Dino Denouement

"The saddest day of the year is the day baseball season ends" (Tommy Lasorda)

On Saturday, July 13th, 2019, the day before my latest birthday, I saw my last live baseball game, at Changwon NC Park.  A muggy, yet perfect 74℉ (23℃) summer evening, with only a whisper of potential rain.

It was also the last destination in my Korean baseball stadium quest (kwest), which began on May 6, 2015, amid the cool days of spring at Hanbat Stadium in Daejeon, my home city in the center of the country, 104 miles to the west.  Four years, nine stadiums, ten teams.

That July 2019 contest had all the elements I love in a good game - a raucous crowd, an outside venue, an as-of-yet-unseen stadium, and the heady promise of new adventures.  I settled in with my scorebook along the third base side, to hear the Korean national anthem, Aegukga, played by a group of flutists, then headed up somewhere around the sixth inning to the upper decks also on the third-base side, just to catch a different perspective of the game and the fans.

The expansion NC Dinos were hosting the expansion KT Wiz and ended up getting pummeled that night, 13-3.  The ninth inning was a bit of a disaster, as the Wiz scored four runs on three errors to blow an already ridiculous blowout wide open.  Dino starter Drew Rucinski ended up going only four innings, before he was lifted, with his team down, 6-1.  A lively group of 10,805 fans, including a fair number of Wiz faithful along the third-base side, half-filled the stadium.  The cheerleaders danced, the Dino mascots ran about, and the announcers gave children in the home section microphones to announce upcoming batters.

But for all the antics on the field, the stadium was worth the trip in itself.  Opened only in March of that year, it cost twice the average price of any other stadium I'd been to, 20,000 Won, but was worth every bit of it.  As you walk up to the field, you ascend on ramps and staircases straight into the outfield bleacher area and are able to take everything in at once, gifted with a wide-open view of the entire layout.  No other sports stadium in South Korea has this open-wide feel to it, as the rest of them are perfectly-enclosed like the big USA concrete bowl stadiums of the 1970's. 

It's also got the smallest potential home base in South Korea, in the ninth-largest city of only one million, closest to Busan in the southeast corner.

Changwon NC Park very much felt like some of my favorite ballparks in the U.S., so I was not surprised to find out later that the global architecture firm Populous was responsible for its construction (the same firm that spearheaded the retro construction period and produced Camden Yards in Baltimore, Progressive Field in Cleveland, and Minute Maid Park in Houston, among other places).  This is the only baseball stadium that firm has designed in Korea.

The NC Dinos are also one of the more enigmatic teams in the league, an expansion franchise owned by the NCSoft video game development company (the rest of the teams are owned by the big corporations in the country).  The Dinos began playing in 2013, and have made the playoffs five out of the franchise's first seven years.  They even made it to the KBO series in 2016, but lost their so-far one and only chance to the Doosan Bears.  They're back at it again this year, four games ahead of those same Bears in first place in the 2020 standings.  That's an amazingly high yardstick they're holding up over the league.

They also have personalities galore.  One of their most famous alumni is third baseman Eric Thames, who went on to generate big buzz and big money in Milwaukee.  Thames landed with the team in 2014, and put up some remarkable numbers, most notably 47 home runs and 40 stolen bases in 2015, becoming the first KBO player to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season.  He won the MVP award in 2015 for this.  He seemed to enjoy his time there.

In April 2016, Changwon apparently granted him honorary citizenship, and he responded by leading the team with another gigantic season (40 home runs) which took the team to the brink of a championship.  Few players have made a bigger impact in the KBO, yet several now have followed in his wake to return to big money playing in the major leagues in the USA.  One example is Josh Lindblom, former Doosan Bear now Milwaukee Brewer.

The 23-year-old lefty pitcher Koo Chang-mo is generating the most buzz right now for the Dinos, with his 6-0 record, and he's had plenty of help from two-year Dino veteran Rucinski (5-1) and newbie Mike Wright (6-2), as well as former Phillie center fielder Aaron Altherr, who's already hit 10 home runs, and is among the top five best foreign hitters in the league currently.  Then there's 8-year Dino veteran Na Sung-bum, an outfielder/designated hitter, who hits in the middle of the lineup, and who's usually good for 20+ homers a year.  The Dinos have talent.


And while that talent did not coalesce during that game in July 2019 (the Dinos left 12 men on base in a dismal offensive effort), they did make the playoffs later in the season as a wild card.  And honestly, I was having too good a time wandering about this new stadium, observing all the little touches of Chez Dino.  One standout structure that I couldn't help but notice was the gigantic beer garden-cafe overlooking left field, with several floors and porches overlooking the field.  Down below, in back of the ground-level seating, there were wide open concourses, so you never felt cramped, and were always close to the action below.  There were big lines for food, and heading into the gift shop at the end of the game.  I resisted the urge to join the crowd and pick up a plush Dino. 

There is a reason for the dinosaur-centric theme of Changwon, as the southern area of the country seems to be a dinosaur fossil hotbed (the Goseong Dinosaur Museum is also relatively close).  Specific NC mascots include Seri, a green Brontosaurus that wears a necklace, and Dandi, a blue Tyrannosaurus.  Yeah, that rocks about as hard as you think.

