Tiebreaker

  It was a beautiful Sunday morning.
  No it wasn't.
  It was cold as hell, and I hadn't gotten a chance to get more than three hours of sleep before waking up at 5:50 a.m.
  To catch a cab at six. To get to the bar (don't judge) at 6:30. To catch a ride to be at the baseball field (hope you didn't judge) by eight at the absolute latest. And by baseball I mean some sort of free-flowing derivation where some of the important rules are retracted and other, less sensical ones, are added in.
And by field I mean a patch of dirt and rocks that would be in the running for the Korean Salt Flats.
  The elk were awake as early as elk are, and had already begun a high-pitched squealing noise that would haunt us for most of the game. Why elk? Who knows.
  Long story short, we began our second round tournament game at 8 p.m. with a one-hour-and-forty-minute timeline. Quite a game it was. For five solid innings, our teams kept it to a measly four runs apiece (that's not a lot for the Korean Adult Leagues). Then came the call: Time was up. This was the last inning.
  In the top half of the inning, we missed our chance to break the tie. But in the bottom part, two things were playing on our solid, yet unawakened nerves.
  The first was we couldn't let anyone score.
  The second? We had no idea what was going to happen if this game turned into a tie.
  Why not extra innings? Maybe it's because Koreans are so damn efficient. And even though they aren't on time for most social events, they're never late to work. At least I am guessing (they are always there before me). Maybe it's because we are the foreigner (weh-gook) team, and they just don't care. Like the time they retracted the time limit (see above) because we were winning from the second inning on.
  No, not extra innings. Something different. So as we lined up at the end of the game, as we always do, we were annoyed at the fact the outcome of this game (and probably the tournament) would be settled by something other than the game itself. It was just the tip of the iceberg, and the decency of baseball was the Titanic. Glug. Glug.
  Glug.
  So as was common Korean practice (as we later found out), the carefully crafted tie which it took 100 minutes to build would be settled by none other than (one game of!) Rock-paper-scissors. Needless to say, our rock was shamelessly defeated by their paper.
  Why Rock-paper-scissors? Because Koreans are crazy about it. They do it back-to-back. They do it two-handed. They do it in eight-person groups (yes, possible).
  It's how they settle things.
  But baseball?
Oi.