Trail of the Lion King

I’d watched Samsung Lions a couple of days earlier in their home game with Nexen. Their next fixture was at Jamsil against Doosan Bears and as it was a warm evening, one of the first of the year, I thought I’d go along after work and watch.

My initial plan had been to walk, but I got a bit impatient and hopped onto the subway at Seolleung for a two stop journey that saved me twenty minutes or so. The way the game panned out it proved to be a lucky decision. The area around the stadium was fairly busy and there was a sizeable queue at the ticket office.

As I stood in line I was approached by one of the granny touts. She had a nine thousand won ticket that due to her holding up three fingers I thought she must have been asking thirty thousand for. I offered her a ten thousand won note, which she took and then gave me five thousand won change. I’ve no real idea how that worked but can only assume that she had originally been asking for three thousand won and had then decided that I could afford five thousand instead. Still, we both did ok out of it.

That's my granny tout in the brown coat.

My ticket was for a reserved seat in the main stand. I’m just as happy sitting in the outfield though and as the entrance was right next to the ticket office I went there instead. I had to persuade the girl on the gate to let me in, but as I had a higher priced ticket and there were likely to be lots of empty seats, that wasn’t too difficult.

I’d missed the opening twenty minutes, but it was still 0-0 with Doosan batting in their first innings. I’d been right about there being plenty of empty seats. The outfield was sparsely populated and I could have had my pick of where to sit in most parts of the main stand.

Plenty of space in the outfield seats.

Jang Won Sam was the starting pitcher for Samsung. He has an unusual action where he faces away from the batter as he starts his throw. I’m sure that most of the coaches that he will have worked with over the years will have wanted to pick him up and re-position him in the opposite direction. I was in Japan a couple of years ago and kept seeing people reading on the subway. Over there, writing is done in vertical lines rather than horizontally and it took all of my willpower not to reach out and rotate whatever they were reading ninety degrees for them.

Jang Won Sam prepares to get tonked out of the ground.

Maybe Jang Won Sam will start facing the right direction when pitching in future because he got a real pasting in this game. Firstly Kim Dong Joo got a hit that allowed a team mate to get home from second. Then Choi Joon Seok  cracked a home run for three to make it four-nil. One of the younger Doosan players, Jung Soo Bin, got in on the act next hitting to second with the bases loaded to get two more home. Six-nil to Doosan. There was more to come though and Son Si Hyun hit a ball deep into the outfield for another two runs.

The first Doosan innings finally finished at twenty past seven with them leading by eight runs to nil. It was virtually game over. For Samsung starting pitcher Jang Won Sam it actually was game over as he got the hook after a first innings where he had pitched fifty-three balls for eight runs and six hits.

Choi Joon Seok doffs his cap after his three run homer.

The game settled down a bit after that opening flurry and there were no more runs for a while. Samsung seemed to show a bit more urgency in the field than they had done early on, but when you are eight runs down it’s probably not going to make a lot of difference. I got a couple more cans of Hite from the lady who was wandering around with a basket on her head and just sat back waiting for some more big hits.

I did my best to lighten her load.

I had to wait until the fifth for the next run. Jung Soo Bin’s hit took him to third, enabling him to get home a couple of balls later and extend Doosan’s lead to nine.

The travelling Samsung fans didn’t seem overly subdued by the scoreline and they had the odd moment or two to cheer. Unfortunately it was more often than not their mascot moonwalking than anything happening on the field though. Lee Seung Yeop, newly returned from his time in Japan, improved the mood with a hit to second. Unfortunately he raised an even bigger cheer from the Bears fans next ball when he strayed too far from his base and ran himself out.

Lee Seung Yeop - Samsung Lions

Doosan got through plenty of pitchers as they looked to be giving everyone a chance in conditions where there wasn’t much pressure. In the ninth it was the turn of their American fella Scott Proctor. I’ve looked him up and he’s played a lot of Major League Baseball. He’s an interesting character, having been thrown out of a couple of games for deliberately chucking the ball at the receiving batter. He also set fire to his baseball kit on the field after one bad performance for the New York Yankees. That’s worth staying to the end for.

"Can I borrow your lighter please?"

With a nine run lead I wasn’t expecting Proctor to get up to much mischief in this game. I was pleased though to see Lee Seung Yeop take a consolation run off him in the ninth, just on the off-chance that the pyromaniac pitcher might reach for the petrol can and start dowsing his cap and boots. If he did, he waited until they were safely out of sight in the dressing room.

The defeat was the second in a row for last season’s champions following their 10-7 home defeat against Nexen. Whilst that game had been close, this one could have been an even heavier loss than it was as only some very good Lions fielding and a couple of hits falling just short of the crowd kept the score down to nine for Doosan.

