KBO | Gwangju Mudeung Baseball Stadium — Tears of Mokpo, Sung by a Full Stand

When the KBO's first season opened in 1982, supporters of the Haitai Tigers at Gwangju Mudeung Baseball Stadium (광주무등야구장) took up 목포의 눈물, Tears of Mokpo, a 1935 ballad from the Jeolla region, as their cheering song. That was two years after the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, in a city still under the government whose troops had killed its citizens. A sorrowful regional folk song, sung together by a full stand, was one of very few forms of collective public grief available. Korean accounts of the period describe it as a chance to cry together and then go back to ordinary life. Then Haitai started winning. Nine championships in fifteen years under Kim Eung-ryong (김응룡), and the Tigers have still never lost a Korean Series across twelve appearances, the only club in KBO history that is unbeaten in finals. Sun Dong-yol (선동열) pitched out of this ground to a career ERA of 1.20, the lowest anyone has recorded. Bang Soo-won (방수원) threw the league's first no-hitter here on 5 May 1984, beating Sammi 7–0. Lee Jong-beom (이종범) stole 84 bases in 1994, a single-season mark that has stood ever since. The ballpark opened in 1965 and hosted its last KBO game on 4 October 2013. Its centre-field wall stood 6.9 metres high and got compared, endlessly, to the one in Boston. The Tigers then moved about 193 metres to Gwangju-Kia Champions Field, built on the footprint of the old complex's athletics stadium. Mudeung is still standing. It was remodelled and reopened in 2023 as an amateur ground, which means the stand where 목포의 눈물 was sung is somewhere you can walk into on an ordinary weekday afternoon. Photos: rrego, CC BY-SA 3.0; paper, public domain — both via Wikimedia Commons