Jared Hoying returns to South Korea to play baseball

Dayton, Ohio — Jared Hoying’s Major League baseball dream came true when he was called up to the Texas Rangers in 2016...it just didn’t last very long. Hoying spent parts of two seasons with the Rangers...74 games to be exact. Then rather than bounce back and forth to the minors, the 30-year old outfielder decided to take a long road trip, 6,700 miles away to play in South Korea.

“Not in a million years,” Hoying said on a FaceTime interview from his apartment in Daejeon, South Korea. “If somebody would have told me that starting out I would have told them they were crazy, a small town country boy and here I am here in Korea.”

This is actually Hoying’s third season playing in Korea, but like the rest of us, the first in the “new normal” of the coronavirus.

“Over here they’ve got it handled," Hoying said. “I’ve been out to the grocery story the last two days and people are everywhere, kind of like normal, people just wear masks everywhere.”

The Korean baseball season is expected to get started early next month, but they might have to play some of the early games in empty stadiums. Hoying says that will be strange since baseball is a huge spectator sport in South Korea.

“It’s absolutely awesome, imagine a soccer crowd being shoved into a baseball stadium. They’re standing the whole time with cheer songs for each team and cheerleaders on top of the dugouts. It’s a pretty incredible atmosphere.”

Hoying is one of three foreign players for the Hanwha Eagles in the Korean Baseball Organization. This is his 11th season of professional baseball.

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