Major League Baseball and Racialized Masculinities in Korean Digital Media

White Idols

Media construction of the three baseball players tends to rely on the naturalized connection between athletic power and male bodies, so that the bodies functioned as an ideological space to reaffirm male-centered athleticism (Trujillo, 1991). For example, the nicknames of the three players were representative signifiers of the power of male body. Referring to his phenomenal fastball, Chan Ho Park’s best-known nickname among fans is “Korean Express” (J. H. Kim, 2000, ¶ 2; Ko, 2001a, p. 34). Hyun-Jin Ryu has been frequently called the “Korean monster” (Hwang, 2013, ¶ 3), “left-handed monster” (N. J. Choi, 2012, ¶ 1), or “monster pitcher” (H. J. Yi, 2013a, ¶ 5), implying that he is a fearsome player. Shin-Soo Choo’s monikers were “wildcat engine” (Y. W. Kim, 2009, ¶ 2) or “choo-choo train” (Y. R. Kim, 2012, ¶ 3). Following his surname, the nicknames liken his batting to a powerful locomotive. With those metaphors, various linguistic expressions that portray superior athletic force and skill were frequently used in representing the players and their global visibility: “his fastballs that go over 160 km/h” (Gang, 1998, p. 10); “Shin-Soo Choo as five-tool player having hitting for power, hitting for average, fielding ability, throwing ability, and speed” (Jeong, 2008, p. 26); and “blue monster, fearsome changeup” (H. J. Yi, 2013b, ¶ 1). Further, not just physical but also moral and mental attributes were associated with the male athleticism. Media’s focus on the players’ regimented lifestyle that included no smoking or drinking alcohol (or even soda) reaffirmed their mental toughness as a natural quality embedded in male body (Jeong, 1997; D. H. Kim, 2010). As Adelman (1986) points out, star players in baseball demonstrate both physical prowess and virtues such as courage, fortitude, or discipline.

When Korean players were juxtaposed with White males, however, the seemingly solid conflation of male body and athleticism in Korean males was fractured and agitated. That is, the dominant status of Korean athletes as powerful males became enervated within a newly constructed racial hierarchy. When Chan Ho Park joined the Texas Rangers, he was often compared to the legendary U.S. pitcher Nolan Ryan. Under the headline of “Chan Ho, be the 2nd Nolan Ryan,” the White pitcher was cast as the exemplary role model for Chan Ho Park (Ko, 2001b, ¶ 1). One reporter also emphasized the “leader–follower” relationship, stating “Chan Ho Park now plays in the Texas Rangers where Ryan, hero of Chan Ho Park, played” (H. K. Choi, 2001a, ¶ 4). Orel Hershiser was identified as another example for Chan Ho Park to emulate. In an article, “mat-hyeong (the eldest brother), Hershiser’s love for Chan Ho,” the hierarchically constructed relation between a Korean man and a White man is conspicuous (Gang, 2000, p. 33):

The 42-year-old veteran pitcher Orel Hershiser who came back to the Dodgers last winter has come forward to train Chan Ho Park. Hershiser who led the Dodgers to victory in 1988 lavished advice on Chan Ho Park, the yokel, at the official joining ceremony of Chan Ho Park to the Dodgers in 1994. Thus, Chan Ho Park always considers him as one of the most respected MLB players (Gang, 2000, p. 33).

In this way, Hershiser was represented as skilled and competent, while Chan Ho Park was depicted as a “yokel” who needed to be taken care of and disciplined by a (White) man with greater experience and expertise in baseball. Further, by using a kinship term “eldest brother” as an appellation for Hershiser and stressing his age, the narrative presented the two men as brothers. Chan Ho Park, cast as the younger brother, was expected to defer to his eldest brother as dictated by Korean Confucianism. In this way, media narratives create a hierarchical social relation between Korean men and White U.S. men, reflecting Koreans’ cultural ethos favoring Whites. Although Whites are rare in Korean society, many Koreans do hold pro-White attitudes ¹ (Y. Choi, 2018). As far as globalization is concerned, White men from the United States are particularly preferred and admired not only because of their skin color but also because of their economic achievement and global leadership, under the assumption that White masculinized figures representationally embody the nation (Reeser, 2010). In a sport context, White men’s athletic superiority combines with their presumed earning power so that they become idealized “role models” of masculinity worldwide. Given that “many Koreans show signs of an eagerness to position themselves closer to dominant groups” as Shin (2012, p. 385) argues, the juxtaposition between Chan Ho Park and Nolan Ryan or Orel Hershiser in media texts reveals a yearning for White men’s power among Koreans which then normalizes (U.S.) White masculinity, connoting a valorization of neocolonial dominance by White men.

