The first time I broke out my digital camera for scouting purposes I slipped into the hallway that circles Mongduk Stadium in Seoul. I walked casually stopping in one of the bathrooms for no special reason. I continued down what I knew was the right field line, measuring the exact spot — pitcher’s mound, the third baseman, the scoreboard in center — until I knew I had the correct angle.

I took a couple of steps up toward daylight, but being careful not to emerge from the tunnel just yet. I was filming a player. A player I didn’t necessarily want others to see me filming. It was a cold outside, still early in the morning (10 a.m.) and a scrambled to open the lens cover and get the camera situated in my right palm.

The sound of a ball being hit drew my eyes into the air. No ball. No ball. Then…ball. Ball going up into sky, ball headed in my direction, then exactly in my direction. I had two options, neither of which involved dodging the ball. I could turn away from said ball, hoping it wouldn’t hit me in the head or ricochet off the stairs into my mouth, — or, I could try to bare-hand it. With the camera strap covering my right (glove) hand, I had to use my left (throwing) hand.

The ball smacked awkwardly against my thumb. I effectively shielded myself from the ball and it bounced into the tunnel. I grimaced in pain and my thumb was throbbing with pain. The thought that it was broken crossed my mind, but it was too cold to really be sure.

I pressed on and walked up the last couple stairs and toward the railing separating the upper and lower sections of seats. I rested the camera on the yellow metal surface and started to line the lens up with the batter. But there was a problem. I still had to turn the camera on…with my left hand, which had been rendered useless by the ball.

I tried to move my thumb. Pain gave way to numbed pain. I used my left hand as a stump, placing it on top of the camera, holding it against the rail while I slipped my right out of the strap and turned on the camera, which swivelled from side to side between my stump and the pole. Still with my right I opened the viewer. But there was just no coordination with my throbbing left.

The batter grounded out and moment lost.

All that remained was a non-Korean thirtysomething, standing in open view trying to stop his camera from falling to the ground.

Indeed secrecy is a big part of what I (try) to do, but near empty stadiums during Korean High School baseball tournaments are a hard place for the one non-Korean in the whole joint to blend in. Over the past weekend, at the 63rd Blue Dragon tournament, I was presented with this reality time and again.

Except in the largest of Korean cities, foreigners attract a disproportionate amount of attention anyway. Sure I was in Seoul, but many of the people in attendance are coming from remote areas of Korea. Their children’s perspective on non-Koreans doesn’t extend much further than their grandfather’s. And his sole perspective was formed during the Korean War. Lovely.

Such was the case during yesterday’s battle between Jemulpo, a school from Seoul, and Sulak, a school somewhere in Gawangdo Province.

Gawangdo is in the northeast corner of South Korea and the province even extends into North Korea itself, where it is still spelled (in English) as Kangwŏn. Whereas Seoul has a population of some 10,356,000 people living in a 233.72 sq mile area, the entire 6,523 sq mile province of Gawangdo has 1,592,000 people. See what I’m getting at here?

I’ve always wanted to go to Gawangdo (I’ve just barely crossed the border once) and hopefully my scouting exploits will take me there at some point. Should that happen it probably won’t be to see a player from Sulak. Not because the players aren’t good (well, they aren’t), but because the entire Sulak roster has 13 players, 11 of which will graduate this spring. Two are first year (sophomore) players. I don’t think the Sulak baseball high school is long for this world.

As I walked into the stadium yesterday a little boy was running by me. In seeing me he nearly tripped because of the shock. Then, he broke into what was some kind of little dance, screaming “father! father!”

I was waiting for “foreigner!” or “American!”, but instead was greeted with “SCOUT!”

Cover blown — 5.2 seconds after entry.

The day before, I was half-sneaking/half-exercising through the hallways again. There’s a lot of sitting in scouting and the need to stretch one’s legs is imperative, to say nothing of necessary in order to avoid gaining breast mass over just a few days.

East of the stadium, within the same Mokdong complex, was some kind of celebrity soccer match/Korean culture festival. Come to think of it, I think all events in Korea feature some Korean culture component. Two weeks ago my friend attended a “foreigner culture” festival in Bucheon, an hour outside of Seoul. He said the Korean culture table was by far the most popular amongst the mostly Korean audience.

