I didn’t really grow up with baseball, or at least watching baseball. I’m still American, so my dad taught me how to throw and how to (kind of) hit a baseball, but I never played outside of our yard, and we never watched games. I can put most of the blame for the latter on the fact that we had no team for most of my childhood – Virginia lacks any major sports teams and Washington, DC (my dad’s hometown and source of our local major sports teams) was in its 33 lacuna of no baseball until I was fifteen, by which point I was a bit too busy to become invested in another sport. I’ve had a passing interest in baseball, and I followed the Nationals 2019 triumph, but only via the newspapers. However, when we were planning our move to Korea, I had heard that attending a baseball game in Korea was a must. While we were surviving our first Korean winter (I say surviving, my partner and daughter loved the freezing cold, me not so much) I was eagerly looking forward to the start of baseball season.
Our local team, the Hanwha Eagles of Daejeon, are historically a bad team. They last won the championship in 1999 and rarely if ever make it to the post season (which requires the team be in the top half of Korea’s ten team league). I am no stranger to following terrible teams, I was raised on Washington Football after all, and the benefit of a bad team is that tickets should hopefully be easy to come by. I thought we’d have no trouble getting tickets to watch the local team lose. This proved to be an erroneous expectation.
While the team may not have been good, their mascot game was and remains incredibly strong.
Initially, I did not notice the impending difficulties. While I was excited for the start of baseball, I was also starting a new job in the spring which took up much of my attention. I also wasn’t sure how best to watch baseball – we don’t have a TV in our tiny apartment and Korean streaming services have proven confusing, in no small part thanks to my inability to read hangul. At the start of May we took advantage of a long weekend courtesy of the double holiday of Buddha’s Birthday and Children’s Day (plus the not holiday but maybe it should be of my own birthday) to travel from Daejon to Gwangju, in the southwest of the peninsula. By coincidence, our local Eagles were traveling in the same direction to play Gwangju’s Kia Tigers (last year’s season champions, generally considered the best team in the league, but who are doing poorly this year). The wave of orange clad Eagles fans that accompanied us on our train journey motivated me to track down some baseball while we were relaxing in our hotel room, and slowly but surely the three of us were hooked. Initially we couldn’t find the Eagles game, so we rooted for Daegu’s Samsung Lions against the Doosan Bears from Seoul (when in doubt, root against the big city team), but on subsequent days I was able to find the Eagles. When we came home on Tuesday, I signed up for a TV streaming service for the princely sum of $3 a month so we could watch the games live.
Once we started following the Eagles more seriously, it was time to start looking for tickets to see them live. This is where things got complicated. You see, usually the Eagles are a bad team. This year, though, things are different. When we started watching them, they were on the tail end of what turned out to be an impressive 12 game win streak. They were also, for a time, top of the league and at time of writing are still solidly in the top three. Few things can get fans more excited than a historically bad team suddenly having a hot season.
This matter was compounded by the fact that Hanwha just built a brand-new state of the art stadium in Daejon, and this was its debut season. Curiosity about the new stadium’s features alone would drive more ticket sales. My expectation that we could pick up tickets to see a pretty bad baseball team whenever we wanted were dashed as tickets to Eagles games sell out in under 10 minutes. If you sign in to the ticket purchasing app at the exact time the tickets go on sale, there is no guarantee you’ll get them. It’s brutal out there.
The old stadium was the smallest in the league, this new one is one of the largest. Here it is from behind home plate (not where our seats were) and it really is very nice. There’s a picnic area out in left field and we'd love to get tickets to sit there, but getting any ticket is a challenge let alone a specific one!
If I had been on my own, my quest would likely have ended here. Thankfully, I had a secret weapon: my partner is big concert (and Kpop) fan. She saw Suga in New York and J-Hope in Seoul, in addition to several classic bands like Fleetwood Mac and U2 in Dublin. She’s good at buying tickets to events that will sell out and sell out quickly, is what I’m saying. Even still, baseball proved a challenge. Unlike most concerts nowadays, and especially the Korean concert she went to, there is very little to stop people from buying huge numbers of baseball tickets and reselling them on second-hand sites. We saw some listings where people had 40+ tickets for sale. So even if she could get within the first several thousand people in the queue to buy tickets, that was no guarantee that there would be seats left by the time it came to her. In the end it was her skills navigating the second-hand sites that got us tickets. They were more than we would have paid if we bought them direct, which is annoying, but they still were not too expensive once all things are said and done (certainly much cheaper than Major League tickets in the US). We had tickets for Hanwha Eagles vs. SSG Landers in Daejeon on Friday the 16th of May at 6:30pm.
Reader. It rained.
It was a tough week even before that. I was swamped in work and the Eagles ended their 12-game winning streak with three straight losses to the Doosan Bears, a team from Seoul and the ninth ranked team out of ten. It was rough. Thankfully our game would be against a new team, and we had that to look forward to, but the weather warnings were ominous. On the day it looked like all the other games in Korea would be cancelled but SSG vs. Hanwha would go ahead – right up until around two hours before the game was due to start. We got a mild consolation prize in the form of not having to leave my daughter’s kindergarten festival early, so we got to see her and her classmates perform some chaotic noise that was a lot like singing (and incredibly cute). Unfortunately, in Korea there is no rain check – we got a refund, but we would have to buy tickets again from scratch!
