Sunday, March 28, 2010

Opening Day 2010

If last Saturday marked the "official" beginning of spring, what with the period of day and night being of equal length, and so on and so forth, then yesterday was the *real* first day of spring, as the baseball season got underway all across the peninsula.


You may not know it, though, judging from the weather. I am told the late cold snap is called ggot sem chui, an idiom something like "winter is jealous".

And Yours Truly was there, along with the usual suspects, Nick, Greg, Andy and Eric (later joined by Jeremy and Jisun):


And 93,493 other people, as all four opening day stadia in the KBO were sell-outs.

Just like last year's opening day, this one featured our Doosan Bears hosting the KIA Tigers from Gwangju. The Tigers are reigning champs, as you may recall from my post about Game 7 of the Series.

Here is a shot of the atmosphere outside the stadium--some ajumma hawking their kimbap, boiled eggs, beer and water:


And inside--someone has set up some kind of jesa or charye table, a traditional ritual memorializing ancestors; a couple of guys smoking directly underneath a No Smoking sign, with stadium officials a few yards away:



On to the game: Both teams' starting pitchers were foreigners (Lopez for the Tigers, Jimenez for the Bears) as were six of the eight starters across the league today. Jimenez had a better day of it on this particular occasion, helped tremedously by a big third inning from his batters. Kim Hyun-soo went 4-for-4 with two runs and got things going when the Bears scored six runs off three homers in third. In my video below, I managed to capture one of the home runs in the middle of the extraneous footage I got:



Baseball season, and thus Spring, is now really, really here.

5 comments:

Mo said...

Cool, looks like fun! I'll have to attend a Korean sporting event or two at least when I'm there. How much are tickets to baseball games usually?

Tuttle said...

It's much cheaper and easier to attend a sporting event here than it is in Atlanta. Public transportation is frequent, and drops you off right outside the stadium, they don't hike up the beer and food prices inside, and the fans are awesome.

Tickets at Jamsil are pretty much 8 000, 12 000 or 20 000, depending on seats, though I think it is slightly more at Incheon and slightly less at Mok-dong.

Andrew Lasher said...

You really got a good picture of me there, Tuttle. Nice.

Tuttle said...

Hey, Super, I think you look really happy to be out watching a baseball game!

It was a fun day--and thanks for rescuing my scarf!

KOREA.NET said...

Korea.net is the official website of the Rep. of Korea. For our “Blogging on Korea” section on our webpage, we pick nice and appropriate blog posts and introduce them to our visitors.
Any blog posts about Korea (Korean food, life, people, festival etc), we read thoroughly and feature it on our web for a couple of days.

We’d like to outlink your blog post "Opening Day 2010" on our web, so we can share it with our visitors. Thank you for your source, and please visit our website and other official social networking channels.(see the links below)
http://korea.net/index.do
twitter: http://twitter.com/koreanet
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Seoul-South-Korea/Korea-Clickers/181274814520