This wasn’t a game that we’d planned to see. Jen and I should have been watching a Futures League fixture at Gyeongsan but it had started and finished earlier than we had expected. With it being a sunny day we thought that we might as well watch some KBO baseball and so we got a taxi from Gyeongsan that dropped us outside of the Daegu Stadium just as the game was starting.

It was busy outside.

There were only outfield seats at seven thousand won remaining and by the time we had bought a couple of tickets and made our way inside the game was ten minutes old.

It was still scoreless in the first innings as we looked for vacant seats. You know how it is, I’ve moaned about it often enough, but the ground could be half empty and there would still be nowhere to sit due to people using seats to put their food, coats and bags on. Then there are the seats saved for non-existent friends. If I could suggest one improvement to Korean baseball it would be to have stewards whose job it is to stop people abusing the free-seating policy in the outfield area.

Fortunately we spotted a pair of seats near the scoreboard and were able to sit down. I suspect that if we had arrived ten minutes later then we would have been standing at the back.

Plenty of seats.

The number 36 for Samsung, Lee Seung Yeop, was popular with the home fans. I had a look for him online afterwards and it turns out that he’s one of the best Korean players ever and has just returned to Samsung Lions this season after eight years in the higher-level Japanese league. In the nine seasons that he spent with Samsung before moving to Japan he was voted KBO MVP in five of them.

Lee holds plenty of records and won an Olympic gold medal in 2008. I suppose you could summarise it all by saying that he hits a baseball further than most people do. He did his popularity with the fans no harm in that opening innings when his first hit got him to second base, allowing a team mate to put the first run on the board. Lee Seung Yeop followed him home a few minutes later to make it two nil to Samsung.

Lee Seung Yeop - Samsung Lions

The Samsung lead lasted until the third innings when a Nexen player hit a four run homer that clipped the top of the fence before going over.  Those are the fine margins that can make such a difference. The next ball Nexen’s Kang Jung Ho hit one in the same direction but with just a little more force. It cleared the fence with ease to make it five–two to Nexen.

Samsung pulled a run back in the third, but in the fifth innings Kang Jung Ho clattered another one into the crowd for Nexen, hopefully landing in the picnic that someone had spread over an empty chair. The two run homer extended the visitor’s lead to seven-three.

Kang Jung Ho trots around after another home run.

Samsung don’t lose that many games. They certainly don’t lose many to Nexen and it wasn’t long before the home fans were starting to make their way out. Those that remained were understandably subdued although they did knock out a song to the tune of Cum On Feel The Noize. I wonder if Noddy Holder knows that Korean baseball fans sing along to one of Slade’s hits. I remember seeing them at Boro Town Hall in 1980 when they were in their heavy metal phase. The next day at school everyone was walking around with a sore neck from the head-banging and with ears that were no use for anything other than keeping your glasses on. To make it worse, we didn’t even get to hear Merry Christmas Everyone as they refused to play it. Although with it being February, I suppose that they had a point.

Nearly forty years on and now sung at Korean baseball.

Samsung pulled a couple of runs back in the sixth when Lee Seung Yeop scored a two run homer and then they got to within a single run of Nexen in the eighth, just before we left to catch our train. I checked later and Samsung finally went down ten-seven in the tenth.

One of the things that I’m trying to do this year is to see more baseball outside of the eight team top-level KBO League. Usually that involves stumbling across a run-down stadium in a one-horse town and then hoping that some sort of local tournament is taking place. To be fair, it’s an approach that has worked reasonably well so far.

My latest discovery though, is the Futures League. It’s basically a reserve league for the KBO clubs, supplemented by the Police and Army teams. Like most reserve leagues, it allows young players the opportunity to press their case for a place in the proper team whilst those recovering from injuries can get back to full fitness in an environment where winning isn’t necessarily the main focus.

The appeal to me is that they don’t play the games in the usual stadiums and so it’s chance to visit some smaller venues with virtually nobody there. What’s so good about that? Not sure really, although there’s definitely an element of ticking places off lists and it’s quite nice sometimes to watch something without a load of strangers making a racket.

Anyway, Jen and I had been watching a couple of football matches in Cheonan the day before. Afterwards we caught the KTX to Daegu, which is the nearest big station to Gyeongsan. Gyeongsan being the place where we intended to watch the Samsung Lions second team take on their KIA Tigers counterparts the following day.

There are always plenty of places to stay in the areas around stations and the combination of neon palm trees and onion domes on the roof was sufficient to draw us in to the thirty-five thousand won per night Paradise Motel.

Paradise.

Just in case the single free condom in the complimentary toiletry pack wasn’t enough, they had thoughtfully provided a vending machine full of them right next to the reception window.

Something for the weekend, sir?

