I Came to End This War (1)
The runner was stealing a base.
But not second. Not third.
Straight toward the very direction the pitcher was throwing — brazenly charging the base the catcher was standing guard over in plain sight.
How do you call it stealing when you walk right up in front of the glaring owner and plant yourself there for all to see?
This wasn't stealing a base.
This was just coming to take it.
The brief window of the pitcher's delivery, and the equally brief window of Pi Anta diving in, stretched into something that felt impossibly long.
This kind of thing never comes up in the lectures…!
To even look up something like "how to stop a steal of home," you'd first have to recognize steal of home as a tactic worth preparing for. But steal of home was rare enough to qualify as overseas-news material in the first place — and in most cases it got stopped on its own without anyone particularly trying, so even fewer people ever bothered hunting down countermeasures.
"Kh…!"
If you froze mid-throw in a panic trying to stop a steal of home, it became a balk — the pitcher's illegal act — and the runner walked in free. A common mistake on home-steal defense. Fortunately, the pitcher finished his delivery cleanly.
Now only the catcher's job remained.
Thwack!
"Got it…!"
A steal of home didn't work on a different mechanism from a regular steal. Most people pointed to the "3S" as the three elements that made a steal succeed.
First: the jump — that first step that stole the pitcher's timing. Second: speed.
The problem with a steal of home was that even if you nailed both of those, the runner was still inevitably slower than the ball.
The catcher had the ball. He had a sliver of time on Pi Anta charging home — less than a second, but being able to catch and wait for the runner was as good as seizing the high ground.
He set his glove and waited. Right on the expected path, Pi Anta came sliding in with her arm outstretched.
Out.
…It should have been.
"Huh…?"
Pi Anta had slid on a line that veered a hair off the plate. In the instant before the catcher's mitt could touch her, she twisted her left shoulder and rotated her body with exquisite precision — slipping clean past the tag.
"Wh—what?!"
The last of the 3S of a successful steal.
The magic that turned an out into a safe even when the timing was a fraction late.
Sliding.
A steal was a battle of a tenth of a second. In that brief hesitation, the second hand of the contest kept ticking —
"Safe!!"
— and the result flipped.
"Yeah! Steal of home tastes so sweet~!!"
Pi Anta pumped her fist in delight while the pitcher and catcher stared at her with hollow faces. Nothing had gone wrong with the throw or the catch. Every step had flowed as naturally as water — and they had still allowed the steal of home.
So whose fault was it?
Nobody's, really. The runner's skill had simply towered so far above the pitcher-catcher battery that chemistry alone couldn't close the gap.
Someone in the middle of all that started hunting for a reason and working the politics — and that was how teamwork came apart.
No matter how far the value of steals had fallen in modern baseball, no matter how widely science had grafted itself onto the game, baseball was fundamentally a mental sport. A steal that could shatter a team's chemistry in a single stroke still had value for that alone.
"Alright then — shall we win again today?"
The monster hitter who had single-handedly, on her own two feet, torn a team apart strolled back to the dugout and began sketching out the picture of victory.
She still had a long way to go.
A few days later.
Eokpal, who had been monitoring Pi Anta's exploits late into the night, couldn't help clicking his tongue again.
"Crazy. Does this even make sense?"
There wasn't just one or two points that felt miraculous.
First: the volume of games.
Most people played one or two and spent the rest of their time in match mode. Pi Anta was playing five games a day.
Each game ran about three hours, so how was she even managing five? Looking closer—
"Called games…? She's actually insane."
BoL had a Called Game option. In amateur baseball, too, when the score gap ballooned too far, games were stopped at a certain point to keep them from dragging on meaninglessly — and BoL offered both Automatic Called Games and Agreed Called Games.
An Automatic Called Game kicked in when the gap got too large: fail to overcome a fifteen-run lead after five innings, or a ten-run lead after seven, and the system processed the called game on its own.
An Agreed Called Game was when the opposing players consented to surrender — the equivalent of typing "surrender" in a MOBA.
In other words.
"…She's beating them senseless to finish fast because she doesn't have the time."
It looked like she was crushing them thoroughly, giving them no false hope, just to snatch the win and move on.
