Double Peace
Game One of the KBO postseason playoffs.
The home crowd packing the stadium was not disappointed. From start to finish, the game belonged to the Suwon Wizards — and the final score said the same.
And the MVP of Game One was…
"Our goal has always been the championship! We'll keep showing you great baseball!"
Lee Dae-beom.
Charlie, six innings, one run. Gong Ji-hoo, two-for-four with two home runs and three RBI. Plenty of players had their moments.
But Lee Dae-beom's line was more than enough for the hardware.
Four-for-four. One home run. Four RBI.
A pure cleanup-hitter performance.
And yet, the player who completely dominated the Suwon Wizards fan community was someone else entirely.
Ever since returning from injury, Gong Ji-hoo had been putting up completely different numbers and pulling off all kinds of strange antics. He had always been the player who owned the biggest share of attention in the Suwon Wizards fan community.
And the internet was a place where meaning twisted itself into something else entirely — whether he intended it or not.
So Gong Ji-hoo, the man who had just set off a ceremony controversy, found himself here:
"Alright. What do you say?"
"I… I'm the idiot who was the only one who couldn't get on base…"
They were holding a reflection meeting with the draft classmates at their usual café.
A regressor returning to the past only to get screwed over by the entire world is, without a doubt, not a recent trend.
Which meant—
"I'm not the one who's wrong. This world is wrong…"
"Why is this guy broken now?"
Right. Maybe it was a scheme by the Irons, wary of my ridiculous performance. I had been carelessly taken in by Ryu Hyun-seo's kind face.
"Hey! Gong Ji-hoo!"
"…Huh?"
Lee Dae-beom clicked his tongue like he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"We just finished fixing Park Ji-han yesterday and now you're the one falling apart? What are you guys, robot vacuums?"
"Hah… must be nice, Dae-beom."
"What is?"
"You won MVP and still managed to generate zero controversy. I'm genuinely envious. Deeply envious, my friend…"
"…You looking for a fight?"
The muscle pig sitting on the bench rose to his feet. I had a solid build of my own, but—
That frame is half a ton…
"This."
An Sung-woo, who had been quietly watching the whole thing, held out his phone to Lee Dae-beom.
So this is that thrilling height-difference thing people talk about.
An Sung-woo, at 173 centimeters, was short for a baseball player. Lee Dae-beom, at 190, had to duck his head just to look at the phone being held out to him.
A disgustingly well-matched pair.
"This bastard's thinking something weird again."
"Ah — no I'm not?"
I should probably cut back on the novel input going forward.
I was following along just fine and then the whole thing drifted off a cliff…
"Ah… it was because of this ceremony?"
Only after reading the community reactions An Sung-woo showed him did Lee Dae-beom grasp the situation.
"But… it's not actually that, right?"
He asked carefully.
"It's not!!"
There was no choice now. I had to perform somehow and land an interview.
Which meant—
"Ji-han, you good?"
I asked Park Ji-han, who wore a calm expression.
"Yeah. I'm fine."
"Alright. Let's go hard."
Today's game. The Suwon Wizards had a small change.
Leadoff: An Sung-woo.
Two-hole: Park Ji-han.
The table-setter order had been flipped.
"Game One of the playoffs ended in a Suwon Wizards victory. But the series is far from decided. And now — Game Two of the playoffs is underway!"
"The Gwangju Irons lineup stepping up first shows no real changes. Honestly, yesterday's game wasn't a hitting problem. The lineup did what it was supposed to do. The issue was…"
"Charlie's outstanding start for the Wizards, combined with the sheer firepower of their middle of the order. In fact, once Charlie came out of the game in the late innings, the Irons strung together runs and closed the gap to four."
"And leading that charge, as always — here he is! Stepping into the box, the Irons' leadoff hitter, Ryu Hyun-seo!"
Ryu Hyun-seo stood in the batter's box with a complicated mix of feelings.
I didn't think the Wizards would be this strong…
The Suwon Wizards he remembered and the Suwon Wizards he was meeting in fall baseball were two very different teams.
