Rookie Season Prep and the Pitchers
Winter. In the only stretch of rest a ballplayer ever really gets, Choi Seungtaek walked into the Daejeon Magpies' front office.
"Well, look who it is! Choi Seungtaek — what brings you in today?"
"Haha, hello!"
A friendly front-office staffer greeted him at once. She was with the operations team, and she'd been in the room when he signed, so she knew his face immediately.
"Did you find a place? How's the housing search going?"
"Not yet. I'm planning to move to Daejeon before spring camp, though."
Seungtaek had signed with the Magpies on extremely favorable terms: a 300-million-won signing bonus and a 20-million-won salary, better than what some first-round picks had received. Rookies were also expected to live in the team dorms after they signed, but he had talked that away in negotiations, taking a smaller bonus in exchange for the right to live off-site.
Clubs did not usually grant that kind of exception — fairness among players being the issue — but once he explained his family situation, that he wanted to live with and look after his mother, they had been persuaded enough to allow it. Of course, the real reason he wasn't rushing the move was so he could keep seeing Park Gayeong in Seoul.
"Ah, I see. So what brings you to the office, then?"
He had come for something else entirely.
"I was wondering if I could stop by the strategy analysis team."
Know yourself and know your enemy, and you need not fear a hundred battles. That was how Seungtaek had broken down his own high school teammates and the opposition, and how he had won the Presidential Cup. Now, though, he was flying almost blind.
He had spent four years in the pros, from 2015 through 2018 — but that version of him had barely cracked a first-team roster, and he had never really understood scouting reports. Even as an active player, he had been starved for information on other guys. If he had gone back to the Busan Seagulls, at least he would have known his own teammates. Landing with the Magpies meant starting from zero: opposing clubs and his own roster alike.
So he was here to fix that — walk into Magpies analytics and get the intel.
The problem was—
"Ah… we don't actually have a strategy analysis team right now."
The operations staffer looked deeply uncomfortable.
"I'm sorry — you don't have an analytics team?"
"Well…"
At this point in time, the Daejeon Magpies' analytics department was a team in name only. Manager Han Geunseong had confirmed as much after taking the job, and only now was he hiring people and starting to rebuild the files from scratch.
"Ah, hell…"
Seungtaek was stunned. That meant doing it the old-fashioned way — the same way he had in high school. Dig everything up himself and grind through the tape.
Great. So I get to spend the entire winter staring at film.
Pro player data had to be updated constantly. A guy would show a hole one week and patch it the next — or dangle the patched hole as bait. You wanted a finished database to work from. This was not that.
Yeah. I think I just figured out why they finished last.
The door creaked open. Someone else had arrived.
"Hello, Skip."
"Good afternoon, Manager."
It was Manager Han Geunseong.
"Right. Choi Seungtaek. What are you doing here?"
"I came to visit the strategy analysis team. They told me there isn't one yet, so I was waiting."
"Analytics? Why would you need that?"
"I'm a catcher, sir. I wanted to get a head start on our pitchers — learn their stuff, get a feel for how they work."
"You can do that at spring camp. Why start now?"
"I'd rather spend camp focused on training."
Han Geunseong nodded.
"Good. That's how a catcher should think. Shame you came all this way for nothing."
"Yes, sir. I was going to head home and start breaking down last year's games."
"A kid who just got called up, doing analysis? Head coach is upstairs. He's in there with the new scouts, putting pitcher files together. Help them sort it and learn while you're at it."
"Yes, sir! Thank you. I'll head up right now."
"Go on."
Seungtaek went straight upstairs and found the head coach. An office was being fitted out — the new analytics department. The other scouts were out on other business; only the head coach was still there.
"Oh! Choi Seungtaek! Our Blocking Machine. What are you doing here?"
"Hello, Coach. I came because I wanted to study our Magpies pitchers. The manager said I'd find what I needed here."
