The Whimpering Lamb of the Weight Room
The Daejeon Hawks were famous for never skimping on the team cafeteria — fitting for a club whose parent company's motto was, quite literally, loyalty.
After all, the chairman had given strict instructions that the players were never to be shortchanged when it came to their meals.
"Ajumma! What's on the menu today?"
"Chinese today!"
Seo Ji-hoon checked the cafeteria board like he did every day, and his face lit up.
Menbosha on the spread as a special treat?
The players' dining hall was buffet-style, serve-yourself — which meant he was free to pile on all his favorites without a word of complaint.
He had scooped fried rice and menbosha until his tray was overflowing, chopsticks and spoon in hand, when two hulking figures dropped into seats at his table.
"Hyung. Why'd you load up on so much menbosha and fried rice? You said you were cutting back on carbs and fried food."
"Bro. No way he's eating all that. He was gonna share with the other guys, right, Mr. Seo?"
"Huh? Uh……"
"Oh, really? Anderson, you want some?"
"Can't turn down Mr. Seo's generosity."
Without so much as a by-your-leave, the two of them had confisc— acquired everything on his tray.
"Haah……"
The indignity of not even being able to eat what you wanted lasted only a moment. He had said those words himself, after all — and Ji-hoon, constitutionally incapable of telling people no, simply pressed his lips shut.
I never should have opened my mouth to Kang Hyuk that day……
It had been after that road trip to the Grizzlies.
That was when he'd asked Kang Hyuk to help him train.
The reason he'd resolved to change in the first place was something almost embarrassingly small.
He'd been reading the comments — Lee Won-taek, his own draft classmate, is flying around out there, and this guy still hasn't improved a bit.
Gye-reuk. The useless white elephant.
Looking back, the label had chased him his whole career.
Even back in middle and high school, he'd been written off as a half-finished player.
Most of the scouts who watched Ji-hoon play in high school said pretty much the same things.
"His hitting's not bad, but…… hmmm. The defense's rough. Throws have no carry on them."
"Sure, his pitch recognition is decent, but he runs like that — what's he good for? Too slow to be a table-setter, not enough pop for anything else."
"Kid's not gonna make it. Contact's all he's got. How's a guy like that survive in pro ball?"
He'd been seriously considering quitting baseball altogether under the weight of those cold evaluations — and then everything changed when his high school coach, the man he still revered as his mentor, moved him to first base.
Of course, his swing back then was still a far cry from a slugger's.
But with the defensive burden minimized and his energy poured entirely into hitting, he'd managed respectable results in high school ball.
That was what earned him a fourth-round selection from the Hawks, who saw potential in him.
Looking back, it was all luck.
It was only possible because the Hawks' depth paper-thin. If he'd had to compete with other players for the first base job, he probably wouldn't have lasted long.
He'd never been the type to burn with competitive fire the way other pros did. He'd simply been grateful to be playing professional baseball at all.
And then one stray comment had stung him enough to land him here.
He was still lost in those thoughts when Anderson's deep bass voice snapped him back to reality.
"Mr. Seo. How long are you planning to take eating that?"
"Huh? I'll be done in a minute."
Barely five minutes in, and the two muscle monsters had already cleared their trays.
"Eat slowly, hyung. You don't want an upset stomach."
"Ah, I want to hurry up and get to the post-meal workout."
These were men who treated exercising after eating as naturally as a smoker reaching for a cigarette after a meal.
When the meal ended, they swept him along to the weight room as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
There was no such thing as an exemption.
Last time, he'd quietly skipped training to have dinner with his wife — and Kang Hyuk and Anderson had nearly shown up at his front door.
"Hup! Hup!"
As he pressed the barbell up on the bench, a question suddenly began gnawing at him.
Do I really have to go this far?
Couldn't he just tweak his swing a little and call it a day?
Come to think of it — yes. Exactly.
He'd asked Kang Hyuk to fix his hitting form. At some point, he'd simply been getting dragged off to the weight room.
I'm supposed to be the senior here, damn it.
Ji-hoon racked the barbell, scrunched his face into the fiercest scowl he could manage, and shot up from the bench.
"I've thought about it, and this is just wrong!"
The moment he shouted, a sound exploded through the weight room.
CLANG— BOOM!
Anderson, mid-deadlift, had dropped his barbell — and the impact thundered straight through the sound-dampening floor mats.
It gave some idea of just how much weight the man had been lifting.
Clack.
Meanwhile, Kang Hyuk, who'd been squatting alongside him, set down his own bar and turned to stare at him.
With two enormous, muscle-bound giants looming over him, the intimidation factor was anything but ordinary.
"Ang?"
"Hyung. What did you say?"
"……The more I think about it, these are weights no pro should be lifting. I need to bump up my load. Right now."
And so Ji-hoon folded like a lawn chair.
Anderson patted his shoulder as if to say, well reasoned.
"Good thinking, bro. A weight that can't crush me to death only makes me stronger."
Resigned, Ji-hoon's shoulders sagged all the way to the floor.
Throughout the entire workout, I could hear every voice inside Seo Ji-hoon's head.
'Ah, this is killing me.'
'I just want to be comfortable again.'
That kind of weak, comfort-seeking whining, on loop.
For a moment I felt bad for the poor guy — a decent man, suffering like this — but I hardened my heart.
'For his own sake, this is the right call.'
Ji-hoon hyung had a habit of underselling his own ability, but I saw it differently.
Too slow on the basepaths? That was a problem solved simply by hitting for extra bases. Even the slowest runner turns a ball driven deep into the gap into a standing double.