I had no idea what to expect from Changwon, the little sleepy port town modeled after Canberra, Australia, and even after staying there one night, I didn't learn enough about its main attractions, other than being on the coast, and their summer entertainers, the NC Dinos.  All the motels seemed to be in one area, and it had a definite "working port" kind of vibe, much different from the upscale Busan.  Apparently, the city has branded itself an "environmental capital."  Further research on the city revealed copious thought put into the flag - a tri-coloured pinwheel made of 'C' shaped wings, including blue, symbolizing the ocean, growth, and hope; orange, representing passion and creation; and green for nature and balance.  They've put a lot of thought into the town's bits and pieces.

After the game, I saw some of this "green aspect," as I wandered on the lamplit footpaths along the Haewancheon River, before settling back in my nearby motel for a nice, soothing post-game bath.

Changwon seems like a nice enough place to be, and I've heard that it actually has a sizeable foreign community.  On Sunday, my birthday, the day after the game, Pizzeria da' Genna (open since 1957!) served me one of the most satisfying Italian meals I've had in country, Pesto Mussels Vongole, and before I boarded the train, a Starbucks staffer gifted me a size bigger on my latte to compliment my cheesecake.  Small little touches like these made great gifts on my big day.

Full of cake and mussels, I waved goodbye to green and friendly Changwon, the NC Dinos, and boarded the train back to Daejeon, my Korean baseball stadium quest at an end.

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Speaking of small gifts, I want to thank each and every reader who joined me for a few miles on my blogging baseball journey, and I hope this series carries on into the future as something to be discovered by others.  I also hope all you readers can discover some magic in your own expectant journeys, your own quests.

Will this now long-ago 2019 birthday weekend game be the last one that I see?  Time will tell.

I expect I will see others, perhaps even pursue, and eventually fulfill another baseball quest, but you never know.  The next great disaster, the next daunting health crisis, the next sequestering world event, may be yet around the corner.

We must do what we can in the time we have.

The game is over, the lights are dimming.

It's time to go home.

KIA Tiger Kings

I was aware of the echoes of history as I made my way two hours south on a cloudy Friday, on July 12, 2019, to the southeast of the country to visit Gwangju-KIA Champions Field during my "Great Birthday Baseball Trip" of that year.

The KIA Tigers have won every KBO Series in which they've been involved.  They've also won 11 KBO championships (which, to be clear, is the most of any KBO club).

So they are etched into Korean baseball history, and tend to win a lot.  In fact, they are one of two teams I have seen live over the years who win more than they lose.  My scorecard confirms this.  In the six games I've seen them, they've won three times, tied once, and lost twice.

July, unfortunately, is a tricky month to plan any baseball trip, because that's the beginning of the rainy season, but I had to try, and everything ended up working out perfectly.  As it turned out, the Tigers were playing at home against Hanwha, so this game also marked the first time I ever saw the Eagles play on the road.

But there is other history as well that reverberates through the ages.  Gwangju is a seminal town simply for being the most "politically rowdy." (which resonates with our ongoing 2020).  The pivotal moment for this was the period of May 18-27, 1980, when scores of people were killed during a student uprising against the the military-led government of the time.  It remains a point of stubborn pride for the city, as well as a wound that never really healed, and really marks the beginning of the long, turbulent ascent to democracy in South Korea.

So it seems pretty fitting in a way that this history-soaked city should have the most-titled ballclub in the country, which established the KBO only in 1982 (two years after the Gwangju massacre).  Most of those titles came in the early years of the league (the Tigers won nine of their championships between 1983-1997), but still, that's a lot to hang your hat on.

Luckily, things were calm when I visited the ballpark on that cloudy day, and only 9,208 people showed up in a stadium that fits 27,000, but they did make a lot of noise.  Gwangju-KIA Champions Field was opened in 2014, and is one of the newer ballparks in the country, so it reminded me of the Samsung Lions' stadium, although the Tigers are one of the original teams in the league.  They used to be the Haitai Tigers, but became the KIA Tigers in 2002.

I took my time strolling about the periphery of the place, admiring the Tiger statuary and other decorations along "Gwangju Baseball Street."  I was familiar with a few of the Tiger heroes, especially pitcher Sun Dong-yol, who was the other half of the "Perfect Game" (which I wrote about in my Lotte Giants blog).  Sun was a big part of the 1980's-early 90's success of the Tigers, and he holds the record for the lowest  career ERA in the league, 1.20.  He also was a member of six of 11 Tiger championship teams.  He's one of the legends of Korean baseball.

Sun's number, 18, is one of two retired with the team.  The other is number 7, belonging to Lee Jong-Beom, a shortstop converted to center fielder who apparently was dubbed "Son of the Wind" for his speed on the base paths.  Lee holds the single-season stolen base record in the KBO, with 84, and is second all-time on the KBO stolen base list with 510.

Gwangju has more than its share of famous Korean baseball names.  Kang Jung-ho (the former Pirate who is in hiatus with numerous DUI's), Kim Byung-hyun (who played with both the Red Sox and Diamondbacks), Choi Hee-seop (former LA Dodger and longtime KIA Tiger), and Jae Weong Seo (NY Met turned KIA Tiger) all hail from Gwangju.

The current team seems to have a good balance between pitching and batting,  Former Houston Astro outfielder Preston Tucker has been with the team for two years now, and this year, the Tigers hired their first ever American manager, Matt Williams (yes, that Matt Williams of San Francisco fame).  So far, he has them contending above .500, in 5th place, right in the playoff mix for 2020.

