By Oh Young-jin
Assistant managing editor
I hate sports but once in a while I watch the games of some of my national football team.
Today, however, I want to focus on professional baseball, particularly Lee Dae-ho, the Lotte Giants’ slugger who set the world record by hitting a home run in nine straight games (I am not declaring I have suddenly converted to baseball).
I am writing about this with the hope that more people will pay attention to Lee’s world record and give him more credit for it.
Perhaps the U.S. National Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., should give him special recognition, considering he doesn’t play U.S. Major League Baseball. After all, MLB, in no insignificant part, owes its success to foreign talent ― Park Chan-ho (not that great), Choo Shin-soo of Cleveland Indians, Ichiro Suzuki of Seattle Mariners, all those Cubans, Puerto Ricans and the like.
Perhaps, it is time that MLB Commissioner Bud Selig should open up a bit more and let his outfit live up to the true American spirit. After all, they are making a lot of money from those foreign players.
Or the Guinness Book of World Records may create a new entry for Lee. I made a cursory check on its homepage regarding home run records but couldn’t find anything under home runs other than MLB-related. Shame on Guinness!
Then again, I am also disappointed to see little enthusiasm from Koreans about Lee’s record.
Before we go on, let’s re-relish Lee’s shining moment.
At the top of the seventh inning in the away match against Kia Tigers in Gwangju on Aug. 13, the 28-year-old third baseman of the Busan-based giants connected former Major Leaguer Aquilino Lopez’s fifth pitch for his eighth homer in as many games over the left fence of the Moodeung Stadium.
Lee put himself in the league of three other big names in the MLB ― Ken Griffey Jr., Don Mattingly and Dale Long in the most homeruns in games played in a row.
Except for sports newspapers, Lee’s achievement received little front-page coverage in regular newspapers or failed to be placed as one of lead items in primetime television news.
In the next game, the 194cm-tall, 130km-heavy did what no pro-baseball player of any nation had ever done ― extending his homerun streak to the record-breaking ninth game.
This time, he took the air out of Tigers reliever Kim Hee-girl by having it “going, going and gone.”
I regard the media’s treatment about his world record as sorely disappointing to the point that I suspect baseball writers were goofing off, unsure of its significance.
In a way, I sympathize with them because they have never experienced an achievement of this magnitude.
They may have had a lot of thought about how to best deal with it, perhaps comparing the histories of professional baseball in the United States, Japan and Korea. For reference, Korean professional baseball is 28 years old; Japan 60 years old and US 109 years old. Or they remember their hero, Lee Seung-yeop, is sagging on the bench of Japan’s Yomiuri Giants, after being transferred from Samsung Lions thanks to his Asian record of hitting 56 home runs in one season.
But history can be reduced to a figure of speech, when it comes down to sports, perhaps for any matter. The Korean pro-am baseball team won the gold medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and won the silver in the 2009 World Baseball Classic in Los Angeles. We may be better than we think. So I beseech the baseball writers to reflect and write a paean about our new baseball god, not just for his sake but for ours as well.
This leads to my point.
First, not just Korea but the world needs heroes.
In the face of Republican acts of sabotage, Obama’s promises to go beyond “primary colors” and achieve ideological peace have so far turned out to be all too human. (Alas, Nietzsche, your ubermensche is not coming!)
A check of the list of nominees for new ministers by President Lee Myung-bak shows they are all lawbreakers, some for increasing their wealth, while others for giving their children a better education at another’s expense.
Can you parents tell, with a straight face, your children to abide by the rules, when all important wannabes are all opportunists (myself included to a degree)?
Simply put, we are living in the age of a dearth of heroes and we have only ourselves to blame because society is a reflection of what we live for ― generous when it comes to our own mistakes but keen to criticize others’.
That is where Lee steps in and can be a good starting point for a new culture.
Let’s make a habit of praising others for what they do and create a culture of positivity, making heroes out of ourselves. If it is self-aggrandization, so be it.
Perhaps, what we have around us looks so gloomy that I am getting a little carried away. Or my constructive skepticism is overworked, preventing me from appreciating all positive elements in the world. I hope so.