In Korean Baseball, Louder Cheers and More Squid

BUSAN, South Korea — It was the bottom of the ninth and the home team was behind, 10-6. In an American ballpark, fans might have started glumly filing out of the stands to beat the traffic.

But here at Sajik Stadium, home to the Lotte Giants, drums were thundering, plastic trumpets were blowing and thousands of people were singing, chanting and catcalling themselves hoarse.

“I come here to scream the stress out of me,” said Ok Hyun-ju, a 44-year-old math teacher sharing beer, chicken and roasted squid with her friends on a September afternoon. “When it comes to shouting whatever you like, never minding what other people might think of it, there is no place like a ballpark.”

The Korean Series, which starts Tuesday, signals the end of another season in a country where baseball remains the most popular spectator sport. But understanding South Korea’s version of the national pastime requires a visit to the stands, where the festivities are both raucous and organized to a degree that American fans might find startling.

The infield stands are in a constant uproar, with the opposing fans engaging in “cheer battles.” The crowds chant and sing in unison, doing synchronized hand moves and banging out a rhythm with noise-making plastic tubes. Meanwhile, cheerleaders dance on raised platforms like choreographed K-pop groups, often with suggestive moves that older Koreans might frown upon.

“There is much more music, much more dancing, much more singing and much more cheering,” said Daren Hoelscher, an oil and gas engineer from Houston who was watching the Giants play. By comparison, he said, “Baseball in America is mostly quiet.”

Professional baseball in South Korea dates from 1982, when President Chun Doo-hwan threw out a ceremonial first pitch in a Seoul ballpark. From that unpopular dictator’s point of view, one benefit of the game was to give the people something to rally and shout about besides his regime. (He provided tax incentives to team owners, along with other forms of support, encouraging baseball to “entertain the people.”)

That did not work out for Mr. Chun; widespread political protests continued, eventually leading to South Korea’s democratization. But baseball thrived, building on a national tendency to identify strongly with hometowns — and a fondness for mass singing and dancing.

Ms. Ok, the math teacher, remembers the sense of liberation she felt when she first went to a game as a high school student in the late 1980s, and later worked part time at a ballpark selling ice cream.

“Except for the ballpark, there was no place where women could shout in public and didn’t have to worry about ‘face’ in our Confucian society,” she said, referring to the traditional decorum that had required women to look coy in public.

In those early years, the crowds were almost entirely male and known for drinking, smoking and brawling. Today, smoking and hard liquor are banned, and teams actively market to women and to couples. About 40 percent of spectators are women, somewhat lower than the percentage in the United States and roughly comparable to that in Japan, which has its own proud baseball tradition — including organized mass cheering.

But South Korean crowds are considerably younger than in either of those countries. An Olympic gold medal in 2008 — the last for baseball, which was dropped as an Olympic sport afterward — lifted the game’s popularity among young South Koreans, who are known for their particularly fervent patriotism when Korean teams compete internationally.

Tickets are cheap, starting at about $7.50. And in a distinction that Americans might find downright revolutionary, fans are allowed to bring in their own food and beer (though stadiums do sell their own, including Korean standbys like dried squid). Some ballparks provide seating at tables with built-in grills, for those who want to do their own cooking.

The Lotte Giants fans in Busan, a port city that is South Korea’s largest after Seoul, are widely considered the country’s fiercest. (While South Korea’s nine teams are strongly associated with their home cities, their names are derived from their owners, conglomerates like Samsung and Lotte, which is best known for its department stores.)

Each Giants player has his own cheer song, which the crowd sings as he steps to the plate. A curious Giants tradition is for fans to inflate orange trash bags and strap them to their heads, which results in a bobbing sea of orange as they jump up and down while singing. When the game is over, they use the bags to pick up their trash — the reason the Giants handed them out in the first place.

Japanese fans rarely boo the opposing team, but South Koreans act as if they can change the game’s outcome through sheer volume. During the recent game in Busan, when the pitcher for the visiting SK Wyverns made a pickoff attempt to first base, Giants fans pointed to him three times in unison with a menacing “Ma!” meaning “Hey you!” (The opposing fans will often respond to this with “Wa!” meaning “So what?”)

One long-struggling team, the Hanwha Eagles — sometimes mocked as the Hanwha Chickens — recently tried to improve its fortunes with cheering robots. The “fanbots” held up screens that scrolled messages of support, uploaded by fans who weren’t at the game; fans were also encouraged to send selfies, which appeared on the robots’ screen faces. The robots were also programmed to do “the wave.” So far, they have failed to lift the Eagles out of last place.

Historically, the Giants haven’t had an easy road either, despite the high spirits at Sajik Stadium. The team has not won the Korean Series since 1992. In the early 2000s, the Giants spent four consecutive seasons in last place; angry fans responded with boycotts, and one game was played in front of just 69 spectators.

The Giants finished in seventh place this year, their worst season since 2007. Fans lamented a “dark age” for the team and demanded the ouster of the current management. Last week, some of them set up a protest site outside a Lotte department store in Busan, complete with funeral wreaths. Giants management issued a statement saying that it “humbly accepts their admonishments.”

“The hardest time being a Giants cheerleader is when the game is going badly and some drunken fans look at us full of anger and try to boo us offstage, as if that’s our fault that the team is losing,” Park Ki-ryang, 23, a cheerleader who has her own fan club, said at the game in September.

Bae Sin-kyu, a 54-year-old fan, knows that anger well.

“When we lose a game, I spit and swear that I will never come again,” Mr. Bae, whose blue jersey was studded with Giants pins, said while waving flags during the game against the Wyverns, which ended in a 10-8 loss for the home team.

“But I know I will be here for the next game,” he said. “I can’t help it.”