1. The Man Hits a Home Run (2)
Min Do-hee, who had been standing on second base, took off for home a beat too late, rounding the bases with an expression even more stunned than mine—and I was the one who'd hit it.
Baek Ha-rin, meanwhile, hadn't moved an inch. She simply stood there, staring blankly at the left-field wall where my ball had vanished.
...
Coach Yoon Gaeul stood in front of the dugout with her arms crossed, quietly watching me. Her expression told me nothing about what she might be thinking—but I had taken Baek Ha-rin's pitch and turned it into a home run. Surely that had caught her eye, at least a little. Cradling that hope, I stepped on home plate.
The score was 5-5.
No one had imagined Baek Ha-rin coughing up the tying run, and a strange silence hung over the field.
"...Did that seriously just go over?"
That question was the signal, and the dugout erupted into noise a beat too late.
"That last pitch was a miss, right?"
"...Oh, come on. Ha-rin was obviously taking it easy on him."
"It did kind of look like the inside heat was stacking up..."
"No, seriously—no way that thing cleared the fence?"
Amid the clamor, I picked up my helmet and walked back to the Blue team's dugout.
Looking around, I found the batters' eyes subtly, strangely changed. It wasn't admiration, of course—most of the women were watching me with something far closer to suspicion than acknowledgment.
"Oppa, you really did hit Ha-rin sunbae's pitch over the wall just now, right?"
"Hey—hey, Min Do-hee! Way to read the room!"
Min Do-hee, still a freshman and utterly blind to the mood, kicked up a fresh ripple of noise with her question.
A game-tying two-run homer off Baek Ha-rin's mistake pitch. However careless she'd supposedly been, the very idea that a man had homered off Baek Ha-rin's arm simply didn't compute.
But she had to be rattled. And if she was rattled, then maybe—just maybe—we could push past a tie and take the lead.
"Strike!"
"Strike!"
"Strike three! Out!"
Of course, that hope evaporated on the spot as I watched Baek Ha-rin carve up the very next batter—their No. 1 hitter—on three pitches.
Baek Ha-rin really is Baek Ha-rin.
Even in a moment that would have shaken anyone, she'd mixed four-seamers, sliders, and forkballs into a three-pitch strikeout, and only then did breath finally escape from pockets all over the dugout.
"Whew. Ha-rin really is Ha-rin."
"I guess that last one really was just a bad pitch."
"Exactly. I mean, how's a guy supposed to hit Ha-rin's stuff anyway?"
...Well. That's how it always goes, I suppose.
So long as I was a man, hunting for a reason why Baek Ha-rin had no choice but to get hit by me was a far more comfortable story than accepting the result itself—that I had actually squared up her pitch.
When the bottom of the seventh ended, Coach Yoon Gaeul clapped her hands and gathered the players.
"Alright, that's it for today. Clean up and gather in the locker room—we're going straight into the meeting."
"Yes, ma'am~"
"And Tae-oh, you..."
A tiny, treacherous flicker of hope lifted my head at the coach's next words. I had, after all, sent a monster pitcher's pitch over the wall by this world's standards.
"...Put the equipment away with the managers, then come in."
"...Yes, Coach."
...Yeah. That was the realistic outcome.
For a moment I'd let myself daydream that this one home run might catch Yoon Gaeul's eye and somehow open a path to a KLB debut—but that was nonsense, obviously. Flip it around, and it was the same as a female manager back in my old world taking a male pitcher deep. And on an obvious mistake pitch, at that. Nobody would believe I'd driven a well-located ball. They'd assume that even on a miss, if the sweet spot of the bat happened to find it, even a man could go yard. It was a scrimmage, after all.
Disappointing, I'll admit. A little.
Still, in the instant my foot came down on home plate, something deep in my chest had burned hot for the first time in ages. It didn't matter that nobody acknowledged it. For that one at-bat, at least, I had been a baseball player again.
I had just bent down to pick up a bat rolling around on the floor when Cha Seo-rin appeared at my side.
"Hey. Tae-oh."
"Yes?"
"That swing just now—you read it and hit it, didn't you?"
"...Just got lucky, I guess."
Saying I'd read it would have changed nothing—she'd never have believed me—so I hedged.
"You know it was a botched pitch, right? Ha-rin got careless because you're a man and just lobbed it in there. Throw it for real and your bat doesn't even touch it, dumbass."
"I know. That's exactly why I said I got lucky."
"...Tsk. Fine."
On any other day she'd have piled on a few more jabs. Maybe I was imagining how oddly tame she'd gone.
The rest of the gear was more or less put away, and the moment I turned my gaze toward the mound to go collect the spike cleaner and the rosin bag—
...
