Lazy Saturday...and Baseball

We did very little of note today, and that was absolutely necessary and absolutely wonderful.

We slept in.
We sat around the apartment.
We read.
We ate.
We watched TV.
We didn't leave our apartment until 4:00pm, when we met Fonda downstairs to go to our first Taiwanese baseball game;

Brother Elephants                                        vs.                                 Lamigo Monkeys.

Now, I've been to a few professional baseball games; I count myself a Mariners fan and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I was wrong.

In America, a baseball game is pretty straightforward: everyone pays for a ticket, goes in, gets searched on the way in to make sure you don't have anything dangerous like *gasp* bottled water (the only danger, of course, being a cut in the stadium's concessions revenue), and then sit down in whichever section your ticket places you, depending on what gigantic sum of money you decided to lay down, and watch the game. Occasionally, a digitized cheer will start up; a few times in the game you'll be prompted to 'turn your attention to the Jumbotron' for a special announcement or prearranged video game; as each player comes up, his own theme music will play. Other than that, you're pretty much left to your own devices.

Not so in Taiwan. First of all, tickets for the outer stadium are free; a seat in the inner stadium sets costs the paltry sum of $300NT, or about $10US. Outside food is a-ok (I enjoyed some tasty pizza and Taiwanese style tea while I watched); there's no screening process; and once you get there, you discover that the entire stadium is split down the middle, with each team's fans sitting above their own dugout.

And there's good reason for this.

Each team has its own cheering section (these are NOT necessarily your typical cheerleaders; ours wore matching yellow jerseys and long shorts, while the Monkeys's wore skanky outfits the likes of which haven't been seen in professional sports arenas in America) and its own band, the only requisite instrument of which seems to be a large bass drum, in addition to a microphone. And all of this lends itself to the single most distinctive feature of Taiwanese baseball: the cheering.

Everyone, and I do mean everyone (ourselves included) comes to the game equipped with large plastic cones in their team's color--for us, yellow--and for the length of the game, these cones serve as surrogate hands/mouths/vuvuzelas, and are in pretty much constant use.

This is where the seating arrangements, drum, and microphone come in: for the ENTIRE LENGTH OF THE GAME, if your team is playing, you're making noise, led by the drum, the cheerleaders, and a man with a microphone and a seemingly boundless store of energy and little ditties with which to fill blank space, including such classics as "Popeye the Sailor Man." It's insane. It's amazing. And it would revitalize American baseball if we could get it to catch on here. Allow me to illustrate:

This video was not taken at any particularly exciting moment in the game; this is just how things were. It actually got MUCH louder and more raucous at exciting moments, like when the catcher dropped the ball and an Elephant dove in from third to score. I loved it!

The game was an absolute blow-out; we left in the middle of the 9th inning, before the Monkeys's last at-bat, but the score was 18-3 Elephants; I'm pretty sure there's no coming back from that.

It was an amazing day, despite the 3 bug bites I got while cheering on the Elephants--a little itching is totally worth it.