Scout (3)
"I…"
After turning it over in her mind, the answer Pi Anta finally offered was neither acceptance nor refusal.
"I'll need to think about it a bit."
A hold. A reservation.
Yerin swallowed her disappointment and put on a look of polite curiosity.
"Would you mind telling me why?"
"Ah—just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm not saying no."
"Then what are you saying?"
Pi Anta started to answer, then reached for the pizza instead. It had gone a little cold, so she called the server over and asked them to reheat it before she finished her thought.
"Everything you've promised me so far is basically a blank check, isn't it?"
"A blank check?"
"I can see the passion and the will. But aren't most of these things beyond a head of scouting's authority?"
The point landed cleanly.
Bring in a quality foreign pitcher? Draft promising rookies and rebuild the franchise from the roots up? Every one of those required the general manager's sign-off—and even the GM had to watch the owner's face before he could load the budget. The reality was that even the cornerstone of that grand plan—signing Pi Anta herself—was something the head of scouting couldn't guarantee on the spot.
"Even if you decide to sign me, once you go back down to Daejeon you'll still have to run the paperwork up the chain again, right? And it could get rejected somewhere along the way."
"I believe the starting point of all of it is the will to try."
"That's true enough. But sitting around trusting nothing but that will—and turning down offers from other teams while I wait—is just too inefficient for me."
Yerin bit her lip and managed a wry smile. The nod she gave couldn't quite hide the regret in it.
Twenty-two years without a single postseason appearance. A franchise whose own fans had stopped expecting a rebound. The GM and the owner ran the club on a single principle: as long as we don't finish dead last, we're fine. Under those conditions, aggressive spending to snatch up a meteoric rookie was hard to expect.
And yet—watching a team manager from a franchise that broken, a lifelong fan who had grown up through the club's glory days and its collapse, sit there and ask her to save the team—something about it set a fire under Pi Anta's ribs.
"But like I said earlier, I never said I definitely wouldn't go to Goraniz."
What she needed was a promise.
Even if the team was a mess right now, she wanted proof that the will to change was real—exactly the way Yerin claimed. For an athlete, every single year mattered.
"If the general manager and the owner can get on the same page about turning this team around, then we talk again."
"The general manager and the owner…"
"I'm asking you to persuade the people who actually have the power to overhaul the franchise."
A bold proposal. And a dead-accurate read of the situation.
Yerin let out a short laugh.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Sorry. It's just a little funny."
"What is?"
Pi Anta looked puzzled. Yerin retied her hair as she explained.
"Most players in your position—someone who never even knocked on the pro door in high school and had to retire—would grab the first offer that came and sign without looking left or right. They'd think a hard-won chance had finally shown up."
Amateur baseball no longer ran on the old elite-athlete pipeline the way it had in the previous world. With the sport's massive penetration rate, skilled players poured out without ever needing that formal track. When the talent floor rose across the board, the ones who suffered were the ones getting older. That was why the conventional wisdom held that if you hadn't been drafted by the time you finished high school, you were already a little late for a real pro career.
And yet here was Pi Anta, in exactly that position, not only refusing to tiptoe around a pro club's head of scouting—but raising the stakes even higher.
"What late-blooming pro hopeful in the world issues an ultimatum like, If you want me, go convince the GM and the owner? In all my years, I've never met anyone like you, Pi Anta."
Was that a compliment? Pi Anta was still turning it over when the server returned with the reheated pizza. Watching the cheese stretch across the warm surface, she picked up a slice and chewed with pure, uncomplicated pleasure.
"Watching you eat, you look for all the world like a high school girl."
"I'm not a high school girl. I'm an adult."
"I mean you're that cute."
"Don't call me cute. I have the heart of a warrior."
A squirrel warrior, maybe, Yerin thought, and laughed under her breath.
The negotiation, which had gone a little stiff, loosened thanks to the pizza. Yerin reached for a slice herself. The thin gorgonzola, freshly warmed and dipped in honey, seemed to melt the tension right out of her shoulders.
Eating helped. She felt better.
