The Season's Final Game (3)
Flailing in the swamp of my own complacency, I found myself in crisis in the blink of an eye, and I scrambled to sort the situation out inside my head.
Top of the sixth, score locked at 0–0. Runners on first and third, nobody out. Kim Dohyeon at the plate.
I was desperately trying to get my stalled brain moving again when—
"…So what are you going to do?"
Catcher Kim Gyeongmo had come out to the mound and asked me. He was clearly asking about the direction of the next pitch, but somehow it landed in my ears like a rebuke for the mess I'd created by pitching so carelessly.
…What do I throw?
The first thing that came to mind was the most realistic option. Concede a run if I had to, and focus on inducing weak contact for an out. Ground ball, sacrifice fly—whatever it took. Give up one run, get out of the inning, and trust the lineup to manufacture another chance. That was plenty possible.
Yeah… one run is still fine. We can claw one back easy enough…
But the moment I remembered the score was still 0–0, my thoughts veered hard in another direction.
If this 0–0 balance breaks now…
Cold sweat ran down my spine.
I couldn't settle on what was best. Not easily.
"…"
What was worst, though—that much was crystal clear.
A walk was absolutely not an option.
Bases loaded, nobody out, with Park Taewon coming up.
That was the one thing I had to avoid.
I bit down on my lip and steeled myself.
"…Let's go after him."
So I chose a head-on fight.
In the end, fretting wasn't going to spit out an answer. And even if it did, baseball was not a sport that moved the way you intended. It didn't land where you calculated, and it never played out exactly like the picture in your head.
Which left only one thing.
Do not walk him. To make sure of that, I had to challenge him straight up.
In this situation, that was the best I could do.
Kim Gyeongmo gave a quiet nod of agreement.
"…Yeah. Let's do it."
He tapped his mitt twice, lightly, and took a step back. He looked me in the eye one last time, then walked slowly down off the mound.
This was a crisis I had brought on myself.
So the responsibility was mine to carry.
I locked that resolve in place and squeezed the baseball tight in my right hand.
Right on the edge of October, a late-autumn wind brushed cold across my cheek.
But in front of a shoulder burning hot with Full Power Pitching switched on, even that chill lost its bite almost at once—as if it melted the second it touched the heat pouring off my body.
Crack!
On the fourth pitch, Kim Dohyeon forced a well-located low-and-inside cutter up into the air. He'd swung with full intent—his body bowed back like an archer's draw—but his core strength was monstrous enough that his balance never broke.
"Ptoo."
I checked the flight of the ball and spat once. The high fly dropped into the stands down the first-base line.
After how thoroughly he'd been beaten in his first two at-bats, you might have expected him to hesitate at least once by now. But Kim Dohyeon's bat still jumped out the instant anything neared the strike zone.
As if it were saying,
You have to go after me this time. No choice.
There was no hesitation in that swing.
Then…
—Slider.
So the next pitch was settled: a slider.
Count was one ball, two strikes. Perfect timing for a chase pitch.
A back-foot slider that would look, for a heartbeat, like the same track as the fourth-pitch cutter—then break deeper and drop. A dagger of a pitch, slipping in under the residual image of that cutter still sitting in Kim Dohyeon's head.
He was staring me down, eyes wide. The tip of his bat swayed in a steady rhythm, but his gaze never wavered.
I drew a short breath and set my foot on the rubber.
I started the delivery. In that brief instant when every ounce of force in my body gathered into my fingertips—
Now.
I drove hard into the right side of the ball with my index and middle fingers and let it go.
But—
The moment I released it, there was no catch of the seams against my fingertips at all.
…Wait.
The slider that should have slid and dropped toward the batter's ankles floated up with zero movement and rode straight into the zone.
And then—
CRACK!
Kim Dohyeon's bat flashed, and a clean, ringing crack of contact punched straight into my ears.
"He's pulled it! It's carrying, still carrying, still going—toward the wall——"
The high drive was headed for the fence.
"Caught in front! Third-base runner tags, strolls home. Kim Dohyeon's sacrifice fly puts the Suwon Storms on the board first!"
"Hoo…"
I watched the right fielder snag it just in front of the warning track and pressed a hand to my chest.
Ugh. Thought it was gone for a second. Nearly had a heart attack.
The familiar alarm—A wild pitch has occurred!—never flashed. But this had absolutely been a wild pitch. Not the kind the System forced into the middle of the plate on a probability roll. Just my own lack of skill. My own hand failing to finish the ball cleanly.
Setting him up with the cutter was perfect. Of all times for the slider to hang…
It would have been better not to give up the run at all, but under the circumstances I could almost call this a bargain. Bases loaded threat with nobody out, and my best put-away pitch—the back-foot slider—coming in as a hanger… getting out of it for a single run was cheap.
