Spring camps for 10 professional baseball teams are in full swing to prepare for the 2025 season. After the first-team players left Korea late last month, Futures (second-team) players will leave Korea one after another this month.메이저놀이터

The most sought-after team is Japan. Five teams - the KIA Tigers and Hanwha Eagles (Gochi), the Samsung Lions (Okinawa), the Doosan Bears (Miyakojima) and the SSG Landers (Kagoshima) - will set up camp in Japan. The Lotte Giants (Tainan) and the Kiwoom Heroes (Gaohsiung) chose Taiwan. Only three teams - the LG Twins (Toyong, South Gyeongsang Province), the NC Dinos (Goseong, South Gyeongsang Province) and the KT Wiz (Gijang, Busan) - will be in Korea.

Samsung was the first team to attempt overseas camp for the second tier team in 2012. When the first tier team moved to Okinawa after finishing its Guam camp, they sent the second tier team in Daegu to Guam after that. "The decision was made to motivate the second tier team players and make them proud as professionals," a Samsung official said. The following year, Nexen (currently Kiwoom) and the SK Wyverns (currently SSG) set up a second tier camp in Taiwan, and since then, other teams have turned their eyes to overseas as well. In 2017, for the first time in the history of all 10 teams in the second tier team, all experienced overseas camp.

At first, Taiwan was in the spotlight. Most of all, the cost of staying there is relatively less. Now even second-tier camps are considering the environment more importantly than the cost. As a result, more teams are moving to Japan with better training facilities. The duration of stay has increased, but in the past, short schedules of around two weeks were mainstream, and now it takes about three to four weeks.

Defending champion Kia sent its second-tier team to Kochi on Sunday to start the camp first. It will take 28 days. Samsung set up its second-tier camp just a 10-minute drive from the first-tier camp site, which allowed coach Park Jin-man to easily come and go. Major players undergoing rehabilitation including Kang Min-ho, Koo Ja-wook and Won Tae-in are also in the second-tier camp. "The condition of the ground, training equipment, indoor practice range, and operating personnel is superior in many ways compared to last year," SSG, which moved its training site from Taiwan to Kagoshima, said. "As Samsung can also hold practice matches with Japanese club teams with good pitching capability, it is also good for fielders to develop their sense of play in the game."

Underneath this trend are trends in the club that emphasize the importance of fostering players. The first-tier Korean Professional Baseball League is not that thick, and it costs too much money to recruit free agents that can be used. It is more efficient to find young prospects and nurture them well. The Hanwha Eagles recruited Takahiro Saeki, former coach of the Chunichi Dragons, from the Japanese professional baseball league as a camp instructor to fix the situation.