Pacific Perspectives: The scarcity of KBO statistics

Posted by Michael Street on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 3:03 am

I am not normally a booster of corporate America and its intersection with MLB, nor of the Supreme Court, at least not lately. But they have brought us one perhaps underappreciated aspect of baseball, without which most of us here at BDD would not do what we do, without which most of you readers would likely not be reading this blog, and without which fantasy games would likely not exist—or perhaps would cost a mint.

What is that underappreciated aspect? Statistics.

Not just statistics, but free statistics. A series of lawsuits in the ’90s and 2000s established that in America, statistics are not intellectual property rights, but facts. They can be copyrighted when arranged and delivered in a unique way, which is why Baseball Prospectus and the Graphical Player, among other guides, can produce and copyright their books. But they can’t copyright statistics, any more than the phone company can copyright names and addresses.

That’s not to say that some companies (like STATS Inc.) don’t make money delivering those statistics, but the stats themselves are generally easy and cheap to come by and compile, which is how sites like baseball-reference.com or fangraphs.com can deliver stats for free. If you want something like BP’s awesome Player Tracker, that packages and compiles those stats in a useful way, it’s totally affordable.

The result has been a rabid fanbase and a massive online presence, including the fantasy games so many of us play (one of the lawsuits concerned fantasy statistics and whether MLB could make an exclusive agreement with any of them, essentially copyrighting statistics).

Why am I ranting on about this? Because it’s not true in Korea.

The Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) runs a Korean-language website with the statistics for the year, but doesn’t compile or release them for previous years. Want to get ‘em? Be prepared to cough up $20K and up for the privilege.

There are many reasons for this—for one thing, South Korea doesn’t share all of our legal systems and decisions, and many of ours were made in the past twenty years. Also, sports gambling is illegal, and the KBO reportedly believes that withholding statistics like this will discourage gambling (more likely, it will merely put those stats in the hands of the wealthiest bookies).

The result has been an extremely difficult time for those of us covering KBO, and quite possibly a dampening of the market for Korean players. Hard to do any kind of statistical assessment on potential players, particularly since the KBO site isn’t produced in English (they’re not too far behind the curve—NPB, the Japanese major leagues, only created their English site this year).

It dampens my ability to write about these players, and it’s not just me. I’ve been talking to Baseball America about searching and compiling statistics for the handful of American prospects who played in Korea.

Fortunately, however, there are KBO fans taking matters into their own hands. One group has worked collectively on compiling their own database from KBO statistics that was briefly available on a website. Other enterprising fans have banded together to pool their resources to buy the data and make it available to paid members (though the site, too, is only available in Korean).

It seems downright criminal to those of us who are used to getting MLB statistics from a variety of sources, totally free, even ones that include proprietary statistics. As East and West move closer together in the baseball world, moments like these remind us of how different we still are.

This isn’t the reason that KBO isn’t terribly popular in the United States—the thinner talent pool might have a lot to do with that, even though the WBC and Olympics showed that Korean baseball continues to grow and excel, outpacing their Western counterparts. But allowing those statistics to reach across the ocean (or even within their own country) would go a long way towards helping US (and Korean) fans understand and follow their players.

I’m sure there’s a healthy blogosphere about Korean baseball, but I sincerely doubt they have the depth of sophistication we have in America. One of the truly awesome aspects of the privilege of writing baseball analysis is experiencing the amazing depth and breadth of statistical knowledge available here at BDD and across the web.

It’s the culture that has driven the explosive growth in fantasy sports (remember when you used to have to pay for fantasy games at the major sites?) but it’s even improved the game. Stat geeks like Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer are general managers, and plenty more are lining up behind them.

As many readers as I might have, I don’t imagine many of them are KBO higher-ups, but if by chance they are, listen up: Let My Statistics Go.