The Manager of the Magpies
Baseball is a sport of data.
The Korean professional league plays 144 games a year. Japan's NPB plays 143. Major League Baseball in the United States plays 162. With that many games logged and recorded every season, baseball lends itself to being quantified—and as the years have passed, teams have learned to extract ever more varied, ever more meaningful numbers from the noise. These days, the clubs that win are the ones that dig out the hidden data that actually matters and put it to work.
What Choi Seungtaek meant to use was the defensive half of that ledger.
DRS—Defensive Runs Saved—measures how many runs a player prevents with the glove. The metric folds in everything: a fielder's positioning, an infielder's bunt coverage and double-play work, an outfielder's throwing arm, a catcher's receiving, even a pitcher's ability to hold runners and field his position. Seungtaek had decided to play defense more aggressively, to take the load off his pitchers, and he had built the whole board around driving that number up.
UZR—Ultimate Zone Rating—carves the diamond into sixty-four sectors and assigns a weighted value to every batted ball. Using that information, he had already broken down the opposing hitters and prepared a full-scale defensive shift.
"Choi Seungtaek… what do you think you're doing?"
The bench had clearly flashed a sign for something like an infield-in. Seungtaek had gone ahead and slammed a full shift into place anyway.
"Send the sign again."
"Yes, sir."
The head coach snapped his gaze toward Seungtaek and relayed the infield-in sign a second time.
Choi Seungtaek, you little—look over here! What are you doing?
Mm… I decline.
In today's thoroughly quantified professional game, clubs write the script before the first pitch is even thrown: whether to lean on starting pitching, whether to play small ball and run, whether to lean on a deep bullpen and go hard with the Opener Strategy. They analyze everything, and if rattling the other side even a little might win them the game, they use all of it. In the end, though, that was a decision the coaching staff wrestled over and the manager signed off on—territory Seungtaek had never intended to touch.
Not from today. I've got a seven-year head start. I take this one.
Seungtaek nodded calmly toward the head coach, who was still working the signs with everything he had. He nodded as if he'd understood perfectly. Then he kept right on going.
Center fielder shades toward right. Right fielder a step toward the foul line.
Seungtaek put the sign down to center and right. Lee Sung-sip, in center, drifted toward right field, and the left fielder, reading the movement, eased a little toward the gap in center.
Good. Let's get this started for real.
The scenario Seungtaek had written began with this act of insubordination. And the beauty of it was that none of it would show from the outside.
"Oh! They're putting on a defensive shift."
"That's right. A very Han Geunseong decision."
The broadcast crew watched the Magpies' alignment lurch into a new shape on a signal from the dugout and credited it to Manager Han Geunseong. They hardly had a choice. Shifts were a rare sight in Korea at this point in time, and it looked exactly like the kind of small-ball instruction Han would give. In Major League Baseball, though, shifts were used constantly—and when Seungtaek had been learning the game in the States, he had watched teams carve opposing hitters to pieces with them, relentlessly.
Good. The fielders are set.
With the shift locked in, Seungtaek nodded, satisfied. The Magpies' bench gave up sending signs.
He started to put a pitch down to the mound—and found Russell sightseeing, looking perfectly pleased with the alignment they'd just built.
Aigoo… look over here, would you?
Russell finished his tour of the diamond, caught Seungtaek waiting on him, and flashed a slightly sheepish grin.
Low fastball, inside.
A nod.
The ball hissed in.
Tick!
The Falcons' number-two hitter put it in play. The ball shot at a vicious clip into the awkward hole between first and second—except the second baseman, shifted over, was standing right in its path.
"Gwan Yonggwon gloves it at second! Feeds Hwang Ganggyeong at short! Shortstop on to first—they turn two!"
"Ah—Han Geunseong's move pays off. That's a tough break for Park Gyeongmin. That ball is a hit if there's nobody standing there. There isn't supposed to be a fielder in that spot."
"Nice!"
The infielders whooped. Russell clenched a fist.
That's it. Let's keep him under ten pitches an inning.
Seungtaek kept asking Russell for something low, just nicking the bottom of the zone. The point was ground balls. In the modern game, the most lopsided pairing on a diamond is a defensive shift and a pitcher who can induce them. And because the pitches were coming openly into the strike zone, no hitter alive was going to take. Even if they punched a single on the first pitch—turn two on the next guy and call it a day. The whole approach chased efficiency to the extreme.
A pitcher who missed bats with raw stuff was more devastating, of course. The Magpies did not have that luxury.
