Korean Baseball

This Friday night my friends were looking for something to do since the weather was nice. It was about 65 out today, so it was perfect weather for jeans and a t-shirt. Apparently Koreans really like being warm, because a lot of people were still wearing winter coats. We had originally planned on going to a baseball game next weekend, but since we were looking for something, we decided to go. The stadium was a bit of a train ride away, but whatever, it was subway accessible. What more could a cheap college kid like me ask for?

Seoul has quite a few baseball teams, and two share a park. The two teams are the Doosan Bears and the LG Twins. The teams are each sponsored/owned by a corporation. My friends and I decided to be Bears fans because they're a good team, and Doosan is fun to say.

The train station was called "Sports Complex" in English, and the name was fitting. There were baseball bat shaped benches, some sporting good stores, it seemed pretty sporty. Then we saw our first stadium gear vendor: The guy selling thunder sticks. Thunder sticks, if you don't know, are the inflatable sticks you bang together to make noise with. They are a lot cooler when an entire stadium has them too because if just one person has them it's really annoying.

We got out of the subway and the street is packed. There are women selling hard liquor, dried fish, beer and snacks off of tables lining the sidewalk. There's also a REALLY long line. Ouch. We then realized that we had no idea what the line is for, so we prayed that it wasn't the ticket window. It was not. It was a line for an air hose so you could inflate your thunder sticks. We then made our way to the ticket window, which also had a really long line. Woof.

We saw that there was a sign for a second window and decided to try our luck there. The ballpark was different than American ballparks because the majority of the food was on the outside perimeter of the stadium. You didn't need tickets to eat stadium food, which was pretty cool. Also, the stadium food was KFC, Burger King, and a convenience store that only sold tall boys, chips, ice cream, hot dogs, corn dogs, and Korean spicy rice cakes. The prices were also the same as the prices in the city. No outrageous mark up. It was truly heaven. The tickets were the only bad part of the game. We wanted to sit in the red seats, which were the 3rd best seats, right behind the home plate seats with table service (restaurant food and drinks) and dugout seats. They would have cost us a whopping... $10. This section starts at the beginning of 3rd and first base for each side. Unfortunately these seats were sold out, so we were forced to sit in the outfield. Thus bringing our cost of entry to $8. We walked into the stadium, had our tickets taken and proceeded to look for some seats.

The seating was totally different than seating in America. Primarily because the sport isn't as big, but also because the stadiums are newer and the game is played differently.

As you can see, the outfield seats are very close to the actual outfield and don't extend up super high. The outfield is just a big set of bleachers. Which is awesome. No hard numbering on your seats, you sit where you want to and that's that. Score. The Korean national anthem had just come on when we got to the stadium, so we stood for that found our seats, and then sat down just in time for the first pitch.

We then saw how the cheering here worked. The cheers were led by each team's cheerleaders, and each team had general songs and some unique ones. And these cheers were insane, and not just because I can't speak Korean. Firstly, they all involved the thunder sticks. Instead of claps, you used the sticks for the noise, and then as cool bright pointers for gestures and dances. It was pretty cool to see a whole section moving together. Secondly, some of the cheering was in English. A common cheer was Home Run ________ with the player's name after that. Thirdly and most importantly, the cheers used American songs with Korean words. Some songs that played were Surfin' USA, Who Let The Dogs Out, MMMBop, the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song, It's a Small World and Pomp and Circumstance (The Graduation Song). We all laughed pretty hard when the songs came on, then got really sad that we didn't know any of the words except for "Home Run." We were also very sad that we didn't have thunder sticks. I mean, you would be too if you had this rowdy group yelling stuff at the field. Also, this was the 1st inning. People were still showing up.

The Bears' side of the stadium

Shawn with the goods

The people in our section also weren't too into the mass cheering, so we kinda missed out. However, it was still cool to watch. Then a guy with a keg strapped to his back started making his rounds. Being of legal drinking age in Korea, we figured we'd try the ballpark beer. We got one each and gave the guy 10,000KRW. We got three beers and 1000KRW change back. What. If I wanted a beer at an American ballpark I'd get carded and I'd need to give the guy a $20. This guy saw my three fingers, walked up to us and just gave us some ice cold beer. And it wasn't bad for Korean beer. Not that I've ever had beer before Mom and Pop...

