A Cascade of Criticism
Article after article with dizzying headlines kept flooding my vision.
“Come on, I already said it in the interview. The Tommy John complications healed.”
The first thing I felt was injustice. Sure, the Status Window was a cheat key of sorts, but my velocity had risen because my elbow had come back. I hadn’t borrowed the System’s power for this. It was the talent I already had, my body, and the work I’d put in that produced that speed.
And they were calling me a doper with zero evidence?
“Wow… that bastard Kim Yeongseon. What the hell kind of interview is this?”
Then came the anger. The moment I read the interview, a curse I almost never used slipped out of my mouth on its own.
Fine. Even giving him a hundred concessions, a sudden jump in velocity could make people suspicious. That alone already stung.
But we weren’t strangers. A senior I’d played with on the same team for two and a half years talking like that… this was too much.
He never once said the words “drugs” or “doping.”
“But honestly speaking, I’ve been playing baseball for over a decade, and I’ve never seen velocity climb like that in just two months.”
“Just… any fan who’s watched baseball long enough would’ve felt it. A person changing that suddenly… well, it don’t usually come from ordinary methods, y’know.”
“Not that I’m suspecting him… no. Doyoon ain’t that kind of kid. He isn’t.”
Kim Yeongseon had circled around it so cleverly that anyone listening would think “doping,” then casually pulled his foot out at the end.
The betrayal was one thing, but how a person could be this low… I truly couldn’t understand it.
And the fallout from that interview was nothing short of disastrous.
Hate comments on that level were still the polite ones.
As if the limits had been lifted, the hate aimed at me poured down without end. Every sentence, every word felt like a blade slicing straight into my skin.
It wasn’t as if I’d never gotten hate comments before. Back with the Seoul Wales, when my performance was bad, the fans’ mockery was something I could shrug off as “just part of pro life.”
But this was different. Right now, fans from all ten clubs were swarming in to tear me apart, and even people who weren’t baseball fans were gleefully stringing me up and throwing stones.
And the last emotion that rose as I watched that spectacle was—
“Excuse me… are you Han Doyoon?”
“H-huh?!”
Fear.
I’d been staring at my phone as if hypnotized when my name came from right behind me, and my heart dropped straight into my stomach. I turned. A middle-aged man who looked like a father stood there, a cute little kid clutching his hand tightly beside him.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. My kid’s a big Han Doyoon fan. Would it be possible to get a photo…?”
The man’s tone was polite, and the child’s eyes held nothing but pure, bright excitement. No threat, no malice, no suspicion at all.
And still my chest hammered like mad, and my fingertips trembled.
This guy doesn’t think I’m a junkie too, right?
Or has he just not seen the articles yet?
“…Ah, yes. Sorry. You startled me.”
I forced down the thoughts flooding in and managed a stiff smile.
Even then, the fear that someone might whisper behind my back, that someone might point a finger, kept the hate comments I’d just read circling through my head like auditory hallucinations. My eyes lost focus and wavered.
After taking the photo, I hurried away toward the elevator. Even the murmur of the restaurant felt like every voice was aimed at me, and my breath kept catching in my throat.
“Haa…”
Only when the elevator doors closed did I finally manage to breathe. The moment they opened again I rushed down the hallway and into the room.
— Click.
The instant the door shut, the silence inside the room closed around my throat.
“Haa… haa…”
I hadn’t even walked that far, yet my breath shook as if I’d just sprinted full out.
I had no idea how long I’d been sitting there.
Collapsed in front of the entrance, I just stared blankly at the floor.
Then—
“You’re back? Where’d you go?”
The bathroom door opened and a familiar voice came through. My roommate for this road trip: Kim Gyeongmo.
I jerked my head up. The sudden sound made my heart lurch again, and Gyeongmo stopped short, eyes going round at the look on my face.
“What the hell? What’s wrong with you? Did something happen?”
He must have realized something was seriously off, because he came over in a hurry without even finishing drying his hair. He looked my face over from every angle, then crouched right down in front of me.
