Korea's 《야구여왕》 Built a Women's Baseball Team Out of Olympians, Lost 36–0, and Now Has to Win 60 Per Cent or Be Disbanded

Top of the sixth, one out, bases loaded, and a team that has existed for less than a year is five runs up on the club that beat it 25–12 last season. The ball goes to third. 최혜빈 steps on the bag, throws across the diamond, and the game is over.

It was the first double play in the history of the 블랙퀸즈 — the Black Queens — and it was not even the story of the night. That was 박민서, 22, who had never caught before and caught; who had never hit a home run for this team and hit a three-run one; who threw out a runner stealing second; and who then walked to the mound and closed the game. Final score, broadcast on Thursday 17 September: Black Queens 10, 고양특례시 5. MVP, without argument, in the words of the match report.

"언니들이 잘 챙겨준 덕분에 재밌게 포수로서 플레이했고, 첫 홈런까지 쳐서 기쁘다," she said afterwards — the older players looked after her, catching was fun, and she was happy to have hit her first home run.

The win took the team to five wins and two losses. That matters more than it would on any other programme, because on this one a winning percentage below .600 means the team ceases to exist.

This is 《야구여왕》 — Baseball Queen — and it is the most interesting sports show in Korea that almost nobody outside Korea can watch.

What it is

A 채널A series, from the people who made the military-survival show 《강철부대W》: producer 신재호 and writer 강숙경, who also structured both seasons of Netflix's 《피지컬: 100》. The idea is simple and slightly mad. Take women who were elite athletes in other sports, most of whom have never played baseball, form them into a team, and send them out against Korea's real women's clubs.

The manager is 추신수 — sixteen seasons in Major League Baseball, an All-Star, and now assistant to the owner and head of player development at the SSG Landers. When the show was announced, 채널A said he would film on his "개인 휴일", his personal days off, with the club's agreement. His coaches are 이대형, who stole 505 bases in the KBO, and 윤석민, the former KIA ace who once won the pitching quadruple crown. The technical coach, 어제인, is not a retired anything: the federation lists her as a current infielder on the Korean women's national team.

Season 1 ran on Tuesday nights from 25 November 2025 to 3 March 2026, was extended mid-run from twelve episodes to fifteen, and had 박세리 — the golfer, five majors, the most famous Korean sportswoman of her generation — as the team's general manager. She has not come back for season 2, which began on 9 July 2026 and airs Thursdays at 22:00. Nobody has replaced her. There is no general manager now, only a manager and a number.

Who is on it

Seventeen players. These are the ones whose records we have checked against a federation, an Olympic roster or the national wire:

Player	Came from	What she did there
김온아 — captain	Handball	Olympic bronze, Beijing 2008; Asian Games gold, 2014 and 2018
김성연	Judo	Asian Games gold, −70 kg, Incheon 2014
주수진	Football	Won the 2010 FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup; scored against Spain
최현미	Boxing	WBA world champion at featherweight, then super-featherweight
신소정	Ice hockey	Goaltender for the unified Korean team at PyeongChang 2018 — 50 saves from 52 shots against Switzerland
장수영	Badminton	Picked for Korea at fifteen, after sweeping three titles at the 2003 national age-group championships
송아	Tennis	Converted to starting pitcher over the winter; four home runs this season
노자와 아야카	Softball	The only foreign-born player; the uniform says 아야카
박민서	Baseball, then golf	See below

신소정 is worth a second look. The federation's 2025 list has her in the women's baseball national reserve squad, registered to a club called 리얼 디아몬즈 — which is the club that introduced the Black Queens to their new sport.

36–0

The first practice match, shown in the second episode, was against 리얼 디아몬즈, billed by the broadcaster as the top-ranked women's side in the country, with eight national-team players. The Black Queens lost 36–0.

That result is not in their official record. What is: eight competitive games in season 1, four wins and four losses, all against registered clubs. The rule that season was that every third defeat would cost one player her place, and at the end it did — the rhythmic gymnast 신수지 was released after the final game, an 8–9 loss to 서울 히로인즈.

Among those four defeats was a 25–12 beating by a club called 버스터즈. Its successor is 고양특례시. That is who they played on 17 September.

Win 60 per cent, or disband

Season 2 threw the release rule away and replaced it with something blunter: "승률 6할 달성 실패 시 팀 해체." Fail to reach a .600 winning percentage and the team is dissolved.

It began with an open tryout: 308 applicants from 47 sports, eighteen of them brought to a final on camera. Among those who did not make it were an Olympic fencing medallist, an Olympic badminton medallist and a footballer with three Asian Games bronzes. The plan was to sign three. 추신수 signed five.

Then four straight wins — the opener by the mercy rule; the second over 인천 해머스스톰, a club 채널A billed at eleven wins from twelve, whose one loss had been a rained-off game settled by drawing lots; and a 14–5 win in the team's first international match, against a club from Taiwan, with the Korean flag on their chests. Then two straight defeats, the second to 서울 나인빅스. At four and two the percentage was .667 and the Korean sports press was running the headline "존폐위기" — existence in the balance. One more loss would have made it .571.

