By Troy Stangarone

As a Chicago Cubs fan, I’ve watched the slow influx of Korean players into the major leagues in recent years with interest. When the Cubs first signed Choi Hee Seop he was pegged as the power hitter who would eventually succeed Mark Grace as the Cubs first basemen. That didn’t work out, and the signing was originally controversial in Korea where Choi was temporarily banned from playing. However, over time, the Cubs and other major league teams began signing more Korean players as the level of play in Korea advanced. That may soon change because of the recent signing by the Baltimore Orioles of Korea’s most promising young pitcher, Kim Seong-min.

By signing Kim Seong-min to a contract, the Orioles have set off a controversy that has already lead to Orioles’ scouts being banned from Korea and Kim being banned from playing or coaching in Korea for life. The controversy over the signing stems from the Orioles failure to follow protocol in signing the 17 year old Kim, which calls for Major League Baseball (MLB) to notify the Korea Baseball Association (KBO), which runs Korea’s professional baseball league, before negotiating with Kim to determine if he was eligible to be signed. Unlike the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico where a player can be signed at the age of 16 (as well as for many other international players), Korean players are only allowed to be contacted by Korean or foreign teams during their final year of high school. Kim was only a rising junior in Korea.

Though the contract is ultimately expected to stand, Kim’s signing has also raised concerns about the increasing number of Korean players who are being signed by major league teams and the ultimate impact these departures will have on the development of youth baseball in Korea. Much of this is due to the increasing level of play in Korea, which finished second in the 2009 World Baseball Classic, baseball’s Johnny come lately answer to soccer’s World Cup. As the quality of players in Korea grows, there will be increasing interest from MLB in bringing players to the United States.  

The increased interest from professional teams in the United States has made it more difficult for Korea to develop youth baseball programs. The most recent incident is pushing the KBO to seek to revise its agreement with MLB to prohibit major league teams from signing amateurs in Korea, but instead limiting signings to players who either have or currently are playing in Korea’s major league. However, MLB has done a great deal to develop youth baseball in the United States and abroad and would seem to be well placed to do so in Korea as well.

The challenges Korea faces in keeping talent at home, however, are not unique. Japanese professionals have long sought to play in the major leagues as it is the world’s elite professional baseball league. One of the biggest signings this winter was of Yu Darvish from Japan by the Texas Rangers. While formally joining the Rangers through the posting system, he would have been eligible to sign with a major league team prior to joining Japan’s major leagues.

The United States also faces this issue in respects to soccer. The premier professional leagues for soccer are in Europe, not the United States. Most of the best U.S. players end up playing in the English Premier League or the Italian Serie A. They are mostly encouraged to do so as the level of U.S. soccer on the international stage will only be enhanced by U.S. players playing regularly against the world’s best. This is true even for perennial soccer power Brazil, which also sees many of its most talented players suit up for European clubs. Interestingly, Major League Soccer has tried to draw in the best possible international talent rather than retain U.S. talent in trying to raise the level of play in the United States.

For anyone who has been to a baseball game in Korea, it would be hard to argue that there are any more passionate fans in the world for the sport. It seems clear that the Orioles violated the spirit of the rules when it comes to signing Kim Seong-min and that MLB and KBO should work together to try and clarify the procedures for MLB teams signing armature talent in Korea rather than prohibit it.  However, Kim’s exposure to the best players in the world will likely only enhance his value to the Korean national team in future international competitions.

Troy Stangarone is the Senior Director for Congressional Affairs and Trade at the Korea Economic Institute. The views expressed here are his own.

Photo from Dave Newman’s photostream on flickr Creative Commons.

By Chad O’Carroll

Rewind to April 1995, just one year after the death of Kim Il Sung, a nuclear crisis that nearly brought about war, and a time of biting economic hardship.  After such a long period of mourning, probably the last thing you would have expected to see taking place would be an international wrestling tournament in Pyongyang, attended by the likes of boxing champion Muhammad Ali and World Championship Wrestling’s (WCW) Rick Flair.  But that’s exactly what happened, and bizarrely, all in the name of international peace and friendship.  If the post Kim Il Sung period is providing the template for North Korea after Kim Jong-il, might Pyongyang now seek to repeat history through another major wrestling tournament at some point this year?

Having organized a number of similar events in Beijing, Moscow and Baghdad, event director Antonio Inoki evidently saw 1995 as the perfect time to help improve the DPRK’s relations with long-time adversaries Japan and the USA. As a well-known wrestler and former Japanese politician, Inoki was in a unique position to put on an event like “Collision in Korea”.  Having been trained by the legendary Korean wrestler Rikidozan (much admired in the DPRK), Inoki’s popularity in North Korea gave him the capacity to convince authorities there about the benefits of his prospective tournament.  And as owner of New Japan Pro Wrestling (a well respected international wrestling promotions company), he had good connections to wrestling communities in both Japan and the United States.

