‘America’s pastime’ is also South Korea’s most popular sport, writes ANDREW FARRELL
Soccer fans worldwide will recall with great fondness the summer of 2002, when South Korea and Japan co-hosted Asia’s first World Cup. Even Ireland joined in the party, before Spain sent us packing in Suwon.
Fast-forward to 2010 and World Cup frenzy is again gripping the globe. But it may have slipped quietly under the radar last week that South Korea put in its bid to host the competition in 2022 on its own. Certainly they’re making little fuss of it here, because soccer is a sport in the shadows in a land where baseball is the only game in town.
I never fully appreciated the importance of baseball to the people of Korea – especially those in my city, Gwangju – until the day I arrived. After an arduous 24-hour trek, I was required to stall at every TV in the bus station so my foreign liaison could get updates on the local team, the Kia Tigers. The country’s most successful baseball team was finally awakening after a number of years in the wilderness, and they went on to take the Korean Series in an epic finish in mid-October.
Even for those unsure of the rules, there are numerous attractions to attending baseball games in Korea. For starters, how many defending champions of their sport charge a paltry €4.60 to see them in action? The benefit of this is an electric atmosphere for the entire three hours as people of all ages and incomes can afford to watch the games.
And if you think these seats are for the nosebleed section or behind a giant wall, you are badly mistaken. The tickets don’t have seat numbers, so you can sit almost anywhere you like – arriving early gives you the best view with the hardcore fans.
Baseball season in Korea runs from April to October, with each team playing six games a week, three of them at home. The stadium in Gwangju holds 14,000, so for a baseball-crazed city of 1.6 million, there are ample opportunities to catch your team in action. This helps to explain the high crowds at games. And of course, as the season nears its conclusion, games are quickly sold out and tickets are like gold dust.
However, it’s the noisy, colourful and friendly atmosphere that brings people like me back. The chanting of players’ names is continuous and deafening when their golden boys get ready to bat. Fans also whip out their bright yellow thunder-sticks and put on a decent show with the four cheerleaders on the field and the man in the booth on the keyboard. They’ve even managed to adopt an alternate version of that famous Christmas song, Feliz Navidad, as their main team chant.
The baseball stadiums are a far cry from their larger soccer counterparts, which were mostly built for the World Cup in 2002. These grounds should be standing as beautiful monuments to a glorious age in recent Korean history, but they tower above local communities empty and alone.
The World Cup stadium in Gwangju holds over 40,000 people, but the average attendance is a paltry 12,000, and when the local team played Jeju United in a recent K-League game, there were just 2,000 people in the stands.
It makes one wonder why they’re not only bidding for another World Cup, but also planning to increase the capacity of their ghostly grounds, because despite what you saw in 2002, baseball is Korea’s real sporting pride and joy.
Andrew Farrell is working as an English language teacher in Korea
