Baseball in Korea

I went to a baseball game yesterday at Munhak Stadium. It was the Incheon's SK Wyverns vs the Lotte Giants from Busan. Incheon won the game 14-4 and just demolished every picture on the mound. Seriously, a grand slam in the 8th was just overkill. Anyway, there's a lot of differences between baseball games in Korea and America and here are a few of them.

• You can bring food and drinks into the stadium. Even though the mark-up on snacks and beverages inside the stadium isn't that high, it's still cool that you can bring in as much food and beer as you want. There were a lot of people yesterday that brought in pizzas or entire coolers.
• There are cheerleaders.
• The crowd's a lot more involved. The cheerleaders lead chants and songs that everyone knows. There's even assorted clap patters and dances that accompany them. The highlight of last night was that the crowd started doing the wave. They did a few normal waves and then they did one in slow motion. That was probably the greatest thing I've ever seen a crowd do.
• The pitchers are worse. None of them are throwing in the 90's or even high 80's. It probably makes the game more exciting though, since the players are hitting the ball more often. There were three guys on the Incheon line-up that were batting over .400 and that's just ridiculous, even if we are currently leading the league.
• There are a foreigners who play in Korea, but there's a limit on how many the team could have. From what I've seen, most foreigners are pitchers.
• There's no 7th inning stretch in Korea.
• A lot of fans don't just wear jerseys or hats, but some die-hard ones come in full gear. They're dressed in baseball pants with the high socks and everything. It's sort of cute when kids do it, but seeing grown men in the full gear is a little funny.
• In between innings, there's a 2-minute time limit to help speed up the game, which I haven't really made an opinion on yet.

To be honest, I think that the games in Korea are a lot more enjoyable than games in America. Sure, I'm not as invested into the games since I don't really know the players or the teams, but it's still a really fun time.