Knuckle Curve (1)
"So you're determined to find a solution for this, no matter what it takes?"
"Yes. His willpower is strong enough that talking him out of it would be difficult, so I'm approaching this as conservatively as I can."
Manager Jeong Jin-haeng was having a light conversation with the pitching coach. Managing a ballclub meant overseeing more than eighty grown men once you counted the entire coaching staff, but with a headache-inducing topic like this cropping up every single day, he couldn't help feeling he wasn't getting paid for the life he'd imagined.
Come to think of it, that was probably why the old-timers took their money and then refused to manage, going off to start their own YouTube channels instead.
"Right. In that case, there's no need to push them into the starting rotation. Let's give Dae-se and Ho-yeol a chance this time around. They're rookies, and when you think about it, we've been running the rotation on a pretty strict loop for them so far."
"Understood. I'll pass that along to them."
Still, as long as he drew a salary, he had to give his all to the job. It was obvious that after all this tinkering and experimentation with new approaches, the balance of the pitching staff would need rebuilding from the ground up — which meant this was precisely the time to avoid forcing anyone into game action.
Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk already lived in the Futures team dorm anyway, so a short stint back down wouldn't hurt them.
"I swear, I will never understand these so-called geniuses."
"It's less genius and more the stubbornness of their age, sir. Aren't those the years when you worry the most and try the most things?"
Manager Jeong had survived a long, thin career scraping to stay on the first-team roster, while the pitching coach had burned bright and brief but left a real mark on the KBO — and their answers to the same question couldn't have been more different. That right there was the difference between a genius and an ordinary man.
Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk alike were posting solid results. If they simply kept up their current cumulative numbers in the KBO, a move to the States was well within reach. Factoring in that it was still early in the season, neither had missed a rotation turn, taking the mound like clockwork and averaging over five innings per start with an ERA in the low threes.
And according to the analytics department, even that understated things — their BABIP hadn't been kind to them, inflating the runs they'd surrendered; once the numbers normalized, an ERA in the mid-twos was entirely plausible.
Mid-two ERA. In the entire league right now, that described maybe two or three pitchers. By the standards of a journeyman like himself, career goals didn't extend past numbers like those. And yet these kids, unsatisfied with even more, were gambling the season away on new experiments mid-year.
He wasn't asking them to keep growing. Just, please, don't blow up. They couldn't afford to become the traitors who ruined the future of Korean baseball, talked about for decades to come.
With those thoughts, Manager Jeong Jin-haeng turned to wrestling with the rotation shuffle and the list of fresh arms to call up to the first team.
There was a pitch-data measurement room tucked into one corner of the Futures training facility. It was still a professional organization, after all — the equipment was every bit as good as anything at Director Cho's institute.
The people gathered here today: Director Cho, who served as my personal instructor; the first-team pitching coach; the bullpen coach; the Futures pitching coach; the head of the analytics team's pitching division; Sunbae Min-seol; and the battery coach, all told.
"Yep, this one's a dud."
"Couldn't it improve if we put in some time honing it?"
"Hard to say. The kid wants a weapon he can use right now, and at this rate it'd take a solid year or two of steady practice before anything usable came out of it."
And the object of their collective critique, tossed around one remark at a time, was my slider.
"...That's exactly why I said we already tried this."
"Now, what looks unremarkable to laymen looks quite different to people like us. You can see the potential in it — and Yi-seon, you, well..."
I knew the rest without them saying it.
I mean, the original Kim Yi-seon was a slider-centric pitcher from the start. Of course I'd experimented with the slider. Ever since converting to the mound in my second year of high school, a lingering attachment had me giving it a steady try at least once a year.
"The velocity's actually fine, considering these are practice throws — but that's just because your arm speed was always fast. It comes out at an awkward middle speed. And the break angle is small, sure, but with that velocity it gets covered to a degree. The problem is the angle seems to fizzle out a little early, so, eh..."
Yeah, I know. You didn't have to say it.
Director Cho cleared his throat and claimed the floor.
