Don't call it a comeback — long droughts end across the baseball world

It was the year of the comebacks in global baseball, with the winners of the World Series, Japan Series, Korean Series and Taiwan Series all snapping lengthy droughts to win their championship titles.

Clockwise from top left: The Texas Rangers celebrate winning the World Series on Nov. 1. The Hanshin Tigers celebrate winning the Japan Series on Nov. 5. The Wei Chuan Dragons celebrate in a graphic released by the club following their Taiwan Series win on Nov. 12. The LG Twins celebrate winning the Korean Series on Nov. 13. [SCREEN CAPTURE; AFP; EPA/YONHAP]

It was the year of the comebacks in global baseball, with the winners of the World Series, Japan Series, Korean Series and Taiwan Series all snapping lengthy droughts to win their championship titles.

The LG Twins were the last across the line, beating the KT Wiz 6-2 in Game 5 of the Korean Series on Monday to take the championship with a 4-1 score in the seven-game series.

That win snapped a 29-year drought for the Twins, who had previously won the Korean Series in 1990 and 1994 but struggling to make an impact since then.

The Twins’ win came just a day after Taipei’s Wei Chuan Dragons beat the Rakuten Monkeys 6-3 in a winner-takes-all Game 7 of the Taiwan Series, winning the highest prize in the Chinese Professional Baseball League.

The Dragons last won the Taiwan Series in 1999, a 24-year drought that came on the tail of three straight wins in 1997 to 1999.

A week earlier it was Osaka’s Hanshin Tigers who snapped a 38-year drought.

The Tigers beat the Orix Buffaloes 7-1 in a winner-takes-all Game 7 of the Japan Series on Nov. 5, taking the title for the first time since 1985. That year, a statue of KFC’s Colonel Sanders was stolen from outside a restaurant in central Osaka, starting what Hanshin fans came to think of as the 38-year Curse of the Colonel.

But the biggest comeback of all was Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers, who beat the Arizona Diamondbacks in early November to snap a 62-year drought and win the first title in the club’s long history.

Combined, the achievements of the four clubs — playing in four of the biggest baseball league’s in the world — appear to make for the largest combined drought end since the Taiwanese league was established in 1990, totaling 153 years.

The only other recent season to come close was 2016, and that year the vast majority of the work was done by the World-Series-winning Chicago Cubs, who snapped an insane 108-year drought.

BY JIM BULLEY [jim.bulley@joongang.co.kr]