...
Everyone else had already filed into the locker room, and yet my eyes met Baek Ha-rin's—still out there on the mound, staring straight at me.
"Hmm, the water jugs are all emptied out too..."
Afraid of picking a fight I couldn't afford, I quietly looked away and deliberately finished putting away the rest of the equipment. By the time I glanced back up, Baek Ha-rin—who had been standing on the mound watching me—had already vanished into the locker room.
One after another, the players drifted over to Baek Ha-rin, who sat in the corner of the locker room.
"Ha-rin, don't let it get to you."
"Yeah. It was just one bad pitch, whatever."
"Everyone could see you easing off so the guy wouldn't get hurt."
"Ha-rin, if you'd thrown for real, that Kang Tae-oh kid couldn't have laid a bat on your stuff."
The voices of comfort rang nonstop in her ears—and yet, to Baek Ha-rin, not a single one of them sounded like comfort.
Sure, it had been a mistake pitch, and sure, she hadn't thrown it with real intent. ...But it was equally undeniable that he had pulled an inside pitch aimed at his own body and turned it into a home run.
Crack!
The sound of Kang Tae-oh's bat striking the ball echoed through her head all over again. Not a mishit. Not a lucky flare. A perfectly squared-up strike.
"Ha-rin."
Cha Seo-rin sat down beside her.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Really?"
"Yes."
Baek Ha-rin did her best to arrange her usual expression, but the air around her was unmistakably off, and Cha Seo-rin, watching her carefully, kept offering what comfort she could.
"Don't dwell on it too much. Some guy got lucky once. That's all this was."
"I know."
"And it's not like you threw that one full-out either, right? You just wanted to plant one inside to brush him back, then punch him out..."
"I know that much."
At the faint edge in Baek Ha-rin's voice, the air in the locker room stiffened a touch.
"Sorry."
"It's fine."
Cha Seo-rin shrugged.
"The video's gonna be a pain in the ass, though. I heard the university's been streaming the game on its website for promo."
"...Ah."
At those words, Baek Ha-rin's eyes moved.
Why. Of all days, it had to be today.
Under normal circumstances, Baek Ha-rin had been planning to apply for early professional drafting this very year, while still a college sophomore. Scouts from multiple clubs were already tracking her—a left-handed fireballer who had come through Tommy John surgery and a complete rehab without a single hitch. As a rotation-ready starter, a first-round selection had been a foregone conclusion; the only thing left to agonize over was how big her signing bonus would be.
And now, at precisely this moment, she had gone and served up a home run to a male trainee—a man who was, in practical terms, little more than a helper for the baseball club. Not good. Mistake pitch or not, the bare fact that a man had taken her deep would never change.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Baek Ha-rin picked up her smartphone. Notifications were flooding in through her ByulStar DMs, one after another. She didn't need to open a single one to know that every message would be some cocktail of mockery and sneering.
Just how far had that video spread? With that thought, she opened the college baseball community board—and the very first post to catch her eye was this one:
Two short clips and a single line of mockery. And beneath them, dozens of anonymous comments were already multiplying fast.
Baek Ha-rin's eyes stopped on one comment.
The others she could swallow. But the claim that she had failed her post-surgery rehab—that, she could not let pass.
Don't make me laugh.
Her body was in flawless condition, beyond any complaint. Her velocity had touched 153 km/h, and there was no pain. She had even retired the side in order for two straight innings, right up until Min Do-hee's surprise bunt. Just that one pitch had slipped, ever so slightly, out of her hand. A pitch meant as an inside brushback had tailed in by a hair. And of all moments, it had to come in Kang Tae-oh's at-bat. ...And of all people, he had to be the one to square it up. That was all.
Tap, tap.
Baek Ha-rin opened the comment box. She knew perfectly well there was nothing more ridiculous than getting worked up over a single internet comment. But that one—someone who knew nothing, flatly declaring her rehab a failure—she simply could not let slide.
...
Too detailed, maybe.
While she spent a few seconds debating whether to delete it, the replies kept coming:
...
Click.
Reading any further would only grind her down—that much was obvious—so Baek Ha-rin switched her phone off entirely. The voices of the other players drifted in from outside the locker room, fading into the distance.
Fact is, either way, a man hit it and it cleared the fence.
...It was true.
Whether it had been a mistake pitch, whether she had let her guard down, whether it was a scrimmage and not a real game—an ironclad fact remained: a ball hit by a man had gone over her wall.
...
She had to prove it. That it had been nothing more than a single mistake—that she was not some pitcher who let men like him knock home runs out of the park.