K-Sports Global

The KBO cut two seconds off its pitch clock for 2026. Games got longer anyway. Korea's league publishes its own average-game-time table, and when I opened it on the evening of September 17 KST it read 3 hours 6 minutes for regulation nine innings, against 3:02 for all of last season. Two numbers, four minutes apart. The league's own table, not the headline number KBO's 평균 경기시간 page carries two yearly tables, and they do not say the same thing. One is labelled 정규이닝, regulation innings, and starts at 2010. The other is 연장포함, extras included, and runs back to 1982. Read down the 정규이닝 column and you get 3:12 in 2023, 3:10 in 2024, 3:02 in 2025, and 3:06 so far in 2026. The 연장포함 column runs three or four minutes longer in every one of those years, at 3:16, 3:13, 3:05 and 3:09. The long view lives in that second table. KBO games sat under three hours through most of the 1980s and 1990s, and the floor is 2:47 in 1993. Every season from 1999 onward is above three hours. The p...

South Korea's Asian Games baseball squad reported on September 14 and will not be back with their KBO clubs until September 28. The KBO schedule for September 2026 does not pause for any of it. Twenty-four players are out for two weeks of a pennant race that runs to October 7. Everything below is as of 7 a.m. KST on September 16. Hankook Ilbo set out the plan on the 14th: two training days at Gocheok Sky Dome on the 15th and 16th, a practice game against the Armed Forces team on the 17th, then the flight to Nagoya on the 18th. Who each club is missing The KBO and the Korea Baseball Softball Association named the 24 at the Press Center in Seoul on June 11, with Ryu Ji-hyun as manager. Eleven pitchers, two catchers, seven infielders, four outfielders, and not one amateur among them . Selection was built around players 25 and under , or in their fourth professional season or earlier, plus three wildcard places for players 29 and under. The wildcards went to Gwak Bin (Doosan), Noh...