Gain Weight, or Bust
In baseball, weight matters.
Choi Seungtaek was no slap-hitting speedster. He was a power bat built to drive the ball into the gaps and over the wall, which made the extra pounds even more important. The swing he used was modeled on Mitchell Nelson, a major leaguer who stood six-two and weighed two hundred twenty pounds, and the reason that form had worked for Seungtaek in high school was simple: he'd been roughly the same height.
To hit like Nelson, copying the mechanics was only half of it. You also needed a body that could generate the same kind of output. Baseball, at the end of the day, was force against force—pitcher versus batter—and if he wanted clean extra-base contact with that swing, he had to put more power behind it. Keep losing weight, keep losing pop, and the fly outs would keep piling up the way they had in recent games.
Hoo… so I have to put the weight back on. That's not going to be easy.
Seungtaek's face darkened. Catcher is a brutal position. Play one game and you drop four to six pounds; in the summer heat you shed even more, which means you need extra food and rest just to stay even. The problem was that even with plenty of eating and rest, six games a week meant the scale went down faster than it went up. That's why a catcher needs a backup, and why a manager has to actually manage his starter's stamina.
Right now, the only catchers behind Seungtaek were underqualified second-team guys. If Manager Han Geunseong was truly lining the roster up to win, days off were probably not in the cards. Even if Seungtaek started managing himself ruthlessly from this moment on, he was going to wear down.
It'll be okay once Oosoo hyung comes back. I can hold out until then, right?
Of the injured catchers, Jo Oosoo was the one returning first. If the knee healed fast, he might even join in May—and even then, he'd only be able to spell Seungtaek for maybe one game a week. Seungtaek's expression stayed dark anyway. He'd thought he'd been eating carefully this whole time. Seeing the number drop that hard still caught him off guard.
I need to get serious about the weight. It's not even summer yet and I'm already like this… this is bad.
He looked at himself in the mirror. Healthy eating and regular training had carved his muscles into sharp definition. It looked great. For a professional baseball player, it was not.
Ugh. I have to put the weight back on. How?
He called Jo Oosoo. If anyone among the seniors knew how to pack on kilos fast, it was him. The answer shouldn't be hard to get.
"Sunbae, how are you?"
"What? What's going on?"
"I, uh… I haven't been managing my weight. I need to bulk up. How do I put it on fast?"
"Boil ten packs of ramyeon. Right now."
"What?"
"Then slam the whole damn pot. We done?"
Beep. Beep. Beep.
"Come on! I called because I can't do that!"
The cheat code baseball players used to pack on weight was boiling ten packs of instant noodles. You rammed carbs into your body with zero mercy—cheap, explosive, and brutally effective. The System, of course, was never going to let that slide.
This… this penalty's a bigger deal than I thought.
Stuck on a healthy diet because of the penalty, Seungtaek couldn't just flood himself with calories. Cheap, high-calorie food was almost all flour and fried stuff—exactly what the penalty blocked. That left eating a mountain of meat, and that wasn't easy either.
Meat's fine once or twice. After that it just gets old. What now?
Calling other seniors or the club trainer would get him roughly the same answers. The seniors would tell him to scarf ramyeon. The trainer would tell him to eat meat. Stuck, Seungtaek started digging through fitness YouTube channels for ways to gain weight, and a few minutes of searching later he found a video from a well-known fitness YouTuber—Han Nam-ja, the trainer who could also actually sing.
Seungtaek filed the whole thing away as he watched. The shake was what snagged him. The ingredients were simpler than he'd expected, so he went straight out, bought them, and made it exactly the same way.
Wiiiiing!
The blender screamed, and a moment later a thick, gloopy, blue-green shake sat in the cup.
"Uhh… is a human being supposed to drink this? That color is not okay… wait. It actually smells pretty good?"
He studied the finished shake, then took a sniff. The aroma was better than expected. Satisfying, even.
All right. One sip.
He drank.
"Urgh."
He barely kept it down.
This shit—did it just slap me with a penalty?
No penalty has been applied. This is healthy food.
No, but…
Every swallow tasted like something that had no choice but to be healthy. There was no good way to describe that weird, force-it-down feeling—but the worst part was the aftershock once it hit his stomach.
"Ugh…"
If I have to keep drinking this, I might as well just cram down a whole chicken…
In that case, I will increase the penalty.
How much more are you even going to stop me from eating?!
He glared at the floating text, then gave up.
"Fine… this is better. At least I can dump a ton of calories in fast."
He decided to just drink the awful shake. Thirty minutes of chewing versus a one-minute chug. The math wasn't close.
Okay. Two meals in the morning—two giant sandwiches from Train. Two more at lunch—shakes at the stadium, keep it light. One meal before the game at dinner, then meat as a late-night snack after. That should do it.
And just like that, Seungtaek went from four meals a day to six and started the bulk.
The next day, Seungtaek showed up at the stadium carrying two finished shakes. He hauled everything into the locker room and went to drink one.
"Ugh. This is not easy to get down."
He'd already eaten tuna and chicken sandwiches from Train that morning, so he wasn't hungry. He still had to eat if he wanted the weight.
"Seungtaek… you made it…?"
"Huh? Hyung, you okay?"
Hwang Ganggyeong had gotten there first. His voice was drained.
"Seungtaek… you know I really can't stand you, right?"
There was a little venom in his eyes.
"Haha… why?"
"Thanks to whoever ran their mouth to the manager, the infielders have been doing fungo all week. I didn't even get a rest yesterday. I feel like I'm gonna die. If I collapse during a game, it's not the manager's fault. It's yours."
After the string of errors, Hwang Ganggyeong and the rest of the infield had been put through brutal defensive work, and Hwang was wasting away.
"You still have to put the work in, hyung. Your nickname's Butterfingers right now."
"Kh…"
Hwang flinched. Magpies fans had tagged him Butterfingers after he'd muffed the ball twice—an ugly nickname, and he'd earned it.
He's fast, his range is huge, and he's got real defensive instincts—he fields the ball just fine. Why can't he throw?
Seungtaek looked at him with a little pity.
"Anyway, what's that?"
"This? It's a shake."
"You're such a weirdo. You're drinking shakes now?"
"Hey, I've got a lot to study. I don't have enough time to train as it is. I'm drinking this to cut down on eating time!"
"Bullshit."
Hwang looked incredulous—then his eyes started drifting toward the luminous green shake.
"Is it any good, though?"
Wait. He wants to try it? Suddenly I really want to feed it to him.
Seungtaek caught a whiff, then started bluffing.
"This? Yeah! It's good. It's Han Nam-ja's shake—the fitness YouTuber."
"Oh, yeah?"
Hwang had heard the name plenty of times. His ears perked up.
"Let me have a sip!"
"Aww, I need this, though."
The less you give someone, the more they want it. Seungtaek made him squirm.
"Come on, don't be a stingy little shit."
"Fine. One sip. That's it."
Seungtaek casually popped the lid and handed it over.
"Wait, I can actually drink it?"
"Yeah! I've got another bottle, actually. You want the whole thing?"
"Oh… you've got another one? It must be really good."
Seeing Seungtaek pull out a second bottle, Hwang took the shake without a second thought and chugged.
Seungtaek couldn't hide his grin.
Gulp.
Glllk?
"Mmph…?"
Hwang's face darkened by the second as he realized something was very wrong. He couldn't hold it. He started looking for somewhere to spit.
That was when Seungtaek's face went completely serious.
"Kh-hhhk!"