Korea Baseball Organization

APRIL 20, 10:00pm: The KBO’s Opening Day is set for May 5, Dan Kurtz of MyKBO.net tweets (Korean language link via Naver Sports). There will not be fans in attendance.

8:40am: Yoo details the abbreviated preseason at greater length in a second column, outlining the limited travel arrangement in place and the safety/testing precautions that the league will implement. Players will be tested twice prior to games, receive “strong” recommendations to wear masks throughout the stadium when not on the field and be prohibited from spitting (while being “discouraged” from celebratory high fives). Umpires will wear masks and gloves.

Players showing symptoms will immediately be quarantined and tested further. Their stadium would then be subject to a 48-hour closure. A positive test would result in a meeting with text executives throughout the league to determine whether a full stoppage of play is necessary.

April 19: An official announcement is expected Tuesday about the state of the KBO League’s schedule, Jee-ho Yoo of the Yonhap News Agency writes, as Korea’s top baseball league is preparing to begin play in early May.  League officials will meet with the presidents of each KBO team Tuesday, and it is still possible that the KBO could complete its usual 144-game schedule, with liberal use of double-headers and playing games on Monday (which is normally a league-wide off-day).

If a full season is played, the schedule would stretch into November, with postseason games in the latter half of the month played at a neutral venue — the domed Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul.  The KBO preseason is set to begin on Tuesday, with teams playing four games before beginning regular season action in the first week of May (possibly even on May 1 itself).  All preseason games and regular season games in at least the first portion of the schedule will be played without fans in attendance, and it is possible fans could be allowed to watch games in person later in the year depending on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of course, all of the KBO League’s plans are dependent upon a continued decrease in coronavirus cases.  South Korea has showed good progress in this direction, as only eight new cases were reported in the country on Sunday, the lowest daily total in two months.  South Korea prime minister Chung Sye-kyun said today that general social distancing policies will remain in place until at least May 5, though “the degree of social distancing will be flexibly changed depending on the scope of transmissions.  The government will evaluate the risks every two weeks, and adjust the level of social distancing if necessary.”  In the meantime, some outdoor facilities, churches, restaurants, schools, and gyms could be allowed to open, assuming strict guidelines are followed for such public locations and gatherings.

If Asia’s top professional baseball leagues represent a preview of what MLB can expect when it tries to get back to play, then the results are mixed — and remain largely indeterminate. Let’s catch up on the latest …

Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball is back on ice, as Jason Coskrey of the Japan Times writes. It’s a reflection of renewed measures to tamp down on the spread of COVID-19 in the island nation, which recently declared a state of emergency in Tokyo and other areas.

The league’s timeline is now again uncertain. With the new restrictions on activities already set to extend for about a month, a mid-May start to the 2020 NPB campaign would seem to be the best-case scenario.

Even still, Japanese clubs remain able to do quite a bit more than is presently possible for their MLB peers. As Coskrey explains, teams are now backing away from full-squad workouts but are still holding individual or small-group practices at team facilities.

The situation is more promising at the moment in Korea. Per an Associated Press report, the Korea Baseball Organization is currently hoping for an early May launch.

Pre-season KBO contests could occur as soon as April 21, according to the report. There’s already baseball of some sort available, as the Lotte Giants have plans to broadcast intrasquad contests (via MyKBO, on Twitter) as they prepare for spring tilts later this month.

Most promising of all? Taiwan’s top league, the Chinese Professional Baseball League. It’s still scheduled to launch its season — without any fans (real ones, anyway) — on April 11. While it doesn’t carry the reputation of the other two major Asian professional circuits, the CPBL stages a five-team league that spans the island and typically draws reasonably sizable crowds. It’s a much simpler and smaller operation than the majors, to be sure, but it could be a good bellwether for whether and how baseball can resume.