When Three Walk Together
“Even if I’m in a slump, you could still count the hitters better than me on one hand, you know?”
“What?”
“I’d at least outhit every Foxes batter.”
Ah.
“What’s wrong?”
An uncomfortable silence settled over us. Sensing the sudden chill in the air, I let out a long breath.
“Haa…”
That was a mistake…
I’d spoken a little too roughly. Still—
I’m not wrong, though.
It wasn’t my fault either way. No need to feel guilty about it.
The catcher had been trying to break my concentration, and I’d simply fired right back. This kind of sharp psychological warfare was part of the beauty of baseball.
…Or is it?
Whatever.
Thwack!!
“Ball.”
See? Despite the catcher telling me to just stand there and take a strikeout, the pitch had sailed clean out of the zone.
“Strikeouts aren’t coming easy, huh…”
“What are you on about now?”
“I’m just standing here, and the pitchers are too scared of some slumping hitter to even challenge me.”
“…”
“Ah, even I’m starting to find myself terrifying.”
“Ji-hoo.”
“Yes?”
“You’re a real pain in the ass.”
I win.
In a war of words, the first one to get irritated loses. That truth was carved into the murals of Goguryeo martial arts.
“Heh…”
Whoosh!!
The verbal sparring ended in my victory. But—
Crack!!
A batter’s true duty comes from the end of the bat, not the tip of the tongue. I lifted a big-breaking curveball dropping from high above, watched the ball clear the infielders’ heads, and strolled leisurely to first base.
Still—
They’re going to give me grief for not hitting a home run again…
I didn’t feel particularly good about it.
I’m a fairly honest person. Everything I’d told my teammates—
I’m not a home-run hitter.
Or—
Baseball’s been easy lately.
—had been completely sincere.
From the beginning, my goal had always been consistency rather than the big swing. Even after my consecutive-game hit streak ended, I’d kept getting on base steadily right up through today’s game. Multi-on-base games were frequent, too.
Still—
“I just can’t help being annoyed…”
“What’s got you so irritated, hyung?”
Sim Ji-hwan handed me an electrolyte drink.
“I just don’t get why everyone’s so desperate to tear me down, you know?”
“Ah, the slump talk?”
“Yeah. The Foxes catcher was needling me about it earlier.”
“Can’t be helped, can it?”
The burden of being number one—you just have to accept it. Sim Ji-hwan nodded calmly, as if to say he understood that feeling all too well.
“Heh.”
Reading the question in my eyes, he let out a short laugh and spoke.
“It might look trivial from the eyes of someone on an MVP pace like you, hyung… but I’m in a race of my own right now, aren’t I?”
“A race?”
It couldn’t be the Golden Glove. That was absurd.
Do Jeong-hoo of the Wolves was a natural disaster to every pitcher in the KBO. Ever since his debut, competition for the pitchers’ Golden Glove might as well have not existed. Occasionally a foreign pitcher with big-league experience or some sudden breakout arm would get treated as a rival, but the results? Well.
Even Oh Jin-muk, for all his dominance, rarely made the Golden Glove conversation because he was “just a bullpen guy.” And Sim Ji-hwan?
“No, not the Golden Glove.”
“Wow… you’re good at reading minds.”
Was he an esper?
“You’re just too transparent, sunbae… Anyway! Rookie of the Year. ROTY.”
“Ah… Rookie of the Year.”
Sim Ji-hwan had signed last year, but this was his first season in the majors. He fully qualified as a rookie. And—
“Aren’t you running away with it? I haven’t heard of any real competition.”
He was currently dominating the Rookie of the Year race in crushing fashion.
“Yes. But when you’re doing too well, problems start cropping up.”
Same issues as you, hyung. Sim Ji-hwan sighed.
“I give up five innings and four runs in one game and suddenly the bubble’s burst. I take my first loss and I’m the fastest washout ever. It’s been a real headache.”
“Oh…”
In my first major-league at-bat, I’d frozen up, gone down on three pitches, and completely crumbled under even the mildest critical glances from the fans. Looking at Sim Ji-hwan through those eyes—
“That’s impressive.”
“Huh? What is?”
“If you can talk about it out loud like this, it means you don’t think it’s a serious problem.”
Really.
“I couldn’t say a word to seniors or peers. I just scraped at the dirt.”
And that was how the legend of Minor League Yeopo Gong Ji-hoo began.
“Whew… thanks, Ji-hwan.”
“What?”
“The old sages said, ‘When three walk together, one among them is my teacher.’ Looks like our junior is becoming my master!”
“Three walk… what?”
There was no need to get irritated over a few comments about a slump.
The biggest difference between “Minor League Yeopo Gong Ji-hoo” and “regressed Gong Ji-hoo” was mental fortitude, wasn’t it?
I didn’t call my stable mindset the only regression perk for nothing.
So—
“I just have to keep doing what I’ve always done, quietly. Beginner’s mind! Right?”
“Hyung? Can you hear me? Hello?”
“That’s our Ji-hwan! I knew from the first time we met that you were going to be someone big.”
“You didn’t even remember me back then.”
Had that been the case?
“No way. I definitely thought you’d become a pitcher who represents the league someday. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I did.”
I clapped Sim Ji-hwan on the shoulder, laughed cheerfully, and stood up from the bench. Our offensive inning was about to start.
“Does that guy not understand that conversation is supposed to go both ways?”
Whatever Sim Ji-hwan muttered behind me didn’t reach my ears. Probably praise, more or less.