It was a different story in 2019, however, (the Tigers missed the playoffs that season) but the team was only two years removed from their 11th championship in 2017.  On that steamy July night, I had the luck to catch veteran pitcher Yang Hyeon-jong, who struck out five on the way to his 130th league win (a 5-0 shutout by KIA).  Yang, who is also from Gwangju, has also had quite the baseball career, pitching 14 years for the Tigers, with two championships, and an MVP award for the 2017 series.  He also has three gold medals from the Asian games.  It's nice to see the homeboy made good in his own stadium.

As usual, I occupied my upper deck position behind home plate and enjoyed the show, (motto: Always KIA Tigers), marking down the action in my scorebook.  The first pitch was driven in via a KIA car (naturally) and the scoreboard was rocking the anime figures including a late-inning shell game of Kai Bai Bo (Rock Scissors Paper) which for anyone who hasn't lived in Korea, is how almost everything is decided here.  Just trust me on that.

The Tigers scored all their runs in the fourth inning, on two monster home runs which surprisingly didn't come off the bats of Na Ji-wan (13 years a Tiger, 209 career home runs) or Choi Hyoung-woo (308 career home runs, former Samsung Lion). Side note: Choi was the first player in the league to receive a 10 billion won ($8.5 million) contract when he signed with the Tigers in 2016.

As I alluded to earlier, the KIA fans were active all night on the third-base side with their yellow KIA boomsticks, and I counted three Eagles fans bravely representing on the opposite side, waving a giant Hanwha flag.  They were loud and proud but even they could not spur their side's offense, which mustered all of four hits for the night.

After two and a half hours of this shutout, we all poured out onto "Gwangju Baseball Street" abuzz with excitement to catch our buses, and I waved goodbye to my second-to-last stop on my Korean stadium quest, heading into the night to make more history.

I didn't see any sign of the stalwart Hanwha fans.  I assume they made it home safely.

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It's time for the ninth inning, last ups, and we're heading east toward Busan to catch the NC Dinos in the brand-sparkling new Changwon NC Park.

Bill the Wall! (in Suwon)

There is no mistaking Suwon Baseball Stadium

Because like everything else in Suwon, it pays homage to the great and mighty "wall."

That wall is the Hwaseong Fortress, constructed just before 1800, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the tourist magnet which puts this city on the map.  Suwon is just 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of Seoul, and is easily reachable by the Seoul subway (and/or any number of trains), and thus I consider an extension of that supersized city, very much like Incheon.  Apparently, Suwon is the only remaining completely walled city in Korea.

And it is quite a sight.  I've spent a few times walking the length of it (3.5 miles/5.74 kilometers), up Padalsan Hill, over gates and traffic, and even all the way out to the wall's archery complex (which was unfortunately, closed on that day).

Suwon Baseball Stadium, which opened originally in 1989, and which was the home stadium for the now defunct Hyundai Unicorns until 2007, is currently the home of the KT Wiz, the league's latest expansion team.  The KT Wiz, formed in 2013, played their first season in 2015, and like most expansion teams throughout history, they have struggled, have yet to make the playoffs, and are routinely punching bags for the rest of the league, although they did rank as high as 6th last year.  Currently, in 2020, they are tied for 8th place in the standings (out of 10 teams).

You can't help but feel for any expansion team, especially for one as new as the Wiz, and you wonder when they will start to put things together and really start to compete with the big boys (i.e. any of the Seoul-based teams, like the Doosan Bears or Nexen Heroes, which are natural local competitors).

When I visited the Suwon Baseball Stadium for the first time on October 12, 2018, the KT Wiz were just finishing up a ninth place finish to the season, and were hosting the playoff-bound Nexen Heroes on a cold evening before what would be eventually 10,268 fans (the stadium holds almost 21,000).

I was on my way to Seoul to attend the annual international KoTESOL (Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) conference (yeah, I know, that's a mouthful), and thought it made perfect sense to detour on the way up to the bright lights of the big city.

I ended up staying through eight innings before the cold got to me (it fell from 59℉ at 6 p.m. to 49℉ by 9 p.m. ... a five degree downward shift for Celsius fans) and I was also obsessed about getting the last train back to Seoul.  I made the train in plenty of time, and in checking the KBO app, found that I hadn't missed much.  The hometown Wiz were losing 8-5 when I left, and eventually let two more runs cross the plate to lose 10-5, before all was said and done.

To be honest, there were as many Nexen fans as Wiz fans at the stadium that evening, and they were loud and proud.  Park Byung Ho (formerly of Minnesota) hit his 42nd home run of the season during the third inning, which broke the 2-2 tie and put Nexen on top for the remainder of the game.  The KT Wiz mainly relied on their outfield for any offensive production, including leadoff hitter and left fielder Kang Baek Ho, who won Rookie of the Year with 29 homers that season, and the speedy center fielder Mel Rojas, Jr., who is still with the team as of this season.  Rojas, who has yet to play in MLB, is the son of Mel Rojas, who you may or may not remember playing for the Montreal Expos in the early 90's as the setup man for closer John Wetteland.

But mainly I was enjoying the overall atmosphere of the stadium, the fans desperately trying to keep themselves warm in the October cold, with their dances and cheers, and their frequent runs to buy beer, the two freakish wizard-monster mascots named "Vic" and "Ddory" (combine those and what does it spell?), and most especially the little touches of wall at the top of the stadium and scoreboard.  These little Hwaseong Fortress wall touches, more than anything, make Suwon Baseball Stadium stand out from its brethren, and really plays a constant unifying theme for this city.