Russell, you have to be an innings eater. Every time you take the ball, you go the distance.
Russell was the type who would love punching out hitters and pumping his fist. Seungtaek had no intention of letting him pitch that way going forward.
The Falcons' three-hole hitter stepped in.
Huh?
Seungtaek had been about to call another low pitch. He jerked his head up and stared at the man in the box. Exceptions existed.
He started to call another low pitch anyway—and the entire bottom through the middle of the strike zone had gone bright, bloody red. Seungtaek let out a long breath.
The Kim Gwang-gyeon type? Unbelievable. He built this with pure physical talent? This guy's no joke.
Samoss Kim was mixed-heritage, but his nationality was Korean. Having grown up abroad, he went by Samoss Kim; in Korean order, Kim Samoss would have been the proper name. He had hit .300 from his first year in the league and held it there, year after year, which had earned him the nickname Robot Kim—a machine that manufactured base hits. Calling him a perfect contact hitter was not an exaggeration.
Admiring him would not get the out. Seungtaek changed the plan. The inner half up and the outer edge were still pale, at least.
Then we pitch Samoss Kim to contact and live with it. Throw him something low and he'll crush it.
No shift this time. No ground-ball plan. All he could do was trust Russell and let him throw. Seungtaek called for a high fastball.
High pitch, outside.
A nod.
The ball hissed in.
Crack!
"It's up!"
Samoss's contact climbed into the sky. Kim Haeja in left walked in a few steps and squeezed it.
"Nice!"
Ugh… he still got the bat on that. Thank God we caught it.
Seungtaek let out a breath of relief and headed for the dugout.
Manager Han Geunseong was a little shaken.
A shift of that shape was in his notebook, yes—but he had not intended to deploy it this aggressively from the first inning. Against his expectations, Seungtaek had used it without hesitation, and it had been dead on. With Samoss's out, the players started filing back into the dugout.
"Go get Choi Seungtaek. Now."
"Yes, sir."
The head coach shut his eyes for a beat, then went to fetch him.
"Seungtaek!"
"Yes, Coach."
"The manager wants to see you."
"Yes, sir!"
"You know why he's calling you, right?"
"Ah—yes! Of course I do!"
Act Two, then.
Act One had been insubordination. He had refused the bench's signs and run the game his own way, which, frankly, was a ticket to the second team. That made the whole thing dangerous. If he was going to drag this club to a championship in 2016, Choi Seungtaek had to stay in the first team and keep the pitching staff intact.
The Han Geunseong that Seungtaek knew gave his starting catcher more autonomy than people expected. He had that on good authority from the manager's two disciples, Jo Oosoo and Park Wangyu. Which meant that if Seungtaek could show conviction now, that autonomy might be his going forward. Right now, though, he had been caught in open insubordination, and he needed to think on his feet.
"Choi Seungtaek."
"Yes, Manager."
"You know what you did wrong."
"I'm sorry! I forgot the sign for a second!"
Seungtaek deployed the lie without blinking. Han Geunseong and the first-team head coach both stared at him as if he had grown a second head. A look was already spreading across the manager's face that said, You're the first-team catcher and you forgot that? In that instant, Seungtaek started a different excuse and set about talking Han Geunseong around.
"You call that an answer?"
"I forgot the sign, Manager—but I knew what I had to do. And it worked, didn't it?"
Luck was on his side. Han Geunseong's notebook had a file on the Falcons' two-hole hitter, Park Gyeongmin, and beside it a shift drawn in that looked almost exactly like the one Seungtaek had just run.
"You were thinking the same thing, Manager. The shift you prepared and what I had in mind were identical."
Han Geunseong looked at him without speaking.
"Hrm."
"Manager, I go through everything at night. I check it until it's perfect. I stuffed so much into my head that I forgot the sign—but if I execute the part that actually matters, isn't that enough?"
In the end, the catcher was the one who put the signs down to the fielders. This catcher had put down the right ones, and they had worked. Choi Seungtaek had done his job.
"You think you can run it without signs from the bench?"
Han Geunseong put it back on him.
"I have to. I'm the starting catcher."
"..."
Fail, and it is treason. Succeed, and it is a revolution. Seungtaek's reads had broken the right way more than once already, and Han Geunseong had no choice but to sit with it.
Hrm. What to do. We've already decided to push him as the starter. Might as well push him all the way.
He looked at Seungtaek a moment longer, then answered.
"Thank you, Manager."
Choi Seungtaek's insubordination had succeeded. And with it, he had taken the Magpies' commander chair from Han Geunseong himself.