Parent Spotlight: Taejin

[Translated from Korean Original Text]

I am a parent who moved from the mainland to Jeju and have now lived here for 13 years.

After coming to Jeju, I started playing amateur (community) baseball. In the early days, it wasn’t easy to even find or join a team, since Jeju is more rural compared to large cities. As a beginner, I needed to buy all the baseball gear, but at the time there was only one store on the entire island, and its selection was very limited. Buying good equipment was difficult, so I ended up purchasing most of my gloves, bats, and shoes online, based on advice from teammates.

On the mainland, baseball fields are open on weekdays, weekends, daytime, and nighttime, giving plenty of options. But in Jeju back then, there were only 3–4 fields, weekday access was difficult, weekend reservations were hard to get, and night games were nearly impossible. In other words, the infrastructure for amateur baseball was far worse than on the mainland. Sometimes I even had to drive more than an hour just to reach a field. Facility conditions weren’t good either—some fields had no artificial turf, scoreboards were often broken, and the nets were poorly maintained. (It has improved somewhat over the past 10 years, but still far behind big cities.)

Even now, overall conditions remain less favorable compared to the mainland’s major cities.

Baseball is a team sport—you can never win just by being good individually. You need your teammates’ help and performance to succeed, which makes teamwork the most important factor. And since this is a club activity, respect and consideration are also needed to get along well. At the same time, decisions about positions and starting lineups in real games can easily cause conflicts if there’s not enough understanding among teammates. A game can’t even happen without nine players, so if you want to play, you must make sure your teammates can also attend. In that sense, it’s very similar to social life.

To truly enjoy baseball as a team sport, you need both a large enough community of players and sufficient baseball fields. Without players, fields won’t be built; without fields, players won’t gather. In other words, baseball players and baseball fields must grow together in a cycle.

For baseball in Jeju to thrive, unlike on the mainland, I hope to see more—and better—baseball fields built here.