The room itself was fine with a big tv, computer and as far as I could see no hairs belonging to the previous occupants of the bed. There wasn’t much of a view, with the narrow alleyway beyond the window obscured by bars and barbed wire. But, it’s Daegu city centre and there wouldn’t have been much of a view regardless. Fortunately we were only one floor up and so we probably wouldn’t have needed to use the window as an escape route if a guest had tried to burn the place down in protest at having to pay for a second condom.

The view.

At noon the next day we hailed a taxi for the journey to Gyeongsan. Jen, who speaks very good Korean, was extremely specific with the instructions to the driver. She told him the town that we wanted to go to, Gyeongsan, then she told him the area of the town. He nodded and grinned. Happy that he knew the town and the area of the town, she then told him that when we got to Gyeongsan it was the baseball stadium that we wanted to go to. He repeated back the word ‘baseball’ and set off.

Twenty minutes later we arrived at the Daegu Baseball Stadium, home of the Samsung Lions and venue for a first-team game that day between Samsung and Nexen. Jen explained it all again to him, re-emphasising that the name of the town that we wanted to go to was Gyeongsan and pointing out that the name of the town that we had asked him to go to differed from the one that we were in.

Not Gyeongsan.

He seemed baffled, as if the idea that other towns could have baseball stadiums as well was a concept too bizarre to dwell upon. Then he suggested that this game would be better. When we politely insisted upon the original plan he seemed to mark us down as trouble makers and quoted what I suspect he felt was a prohibitive thirty-five thousand won fare to take us to the place that he’d already agreed to take us to twenty minutes earlier. That’s fine. Just drive.

Half an hour later, we arrived in Gyeongsan. The driver behaved as if he had been caught up in a tornado and then deposited in a random town hundreds of miles away. He kangarooed along the main street, accosting random passers-by with a variety of questions that no doubt included whether he would need a visa and if the water was safe to drink. We paid him up and left him to what was likely to be an uncomfortable few hours driving around in circles before he chanced upon the road home.

Fortunately the next cab driver knew exactly where the baseball stadium was and a few minutes later we were there. It was ten minutes or so after the scheduled one o’clock start time, but that’s not a big deal in a game that can last for three or four hours. It wasn’t as if it was likely to sell out.

The stadium looked pretty new and seemed more like a training facility than a baseball park in its own right. There were a few players standing around outside and three or four fellas using cameras with large lenses to take photographs. I didn’t want to miss any more of the game so we went up to the seats. There weren’t many people watching, maybe ten in total, so perhaps the Futures League isn’t much of a draw.

It was certainly quieter than a KBO game.

I had a look at the scoreboard and discovered that Samsung were leading Kia by two runs to one, in the eighth innings. Eighth? It was ten past one. Ten minutes after the scheduled start-time. Something wasn’t right.

Eighth innings action.

There were some Samsung players sat nearby and one of them asked me why we were there. Why indeed, I thought, there’s no easy answer to that one.  I asked him about the change to the start time and he told me that they had started two hours earlier than intended because they had the following day off and they wanted to get away as soon as possible. Marvellous.

Almost as many players as fans in the crowd.

Ten minutes after we had arrived it was all over with Samsung holding on to their two-one lead. As we wandered out we hopped into our third taxi of the last half hour and got the driver to take us back to the Daegu baseball stadium that we’d been at an hour earlier. So far the Futures League seems to be a lot of travelling and not very much baseball.

If I walk past a sports ground of any kind, I’ll always try and have a look inside just in case there is something going on. This was one of those times when I got lucky. Jen and I had gone to Suwon to watch Suwon City in the National League and we had got there an hour and a half before kick-off. Next to Suwon’s Civil Stadium is the Suwon Baseball Stadium, which is the former home of the now defunct KBO team Hyundai Unicorns. The Unicorns were one of the most successful sides in Korean baseball, winning the Championship four times before relocating to Mokdong, changing owners and ending up as the rather less successful Nexen Heroes.

As we walked around outside, we could see players arriving in their kits and with noises coming from inside the stadium, I was fairly sure that something was going on. We walked through the main entrance, gambled on turning left and a moment or two later found ourselves in the away team dugout. Nobody seemed surprised by us appearing there and I took the opportunity to get a few photographs from pitch-side.

I don't think we were supposed to be here.

We re-traced our steps and took the corridor that had been to our right. This brought us out at pitch-side once more, but further along and not far from the plate. A bloke gave us a programme and we made our way up into the posh seats with the tables. There weren‘t many fans there and it’s possible that we were the only ones not to be either playing or watching a family member play.

It's seen busier days.

A quick glance at the the programme revealed that this was the first day of a multi-team tournament that was scheduled to run throughout the Summer. We had arrived in the first innings of the third game of the day, a contest between KPC and Kogas-Tech. I assumed from the names that they were company teams, although I suppose that maybe it was just a sponsorship arrangement.

