Goodbye to Jamsil, Seoul's imperfect, beloved baseball cathedral

Fourteen seasons. Somewhere between five and 15 games a year, depending on work, weather and how the Doosan Bears were getting on. Subtract most of 2020 and a good chunk of 2021, when the pandemic first locked fans out entirely and then let a fraction of us back in on the condition that we sat apart, kept our masks on and didn't sing. That's a cruel thing to ask in a ballpark built on singing. Add the hour before first pitch and the slow shuffle back to Sports Complex Station afterward, and it comes to roughly 500 hours. That's three weeks of my life, give or take, spent in one concrete bowl in southern Seoul.

That doesn't include the road trips to every other ballpark in the country, which are a separate and slightly more embarrassing calculation.

However you round it, Jamsil Baseball Stadium is the building in Korea where I have spent the most time that isn't a home or an office. It just doesn't have a roof — yet.

On Wednesday, Jamsil hosted its last derby. The Twins beat the Bears 7-5, which hurt, but was probably about right for this season. It was the final regular-season meeting between the two clubs that have shared the stadium for four decades, and the night the league had originally lined up as Jamsil's farewell. LG's postseason berth means the old place will see a few more October nights, and Doosan could always push through from the wild card spot. Then, in December, the demolition starts. Technically, the last regular-season game falls to the Bears and the Lotte Giants on Monday, thanks to an earlier rainout, but nobody is going to remember that one.

The plan calls for the ballpark to be replaced by a 30,000-seat domed stadium on the site. It's the centerpiece of the 290,000-square-meter (72-acre) redevelopment of the Seoul Sports Complex that also includes an exhibition center around two and a half times the size of Coex, plus hotels, offices and shops. A Hanwha-led consortium signed on in July, and the dome is due in 2032. Until then, the Twins and Bears will spend five seasons in the main stadium of the 1988 Olympics next door, halfheartedly converted into a ballpark.

I have been a baseball fan since I was a child, which is unusual for a British person but not unheard of. My first love was the Boston Red Sox and their minor-league affiliate, the Pawtucket Red Sox, a team that also lost its stadium — and its name — a few years ago. I seem to have a type.

When I arrived in Korea in 2012, I lived in South Chungcheong. It's a province that lives and breathes the Hanwha Eagles, but any true scholar of Korean baseball history knows it should be Bears country. The OB Bears were founded in Daejeon in 1982 and played there for three seasons before leaving for Seoul. The Binggrae Eagles, later Hanwha, were created to fill the gap.

My first KBO game, at the start of the 2013 season, was a Bears game at Jamsil, the crucible of Korean baseball, in spring. That was all it took.

Jamsil opened in July 1982, the year Korean professional baseball was born. MBC Chungyong, a team owned by the broadcaster, played a handful of games there that first season before moving in full-time from Dongdaemun in 1983, and became the LG Twins in 1990. The Bears arrived in Seoul from Daejeon in 1985, spent a season at Dongdaemun and joined them at Jamsil in 1986. The two clubs have shared the stadium ever since, producing a subway series so acutely localized that neither team actually has to ride the subway. The Bears still lead the all-time series, although LG have seen a resurgence in form in recent years.

Many of the big moments in Korean baseball happened here. In 1982, with Korea trailing Japan 2-0 in the eighth inning of the world championship final, Kim Jae-bak's famous "frog bunt" brought them level and Han Dae-hwa's three-run homer finished the job. A year later, Jamsil staged the first night game in Korean professional baseball.

Hanwha won its first title here in 1999, a rookie named Ryu Hyun-jin picked up the first win of his career here in 2006 and Kia clinched the 2009 Korean Series with a walk-off home run in Game 7. Not all of it was pretty: In 1990, a crowd riot brought a game to a halt. But that was pure Jamsil, too.

The Twins won titles in 1990 and 1994, waited 29 years for the next one in 2023, and won again last year. The Bears won in 1995 and 2001, then built a dynasty that brought championships in 2015, 2016 and 2019. Along the way, in 2000, Kim Dong-joo hit a home run against Lotte that cleared the stadium entirely, a 150-meter (492-foot) bomb that earned him a plaque where it came down. That plaque will be kept and preserved when the rest of Jamsil goes to the wreckers.

I have sat in those stands when it was hot and cold, wet and dry. Nearly always it was the red seats just off first base, next to the cheerleaders. I've experienced moments of unadulterated joy and heartbreak there. I've stayed long after the final out for the send-offs of legends like Dustin Nippert and, slightly more tongue-in-cheek, Yoo Hee-kwan.

Doosan fans call themselves the "strongest No. 10 hitters," the extra player in a nine-man lineup, and I have done my best to bat my weight. I think I learned the words to "Bravo, My Life!" (2002) by Spring Summer Autumn Winter before I learned the Korean national anthem. I am prouder of the Bears flag I own — a privilege you cannot buy, but that is handed out to random fans during select postseason games — than almost any other possession.

Later, as this newspaper's baseball reporter and then its head of sports, I got to know the KBO's other ballparks well. None of them replaced Jamsil.

Jamsil was never perfect, but it was home. Like most baseball stadiums of its era, it is a towering mess of concrete. It was designed before anyone had thought of hospitality suites or corporate boxes. I once attended a corporate event during a game there, and the Bears' solution was to tape a large flag to the wall of an ordinary office.

But isn't that what we want baseball to be? Jamsil was unapologetically for the fans, not for the corporations that run the teams. That may not have been the intent, but it was the result. It was a beautifully democratic stadium, where every seat was more or less the same and, especially in the early days, a good view cost very little.

It is very difficult to persuade sports fans that their home needs to change. The late Kerry Maher, a devoted Lotte Giants fan and tireless KBO advocate, once told ESPN that he'd always seen MLB as opera and the KBO as rock-and-roll. Rock-and-roll isn't supposed to be clean or polished. It's rough and ready, and Jamsil was definitely that.

This season, for reasons that had nothing to do with the Bears, I got to nowhere near as many games as I normally would. The end of the Jamsil era crept up on me. There is a strange sense of bereavement in that: grieving for a place that, for just a few more days, is still standing.

When the Bears — and Twins — finally return in 2032, there will be a roof over my head. It will presumably be a better stadium in almost every measurable way. It just won't be home.

BY JIM BULLEY [[email protected]]