KBO got its first exact playoff math when a Mines team rebuilt magic numbers for draws

By March 2020, most professional sports worldwide had stopped for COVID — with the notable exception of Korean baseball, which planned to play. Korean sports media, unlike their US counterparts, had no outlets backed by rigorous mathematical models for the postseason question fans care most about: has my team clinched, or is it eliminated?

A Colorado School of Mines team had built integer-programming models for Major League Baseball that answer exactly that question. Rather than re-running them, they translated the models into the Korean Baseball Organization's rulebook — where the critical difference is that games can end in a draw, something MLB-style magic-number math never handles and which silently corrupts any direct port.

The adapted models compute, for each team and each remaining game, whether a playoff berth is guaranteed under every outcome or impossible under every outcome, accounting for KBO's standings and tiebreak structure. The results went up on a website fans could check for up-to-date, precise postseason prospects.

Korean sports writers and fans picked the site up, giving Korean baseball coverage something it had never had: exact, model-backed clinch and elimination calls, first delivered during the season when no other professional league was playing at all.

Imported formulas break on one local rule: draws

The draw rule is not a corner case in KBO — it occurs regularly and changes elimination arithmetic, so importing MLB formulas without modification would produce wrong answers fans could catch.

COVID created the moment: Korean baseball was the only major league playing in spring 2020, so fan attention on standings was unusually high and the void in exact reporting was fully exposed.

The models already existed for MLB; the marginal work was rulebook translation, a small lift that produced coverage unique to the Korean market.

Free, always-current publication on a website matched the fan use case — checking 'is my team alive tonight' — better than any season-ending analysis would have.

Porting an analytics product across markets is a rulebook-translation problem, not a re-run: one local rule (draws) invalidates the imported formula, and that one difference is the whole project.

The KBO work was published in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics in July 2024 (volume 54, issue 4) by Sam Sung Ho Kim, Mark A. Husted, Eli V. Olinick and Alexandra M. Newman, extending the team's earlier NBA playoff-elimination models (published March 2021). The results were described in the paper as new to Korean media, with the fan website drawing attention from Korean sports writers.