Suwon lives, breathes, and plays in the shadow of that wall.

I like historical walls, and the lessons they teach about time and permanence.  Hwaseong Fortress is, as I've mentioned before, is one substantial stretch of concrete and stone through town, but there are all sorts of bits and pieces to discover, including an elaborate array of observation towers, guard chambers, crossbow platforms, beacon towers, and flood gates which cross over Suwoncheon Stream.  It's very photogenic, and you can step on and off at any point to wander to restaurants or park areas.  Not surprisingly, it took some damage during the Korean War, but was restored and mended.

A strong second draw to the city is the uniquely scatalogically-oriented "Mr. Toilet House," which explores the life and times of "Mr. Toilet," Sim Jae-duck, who built a toilet-shaped house (eventually made into a museum) to celebrate the philosophy of good toilet hygiene.  If you have the opportunity, it's best just to go and see for yourself.  The alarming statuary of various figures engaged in "number two" are in and of themselves worth the trip.

I've also enjoyed one of my favorite lunches at the Din Tai Fung Dim Sum restaurant (which has branches all over the world, and which is within walking distance from the Suwon train station) and ventured out on another cold November day to the Suwon World Cup Stadium to catch the finals of the Korean FA Cup (the Suwon Samsung Bluewings are actually one of the more successful soccer franchises in the country).  The restaurant had no wall decor that I can remember.  The soccer stadium definitely did.  That wall reigns supreme.

There's a lot to explore, actually, in Suwon.  Just not, as of yet, a winning baseball team.

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We are late into the game, and bound for the 8th inning.  Next stop is to the southwest of the country to Gwangju-Kia Champions Field, home of the most successful team in the KBO, the KIA Tigers.

Daegu Discovery

I am always stimulated and encouraged by my solo trips of discovery in the Land of the Morning Calm.

April 21, 2018 was such a day; it was a second chance for me to visit Daegu, just an hour southeast from my own city in the middle of the country, and my first chance to catch a game at Daegu Samsung Lions Park.

If the name "Daegu" rings a bell in our year of the plague, it's probably because you've heard of that city in connection to the Covid crisis in Korea. A member of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus became a super-spreader in the city, and was largely responsible for kick-starting the virus spread about the country, and the eventual quick government response to shut things down.

But all of that was far in the future when I went to Daegu, "Colorful Daegu!", on this April day.  I had been in the city only once before, and was interested in digging into old and new haunts.  I've always appreciated, in one historical aspect, how Daegu was the front line of the "Busan pocket," the last holdout in Korea during the war, before the North Koreans were pushed back all the way north.

The old haunts included the street dedicated to Kim Kwang Seok, an activist folk singer who, sadly, ended up taking his own life in 1996.  I'm fascinated with this area in Daegu, and with this singer.  It's a time portal to a turbulent era in South Korean history, when crowds of people were marching against dictatorships (which in this case was as recent as the 1980's) when Korea had yet to make anybody's radar.  Spoiler alert: they emerged happy with a fairly stable democracy.

Protests against authoritarian rulers is a recurring theme in Korea, even as recently as 2016-2017, when millions of Koreans took to the streets and played a large role in the eventual impeachment and ouster of influence-peddling President Park Geun-hye.  Geun-hye has a connection to Daegu;  she was born there in 1952.

But residents prefer to remember Kim Kwang Seok, and his tragic history permeates this street, and the area has become as much a shrine as anything.  His ballads, soft-spoken and folk music centered, with a 1970's feel, are such a contrast from the pop-generated, synth-dance K-music that dominates everything now.  I always feel at home wandering that area of Daegu, drifting along to the recordings of his songs, which are heard via outdoor speakers throughout that area.

But there were plenty of new haunts too.  One of the first on that hot April day included Daegu National Museum, which contained an array of materials from prehistory to the Three Kingdoms period ... ceremonial robes, bronze daggers, tiger-shaped buckles, and Silla-era pottery.  Most importantly for me during this long day-trip, the museum offered a cool respite from the day's heat, and a chance for me to charge my phone and read a short story from my "best of" series.

There is a tendency for me to go somewhere new, even in hiking areas in my own city, just to change things up and get a new perspective, and this is what I did with this April day in Daegu.  Using my various phone transport  and mapping apps, and my T-mobile money bus card, I become Marco Polo with a modern compass, able to unlock exact buses and routes and stops in front of places like this museum.

But the newest thing, and the centerpiece of the day's trip, was my eventual trip to the baseball stadium, the home of the Samsung Lions ("New Blue!  New Lions!"), which required a trip on the Daegu subway out to the eastern end of the city.

As luck would have it, I had arrived with 16,453 other fans for "Darin Ruf Appreciation Night" and enjoyed all sorts of celebrations, including videos from his family in Nebraska, and his son Henry Ruf throwing out the first pitch, as I settled in with my Burger King set and beer in the Sky level seating (yes, the stadium had a Burger King).  People were even allowed to play on the outfield before the game.

