How Do You Counter Gong Ji-hoo?
CRACK!
Lee Dae-beom, the cleanup hitter for the Suwon Wizards, swung his bat with casual ease. The clean, compact stroke sent the ball sailing into the left fielder’s glove—but it was more than enough.
“Safe!”
The distance was plenty for the runner on third, Gong Ji-hoo, to come home.
“Haa…”
Kim Jae-sang watched Gong Ji-hoo head back to the dugout and high-five Lee Dae-beom, then let out a long sigh.
“If we work the pitcher to three balls, do you think that guy’s mental game can hold up?”
Gong Ji-hoo’s words from the batter’s box kept replaying in his head.
It was a pitch we’d planned from the start… but maybe it put more pressure on Sang-eon than I expected.
A triple off Gong Ji-hoo?
That could happen.
At least in Kim Jae-sang’s mind, giving up a hit to Gong Ji-hoo was nothing to be ashamed of.
But.
Walking the next batter on four straight balls had stung a little more.
Cornered into a one-out, runners on first and third situation, he’d thrown a mistake pitch that Lee Dae-beom turned into a sacrifice fly.
No… wait.
At least it hadn’t cleared the fence. That was something.
Is it lucky that Lee Dae-beom’s stuck on nine home runs?
If that mistake pitch had gone over the wall, it would have been an absolute nightmare for Kim Sang-eon on his first career start. Kim Jae-sang forced himself to settle his mind with that thought and started back toward home plate—
“Ugh… that bastard’s really something.”
He ground his teeth as he watched Gong Ji-hoo, who had just ducked into the dugout only to pop right back out again.
Bleh—
A childish little act of revenge.
[Lee Dae-beom’s sacrifice fly puts the Suwon Wizards back in front. Score is now 3–2. Swallows catcher Kim Jae-sang is heading out to the mound to say something to starter Kim Sang-eon.]
[Given that this is his first start, it looks like he’s trying to keep him from getting too tense. Kim Jae-sang’s already in his fifth year, and you can really see that veteran poise.]
While the broadcast booth kept talking, a camera that had caught something earlier quickly cut to the replay.
[Here’s the scoring play from a moment ago. Plenty of distance for the runner on third to come home. Gong Ji-hoo’s no slowpoke, after all.]
Gong Ji-hoo charging home.
Then the high-five with Lee Dae-beom.
Just as the commentators were about to rehash what they’d already said over an ordinary shot—
[Looks like Gong Ji-hoo stepped back out of the dugout for a second. And then…]
A vivid flash of bright red on the broadcast camera.
Gong Ji-hoo’s tongue.
And right there on screen was Kim Jae-sang’s thoroughly disgusted expression as he watched it.
[Haha! Well… those two must be really close.]
[They’re draft classmates, so that makes sense. It’s actually nice to see. This is what sports are about. Even if they’re on opposite teams, at the end of the day they’re still guys who play the same game.]
The broadcast booth was throwing up every shield they had for the two young players.
The rough top of the third finally ended.
“Kim Jae-sang! Get over here!”
The manager called him over.
“You wanted me, Skip?”
“What the hell were those pitches in Gong Ji-hoo’s at-bat?! You going easy on him because you went to the same school?”
No… seriously.
Kim Jae-sang barely swallowed the anger rising in his throat.
“Sorry, Skip.”
He clenched his jaw and bowed his head.
“That guy’s nothing special! Stop calling for meaningless off-speed junk that just runs up the pitch count and lead with some damn confidence!”
Kim Jae-sang bowed once more as the manager waved him off, then headed back. He was sitting on the bench peeling off his gear when—
“You okay, hyung?”
It was today’s starter, Kim Sang-eon.
“I’m fine. More importantly, how about you? Was it that bad having me call nothing but off-speed? Want to go back to normal next time Ji-hoo’s up?”
“No.”
Instant answer.
“I get now why you’ve been so hung up on Gong Ji-hoo since yesterday. What even is that senior? There’s literally no pitch you can throw him…”
The day before.
Kim Jae-sang had been in a good mood.
“Finally…!”
He’d just finished reading the article that said Gong Ji-hoo would be starting the next game.
Gong Ji-hoo.
He was a very special friend to Kim Jae-sang.
Kim Jae-sang had been a genius since he was little. He’d even chosen Jeil High over a powerhouse program just because it was closer to home—that was how full of confidence he’d been.
Until he met Gong Ji-hoo.
“Hmm… how the hell am I supposed to get that bastard Ji-hoo out.”
After hearing Gong Ji-hoo had come back to life, he’d watched every single one of his game clips. He’d even come up with a few ideas for how to face him, but—
“Is this really the best I’ve got…?”
Whether any of it would actually work on Gong Ji-hoo was still a complete unknown.
