Choi Ji-man has already done the thing most Korean amateur players spend their entire adolescence dreaming about. He played 525 games in Major League Baseball. He hit 67 home runs at the highest level the sport offers, wearing the uniforms of six different organizations across nine seasons. By almost any measure, his career is a finished, successful story — the kind of résumé that would let a player walk into a front office interview or a broadcast booth and be taken seriously without another word. Instead, on September 1, at the National Team Baseball Training Center in Goyang, just northwest of Seoul, the 35-year-old put on a jersey with no name recognition attached to it and stood in line for a tryout. Not an exhibition. Not a ceremonial appearance. An actual tryout, in front of KBO evaluators, for the league’s 2027 rookie draft — the same process an 18-year-old high school senior goes through when nobody outside his hometown knows his name yet.
“I feel flustered, like a high schooler,” Choi said, describing his emotional state ahead of the draft, according to South Korean outlet MoneyToday. It is a strange sentence for a man with nearly a decade of MLB service time to say out loud. But it captures something real about what he is about to go through: for the first time in his adult life, Choi Ji-man does not know where he is going to end up playing baseball, and the answer is not entirely in his own hands.
A Tryout in Goyang, Two Decades in the Making
The September 1 tryout at the Goyang training facility was part of the Korea Baseball Organization’s draft procedure for players with an overseas amateur or professional background, or for players who left the Korean amateur pipeline before turning pro — commonly referred to inside KBO circles as the league’s pathway for players returning from overseas. It exists because Korean baseball’s domestic draft system is built primarily around high school seniors moving directly into professional organizations. A player who instead left for the United States as a teenager, spent his entire career there, and only later decided to return to Korean baseball does not fit neatly into that structure. So the league runs a separate track — and a tryout — to formally bring those players back into the draft pool.
Choi is exactly the kind of player that process was built for. He left South Korea as a teenager to pursue a career in American baseball rather than entering the KBO draft as a domestic prospect, and he never got the experience that virtually every other Korean professional player goes through: the nervous wait to hear your name called on draft day, surrounded by classmates who are all hoping for the same thing. Now, at 35, with an MLB career already completed, he is going through that exact process for the first time — decades after the players he grew up with in Korea went through it as teenagers.
That gap is not lost on him. “I didn’t get to feel this feeling in my senior year of high school — I left for the United States instead,” Choi said, reflecting on the tryout, per MoneyToday. “I do wonder sometimes what it would have been like if I hadn’t gone then.” It is a rare moment of a veteran player looking back at the fork in the road that sent his entire career down a different path than most of his peers, and openly entertaining the alternate version of his own story — not with regret, necessarily, but with the kind of reflective curiosity that only comes decades later.
He Says He Doesn’t Care Where He’s Picked
One of the more notable parts of Choi’s comments ahead of the draft was how little emphasis he put on his own draft position. Rookie drafts, in almost every professional sports league in the world, are built around status: where a player is picked signals how much a franchise values him, and it usually comes attached to the size of his signing bonus. Choi, according to MoneyToday, said he is “not fixated on whether or not I go in the first round” of the draft. Instead, he said he hopes that younger players get picked ahead of him and receive large signing bonuses of their own.
It is a notable stance for a player with his résumé to take publicly, and it reframes what Choi’s presence in this draft class is actually about. He is not trying to out-compete Korean teenagers for a headline pick or a franchise’s biggest bonus check. He has already had the kind of career, and made the kind of money, that most of those young prospects are still dreaming about. What he is chasing now looks less like status and more like simply getting back onto a professional roster in the country where he grew up — on whatever terms that requires.
The MLB Résumé: Six Teams, Nine Seasons, One Complete Career
To understand why Choi Ji-man’s name carries weight in this draft class at all, it helps to look at what he actually did in the majors. From 2016 through 2024, Choi appeared in 525 MLB games across six different organizations, batting .234 with 67 home runs and 238 RBI over that span. That is not a cup-of-coffee career or a brief September call-up story — it is nearly a full decade of sustained MLB roster spots, at a level of competition that very few Korean-born position players have ever reached, let alone held onto for that long.
Choi’s MLB path took him through organizations including the Pittsburgh Pirates, Tampa Bay Rays, and San Francisco Giants, among others, giving him exposure to a wide range of MLB clubhouses, coaching staffs, and competitive environments over the better part of a decade. For American fans who may not immediately recognize the name, that stretch of playing time is the relevant comparison point: Choi is not an unknown quantity making a speculative jump into a foreign league. He is a player who already succeeded, for years, at the level KBO players themselves often dream of eventually reaching — and he is now doing the opposite trip, coming back to play in front of the home crowd he left as a teenager.
Back on the Field: A .308 Average in the KBO Minors
Choi has not been sitting idle waiting for draft day. This season, he has already been playing baseball back in Korea, suiting up for the Ulsan Whales in the KBO Futures League — the league’s official minor-league circuit, roughly equivalent to Triple-A ball in the United States. In 20 games there this season, Choi is hitting .308, a strong number that suggests his bat has translated well even after years away from Korean pitching and a level of competition he has not faced regularly since he was a teenager himself.