The tickets for the make-up game on Saturday afternoon went on sale at 9pm and despite getting into the queue as soon as humanly possible we were unable to secure tickets. After around two hours on the second-hand site my partner was able to get us new tickets for the makeup game, the first of a doubleheader. The new tickets even cost less than our old ones and were better seats (just past first base rather than outfield), but at the cost of several stressful hours. Still, we were on for baseball again and 2pm was a better time given that we were attending with a 5-year-old – she’s no stranger to staying up late but getting home at around 10pm after a 6:30 game is still a recipe for an over-tired kid and a difficult bedtime.
On Saturday the 18th, almost exactly two weeks after we started our journey into KBO fandom, we hopped in a taxi and made our way to the new Hanwha Life Eagles Ballpark to watch some baseball!
Having never attended a Major League Baseball game, only one or two Minor League games on school trips as a pre-teen, I have no direct source of comparison for what attending a KBO game was like. Even free of comparison I am struggling to describe the experience. It was amazing, I can say that for certain, and also far more physically demanding than I had expected.
When the Eagles were at bat, we sang. Our seats were in the middle of the cheering section and everyone stood, danced, chanted, and sang. Each batter had his own chant, some had more than one, and most had some form of dance choreography to go with the songs and chants. These could be simple, but some were very complicated. I never mastered when exactly we had to duck down during center fielder Florial’s song. Cheerleaders modelled what we were supposed to do and the lyrics to some of the songs were displayed on the stadium’s wall opposite us (in hangul of course), but mostly we copied the people sitting around us and tried our best to fit in. It was noisy, energetic, and a great time. The crowd’s dedication was truly impressive – no lacklustre performances to be found. Pure dedication to cheering the team on at bat.
The giant flags the fans waived at certain times (clearly on some kind of schedule that I was not aware of) were truly impressive. Believe me when I say that these were the smaller flags people had - some of them were so large it was hard to photograph.
I struggled with the dancing and made no attempt to sing the Korean parts of the songs, preferring instead to join in with the bits in English or the player’s names which were usually shouted the loudest anyway. At times I also found myself paying far more attention to the cheering and dancing, and my own feeble attempts to mirror them, than to the actual baseball being played. My partner, a seasoned Kpop fan and frequent noraebang attendee, was far more ably equipped for this side of the experience, and in fact preferred it to the baseball.
We were granted a bit of a reprieve when the Eagles were pitching, but thanks to our current star pitcher Cody Ponce that usually wasn’t for very long – he pitched a no-hitter for the first seven innings (tying the league record for most strikeouts in a single game and beating the previous Hanwha record of 17 set by his current teammate years previously) so we would quickly be back on our feet to sing again. At some points we would even stand to cheer Ponce on, especially in the later innings as he approached the league record of 18 strikeouts.
As this moment approached everyone got really excited - the crowd even booed when it looked like Ponce would leave the game after 17 strikeouts. I’ll admit that we didn’t exactly know what was happening, but the energy was electric.
While Ponce probably deserves credit for winning the game and all that, the real MVP of my baseball game was the guy in the row in front of us. Part of a group of middle-aged Korean men who clearly came to games often, he led crowd chants, high fived everyone around him (including us) every time there was a big play, and just generally brought an infectious energy of excitement (and despair, when plays went badly) to the rest of us. His greatest service, though, was to my daughter.
My daughter is five years old and certainly some kind of neurodivergent (she’s too young for a formal diagnosis). This was most relevant at the baseball game because she was struggling with the noise of the crowd and the sea of people around her – she is cripplingly shy, hiding whenever she receives unexpected attention (a frequent hazard when one is an adorable five-year-old, especially in Korea). By the second inning she was already kind of done with being at the baseball game. It was hot, it was loud, and she wanted to go home. This was obviously a terrible outcome for us – tickets were not easy to come by, and we were having a great time, but spending a day with a suffering child is no fun for anyone and we were trying to figure out ways to make the experience better for her.
Insert heroic guy in his pink Eagles jersey from the row in front of us. At the start he gave my daughter a pair of adorable little keychains, but his true service came around the third or fourth inning (I forget exactly which) when he returned to his seat with bright orange slushies for his friends – and three for us! Handed over with bright smiles (I speak almost no Korean, my partner was away investigating a snack she could get our daughter, and my daughter, while she speaks passable Korean, was far too shy to talk to a stranger) this gift almost single-handedly redeemed the day for my daughter. All she really needed was some cold sugar water to shift her mood and even after it was gone, she experienced baseball with a newfound enthusiasm. She even high-fived the guy and his friend (a stunning event, this girl does not interact with strangers) several times and his friend gave her a card with Cody Ponce in it at the end of the game. Truly these men were the baseball ahjussi that she needed to show her that this could be fun.