Former WCW President Eric Bischoff wrote about being approached for the tournament in his biography, Controversy Creates Cash. Recounting Inoki’s initial proposal to WCW, he explained:  “When I got that phone call and the opportunity to go to a place that [was] off-limits to Americans, I jumped at it. I said, “Ab­solutely, no problem”.  With support from an American wrestling promoter secured, agreement from the North Koreans to host it in their mammoth sized May Day Stadium, and access for foreign visitors approved, Inoki scheduled the tournament to form the main pillar of the 1995 Pyongyang International Sports and Cultural Festival for Peace.  He was even able to persuade Muhammad Ali to attend, having fought against him in a special event in 1976.

Recorded in history as the largest ever professional wrestling event, the North Koreans packed a record breaking 320,000 spectators into Pyongyang’s May Day stadium to watch proceedings over the course of two days.  But compared to the raucous crowds commonly associated with American wrestling events, the Pyongyang crowd appear subdued in video recordings of the event.  Given North Korea’s isolation at the time, this should come as no surprise.  And as Bischoff recalled,  “I wondered what they could possibly be thinking when they saw Ric Flair come out in his flowered, sequined robe as the 2001 Space Odyssey theme blared through the speakers.”

While the audience was mainly local, some 15,000 Japanese, Chinese and overseas Koreans were reported as also having attended the event, with even a handful of Americans joining.  This foreign presence led to some unforeseen consequences for the hosts, with one post-event news article drawing attention to the plight of the hundreds of ethnic Koreans who had ostensibly attended for wrestling, but really in hope of connecting with lost family members.  Obliged to attend the tournament by night and tour the country’s official sights by day, all requests for family reunions were turned down – even when relatives were known to be living in the center of Pyongyang.   The heartbreak was reportedly too much for one 75 year old woman.  When the tour bus happened to visit a site just a few miles outside her hometown, where her sister still lives, she looked up at the sky and cried out: “Mother, Father! Your daughter has come home!”

Walter Keats, manager of Asia Pacific Travel, was one of the few American tourists allowed to go on the trip, in what marked one of the first opportunities U.S. nationals ever had to visit the DPRK.  Entering the country by train (now impossible for Americans), his group took in a nine day tour of the country that centered around the two day wrestling event. Talking to The Peninsula, Walter recalled the tour as being extremely restrictive, but that the group unexpectedly got to see well beyond the capital, taking in sites deep in the country – all just months before the onset of the countries’ worst-ever famine.

In the final match of the event, Antonio Inoki fought against Rick Flair, winning (predictably) after just 14 minutes to roars of excitement from the North Korean crowd. Even if they didn’t understand wrestling initially, they did know that Flair was an American and were happy to see his demise in the last stage of the event. With Inoki’s victory, one of the most bizarre examples of sporting diplomacy came to an end, bizarrely then kept off American TV screens until one year later, when WCW turned it into a Pay-Per-View for its domestic audience.

As far as sports diplomacy goes, the nature of North Korea makes it hard to see if Inoki’s wrestling tournament helped foster a better understanding of the Japanese and Americans even one iota.  While other sports might strengthen people-to-people relations through team-work and collaboration, by its very nature, wrestling was never going to do much to change North Korean opinions towards two traditional adversaries.  And if the event was at all meant to improve American understanding of the DPRK, it looks to have failed miserably on this front.  Recounting his departure from Pyongyang, in his autobiography Ric Flair describes kissing the ground on arriving in Japan, so “glad to be back on friendly soil”.  And as for Muhammad Ali’s reaction, well, due to expletives it cannot be published here. Suffice to say, he didn’t get a very good impression of North Korea.

While the 1995 wrestling tournament may have had some lofty objectives related to peace and friendship, they sadly went by unachieved. And if anything, the tournament may have even contributed to worsening international opinion of North Korea, such was the nature of the feedback from much of the wrestling community. So while there may be some sense in repeating as much of the past as possible to help bolster Kim Jong-un’s leadership credentials post Kim Jong-il, North Korea would now be ill advised to host another major wrestling tournament.  Instead, a drug-free and constructive participation at the London Olympics offers a much better opportunity for the DPRK to improve its standing and contribute to an environment of international peace and friendship.

Chad O’Carroll is the Director of Communications for the Korea Economic Institute. The views represented here are his own.

Photo from David Stanley’s photostream on flickr Creative Commons.