Black (Un)intimacy

While the case of Chan Ho Park demonstrated White dominance over Asian men in the hierarchical construction of brotherhood, the bond between Korean men and brown/Black men ² tends to show a different model in media. Media accounts often depicted Juan Uribe, retired infielder from the Dominican Republic, as Hyun-Jin Ryu’s best MLB friend. As much attention as Hyun-Jin Ryu’s play and daily life received from Korean news reporters and baseball fans, Uribe also attracted media interest through his visibility in Hyun-Jin Ryu’s stories. Referring to a YouTube video showing a prank they played in the dugout during a game, one reporter quoted an article from Yahoo Sports: “Juan Uribe and Hyun-Jin Ryu act like brothers” and “this clip needs a parent telling these two rascals to settle down or there will be no dessert tonight” (Hong, 2013, p. A28). Although this article also adopted a narrative of brotherhood like the story of Park and Hershiser, including Cuban-born player Yasiel Puig in the Dodgers—another prankster who often exchanged tricks with Hyun-Jin Ryu and Uribe—the scenario for the three players denoted a more egalitarian and cooperative friendship rather than a hierarchically organized brotherly relation. Notably, the intimacy among these men was often coded as a bromance. Being called “Ryuribe,” portmanteau of Hyun-Jin Ryu and Juan Uribe, the two men’s friendship was ranked one of the 10 best baseball bromances of the 21st century (Landers, 2018). As a neologism of “brother” and “romance,” a bromance describes male homosocial intimacy “with emotional and affectionate but not sexual connotations” (Brook, 2015, p. 253). Male–male relationships are implicitly or explicitly likely to be connected to anxiety over homoeroticism. When the relations are named as bromance, however, the coding dispels potential homosexuality in favor of a nonproblematic homosociality, “social bonds between persons of the same sex” (Sedgwick, 1998, p. 696). Therefore, the narrative of bromance evokes and consolidates heterosexual desire, while reflecting the cultural dominance of homophobia both in MLB ³ and in Korean society. Within this frame of narrative, both Korean and Black men’s masculinity remains intact by being normalized as heterosexual.

In contrast to the fraternal companionship between Uribe or Puig with Hyun-Jin Ryu, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Jr., former basketball superstar and current co-owner of the Dodgers, was objectified in media accounts as hypermasculine and hypersexualized, repeating a conventional racial prejudice against Black males. Comparing the body sizes of Magic Johnson and Hyun-Jin Ryu, Ryu’s 187 cm, 100 kg physique was infantilized: “Look at the body of the black hyeong…. Korean Hyun-Jin Ryu turned to a baby (5 agrees and 1 disagree) ⁴ ” (Ryu_Naver_Commenter 1); “Standing next to this black hyeong, Hyun-Jin Ryu looks like a little kid (7 agrees)” (Ryu_Naver_Commenter 2). While some Korean baseball players in MLB demonstrated that Korean men can achieve parity with other players from all over the world in terms of both athletic talent and physical size (Joo, 2012), Ryu’s corporeality which was portrayed as childish and immature subordinated his masculine standing to Johnson’s “bulky and robust” body (Jo, 2012, ¶ 7). Johnson’s hegemonic position was, however, abnormalized in the comments about his accentuated hypersexuality. Using his surname “Johnson,” commenters fetishized this Black male as follows:

Ryu_Naver_Commenter 3: Look at the name. It’s Johnson.

