Trail of the Lion King

This one was a bit of a last minute decision. I didn’t have anything arranged for Friday evening and as I was walking out of work I thought, yeah, why not? Fortunately, my apartment is only two or three minutes walk from my office and I quickly got changed, travelled the three stops on the subway and was outside the Jamsil Stadium for five past seven, thirty five minutes after kick off. That doesn’t sound right. Thirty five minutes after the first pitch is better, I suppose.

I’d had a few stares from people on the subway and realised it was my tee shirt that was interesting them. It was a British Sea Power one and it didn’t look like many of those doing the gawping were familiar with the band. I suspect that most thought it had some sort of nautical or military theme, although why some old bloke would be wearing it would probably have baffled them. They’ve had a bit of trouble with their Navy lately, so perhaps any mention of sea power is a little bit tactless. Mind you, the number of tee shirts that you see over here with complete nonsense written on them in English is incredible. I think the designers just select a headline from the newspapers and change a word or two so that a phrase that made no sense due to being out of context becomes doubly irrelevant by making no sense in any context. I suppose then that British Sea Power probably wasnt too much out of the ordinary after all.

Once at the stadium I dodged the blokes outside selling off their remaining boxes of fried chicken. I hadn’t had my tea, but wasn’t entirely convinced that the chicken would be at its best after at least an hour of being touted about outside the ground in eighty degree temperatures.

Despite the game having already started there were still a few people queueing at the ticket office. I got my usual eight thousand won ticket (thats just over four quid), for high up above first base. This is the area where the home fans sit, whilst the away fans tend to take third base. Mind you, I move around that much during the game it doesnt really matter where I get a ticket for.

I hadn’t even checked which teams were playing before I set out. The Jamsil stadium is shared by the Doosan Bears and the LG Twins, so there is pretty much a game every night of the week except Monday, which is the day off in Korean baseball. Tonight it was the turn of the Doosan Bears and they were playing the team from Daejeon, Hanwha Eagles. I’d been at one of the reverse fixtures the previous month and Hanwha had ran out fairly easy winners. Despite the previous score, it’s Doosan who have done the better of the teams this season and with not long to go to the play-offs they are currently third out of the eight teams in the league. Hanwha aren’t doing quite so well in seventh. The top five (I think) make the play-offs but I’ve no idea if Doosan are safely in there yet or whether Hanwha still have a chance of moving up to fifth.

There wasn’t a very big crowd at all, the lowest I think I’ve seen here, with the stadium less that half full. The visitors were already leading 4-0 as I took my seat and cracked open a can of Max. I’d missed the first innings and Hanwha’s second. Not that it makes a lot of difference to my enjoyment. Each team gets nine innings in total, so there was still plenty to see.

The early Hanwha runs were at odds to the rest of the game, where the pitchers had the most success, both sides rattling through their innings at a fair pace. By the time I’d finished my third can, we were already into the seventh innings and it wasn’t even half past eight. The crowd had swelled a bit as the evening progressed, it’s cheap enough to just drop in halfway through a game and still feel like you are getting value for money. I didnt recognise many of the songs but a little oddly, Doosan sang along in English to Modern Romance’s Best Years Of Our Lives, whilst Hanwha had a song that pinched the tune from Karma Chameleon. I felt like I’d walked into one of those Eighties nostalgia tours.

Not long after nine o’clock it was all over, I’d seen two runs in two hours of baseball with the visitors holding on for a 4-2 win. As I came out of the stadium the Hanwha players were already boarding their bus for the hours journey south, still in their kit. And the blokes I’d passed on the way in had just about got rid of their remaining chicken.

This entry was posted on August 3, 2010 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.