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.