Driven by the English slang for phallus, Magic Johnson’s subjectivity was stereotypically caricatured and exaggerated as a phallic symbol (Trujillo, 1991). In addition to the tropes overly sexualizing Johnson’s masculinity, the Korean neologism huk-hyeong (Black older brother) was deliberately chosen to anchor Johnson in a racially and sexually stratified order. In contrast to the use of hyeong in a depiction of White male as a dominant man, when the word is blended with a Black racial coding, it is converted to a mockery naturalizing the connection between Blackness and oversized hypersexual male body. Further, the number of comments that “agreed,” which exceeded the number that “disagreed” verifies that these comments are not just only one person’s opinion but hegemonic voices which could be recognized as dominant “truths” by the support of the majority in online space.

To some degree, an athletic Korean body symbolized by Hyun-Jin Ryu seems subordinate to a Black male body characterized as biologically superior. Yet the commenters’ tendency to exaggerate and even ridicule the physicality of Black males relegated Johnson’s hegemonic status to an exotic, abnormal, and therefore inferior identity. Introjecting the White supremacist fantasies of phallocentered Black men (Douglas, 2014; Rudolph, 2010), Black masculinity was stereotypically defined as “postmodern savage” (Lafrance & Rail, 2000, p. 90) in Korean media. Not surprisingly, public attention gravitated to the story of Johnson’s HIV-positive diagnosis: “Magic Johnson was infected with AIDS, right?” (Ryu_Naver_Commenter 9); “Magic Johnson is still alive with AIDS” (Ryu_Naver_Commenter 10); and “Hyun-Jin Ryu seems nervous standing next to the AIDS patient” (Ryu_Naver_Commenter 11). These pathological narratives implying Johnson’s promiscuity helped stigmatize him as sexually deviant and biologically menacing, thereby restoring Ryu’s masculine status based on his physically and morally “healthy” heterosexuality.

Yellow Enemy

As the Korean-Black coalition was ambivalently constructed in popular media, the relation between Korean males and other Asian ethnic groups was contextually diversified. Simply put, they are together but separate; same but different. “Yellow gust” and “oriental typhoon” are two frequent metaphors, not only for Korean men but also for other Asian players in a global framing. Through the racialized tropes—yellow and oriental—identifying Asian population (Lee, 1999), Asian male subjects tend to be racially oversimplified and objectified based on the ideology of difference in the West (Ott & Mack, 2014; Said, 1978). These metaphors were also discovered in Korean media texts. Through uncritically embracing the Western-centered stereotypical representations of Asian men, Korean media coverage was complicit in the consent for White hegemony (Gross, 2011). Yet those vocabularies were strategically adopted and positioned for a purpose of manufacturing an excellent Korean male representative. In a news article featuring outstanding Asian players who were selected to participate in the All-Star game, Chan Ho Park of Korea and Ichiro Suzuki and Kazuhiro Sasaki of Japan were all reproduced in a rhetoric of “proud one-Asia”:

“Oriental typhoon” hit the All-Star game of MLB…the five percentage (of the total players) surprised the world. They played an active part as protagonists in the star festival subverting the common belief that Asians fall behind Westerners in power and skill. (S. J. Yi, 2001, ¶ 1–3)

This example emphasized Asianness, bifurcating the associated males between an Asian group and a non-Asian (Western) group. Prioritizing a sort of one-Asia rhetoric under the naming “oriental typhoon” rather than emphasizing the ethnic distinctiveness between Koreans and Japanese, the Korean male’s athletic superiority and global status were reinforced within the narrative of Asian power.

