I Became the Protagonist's Rival

The Weakest High School Ace.

Despite a name that sounded like a straight-up translated Japanese manga, it was, surprisingly enough, a Korean webtoon serialized on a certain Korean platform.

It got no particular attention in the beginning, but it eventually got picked up on the radar of the users of a certain community's manga board — a pack of gluttons who devoured every manga in existence, doubling as deep-sea expedition divers.

The manga board was a gathering of strange people who scraped and devoured everything from borderline garbage serializations about to be cancelled any week now despite sitting at the rock bottom of magazine popularity polls, to the abyss-dwelling dregs of third-rate webtoon platforms — and then spread the word far and wide about just how dogshit each one was.

At first, the board was nothing but mockery — people laughing that he'd shamelessly ripped off a Japanese baseball manga. Around that point, they mashed Kogoo (KBO) and Koshien together into the nickname "Koshien-Kogoo," and it became a kind of meme on the board.

Then, as the chapters piled up and every Manboong-i on the board read the whole thing, the prevailing opinion flipped. The art was, undeniably, genuinely excellent.

Eventually, a new name was coined — on the logic that a nickname like "Koshien-Kogoo" simply couldn't contain the sheer scale of this work. Because it was baseball itself, Kogoo, and because it was a cringe-worthy otaku-pandering manga, they mixed in ssing (from "cringe") and started calling it Ssing-goo.

Let's all agree not to think too hard about why the so-called term of praise ended up shaped like that.

And The Weakest High School Ace, being a manga with jaw-dropping art and character design, had the "battle of the true heroines" among its heroines as one of the manga board's hottest topics at the time.

But then a certain Manboong-i threw out the "puppy adoption" bait, it caught fire, and the board went up in flames. With several upstanding Manboong-i even raiding the comment section of the actual work to spam it, the controversy dragged on with no end in sight.

And the end of all that chaos was—

He'd planted his flag: in his own worldbuilding, polygamy existed, so there would be no "adoption drama," period. For that one day, the manga board worshipped the author as a god. Since there was already a Manshin (Manga God), they dubbed him Yasin — the Baseball God — punning on yagu (baseball).

Of course, plenty of people went "what is this archaic setting?" and came down with heavy-looking weight issues to complain about, launching rating-bombing raids — but the time-rich Time I-kun Manboong-i spun up their own coordinated defense in response, and nothing much came of it.

So while everyone was happily enjoying Ssing-goo, there was one human being on the manga board foaming at the mouth and raising hell.

Tap-tap-tap.

"GRAAAAAAAGH!!!!"

Look, it's a manga, so I do enjoy it as a manga. But every so often, like a car hopping a speed bump, a piece of absolutely deranged baseball "logic" comes flying out of it.

It's that amazing. It possesses the astonishing power to make me seize up like this, unable to hold myself back even knowing it's just a manga.

The author sprinkles terminology this way and that, trying to come off like he genuinely knows baseball and has professional expertise, but even to my eyes — no expert, just a regular baseball fan — it doesn't even look amateurish; a lot of it is just plain wrong.

'A great pitcher must be able to split the strike zone into nine sections and hit every one.'

'An underhand pitcher's curveball actually rises.'

'Elite pitchers have faster subsidiary pitches.'

A parade of mountains of nonsense, each one practically begging for a rebuttal.

And when, on top of that, he starts trotting out outdated Japanese baseball terminology and old-school Japanese baseball theories — apparently because he learned baseball from Japanese manga — it makes me want to die just watching it.

Then why do I read it? Because it's fun, that's why. The art is genuinely gorgeous. Truly, the art is at Manshin level, and the story treats baseball like a joke.

Steel myself in advance against whatever creative baseball ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠theory might emerge today, I clicked on the freshly uploaded latest chapter. This was the most important scene of the entire high school arc.

The protagonist had clawed his way to the final of the Phoenix Flag Tournament — effectively the last national championship for the third-years — only to run into Donghyun High, the rival school he'd battled throughout the series, and Donghyun High's ace: Kim Yi-seon.

The fateful showdown between the protagonist and Kim Yi-seon had begun last chapter. Once this part wrapped up, the high school arc would end and flow straight into the pro draft, presumably. From the perspective of a baseball fan, honestly, the pro arc was the one I was more excited about.

For one thing, in this worldbuilding, South Korea wasn't just the southern half of the peninsula — it was a unified nation, so the population and territory were vastly larger than in reality. On top of that, there was no such thing as a low birth rate, so with so many students, the pool of promising young players was bottomless.

And since it was a country where citizens enjoyed a life with dinner on the table and sports as their leisure, pro baseball in a world packed with fans and spectators? A league with a staggering twelve clubs, split into two divisions?

This was practically alternate-history fiction — the merged daydream of every baseball fan's hopes and fantasies. At this point, you might as well call it a story of dreams and illusions on par with those novels where a certain Busan team actually wins a championship.

His steadfast rival Kim Yi-seon had been clearly foreshadowed as the first overall draft pick, while the protagonist only now had bait dangling that pro scouts were finally starting to properly notice him — so even after this matchup ended, the two of them would surely carry their rivalry into the pros.

The theme of the work was the underdog's rebellion, but what kind of underdog beats the first overall draft pick as a lower-round pick? With the pro arc to look forward to, I started reading this chapter — the closing act of the high school arc — with full concentration.

"Ah, Kim Yi-seon has fallen to the ground clutching his arm. He can't get up. Let's hope it's not a serious injury."

Huh?

He just... threw him away? After dangling all that rivalry bait, the showdown doesn't get properly settled — it's a walkover win by injury?

A wave of absurdity washed over me, and my eyes, wandering blankly into the void, landed on the author's note appended to the end of the chapter.

What? Foreshadowing for Kim Yi-seon's injury? Where exactly was that supposed to be?

As flabbergasted as I was, the Manboong-i were in near-total panic, and when I entered the board I found every flavor of trainwreck on display — curses hurled at Yasin, scathing criticism of the plot twist, and pure unfiltered arson.

Amid all that, I combed through the compiled posts going "isn't THIS the injury foreshadowing?"

Don't tell me Yasin, that bastard, would claim so confidently — right up to mentioning foreshadowing out loud — and that would really be all there was?

Clumsy nitpicking wouldn't leave so much as a scratch on that steel-trap mentality of his, so with something like a "fine, let me rip this apart properly for once" feeling, I chewed through all 326 chapters of the manga, examining every single scene.

Even scenes where Kim Yi-seon didn't appear — I checked them all, to confirm exactly what nonsense and what mind-boggling "baseball knowledge" this dogshit author had left strewn about.

And I arrived at my own conclusions.

Huh?

An obstetrics clinic somewhere in South Korea. The year 2001.

"Waaah!"

"Congratulations, Mother! It's a healthy baby boy."

Ah.