Pi Anta's usual daily load was two or three games. She rarely even hit three. The only reason Eokpal could think of for this five-game forced march was one thing.
"Tier…!"
To hit a specific tier.
And the reason Pi Anta had that goal was easy enough to guess.
Goraniz.
Something had been discussed in her meeting with that club.
I'd heard the rumor they'd already met, but…
Eokpal had put a word in with the Seoul Hustlers scout team reasonably quickly himself — but the working-level staff had hesitated. The same sticking point that had troubled Goraniz's Team Leader Han Yerin must have weighed on them too.
For that same reason, though, the Hustlers had stopped at hesitation.
Goraniz's Team Leader Han Yerin had run on her own two feet to erase the uncertainty.
No — if you think about it, this is an opportunity.
The reason the Hustlers hadn't jumped into the recruitment race until now was the question mark over her skill. They couldn't explain the "if she's that good, why is she still Iron?" problem.
But if Pi Anta resolved that point herself, there'd be nothing left to hesitate over.
Eokpal could guarantee it: the clubs silently watching her tier climb right now weren't limited to the Hustlers.
So he had to hurry.
There was no time to wait until she hit a specific tier.
He had to move first.
Eokpal pulled out his phone and dialed someone. The name on the screen read Kim Jaemyung, and even at that late hour the call connected almost immediately.
"Figured you'd call."
"Were you watching?"
"Obviously."
A scout-team staffer he was friendly with. Their positions as player and front-office employee differed a little, but they were close in age, and more than anything their hunger for the team's championship was so evenly matched it was hard to say who wanted it more — so the two of them had gotten close fast.
"Pi Anta's actually insane, right?"
"Would a batter who plants a side kick into a pro number-two starter be in their right mind?"
"Aigoo, crazy. Still on about that?"
"The clip's still circulating, you know?"
"People like you are why black histories get made, you bastard."
Eokpal growled with a playful edge, then cut to the point.
"Anyway, you can take the entry tryout as many times as you want, right? Isn't that so?"
"Yeah. Whether that brutal tier climb was ordered by Goraniz or her own will — even if Goraniz ordered it, snatching her midstream is perfectly doable."
He clearly understood what Eokpal was driving at. And his determination not to just sit and watch this time was just as clear.
"That's why I'm working overtime right now, isn't it?"
"Oh. As expected."
"Anyway, the higher-ups judge by reports."
From the other end of the line came the sound of a straw scraping the bottom of something completely drained — sshk, sshk.
"Coffee?"
"Energy drink."
"At this hour?"
"I'm not going home today anyway."
"Wow. I really respect you."
"You said she's a batter you wouldn't trade for two ten-win pitchers? To snatch a batter like that, you've got to work hard."
Even allowing for a little home-team bias, Eokpal was genuinely proud that a front-office employee this devoted existed at the Hustlers.
"Still, take care of your body, you bastard. Making a lot of money is fine, but if your health tanks, all of that—"
"I'm not staying up all night doing this shit for the money."
The workaholic on the other end let out a long sigh and answered in a leisurely voice.
"It's the team I've cheered for since I was a kid."
Someone who had entered baseball through the Hustlers, cheered their championships, and cried with them through their collapses — becoming an employee of that same club and working for it. The passion of a so-called dream-come-true superfan wasn't something you could bundle under a tidy word like "company loyalty."
"Let's make sure we get Pi Anta."
"Yeah. She's the batter who'll carry the Hustlers for the next ten-plus years."
And so the next day arrived.
"Hey. We're fucked."
"Why?"
"Can't intercept."
Eokpal, considerably rattled by the bolt-from-the-blue first thing in the morning, pressed the phone back to his ear.
"Why — what for? Shot down from above?"
"Didn't even make it upstairs."
"No, seriously — ha…. Frustrating. Still that tier nonsense?"
"Not that. Everyone agreed we need her."
"Then what's the problem?"
Even though the grand recruitment plan was on the verge of collapsing despite the all-nighter, the voice on the other end wasn't so much aggrieved as calm. If he had to put a word to it, it was the voice of someone who had attained enlightenment.
"Their GM's office is moving."
"What?!"
To put a period on the recruitment war — beyond the working-level staff, the approval line itself had started running on its own two feet.