play features stolen bases and other shit that went out of style during MLB’s statistical revolution. KBO players, as noted by Mendoza, are shrewdly careful hitters. They don’t have to take full cuts to knock you around the park. Yong-Taik Park, the career hits leader in KBO history, wore mirrored sunglasses all game long. Even though MLB allows sunglasses, players rarely wear them, because modern ballparks are oriented with the plate facing away from the afternoon sun. Watching Park, it was like 1988 all over again. At times during the game, my sports high smothered my real high. I was WAY too lucid watching it, no matter how many hits I took off the pen. I muted the broadcast. Sometimes I listen to the broadcast for the crowd, but this time there WASN’T one. May as well listen to Whitesnake instead.
During an inning break, I ate peanut butter and Nutella together on a big spoon. Felt right.
In the fifth, I went to bed with the game at 6–3. Yu Kang Nam smacked a homer that got a rise out of Sciambi, but it wasn’t enough for the Twins to fully rally. I was spent. I’m only human. Also, we had a Peapod order arriving at our doorstep early the next morning. One of the perks of having sports on is being able to ignore them at your leisure. And I was feeling quite leisurely. I had baseball back in my life, which meant I could take it for granted again.
I shouldn’t have.
According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, Major League Baseball is expected to propose an 80-game season to its players tomorrow. The season would start in July and feature an expanded playoff field. Games would be played in empty stadiums and in neutral cities for teams whose hometowns are overrun with Covid. There would be no DH. If you want an idea of what this bastardized season will look like, KBO can give you a solid approximation of it. In terms of action and presentation, it represents the best-case scenario for the future of baseball in North America this year, if not for years to come. And even KBO’s time may be fleeting if the flare-ups in South Korea worsen and more drastic preventive measures need to be taken. This may be all we get. You can’t sleep on KBO if you’re as horny for sports as I have been. Without it, it could be months and months of watching ESPN and seeing nothing except a running crawl of “Today in Sports History” factoids.
I finished the game the next morning, picking up right where I left off with the score at 6–3. I didn’t spoil shit by looking up the final score in advance. When my kids got too loud with the game back on, I would give them dirty looks. JUST LIKE OLD TIMES. Sciambi analyzed the mask game of fans watching from an adjacent parking garage. Then he said, “Not to take you to Negativetown,” before expressing concern about lax mask usage by players and fans. I bet the NFL wouldn’t/won’t allow their announcers to be so candid. And so responsible.
Freed of both the booth and fealty to whatever league it is they’re covering, Sciambi and Mendoza engaged in a more refreshingly candid form of baseball commentary, often talking about the job of calling the game as they were calling it. It was a languid broadcast, and I don’t mean that as an insult. Mendoza ribbed Sciambi for a whole half inning for calling Ring Around the Rosie “Ring Around the Posy.” Then Sciambi explained to Mendoza why he can’t grow a decent beard, and I felt his pain intimately. Real May baseball banter.
They held another inning hostage with an interview, but this time it was a worthy subject. Calling into the booth was Samsung Lions pitcher David Buchanan: an American pitcher who played in both Japan and Korea and hopped in on Zoom to talk about life as a gaijin in both leagues. Like Casey Kelly, Buchanan had to do quarantine after signing and coming over from the United States. His family came over from the states after the season started and ALSO had to quarantine away from him. Buchanan and his family were still 10 days away from being reunited. His team rarely, if ever, has to travel by plane, because they play in a country that is much smaller than ours and has superior mass transit. Buchanan is a worthy tether between our baseball culture and Asia’s. I’m glad I was sober to listen to him and to watch what unfolded next.
In the eighth, with the score 7–3, the Twins kept a running circuit of batters at the corners, and the Dinos’ lead began to shrink. NC switched out pitchers to stanch the bleeding—KBO pitching changes are fast, and MLB should emulate them—but it did them no good. Yu Kang Nam drove in two more runs to make it a 7–6 game. Real dugout high-fives ensued. Turns out KBO has shitty bullpens, which is good for a casual viewer like me, because a shitty game can become unshitty at any moment.
And this game had become something. The lack of a crowd didn’t ruin it. I adjusted pretty quick, and I’d wager you can, too. Lee Chun Woong came up to bat with runners at first and third. His teammates leaned on the dugout railing in hot anticipation before our man hit the sac fly that tied the game at seven. With no crowd, all you heard were dugout whoops. The Twins tacked on three more in the inning to take a 10–7 lead. TWINS TWINS TWINS.
But the Dinos weren’t quite ready to die. They loaded the bases in the bottom of the ninth. That’s right: real ninth-inning drama in May, half a world away. But in the end, the Dinos’ choke stayed a choke. They got only a sac fly out of their rally, and the final was 10–8 from Changwon Park.
I spent the bulk of this game wondering if players would be eager to touch each other. Would they? (They did.) Would they shy away from contact while stealing bases? (They did not.) Would they clear the benches and BRAWL? (They did not, but no one gave them a good reason to.)
Watching KBO proved, at least to me, that these guys have no fear of physical play. They’re too into the game to NOT play it all the way, which is both a boon and a concern. But if you’re hoping sports still look like sports when they return to your TV screen, I have an answer for you, which is a resounding yes. We can get back to sports, and a great many other things, if we’re willing to accept certain realities.