May 31, 2020
There was no white noise. That was one of the first things Tyler Wilson noticed when he took the mound April 27 for his first exhibition start of the 2020 Korea Baseball Organization season. He could hear his spikes shuffling in the dirt, the give of the rubber as he pushed off from the mound. The murmur of the batter in the box was sharp, as were the conversations in the dugout. Usually, all of these sounds would be drowned out by the din of the crowd in the 16,000-plus capacity Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, South Korea, where Wilson’s LG Twins were facing the Kiwoom Heroes.
“When I pitched, I could hear so many new sounds,” he says. “You hear everything so clearly. … In between innings feels strange because it’s so quiet, you’re so aware of everything.”
Playing to an empty stadium is unsettling in any context. The lulls between action become more pronounced. Every motion is heightened, every noise is amplified. But in the KBO, subtracting the crowd strips the league of its ethos. The 10-team, 38-year-old league is sometimes known to international audiences by its bat flips; the KBO’s real defining characteristic is its fans, who regularly spend all game on their feet, regardless of the score.
Jared Hoying is a chatty outfielder who often calls out words of encouragement to his Hanwha Eagles teammates. His home stadium, in Daejeon, South Korea, is the smallest in the league, with a capacity of 13,000, and when the crowd is at full tilt, “it’s like a soccer crowd thrown into a little baseball stadium,” he says. His usual quips from the outfield are no longer muffled by the noise of the fans, and now socially distanced stuffed animals fill every other seat behind home plate. The cheerleaders are still there, as is a drummer, but it’s no replacement for the usual clamor of game day.
The nation’s rigorous, successful handling of COVID-19 comes down to three factors, according to Daniel Kim, a journalist covering the KBO who lives in Seoul. When the outbreak first began in China, Kim says, South Korea’s proximity meant the country immediately attuned to what was unfolding to the west—the flight from Jeju International, the second-largest airport in South Korea, to the Wuhan airport takes less than two hours. While most Americans still viewed the virus as a far-off, transoceanic threat, South Koreans were well aware that an epidemic was outside their door.
Once the virus reached the country, it spread quickly, and the government responded in kind, imposing contact tracing and isolation solutions honed during previous coronavirus epidemics—the second major factor in South Korea’s success, Kim says. After the 2015 MERS outbreak, the country revised the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act, an extensive list of guidelines that, quite simply, work to prevent what’s happening now in the United States.
Under the act, a positive test immediately leads to a review of the individual’s whereabouts, corroborated by CCTV and credit-card information. The government uses cellphone data and travel and medical records to track a citizen’s movements leading up to their diagnosis, then once a “patient route” is determined, texts the information to every phone within 3.1 miles. Hoying’s phone dings with emergency alerts whenever there’s an outbreak or case nearby, he says. Using government-mined data to broadcast individual travel and enforcing mandatory confinement requires a community commitment, and a sacrifice of privacy, that would be almost unthinkable stateside; hundreds are protesting basic stay-at-home orders across the U.S.
Conversations with Wilson, Hoying, and Saupold about the KBO all led back to one thing: the fans. Their in-game experiences with the league rival any other playing atmosphere the trio has experienced, whether it be MLB or Division I competition. A regular-season, low-stakes MLB contest is often marked by a contended mellowness. There’s a certain joy in enjoying a game without high investment, in watching the action just for the sake of having something to watch, and not being tied to every single move as a major, franchise-defining play.
That’s not the mind-set in the KBO. Base hits in a double-digit rout get the level of enthusiasm often reserved for walk-off home runs in the States. A team can be down by 10, but the crowd will still be standing until the final out.
By then, the season will still be relatively young. It’s too soon to know how much the absence of a cheering crowd will affect play or morale, or how the shortened spring training and condensed schedule may affect the quality of play, or the health of players. The KBO is a much thinner league than MLB. There is no deep reserve of minor league talent waiting to step up in the event of injuries, and in less than a month of play, teams are already seeing the impact of a shortened spring training.
The thick of summer, when the weeks fall into a humid rhythm of back-to-back-to-back games and pitches blur together, will likely test players who are used to standing, singing fans for every batter.
“We aren’t yet into the dog days of grinding through when you’re exhausted,” Wilson says. “Those are the games when the fans really are a huge pick-me-up when you’re searching for a little extra something.”
TwentyTwenty games in, Wilson’s LG Twins are second in the league at 14-6. Wilson’s first win of the season was a Tuesday game at Hoying and Saupold’s Eagles; he allowed two hits with three strikeouts (including Hoying) in six innings. The league has, thus far, not had a single player or staffer test positive for the coronavirus, which would shut down games for three weeks for the entire KBO.
