From 'Busan Galmaegi' to 'Miracle Doosan': Cheer like a KBO pro with Everybody's Baseball

Baseball

Published: 16 Dec. 2023, 08:31 Updated: 20 Dec. 2023, 15:17

From 'Busan Galmaegi' to 'Miracle Doosan': Cheer like a KBO pro with Everybody's Baseball

LG Twins fans cheer on the team during Game 1 of the Korean Series against the KT Wiz at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul on Nov. 7. [YONHAP]

There’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to the rules of baseball. There are walks and runs, innings but never outings, and a slew of ways for a player to get across the bases besides hitting the ball as far as they can.

That’s even truer for baseball in Korea, where a decades-old cheering culture is as inextricable from the game as the theater of sliding into home plate. As teams warm up on the field before the start of the game, so do fans — readying their voices for what’s essentially a stadium-wide sing-along.

As anyone who has ever attended a KBO game knows, it can be both mesmerizing and jarring experience — particularly for those who ended up in the stadium for the first time. But a new app seeks to relieve the imposter syndrome that might come with being an amateur fan.

Meet Everybody’s Baseball, an app that holds just about every KBO cheering song — and critically, their lyrics. It has a green icon that looks like the silhouette of a baseball player in a white music note.

It’s totally free, available to both iPhone and Android users, all the more important for an app with a target audience in Korea.

Open the app to a landing page with new icons, one for each of the 10 teams in the KBO. Easily spot Samsung Lions’ blue and SSG Landers’ red; dinosaur scales for the NC Dinos. Other designs are more creative. A wizard hat for the KT Wiz and seagulls for the Lotte Giants, a reference to the classic Giants' fighting song "Busan Galmaegi," literally Busan seagull.

Everybody's Baseball is a one-stop-shop for the cheering songs of the 10 KBO teams. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Choose your team and find a playlist populated with all the songs of the season, from the full-length tracks and fighting songs performed by studio bands to the 20-second cheers every time a team gets a home run.

Click on a song to play it, and the lyrics will conveniently display on the screen, mimicking the lyric feature on Spotify (sorry, Apple Music users) or the TV in a noraebang.

Another section has a designated list of songs for every player on a team’s roster. These include entrance music — typically an existing popular song in either English or Korean (but not exclusively — there have been Spanish songs in the past) with the player's name randomly added — and unique chants designed for each player.

And songs can be saved, too. Just click the heart in the top-right corner to add the song to a personalized song box.

The KBO is a lot more than fight songs and walk-up songs. Every time a player steps up to bat, fans packed into any of the nine KBO stadiums launch into first the player's entrance music and then endless repetitions of their personalized cheer song, and a team of cheerleaders lead the crowd through the connected hand motions.

Find in the app a list of the team's and player's entrance songs, along with their lyrics, which display on the screen as the tunes play. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

“When I visited a baseball stadium as an amateur fan, I didn’t know anything about baseball. But I felt drawn to the cheering culture of the KBO,” said app designer Cho Eun-bi, 25.

Cho is one of the five people responsible for bringing Everybody’s Baseball to life — and keeping it alive. They met last year at the Apple Developer Academy in Seoul, a training program for iOS development. Despite a couple of members of the team watching baseball for years, all considered themselves relatively amateur fans.

So they decided to create a solution for their own problem, making it easier for people like them to follow along during live games.

Of course, most of the songs and their lyrics can be found on individual teams’ official websites. And there are plenty of lyric videos and hour-long playlists on YouTube that also document the evolution of KBO cheering throughout the league’s history as players moved teams and teams changed names.

Plus, there’s another app in the Google Play store, “Pro Baseball Cheering Songs,” that was there years before Everybody’s Baseball launched their Android version.

From left: Yoo Jung-in, Cho Eun-bi, Shim Kyu-bo and Lee Ji-won are four of the five members of the team behind Everybody's Baseball. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

But what sets this app apart, according to the team, is the thought behind its design.

“I want to make the users feel proud when they see the themes in the app,” said Cho.

Cho said her goal was to attach the unique culture of the KBO to the app itself — a difficult feat, bottling up the energy that is palpable inside the walls of every stadium.

The KBO is a lot less stiff than the MLB. Fans are encouraged to bring beer and chicken from outside into the park, and players' character creeps through a lot more — most famously through the endless bat flips.

“[The] KBO fandom, the baseball fandom, is really similar to the idols. People are really into the baseball players and team itself,” said Shim Kyu-bo, the app’s iOS developer. “And also, the fans are really, really active. They’re really into our app and give a lot of feedback.”

Some of the songs sound like they’ve been recorded live at the games, with the slight delay that comes when an 18,000-seat stadium sings one song together. That’s because they have, with the app’s users asking the developers to add their own songs.

In the beginning, the team made the app for amateur fans of the KBO like themselves. But over time, after conducting surveys with users, the team found that the most enthusiastic users were long-time loyalists. That was what pushed the team to add the feature enabling users to save their songs.

“After we expanded the target, the userbase really exploded,” Cho said.

Every time there was a baseball game, their user numbers would spike, said Shim. “About 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. That’s like, a really hot time.”

Users can message the team with song requests through a Google Form accessible within the app. So far, the Hanwha Eagles have received the most, according to the team.

The team hasn't made a dime from their app, due to various copyright issues, and they pay out of pocket to maintain the server costs. But they said they're happy to work on it because of how popular it's become.

As KBO teams lock down their rosters for the next season, Everybody’s Baseball is also hard at work.

The app just hit 20,000 iOS downloads in December, and the team is already working on adding new features, like keeping a song playing even when you click away. Soon, instead of opening to Spotify on a daily commute, transport to the ballpark.

And in the future, the team may want to make it more accessible to fans outside of Korea, too. Japan’s Nippon Baseball League has a cheering culture of its own, as does Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League.

“We can make a community,” Cho said.

BY MARY YANG [mary.yang@joongang.co.kr]