Korean baseball team goes warm and fuzzy to fill stands without fans, photos show

With social distancing now the new normal thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, sports teams that have been allowed to resume in different areas of the world have been forced to get creative when it comes to filling their stands.

The Korean Baseball Organization, one of the most active sports league in the entire world right now, has been more creative than most. It isn’t going to let baseball fans at home lose interest due to no action going down in the stands, and the Hanwha Eagles appeared to have the cutest idea yet, as reported by CBS Sports.

Stuffed animals.

Yes, the adorableness is overwhelming ...

... even if some fans appear a little judgy.

While the Eagles weren’t the first team to replace living, breathing humans with objects, they certainly chose a more innocent inanimate getup than, say, Seoul FC, which was recently fined for filling its empty stadium with sex dolls, according to CNN.

Seoul FC ended up apologizing to fans for the dolls – which wore face masks, McClatchy reported.

Other clubs have chosen to go the safer route as well, like Borussia Monchengladbach of the Bundesliga in Germany, which used cardboard cutouts of fans, according to the Bundesliga official website.

Replacing flesh and blood people with fake likenesses has been a recurring thing during this COVID-19 pandemic. The Open Hearth, a restaurant in Taylors, South Carolina, filled its empty booths with blow-up dolls, McClatchy also reported. Another restaurant in Virginia did something similar by filling seats with mannequins.