He completed his official application to enter the draft process by August 7, formally starting the clock on the path that led him to the Goyang tryout on September 1. The Futures League performance matters here for a simple reason: it is the clearest evidence available that, physically, Choi Ji-man can still play. A .234 career MLB average paired with a .308 mark in 20 KBO Futures League games this year paints the picture of a hitter whose bat-to-ball skills have not eroded, even if the level of competition has shifted.
The Knee: Manageable, Not a Major Concern
Choi is also managing a recovering knee injury, though by his own account it is not currently a significant obstacle. “If the weather isn’t good, there’s some discomfort,” he said, according to MoneyToday, “but there’s no major problem.” He added that as long as he is free of pain, he believes he can still put together strong performances on the field. The specific diagnosis or history of the injury has not been publicly detailed, and this piece will not speculate beyond what Choi himself has said: it is a knee issue that flares up with weather changes but is not, in his own assessment, a barrier to performing at a competitive level.
The Real Opponent: KBO’s Automated Strike Zone
For all the physical questions surrounding a 35-year-old professional athlete re-entering a new league, Choi did not point to his knee, his age, or the level of competition as his biggest challenge. He pointed to a piece of technology: the KBO’s ABS, or Automated Ball-Strike System — the league’s robot umpire.
The ABS system uses tracking technology to call balls and strikes automatically, removing that judgment call from the home plate umpire entirely. It is not a hypothetical or experimental system for KBO — it is already part of how the league calls games — and it is precisely the kind of automated strike-zone technology that Major League Baseball itself has been exploring and testing in various forms in recent years. That shared context is part of what makes Choi’s comments interesting to an international audience: a robot strike zone is not a uniquely Korean concept. It’s a live conversation in American baseball too.
Choi described the adjustment ahead of him bluntly. “Pitches that actually look like strikes get called strikes” under the ABS system, he said, according to MoneyToday, adding that “adapting to it won’t be easy.” For a hitter with nearly a decade of experience reading pitches against human umpires — umpires with their own tendencies, their own zones that shift game to game and even at-bat to at-bat — a system that calls the zone by fixed coordinates, with no room for a hitter’s read of “that looked like a ball,” is a fundamentally different skill to develop. It is, in Choi’s own framing, a bigger question mark than his surgically-recovering knee or his 20-game sample size in the Futures League.
Why an MLB Veteran in a Rookie Draft Is Unusual
It’s worth pausing on how genuinely unusual this situation is. Rookie drafts, in essentially every professional sports league, are designed around scouting unproven amateur talent — players whose ceilings are still theoretical, whose bodies are still developing, and whose professional performance is, by definition, unknown. Choi Ji-man is the opposite of that in every respect. His performance is not unknown; it’s a matter of public record across nine MLB seasons. His ceiling is not theoretical; it has already been reached and thoroughly tested against the best pitching on the planet. And yet, because of how Korean baseball’s draft-eligibility rules are structured for players who left the domestic pipeline as amateurs, he is entering the same draft process as prospects fresh out of high school.
This is the paradox at the center of Choi’s story, and it is what makes it resonate beyond Korean baseball fans. Imagine a 35-year-old former MLB All-Star-caliber player showing up to a league’s amateur scouting combine, running drills alongside teenagers, waiting to hear his name called by a team that might view him as a depth piece rather than a franchise cornerstone. That is roughly the position Choi Ji-man is in. He is not entering the 2026 KBO Rookie Draft, scheduled for September 21 at the Lotte Hotel World in Seoul’s Songpa District, as a marquee return. He is entering it through the same procedural door as every other draft-eligible player in his class, regardless of what he has already accomplished.
It’s a reminder of how differently professional sports systems can be structured around the world. In American sports, a player with Choi’s MLB track record re-entering domestic competition would typically do so through free agency or a direct signing, not a draft. In this case, KBO’s rules for a player with his specific background — someone who left before ever entering the domestic draft system as a Korean amateur — route him through the draft process regardless of his subsequent MLB career. It is a structural quirk that turns an accomplished professional’s return home into a story about patience and uncertainty rather than a triumphant homecoming signing.
What Comes Next
The formal 2026 KBO Rookie Draft is set for September 21 at the Lotte Hotel World in Seoul, roughly three weeks after Choi’s tryout in Goyang. Until then, the specifics — which team will select him, in which round, and what role he might be projected into — remain unresolved, and nothing about that outcome should be assumed or predicted ahead of the actual draft. What is already clear is the shape of the story: a player who left Korea as a teenager and built a genuine, nearly decade-long MLB career is now working his way back into professional baseball at home, using the same process reserved for players who have never played a single professional game.
Whatever team ultimately calls his name on September 21, Choi Ji-man will arrive with a .308 average in his most recent KBO Futures League action, a manageable knee, and — by his own admission — more uncertainty about a computer-controlled strike zone than about his own readiness to play. For a 35-year-old with 525 major league games behind him, standing in a tryout line like a nervous high schooler, that may be the most honest measure of what this next chapter actually is: not a comeback tour, but a fresh start, on rules he has to learn all over again.
Sources: MoneyToday, mhnse, Nate Sports. Follow Tiarat Sports for continuing coverage of Choi Ji-man’s path through the 2026 KBO Rookie Draft, including reaction once his name is called on September 21.