A few posts back, I showed off a new card of former Durham Bulls shortstop Hak Ju Lee. His career was sidetracked by a knee injury and he ended up returning home to Korea. It's been hard to follow his career in the KBO, but I have still enjoyed dabbling in collecting his cards. Here was the card from the last post....
While I was writing the post, I found an interesting video online showing a crowd of fans at a Samsung Lions game singing the Hak Ju Lee cheer song and doing some sort of dance. The video identifies Hak Je Lee as the "Religious Sect Leader of the Samsung Lions"
The song is catchy and I am sure that something is being lost in translation here.
Anyway, I ended up picking up another Hak Ju Lee card last week. I do not have Hak Ju Lee saved in my Ebay searches anymore, but I just type his name in from time to time. A nice looking autograph popped up, it was inexpensive, so I decided to go ahead and buy it.
Which takes me back to my previous Hak Ju Lee post. After sharing the post on Twitter, a person shared a Hak Ju Lee tweet with me from the 2019 season. It was incredible and the perfect follow up to the forty-five second video above showing fans sing and dancing.
The Tweet shows a video of Hak Ju Lee dancing to the song from the video above, only he's wearing a robe and standing at home plate while he's doing it. Even crazier when the at-bat starts and he's still wearing the robe. Seriously.
Per @JoshLindblom52's request, here's the video of the moment: pic.twitter.com/JVJ075MTnZ
— Sung Min Kim (@sung_minkim) July 21, 2019
I either need to watch more KBO games, or we need more Major League Baseball players wearing robes and dancing before they take their at-bats.
Back to baseball cards. Here is the new Hak Ju Lee card.
This card is from Bowman Black, which was a cross product autograph set that Topps put into all the different Bowman products. Hak Ju Lee's cards were in the regular Bowman product. Nice looking card, but I did not shell out for one when these first came out. I try not to pay crazy prices for cards of players in the Minor Leagues. I like the silver ink on the black background. Really pops out.
There are not too many of the Bowman Black autographs floating around on Ebay, so I am happy that I was able to find this card. Plus, it gave me a chance to share the video of Hak Ju Lee dancing.
Well, that GIF/video sure was different! I think the days of MLB fans getting that into the game are long gone, but it's nice to see that it's still occurring somewhere out there.
ReplyDeleteIt would be really hard to pull something like that crowd off in the US. However, I kind of dig the gamesmanship of wearing a robe while taking an at-bat. If there is one thing Major League Baseball is terrible at, it's marketing their players. They need to let the players show a little personality.
DeleteThat video was so awesome. Kinda makes me want to collect HJL too. I think it's so cool how fans over in Korea and Japan get so involved with their cheers. I know that it happens here as well... but just not on the same level.
ReplyDeleteHow many more young people would go to baseball games if we had this type of crowd involvement in the US? Can you imagine the Tik Tok crowd with something like this? They'd be all over it.
Delete