Let's Go Lotte!

Korea has had the good sense, as a culture, to go ahead and be upfront about the fact that corporations basically own the world.

This means that the majority of their sports teams are no longer named after the cities in which they are located, but rather the major corporation that quietly purchased the team sometime in the past twenty years.

Thus, one of the largest Baseball rivalries in Korea takes place not between the teams of "Seoul" and "Busan", but between the teams of Kia and Lotte--two major Korean power players who have owned each team for several years, and taken great pains to rebrand them carefully in their own image.

I knew this, since I was aware that Hyundai and Daewoo owned soccer teams, but I had yet to experience it personally.

When I arrived in Busan, I hit the global ATM I had found during my previous visit, having emptied my wallet via the series of comical taxi rides that afternoon, and hiked back to my hostel. There I dropped off my bag and said hello to June. It took him several minutes to recognize me, and he laughed and said "You look like you're in the army now!" I nodded and said with a grin "I went to visit a friend in the army, and we went to get a haircut. They did this to me."

I set down my bags, and June asked me if I had any plans for the evening.

"Nope, I was going to ask you what was good." He laughed "well, come meet Chris. I just told him all about the town, and he and Shands are going to Baseball tonight!"

Chris and Shands turned out to be a couple of Canadians. Chris was an enthusiastic Nova Scotian from Halifax, with a boisterous voice. He'd been working in Seoul as a teacher for the past nine months, and now had moved to Busan, intending to interview with a school in this area and live here for another year. Korea was the first country outside of Canada he'd ever visited. He hadn't even been to the US. Shands was more widely traveled, and had been in Seoul for the past month and now was about halfway through a month in Busan.

Shands had also been to a Baseball game here before. He was to be our guide.

The game was starting in just a few minutes, but since a game typically lasts three hours, we took our time. None of us were huge baseball aficionados, and we were going more for the experience of Korean Baseball than for a passion for the game.

Shands directed us to the Metro station via one of the better side streets, which let us grab street food (Hello spicy chicken on a stick!) on the way to the trains.

We arrived during the 5th inning and in a 7-eleven near the station bought additional snacks and drinks--I bought a cheap personal sized bottle of Soju--Korean's standard drinking liquor. It tastes like cheap vodka, with a twist of green olives and the tiniest hint of plums.


We bought cheap tickets for about 7,000 won near the third base line, and, in keeping with the tradition of all non-sold-out baseball stadium seating arrangements throughout the world, ignored all the seating information on our tickets except the major section and entrance. We wound our way down near third base and wound up with really great seats. The score was 3-1, with Lotte trailing Kia.

Now, the Koreans, like the Japanese, are crazy for baseball. At any given time during a baseball game, they are likely to be cheering as enthusiastically as Americans do during a home run. They cheer for balls. They cheer when a player is walked. They cheer when an inning is over, and they cheer arbitrarily when the teams are stretching between innings.

The corporation that owns the team has had some poor hack write a handful of incredibly catchy, easy to remember chants written up that incorporate the name of the corporation as well as the team name and generally use tunes you already know. There are synchronized cheers memorized by the audience as a result ("Let's go Lotte" was slightly less popular than a Korean chant that was set exactly to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it!" with a bunch of Korean I couldn't understand followed by shouting "Lotte" instead of the hand clapping portion). The teams best player, number ten, is cheered with a chant of his name "Lee Dae-Ho!" that is identical to the "RU-FI-OOOH" chant from the movie "Hook." There are enthusiastic cheerleaders playing air guitar and mascots running about (my favourite was this guy--a giant Soju bottle with a baseball Jersey and a ball cap and a rakish, hip-hop angle. He was apparently a rapper. That's a picture of him from the after party/riot). Even when (as in this game) they are down two points, the audience cheers at every swing, and the chants are constantly being restarted. Rarely does more than a minute pass without a new one picking up somewhere in the stadium.

And of course, since they are from opposite sides of the country, and two of the most major cities, the rivalry between the Lotte Giants and the Kia Tigers is fierce.

Shands was playing the de facto leader, since he'd done this before, and he introduced us to the local food vendor for this portion of the stands, who bartered with him right there and sold us all these really fantastic chicken wraps at a discount ("3,000!" He yelled, and Shands yelled back "Two for Five!" and after some laughing and insistence he handed us six wraps in exchange for about 12 bucks). The wraps were delicious. As we munched on our food, drank our beer and Soju, and cheerfully shouted the parts of each cheer we could make out, the couple of buzzed Korean men behind us engaged us in typical drunk-fan banter, made somewhat more entertaining by the addition of a language and culture gap.

"Who. . .what. . .team you like?"

"Lotte Giants!" we shouted. Always go with the local team.

They cheered and one of them said "Number Zero. My player. My best player!"

Shands nodded and said "I like Lee Dae-Ho! Number Ten!"

An immediate repoir was established, and we yelled chants together and told them where we were from.

As we finished our wraps, Shands turned to us and shouted over the racket. "Around the end of the 7th inning, we'll put bags on our heads!"

