What It's Like For American Players Trying To Make Careers In The Korean Baseball League

When pitcher Ryan Sadowski signed with the Lotte Giants of the Korean Baseball Organization before the 2010 season, he did not know what to expect. He did know where he stood, though, and at age 27, he knew who he was. Sadowski had a cup of coffee with the San Francisco Giants in 2009, but he knew that he was seen as a Quad-A guy, and that another couple cups of major league coffee were the best-case scenario for him going forward. So why not make a change? Sadowski thought he would play in KBO for three to four years, immerse himself in Korean culture and get to know his teammates and coaches. That wasn't how it happened.

"Back then, organizations didn't understand what the foreign players' expectations were," Sadowski says. A popular term for foreign player in Korea is "yong-byung" (용병), which is synonymous to "mercenary." Sadowski quickly figured out that he was disposable.

"[Foreign players] could easily be changed," he says "A lot of them were older guys approaching end of their careers. The clubs would go get another guy in lineup the next year and the next year, yet another guy. I wish I had understood how different it was. I didn't go there with an intention of being there for only a year."

This was Sadowski's first lesson—things are different over there.

Indeed, there were a lot of foreign player transactions in 2010, starting with the Kia Tigers cutting injured pitcher Ricardo Rodriguez before the regular season started. Hanwha Eagles' pitcher Jose Capellan was released after going 0-11 with a 9.15 ERA in 15 games; Edgar Gonzalez was nearly as bad and lasted only slightly longer. Nexen Heroes' outfielder Doug Clark was released the day after he played in the 2010 KBO All Star Game. A host of recognizable baseball names came through the league—Francisley Bueno and C.J. Nitkowski and Tim Redding and so on—and were expected to perform without much window of adjustment; if they didn't, they didn't last. Among the 16 foreign players that were on KBO rosters in spring training, only three were with the same team the following season—pitcher Aquilino Lopez of Kia Tigers, pitcher Julio DePaula of Hanwha Eagles, and Sadowski.

Sadowski, as it happened, became something more than a mercenary. From 2010 to 2012, he emerged as a mainstay in the Lotte Giants' rotation, going 29-24 with a 4.03 ERA over three seasons; in a homer-happy league, those numbers are better than they look. Sadowski embraced the experience in a way that few players do, running a YouTube channel detailing his experiences and learning how not just to speak but type fluent Korean; his Twitter account is seamlessly bilingual. On January 15, 2015, Sadowski returned to Lotte—not as a player, but as an international scout.

Plenty of Quad-A types have followed Sadowski, and there are some success stories among them—pitchers Dustin Nippert, Radhames Liz, Rick VandenHurk, and Eric Hacker have found second careers in a league that's hard on pitchers, and sluggers Eric Thames and Brett Pill have put up numbers that are eye-popping even by the league's standards. All of them came to KBO before they turned 30 and became solid regulars, if not outright stars. Some jumped to the Japanese league for more money. Nippert is currently pitching his sixth season with the Doosan Bears.

Down in Busan, a baseball-mad city in the southern part of the Korean peninsula known for its beach tourism, pitcher Josh Lindblom is trying to make not just a living but a career. Lindblom made 110 Major League appearances, but cops to being nervous when he first took the mound in 2015 as a Lotte Giant in the Jamsil Stadium in Seoul.

"Most passionate fans ever," says Lindblom, who had finished his first year in the Korean Baseball Organization league with the Giants, "I have never played in front of fans who were louder in my career." Lindblom was impressed to see that fans had songs to sing for every batters in the team, and they do not stop all throughout the game. "I remember how fast my heart was beating when I took the mound and how much of an adjustment it was to get used to the noise," he says

The 2015 season went well for Lindblom, and the right-hander earned another year of with the Giants; his 3.56 ERA was fifth in the league and his 210 innings pitched were more than any other pitcher logged. He was also open to learning. That was something that Sadowski very much looked for as a scout, and one of the things that drew him to Lindblom. He took to Twitter, thanking fans and congratulating teammates, and did his best to make himself at home.

"The player has to have a desire and willingness to work," Sadowski says. "If a team says "we're gonna educate these guys" and they have no interest, then it's just a waste."

