Baseball is becoming such an unstoppable force on the Korean peninsula that in an effort to further milk every last won from the public, the Korean Baseball Organisation (KBO) has put the final touches on a 10th expansion team that will join the country’s top league in 2015.
Plans for the new expansion team had been in the pipeline for several years, but now the KBO have publicly announced new coaches, players, sponsors, nicknames and, crucially, a city for the team.
Telecommunications giant KT Corporation – who at the unveiling of their team’s new uniforms insisted that all reporters use the lower case ‘kt’, as if they control publications’ house styles – are the latest mega-company to buy into the local baseball market, following the likes KIA, Lotte, Samsung and LG.
The team will be based in Suwon, close to Seoul, and called the KT Wiz – or kt wiz, as its sponsor has it ¬– which has to be one of the worst team names in professional sport.
Team names here somewhat follow the North American example, except that the city name is excluded for that of the company. So from 2015, KT Wiz will join the Samsung Lions, Kia Tigers, LG Twins and SK Wyverns in the top flight.
Terrible name aside, the new franchise has also attracted criticism for its logo, which is seen as a rip-off of the New England Patriots in America’s NFL, while the name would appear to be been ‘inspired’ by the Major League Soccer team Kansas City Wiz (which now competes as Sporting Kansas, a name itself no doubt inspired by the international success of Sporting Lisbon).
Yet the owners of the KT Wiz needed to look no further than the ninth expansion team created by the KBO, the NC Dinos, for inspiration.
Located outside Busan, the most recent addition to Korean baseball’s big leagues faced a sceptical public during their debut season, but surprised the entire country by finishing seventh, above the nation’s most decorated club Kia Tigers.
It is the Dinos’ unqualified success that many people believe has rushed through KT’s autumn of press conferences and open days. However, the real success story is that Suwon, located some 30km south of Seoul, has won the rights to host the new team. This will not be Suwon’s first baseball franchise, but the landscape has shifted almost impossibly since their last attempt.
In 1996 the Hyundai Unicorns settled in Suwon and won their first of four championships just two years later, with the last coming in 2004. Despite being one of the dominant clubs in the KBO at the turn of the century, the team was disbanded in 2008 due to poor attendances: their season average in 2003 was under 2,000 people.
The remarkable transformation in popularity for baseball in the country – ignited by what is commonly referred to as the “Chan-ho Park effect”, the first Korean-born pitcher to play in the MLB – means that the KT Wiz will be expected to fill out Suwon’s 20,000-seater baseball stadium more often than not.
But it’s right across the country where interest has taken off. And it’s a far cry from the dark days of 2002, when one Lotte Giants game saw just 69 people turn up at Sajik Stadium. That number remains the all-time low, and legend has it that those who were there get together annually for a ‘69 meeting’. Lotte’s average gate in 2012 was a much more impressive 21,000.
KT Wiz will join the party in a little under 18 months’ time. They have a stadium, a jersey, a logo, staff and a highly decorated manager. Despite an awkward start, the Wiz have every opportunity to find riches on the never-ending KBO gravy train if they get a competitive team on the field. For the people of Suwon, 2015 can’t come soon enough.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
