Trail of the Lion King

It had been about seven weeks since I’d been to a game at Jamsil, so I thought I’d pop along to the ‘derby’ between the Bears and the Twins. There’s usually a decent crowd when these two rivals play each other and so Jen went down early to pick us up some tickets.

Too early as it happened. After a wasted hour spent queueing in the afternoon only for the ticket office to remain closed, she ended up returning half an hour before the start so that she could save us a couple of seats in the outfield. By the time I arrived half an hour into the game, it was apparent that Jen’s efforts had been for nothing as there were whole blocks of empty seats. Whilst there was a reasonable turnout from the ‘home’ team, Doosan, the Twins fans must have thought that their poor showing this season was enough of a reason not to turn up.

Plenty of space near us.

LG have been slipping further and further down the table lately and it’s just a question of whether they will finish seventh or last. Doosan though, were in fourth position and part of a close scrap for a play-off place.

It was still 0-0 when I arrived, with Radhames Liz pitching for LG. He’s played Major League for Baltimore Orioles and is in his second season with the Twins.

Radhames Liz pitching to Jung Soo Bin

The starter for Doosan was Im Tae Hoon. I don’t know too much about this fella other than he’s twenty three and he won a gold medal for Korea at the 2010 Asian games. Usually a medal at an event like that is sufficient to gain a waiver from Military Service, but in an eight team competition that included those baseball giants Thailand, Pakistan and Mongolia, avoiding almost two years of guard duty and marching up and down seems like a reward way out of line with the achievement.

Im Tae Hoon – Doosan Bears

Anyway, the poor attendance just meant that we had a bit more space to ourselves. We’d brought some leftover pasta and mushrooms in pesto sauce and followed that up with the usual Spanish sheep cheese and chorizo. I’d carefully decanted a couple of bottles of Merlot into an empty plastic litre and a half water bottle in the way that the wine experts recommend and we had a lazy couple of hours as darkness fell.

Doosan fans waving inflatable sticks

It was 5-2 to LG in the fifth by the time the wine had all gone and that, as usual, was our signal to clear off. When you don’t care which team wins you don’t need to stay until one of them does.

Someone celebrating something or other.

Mind you, we missed a fair bit of action. Doosan rattled home seven runs in their fifth innings and added another four by the end of the seventh. That was too many for LG to pull back and despite adding another six runs themselves, they went down by thirteen runs to eleven.

This entry was posted on August 6, 2012 at 5:41 am 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.