Ruf, a power hitting outfielder/first baseman, who bounced up and down with the Phillies for much of 2012-2016, found a three-year home with the Samsung Lions, and was clearly a fan favorite during his tenure there.  He led the league in RBIs in 2017, and was having a decent 2018. It was nice to see the Lions treat their foreign hitter so well.  What can I say ... I'm sensitive to these things as a fellow expat.

The Lions are rich in history, and in winning.  One of the original six teams (from 1982), the Lions have won eight times, mostly recently.  Half of these titles came four years in a row, from 2011-2014.  Samsung, of course, is one of the major corporations in the country, and they are not shy about splashing the money to get decent players.  I once thought of them as the N.Y. Yankees of the KBO, and in this aspect, they are.

One of the most famous Lions, and indeed, most accomplished Korean baseball players of all time, is first baseman Lee Seung-yuop, whose visage, massive left handed batting swing, and retired number 36 are clearly displayed in all their glory on the right field wall.  Lee Seung-yuop played 15 seasons for the Lions in all, and he still holds the KBO records in six categories.  He hit 467 home runs in the KBO (and 626 home runs overall between Korea and Japan), won League MVP five times, and the Golden Glove Award ten times.  He retired in 2017, only a year before I saw this Daegu stadium, and was responsible for four of Samsung's titles, as well as two titles in Japan.  He almost played in the United States, but never came over.  One wonders what impact he would have made.

There's a wide-open and very new feel to the Lions stadium, which was completed only in 2016, and holds 24,000.  Sparkling in the home team blue and white coloration, there's a picnic and camping area beyond the right field fence, and a nice open area in left field which showcases the green of a local hillock.  You feel like you're entering a palace of baseball as you approach from the subway, with a giant "Golden Ball" smashing into "Blue Flower" metal sculpture to get you all amped up for the game to come.

Happily, the Samsung Lions made good on Darin Ruf night, winning 4-1 over the expansion KT Wiz, and Ruf had a decent night, hitting 2 for 3 with a run scored.  All the damage occured in the fifth inning, as Lee Won-seok belted a three-run homer as part of a four-run inning, and Lion starter Tim Adleman moved slowly but surely through six innings, allowing only the one run.

The big picture is a bit dimmer, however; the Lions have suffered in their shiny new ballpark, not having made the playoffs since 2015, when they lost to the Doosan Bears in their last year in the old Daegu baseball stadium, which had a maximum capacity of 5,000 people.  In 2020, they're off to a bad start, in 7th place out of 10 teams and below .500, despite help from pitcher David Buchanan (another former Phillie) and infielder Tyler Saladino (former Brewer/White Sox player).

The Lions are looking forward to the return of former MLB relief pitcher Oh Seung-hwa, the "Stone Buddha," but he has yet to make an appearance this year, as he has been serving through 30 games of disciplinary action and is expected to return on June 9.  There is also the prospect of future stardom in rookie left-hander Heo Yun-dong.

But even if the Samsung Lions don't win, and that's certainly the case of late, they've got a beautiful blue and white stadium to play in, and plenty of stories of former glory to remember.  And they will always have Lee Seung-yuop.  New Blue!  New Lions!

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We're on to the 7th inning jnow, and a trip northward almost to Seoul to the Suwon Baseball Park, the home of the newest expansion team, the KT Wiz.

Code Red at Munhak

The signs all proclaimed that we should "Rise Up!" when I traveled up to attend Opening Day at Munhak Stadium, home of the SK Wyverns, on March 24, 2018.

Maybe they were just trying to keep us warm.

With Code Red pollution levels, a murky haze covering the surrounding mountains, and temperatures beginning at 48℉ (9℃) and then dropping to 45℉ (7℃) with wind chill as the game wore on, it was challenging, to say the least.  But I arrived early, in my bulky fleece and cloth face mask, with hand warmers at the ready, and was ready to go with a bucket of fried chicken to warm my insides.  The saleswoman even gave me a free water to go with my food.

The 2018 KBO season was an oddity, the longest in the league's history, with rain and "fine dust level" (pollution) cancellations during the course of the spring and summer.  The league took a break from August 16 to Sept. 3 for the Asian Games, necessitating the March opening, and played long into mid-November.  It was also the year that I got really serious with my Korean baseball quest, knowing I wanted to catch a game in all nine stadiums.  I ticked off three more in 2018.

Pollution is a significant condition people face here in the Land of the Morning Calm, and it's a significant one with far-reaching health and mental ramifications.  I have gotten into the habit, for the first time in my life, while living here, of checking pollution-tracking apps on my phone.  I also have come to understand that when I look out my window in the mornings and see fog-like conditions, that this is usually ... maddeningly ... NOT fog.

Note: one by-product of the 2020 Covid situation is that for the first time, since I've been here, I've noticed blue skies and have actually gotten out of the habit of checking these aforementioned phone apps (which read a solid green most of the time).


But back to March 24, 2018.

Interestingly enough, and completely unknowable to me with my chicken bucket, sitting in frigid Munhak Stadium (also known by the ridiculously overwrought sponsorship name "Incheon SK Happy Dream Park"), I was watching the first step on a very long triumphal 2018 road for the Wyverns, who marched all the way through the next 7+ months to an eventual KBO championship, beating the Doosan Bears.  On Nov. 12, the fightin' Wyverns claimed the team's fourth title in history.