Pi Anta let out a satisfied Haaah~, patted her stomach, and looked to be in much the same mood. Yerin felt a small pang of regret—maybe they should have filled their stomachs first and talked contracts afterward—but on second thought, this might have been a blessing in disguise.
"All right."
"All right what? The pizza?"
"No. The proposal you just made me."
"…You're actually going to try to persuade them?"
"You said if the people with the power to change the team change their minds, you'll come to us. Didn't you?"
"That's true, but I didn't expect you to finish thinking this fast."
"A long deliberation usually ends in a bad move. Important decisions need to be bold. And this wasn't something that needed much thinking in the first place."
Behind that decision, though, Yerin had a clever card of her own.
"In exchange, I'd like to set one condition of my own."
"A condition?"
"If you look at it coldly, I'm about to go beg my bosses to sign an Iron-tier player. Even if you don't end up joining us, wouldn't it be better for your own future to push that tier up a bit first?"
Pi Anta smiled a knowing little smile.
She was quick on the uptake—an essential skill if you wanted to reach the top tier of a mental sport like baseball. The real meaning under Yerin's words came through crystal clear.
"You'll try to persuade the people upstairs—but you want me to prepare the ground so the persuasion goes smoother. Is that it?"
"I like how fast you catch on."
Yerin grinned and took another slice of pizza. Pi Anta, not to be outdone, grabbed one of her own, and they called a temporary truce. The pizza was still excellent.
When they'd finished and Pi Anta had taken a sip of water, she asked,
"So what tier are you looking for?"
"The minimum standard for a professional player starts at Master."
"Master, huh."
After grinding the game these past few days, Pi Anta had a working grasp of the tier system. She had never run into a Master player yet, so she figured it had to be a high one.
Which meant Yerin's proposal was both critical insurance for the report she would file upstairs—and a hurdle designed to test Pi Anta.
"Reach Master tier within six months. If you do, I'll put that record in front of them and argue that we absolutely have to sign you."
"Signing just me isn't going to fix anything."
"Of course not. I'll recommend we use you as the starting point to overhaul the entire roster."
From Master on up, the question wasn't how many months it took to get there—it was whether you could get there at all. Most experts considered Diamond the highest tier pure effort without natural talent could reach, and countless amateurs chasing a pro career stalled out at Diamond and never crossed into Master.
Diamond and Master. Only one tier apart. On paper, a single sheet of difference. In reality, that sheet was cruelly thick and stubbornly tough.
"Six months."
"What actually moves your tier isn't whether your team wins or loses—it's your individual record. So I don't think I'm asking anything unreasonable."
"Wins and losses don't matter?"
"Of course not. Does a player on the chopping block suddenly keep his job just because the team finished first in the league?"
Baseball was a nine-person game; one player's heroics almost never won a contest alone. Pitchers had the best shot at it, and even a pitcher who got zero help from the offense could at best force a tie—never a win. Just as a ballplayer's value wasn't measured purely by team victories, a player's tier in Baseball of Legend didn't hinge heavily on wins and losses either.
"Then what's the most important number for tier?"
"Oh my. I thought you'd already know."
"I've never played baseball while worrying about tiers."
"The more I see of you, the stranger you get."
Yerin picked up the last slice of pizza, took a bite, and explained around it.
"What matters is individual performance. A number that shows how much more value you produce when you're in the lineup compared to an ordinary replacement player."
"Wait—is that…"
"You know it now, don't you?"
This was a concept Pi Anta already understood.
"WAR?"
"Wins Above Replacement. Exactly."
WAR—Wins Above Replacement.
Basing tiers on that metric worked much like the way Major League Baseball evaluated player value, which meant you could never freeload the way you could in other games. Without real individual skill, no amount of team success would push you past a certain tier. The flip side was just as true: even if your team was a disaster, if you played well, your WAR would keep climbing your tier.
For Pi Anta—who had briefly fretted over what happened when team luck ran cold—this was excellent news.
If WAR is what drives tier the hardest, that changes everything.
A good idea surfaced in her head almost at once.
"Then I won't need six months."
"What? What do you mean—"
If she was going to prove herself anyway, she might as well do it loud and outrageous.
"One month. I'll hit Master in one month."