Chi Sung Pil: A Trailblazer in Korean Baseball

Chi Sung Pil was born in Korea around 1900. His mother, Sun Sin So Kim, was a longstanding Presbyterian missionary. Sometime around 1909, Kim’s husband died. Thanks to the efforts of Christian missionaries in Honolulu, who assisted Korean Christian widows and divorcees in relocating to the United States, Kim moved to Hawai’i shortly thereafter, bringing young Chi Sung with her. Kim continued her missionary work with the other devout Korean immigrants she met, and soon remarried within the thriving community, having two more children.

In Roberta Chang and Wayne Patterson’s The Koreans in Hawai’i: A Pictorial History, 1903-2003, a photo from 1920 shows Kim and the family she built in Hawai’i. The photo is taken against an elegant forested backdrop, and both parents and children are dressed to the nines: mother and daughter in light dresses, father and son in suits — the son, Harry Kim, sporting a jaunty polka-dot button-up and bow-tie. Chi Sung, who would then have been around 20, is not pictured.

Only a few years later, Chi Sung’s photograph would be featured in newspapers across the country. There is one in particular that kept cropping up: an action shot, with Chi Sung’s left arm raised high behind his head, his right arm extended outward and down — the classic, instantly recognizable pose of the submariner. In the Los Angeles Times on April 5, 1923, this photo appeared alongside other images of other people making world news that day — Haran Elkuta, leading a revolution in Albania; a group of Hawai’ian legislators; the U.S.S Pennsylvania at sea.

The caption box beside Chi Sung’s picture reads: “Only Korean ball player is demon pitcher! Chi Sung Pil, now attending the University of Oregon, plans to organize a team of Koreans to tour the Orient.”

***

As the 1910s gave way to the 1920s, interest in expanding the game of baseball around the globe increased rapidly. By 1921, there was a regular exchange of collegiate and semi-professional teams back and forth from North America to Asia, staging tournaments and tours. Most often, this travel centered around Japan, whose well-established baseball culture created ample demand for such exhibition games, and often extended to China as well. Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis saw great potential to spread America’s game — and with it, all the attendant ideas of “American values” — across the globe. In 1922, then, a group of big leaguers that included members of the World Series-winning Giants and World Series-losing Yankees made a well-publicized offseason trip to “the Orient.” The trip was the most extensive yet seen, with stops planned in Japan, Korea, China, the Phillippines, and Hawai’i.

From the American Guardian, December 5, 1922: “America may well be proud of these representatives who typify the best in American sport life.”

The team arrived in Honolulu on January 18, 1923, their trip having been a rousing success. Their contests with Japanese collegiate teams reportedly drew record crowds, one of the games going down as a no-hitter for Waite Hoyt; they continued to draw well the entire trip. And their stay in Honolulu included games with some of the local Asian immigrant teams that had grown over the last decade: the Asahis, a Japanese team, and the All-Chinese.

The visibility of Asian baseball — of its quality and popularity both overseas and in North American — had never been higher. Yet, still, the discussion tended to ignore Korean baseball. Though the tour had ostensibly stopped in Korea, and though there’s evidence of a Korean-Hawai’ian baseball team playing in Honolulu as early as 1912, there was comparatively little mention of this in English-language newspapers. An image of a Korean team was published in American papers alongside a racist caricature. The lack of information was such that when another Korean team was formed in Honolulu in early March of 1923, it was reported as “the first time in baseball here, if not in the world, the Koreans have organized a baseball team strictly for and by the people of that race or nationality.”

***

Chi Sung Pil suddenly became the subject of national attention in mid-March of 1923. He was, by that point, already a junior at the University of Oregon, and had previously been the captain of the baseball team at Pacific College. His baseball career was hardly new. But the culture had finally reached a point where his success was notable — where it was newsworthy.

