Korean baseball’s return is a bitter pill for American sports, but a win for ESPN

South Korea and the United States had their first reported cases of coronavirus on the same date: Jan. 20. But the countries took two starkly different approaches to containing their outbreaks, and now South Korea’s economy will begin reopening this week, including schools, parks, museums, and Korean pro baseball—while U.S. sports are still shut down across the board.

South Korea has had 10,801 total confirmed coronavirus cases and its curve peaked in early March, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. The U.S. has had 1.17 million confirmed cases.

The KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) begins its season on Tuesday in empty ballparks without fans; it has been playing preseason games in that format throughout April. The KBO’s return is in many ways an embarrassing contrast to the state of play in America, where the NBA, NHL, and Major League Soccer all halted their in-progress seasons in March, MLB delayed the start of its season, and the NCAA called off its March Madness basketball tournament.

The NFL held its virtual NFL Draft last month with record viewership, and is still optimistic its season can start on time in September. MLB is reportedly hoping to start up its season in late June, while the NBA and NHL are reportedly aiming to return later in the summer. There are still doubts about the college football season, which will depend on colleges and universities opening on time.

In a savvy move at a time when American viewers are desperate for live sports to watch, ESPN finalized a deal at the last minute with Eclat Media Group to become the exclusive English-language broadcaster for the 2020 KBO season, it announced on Monday. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Yonhap News had reported in April that ESPN initially failed to get the rights after it attempted to get them free of charge, so this time around, there is likely money changing hands.

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As part of the deal, ESPN will air six KBO games live per week with full play-by-play commentary in English from ESPN baseball commentators including Karl Ravech, Jon Sciambi, and Jessica Mendoza. Most games will run on ESPN2, and they’ll run live: Tuesday through Friday games will air at 5:30am EST, Saturday games at 4am EST, and Sunday games at 1am EST (in other words, very late on Saturday night).

Those times are not ideal, but it’s likely ESPN will also stream the games somewhere for its subscribers after they air live.

The key appeal for ESPN in the deal may not really be the live games anyway, but the additional content: SportsCenter will now be able to show KBO highlights (and not just from the games ESPN airs), which gives ESPN commentators something to talk about in a very dry time when sports story lines (apart from coronavirus) are scarce.

Even though most games will air on ESPN2, there’s good reason why the first game on Tuesday, the NC Dinos vs. Samsung Lions, will air on main ESPN, right after the midnight SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt. ESPN hopes to make the arrival of KBO on its airwaves feel like an event. Expect the KBO deal to also earn a mention on Disney’s Q2 earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, amid an earnings report expected to be mostly dire while Disney’s parks and resorts remain totally shut down.

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Daniel Roberts is an editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.

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