They won. Five and two is .714.

The games were recorded over the summer, so the production knows how this ends. We looked for a leak and found none: no final record has been reported anywhere. The suspense is real. Game eight airs on 24 September, against 천안시 주니어, and a match against a club from Japan — the top-ranked country in women's baseball — is still to come.

The player at the centre of it

박민서 started baseball in the sixth year of primary school. She was the only girl in her Little League squad and, by the account of the Korean sports press, holds the record as the youngest girl to hit a home run in it. Then she reached high school, and there was no team in the country she was allowed to play for. So at eighteen she became a golfer.

"새로 하게 된 골프 연습이 너무 지치고 어려웠어요. 야구가 너무 하고 싶었어요. 그래도 이 길이 더 나은 길이라고 생각했어요."

"The golf practice was exhausting and hard. I wanted to play baseball so badly. But I thought this was the better road."

In November 2025 the Women's Pro Baseball League — the first professional women's league in the United States since the one in A League of Their Own folded in 1954 — held its first draft. Four Koreans were taken. 김현아 went fourth overall, to Boston. 김라경 went eleventh, to New York. 박주아 went thirty-third, to San Francisco. And with the 115th pick of 120, New York took 박민서, who by then had been a golfer for three years. "기대는 전혀 안 했어요," she said. She hadn't expected anything.

On 1 August 2026, in Springfield, Illinois, 김라경 started the first game the league ever played, threw the first pitch of that game, and recorded the first strikeout in the league's history.

박민서 was not there. Each team drafted thirty and was due to sign fifteen. The league's official list shows the other three Koreans as Signed and her as Drafted; 여성신문 reported in July that she "did not reach a final contract" and had joined 《야구여왕》 instead. In her first game for the Black Queens she went five-for-five and earned the save. The 17 September broadcast was her seventh.

So: drafted by New York, unsigned, and playing her baseball on a cable variety show, because that is where a Korean woman of her ability can currently play it.

The one per cent show

By the usual measure this is not a hit. Korean trade headlines call it, fairly, "the 1 per cent show" — the piece announcing season 2 was literally headed "'시청률 1%' 채널A 예능 '야구여왕', 시즌2 제작 확정." The first episode peaked at 2.2 per cent; season 2's fifth episode peaked at 2.0.

Everything else about it behaves like a hit. It was first in Thursday non-drama buzz on the Good Data chart in the second week of September, with 박민서 third among all variety cast members. Two of its YouTube videos passed a million views in July. And in early August, when the production offered fans the chance to watch a game in person — eighty pairs, 160 seats — about 3,200 people applied. The fans call themselves 까망이 and turn up in the team's uniform.

It was renewed on that, not on the ratings.

The sport underneath it

There is no professional women's baseball in Korea. The federation's registry lists 49 clubs, all amateur, with somewhere between 1,100 and 1,200 players depending on who is counting. The show bills the Black Queens as the fiftieth.

Below that is the part that should worry anyone who enjoys the programme. In August, 스포츠경향 counted the players registered in Korea's elite school-and-professional baseball system: 15,465 of them, of whom thirty are women — twenty-four under twelve, five under fifteen, one under eighteen. The country's first elite women's development team, founded at Kookmin University in September 2024, has suspended operations because every player left. Its coach, 김익, said why: "국내에 여자야구 실업팀이 없어서 미래가 불확실한 게 선수 이탈의 가장 큰 원인이었다" — there is no works team in the country, so there is no future to stay for. The headline on that article was "'야구여왕' 뜨면 뭐해요?" — so 《야구여왕》 is a hit; what good does that do?

The national team went to the World Cup group stage in Illinois in July and won two of five, losing 2–22 to the United States.

Has the show changed anything? Its producer says the federation's chairman told him that "신규 선수들이 매우 많이 늘었다" — new players are up a great deal — which is a second-hand remark with no number attached. The one number we can find points the same way, modestly: girls registered with the Little League federation rose to 36 this year, up eleven. That is not nothing. It is also thirty-six.

And here is the thing about next week. Asked by the Korea Times what the federation's plan is, its secretary-general said the first priority was to build youth clubs in the regions "like the Cheonan Junior Women's Baseball Team." That is 천안시 주니어. The team the federation holds up as the future of the sport is the Black Queens' next opponent, on 24 September, with the team's existence on the line. The writer, for her part, has said what she wants out of all this: "채널A에서 여자 야구 리그전을 열어서 실제 모든 경기가 중계되는 그날이 오길 바란다" — a real league, every game broadcast.

One caution for anyone about to connect this to the Asian Games, which open in Aichi–Nagoya on 19 September and which Korean baseball is otherwise consumed by: there is no women's baseball at the Asian Games. There is men's baseball and women's softball. 장수영 will be there — as a badminton commentator for KBS.

Can you watch it?

With difficulty, and we would rather say so than pretend.