Prior to re-joining the Giants, Sadowski was a part of Global Sporting Integration, a group that works to facilitate cultural adjustment for stateside players heading to Asia and vice versa. Before the 2015 season, Lotte signed three players—Lindblom, outfielder Jim Adduci, and pitcher Brooks Raley—who had attended a January GSI seminar in Arizona to learn about Korean culture.

"It's about learning these guys' personalities individually and helping them fit in," Sadowski says. "You don't treat Josh, Jim and Brooks the same way. For instance, Jim never eats before games. He never did in states. For me to tell Jim that he should eat before the game because the clubhouse food at Sajik Stadium is so good doesn't make any sense, because he has never eaten before games. But for Josh and Brooks, that was very important." All four players that went to the GSI seminar—Merrill Wynn paid his own way—returned to their teams for a second season.

KBO teams haven't sought to work with GSI yet, but Sadowski thinks a more formal relationship, and greater recognition of and sensitivity to the challenge of going across the world to play baseball, is coming. "I think a lot of people are afraid of change," he says. "It's about being human."

Nothing came to Shane Youman the easy way. Youman had no pedigree to speak of, but defied odds by making to the Major Leagues as a 43rd-rounder in the 2001 MLB Draft. He made 21 appearances (11 starts) and recorded a 5.13 ERA with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 2006 and 2007 seasons. The following season, he found himself out of the MLB system. After bouncing around different independent league teams, he had a stellar 2011 campaign with the Long Island Ducks, pitching to a 7-1, 0.66 ERA in 13 appearances. That year, the Taiwanese league team Lamigo Monkeys purchased his contract and he spent the rest of the season there, posting an impressive 5-1 record, with a 2.15 ERA in 46 innings pitched. The Lotte Giants, looking for a strong starting pitcher to pair with Sadowski, signed Youman for the 2012 season. He went on to pitch in KBO for three and a half seasons

Youman says that his Lotte Giants teammates gave him a nickname just a few days into the spring camp. "Dooly was my nickname," says Youman, noting that the nickname refers to a popular Korean cartoon dinosaur and star of the "Dooly, The Baby Dinosaur" show in the 1980's and 90's. A pitcher on the Giants named Myung-Woo Lee gave him the moniker. "He says I look like Dooly because of my cheek when I smile."

"(People in Busan) made me feel at home," Youman says, "because I was a southern person. Everyone says Busan people are crazy but Louisiana (people) are as well. We like to have fun, we like to be friendly and friend-oriented … you also see people doing a lot of things together. It's a family type of atmosphere everywhere in Korea but especially in Busan. That made me feel comfortable."

But, in this ethnically homogenous region of an ethnically homogenous nation, Youman stood out. "Not everybody in Korea gets to experience being around black foreigners," Youman says. "People came up to me and looked at me because I'm six-foot-four, black, and walking around … sometimes, when I was with Korean girls—just friends—people looked at me differently. Parents and elders expect Koreans to be with Koreans. I guess, culturally, people haven't still accepted that."

During the 2013 season, the star first baseman of the Hanwha Eagles, Tae-Kyun Kim, said during a radio interview that Youman is one of the harder pitchers to pick up pitches from because of his dark skin. Youman did not know about Kim's comments until his translator texted him later in the day. "At first, I laughed," he says now. However, as he let the comment sit in his mind for awhile, he started to feel differently about it. "I never got a formal apology from him until I became his teammate [in 2015]," Youman says. "I forgave him for that. For me, it took a year and a half to fully get past the situation, but we built a special bond as teammates."

But Youman noticed that this sort of thing kept happening. When Youman pitched for the Giants in 2013, the LG Twins had a right-handed ace in Radhames Liz, a black ballplayer from Dominican Republic. After Liz struck out three hitters in a row with his explosive fastball—he's one of the few KBO refugees to make it back to the majors—in a playoff game, a popular web cartoon series "Fastball and Jokeball" published a piece in which Liz was depicted being chased by KKK members. Even by the most generous reading, this was a tasteless bit of wordplay built upon those three straight strikeouts. The league did nothing. "If it happens again," Youman says, "I hope they take action."

