Korea Gets Same Treatment From ESPN that A's, Twins, Rays, Indians & Nationals Know All Too Well

ESPN's negotiations to get live Korean baseball in this time of pandemic were a slap in the face: ESPN apparently wanted the games for free. That's a similar attitude from the broadcasting giant that leads to the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Cubs and Dodgers getting almost all the prime time slots on Sunday Night Baseball.

It’s hard to say where ESPN’s mind is at these days. But what else is new?

There are no live sports to televise, and for an organization whose entire raison d’etre is the broadcasting of live sporting events, and then talking endlessly about them, that’s a gut punch.

ESPN should be up to its elbows in Major League Baseball at this point in the calendar. Not to mention NBA, NHL soccer golf and the occasional tennis match. The advent of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, all that changed. Sports went away.

Instead, across ESPN’s group of channels, you see talking heads talking about sports that aren’t being played and replays upon replays, although with the start of the NFL draft today, that gives the ESPN voices something to dig into for the next few days, at a minimum.

Dead air has become the trademark of ESPN’s channels during the pandemic.

Even at that, what happened this week was kind of nuts. ESPN wanted to add live sports, and was negotiating with the Korea Baseball Organization, which started exhibition games this week and which is down for a May 4 start to the regular season.

ESPN’s offer to KBO and Eclat, which owns international rights to KBO games, was simply put, nothing. According to Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, ESPN was willing to televise the games in the U.S. just to get some live action on the air, but wanted the rights for free.

Seriously?

ESPN, which claims Sunday Night Baseball as the jewel in its baseball crown, pays $700,000 million annually to Major League Baseball. Korea baseball isn’t worth that, but its not worth nothing.

Korea baseball officials feel disrespected.

Join the club. Disrespect is coin of the realm at ESPN. If ESPN could figure out a way to do it, they’d only put the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers and Cubs on the air.

Want proof? The 2020 Sunday Night Baseball schedule for the first half of the season through July 26 called for games to be played over 16 Sundays. One of those five teams played in 15 of those 16 games, and in seven of those 16 games, both competitors came from that five-team list.

It’s not too much of a stretch to think that if ESPN could put the Red Sox and the Yankees on every Sunday all season they would. Three of the first 16 Sunday games on the schedule for 2020 were Red Sox-Yankees.

The Oakland A’s, who won 97 games each of the last two years, weren’t on the list to play. Neither were the Minnesota Twins, who won 101 games and the American League Central title last year. Tampa Bay won 96 games last year, apparently not enough to earn a Sunday night berth. Ditto for the Cleveland Indians, who won 93 games a year ago. And the same goes for the Washington Nationals, who won 93 and … wait for it … won the World Series a year ago.

Who knows what ESPN was playing at? Except that the people making the calls don’t seem to have changed from last year to this.

This much is clear -- putting live baseball on its air didn’t seem to be much of a priority, just like getting all of the best teams on the air hasn’t been in the past.

One last question -- If the network wasn’t willing to pay anything for the Korea games, why did they even enter negotiations?

Just asking.

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

Click the "follow" button in the top right corner to join the conversation on Inside the Athletics on SI. Access and comment on featured stories and start your own conversations and post external links on our community page.