One out, runner on first. And into the box stepped another man to watch: the three-hole hitter, Park Taewon.
I drew one long breath and waited for the sign.
—Four-seam.
Kim Gyeongmo wanted a four-seam fastball, low and fading away.
An easy pitch. One I'd already thrown any number of times today. And a perfect location to set up the slider–four-seam either-or against a right-handed hitter like Park Taewon.
I threw it without hesitation.
Whoosh—!
"Strike!"
The pitch had drifted a little toward the middle, and my chest clenched—but true to his careful nature, Park Taewon just watched it go by.
It was the moment his greatest strength and his greatest weakness both showed. That patient approach earned him a lot of walks and a high on-base percentage, but it also meant that unless a first pitch was genuinely too good to lay off, he almost always took it.
—Slider.
Kim Gyeongmo's next sign came. First-pitch strike secured; time to put him on the hellish slider–four-seam either-or.
Whoosh—!
"…Ngh!"
Park Taewon's bat started to come with it, then stopped just in time. Only Park Taewon could have held up. Against any ordinary right-handed hitter, that pitch would have dragged the bat out a hundred percent of the time.
One ball, one strike. I kept hammering the either-or without mercy.
"Ball."
"Strike!"
Tick!
Park Taewon barely nicked a slider running away outside and kept the at-bat alive.
Unlike Kim Dohyeon, he was calmly picking his pitches—but even for him, the combination of a seventy-grade four-seam and a sixty-grade slider was clearly no picnic. He was surviving, nothing more.
—Slider.
Kim Gyeongmo put down the sign. I shook my head.
—Four-seam.
—Nod.
At the new sign, I allowed myself a small, satisfied smile. I nodded once and set into my delivery.
"Hup!"
Got it!
With a sharp grunt of effort, the ball left my fingertips. Of everything I'd thrown today, this one had the cleanest finish off the hand.
It rode low, as if it meant to skim the dirt on its way to the mitt. If you accounted for natural gravitational drop, it wouldn't have looked strange for the ball to hit the ground.
But—
Whiiiiish—!
It didn't drop. It drove almost in a straight line. The trajectory was so flat it felt like the ball was ignoring gravity—
Thwack!
—and it vanished into a spot that looked impossibly far away for Park Taewon to even think of reaching, and yet was unmistakably inside the strike zone.
"Outside—— it's in! Strikeout! Park Taewon freezes!"
"I thought it was a little off the plate myself, but that pitch just nicks the zone. Heh."
The day of the season's final game.
The Wonju Flyers front office was as busy as ever. The final standing for the year was last place again—same as last season—but the sharp play they'd shown down the stretch had left the office atmosphere surprisingly bright.
Thanks to that, the end-of-season team dinner that every year got planned and then fizzled out under a bad mood was actually going to happen properly this time. It had been a long while since the office hadn't been sagging on the last day of the season.
"You don't think… we'll lose today, do you?"
Cheon Sojin said it with a touch of worry as she flipped through a file, and the staffer at the next desk folded his arms and answered with total confidence.
"Today's starter is Han Doyoon, Team Leader. Don't worry about a thing~ You can watch this one with your feet up."
The other staff all nodded in agreement at once.
"Exactly."
"The way I see it, Doyoon could walk into the majors right now and hold his own. How does he throw like that?"
Han Doyoon had only appeared in three games, and already the entire front office treated him like a walking good-luck charm. Laughter bloomed through the office.
Sojin closed the last approval file, tidied the edges of her desk, and said,
"You all go on ahead. I'll finish this and be right there."
One of the staffers poked her head around the partition with a teasing grin.
"You're not… trying to skip the dinner again, are you, Team Leader?"
Sojin let out a laugh mixed with a sigh.
"Come on. I'm definitely coming today. If you're that worried, one of you can stay and work with me, and we'll go together."
"No, no, no! We're good! Then we'll take it as a promise—you're coming today!"
The staffers shoved each other toward the door and poured out of the office in a noisy rush. Even as the door was closing, someone stuck her head back in and called,
"Team Leader! You really have to come!"
Click.
The office door shut, and the moment it did, the place went quiet as if by magic. The air that had been so loud a second ago settled into calm.
Alone, Cheon Sojin pulled the papers on her desk back toward her and got to work. For a while, the only sound in the office was the tap of her fingers on the keyboard.
Then, suddenly—
…I wonder if Doyoon is pitching well.
After her conversation with Cheon Ihyun, Cheon Sojin had decided to try getting a little closer to Han Doyoon. So if the chance came today—even at the team dinner—she meant to strike up a conversation with him.
It wasn't for any other reason. Absolutely not. Just as Ihyun had said, if she was going to do a general manager's work someday, she needed to learn how to build relationships with people. Han Doyoon, with whom she'd already had a bit of friction, was simply a suitable target for that.
That was all it was.
Nothing more.