In 2014 season, former player and current broadcaster Soon-Chul Lee filled air during an at-bat by then-Hanwha Eagles outfielder Felix Pie by saying "have you been to the Dominican Republic? There are no streetlights outside Santo Domingo. You can't even see the people at night because their skin is so dark." After that, Youman decided something needed to be done.

"I wanted to raise awareness," Youman says. "{The foreign players) do hear about things that go on. We have friends that speak the languages in the Korean baseball world." Youman custom-ordered a set of white t-shirts that read in Korean "Watch what you say" on the front and "Someone is listening" on the back.

"End of the day, you gotta be an adult and apologize for what you didn't fully understand," Youman says. "A lot of it gets swept under the rug."

Youman moved from Lotte to the Hanwha Eagles following a difficult, injury-marred 2014. In an attempt to shake things up after another losing season, Hanwha's front office hired the revered manager Sung-Keun Kim, who turned around another historically middling team into a dynasty in the late-aughts. After making the postseason only twice in seven seasons, Kim led the SK Wyverns to four consecutive Korean Series, winning three. Kim's old-school methods demanded an overwhelming amount of training, but while the easygoing Youman adapted readily to it, the legendarily mercurial Nyjer Morgan lasted only a month with the club.

"All I can say is that, it was two people with strong personalities that couldn't find a common ground," Youman says. "Especially in Korea, the older man wins every time. It's (Kim's) team and he gets to run it his way. I would have loved (Morgan) to stick with the team. He's a passionate player and sometimes it can seem angry and out of bounds, but that's the type of person he is. You have to understand the person to know what he does, and if the team wouldn't accept his personality and he can't be passionate about his game, he wouldn't be as good."

He wasn't as good. In 42 plate appearances, Morgan posted a .273/.405/.333 line with two doubles. He was demoted to the minors in early May, then released. After going 4-6, 4.52 ERA in 91.2 IP, Youman found himself in a similar situation after he went down with a shoulder injury. The Eagles could not afford to leave the rotation spot open during a pennant race, and they cut him loose shortly thereafter. Youman hasn't ruled out a reunion in the future.

It's easier to be a foreign player in the KBO than it used to be, and that has benefitted everyone. Fourteen out of 24 foreign players that were on KBO opening day rosters were re-signed by their respective teams from 2015, which is a big jump from the three who re-upped between 2010 and 2011. Part of the reason for this, Sadowski believes, is that KBO is attracting better players. "Being a foreign player in Korea is not about being [at] the end of your career," he says. "It's about having the best years of [your] career in Korea."

"I think KBO is a very good league," Youman says. "But it can be an even better league … the biggest thing is for KBO front offices to start taking advice and actually implement some of those things to make the league better." Youman also suggested a foreign players association that could provide guidance for first-year players. Despite the improvements and additional openness in the league, he believes, foreign players still need help.

"The biggest difficulty is realizing you are not in America," Lindblom says. "I had only been out of the country once, and it was on vacation to an American resort. It can be very easy to complain about how things are different, but they should be. You always have to keep in the back of your mind that it is a different country with different customs, culture, language. Realizing that is key to adjustment."

That flexibility, as much as any on-field skill, is a must. "You want to bring players that are really interested in making adjustments and can help improve the level of play in Korea," Sadowski says. "That should be the goal of every team. Whenever a team has a foreign player that doesn't play or gets released, it is not a good thing for the league."

It is much easier said than done. So far in 2016, the league has already seen ten foreign players released as of beginning of August. Among them was GSI client Jim Adduci, who was cut by Lotte after he failed a drug test and was to be suspended by the league for 36 games. The report detailed that he was tested positive for oxycodone, a painkiller banned in the league. Rather than to wait out his suspension, the team tasked Sadowski with finding a foreign player who could help the team immediately.

"Today is a hard day not only for me but also for the Lotte Giants fans, players and employees," Sadowski wrote, in Korean, in a statement he posted on Twitter. "It is unfortunate but because he did not follow the rules, he cannot avoid the punishment. The Lotte Giants has the responsibility to put the best possible roster daily so we had no choice but to release Adducci. I read a lot of articles and tweets that urge foreign players being cut or support the release. But please don't forget it is a very difficult decision for the team and it's not an easy thing for a player to go through."

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