Top of the second.
Sim Ji-hwan watched Gong Ji-hoo leaning against the dugout railing with a refreshed expression, cheering hard for his teammates, then turned to Song Han-su, who had just returned from hitting a home run in his first at-bat.
“Sunbae-nim. Do you know what ‘three walk ham palm-yu-a-sa’ means?”
“Three walk ham? What?”
“It’s something Ji-hoo hyung said.”
Sim Ji-hwan recounted what had happened during the defensive inning.
“Wasn’t he talking about ‘When three walk together, one among them is my teacher’?”
“Ah, that must be it!”
“Something like, when three people gather, one of them is sure to be a teacher. Roughly that.”
“Ohh…”
“I think it was something Confucius said.”
“You seniors are all amazing…”
As expected.
“Do you need to study things like this to become a great player?”
Sim Ji-hwan had privately thought of Gong Ji-hoo as a baseball idiot who only excelled at the game, so hearing him drop a classical phrase came as a shock. Song Han-su, pleased by his junior’s hunger to improve, spoke up to keep that hunger from veering into useless directions.
“I doubt Ji-hoo studied just to get better at baseball.”
“What? No way.”
The Gong Ji-hoo that Sim Ji-hwan knew was someone who never put in extra effort on anything unrelated to baseball. The kind of “I just love baseball” player you rarely saw once you turned pro.
Except—
“Ji-hoo’s got a side hustle, remember?”
“Huh? …Ah!”
What had made Gong Ji-hoo famous in the first place?
“Come to think of it… he was a writer, right?”
“Yeah. He’s writing martial arts novels these days. He probably picked it up from that. Classical idioms show up a lot in wuxia.”
“So that was it…”
Sim Ji-hwan breathed an inward sigh of relief. Even though their positions were different, he was trying to model himself after Gong Ji-hoo’s every move—but studying was definitely beyond him.
Sim Ji-hwan was a classic jock.
“Did you know it for the same reason, Song Han-su sunbae-nim?”
“Huh? …No, I studied. I actually like studying, believe it or not. Mind and body both, you know.”
“Ohh, that’s impressive.”
Of course, Song Han-su himself was an avid reader of martial arts novels and knew the phrase from that, but for the sake of senior dignity, he pretended otherwise.
Top of the third.
I looked up at the scoreboard.
Seoul Foxes 4 : 1 Daegu Rhinos
Standing in the on-deck circle, I looked out at the field and thought back over the previous innings.
Probably—
We won’t be seeing him much longer.
Today’s starting pitcher for the Rhinos, the foreign import, looked headed for a release ending.
The Rhinos’ rotation was pretty solid. There was Howard, who’d held the ace spot for years with consistent performances, and Sim Ji-hwan, who’d made his first major-league appearance this year and was putting up noteworthy numbers. The other starters were holding their own as well.
They didn’t trade Lee Min-ho for me for nothing.
Everyone except the foreign pitcher on the mound today.
The new foreign arm who’d joined the Rhinos with decent expectations was, in reality, giving up runs every outing and barely scraping through five innings—a failing grade for an import pitcher.
For a Daegu Rhinos team aiming at a championship, they were probably already thinking about a replacement.
Honestly, it’s already a little late.
Thanks to him, we’d fallen behind early again today and now had to claw our way back with the bats.
“Tsk.”
I clicked my tongue, watched Jang Tae-wook ahead of me slap a short single and take first, then stepped toward the plate.
“Good work out there!”
I greeted the catcher and the home-plate umpire, then—
“Sunbae-nim. I got a little heated last at-bat. Sorry about that.”
I apologized for the minor war of nerves from my first plate appearance.
“It happens. You weren’t the only one at fault.”
The catcher accepted the apology lightly, then—
“Then do me a favor and take a strikeout this time.”
—slid right back into his natural catcher’s work with a sly grin.
“You just said I wasn’t the only one at fault. So how about a nice pitch?”
I was the same.
Tick.
The same curveball I’d hit for a single last time. This time I fouled it off.
“You really trying to strike out?”
“Just because. It wasn’t a good pitch.”
Before long the count sat at two strikes, two balls.
Whoosh!!
The putaway pitch the pitcher threw with every ounce of strength he had—
“Oh.”
—was so overthrown it became a mistake.
CRAAACK!!
I wasn’t about to miss that.
High.
Far.
I watched the ball soar as I rounded the bases, then—
“Ah, damn this unfair park.”
—could only lament.
Because a ball that would have cleared the wall in any other stadium was stopped by Seoul Foxes’ fourth outfielder, Jamsil, caroming off the fence and dropping back into play.
“Tsk.”
I clicked my tongue, settled onto second base, closed my eyes, and steadied myself.
Anyway, we scored.
The speedy lead runner Jang Tae-wook had scored easily on the ball I’d driven off the wall, stepping on home plate with room to spare.
The deficit was two runs. We hadn’t caught the lead, but plenty of innings remained and plenty of chances. More than anything—
The hitters behind me were not the kind of guys anyone would call light hitters, no matter where they went.
A mere two-run gap was no big problem for the Rhinos. Of course—
If our foreign pitcher, who was busy not performing again today, gave up more runs, that would be another story. But if that happened—
What can you do? Pitchers can struggle, hitters can struggle—that’s baseball.
I’d just hit a home run next time, right?
Hurry up and get me another at-bat… my bat is starving…
Having cast off my delusions, my condition was now perfect.