Even so, the fact that he was finally going to face the hitter he’d always wanted to go up against made him happy.
“Hyung.”
“Sang-eon?”
And there was another player who was just as excited as Kim Jae-sang.
The rookie pitcher making his first career start.
Kim Sang-eon.
“About tomorrow’s game…”
“What, first start got you nervous? Just do what you always did in the Futures. Your stuff will play in the big club no problem.”
Kim Jae-sang never blew smoke.
Especially not about baseball.
The mere fact that he was even talking to Kim Sang-eon was proof the kid had talent. As someone once put it, Kim Jae-sang was “a genius who even insults his seniors”—and he never wasted attention on players who didn’t have it.
“I’m a little nervous, yeah, but that’s not really it. I just want to put up at least a decent result tomorrow.”
So he’d come looking for advice from his catcher hyung.
Kim Jae-sang took Kim Sang-eon out of the stadium and headed for a nearby café.
“Well… tomorrow’s game probably won’t be that hard. The Wizards have already locked up second place. Guys like Park Ji-han and An Sung-woo will probably sit out, right?”
Sharp read.
At that exact moment, Manager Kim Tae-sik was deciding to put backup players in the starting lineup in place of those two.
“So then…”
“Still won’t be easy, though. It’s your first start, for one… and even without those two, the Wizards are a strong team.”
In his opinion, the talk about the Wizards having thin depth was pure nonsense. What kind of “thin depth” still left you with a team that was hard to handle even after sitting two starters?
Hell, the Wizards’ foreign hitter slot was currently empty. The guy had gotten homesick and gone back to the States.
Thin depth was what you called a team that fell apart the second one starter went down and forced everyone into full-time duty.
In other words, the Busan Swallows.
It’s only thin relative to a team actually competing for the title… bunch of frauds.
“The one I really need to watch out for… is Lee Dae-beom, right?”
“Lee Dae-beom? He’s good, yeah.”
“Then… Lee Se-ho?”
“That one’s actually got clear weaknesses, so he’s easier to handle.”
“…”
“The guy you need to be most careful of is someone else.”
“Who?”
“Gong Ji-hoo.”
Kim Jae-sang’s tone was absolute.
Kim Sang-eon couldn’t help but look startled.
“Gong Ji-hoo… senior? I heard we don’t need to worry about him…”
“Who told you that?”
“The manager and the coaches…”
“Hah.”
Of course.
“What’d those guys say?”
“Don’t get scared just because he’s hitting 1.000 right now. It’s only a month-long fluke. How good can a guy who wastes time on side hobbies really get? And…”
“And?”
“Oh! They definitely said, ‘Mental issues kept him from hitting? If that’s how it works, every single guy in the second team would be Barry Bonds.’”
Honestly, most of the baseball world right now held pretty much the same opinion of Gong Ji-hoo.
If Kim Jae-sang hadn’t known him personally, he probably would have thought the same thing deep down.
“What do you think?”
“Well… the truth is I’m a fan of Author Gong Ji-hoo—I mean, Senior Gong Ji-hoo. As a fan I want to believe it’s not a fluke, but…”
Honestly, I don’t really know.
That was Kim Sang-eon’s answer.
Kim Jae-sang threw him a strange question.
“Sang-eon. How many absolute geniuses do you think there are among active players—guys you feel like you could never reach?”
“Geniuses…? Hmm, among pitchers, seniors like Oh Jin-muk or Do Jeong-hoo. On the hitting side, Senior Ryu Hyun-seo and… you, hyung? And…”
“That’s enough. All the names that needed to come out already did.”
Kim Jae-sang cut him off before he could keep going.
The only players Kim Jae-sang—who considered himself the best—had ever truly regarded as equals were the ones just listed.
“…Hyung, don’t tell me?”
The reason he liked Kim Sang-eon wasn’t just raw talent.
The kid was sharp.
“Author Gong—I mean, Senior Gong—is on that level?”
“Yeah. At the very least, I consider that bastard my rival.”
“W-well, Senior Gong Ji-hoo did hit home runs off Senior Do Jeong-hoo and Senior Oh Jin-muk, but…”
“You think I’d say something like that just because of that?”
Kim Jae-sang opened his mouth.
“I actually went to the same high school as Gong Ji-hoo.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. And that bastard started playing baseball for the first time in high school.”
“That’s insanely late. Ah! So that’s why you call him a genius?”
“If that was all it was, would I call him my rival?”
The Gong Ji-hoo he’d first met in the high school baseball club.
“Every single practice game, that bastard would just pick off the seniors’ pitches like it was nothing.”
If he’d only been making contact, Kim Jae-sang would have written him off as a kid with decent hitting talent.
“But a guy who’d never even properly learned baseball was picking balls and strikes like a damn ghost.”
Sitting behind the plate and watching it had been almost uncanny.