Whatever was going on it was loud and several times during the game a burst of fireworks went off, shaking the baseball stadium, even startling the players on the field. One pitcher stopped during his motion and stepped off the mound.

West of the baseball stadium, still within the same general area was an ice skating exhibition featuring Kim Yu-na, a Korean figure-skater.

At the moment Yu-na is the single most famous athlete in Korea with the possible exception of Park Chan-ho, who only carries more name recognition due to his longevity. Yu-na is a star. It’s impossible to turn on the TV and not see her image.

I stopped and looked out at the masses of people lining up to go into the ice arena. Naturally, I wondered what it would be like to meet Kim Yu-na. What would I say? Would she find someone like me attractive?

Mind you, Kim Yu-na is 17, which at this point in my life, is beginning to get into father/daughter territory. I furrowed my brow for even letting such dumb questions surface.

I furrowed not due to the obvious moral implications, but because if I were to meet Kim Yu-na — like, if she for some reason decided to sneak away from the masses and catch a few innings of a high school baseball game — she would regard me for what I am; a guy sneaking around a baseball stadium with a digital camera recording the pitching motions of teenage boys.

I once ate lunch with Kristi Yamaguchi, who was promoting some kind of ice skating exhibition, possibly similar to the one Kim Yu-na busy doing whatever at.

I was writing a newspaper article. Yamaguchi’s PR person had called our paper looking for someone to do an interview. The interview itself would happen over lunch at the Ritz-Carlton, a high end hotel in San Francisco. To my surprise the PR person sat Kristi and I at a table at the window overlooking the city, and then proceeded to sit down some 30 feet away, leaving the two of us to chat privately.

I interviewed a lot of celebrity-types while working at that newspaper. Meeting someone like Kristi had little impact on me in that sense. Ice skating ceased to interest me outside of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan thing and I volunteered to do the story out of the sheer improbability of the situation. I asked her what it felt like to be on David Letterman, if she ever wanted to get married (I was steadfastly against marriage at the time). In other words I was trying to see what Kristy was really about.

But of course she didn’t let me. She answered my questions over salads, sandwiches and desert, and when the time came swiftly guided us to the heart of our meeting — her event. She was obviously deft at dealing with people like me.

Several times during our meeting she asked me if I was sure the tape recorder was getting everything, and when I joked at the end that I’d been having trouble with it recently she got irritated and made a comment, which she tried to deliver as a joke, that it’d “be terrible if we’d done the whole thing for nothing.”

I won’t say Kristy she was a bad person and it was dumb of me to expect to have a real conversation in that situation. In my own defense I will say that I think when a person spends their entire life waking up at 5 a.m. and skating for 12 hours a day, your view of the world can’t help but become somewhat skewed.

So maybe if I did meet Kim Yu-na in the tunnel she wouldn’t have anything to say to me. Maybe I wouldn’t have anything to say to her.

I think the high school baseball players in Korea live similar kinds of existences. I imagine them sleeping in dorms, bunk beds, five or six to a room, waking up at a morning bell and heading out to the field, returning at night.

I ran into a former student of mine last week. I always remembered him as a nice, respectful kid. We were making small talk and somehow baseball came up. Turned out he played at one of the baseball high schools in Busan. He was a pitching prospect (a lefty), but had an injury and couldn’t play his senior year. But he was still in the school. He just followed the team around for a year. Like a ghost.

I asked him: “Do you guys really just play baseball all day? All day every day?”

He said “yes,” somewhat regretfully.

Later I remembered he always slept in class. He’d sit right in the front row, just below my podium, and a few minutes later he’d be fast asleep. I never minded too much. Sleeping during class isn’t unheard of in Korean high schools. I figured he’d done it during high school, he could do it during college a bit.

As I’m slinking around the stadium I often run into players waiting to take the field for the next game. They play pepper against the wall and stretch. Usually they’re a lot bigger than me and probably have no inkling that I could understand their conversations. When I walk by we all pretend not to notice the other. But they never mention me at all. We all co-exist as if it’s all a big secret and none of us know anything about anything.