On March 17, 1923, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin ran a feature on Pil. It told of how he honed his baseball skill throwing rocks with neighborhood kids as a child in Korea; how he picked up baseball in Honolulu at the Korean boys’ school he attended, and then at the YMCA, where he spent hours of every day fielding groundballs; and how he managed to win his way onto the Pacific College team as a freshman despite the doubts of a coach:

In the fall of 1919 Pil registered as a student in Pacific College. When the baseball season arrived he turned out for the team. Pil aspired to be a pitcher but he was only five feet seven inches tall and weighed only 145 pounds. The coach of the team had to be convinced that he had the strength and ability to hold down the place on the mound. Pil made a wager that he could throw a stone for a distance of 60 feet and hit a bull’s eye three out of three times. He won the wager.

The Des Moines Register, March 24, 1923

By all accounts, Pil was an excellent pitcher. He was a lefty who could mix in a side-arm and a submarine delivery. His very first collegiate game was an 18-strikeout no-hitter, and he averaged 15 strikeouts per game in his sophomore year. Not only that, but he played every position in the field — his favorite was shortstop. In that sophomore year, he batted .350. And off the field, Pil was a student of journalism, one of the founding editors of a newspaper for young Korean Hawai’ians — one of the first of its kind.

It didn’t take long for Pil’s story to blow up as an item in more distant newspapers: “Korean Ball Player Demon Pitcher,” read the usual headline, often accompanied by that photo. For the first time, a Korean baseball player had achieved North American notoriety. He was, quite literally, the face of Korean baseball.

***

The floodgates, it seemed, had broken. That summer, the Korean Christian Institute of Honolulu sent a baseball team to tour Korea, a trip reported to be wildly successful. Pil himself played with the Honolulu Korean team that summer, with eyes towards organizing another tour.

The tour ended up coming to Honolulu. Community members, in communication with well-connected people in Seoul, organized a historic trip, and Hawai’i, the center of Korean baseball outside of Korea, was the obvious choice of destination. A team of 13 players from Seoul — reportedly Korea’s best — arrived in Hawai’i on June 17, 1924, to a great deal of attention. There were more than 40 receptions planned for them in the intervening 12 days before their first game was scheduled. And with good reason: It was the first time a Korean baseball team was going on tour abroad. Over the course of a single year, Honolulu had gone from seeing its “first ever” local Korean team formed to hosting some of the country’s best international baseball players.

The Honolulu Star-Tribune, July 1924

Despite the fact that their first game was supposedly scheduled for June 29, the Korean team had somehow won three games by June 19. Their trip around the islands would last five weeks, with each successive stop creating more anticipation for the team that had scored off of Waite Hoyt, more admiration for the quality of play and the passion and rivalry displayed. And joining their roster, as pitcher and fielder, was one C.S. Pil.

***

With the KBO and the CBPL currently the only operational professional baseball leagues in the world right now, more North American eyes have turned to Asian baseball over the past three months than perhaps ever before. Scores of people are discovering a new world of players and teams that, for a lot of us, existed on the periphery of our baseball knowledge, beyond time zones and language barriers.

Even though it isn’t as well-documented in English sources as the histories of MLB and MiLB, the past of Asian baseball — in North America and in Asia — has history, too: a history that reaches back into the 19th century, full of the oddities and feats that we so appreciate about MLB. It only needs to be unearthed, the dust brushed off the old newspapers. As it turns out, we can draw a line from today’s KBO, with the movement of its players to and from North America, all the way back to a college student in 1923 — a side-arm thrower, a journalist, the president of the campus Cosmopolitan Club — a trailblazer.

And what became of Chi Sung Pil? He became the athletic director at the YMCA in Honolulu, the place where he had fielded groundballs not that long before. He got married. He moved to San Francisco and worked in journalism and business there, still playing baseball, and then moved back to O’ahu. He died in 1952, a beloved husband and father.





RJ is the dilettante-in-residence at FanGraphs. Previous work can be found at Baseball Prospectus, VICE Sports, and The Hardball Times.

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Lunch Anglemember
3 years ago

What a great story, thanks for telling it Rachael!