Trail of the Lion King

I’m conscious that when I write about a baseball game at Jamsil these days there is very little new that I can say. In fact, when I googled one of the starting pitchers in this fixture it took me to my own blog and I discovered that I’d watched him three months earlier in a game at this stadium and between the two same teams. I’d even sat in the same area of the stand.

However, I like the idea of writing about every single sporting event that I’ve attended in Korea and even if the blog is getting more and more like Groundhog Day, so be it.

As usual, Jen and I got there at about seven o’clock and just like all the other times there was no need to rush. It wasn’t too busy outside and there wasn’t much of a queue at either of the ticket offices.

Sometimes it’s a bit more hectic.

There was a threat of rain in the air so we got tickets for Section 331, which is in the covered main stand and to the left of the plate. Hanwha had brought quite a few fans with them but there was still plenty of space around us.

Kim Hyuk Min was the starting pitcher for Hanwha. All that I can tell you about him I’m afraid is that he isn’t famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page.

Kim Hyuk Min – Hanwha Eagles

Kim Kwang Sam was chucking them down for LG. He doesn’t have a Wiki page either and a photo of him from this blog is about as much as a Google search turns up. He’ll have two photos now, bless him.

Kim Kwang Sam – LG Twins

Looking around the crowd, the highlight was probably the section in the outfield seats that was full of office workers on some sort of team-building outing. They enthusiastically cheered LG on and waved their inflatable sticks but when I zoomed in on their faces more than the odd one looked like they would rather be somewhere else. At home with their families would be my best guess, although if they had to spend the evening team-building then I suspect that most of the fellas would rather be in a room salon having a splash of Coke added to their eighteen year old Chivas Regal by a fawning girl not much older than their drink.

Hooray for LG and unpaid overtime.

As we tend to do these days, Jen and I didn’t bother with fried chicken but had our usual baseball picnic of some Spanish sheep cheese and chorizo with a baguette. In a rare addition to the menu we had some Wensleydale that I must have inadvertently dropped into my suitcase on my last trip to the UK. Once again, we washed it down with a couple of bottles of screw-top Merlot.

If we’d fancied a bit of a change we could have bought crisps or dried squid from one of the ladies who wanders around the crowd with a box of food on her head.

You won’t go hungry even if you don’t bring your own cheese.

And the game? Well, it didn’t really matter. Hanwha are bottom of the table with LG Twins one place above them and that’s where they’ll finish. By the time we left in the eighth it was three each. I stuck the telly on when we got home to see who won but it had already finished. I didn’t care enough to look online. The  teams will play each other again at Jamsil before long anyway, so I can watch it all another time.

This entry was posted on August 14, 2012 at 1:04 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.