Trail of the Lion King

This baseball really is too easy. I can leave work at normal time, decide if the weather is up to it, nip home to get changed, have my tea and I can still get to Jamsil for not too long after the opening pitch.

I missed the first twenty five minutes on Thursday, but when a game goes on for three to four hours it doesn’t make the slightest difference. In fact, if I‘d walked there rather than take the subway it might have worked out even better as I would have avoided the crowds and the queues.

As it was I got there just before seven and because there were so many people at the box office I paid one of the granny touts 15,000 won for an 8,000 won ticket. I’d probably have got it for below face value half an hour later and still been able to see two to three hours of baseball.

It was midway through the second innings when I took my seat close to the Samsung Lions fans and they were leading the Doosan Bears by a run to nil. The teams had met the previous evening and Samsung had come away with an eleven nil victory. Part of me would have quite liked to have seen a second successive humiliation for the home team just to see how the fans and players would have reacted.

Yoon Seong Hwan was pitching for Samsung and did okay, surviving into the fifth innings whilst only conceding a single run.

Yoon Song Hwan - Samsung Lions

The starter for the Doosan Bears, Lee Hyeon Seung, didn’t fare quite so well. He had already been hit for four runs when he was replaced in the third innings.

Lee Hyeon Seung - Doosan Bears

At that stage it looked as if we might have been on for a repeat of the previous night’s thrashing, but the Bears rallied to make a game of it. After six innings they had managed to get a couple of runs on the board to trail 4-2.

Samsung Lions Cheerleaders

Samsung put the game out of their reach though with runs in the seventh and eight innings to stretch their lead to 6-2. I kept an eye out for Samsung’s Ryan Garko but he looked a bit out of form and struggled to get his bat anywhere near the ball. The fans seemed to like him though and they sang his name whilst he swished his bat around more in the manner of a man trying to twat a fly with a Gazette than someone with any real belief that he might hit a baseball into the crowd.

Ryan Garko - Samsung Lions

I left at the start of the ninth. It was getting colder and I didn’t really fancy another beer. I caught the closing stages on the telly as I passed my local fried chicken place and watched Doosan pull one of the runs back. That was as much as they could manage though and at the close had to settle for a 6-3 defeat.

This entry was posted on May 15, 2011 at 11:25 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.