The hero and child whose day he saved (both anonymized for their protection and/or just to protect their privacy). Also pictured, me making a stupid face and my partner making a much more normal one.
While the row in front of us consisted of the middle-aged male crowd I was raised to expect from sporting events, on my left we had an example of maybe KBO’s largest fanbase at the moment: Korean women in their 20s. The woman next to me, who was eating a truly impressive multi-course Korean meal I think she bought somewhere in the stadium, spent the first half of the game in a state of relative calm. She danced and sang with the crowd, but in contrast to the heroic older men in front of us her participation was relatively sedate. This is no dig at her, if anything my energy was much more in line with hers than with the men in front of us, but it belied a deeper enthusiasm that only manifested as the game develop.
The Landers didn’t get a single hit first seven innings, but the Eagles had only scored one run in that time, so the game was still tight. Cody Ponce had delivered a remarkable record, but by the eighth inning you could see the exhaustion arriving. The game got more exciting, but in a stressful way. A heroic throw from right field all the way home, combined with a brilliant bit of movement from the catcher, spared us disaster as the runner was tagged out after a huge hit got the batter to second base, but we were all screaming the whole way. It was at this point that my neighbour’s enthusiasm showed. She had clearly been waiting for the moment of maximum tension before she exploded into screams of despair at every missed ball by the Eagles, switching to elation at the dramatic save by the outfielder/catcher pair. While relief pitcher Kim Seo-hyeon (on my short list for favorite player) was a safe pair of hands to finish the game with, it was a tense final two innings as we failed to get any more runs. My neighbour’s transformation in many ways mirrored my own experience – it is one thing to be up 1-0 during a potential no-hitter in innings 1-6, but to only have one point spare at the end of the game is another matter.
Seo-hyeon came through for us, though, and delivered the game at the top of the ninth – we screamed, we high fived, we celebrated, and we rushed to get the five-year-old to the toilet. She had first indicated she might need it during the climactic moments of the final inning and had to learn an important lesson about timing.
Kim Seo-hyun delivering victory to the Eagles.
Hanwha would go on to lose (decisively) the second game of the double header. We watched the second half of that game, which was played in the rain, at home with our dinner thankful that we had missed both the defeat and the inclement weather.
The experience of watching the game live was fundamentally different from watching it on the TV. The live experience was significantly more human. There were our fellow fans in the crowd, of course, and the interaction with them, but the chants also helped to reinforce the personalities of the individuals who were playing the game. On TV I struggle to know the names of the players because the displays, and the player’s jerseys, are all in hangul (which I’m embarrassed to say I still can’t read, but I’m trying!) In the stadium the main board displays the names in the Latin alphabet with pictures of each player, so I learned the names and positions much faster than I had watching from home where we usually identify players by their numbers or a distinctive feature (first baseman, and team captain, Chae Eun-seong’s glasses being a notable example).
The display board was a huge help, especially when I needed to know what name to sing when we were at bat.
While I maybe had a harder time following the grand scope of the game, placing each at bat or pitch within its full context and seeing how it was developing, I more strongly felt the struggle between players and empathised and rooted for them as individuals. Both experiences have their merits, and while I preferred the in-person game to watching it at home I’m not sure I could handle going to a game like this six days a week (assuming I could even get tickets of course)!
In the days leading up to the game, I was talking to a student at the university I teach at about sports and he told me he can’t stand watching KBO because he doesn’t think the quality of play is good enough to be enjoyable. He prefers basketball anyway and even in that sport he follows individual players rather than teams. Later I thought on this and how there are many ways to engage with sports.
Once upon a time I think I enjoyed watching individual prowess on display and probably preferred the Olympics to all other sporting events, but over time that has changed. Possibly this is my aging, but I bet no small part of it is also me becoming jaded as scandals have shown how many top athletes are basically cheating to achieve their records. Instead of rooting for someone who may be doping or otherwise engaging in nefarious practices to secure that tiny edge that makes all the difference in top tier sports, I prefer to invest in the human stories of players who are good, but maybe not the best. This is possibly also part of why I enjoyed the human connection I felt at the live KBO game so much – sure our star pitcher is an ex-MLB player who moved here after ending his tenure in the Japanese league, but here it doesn’t matter because here we’re all rooting for the home team, and he can help us finally win!
The level of play in KBO is certainly not the same as in MLB, but there is something wonderfully human about it. Also, if I’m completely honest, the games are more fun when people make mistakes. I’m not necessarily here to see the greatest game of baseball ever played. I’m here to see the home team win!
I very much hope to attend another game this season. It’s still relatively early in the season with nearly a hundred games remaining, so I’m optimistic we will be back at Hanwha Ballpark again. For the moment, my partner will keep an eye on tickets (tickets are released for sale exactly a week before each game) and hopefully we can get lucky. In an ideal world we could go every two weeks, but I doubt we will be so lucky. If you do get a chance yourself, I recommend attending a KBO game. It’s a hell of an experience.