KPC, in blue, were leading Kogas-Tech who were in red by three runs to nil. The standard wasn’t too bad, certainly better than the University game I’d seen three weeks or so earlier. Whilst there were plenty of sneaked bases, the pitching was generally on target and the batters were capable of giving the ball a fair crack. We didnt see any home runs but there were some big hits.

The view from our seats.

We watched for just over an hour before it was time to leave for the football game. I’d  enjoying sitting quietly in the sunshine in a stadium that a few years ago would have been filled with twenty thousand capacity crowds. The hour was sufficient time to see KPC take the four innings match by thirteen runs to two and give themselves a solid start to the tournament.

After turning up at Bucheon three weeks ago for a football match that took place elsewhere, I had been looking to go back there and actually see a game. They were at home again last Saturday with a 7pm kick-off and the lateish kick-off gave me a bit of spare time in the afternoon to watch some baseball first.

I had a walk along to Jamsil where LG Twins were taking on Nexen Heroes in another of the pre-season games. As I approached the stadium I wondered whether or not the game was on. I couldn’t see anyone in the seats, which was surprising with only twenty minutes to go before the scheduled one o’clock start.

When I got there though, there were plenty of people milling around outside and the old biddies who sell the food and drink were out in force.

Plenty of dried squid available.

It was free entry, but the outfield seats weren’t open. I took a seat in the away fan section near third base, just high enough up to be able to see over the top of the netting. There weren’t too many other people inside as the game started, but there were probably ten thousand or so in there by the time I left. It was a similar attendance to that of the game I’d seen the previous week at Cheongju, but there’s a big difference in atmosphere between ten thousand people in a twelve thousand capacity ground and the same number of people spread out in a stadium that holds thirty thousand.

The crowd at 1pm.

In last week’s game Nexen hadn’t managed a single run against Hanwha, but they were off the mark in the first innings in this one, with Yoo Han Joon getting the hit that allowed one of his team mates to get home. Yoo Han Joon seemed pretty unpopular with the home fans and was booed every time he walked to the plate. I’ve no idea what the issue was, as far as I can see he isn’t an ex-LG player, nor has he turned out for their rivals Doosan Bears. Perhaps he’s just one of those fellas, like Robbie Savage or Craig Bellamy, that you feel obliged to boo, pantomime-style, whenever you see them. Fair enough.

Booooooooo.

The Nexen celebrations for their run and indeed anything else were hampered by their lack of cheerleaders. Perhaps they were economising and saving them for the proper start of the season. One of their fans was happy to fill the gap though and despite the absence of any music or a megaphone, he managed to lead his fellow supporters in a variety of chants. I liked the way that he generally kept one eye on what was happening on the field whilst still managing to cajole some noise from the Nexen faithful.

Not the usual gratuitous cheerleader picture.

Nexen kept their lead until the third innings and then fell a run behind in the fourth. In the break between innings I had a glance around at the people sat nearby. The old bloke to my right was drinking yellow coloured liquid from a jam jar. I’d like to think that he hadn’t mixed up his refreshments with a urine sample. There was a man behind me using the sort of lens on his camera that you could photograph a moon landing with and of course, the obligatory couple in matching clothes, this time showing their love for Nexen as well as each other.

That's commitment.

There were a lot of families in the crowd too and some of them had brought children that were far too young to really appreciate what was going on. A pre-season game is an ideal situation though to bring a young kid. There’s plenty of room, it’s free to get in and other fans aren’t going to get arsey about a toddler running around.

When my son was three or four years old I would take him to Boro reserve games at Ayresome Park. He’d watch the football for a while but then would be more interested in running up and down, getting some sweets and then going home at half-time. I didn’t mind, I’d got to see forty five minutes or so of football and we’d had an night off from watching Thomas the Tank Engine. Nobody else in the crowd was inconvenienced at those games as the place was empty. Mind you, if I recall correctly the crowds for the first team matches weren’t much bigger in those Lennie Lawrence days.

Nexen regained their lead with two runs in the fifth before the home side responded with a hit that ended up in the empty outfield seats and tied the game at three each.

The first home run of the day.

By the start of the eighth it was still three all and time for me to leave to catch the subway to Bucheon for the football. I had a look on the internet later and someone had got a fourth run to take the game. I can’t remember which team it was unfortunately, maybe Nexen. Anyway, it’s not important.

That’s it for my pre-season baseball, next time I go it will be the real thing. Or maybe not, I’ve got plans this year to watch a fair bit of second tier baseball in the Futures League. So it will be up and coming hopefuls battling it out alongside grizzled old pro’s returning from injury or loss of form. The stadiums appear to be located in towns whose existence is rarely even acknowledged by the guide books and I’m expecting the crowds to consist almost exclusively of coaching staff, agents and families. There’ll probably be an old bloke or two drinking their own piss as well.