May 20

May 20 Update

Where to Watch Pro Baseball

With the ongoing talk about the delayed start to the MLB season, resuming the NHL and NBA seasons, and the NFL's relative indifference to starting their season up as planned, there has been a lot of online clamouring for all kinds of professional sports. Some professional sports leagues have been able to modify their offerings and continue providing people with the necessary escape from our daily lives. Take professional darts, for example:

They have been able to modify their game to provide fans with an engaging, authentic, and at-home experience. Even though some of the hype has been taken away; absent the beer halls of Europe and the incredible, constant-party, atmosphere therein, the core of the game has been able to be maintained. The best athletes, given that their internet connection holds up, can still compete at the highest level.

North American professional baseball is still navigating this new normal that we have found ourselves in. I am hopeful that the MLB can resume play safely in July. In the meantime, professional baseball is going full steam ahead in Asia with the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) and the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) having started their regular seasons. For context, the quality of play in the KBO sits somewhere between the AA and AAA minor league levels and the CPBL sits between A and AA. I've written before on how to watch the CPBL, and many teams are now starting to cater to their North American viewers with English language broadcasts on Twitter or other media platforms (I'm currently a Brothers baseball supporter, mainly because of their unique, bright yellow uniforms, reminiscent of the Savannah Bananas (of the Coastal Plain League)). The KBO is a bit of a different story as their broadcasting rights have been picked up by ESPN in the U.S., but not any Canadian broadcaster at this point. People a little more tech-savvy than myself have leveraged their VPNs and changed their DNS settings to access the English-language broadcasts from south of the border, but for people without the technical knowledge or not willing to bear the expense, there are a couple other options available. First is Naver. This is a Korean media site that provides, anyone with the application, the live feeds of each of these games. The issue is that Naver is entirely in Korean and requires translating if you have no knowledge of the language, but the benefit is that it provides the genuine live broadcast. The second option is Twitch. Twitch is typically a video games broadcasting platform, but it has been leveraged by the KBO to provide fans with live broadcasts and an interactive group chat system. At the start of the season, these live broadcasts were available to worldwide audiences, but have now been restricted to Korean residents. Not all is lost though as the past broadcasts, or video-on-demand, are available to anyone. There are six separate channels which fans can watch: KBO, KBO1, KBO2, KBO3, KBO4, and KBO5. Their past broadcasts are available immediately after the live broadcast ends, which could be a benefit anyways as games typically air at 3:30 AM on weekdays and 2:30 AM or 11:00 PM on weekends. Hopefully this can satiate any desire for watching professional baseball until the MLB returns to the airwaves.

Yours in baseball,

Coach Lovie
Baseball Development Lead
Sherwood Park Minor Baseball Association
baseballdevelopment@spmba.ca