Munhak is large (25,000 fans eventually drifted in to fill the place during that game), but the place looked a bit "beat-up."  The field had all the appearances of an early-spring "just coming out of winter" look (with dirt patches here and there and a kind of unkempt appearance) but I appreciated the energy the fans brought, and my eyes kept wandering over to the left field outfield area, where tents were set up, and people were picnicking and having a grand old time in the chill.  But I would be lying if I told you that I wasn't also constantly looking up with amazement at the solid wall of "fog-not-fog" that surrounded all of us.

The Wyvern energy was there even as I came in to the stadium area, walking up to the ballpark from the subway (it had taken me at least an hour to get out to Incheon from Seoul), and I soaked in the sea of red banners (capturing various players in their pitching or batting glory) and settled in to my seat to a plethora of announcements and huzzahs as the game got started.  I still get into the expectant buzz before a game has begun, and hey, Opening Day is still Opening Day, even if it's late March.

With all that said, I'm going to be perfectly honest here.  I only made it five innings in Munhak, before the bitter chill got to me on that day.  When I left the game, the home dragons were ahead of the visiting Lotte Giants, 5-4, and they would eventually win a close one, 6-5.  The Wyvern's starter Merrill Kelly (a mainstay for a few years with the team before he signed with Arizona in 2019) struck out 10 in five innings, but left the game when I did, so he was denied the win.  Five innings is technically a game, and I rarely leave any game, but in hindsight I should have brought gloves and a winter hat. Others were clearly feeling the same; the crowd had thinned.

The enticements of Incheon city were calling me like a siren into the remainder of the evening.  The stadium is a bit inland but not far from the port area, where most of the action is.  Incheon is just west of Seoul, and is home to the country's airport, and there are myriad subway lines, trains and buses that connect the two.  Incheon also has a significant historical Chinatown area, and it's there that I eventually found the statue of Douglas MacArthur, who of course is famous for liberating the place from the North Koreans with his daring invasion from the sea in 1950.  After all this time, he is still remembered, standing tall in a park above the hubbub of Chinatown.

But back to mighty Munhak and the Wyverns.  I always appreciate a good angry dragon (and the Wyvern fulfills that role nicely although they seem to have some owl and a knight running around the stadium too) and a team that plays itself into contention more often than not.  The expansion team Wyverns have generally done this in the last few years, even though they are off to a wretched start in 2020.  After a particularly painful 10-game losing streak, and a balky bullpen and defensive miscues, they are solidly in last place this season.

Third baseman Choi Jeong, who was batting third that day and who drove in the first two runs with a solid single, really came into his own in 2016 (he has been with the team since 2005) as he started wailing on the ball (he hit over 40 homers and lead the league in home runs both years from 2016 to 2017).  In 2018, he "only" managed 35 long balls.  Canadian first baseman Jamie Romak joined the team in 2017, and has since hit more than 100 home runs.  The Wyverns also boasted a fairly formidable pitching rotation that year with Kelly, Angel Sanchez (now with the Yomiuri Giants), and longtime Wyvern Kim Kwang Hyun (now in St. Louis!)

I always found it a little odd how the Wyverns managed to win in 2018, as their team stats were awful (a recent check of the league's website confirmed this).  Their batting average (.233) was last in the league, and their team ERA was an unenviable 5.21 (third from the bottom).  But they did pull in over a million fans for the season, so they had the support.  Somehow ranked second at season's end, they gutted out a five-game victory over Nexen, and then took on the Bears, beating them in six games, the final win coming on the road at Jamsil.  So they earned it.  Good on them.  Three of their four championships, by the way, have been at the expense of the Doosan Bears.


Historically, the team has had a decent amount of success as they've only been around since 2000 (just before World Cup mania hit Japan and Korea).  During that year, the Hyundai Unicorns, who would eventually dissolve, left Incheon and moved to Suwon.  The league decided it was time to award SK Telecom a team, and the SK corporate leadership saw the vacancy and put the team in the Incheon area. The Wyverns' team colors, appropriately enough for that Opening Day 2018 and for all pollution-challenged games, are orange and red, loud colors in a loud bat-flip league.

Too bad the team is struggling this year.  Perhaps the Wyverns need a few more "dust level" cancellations, a nine-month season, and they'll right back in it.

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We're through five innings at this point (technically a complete game!), and we've got four more stadiums to go.  Next up, we head southeast to Daegu, to one of the original teams of the league, the Samsung Lions.

Jam-Packed in Jamsil

I walked into Jamsil Stadium in Seoul for the first and only time on July 28, 2017.

My first thought, upon reaching this big concrete bowl in southeastern Seoul, was "this place is big."  My second was whether or not my friend Aaron and I were going to get tickets.  I mean ... there were oceans of people coming out of Green Line #2, and alighting en masse from taxis and buses.

We had just spent the early afternoon hiking the most accessible piece of Seoul's City Wall, which is always a good thing to be doing when you're in the city, and had made our way slowly southeast south of the Han River to the evening game between the Doosan Bears and the KIA Tigers, via the ginormous Lotte World, and an equally ginormous samgyupsal (Korean BBQ) dinner.

To be perfectly honest, I do get overwhelmed a lot in Seoul.  It's a huge kind of place (New York masses of people), with almost 10 million inhabitants at last count.  I've made the mistake, only a few times, of getting on the subway in the center of city during rush hour, and while the Koreans have managed to avoid the infamous subway pushers of Japan, they do CRUSH onto the subway.  Trust me ... avoid this.

