Column

I Stayed Up All Night to Watch Korean Baseball Like a Real American

You can’t sleep on KBO if you’re as horny for sports as I have been

Drew Magary
GEN
Published in
14 min readMay 12, 2020

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Banners showing faces of fans are placed in the seating area of Happy Dream Ballpark during a baseball game in South Korea.
Photo: Jong Hyun Kim/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The pregame

Being a sports fan is its own form of voluntary jet lag. I live on the East Coast, so I know all about the NBA, the NFL, and Major League Baseball starting prime-time games too late and deliberately impinging upon my dad hours. On sportsless days, I’m in bed by 9:30 and asleep by 10. It keeps me beautiful. When sports are around, I violate that self-imposed curfew, because, like LeBron James, I will die for sports in general, which is neat, because American team owners are about to ask their players to do just that. But there haven’t been any sports around these parts for months now, and thus my sleep schedule has gone uninterrupted for the longest stretch of my middle age…

Until Saturday night.

On Saturday night, I resolved to stay up and watch the LG Twins and NC Dinos go at it in the Korea Baseball Organization. KBO began its season a week ago, with ESPN broadcasting the games live for a nominal rights fee. (The Worldwide Leader demanded the rights for free at first, and the KBO told them to go suck a used Covid mask.) I would watch this game. What’s more, I would watch it while…

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Drew Magary
GEN
Writer for

Columnist at GEN. Co-founder, Defector. Author of Point B.