As a Fixed-Nick, I Won't Stand for Baseball Noobs Acting Tough! / First Relief Appearance
“Ha... yeah. This is the gallery, all right.”
Clutching my pounding chest, I clicked into the thread.
Jang10Sae exhibition season stats
21 games, 19 innings, 5.79 ERA
29 hits allowed, 6 home runs allowed, 25 strikeouts
WHIP of 1.58
What, "it's only spring training, cut him some slack"? Sure. Average fastball velocity 138 km/h — a dime a dozen among right-handers.
Arsenal? Barely a slider and a fastball. That's it.
Guaranteed to start in the minors, and if he's lucky, long-relief mop-up duty in the first team.
And THIS guy is a pitcher to look forward to?
Seriously, flush the looks-fans out of this gallery already, dammit.
Vicious, scathing criticism.
“Hnk... I-I want to argue back.”
Because the truth is, the pitcher is hiding his real ability!
Unable to work up the nerve to reply, I was still gnawing over the post when live comments started piling up beneath it.
As expected, the comments section was not exactly full of kind words.
“Aaagh!”
I'd chosen to click knowing what I'd find, but it stung far more cleanly and thoroughly than I'd braced for.
It's an anonymous community anyway. Maybe I should just go for it?
“Yeah! Dammit! Who's gonna recognize me anyway?”
Resolved, I was hammering out a wall-of-text reply when — right in the middle — another new comment dropped.
“Dancing Goose?”
I didn't browse the gallery often enough to know the details, but I figured this must be that famous fixed-nick everyone talked about.
Either way, a big-name user had just materialized out of nowhere and started running interference for me.
It felt like someone dabbing burn ointment onto a heart scraped raw.
Before long, the analysis post written by Dancing Goose went up in the gallery.
I opened it without even a flicker of hesitation.
For the record, I'm someone who watched every single exhibition game without missing one.
As you all know, Jang Han-sae got into a car accident right after his military discharge, and his form has taken a serious hit because of it.
Thankfully, he recovered his body quickly and returned to the team, and he looked good enough to make the first-team spring camp roster.
Now, I'll cut the preamble and get to the point.
Jang Han-sae's biggest strengths are his command and his breaking balls.
The raw power of his fastball is well below par, but he can paint the corners where hitters struggle to do damage.
Look at his pitch distribution charts from the exhibition games: not a single throw strayed far outside the strike zone.
Not one wild pitch — the kind of thing minor-league arms do like breathing — is worth noting.
And hey, the bastard listing stats upthread? You conveniently left out the walks, didn't you?
Jang Han-sae's total walks across the entire exhibition season: exactly one. One.
And even that one was issued to Yu Chang-ki, who draws 80-plus free passes every single season.
At this point, even the tadpoles swimming around inside your nut sacks know Jang Han-sae has elite command.
Now then, let's talk breaking balls.
His arsenal isn't exactly deep, but he can throw a slider and a curveball.
To the floating anon who wrote that earlier post:
You claimed he's a two-pitch pitcher with nothing but a slider and a fastball. Keep fabricating and you die. For real.
Starting with the curve: it drops from twelve to six o'clock with a huge vertical break.
The drop on Jang Han-sae's curveball is roughly 28 cm.
At that level, it holds up even when you compare it to major leaguers.
And his true weapon is the slider — average velocity of a whopping 138 km/h.
That is to say, the exact same average speed as his fastball.
On top of that, it breaks with a sharp, late bite, so from the batter's box it's nearly impossible to distinguish from the fastball until it's too late.
These are the reasons people say Jang Han-sae is a pitcher worth getting your hopes up about.
He's kind of easy on the eyes, too, lol
“Truly an analysis as sharp and precise as a multi-blade razor.”
Reading down the post, I found myself genuinely admiring Dancing Goose's breakdown.
Not because it flattered me, obviously!
What impressed me was how skillfully it caught all the details the raw numbers had buried.
So this is what they call a "stan fixed-nick," huh?
