The Little Ball Launched by an Attention-Seeker (1)
"Rookie of the Year. And…"
Pi Anta stopped there and turned the next words over in her head.
This was an eighteen-billion-won question. Put another way, she had to put forward a goal worthy of eighteen billion won.
What would do it?
A team championship? A Korean Series berth? For a club that had finished dead last four years running, that was pure fantasy. Even the scout team leader had framed Anta's first-year target as simply "not finishing last." There was no need for someone who hadn't even signed the contract yet to overreach.
More than that, the pro league was not some ranked game with yawning skill gaps. However badly the Goraniz were floundering at the bottom, every one of those so-called pathetic players was Master or Challenger by tier. If you couldn't even hit Master, your name never made a first-team roster in the first place.
So hitching an aggressive team goal — and eighteen billion won of signing money — to a roster still stuck in last place was simply not appropriate.
An individual record, then.
A target she could hit on her own, with no one else's excuses to lean on. And still impactful enough that eighteen billion wouldn't feel wasted.
Pi Anta made up her mind and picked up the pen.
In the blank on the contract, the condition already read "Rookie of the Year." And then…
"A .400 season batting average."
The realm of the gods.
There was not a flicker of hesitation in her. She didn't float the words to gauge the room — she wrote her goal across the contract in a bold, unflinching hand.
That sheer audacity finally cracked the general manager's easy composure. For the first time, something like alarm flickered across his face.
"Miss Pi Anta… you do understand what a .400 average means, I hope?"
"Of course."
People liked to praise a hitter in the zone by saying, "She'd hit .300 even holding the bat upside down."
.300. Three times out of ten.
Fail seven times out of every ten chances, and you still got called a good hitter.
A season .400 average was, quite literally, the stuff of dreams — the domain of the divine.
Even by the standards of her previous world, not a single player in the Japanese leagues had ever done it. Korea had produced exactly one. And across more than a century of Major League history, only sixteen hitters had ever set foot in that promised land.
Every one of those marks, moreover, dated from before the 2000s. Once baseball modernized and talent leveled up across the board, .400 hitters became rarer still.
Even holding a .400 average through a single month was enough to send the media into raptures. The number itself carried a rare, almost otherworldly weight.
And she had written season .400.
What were you supposed to think, watching a player about to enter her first pro year casually ink a dream like that onto the very paper that set her value — not in private, but right there on the contract?
"Are you sure about this?"
The GM asked again for that reason.
Pi Anta only looked puzzled.
"If I fail, you keep the eighteen billion. Why do you keep trying to talk me out of it?"
"I'd like to hear the thinking behind putting a goal like that on the table."
Her confidence had piqued his curiosity.
Pi Anta gave a thoughtful "Hmm," set another piece of meat on the grill, and began to explain, step by step.
"Rookie of the Year will come naturally if I put up a landmark season. The real question was what that 'landmark' should be — what kind of goal is actually worth eighteen billion."
She scratched her head with an embarrassed little laugh.
"Your ordinary individual titles just don't add up to eighteen billion won."
Batting title? Golden Glove? MVP?
Someone hit those every year, whether it was her or not.
But a total signing package of 2.1 billion. A contract that shattered the previous high-water mark would follow her for the rest of her career, talked about endlessly.
Having lived a pro life once already, Pi Anta knew exactly what that spotlight would look like.
"People will bring it up every chance they get. Was she really worth burning 2.1 billion on a signing bonus?"
Rookie of the Year plus MVP?
Impressive — but she could already hear the muttering: "For 2.1 billion, she'd better."
And "she'd better" was never going to be enough for Pi Anta.
"My goal is to make people look back and say 2.1 billion was a bargain."
She had taken a historic signing bonus. She would answer it with a historic record.
Not the kind of mark someone hit every year — a record that only existed because it was Pi Anta.
That was where the goal had come from.
"A .400 average. Isn't it good for the club to have a record-holder on the books?"
She said it while calmly flipping the meat on her personal grill, and the GM found himself speechless — then let out a short, disbelieving laugh.
He had never seen this coming.
Honestly, he hadn't expected anything close.
The first thought that had crossed his mind when he met Pi Anta had been nothing special.
She's a really pretty girl.