"Did he? You're a funny one. It's winter. You're supposed to be resting, and you want to look at this?"
"If I study now, it gets easier later."
"This is the last stretch you'll actually get to rest, and you're not taking it? Fine. Hang on."
The head coach looked at him with something like pride, then stood to find the files.
"How much do you need?"
"Just the pitcher information for now."
"Hmm. Here we go. I'll give you what we have on the guys still on the roster."
"Thank you."
A little later, the head coach handed over the files on every pitcher currently with the Daejeon Magpies. Seungtaek started reading on the spot. He was used to far more sophisticated data than this; at this level, the reports weren't hard to parse.
Uh. Yeah. This is… not good.
From the rotation through the bullpen, the numbers were grim enough to make him dizzy. Role didn't matter. Every pitcher's ERA sat over 5.00. A 4.00 made you the ace. BABIP, WAR, WHIP — even by modern standards, every metric was bleak. Worse, there was no real starting rotation, and no late-inning winning group to speak of.
The misery of a last-place club. There was a reason the Magpies had finished dead last three years running.
"Well? What's the problem, you think?"
"We don't have three guys who can start. The bullpen's in bad shape too — I don't see how you even put together a winning group."
Any fan who'd actually watched the team could have said the same. But a few names jumped out at Seungtaek as wrong.
Park Hyeok. Ki Youngbae. And Song Geumho.
Park Hyeok and Ki Youngbae had pitched for the 2014 champion Daegu Eagles. Song Geumho was currently with the Gwangju Pigeons.
"Wait — Park Hyeok, Ki Youngbae, and Song Geumho aren't even our players, are they?"
"Ah. That."
The head coach glanced around, then put a finger to his lips.
"Shh. This is just between us. You don't breathe a word of this anywhere. These are the free agents we're bringing in."
Free agency — FA — meant a player who had earned the right to sign with any club. Multi-year deals and signing bonuses were on the table. Usually a player negotiated with his current team first; if that fell through, he moved, and compensation rules kicked in — cash, and sometimes a player. By the time Seungtaek had originally come back, a tiered FA compensation system was in place. At this point in history, it didn't exist yet.
"So we're bringing in these three."
Ah. So that's when they came to the Magpies.
"It's the Stove League, kid. You're a rookie, so you wouldn't know, but the rest of the roster and the front office are slammed right now."
The Stove League: the stretch between the end of one season and the start of the next, when contracts got rewritten and trades got made. The name came from fans huddling around a stove in winter, treating the rumor mill like a sport of its own.
But as Seungtaek turned the three names over, his face hardened.
Park Hyeok, Ki Youngbae, Song Geumho. Two of these three were busts, weren't they?
That was how he remembered it. The pitching staff was thin — that much was true. But if they were about to import guys who wouldn't actually help the club…
Do I stop this?
On what grounds? If these were the manager's picks, what was the blowback for getting in the way? And what if he blocked them and they went somewhere else and thrived? His head was a mess.
"What? Something not adding up?"
"Haha, no. Just a little worried. Park Hyeok and Ki Youngbae are Daegu Eagles guys. The Eagles are flying high right now — you think they'd actually leave?"
He'd almost mentioned only Ki Youngbae, then tacked on Park Hyeok so it wouldn't look strange.
The head coach chuckled, easy and good-natured.
"The better a team is doing, the more quietly people get left behind. I was with our manager a long time at the Incheon Cranes. You feel it even more from the players' side."
"Even more?"
"Yeah. The guys who just put their heads down and produce — those are the ones a club tends to take for granted. How important they actually were."
"Ah…"
"So they're easier to shake loose. Especially if we can give them what they're actually after."
That tracks. I've never been on that side of it, but yeah.
"And the manager likes these guys. The players themselves have been giving us positive answers. From where I'm sitting, I think we can land all three."
"All three! That's great!"
He smiled on the outside. Inside, not so much.
We're fucked.