With all the news around how 8 Kansas City players could start on the American League All-Star team due to a surge in online fan voting this got me wondering if South Korean netizens were behind this? I ask because the Kansas City Royals are a popular team in Korea now due to their SuperFan Lee Sung-woo. If anyone knows how to get out the vote online it is South Koreans netizens. So is this online voting surge just a coincidence or has anyone seen anything in regards to South Koreans getting out the vote for the Kansas City Royals?:
– In every corner of the Kansas City Royals‘ clubhouse, they revel in the chaos, each player’s face contorted into something that resembles a Guy Fawkes mask. Somehow, the American League All-Star team’s lineup as of today consists of eight Royals and the best player in the world, and this, to them, is the most glorious kind of anarchy, one everybody involved wants to believe is built on the back of pure passion.
It may well be that the 25th-sized market of Major League Baseball’s 26 mobilized, rocked the vote and did so without the help of a sneaky Python script or an undetectable Perl script or any of the ways around the system that for the first time has gone online only and seen itself turned completely on its head. Because right now, the single worst offensive player in baseball is the AL starter at second base and the single best offensive player in the AL is not starting and the entire thing is like a coastal fever dream in which the Midwest rises up and fights back for all those years of flyover jokes. [Yahoo Sports]
You can read the rest at the link.
Via the Marmot’s Hole comes this interesting story about a Korean superfan who has become the face of the fanbase for the Kansas City Royals baseball team that will take on the San Francisco Giants in the World Series:
The Irish have the Blarney Stone, the Chinese rub Buddha’s belly and the Kansas City Royals have Lee Sung-woo.
They have who, what, huh?
Okay, so the story goes that in the middle of the American major league baseball season the Kansas City Royals were just an average team in a small market with average talent, having yet another ho-hum average season in their bland 45 year history (playoff-less in the last 28 of those 45 years). That was until a foreigner named Sung-woo Lee from far away South Korea came on the scene. Through social media, Sung-woo was a regular fixture on Royals’ fan sites and blogs and exhorted Royals’ fans to persevere, which helped to inject much needed enthusiasm into the traditional fan base. Interestingly enough, Sung-woo’s online participation started as an attempt to learn English by consistently conversing with American baseball fans. [Marmot’s Hole]
You can read more at the Marmot’s Hole link, but if they win the World Series this is a Disney feel good story in the making. In fact a filmmaker is already making a movie about Lee:
That would be OK, but… what if SungWoo could come back for the World Series in Kansas City?
It appears to be happening. Due to a viral effort by bloggers and a filmmaker named Josh Swade – who is in Korea right now — wants to document the story, several people close to the situation are reporting that Lee will be returning for the first Fall Classic in Kansas City since 1985. Andy McCullough in the Kansas City Star reports that Swade is talking with Lee’s employer in South Korea to make it possible for him to get away. Announcements have been made elsewhere. [Yahoo Sports]
You can read more at the link, but what an incredible story.