A girl this pretty who could also play baseball would be popular with the public — that had been about as far as it went.
To be precise, his first impression had weighted her looks more heavily than her talent. That was the truth of it.
But the thing that most clearly revealed who she was had nothing to do with her face.
It was her ability.
No — her ambition.
Pi Anta's ambition was fixed on a height so far beyond anything the GM had imagined that he couldn't help being rattled.
And her plan didn't stop there.
"Could I ask one favor?"
"What is it?"
"Once the contract is officially done, would you set up an interview for me?"
"Going through the PR team shouldn't be hard — they'll already be preparing something. Is there a particular reason?"
Pi Anta's thinking had already moved past individual performance.
She was aiming for deeper water.
"We need to make this an issue. Highest signing bonus in history. But the option is eighteen billion, and the condition is hitting .400 for the season — and that option is a goal the player wrote in with her own hand."
"…Oh-ho."
"Even if it's just out of curiosity — will she actually do it or not? — people will start watching Goraniz games, won't they?"
After the GM, it was Scout Team Leader Han Yerin's turn to let out a stunned breath.
Most rookies just entering the pros did not exactly welcome media exposure. Bold words from day one had a way of becoming scarlet letters that dogged you forever, and the attention itself could turn into pressure.
Pi Anta was different.
She wanted more eyes on her, not fewer.
Through that attention she would raise her own value — and, beyond that, she was already thinking about how to pull the long-departed Goraniz fans back home.
"Really… well…"
The GM was almost startled by the state of his own heart. Yerin seemed to feel the same; for a moment their eyes met.
This was supposed to be a contract signing.
A dry, strictly business conversation.
So why?
Why on earth was his chest starting to pound at her words?
Looking at a player who hadn't even taken her first step as a rookie —
Why was he already expecting her to do something extraordinary?
"Are you sure you'll be all right?"
"With what?"
"In general. Whether the pressure will get to you. Whether you'll regret setting a .400 target."
Pi Anta answered the GM's question with a bright little smile.
"If you set your goal at .300, you only ever put in the work it takes to hit .300."
"You don't settle for three hits out of ten. You dig into the causes of the other seven failures — and only then do you become a hitter who gets four."
The GM nodded, clearly impressed.
Beside him, Yerin finally realized just how little she had understood about Pi Anta.
She had tried to hand a "hit this tier" goal to a player who could rewrite the meta of the entire baseball world and put hope back into a dying franchise.
It was past embarrassing. It was absurd.
At the same time, she congratulated herself all over again for getting off the keyboard and running this one down in person.
Goraniz fans.
We are about to sign the best hitter in the game.
No — a superstar beyond even that…!
"When I hit the goal, you have to give me the eighteen billion. I promised my dad I'd bring home ten billion today."
And then she would mutter something like that and look every bit the twenty-year-old girl she was.
One moment a superstar who seized people's hearts — the next, a cute, lovable girl.
How was anyone supposed to resist falling for her?
Just imagining how many of her uniforms would sell already had Yerin's heart hammering.
The GM took the contract Pi Anta had finished signing, added his own signature, and handed it back.
"Don't worry about the eighteen billion. Start thinking about how much of a raise you're going to demand at next year's salary talks."
"I'll hold you to that."
"Miss Pi Anta. This is a challenge for me as well."
Looking thoroughly satisfied, the GM passed the contract to Yerin and went on.
"Through your performance, our club is going to make a powerful statement: that we give extraordinary treatment to players who put up extraordinary results — regardless of years of service."
"So you've got something on the line worth eighteen billion too, then."
"Of course. If you put up a terrible season, the overhaul of this organization's culture hits a brick wall."
The shapes were a little different.
But the two of them were pointed in the same direction.
"Let's make this work."
The GM offered his hand again. Pi Anta rose slightly from her seat and received the handshake with both hands, formal and precise.
That evening, the news of Pi Anta's signing with the Daejeon Goraniz broke across every major outlet.
The moment that outrageous option went public, every community on the internet caught fire.
But the blaze was only getting started.
The firewood and oil this girl — an attention-seeker beyond anything anyone had imagined — had prepared were a vast, deliberate provocation, enough not merely to heat every baseball community in the country but to burn them to the ground.