Of course the Wizards were a strong club — two spots above his own Gwangju Irons in the standings. But still.
The lineup's destructive power is different.
The middle of the order was putting up a completely different level of overwhelming firepower. And at the center of that firepower—
Crack!
Ryu Hyun-seo swung cleanly and then dropped his head. He had perfectly squared up a tough left-hander's changeup, but the ball traced a gentle arc — and waiting at the end of it was already a player in position.
Thud.
"Out!!"
Gong Ji-hoo.
…I wanted to lift one more trophy before heading to America.
For the first time in the postseason, Ryu Hyun-seo found himself thinking that it might not happen.
"Top of the first. Looks like Jack, the Wizards' starter, woke up on the sunny side of the bed today. Three up, three down — the Suwon Wizards cleanly end the inning and prepare to hit!"
"Jack is a pretty streaky pitcher. He's thrown a complete-game shutout in the regular season, but he's also had outings where the command deserts him and he's pulled early. A good Jack is a very welcome thing for the Suwon Wizards."
"Exactly right! On the other side, the Irons' starter today is Felix — always a picture of stability. He also ate up over 180 innings this season, showing real innings-eater credentials."
"His main weapons are a two-seam fastball and a changeup — a contact-manager type. The Wizards' lineup can't just hand him free outs at-bat after at-bat."
"There's a small change in the Wizards' order today, isn't there? Yesterday's leadoff hitter Park Ji-han moves to the two-hole, and yesterday's two-hole hitter An Sung-woo steps in now as the leadoff man!"
"Manager Kim Tae-sik is entrusting Park Ji-han with a key role again despite yesterday's hitless night. That tells you how much he trusts him."
Whoosh.
"Ball."
"An Sung-woo. Yesterday's line: three times on base including an infield single. With his speed, if he reaches, he becomes a real problem for the Irons!"
"He's a high-level contact hitter by KBO standards. Excellent eye, precise barrel control — a table-setter in every sense of the word."
Just as the booth said, An Sung-woo was every bit the table-setter in the box — stubborn and relentless.
Tick.
"Foul!"
Tick.
"Foul!"
Tough pitches in the zone, he somehow cut. Breaking balls diving out of the zone, he somehow held up.
Whoosh.
"Ball."
And so, after a six-pitch battle, An Sung-woo—
Crack!
—managed to squirt a ground ball that skimmed past the mound.
"An Sung-woo swings! The ball past the mound is moving fast— wait? Wait!!"
It was a sharp grounder on a perfect course to split the infield. But—
"Ryu Hyun-seo! Out of nowhere the shortstop Ryu Hyun-seo snatches it! Can he make the play?! He throws to first as smooth as water! And the result — the result is…"
The ball rocketing from shortstop. The batter sprinting full speed out of the box. At the razor-thin timing of their arrival, the one that got there first was—
"Out!!"
—the ball.
"Ryu Hyun-seo! An absolute gem of a play right out of the first inning!"
"Against a runner as fast as An Sung-woo, he could have rushed it — but he stays calm and gets the out. That's Ryu Hyun-seo for you."
And then—
"After An Sung-woo's hard-luck out, Park Ji-han steps into the box."
Park Ji-han, who had watched the whole thing, took a deep breath and settled into the batter's box.
Park Ji-han thought back to the first time he had wanted to become a baseball player.
Fourth grade. A Little League game he had stumbled across by chance.
The older kid he could see beyond the mound had looked impossibly cool. Maybe that was why.
He had begged his parents for a glove and a bat, then gone looking for Ryu Hyun-seo with nothing but pure impulse.
Ryu Hyun-seo had always been the object of his admiration.
And once they both turned pro, that object of admiration had become an unscalable wall.
Three years of age difference. As kids it had felt enormous; as professionals they were treated as the same generation.
Park Ji-han and Ryu Hyun-seo.