In many other Korean contexts, however, Asian baseball players were not categorized as one homogeneous group. Choi (2001b) reported the same event with the headline “Comparison between ‘yellow express’ Chan Ho Park and Ichiro Suzuki” embracing the nuance of who is better (¶ 1). Characterizing Chan Ho Park as a late bloomer and Ichiro Suzuki as a batting genius, he appreciated Chan Ho Park’s effort more than Ichiro Suzuki’s natural talent. In other words, Park was portrayed as someone who had been an unknown athlete but finally achieved the American dream through consistent effort and hard work since joining MLB. In contrast, Ichiro was described as a baseball genius and superstar who had already acquired a great reputation from the Japanese professional league by the time he moved to the United States. Likening Park to a bull but Ichiro to a samurai, the reporter predicted that “the powerful, honest, and sincere bull will eventually defeat the Japanese samurai who is manipulative and astute, merely relying on his technique” (H. S. Choi, 2001b, ¶ 5). In addition, when the LA Dodgers named Chan Ho Park as a starting pitcher and won against the New York Mets, media accounts reduced the victory to a match between Korean player Chan Ho Park and Japanese player Tsuyoshi Shinjo of the Mets (Gwon, 2001). By flattering Tsuyoshi Shinjo as an exceptional player in the Big League, Chan Ho Park’s pitching against the batter was described as a “complete achievement” (¶ 1). Likewise, three Korean males were frequently placed adjacent to Japanese males in the Korean mainstream media. When Shin-Soo Choo’s ranking was released from the MLB.com , using the headline “[in] ML ranking, Shin-Soo Choo is above Darvish,” one reporter zeroed in on the confrontation among the Asian players in MLB (Bae, 2013, p. 24). By highlighting the nationality of each Asian player, Shin-Soo Choo’s status was elevated to a more outstanding and dominant level, the Asian number one. Similarly, when Choo put his name on the American League Most Valuable Player award as the first Korean who gained votes in 2010, the result was reframed in a way that compares two Asian players: “Shin-Soo Choo, 14th place in AL MVP, defeated Ichiro” (Y. J. Kim, 2010, ¶ 1). In these examples, the ways in which Asian men and masculinities are constructed in Korean media were intimately engaged with ethnonational subjectivities (Joo, 2012).

The narrative-style pitting Korean and Japanese men against each other began in 1995 when the Dodgers had only two Asian players: Korea’s first major leaguer Chan Ho Park and Japanese star Hideo Nomo. Although the men were on the same team, media accounts portrayed the two Asian pitchers as competitors. Presented as symbols of “Korean express” and “Japanese express,” they were often polarized as a “rising star/falling star,” “extrovert/introvert,” and “water/fire” (H. J. Yi, 1997, ¶ 2). Through the symmetrically oppositional metaphors, Chan Ho Park was affirmed as a confident, sociable, and culturally competitive citizen who is worthy of the transnational popularity; in contrast, Hideo Nomo was denigrated as a passive, quiet, and retiring man who seemed out of place in the global dynamic. These polarized portrayals reflect the colonization of Korea by Japan in the early 20th century and Koreans’ ongoing resentment and strong sense of rivalry against the Japanese (Cho, 2016; Oh, 2009). Relying on a frame situating Japan as the “old foe” of Korea and sport between two countries as a quasi-war, Korean media accounts continued to contrast Korean men favorably against Japanese men, stressing Korean men’s athletic power and global success, while in turn naturalizing androcentric national imagery and also dismissing Japanese men and masculinities as less heroic. Indeed, while White men were easily idolized, Japanese men seldom were in Korean popular media. Rather, in a more explicit expression of anti-Japanism, among the Korean public, Japanese men were symbolized as inferior or at least “less” superior than Korean men: “Well, he is reliable with the big physique which is different from the skinny Japanese players” (Ryu_Naver_Commenter 12); “Sweep the board…do better than monkeys” (5 agrees and 1 disagree/Ryu_Naver_Commenter 13); and “Do a hundred and thousand times better than japs, Kuroda Hiroki∼!! Prove that he is not a great pitcher ^∧∧ You are the strongest now” (3 agrees and 5 disagrees/Ryu_Naver_Commenter 14). Koreans’ colonial memories and the subsequent political hostility against Japan and Japanese men were manifested through ethnically derided expressions such as monkeys or japs. While orientalist expressions such as “yellow” or “oriental” have been employed to lump all Asian males together to underscore the excellence of Korean males along with other high-profile Asian players in MLB, the use of racialized tropes of “monkeys” or “japs” rather functioned to separate Korean men from the group of Asian men, highlighting a view that Korean men are more superior than any other Asian in MLB—especially in comparison to Japanese players. Through the dual strategy of disjuncture or intermingling of Asian players in MLB (Shah, 2008), in the media accounts featuring a rhetoric of ambivalence, Korean men’s athletic competence and global visibility are thereby maintained and fortified.