"Ok!" I shouted back, caught up in the enthusiasm of the crowd and the cheering and my bottle of Soju. "Wait. What?"

"They give us orange bags with Lotte Giants printed on them near the end of the game, to put our trash in, but nobody does. Instead everybody puts the bags on their heads!"

"Oh." Chris and I laughed. "Well, when in Rome!"

Sure enough, nearing the bottom of the 7th, orange dots started to dot the higher stands, and a wave of bright orange bubbles soon filled the upper bleachers. And it wasn't just the most enthusiastic of the audience, I'd estimate more than 95 percent of the crowd did this. Eventually a block of cheap plastic bags were passed down to us, and we dutifully stripped off one for each of us and passed them along. Shands showed us how to swing the bag carefully to fill it with a pocket of air before tying the handles together to form a makeshift balloon, then pull the handles down over your head and hook them around your ears.

Chris and I took each others pictures.

Lotte Giants Baseball is serious business.

During the 7th, Lotte scored a run, bringing the game to a close 3-2. They couldn't build momentum though, and soon we were in the bottom of the 9th, still trailing by a point. The crowd, unflagged, cheered on. During games with a wide point spread, much like their American counterparts, Koreans will trickle out of the station throughout the 8th and 9th innings, but not a soul left their seats this time. Busan was cheering for a miracle.

They got it. After the first out, Lotte got lucky with a dropped ball allowing a runner to make it to second base and then advance on a careful shallow hit, and then our new friend's favourite player (Number Zero!) hit deep, and the score was tied when a man made it from third to home with that carefully placed hit to no man's land near center field.

A second out was made, and now number 47 stepped up to the plate, with men on Third and First, to try to keep the game from entering extra innings.

The crowd was on their feet. The cheers were cascading around the stadium like depth charges dropped during a storm. The tension was palpable.

After a couple of balls, a foul and a big, empty swing, number 47 found the perfect sweet spot on a centerline pitch, and the ball was long, high, and deep, landing maybe five meters back in the left field stands. 6-3, Lotte! The crowd was chaos, cheering and shouting. Fans were dancing and high fiving one another left and right. Number 47 ran the bases with huge, leaping bounds, his team rushing the field and a few of them corralling him from base to base, the rest bouncing up and down around home plate. He disappeared into the enthusiastic cluster of players and their shouts would have been audible in the nose bleed section if not for the fact that the crowd was still cheering and chanting as loudly as they could.

Talk about your big finishes!

The mascots danced like crazy, and the home run hitter was dragged back out on a special platform hastily assembled near the dugout to be interviewed about his game changing hit.

We stuck around after the game, an impromptu riot/party forming in the crowd milling around outside the exit some of the players would use. Thousands of Koreans still high on the excitement of that big finish cheered and danced. The Soju bottles and a couple of B-boys made an appearance on a small stage and thumping music accompanied a few minutes of choreographed dances. There was a giant cheering circle that Chris and I ran to join. During the mass chaos, pictures with the white people were especially popular with the enthusiastic local fans. Shands is buried this one.

After most of the players had left, and the crowd had dispersed, we much up with a few of Shands' friends, 'local' foreigners who were teaching English in the Busan area schools. One of them was a laid-back Ozlander with a penchant for Menthol cigarettes and the twanging, twinkling laugh of a cowgirl. The other two were Wisconsinites. Midwesterners. One was teaching and the other was here for a month to visit her friend. They'd gone to high school together. The visitor, (Christen?) was sharp tongued and a smart alec, and Chris and I bantered with her throughout the evening to follow. The friend she was visiting was a feisty Brunette named Anne, who started fresh Lotte cheers every few minutes for hours after the game was over and we were deep in the subway and loudly insisted to anyone who would listen (and a lot of people who wouldn't) that one of the Lotte players, an import named Garcia, couldn't be Mexican because he had blond hair and light skin.

She was the sort of outgoing, boisterous person who knows no social boundaries, and will in turns charm you with her ability to strike up a conversation with strangers and locals on the street, then make you want to deny all knowledge of her when she crowds in at a table with a handful of them that are obviously there to sort out and settle a long standing dispute which has a couple of them ready to break dishes and heads, whichever are closer at hand. That's her making an attempt to save our second pitcher, which came to the table overpoured.

The three of them and the three of us head out to see the nightlife in the Seomyeon District, very near our hostel, and wind up at a bar called (I'm not kidding) Miller time. NOT my idea. Still, the place is good for a party of six to sit and talk and chat, and we split two ridiculously giant 'pitchers' of Miller (no, really--I'm quite ashamed) and hang out and chat until early morning.

The rest of them are talking about staying out until they can get breakfast at McDonald's and the Subway reopens, but Chris and I are tired and have plans for the next day, so we bow out as graciously as possible around 2AM, and split a cab back to the hostel when the directions were given turn out to be vague, and the winding, pulsing neon streets spit us out near the wrong end of the Seomyeon metro station instead of where we expected.

Tomorrow: The quest for Jang Gi, The Absence of Soccer, and East Meets West for Dinner.