“Doyoon. What’s going on. You okay? Can you get up?”
My legs had gone completely soft. With Gyeongmo hyung’s support I barely managed to sit on the bed.
“…Sorry, hyung.”
Gyeongmo hyung frowned.
“Sorry for what. What the hell happened to put you like this. Your face is white as a sheet. Drink some water first.”
I took the cold water he handed me and drank. The fog that had been sitting on my mind started to clear a little.
“…Senior. Look at this.”
“Hm…? What’s this.”
With shaking hands I unlocked my phone and showed him the Kim Yeongseon interview screen.
Gyeongmo hyung’s expression hardened the further he scrolled. A few seconds later he pulled his eyes off the screen and looked at me. Shock and anger burned in them at the same time.
At first she hadn’t planned to go this far. Han Doyoon’s pitches had simply been too good, so she had intended to write one calm, long post and leave it at that. How his body was actually functioning, what changes had occurred, and that a velocity jump of that size was genuinely possible without doping — she laid out every piece of evidence she knew in a logical explanation.
What came back was not a conversation.
Park Haeun bit down hard on her lip.
“…Hah. Fine. I’ll just go back to watching pitches.”
She swallowed her anger and returned to the pitch data window. The astonishing vertical movement Han Doyoon was showing, the release changes when his form shifted, the spin axis, and on and on…
Haeun fed every one of those values into the pitching model she had built herself and quietly waited for the analysis results to appear.
But—
She kept thinking about them. Those comments that refused conversation. People who clung to a false premise, already decided on their conclusion, and only drove everything toward it.
And…
The indiscriminate flood of accusations against Han Doyoon as well.
“No matter how I look at it… this isn’t right.”
Haeun stared at the monitor and clenched her small hands tight. She knew. She was certain that Han Doyoon’s velocity increase was not the result of doping-driven muscle gains.
Knowing that, and still just digging into “the pitches she liked” without saying a word, suddenly made her feel unbearably cowardly.
Simply analyzing Han Doyoon’s pitches and being satisfied with that was no different, in this moment, from leaving Doyoon alone and abandoned.
In the end Haeun opened the community window again. She opened her own post, already buried under hundreds of downvotes. And one by one she read every comment and began writing rebuttals.
At first she meant to stay calm. Attach evidence, lay out logic, dismantle the other side’s claims one at a time.
But after reading only a few comments, Haeun’s expression hardened completely.
Her breath caught. This wasn’t conversation. It was only voices that had already decided the conclusion, forcing people into that frame and mocking them.
Haeun’s fingers were already moving far faster than her own will.
The sentences stayed measured, but inside she was already boiling. Still she kept writing, and writing, tearing down, rebutting…
Then, suddenly, something in her head felt like it snapped with a clean click.
In the brief pause while she was mid-rebuttal, a thought crossed her mind.
…Wait. If I’m going to fight this hard, don’t I need to know more about the person named Han Doyoon too?
Until now she had only looked at “pitcher Han Doyoon’s” pitches. She took the data, watched the form, analyzed the numbers.
But people were attacking “the human Han Doyoon.” His past, his injury history, the flow of his games — all twisted however they liked.
Haeun closed the window and immediately typed “Han Doyoon” into the search bar.
Press articles, interviews, his amateur record, game footage from his Wales days — she opened them one after another.
The interview where he said he’d refined his form himself while resting the elbow. Articles about how he never gave up even after his velocity dropped. Even photos from fan signings and volunteer events.
And—
The Phoenix Flag final. The game where, after throwing 130 pitches the day before, he came back out as the closer and delivered the team’s championship. The fact that that was what had wrecked his elbow so badly.
Once she knew that much about Han Doyoon, the urge to protect him only grew stronger.
So she kept rebutting, and rebutting, and rebutting again.
— Click, click.
Lost in that trance, flipping through internet windows, she suddenly noticed the clock on the monitor.
“…Did I just pull an all-nighter?”
Morning sunlight had already been peeking through the curtains for quite some time.