In Korea, Watching ‘Tiger King’ and Training for Baseball Alone

“I was like, ‘If I’d have been playing in the States, I’d be playing,’” Bell said. “Now I’m sitting here and we’re going to be playing well before them. But when it first started, we were like, ‘There’s no way.’”

K.B.O. teams do not train in the same area, and while most players returned to South Korea when the league shut down in early March, five of the league’s 10 teams allowed their foreign players to return to their homes. Those who did — like Bell, who went to Tennessee, and Brigham and Jokisch, who went to Florida — were tested for Covid-19 when they arrived in South Korea in late March, and then began their 14 days of isolation.

“The teams check everybody’s temperature every day when they get to the field, just trying to do everything they can to monitor everybody’s health, because as we saw in the States, in the N.B.A., one guy gets it and they have to shut it down,” Bell said. “They’re being very proactive over here, but still that’s the main worry: One guy gets it, and then you’re basically on hold for three weeks right in the middle of the season.”

With their lives on hold, the players have turned to their translators for food and grocery delivery. They cook for themselves, talk to their families as soon as they wake up and again before bed, and search for ways to pass the time. Jokisch watched the Netflix series “Tiger King” on his overseas flight, and is trying to get into the “Ozark” series. His translator brought him a “Toy Story” puzzle, and he is almost finished.

But the lull of self-isolation comes with a nagging sense of the unknown, especially for pitchers.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/sports/baseball/kbo-baseball-coronavirus.html