Play Ball!
Play ball — BoL!
The Connector: a device that bridges you into virtual reality. I slipped the goggles on and peered into the pitch-black void within, dark as outer space.
"Whoa…!"
A mysterious screen bloomed before my eyes like stars unfurling across a night sky.
Even in the total darkness, a message window glittered so close I could almost reach out and touch it. A low woooom hummed in my ears as lines of text flickered across the window.
Initiating biometric scan.
Cross-referencing biometric data with account.
Connecting…
The moment the connecting message vanished, a scroll of game titles unfurled across what had been pure black.
So it's like a game launcher.
The design was similar to the launchers Steam or Riot showed you before a game booted up.
I wondered how you browsed the list and reached out — and the moment I swiped upward the way I would on a phone screen, the list scrolled up with me, smooth as anything.
"The motion tracking is ridiculously smooth."
The fidelity was so seamless I couldn't feel a shred of disconnect. Admiration came out of me unbidden.
At this rate, gaming was actually going to be fun.
Judging by how massive the game list was, this Connector wasn't just a launcher for Baseball of Legend — or BoL, or whatever it was called. It looked like a full platform for diving into all kinds of VR titles.
I'd have to try the rest later.
For now, Baseball of Legend first.
Baseball of Legend.
Every title was in English, so I just had to look under B, right?
Baseball, baseball, base…
Found it without any trouble.
To launch a game, you just tapped the title twice, like double-clicking a mouse, right?
Exactly as I'd guessed. The interface felt incredibly familiar.
Everything so far had given me the sensation of floating in the middle of deep space — except the stars hanging in that void moved exactly as I willed them the instant I touched them. The satisfaction was off the charts.
If the baseball game itself was this good, it might actually be something special.
A soft woooom hummed in my ears again.
The star-strewn cosmos filling my vision blacked out in an instant, like a TV screen powering off.
And then, right in front of me—
"Whoa."
A baseball stadium unfurled.
A white batter's box and a pentagonal home plate were already set into the ground beneath my feet. Batting gloves sat snug on my hands as if they'd always been there, and a helmet rested naturally on my head. Even the fine, well-groomed dirt had texture — and when I kicked off the ground, dust rose with it.
The level of immersion was staggering.
I could barely believe this was virtual reality.
…It feels real.
Without the message hovering in front of me, I wouldn't have even registered that this was a game.
Welcome to Baseball of Legend.
Once the welcome message faded, the game's main window appeared — still floating against the stadium backdrop. In the upper left sat a button labeled Start Game; the upper right was crowded with various icons I didn't recognize yet.
I'd figure those out later.
First, I was going to play a round.
I was too curious not to.
I reached out, touched Start Game, and a spread of game modes appeared.
Normal Mode.
Ranked Mode.
Match Mode.
AI Match Mode.
Tutorial Mode.
Five options. Obviously, if you wanted to understand the game, you were supposed to go through the tutorial.
Normal Mode.
A king-god absolute alpha male did not need a damn tutorial.
Besides, after the hyper-realistic tech I'd just experienced, I wasn't sure a tutorial was even necessary.
At the end of the day, it's still just baseball, right?
Unless there was some weird control scheme, I was confident nothing here would give me trouble.
I'd been a working pro ballplayer until a few minutes ago, after all.
Even if I was a woman now.
I selected Normal Mode and hit Start Game. A sleek loading screen played for a moment.
But how did you pick a position? Who set the batting order? Did the system just assign everything?
The questions answered themselves the second I entered the game.
"W-what is this?"
The second I entered the game, a flood of chat poured across my vision.
And the words I'd just blurted out without thinking were instantly converted into a chat message and delivered to everyone else's windows.
Apparently you didn't type chat at all — speech was auto-recognized and dumped straight into the conversation window.
That was going to be annoying. If the settings let me change it later, I was flipping that off immediately.
Meanwhile, HalfHalfNoMoney and DaechiJammin kept screaming "Calling 6" without giving an inch.
"Calling 6 — what does that even mean?"
Oh, for fuck's sake. Seriously.
And wait — was "Pi Anta" my nickname right now? Who the hell played a game under their real name?
Then again, with a name like that, people would probably just assume it was a handle.
Someone kindly answered the question I'd thrown out without meaning to.
Ahh. Now it made sense.
Baseball assigns a number to every position. The 6 everyone was fighting over was shortstop; 2 was catcher. The classic 6-4-3 double play meant the shortstop fielded it, flipped to the second baseman, and the first baseman finished the out.
In other words, all that spamming was a position war.
…Wait a second.
That basically meant there was almost nowhere left for me to go.
While I was still asking, the remaining defensive spots kept vanishing one after another. What finally remained was—
DH?
Designated hitter?
No defensive spot left at all?!
I was still clicking my tongue in disbelief when another window popped up, as if to say I didn't have time for that.
Assigning batting order.
And at the exact same time—
These lunatics — every last one of them wanted to bat cleanup!
I couldn't survive that chat war. In the end—
Pi Anta — 8th batter, Designated Hitter.
No defense at all.
And on offense, I got stuck in the eight-hole — the slot reserved for the weakest bat in the order.
This was straight-up newbie discrimination!
The way the game actually played out was astonishingly realistic.
Every time the pitcher worked the rosin bag on the mound, white dust bloomed in vivid detail. When he wound up hard and fired, a heavy WHAP!! cracked through the mitt like it might tear it open.
Each player held down the position they'd claimed, fielding cleanly — and on balls that looked just out of reach, they'd dive and stretch their gloves out anyway.
From the stands came the rattle of drums and cheer sticks, plus a fight song I couldn't quite make out the words to, all of it rendered in perfect clarity.
It really felt like a ballpark.
Aside from the scattered women on the roster — myself included — it was so real you could almost forget it was a game.
But by what logic were female players competing on equal footing with the men? I'd already watched a woman on the other team casually take a male pitcher's offering and drive it for a home run.
I didn't know the details, but inside this game, the physical gap between men and women seemed to have been erased.
Honestly, it held up fine even next to a pro game.
No — it might have been better.
The reason being:
Strike — out!
Runner is safe!
No blown calls!
Players did the playing, but every judgment call came from the system — so there was zero room for a bad ump, and zero need to challenge anything on video review. The athletes never second-guessed a ruling; they just focused entirely on the game.
The old maxim that "bad calls are part of the sport" simply didn't apply here.
While I was still marveling at everything I could see, hear, and feel, my turn at the plate arrived before I knew it.
8th Batter — Designated Hitter, Pi Anta
They even had a stadium announcer calling out names. The more I learned about this game, the more staggering it got.
I was right-handed but batted left. I stepped into the left-hand batter's box, planted my front foot with three firm stamps — thump, thump, thump — raised the bat vertical, and took one long look at the pitcher on the mound.
My pre-swing routine.
The pitcher saw me settle in and set himself. Ball hand and glove hand came together at his chest; his left leg drew back.
Windup.
I locked my eyes on him as he concentrated and delivered.
And as his front foot drove forward, I counted the rhythm in my head.
One. Two.
WHAP!!
Strike!
The sound of it punching the heart of the zone was crisp and clean. The pitcher looked satisfied too — he took the ball back from the catcher and gave a little nod.
I had no idea what Diamond or Master even meant.
I genuinely could not understand what everyone was freaking out about.