Yet when I figured the post had to be nearly over, there was still scroll left on the page.
“Seems like he's said everything there is to say. What else could there be?”
Thinking that, I scrolled on down.
Of course, there are downsides.
Everything other than the strengths listed above is a downside.
The biggest of them is stamina.
The car accident is a factor, but either way, the man's stamina is abysmal.
Which means he'll probably get used as a one-point reliever, and even at his best, one inning is his ceiling.
A delivery with no distinguishing traits worth a thing is a problem too.
And compared to his command, his raw stuff is way, way, way, WAY too weak.
The moment all of these flaws stack up and his tank starts running dry, he turns into a batting-practice pitching machine.
But even so, I'm going to keep cheering for Jang Han-sae.
If any of you are true Urbans fans, root for the team's young prospects with a little kindness, will you?
It won't be too late to curse him out after he's established himself in the first team and goes into a slump.
Three-line summary
1. His command and breaking balls are legit
2. But everything else is a letdown
3. Still, let's cheer him on hard
“Haah... giving the disease and the cure in the same breath, huh.”
Truthfully, not a single word of it was wrong.
The strengths, the weaknesses — all of it hit dead on.
Going by this post alone, Dancing Goose seemed like a remarkably logical, level-headed person.
You could tell just from watching the mood of the comment section flip entirely.
Considerable influence within the gallery.
A single word of encouragement from someone like that carried real weight with me.
“Yeah... if he's a fan, then cheering me on is his job...”
But before that, the players themselves had to go out and perform well enough to be worth cheering for.
I turned my head toward the baseball sitting beside my desk, picked it up, and squeezed it tight as I steeled my resolve.
“I'm going to flood the front page with GIFs of me doing awesome things!”
A small ambition.
“By the way, who on earth is this fixed-nick, really?”
My curiosity about the identity of Dancing Goose didn't last long.
Because a fixed-nick under a name I absolutely could not scroll past appeared: HansaejjingSaranghae★.
“Heheh.”
And that's how I topped up my dopamine reserves, reading a roughly four-thousand-character wall of text devoted entirely to defending Jang Han-sae.
Myo A-rin's studio apartment.
The soft glow of a laptop screen faintly lit a room already sunk in darkness.
“Running their mouths about things they don't even understand.”
It's the internet, sure — but watching baseball noobs get cocky was something A-rin would die before tolerating.
And if the target of that nonsense was her childhood friend, then even more so: the facts demanded rebuttal.
“Kids like this are the kind you have to hunt down and crack their skulls open, one careful stitch at a time.”
Even after posting her long analytical rebuttal, the anger wouldn't dissipate.
Did I write it too one-sidedly? No — every word of it was fact, and now that he's technically a coworker at the same company, it's fine to shield him a little. It's not like he's just some random guy...
With that thought, A-rin closed her laptop.
My heart was pounding.
Do I have hyperhidrosis or something?
My hands were sweating so much I'd kneaded the rosin bag until it wore soft and crumbly.
Just as the manager had promised, I'd made the first-team Opening Day roster.
And the first-team debut I'd longed for — it had arrived, right at this very moment.
The problem was that it had come as a relief appearance in the bottom of the eighth inning with nobody out and the bases loaded.
The score was 4:1 — we held a three-run lead.
The opponent: the Fighters, another club based in Seoul.
You told me you'd put me in when the score gap was big! Big!
Never in my wildest imagination did I picture being thrown into a high-leverage moment like this!
I covered my mouth with my glove and let the curses fly.
Even just that much seemed to loosen the knot of tension a little...
And the batter I'd face was the Fighters' cleanup hitter.
Worse — a foreign player I hadn't laid eyes on even during the exhibition games.
Which is to say: I had zero data on him!
My three warm-up pitches were done, and the home plate umpire signaled for play to resume.
From here on out, it was the real thing.
The stage of Jang Han-sae's professional, first-team debut.
“Whew...”
I took a long, deep breath and gave a firm nod to the catcher's sign.