A view of the field from our seats

A view of other seats from our seats

By about the 4th inning it had started to get dark out. The stadium was chilly, but I was fine in jeans and a button down. At this time we noticed that the guys in front of us were watching TV on their phones. Apparently one can get satellite TV on their phone here in Korea, so about every other person was also watching the game on TV. I think of people in America who bring the radio to the ballpark to hear the calls and now it seems we live in the baseball stone age. I kind of like the radio more; it makes no sense to go to a ballpark to watch a game on TV. But it was still pretty cool to see some instant replays.

Also, the stadium had filled up a lot by now. Latecomers were pretty common.

A big box of KFC seems like a pretty good ballpark snack

This is the Bears' section with more people

Also, Korean baseball teams have cheerleaders. If you read my earlier blog post about the KU cheerleaders, there are a few similarities and differences. Firstly, the baseball cheer squad is lead by a man wearing a players' uniform. He leads the cheers with yells and does some badass sky punches, just like the KU master wizard or whatever his official title was (he did have flowing robes...). However, the rest of the team is female, extremely attractive, and scantily clad., just like Abner Doubleday intended. There are about 4 or 5 women on the squad. We were sitting pretty far away from them, so I couldn't really tell. The guy with the white pants near the guy in the orange shirt is the male cheerleader, so I couldn't get too good a look other than when they came on the Jumbotron.

As far as the game went, it was a little more eventful than american baseball. Not as many pop outs, a whole lot more hits, and a lot more walks. The Twins walked 7 people, yet the Bears gave up about 15 hits. The pitching wasn't unbelievable, and there were also a whole lot of errors. I could hear my dad screaming "Body in front!" whenever an infielder failed to pick up a grounder. There was also the worst error you could see, an outfielder collision. 2 Bears players ran into each other on a pop fly. It was pretty bad too. The whole training staff came onto the field

And then an ambulance came

 But the guy got up and walked it off, because baseball isn't soccer and men are men. It also reminded me that there is no way to run down the clock in baseball, you need to throw every pitch and get every out. There's no way around it.

All the errors were making me hungry so I decided to go get some food. My friends brought me back the Bulgogi Whopper from BK (It was just OK), but I was still hungry. I went outside and there was a stand selling Korean food. I got my favorite, spicy rice cakes. They were delicious, but kind of hard to eat while cheering. There was a lot of sauce left at the end and I really wanted rice to soak it up. I guess it's the American in me that thinks every sauce is gravy that needs to be soaked up and eaten, but trust me, this stuff was too good to waste.

The lady made them fresh!

The 7th inning stretch was also the 6th inning stretch at Jamsil Stadium. Again, we all laughed at the tiny difference, as well as the grounds crew. There was a golf cart with a big electric LG sign on the hood that was pulling one of the mats to smooth out the dirt. It was also being driven pretty erratically so the guys running with the mats had to pick up the slack. We also noticed that there was no tarp in foul territory. It rains a lot in Korea, so this surprised me.

When the 7th inning started, cards came out in addition to the thunder sticks. The cards were used in cheers and they said "GO!" and some other stuff written in Korean. Nobody in the bleachers had them, so we just laughed when Baha Men came on and hoped that the Twins screwed up in the end so that the Bears would win.

The Twins side had a whole lot more cards and some better cheers 

The Bears were down by 1 run in the 9th inning. After they got the last out of the 8th, the stadium started erupting. Then the Jumbotron started blasting ominous music and showing pictures of people holding black jerseys. The Twins' colors are Maroon and White, not black, so we were kind of puzzled. Then it had a video of strikeout after strikeout after strikeout. More black jerseys, more ominous music, more of the same pitcher striking batters out. After some deductive reasoning, we determined that the LG Twins had Korean Mariano Rivera. He was there to put the final nail in the coffin. And that's just what he did. He threw some great pitches and the Bears went down looking. You hate to see that.

Everybody started filing out of the stadium, and right as I stood up I felt something hit my back and then I felt my back get wet. Someone had hucked a full beer at me. I looked behind me and there was a pretty drunk twins fan and her boyfriend. The guy kept saying sorry while his girlfriend couldn't really stand too well. He gave me a ton of napkins and a wet wipe, and I used my limited Korean to say "It's alright." Plus, they wasted a perfectly good beer. Their loss.

I'm going back to Jamsil to see the Bears play again on Saturday, so hopefully I'll have some more pictures then. Korean baseball is a little small time, but it's been on every TV I've seen in public. I'm just waiting for a T-Shirt cannon to give me a shirt that would have fit me in 5th grade.