Strangers In The Field

In April 2013, unfamiliar faces appear at the Jamsil Baseball Stadium during the opening matches between Doosan and SK. The nervous middle-aged men throwing and batting the first ball are, in fact, Korean-Japanese former team members that played on that same spot in the 1982 finals of the Bong-hwang-dae-ki games. Director Kim Myeong-joon uses the four mounds of a baseball field to reproduce the happy reunion between the middle-aged men, who are no longer baseball players, just those who lead very normal lives. Their reunion begins at the batter’s box and ends at home plate, and does more than simply remember the individuals who played in the 1982 games. It shows the history of Korean baseball marked by the footprints left by the Korean-Japanese players who visited their homeland between 1956 and 1997.