Ex-A's 3B Coach Williams Ready to Manage as Korean Baseball Gets Going Again

Former Oakland Athletics third base coach Matt Williams, now the manager of the KIA Tigers, will be back doing baseball again in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as Korean baseball starts exhibition games Tuesday, building up to a May 5 start to the regular season.

If A’s fans are looking overseas to use baseball in Asia as a hint as to when or if baseball will return to the Coliseum, they’re seeing some mixed messages that aren’t clearing things up at all.

Over the weekend, Nippon Professional Baseball said that season openers will not take place this month.

On the other hand, in South Korea, the Korea Baseball Organization (KAO) is poised to start playing exhibition games Tuesday leading up to a scheduled May 5 start to the regular season.

Mark Weidemaier, a former big-league coach and scout who currently coaches for the KIA Tigers, told the Baltimore Sun, “We’re playing baseball.”

The Tigers are managed by Matt Williams, who was the A’s third base coach the last two years. He and Weidemaier are longtime pals. Weidemaier coached for Williams when Williams managed the Washington Nationals from 2014-15.

“We’re probably in the safest place in the world,” Weidemaier told the newspaper before an intrasquad game. “It’s pretty much business as usual,” Weidemaier said. “The government has done a great job of testing. We get body scanned as soon as we walk into the stadium. The front office workers wear masks.”

And they are about to play baseball again, although players may wear masks and there won’t be any fans watching from the stands.

Things aren’t nearly so rosy in Japan.

There, the baseball season’s original opening date was March 20. That was set back to April 10 because of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and then to this week. But the April 24 date has been scratched, too.

More than that, NPB, which oversees of professional baseball in Japan’s Central and Pacific leagues, has given up even putting out a new proposed start date. The NPB bosses will receive a briefing from medical specialists on Thursday, and it’s possible that a new start date will be settled on.

Already the NBP 143-game schedule has been whittled down. The Central and Pacific leagues won’t play any interleague games, so the season won’t have more than 125 games. Interleague games have been a staple of the Japanese baseball schedule since 2005.

NPB had been hoping that cutting the number of games down wouldn’t be necessary; the schedule began early in order to observe a three-week break brought about by the Tokyo Olympics.

Elsewhere, Taiwan’s four-team Chinese Professional Baseball League has begun play, getting teams on the field without having any spectators in the stands.

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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