“Life seems normal over here,” Wilson said days before the regular season began. “Outside of talking about it all the time and baseball.”
Saupold realizes how lucky—and bizarre—it is for him to be playing sports while the vast majority of professional athletes have their seasons put on hold. As a sports fan himself, he turned to the Australian Football League as a comfort when he was lonely in his first spring in South Korea. He can commiserate with American fans missing their usual outlets, and has also kept in touch with former teammates in the States who are facing down the potential of losing a year of competition, a devastating blow for minor league players looking to break through to the next level.
“They could lose a whole year of baseball,” Saupold says. “You’re pretty much a year on the back burner, a year from trying to get to your dream, get to the major leagues. It’s a very tough spot.”
But there’s a risk in jumping to ease up on social distancing restrictions too quickly, even if it’s only to bring players together for training. Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball continued exhibition games in March until three players on one team tested positive; now, the league is eyeing a tentative June start after pushing back the regular season twice. While no player in MLB has tested positive, there were seven known NBA players with the virus within a week of the season’s suspension.
It’s going to be difficult to bring sports back in the U.S. safely at the current level of infection in the country, Binney says. It’s not about how long into the pandemic a country is, but about how it’s meeting criteria in terms of bringing down case numbers, identifying new cases, and isolating those cases. Meeting that criteria means staying tough on the virus—now, and moving forward.
“If you take your foot off the gas, too soon or too much, you can just roll down the hill and end up right back where you started,” Binney says. “And then even if you did bring sports back, you lost it again, and nobody wants that.”
One could easily watch the South Korean players undergoing quick temperature checks, distancing themselves in the dugout, and playing under the watchful eye of masked umpires, and figure: Why not us, why not now? To the TV spectator at home, a crowd seems like a small thing to give up to get games back. But take out the fans, and add up the rosters, staff, trainers, broadcasters, and necessary stadium personnel, and groups of up to 100 people would still be needed to run just one baseball game. That’s significantly more than the limit of 10 people recommended by everyone from the World Health Organization to President Trump (at one point). And based on data, America isn’t ready for that yet.
“The message people should be taking is not, ‘Look, the KBO is restarting, we should do what they’re doing and restart MLB,’” Binney says. “The message should be—because South Korea got cases down to a very low level, the KBO was able to start, wouldn’t that be cool?”
Herd immunity is frequently tossed around as a justification to filling stadiums as soon as the fall without a vaccine. But for this strain of the coronavirus, current hypotheticals about immunity are based more on wishful thinking than actual scientific evidence.
“The important thing to remember here is that we just learned about this virus four months ago,” says Jill Weatherhead, an assistant professor in infectious diseases at Baylor University. “The amount of scientific knowledge we’ve gained about it is incredible … but there is so much we don’t know. And so many of those really salient points are going to dictate the safety of having group activities.”
It’s impractical to make assumptions about how COVID-19 can affect a team’s schedule given the virus has been around for less than the length of what would have been the major league season so far.
It’s easier for South Korea to restart a national league given the country’s unified approach and geographical size—players travel to every away game by bus. The United States’ overarching response to the virus at the moment is fractured, at times split as narrowly as county-by-county policies. But American sports leagues are national organizations, and allowing them to proceed as close to normally as possible, with precautions in place to protect everyone from starters to maintenance staff, requires a unified approach, Binney says.
Baseball in South Korea, despite its safe return, is still far from normal. Plans for an early June reconsideration of fan attendance will likely be reevaluated after a spike in infections stirred up fears about a potential second wave.
On May 28, 79 new cases—the highest reported in almost eight weeks—were announced, mostly tied to an e-commerce company. Hoying is hankering for the fans to return soon; entering Friday, the Hanwha Eagles were nine of 10 teams in the standings at 7-14, with a five-game losing streak, including back-to-back losses at home to Wilson’s LG Twins, and two defeats with double-digit runs this season. When a player’s mental and physical resources are drained, there are no reserves to tap into but their own.
Hoying’s life is likely closer to routine than the vast majority of his peers or his countrymen. But there are reminders of the lingering effects of COVID-19 in every inning. People pay money to cram into inflexible plastic seats hundreds of yards removed from on-field action to be part of a raucous crowd, to high-five strangers, to take part in the anonymous exaltation of joining a larger, singular cause. Losing that collective experience not only distances fan bases from the team, but removes an intrinsic aspect of the player experience. The impact of the virus is seen most clearly in what it has taken away.
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