• Netflix has season 1 only, as Baseball Queen. On the listing we opened — the Korean catalogue — the only subtitle track was Korean.
• Disney+ Korea carries both seasons and is where 채널A itself sends viewers. TVING has it too, and is blocked outside Korea.
• Free and legal: 채널A's main YouTube channel has the opening episode of each season in full. The programme's own channel, @CHA야구여왕, posts highlights, training logs and a weekly spin-off, 《지옥훈련》 — Hell Training — on Fridays at 18:00. Many of those videos carry YouTube's automatic English dubbing, which is a machine and sounds like one, but it is enough to follow a game.

If you have ever stood in a KBO crowd and wondered where the women who love this sport are supposed to play it, this is, for now, the answer: on cable, on Thursdays, needing one more win.

Update, 28 September: 16–1, in five innings, against the federation's model club

Game eight aired on 24 September and ended early. The Black Queens beat 천안시 주니어 16–1, the mercy rule closing it in the fifth, for a sixth win: six and two, .750, further clear of the line.

The box score reads like a team that has stopped being a novelty act. Three home runs — a three-run shot from 최혜빈 in the first, another from 김세현 in the second, which was her first hit of the season, and a long one from 박민서 in the fifth. 송아 started on the mound with 박민서 catching, a battery that did not exist a month ago; 아야카 pitched from the fourth. The defence went the whole game without an error, and 최현미, the former boxer, covered an empty third base to complete the first rundown play in the team's history. Her line afterwards: "저희가 끈끈하게 뭉쳐서 만들어낸 결과라 생각한다" — a result made by sticking together. They did it, too, through a run of knocks on the day, with three starters coming off during the game.

One honest caveat about the opponent. We wrote above that 천안시 주니어 is the club the federation names as its model for youth development. It is a junior side, and a 16–1 five-inning result against it says as much about the age gap as about the Black Queens. The verdict on this team is still the games against adult clubs, and the one that matters most — against a club side from Japan, the top-ranked country in women's baseball — is still to air. Game nine is on 1 October at 22:00.

Chart re-drawn to eight games. Sources: bnt뉴스 and MHN스포츠 match reports of 25 September.

Images. Both photographs are of 추신수 with the Texas Rangers, in 2017 (by Keith Allison) and 2018 (KA Sports Photos), both CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, licences verified on the file pages, both genuine camera photographs. They are eight and nine years old and show the career he brought to the dugout, not the dugout itself. The chart is ours, from results as broadcast. We rejected a well-filed photograph of 김온아 because the player in it wears Korea's No. 7, and the Olympic rosters have her at No. 3 in 2012 and No. 23 in 2016 — we could not be sure it was her. There is no licence-clean photograph of 박민서 or of most of the current squad anywhere we looked. The programme's own pictures are 채널A's, and we are asking for them.

Sources. The 17 September game is from 스포츠경향 and GP코리아 of 18 September. Format, staff and 추신수's arrangement with SSG are from 채널A's own release of 31 July 2025 and its programme pages; his current title from 연합뉴스 (April 2026). Season 1's record, the release rule and the final game from 오마이스타 (4 March 2026), 동아일보 and 머니투데이; the 36–0 practice match from Netflix's and Disney+'s own episode synopses and 스포츠경향. Season 2's rule, the tryout and the cast changes from 동아일보, 비즈엔터, 스포츠경향 and 텐아시아 (9–10 July 2026) and 쿠키뉴스 (11 June). Player records: 연합뉴스 and 뉴시스 for 김온아, 김성연 and 신소정; the 2010 U-17 World Cup squad list for 주수진; 매일경제 for 최현미; Korean Wikipedia for 장수영; the federation's 2025 reserve list and 2026 national-team list (wbak.net) for 신소정 and 어제인. 박민서: 더게이트 (21 November 2025), 일간스포츠 (22 November), 스포츠경향 (10 July 2026) and 여성신문 (20 July 2026); the league's opening game from 한겨레 and 머니투데이. Ratings from 채널A, 머니투데이 (27 February 2026), 스타데일리뉴스 and iMBC (18 August); the buzz chart from 스포츠경향. The state of the sport: 스포츠경향 (이두리, 3 August 2026), the Korea Times Weekender of 28 August, the KBSA registry, and the WBSC's standings for Rockford.

Stated rather than smoothed. A great deal of what circulates about this programme — a rule sheet with a shortened pitching distance and a twenty-metre run to first, a fourteen-episode count, a finale date, the name of the Japanese opponent, a home ground — appears only on a user-edited wiki, and we have left all of it out rather than launder it. What we can say is that the 17 September game ended in the top of the sixth, so these are not nine-inning games, and any comparison of scores with the KBO is meaningless. "The fiftieth team" is the show's billing; we did not find the Black Queens in the federation's registry. We say 김보름 and 박보람 did not return, not that they chose to leave, because the press says only the first. 어제인 is widely described as a former United States international; we could not confirm it and have not printed it. 동아일보 called all four WPBL draftees "national-team players"; 박민서 has said herself she has no international record, so we have not. Two counts of elite women players are in print and they use different bases — thirty of 15,465 across school and professional registration (스포츠경향, August 2026) and eleven of 11,155 elite youth players in 2025 (KBSA, via the Korea Times); we have used the first and are telling you about the second. And the Netflix subtitle list is what the Korean catalogue showed us; other countries' may differ.