Jamsil tries to accommodate the city's population, and is one of the bigger stadiums in the country, fitting approximately 25,500 people.  Gocheok Sky Dome, home of the Kiwoom Heroes, which I had been to earlier in the same year, is the other stadium within metropolitan Seoul, and it's also south of the Han River.

In fact, Jamsil is so big (the stadium is part of the sports complex built for the 1988 Olympics), that it acts as the home stadium for not one, but two of the "original six" teams, the LG Twins and the Doosan Bears.  The Twins (formerly MBC Chungyong) have been using the park since its opening in 1982, while the Bears (formerly the OB Bears) moved there in 1986, so they are technically the usurper.

Thirty four years is a long time to be sharing a stadium.  Frankly, I find that hard to believe, but somehow they make it work, year after year.  Someone needs to move north of the Han River.

So which team do you root for?  Well, it depends on your predilections.  Do you like teams that win, especially those who currently win?  Then the Bears are your team.  Besides winning the first ever KBO championship back in 1982, Doosan has won five other times, and the Bears have competed in the KBO Series an amazing five years in a row, beginning in 2015.  They won the championship three times during this span, in 2015, 2016, and 2019.  It ain't a KBO series unless the Bears are there.

Or do you like hard-luck scrappers, teams that compete but who haven't quite put it together?  The LG Twins may be your choice then, as they have been off and on to the playoffs since 2013, but they haven't been to the final dance since 2002.  Their glory years were the early 90's; they won the title twice in 1990 and 1994.

Maybe you prefer to focus on players?  Over the last few years, the LG Twins have tapped into Red Sox and Orioles.  From 2015-2017, Dominican third baseman Luis Jimenez provided some power at Jamsil (after the Red Sox had claimed him off waivers and then designated him to Pawtucket in 2015).  This season, the Twins signed Casey Kelly (2008 Red Sox draft pick) to join former Oriole Tyler Wilson in the rotation.  Kim Hyun-soo, who played for the Orioles for two years, is also back with the LG Twins.

The Doosan Bears seem to have a talent for picking foreign players that will help their cause the most, and 2019 was the proof in the pudding.  Jose Miguel Fernandez, the Cuban defector who dallied with both Los Angeles teams for a time, and then found a home with Doosan in 2019, hit .344 in 2019, to help lead the team to the eventual championship, and to date is now leading the league with his .458 average in 2020.  Pitcher Josh Lindblom (after a successful 2018 with the Bears) arguably played an even bigger role the next year, winning the 2019 KBO League MVP Award after posting a 20–3 record with a 2.50 ERA and 189 strikeouts over ​194.6 innings (as well as his second Golden Glove award).  Lindblom parlayed his success into his current three-year contract with the Milwaukee Brewers, a rare but not isolated "transition back to MLB baseball in the US" from South Korea.

Another thing you could factor into your eventual choice is player longevity.  Both teams have retired two numbers, after long stints with either club.  Pitcher Park Chul-soon (#21) threw for the Bears from their inception in 1982 until 1996, and then coached the team for two seasons.  Twins outfielder Lee Byung-kyu played 17 seasons in Jamsil before hanging up his cleats in 2016, and the team retired his #9 the following year.

Or there are more recent cases, including Doosan's Kim Jae-hwan, who has run into trouble over the years with doping but who has also led the league in home runs (2018), and has been with the Bears since 2008.  More poignant for me, especially as a long-term expat, is the story of Dustin Nippert, who pitched for Doosan from 2011-2017.  The Bears fans, who loved Nippert, gave him the nickname "Ninunim" (the name was a combination of his last name and the Korean word for "God,").  He also won the KBO League MVP award (in 2016), one of only five foreign players who have won that since 1982.  Finally, in 2018, in his final and only year with the KT Wiz, Nippert became the first foreign pitcher to reach 100 wins in the KBO.  Quite a record of achievement for the former Diamondback, who made his MLB debut all the way back in 2005.

Or maybe your decision on who to root for comes down to one of the most important factors - mascots.  The Bears feature ... well, dancing silver bears, and the Twins rock with ... yes, you guessed it ... a pair of dancing Twins.  Yeah, I think I'm going to give that one to the Bears too.

Jamsil was quite the experience when I visited on that hot and hazy summer day in 2017, although we had to sprint around the stadium to the bleacher seats in right field (which had their own private entrance gate and ticket office) to find a seat.  It was a lively game, with just over 23,000 showing up, and it was the first time I witnessed a game that ended in a tie.  In Korea, games are allowed to continue until the bottom of the 12th inning before the tie goes into the books.  Because of this, my introduction to Jamsil lasted a good four hours and five minutes.

And it was quite the atmosphere.  Despite us being way out in the far reaches of Jamsil, planted in back of the right field foul pole, we did manage to catch a nice view of the game and of the hometown Bears fans on the first base side jumping up and down to their cheer leading crew.  Tiger center fielder Kim Ho-ryeong kept making spectacular acrobatic catches (I have at least three exclamation points on my scorecard for him) and we had a close-up view of all of those.

Doosan managed to tie the game, 3-3, in the ninth inning on a single by the aforementioned cleanup hitter (and DH) Kim Jae-hwan, but then both teams slogged pretty meekly through the overtime innings, with only one batter out of 19 reaching base on a single.  But well ... it was a hot night.  Everyone was tired.

It was time for the 23,000 to make their way home into the city of 10 million (and jam Seoul's subways once more).

