Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing – and the Korean Baseball Organistaion (KBO) is only beginning to realise that.
In 2015, the country’s top professional league, the Korean Baseball League (KBL), will welcome its 10th team to compete for the annual Korean Series. Baseball is the most popular team sport in this country, but it looks like the KBO has overstated exactly how popular it is among the populace.
The city of Suwon, with a population of 1 million, will be the home of the new expansion team. And the decision to grant ownership of the 10th new franchise to the telecommunications giant KT has been met with much disillusionment.
Essentially, the KBO wants to cash in while the game is at its most popular, despite shockingly limited advertisement and marketing campaigns. Instead of developing the product they have in place, it seems the execs are more interested in milking the cow for all it’s worth.
There is also a motive to improve the credibility of the KBL, making it more attractive to investment and sponsorship. Up until the current season, the league consisted of eight teams, with half making the end-of-season play-offs. Ideally, the KBO would like to copy the American and Japanese example of having two divisions. But simply adding teams isn’t going to cut it. Take the south coast-based NC Dinos, who are the most recent editions to the KBL. Despite starting the season relatively well, they have struggled badly to fill out their 16,000-capacity stadium in Masan, a suburb of Busan.
But they are not alone. Last year it took 65 games for combined attendances to reach one million people – a record number. This season it took exactly 100 games for the same milestone. The nine KBL teams are averaging just 10,380 fans per game, down from nearly 13,000 the previous year.
Last year was the fourth straight year the KBO, founded in 1982, broke its single season attendance record, with 7.15 million fans walking through the gates. This year, breaking 7 million looks unrealistic already.
There are numerous reasons blamed for the falling interest. South Korea performed appallingly at the World Baseball Classic in March. What’s worse, the traditional start of the season in April was the coldest in 17 years. And the form of Korean players in the US and Japan is seen as a distraction.
But the biggest reasons are in the running of the game. ‘More teams’ does not equal ‘more quality’. In fact, quite the opposite: there simply aren’t enough good players to fill the rosters of the nine teams. On top of that, having an uneven number of teams means one club is forced to sit out a three-game schedule every four weeks. This has had a disastrous effect on crowd numbers. Too many poor quality players and too many on-field errors all add up to a distruntled fan base.
Even the enormous Lotte Giants are averaging crowds 33 per cent less than the same period 12 months ago. Defending champions Samsung have seen a quarter of supporters disappear. And Seoul-based Nexen Heroes, perennial whipping boys but sitting second in the table, are experiencing a jaw-dropping 40 per cent decline. Only the Gwangju-based Kia Tigers have seen a rise in crowd figures through early May.
Which brings us back to Suwon, which previously hosted a team called the Hyundai Unicorns. In 2004, the Unicorns won the Korean Series for the fourth and final time. Their average attendance that season was just 1,955. Despite being the second most successful club in Korean baseball, they were disbanded in 2008.
Lessons from the past are clearly not being learnt. Expect to see a few more clubs discarded onto the Korean baseball scrapheap in the coming years.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
