A Sheet of Paper
By Kim Ji-soo
Staff Reporter
The World Baseball Classic (WBC) final, between South Korea and Japan, was a tension-filled four-hour game between bitter rivals worth watching.
The game was taut with political tension, considering the history between the two countries, national pride and good baseball. People flocked to television screens or stole glances from their desks toward TV screen in their offices as Korean and Japanese players played with radar-sharp focus.
Neither team could afford to lose. One mistake could cost them. As everybody well knows by now, the young Korean players were good but they made mistakes, while Japanese starting pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma didn't let any Korean hitter go past the second base until Choo Sin-soo hit a solo homer in the fifth inning. Then, famous hitter Ichiro Suzuki lived up to this fame.
It's been a while since I watched anything with such anticipation and hope. The gloomy economic situation and its according reality biting in have no doubt taken a toll, weighing down heavily on our weary hearts.
Koreans have always been sports fans, but many were surely attracted by the sense of anticipation and hope that the Korean team brought to the game. Putting aside the daily grind and worries, the audience watched with awe as 61-year-old Kim In-sik leaned on the rails of the ball pen to guide his team.
Kim, felled by cerebral infarction in 2004, walks with a slight limp. Seeing the old guard stalwartly do his job rekindled a sense of solemn duty and sacrifice. Kim took the helm last November when his juniors and fellow managers declined or shied away from what was expected to be a tough job.
Watching Choo hit a homer in the fifth provided a relish that we needed. The sight of Lee Yong-kyu smashing his helmet to make a steal but never letting his hand leave the second base was inspiring. And when Lee Bum-ho then turned the game around in the eighth, we saw hope.
The intensity of the game was such that the four-hour rallying and cheering left the home spectators drained but happy. And what struck me was that baseball was indeed a miniature version of our life.
The Korean team was good, but as the article on International Herald-Tribune read, the Japanese team was ``a little smarter, a little more aggressive and a little better. The Japanese manager, Tatsunori Hara, expressing respect for the world-level skills of the Korean team, said that the skills difference was ``just the thickness of a sheet of paper.''
The difference between a sheet of a paper, however thin, is nevertheless a compilation of days, months and years of sweat, blood and experience. The passion of the Korean players, their tenacity and their practice are undeniable.
One foreign commentator expressed his joy at seeing the Korean players practice before the game started, something they don't see in the Major League. But they're relative newcomers-Korea's professional baseball league is about 30 years old, while Japan's pro-baseball goes back 70 years-and infrastructure in Korea lags behind other countries.
The baseball population in Korea is not large, with 55 high school teams and 8 professional teams. The ``little'' made a lot of difference this time, but we saw that Korean baseball has come a long way. We saw hope, a similar kind of sense-heightening that we experienced when we saw Choo's ball fly out and out, and prayed and prayed it would be a homer. We saw a future.