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If you’re sad about the Oakland A’s moving to Las Vegas, or if you’re jonesing for more baseball because it’s winter—and the real hot stove drama about who is getting international superstar Shohei Ohtani is somehow not enough for you—you need to binge watch the 2019 Korean drama Hot Stove League. In short, it’s Moneyball with a healthy dash of soap opera added to the mix.
(Amazon / SBS TV)
The series follows a fictional professional Korean baseball team called the Dreams, a group of long-running, last-place losers who hire a new general manager to captain the ship. The issue is, he has never worked for a baseball team before. You might be familiar with the premise because it’s very similar to Ted Lasso (as are some of the twists), but Hot Stove League is more melodrama than dramedy. Baseball fans will have much more to latch onto due to how much it wears its inspiration on its sleeve: the green and gold designs of the Dreams’ hats and uniforms are almost lifted from the Oakland A’s, and there is a focus on sabermetrics and stats, although it takes a backseat to dramatic license sometimes. Still, there are enough references to in-depth baseball here to make its nerdiest fans smile.
Over the course of 16 episodes, the team transforms from a group of uninterested has-beens racked with inflated egos and infighting (there is a power struggle between the coaches, and the team’s star player is a clubhouse cancer, for example) to a cohesive unit. While there are ups and downs—wins and losses—even betrayals and secrets revealed, it is a feel-good story and perfectly cozy for the wintertime.
The drama happens on the field and in the front office, with rival GMs, with the Dreams’ owner, clashes within the marketing department, or sketchy behaviour from the team’s scout, but it also follows the characters home too. As someone unfamiliar with K-dramas, it’s fascinating to get a window into Korean culture and lifestyle: at restaurants they constantly order pork for team functions because beef is too expensive, and I learned that crispy Korean corndogs are a thing—it made me go and look for them near me, and they are as delicious as they looked on screen.
If you are an avid baseball watcher, Hot Stove League probably won’t teach you anything you don’t already know but for me, I loved seeing something familiar in a new setting. These are not American baseball players, and in real life, the KBO and NPB (Korea’s and Japan’s professional leagues) are extremely popular. There is even a fun subplot in the series where some characters travel to California (though clearly filmed in Hawaii) to try and sign an American pitcher.
Hot Stove League is packed with story and is able to dig into all of the aspects of the sport I find incredibly enjoyable.