What Kind of Team Is Goraniz?
What kind of team is Goraniz?
What kind of team is the Daejeon Goraniz?
Four consecutive years at the bottom of American Mode. Twenty-two consecutive years failing to reach the postseason. Forty-one consecutive years failing to win the Korean Series. Every one of those streaks was still very much alive.
Even among the fans, opinions remained bitterly divided over why the franchise had endured such a long dark age. When they committed to developing prospects, they discovered they had no veterans left to serve as a center of gravity. When they plugged the holes by signing career veterans, the prospects lost their chance to grow. For decades the fans had watched the team fail to improve while the coaching staff collected paychecks and accomplished nothing, and they mockingly dubbed those coaches Gomu-wons — a portmanteau of Goraniz and gongmuwon, the word for civil servant. But even when the coaching staff was overhauled, the results barely budged. They brought in a string of big-name managers and gambled everything on them, and every single one of those bets came up empty.
By now the fans had simply resigned themselves to it. Baseball being what it is, you still win roughly three games out of every ten no matter how bad you are, and they took those rare winning days as their small joy, growing old together with the team in a long, affectionate resentment. That was the Daejeon Goraniz.
"Even if being a ten-year Goraniz fan means you'd marry someone without looking at them first, that doesn't mean you send your own daughter there!"
"That's a cold thing to say. A true fan cheers harder when the team is struggling, and when the team needs you, you roll up your sleeves and step up. That's how it works!"
"The team needs what? Our daughter?"
"Honestly, you don't even know how the world works. You should read the articles!"
Anta's father pulled out his phone, opened a browser window, and held it out to his wife. As a Goraniz fan, he was so proud that his daughter had been linked to the team that he had bookmarked the piece.
"See? It's an official article."
"You sure it's not just a tabloid?"
"How can you talk about our daughter like that?"
"I'm not putting her down. I'm just saying — a few days ago she was talking about quitting baseball, and now a pro team is coming after her?"
Her skepticism was only natural. In truth, aside from Eokpal and the Goraniz, no other clubs had entered the bidding for Pi Anta. Eokpal and the Goraniz were simply investing in her potential. The career she had actually shown amounted to a handful of at-bats that flashed bright for less than a full season. Baseball is a sport of records. Hesitating to sign a player with no real track record is not recklessness — it is common sense.
"What are you going to do, Anta?"
The sudden spotlight on her made Pi Anta, who had been quietly eating, choke and cough once as the food went down the wrong way.
"W-why me?"
"Are you going to the Goraniz or not?"
"Anta. You can't go to the Goraniz."
"I cannot believe this! Is that all our fandom was worth?!"
"Our fandom is one thing — you don't drag the kid into it!"
"And what if our kid turns out to be the hero who ends this endless dark age? Who's to say she won't?"
"She might not, either!"
"I cannot believe you!"
As the recruitment debate escalated into a full marital argument, Pi Anta quietly slipped out of it.
No — I should at least wait until I get an actual contract offer before saying anything…
In short, they were counting their chickens before they hatched. And that was the most accurate assessment of the situation.
It was late, long after everyone else had gone home. A woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties sat in front of a monitor, hammering away at the keyboard. She had abandoned a half-eaten chocolate and casually stuck a straw into a caffeine bomb of iced coffee mixed with an energy drink — and yet, with a full chest straining the buttons of her blouse and a waist without a single spare ounce of fat, she had a figure so perfect it was hard to believe she was a desk-bound office worker grinding through overtime.
"As expected…"
She muttered to herself and sucked on the caffeine drink. One of the dual monitors displayed a spreadsheet; the other was playing baseball footage — pure baseball, nothing else. The sheet was packed with analysis of the girl on screen: her hitting, her baserunning, the traits that showed up in every at-bat and every stolen-base attempt, and a meticulous catalog of her strengths.
"Pi Anta…"
She tapped her forehead a couple of times, crossed her arms, and let out a heavy sigh.
"We need her. She's a genuine jackpot."
She had taken over as the Goraniz front office's new Scout Team Leader at the start of this season, and even back when she had been nothing more than a fan, she had been a master at organizing player records. Records hold a vast amount of information. A player's strengths and weaknesses are only the beginning — you can read their tendencies, their preferred style of play, even the direction of their growth and their ceiling. She did not trust her eyes. She trusted the numbers.
That was why she was so intensely curious about the secret behind a player who, until a few days ago, had been floundering in Iron, only to explode overnight into someone who could thrash even pro-team pitchers. And she had another reason for paying such close attention.
Her play style has completely changed.
Of course she had dug up the footage from before Pi Anta became famous, and the hitting style on those older clips was nothing like what she was seeing now. It was not a simple matter of a revised swing. It was as if she had become a different person entirely — as if her fingerprints had changed.
The reason Pi Anta had never climbed out of the deep waters of Iron was simple: high velocity. She had no answer for fastballs at all, so she had been forced to time everything to the heater, and once that weakness was exposed, any off-speed pitch that even vaguely resembled a fastball would leave her helpless. Even without that elaborate setup, just pounding her with pure heat was enough to make her flail and walk back to the dugout — a textbook talentless hitter.
Not anymore.
She times herself to the breaking ball instead, and cuts every fastball foul to foul it off.
The balls she drove cleanly were almost all off-speed. Right-handed or left-handed made no difference; whether it was a slider designed to fool the eye with its path or a changeup designed to fool the ear with its speed, everything got hit. At first she had wondered whether even a deep-tier league could produce a batting average that monstrous. Watching it in person, she understood.
If a pitcher tried to get ahead with fastballs, she cut every one of them foul and forced the zone to shrink. She controlled the pitcher completely, cornering him the way a boxer slowly drives an opponent into the ropes — until he threw the pitch she wanted, in the location she wanted. The only way to break that sequence was to overpower her with a fastball that exceeded her expectations. But when pitchers came at her with heat, she read every thought off the top of their heads and ripped hits without mercy.
In theory it was possible. The ability required to actually pull it off, however, was none other than the ability to handle velocity. Most hitters time the fastball and lay off the breaking stuff. This girl did the opposite. Underneath it all was an absurd confidence that no matter how hard the ball came in, she could still cut it foul by a hair.
But she used to be a hitter who couldn't handle fastballs at all.
That was the question. What on earth had changed her this much? What magic had transformed a hitter with zero answer for heat into a reaper of fastballs?
She glanced at the nearly empty caffeine drink her straw was still stuck in, and a subtle expression crossed her face.
No way.
Drugs?
It was a game that perfectly blocked unauthorized programs, which was why it could fully replace traditional sports. Ironically, though, because it faithfully reflected a player's real physical ability, it had a different kind of problem: performance-enhancing drugs. If you built muscle or improved your game with pharmaceuticals, those gains carried over into the game. The reason most users never raised doping suspicions was simple. Why would some nobody hitter who had never drawn a second glance stick a needle in her arm just to find out how much better she might get? Getting the drugs was not as easy as buying cigarettes at a convenience store, either.
But from where she sat, the suspicion was more than reasonable. Nothing else could explain a transformation this dramatic in a single person's physical profile. So she would verify it. If the jump in performance was not the result of drugs — if those numbers had truly been earned through pure skill — then that alone would be another perfectly rational reason to sign her. The method of verification was not complicated. She just had to meet her. Anyone who had taken enough of a substance to produce a leap this large would show it on the outside.
Whether she'll agree to meet is another question…
Hesitation only delayed the solution. She sent a message straight to Pi Anta's Ball account.
That bulldozer drive was the single greatest weapon that had carried Han Yerin all the way to Scout Team Leader.