Shin-Soo Choo peels off the sweaty shirt in the Cleveland Indians clubhouse.
Shin-Soo Choo peels off the sweaty shirt in the Cleveland Indians clubhouse. He’s alone — his teammates enjoying a day off — but this day he’s smiling.
He has just hit balls off a tee, his first swings of a baseball bat in more than a month since his left thumb was broken by a pitch June 24 in San Francisco.
The South Korean outfielder is getting a chance to play again, to salvage a season marred by not only the injury but also a DUI arrest. It’s a season in which arguably the best player his country has produced often felt alone and isolated, feeling the weight of the world — or at least countries on both sides of the world — pressing down on him.
Choo knew he had made a serious mistake when he was stopped by police May 2 in the Cleveland suburb of Sheffield Lake. He called teammates together on the field during batting practice the next day to apologize, telling them he didn’t want to be a distraction.
“I don’t want to make trouble on the team,” Choo told news reporters after that meeting. “Every person has to learn. I regret that this happened. … I apologize.”
But as the surprising Indians rolled along at or near the top of the American League Central, Choo was the one who was affected.
“It was hard to hear,” Choo, 29, says of the reaction to his arrest. “This is almost my country, too. I have two countries. I try to make everybody happy. I try to make everybody like me. I learned a lot this year. Not only baseball. I learned a lot about life.”
Choo’s position is unique in the major leagues. His 539 games are the most played by a Korean in the majors. He is the unquestioned star of his country’s national team and — most significantly — the only player in the majors who is the sole representative of his country.
“He’s representing a whole country,” says Indians manager Manny Acta, the only current major league manager from the Dominican Republic. “It took a lot of counseling to help him get through it.”
This year’s major league opening-day rosters included players from 14 countries outside the USA, constituting 27.7% of major leaguers. Beyond the significant influence of Dominicans and Venezuelans and the high-profile Japanese presence, other countries are represented by a select few, and their fame in their homelands is mostly muted:
•Colombia has three players, but veteran infielders Orlando Cabrera and Edgar Renteria are each in their second decade in the majors.
•Panama has five, but even its best, New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, admits baseball is losing out to soccer among Panamanian youth.
•When the Seattle Mariners added outfielder Greg Halman to the roster in June, he became the only current major leaguer born, raised and trained in the Netherlands. Halman was optioned this month to Class AAA. A teammate there, third baseman Alex Liddi, could soon be the first major league player developed in Italy. But Halman and Liddi are hardly noticed back home beyond by family and friends.
Embarrassed at criticism
Choo is an unquestioned celebrity in South Korea. He has endorsement deals, and a common debate there is when Choo will surpass pitcher Chan Ho Park — playing in Japan this season after 17 years in the majors — as the country’s greatest player.
Though Choo now makes his home — with his wife and two sons — in Arizona, he spends three or four weeks each offseason visiting his parents in Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city, where he grew up.
“Baseball is the most popular sport in Korea,” he says. “Everywhere I go, people want autographs. They want to take pictures.”
And they certainly took note after his arrest.
Choo gets frequent attention from Korean news media but isn’t as closely followed by reporters as some Japanese players are or Park was after he became Korea’s first major leaguer in 1994.
“It’s different now,” Choo says. “People get everything from the Internet.”
Those changes nearly became Choo’s undoing.
He was embarrassed and upset by his arrest. He understood criticism was warranted. But he was worried about what people thought.
“I listened to everybody,” he says. “I heard everything. I saw everything. I kept checking on the Internet. The articles weren’t so bad, but the part down at the bottom … really bad.”
Choo says news media coverage in South Korea and the USA was straightforward enough, but the comment sections from readers stung. Some in the Cleveland area, he felt, used the story as a chance to make deragatory comments about his ethnic background. Some in Korea called for the revocation of his prized military exemption.
Until this year, that exemption was the biggest source of stress in Choo’s career. South Korean men are required to serve two years in the military before they turn 30. Choo and the Indians knew the only likely way to avoid interrupting his career was for the national team to win a major international event, for which exemptions often are granted as a reward. South Korea, with Choo batting .571, won last year’s Asian Games, and the players got the exemption.
“I cared about what my friends in Korea were thinking,” Choo says. “I cared about what my family was thinking.”
And his game suffered.
Choo was batting .250 at the time of the arrest but was on an eight-game hitting streak that had raised his average 47 points.
He went hitless in his next 18 at-bats.
A career .291 hitter who led the Indians in just about every offensive category last season, he never got above .250 from his arrest until he went on the DL in June.
Acta watched closely, becoming increasingly certain Choo’s hitting woes were more psychological than mechanical.
“I think (the arrest) bothered him a lot,” Acta says. “He knows how serious it was. He was keeping tabs on what people were saying. I tried to relate to him. I know I feel a lot of pressure sometimes as the only Dominican manager.”
After a month of struggling, Choo admitted to the local news media that the DUI was affecting his play.
“I wanted to play good … and then try to make people forget about that happening,” he said. “I think I’m trying too hard, I’m thinking too much.”
He recalls several sit-downs with Acta — “He helped a lot,” Choo says — and almost nightly heart-to-hearts with his wife, Won Mi Ha.
“What can I do?” he would say at home.
“Now, I know some people won’t like me,” he says. “It’s OK. They don’t know me. They don’t know I’m not really that kind of person. They don’t know how much we have stress. People see that we play baseball, we make a lot of money. They see nothing else.”
The injury, it seemed, couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Perspective from family
Choo returned to the Indians on Aug. 12, and he’s hitting .343 since then, raising his batting average to .256.
The time off added perspective. He was home every day with his boys — ages 6 years and 22 months — and his wife, who is expecting a daughter this month.
“It’s not my life,” Choo says, laughing, of being home every day. “It’s all for the kids. I have a pregnant wife, and she does all these things and never says anything. I feel like a baby every time I complain to my wife. … I’m a really lucky man. Now, 0-for-4 or 0-for-5 doesn’t matter as much.”
Choo is itching to contribute again in a tight division race.
His DUI case ended last month. After pleading guilty, he was fined $675, his license was suspended for six months and he was given a suspended 27-day jail sentence, which he won’t have to serve if he stays out of trouble for a year. Prosecutors told the court they would not push for stiffer punishment because they felt Choo had shown a great deal of remorse.
There will be changes.
He no longer has the same cellphone that he would pick up anytime a reporter called — from the USA or South Korea. He’s weaned himself from devouring news media reports.
“Now, I close my eyes, I close my ears,” he says. “I’m not stressed now.”
But he knows an entire country is watching.