His throwing and defense were close to unfixable, admittedly — but hitting was a domain that could be rebuilt as much as you liked.
'There's real potential here.'
The only reason hyung lacked power was that he simply didn't train enough. Unlike the natural-born slap hitters, his underlying muscle quality wasn't bad at all.
More likely, it was his nature — the aversion to competition, the lack of a killer instinct — holding him back.
'This is exactly when he needs someone cracking the whip beside him.'
Under normal circumstances, I never could have forced this kind of training on a senior. White Room or no White Room, I was still just a rookie — a slightly ahead-of-the-curve rookie, sure, but a rookie.
But hyung had asked first. Which meant the handle of the whip had effectively been handed to me.
Anderson's presence was doing a lot of heavy lifting here, too. My kind-hearted hyung, constitutionally incapable of refusing anyone, had no choice but to be dragged along behind a man who looked only forward and ran.
Not that I hadn't contributed a little myself.
Once I'd discovered that hyung couldn't understand a single word of English, I'd introduced a very slight margin of translation error into our sessions.
For instance: when Anderson asked, "Do you want to quit training?" I would render it as, "Do you want to stop breathing?" — utterly trivial (?), harmless mistranslations of that sort.
Compared to the movie hero who gets "there's no hope for you anymore" translated at the most crucial moment, these were practically rounding errors.
"Mr. Seo! Grab it by the collar like a pitcher who just threw you bullshit, and LIFT!"
"UWAAAAAH!"
'…This is fine, right?'
Once I confirmed that hyung was fully absorbed in Anderson's brutal training, I slipped quietly out of the weight room.
My destination: the video analysis room.
"You called for me, Coach?"
The hitting coach was already seated inside.
"Hyuk-ah, get over here and take a look at this."
"I already left the swing correction to you, Coach……"
"Still, I won't feel right about it until you sign off."
"Not the manager?"
"That old man? Useless. Useless, I tell you."
After delivering his affectionate slander of the manager, the coach pulled up two clips on the screen.
Both showed hyung batting. One was his old toe-tap; the other, the leg-kick stance he was currently practicing.
"He's been hitting off the toe-tap for so long that he's clearly still struggling to time the leg kick."
"Yeah. His timing's definitely off."
"But look at the exit velocity."
Hyung's exit velocity with the old toe-tap sat around 137 km/h — roughly league average.
"Now, the average on the balls he's barreled with the leg kick……"
"143 km/h."
That was a genuinely meaningful jump.
It was still too early for the strength gains from training to show up in his body. Which meant the increase had to be coming from the swing change itself — better weight transfer putting more force into the barrel.
"Bigger effect than I expected."
It was common knowledge that the harder the ball comes off the bat, the more fielders boot it, and the more likely a ball turns into a hit.
If hyung successfully integrated the leg kick and completed his bulk-up, the improvement would be anything but small.
"The sample size is thin, but there's clearly something there. What worries me is……"
"That we might cost him his contact ability — his one real strength?"
"Exactly. It's only been a short time, but he's visibly struggling with the timing."
It was no exaggeration to say that hyung held a starting job right now on the strength of his on-base percentage alone.
And if even that slipped? Then what?
I answered firmly.
"We push forward anyway."
"Why?"
"Hyung seems content holding his current spot — but do you honestly believe he'll still be a starter a few years from now?"
"……Hard to say for certain."
It was no exaggeration to say that power mattered more than any other tool for a first baseman.
Leaving out the DH, it was the position with the lightest defensive burden in the field.
Until Anderson arrived, hadn't our own team suffered precisely because it had no legitimate slugger?
There was a reason the classic power bats had always played first base.
Right now, the Hawks' big-league lineup wasn't exactly feared — but in the Futures league, it was a different story. There were plenty of hitters putting up respectable averages down there.
Put cynically, that meant the gap between our starters and our backups wasn't large. Put optimistically, it meant we had a deep bench of prospects showing real potential.
And if even one of them turned out to have serious slugging numbers?
Nobody would blink if he got called up tomorrow to compete with Ji-hoon hyung for the job.
"Besides, hyung only has two years left before free agency."
"True."
"And given how this front office operates, they'll have no reason to offer him big money."
And no other club would be lining up to court him, either.
That was why, even as my heart ached watching him suffer, I was pushing the training forward regardless.
The coach sat in thought for a moment, then let out a sigh and nodded.
"You're right."
"I'll help with his training as well."
"Appreciate it — even if it's just words."
As we discussed hyung's swing mechanics, the coach asked me another question.
"How's the prep for the next series coming?"
"Against the Busan Marines? Of course."
"There's talk Yoon Tae-yang might get the start out of the bullpen — he's your classmate, isn't he?"
"Yoon Tae-yang?"
The news caught me so off guard that my poker face failed completely.
Don't get me wrong — my draft class had been talented enough to be called a golden generation.
But a high school rookie starting a first-team game?
"What's so surprising? You're already bombing the league yourself."
"……Fair point."
"I feel bad saying this while you're also helping coach Ji-hoon — but keep up the good work analyzing the pitchers' footage."
"Understood."
Stepping out of the analysis room, I glanced back toward the weight room door.
Anderson was still hounding hyung mercilessly, and Ji-hoon's face was twisted into an expression of pure suffering — the kind of visage that belonged on a villain in an old melodrama.
So hyung can make a face like that.
They say a person's true nature comes out when they're pushed to the limit.
For someone like me, who had only ever seen hyung's easy smile, it was nothing short of astonishing.