Baseball in Korea

Anybody remember the Tom Selleck (sp?) movie "Mr. Baseball"? And do you remember watching it and thinking, "Surely Asians aren't that fanatic about their baseball teams?" You would be mistaken - unfortunately, I really think that Asians (in this case Koreans and Japanese) love baseball even more than your average American might. What a bummer, considering it's OUR national past time.

But I digress. We've been wandering our way up to Seoul in the last few months, and discovered the quickest way to get to see some "professional" baseball teams in Korea. The Doosan Bears and the LG Twins share a stadium in Jamsil, just on the east side of Seoul, so you're guaranteed to have a home game every weekend. Tall boys of Korean beer are $2 each, the fans have no idea what you're screaming in English (ops tested, to the dismay of any English-speaking Koreans in the stands), and the games are actually pretty exciting. What more can you ask for from a Saturday afternoon then to sit in an open-air stadium with 15,000 of your closest friends, get hammered, and watch baseball.

That's the other funny thing about Korean baseball - the teams are all named after their sponsors. The LG Twins for instance, are sponsored by the LG electronics company, and Twins fans chant "LG! LG! LG!" when stuff goes right. Imagine Derek Jeter hitting a home run and having the fans chant "Chrysler! Chrysler! Chrysler!" as their cheer. Weird.

Anyway, the pictures below are from the first game we went to go see, the Doosan Bears vs. the Hanwha Eagles.

This is just a picture of the field, but the video below shows how the stands divided out between the Eagles fans (orange) and the Bears fans (white). You can also hear the organized cheering that the Bears fans have started, with a little help from the Bears' cheerleaders. Yes, I said it. Korean baseball has CHEERLEADERS. MLB, stand up and take note.

Finally, we discovered that in Korea, they've never heard of the seventh-inning stretch, so we loudly led the charge on that one (the Koreans loved it - we got a standing ovation). They also apparently had never seen the "wave". How America has failed to export that sports fan maneuver, I'll never know, but we decided to try and teach them how it worked. Fortunately, Bodhi had had enough Korean beer to lead the charge, and after twelve tries, we finally got a wave that carried all the way around the stadium - in fact, it even reversed course and came back! I would be lying if I didn't feel like at least now I had made a contribution to the Korean culture (significance is still up for debate). The Korean kids liked it so much, they adopted Bodhi as their unofficial mascot and kept asking him to lead the wave again for the rest of the game.