A Gee-Long shot
Geelong City is convinced that Geelong-Korea will attract baseball fans to the region.
Australia is a less than ideal market for a professionalised baseball league. There is very little grassroots engagement — often thought of as ‘boring cricket’. If you ask someone wearing baseball merchandise if they’re a fan of the team, they usually respond with a non-committal “I-went-to-their-stadium-once-and-bought-this-cap.” After the financially disastrous and experimental Australian Baseball League of the 1990s ceased playing in 1999, the Australian Baseball Federation could have accepted their second-rate bat-and-ball sport fate. Instead, in 2011, it decided that the perhaps masochistic experiment should continue. With that, the ABL was reborn.
Initially consisting of only six teams across Australia, modest success allowed the ABL to expand to two new cities — Auckland and Geelong. There was clear justification for New Zealand expansion — the professionalisation of Baseball New Zealand and the extension of the league into new markets.
The reasoning behind Geelong-Korea, on the other hand, is less clear.
Yes, Geelong’s baseball team is called Geelong-Korea.
Geelong-Korea, is the brainchild of cross-collaboration between the Korean marketing firm Happy Rising and the ABL. Every player, coach and the majority of its management are Korean citizens, largely players who have been released from the highly popular Korean Baseball Organisation.
But they play in Geelong. Geelong, of second largest “city” in Victoria and 250,000 people fame.
As silly as a team called Geelong-Korea sounds, the ABL is not entirely throwing wild pitches. The league already draws heavily upon other countries’ higher-quality development programs, to compensate for Australia’s inability to produce competitive international baseball players — or stop them from leaving when one miraculously appears. The inclusion of a Korean team allowed the tournament to expand to Geelong without having the league resemble European cricket. It also created stronger links with the KBO, which could attract better players to play for another Australian team in their off-season. Baseball Australia even reckons that the ABL could start to attract an audience in Korea, with CEO Glenn Williams stating that the team could help the league reach “maximum exposure not only domestically but internationally as well."
These hopes haven’t materialised, though. In their three seasons, Geelong-Korea finished last in their division on every occasion, never with a winning percentage above 0.350. It’s hard for an established team with a strong connection to a local area to maintain an invested fanbase in such an unpopular sport. It’s even harder to believe that an Australia team featuring only Korean players could gain a foothold in either Geelong or Korea, given its half-removal from both markets.
Geelong City is convinced that Geelong-Korea will attract baseball fans to the region. Its mayor Peter Murrihy claimed that international broadcasts of Geelong Korea are “expected to reach 20 million baseball fans in south-east Asia,” apparently demonstrating the lack of connection between Geelong and Korea by embarrassingly mixing up his Asian geography. My Geelongite housemate (notably, an avid Geelong Cats fan) says that not only do very few locals attend games, but many have never heard of the team. The ABL doesn’t release public attendance data, but the finals held in Perth earlier this year attracted fewer than 3,500 attendees. There is mental gymnastics involved in imagining the regional Geelong Baseball Centre’s stands being packed full of international tourists ready to stimulate the local economy. Korean neither registers as a top five language or ancestry among Geelong residents, so it’s not like the region was planning on marketing the team as representative of the region’s diversity.
There is one thing Baseball Australia may have gotten right, though. The US has a strong history of minor league teams with exceedingly fun names — the Lansing Lugnuts, Fort Myers Mighty Mussels and Rocket City Trash Pandas. Until now, Australia didn’t have its own answer to this; the Sydney Blue Sox, Adelaide Giants and Perth Heat names are boring, and professional. Geelong-Korea may yet serve the ABL by making baseball relevant in giving fans one thing cricket can’t claim: the most fun name in Australian professional sports.