Ryu Hyun-seo had never once given Park Ji-han a reason to regret making him his idol. Cruelly so.
That's why I got so impatient…
To Ryu Hyun-seo, who would soon leave the KBO for something higher, he had wanted to be seen not as a fond little brother but as a rival. Looking back on it now—
"What a joke."
Park Ji-han muttered it in the box, then settled into his stance.
A stance so identical to Ryu Hyun-seo's it looked like someone had just swapped the uniform colors. The posture of a little kid copying his older idol had, at some point, become fully his own.
"Hoo…"
A deep breath.
His grip tightened on the bat. Park Ji-han thought only one thing.
Get on base somehow.
The day before, he had put on a performance so vacant even he couldn't defend it. And his classmates—
Hadn't said a word about it. Not really.
They ribbed me a little, sure.
Probably.
He glanced toward the on-deck circle. Gong Ji-hoo was there, bat in hand, timing pitches.
Ji-hoo was the one who steered it that way.
Lee Dae-beom would have pointed out the problem head-on. An Sung-woo would have offered silent comfort.
The only teammate who could blow away his brooding with useless chatter and dumb jokes was Gong Ji-hoo.
Maybe Dae-beom was right calling him a mental specialist.
Gong Ji-hoo was a strange person.
The old Gong Ji-hoo had always worn a gloomy face — like coming to the ballpark was the last thing on earth he wanted to do. Honestly—
I didn't like it.
Contempt, even, if he was being honest.
And the Gong Ji-hoo he had met again this season—
Completely different person.
By his own account, he had finished a long stretch of wandering and simply returned to his original personality. Park Ji-han didn't fully buy it, but—
"Why do I smile so much when I play? Because it's fun."
Being able to play baseball again after so long — how could that not feel like a blessing?
That was how Gong Ji-hoo had answered a question once.
It's only been six months, though…
Sometimes Gong Ji-hoo showed a surprising ignorance about pro baseball — as if, just like he said, he had gone a long time without even looking at the game before picking it back up.
The "secret intel" on the Irons pitchers that Gong Ji-hoo had shared with great ceremony as his trump card had turned out to be nothing more than things the analytics team could have told them in finer detail. It had also been stuffed with useless trivia about players' hometowns and food preferences.
When Gong Ji-hoo had then loudly claimed that intel was the reason he hit two home runs, Park Ji-han hadn't known whether to laugh or cry.
That was just him hitting well.
Did he actually regress like the protagonist of one of his novels or something?
Like the Gong Ji-hoo who starred in Gong Ji-hoo's own stories.
Park Ji-han let out a small snort of laughter.
The Irons catcher, seeing that expression, muttered—
"Seriously… every single one of these Wizards guys has gone weird…"
"It's because of Gong Ji-hoo, sunbae."
"Figured as much."
That's right. It was because of Gong Ji-hoo.
The one who had made him stop treating this series as his last chance against Ryu Hyun-seo, and start treating it as nothing more than a stepping stone to the Korean Series—
So.
Whoosh!
He forced the hands that wanted to swing to stop.
"Ball."
If Gong Ji-hoo was the reason he had lowered the stakes of this game in his own heart, then Gong Ji-hoo could take the responsibility for it too.
Whoosh!
The pitcher delivered.
Gong Ji-hoo said he could see the trajectory of a pitch.
Park Ji-han could not. But he had always been a player who improved himself through imitation.
Crack!
He stayed through a faintly visible breaking ball and punched it the other way with the grain of the swing—
"Park Ji-han goes the other way! The ball clears the first baseman's glove! Park Ji-han's first hit of the playoffs! One out, runner on first!"
—and it was a single.
And then—
Waaaaaaaaah!!
"The home crowd is starting to roar! Every Wizards fan in the building is waiting for what this next hitter can do!"
— Now batting, number three, left fielder, Gong Ji-hoo —
Gong Ji-hoo stepped into the box with a sly grin, lowered his body, and settled into his stance.
The smile Park Ji-han had just worn looked strangely like that one.