“So I asked him. How the hell do you do that?”
Gulp.
Kim Sang-eon, hanging on every word, swallowed hard.
“You know what Gong Ji-hoo said back?”
“What’d he say…?”
Hah.
Remembering it, Kim Jae-sang let out a hollow laugh.
“He just said, ‘I can see it, so why can’t everyone else?’”
“Are you going easy because it’s the seniors throwing? Was I being dense about that part?”
He’d even tacked that on at the end.
Kim Sang-eon, who had been listening with complete seriousness, waved him off like it was a joke.
“Come on~ Senior Gong’s just full of it. Leave it to a novelist, right?”
“Sounds like bullshit?”
“…You’re saying that’s real? What is this, a novel…?”
Kim Sang-eon finally realized Kim Jae-sang wasn’t messing around.
“So he can just see exactly what kind of breaking ball is coming and where? Does that even make sense?”
“What, you think Gong Ji-hoo’s some novel protagonist like you said? It’s not that extreme.”
Gong Ji-hoo’s vision was actually pretty simple.
“Back in high school he’d literally just started baseball, so he probably didn’t even know what kinds of breaking balls existed. Not sure about now. Anyway, what he means by ‘seeing it’ isn’t that.”
“Then what?”
“The trajectory.”
“…Trajectory?”
“Whether it’s a breaking ball or a fastball, he can see the path the ball’s taking. From the second it leaves the hand he knows if it’s a pitch he can hit or not…”
Kim Jae-sang took a sip of the coffee on the table.
“If the trajectory looks like something he can’t swing at naturally, he just calls it a ball. Crazy bastard.”
Click.
The sound of the coffee cup settling back onto the table rang out clean and clear.
Top of the fifth.
Only one out remaining until the starter’s minimum of five innings.
“Hoo…”
Kim Sang-eon drew in a breath.
Pitch count was a comfortable eighty or so. For a first career start, it was a performance everyone would call solid.
Or so he wanted to believe.
But.
— No. 2 hitter, left fielder Gong Ji-hoo
The final wall felt impossibly high.
Even among baseball players, 190 cm was tall.
A solid, powerful build.
None of that was what really pressed down on him, though.
Hyung was right…
The eyes.
Those eyes under the helmet, smiling that little smile from far away—they were terrifying.
Whoosh—
Kim Sang-eon took Kim Jae-sang’s sign and threw.
A forkball that dropped absurdly low, well below the strike zone.
“You won’t believe it just from hearing it, right? So let’s do this. First at-bat, throw only the locations you like.”
Gong Ji-hoo didn’t so much as twitch.
“Ball.”
And the pitch we threw the normal way went straight over the fence.
The second the ball came back from Kim Jae-sang, Kim Sang-eon set again.
“If the first at-bat doesn’t go well? Then you listen to me and throw it my way once.”
THUD!
A 153 km/h fastball knifed into the low outside corner. A location that would make most hitters flinch.
“Ji-hoo said he fixed his trauma, but does that kind of thing really get fixed overnight? We go after that.”
“Ball.”
Gong Ji-hoo never swung, so of course it was a ball.
“Haa…”
The most frustrating situation imaginable.
“Low. High pitches can turn into extra-base hits right away, so only throw spots even lower than the strike zone. Keep it up until Gong Ji-hoo in the box starts getting antsy about wasting the chance for nothing.”
At least it was a home game, so the crowd would be on their side. That was what Kim Jae-sang had said.
— Hey! You gonna pitch to him or what!
In the first at-bat, that had definitely been the case.
Even a Busan native like him had never heard booing that vicious.
But Gong Ji-hoo had still hit a home run in that atmosphere, and now Kim Sang-eon was throwing nothing but balls that missed the zone only when Gong Ji-hoo was up.
He could feel the boos slowly shifting onto him.
“If Gong Ji-hoo’s trauma really is completely fixed and that fails? Then we throw our ace in the hole.”
Kim Sang-eon took the sign.
He gripped the baseball inside his glove.
Same four-seam fastball grip as before.
The delivery that followed looked identical too.
Except—
Whoooosh—!
He put pressure on his middle finger.
“We go after him with a pitch we haven’t shown yet.”
Cutter.
According to Kim Jae-sang, it was the best pitch in his entire arsenal. So they’d sealed the cutter against Gong Ji-hoo until the very end, saving it as the secret weapon for the most important at-bat.
A pitch that broke ever so slightly in toward Gong Ji-hoo’s body right as it reached the plate.
Watching that exquisite location, Kim Sang-eon remembered the last exchange from that day.
“What if even this doesn’t work?”
To that question, Kim Jae-sang—wearing an awkward expression Kim Sang-eon had never seen on his usually confident face—had answered:
“…Then we’re just fucked.”
“We’re fucked.”
CRAAAAAACK—!!!