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We're coming up to the fifth inning, and it's time to head west to the port city of Incheon, where the SK Wyverns play in the mighty Munhak Baseball Stadium, also known as the "Incheon SK Happy Dream Park."

Hermetically-Sealed Heroes

I have never thought much of seeing baseball played in the cavern-like confines of a domed stadium.

They are darkish, artificially lit, and almost always artificially turfed ... and you've nullified those subtle touches which imbue the periphery of the game - the breezes of a summer day, the sun going down slowly and covering section by section of the field, smoke rising from a BBQ shack located in the causeway beyond the outfield wall ... all of that.  Crowd noise is artificially amplified, encasing the entire game in a sterile, steel bubble.

It's the triumph of capitalism, really, as if the owners have said, "this game will be played and will make money, no matter the weather."

I've felt this in all the domed stadiums I've been in, from the Kingdome in Seattle to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, and even across the border at the perpetually-broken Le Stade Olympique in Montreal.  I've been to games in all these thunderdomes.

But, truth be told, I was more than a bit glad to step inside a comfortable environment on March 8, 2017, as I marched through the cold drifts and winds of a Seoul snowstorm, and entered the Gocheok Sky Dome (home of the Kiwoon Heroes) for the first time.

I was there to watch the Netherlands take on Chinese Taipei (Taiwan really) in the first round of the World Baseball Classic.  Knowing full well that the Red Sox shortstop, Xander Bogaerts, would be suiting up for the Netherlands (or specifically Aruba), I made the trip north via Korail from Daejeon (only one hour away by train) and become one of a miniscule but loud 3,606 fans (in a stadium that fits just under 17,000 for baseball).

The Netherlands had more of the known quantities (Bogaerts, Jurickson Profar, Didi Gregorius, etc.) and everyone chipped in to squeak out a 6-5 win in the ninth inning via a bases-loaded walk.  I had originally purchased a cheaper ticket up high, but staffers wandered by and instantly upgraded my ticket, placing me in the second tier, directly in back of home plate among a crowd of scouts with their radar guns and scorebooks.  Yes, scorebooks!

That evening featured a panoply of unique "international baseball" moments: Taipei fans unfurling a giant flag along the third base side, Bogaerts' extended Aruban family standing up and cheering on the 1st base side, Baltimore Oriole Justin Schoop dapping an Orioles fan though the netting on the on-deck circle, and even Boston's Puerto Rican scout coming over to say hello, after he noticed my Portland-Seadogs-hat-and-Red-Sox-"Nomah"-jersey combination.  Directly behind me, an English baseball fan, with a large drawing pad, penciled in a portrait of the stadium as he watched the game (this was something he apparently tried to do at every baseball game).

A distinctive night during my Korean baseball stadium quest.

But since that represented the one and only time I've been at Gocheok, I have never seen the Kiwoom (formerly Nexen) Heroes play at home, for they are the regular inhabitants of this only domed baseball stadium in Korea, and one of three teams who play south of the Han River in the greater metropolitan Seoul area.

Besides playing in an inverted fishbowl, the Heroes do have the distinctive aspect of being the only team that isn't owned by a company, and are instead privately owned by stockholders (as now-famous Korean baseball website organizer Dan Kurtz explained on a recent Only a Game broadcast. Kiwoom (an on-line securities trading firm) bought the naming rights to the team in 2018.

The Heroes have that "new baseball team" smell about them, as they have been around only since 2008, and in the beginning, they were made up largely of the surviving members of the Hyundai Unicorns, a team which was disbanded in 2007.  The Unicorns, one of the original six franchises who began life as the Sammi Superstars, were actually a moderately successful franchise, as they won four KBO championships in 25 years.  They dominated the late 90's and early 2000's.

Unfortunately, the Heroes have been unable to add to this title success as an expansion team, but they have been a regular feature in the playoffs for the last seven years, have gone deep the last couple of years (they kicked Hanwha out of the playoffs two years ago), and even made it to the championship series last year, only to be swept by the Doosan Bears in four games.  They are scrappy, and they seem to be always in the mix of things at the end of the season.

The Nexen mascot is named Teokdori (Mr. Jaw) an odd humanoid who looks like an angry old man ready to yell at other teams to get out of his dome.

Park Byung-ho, who spent a year in Minnesota, is arguably the most famous Korean Hero, and is now back playing first base full time for them.  He seems to do much better in his birthplace.  In 2018, when he returned for a full season, he belted 43 home runs (tied for second-best in the league) after hitting only 12 home runs in MLB during his stint with the Twins.

When you follow the KBO for a number of years, you tend to associate certain teams with certain players.  The Heroes seem to seek out and retain durable foreign pitching help, while foreign position players come and go.  Jake Brigham, who came up for a brief time in the majors in 2015 with the Atlanta Braves, and then played in Japan, has been in the Kiwoom rotation since 2017.  Brigham follows in the footsteps of long term Hero fan favorite Andy Van Hekken, who was the KBO wins leader in 2014, and who pitched in nine (yep, NINE) countries.

There's a lot of interesting stories in the KBO if you look around enough.  Even if you dig a bit beneath the turf of Korean baseball's sole (and Seoul) dome.

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We're coming up on the fourth inning now.  Everyone has had a turn at bat.  Time to drive across the city, and visit Jamsil Stadium, the home for two KBO teams.