"I asked for the field experts' input, so this confirms it once and for all — as you can see, Yi-seon's slider is not a pitch that can be finished in a short window. If he introduced external rotation into his delivery, it would absolutely transform into a devastating weapon. But as the materials I circulated make clear, the toll on the arm would be severe."
"And yet, watching that slider, I still can't wrap my head around the fact that he can't throw a cutter."
"Every kind of human being exists in this world, coach. This Yi-seon character is the strangest specimen I've ever examined. His fingertip feel is dull as a stump, yet oddly enough he has real strengths in wrist strength and wrist rotation. It's a shame the ways to put that to use are so limited. By all rights, the kid should be throwing a changeup for the ages."
Except that changeup was, for reasons unknown, currently broken.
Anyway, that's the whole story of why I abandoned the slider in high school and added three variations of curveball instead.
I tried locking my wrist and throwing a cutter-adjacent pitch too, but between the cautionary tale of the manga pitcher who wrecked his arm throwing high-velocity cutter-style sliders, and the fact that without the wrist you simply don't generate that terrifying bite, I gave that up as well.
If I was going to be mediocre at something regardless, Director Cho reasoned, better a power curve — definitively slower than the fastball, giving my repertoire a change of pace in velocity, with a respectably steep drop. That's why I've been running three curve variants ever since.
He said the curve would keep improving the more I threw it, so I've kept throwing it since. But improve, my ass. It's still stuck at roughly the level I first learned back in my second year of high school.
"Alright then, let's brainstorm the next pitch to try."
After that, the coaches and engineers erupted into a free-for-all over what suited me best. A sigh escaped me on its own.
"Kim Yi-seon. What's your read?"
"Same as always. You?"
"Not easy on my end either."
Hah... this genuinely sucks.
When I'd asked Min-son sunbae — the one who'd told me to stop throwing the changeup — what I was supposed to do about it, his answer had been to bolt on a different usable pitch.
Frankly, from where I stood, I'd have preferred fixing my current changeup over scrambling to debut a brand-new pitch, but nothing had changed no matter how hard we'd worked at it, from spring camp all the way to now.
So there was no other way.
At least it wasn't some lazy, off-the-cuff suggestion — word was that our club had a genuinely stellar reputation for matching pitchers with the pitches that fit them.
The trio of Ji Ha-seob, Lee Ba-da, and Park Ha-neul — once mediocre pitching prospects — becoming the Twins' ironclad winning-setup corps was thanks to exactly this process. Ji Ha-seob's league-famous slider, Lee Ba-da's curve, Park Ha-neul's changeup — all of those pitches were born from it.
So I trusted them and handed over the reins, and this is what I got.
"Right now, isn't Yi-seon's core problem the absence of a pitch with a true vertical drop? In that case, what about a splitter?"
"He already throws a changeup; a splitter seems redundant. Better to add a two-seamer on top and shift his four-seam locations as tight to the inner half as possible..."
"His changeup already moves like a sinker as it is. Tacking a two-seamer onto the repertoire would be inefficient. Better to take the curve — which is closer to a power curve right now — and slash its velocity way down..."
"The kid can't control his curve's drop as it is — it comes out random. How many years do you plan on spending teaching a slow curve to that?"
From the big picture down to the fine details of how each pitch should actually feel coming out of the hand, not a single opinion aligned. These were supposedly capable people — was the atmosphere this chaotic because my case was truly that hopeless?
Glancing at Kang Min-hyuk's face told me his side wasn't much better. He eventually needed to build an out pitch the opposition could see coming and still fail to hit, and two factions were at war: the camp insisting he needed to add velocity, and the camp asking, reasonably, whether adding velocity was ever actually easy — hadn't he better polish his corner command and acquire a pitch with heavy vertical break instead?
The crowd argued over me and Min-hyuk for a long while, reached no conclusion, and dispersed.
"We all do this to put food on the table. Let's start with dinner."
"Agreed. Coach Choi, how about a drink tonight?"
"Oh, why not. Same place as last time?"
"Yep. Their galbi is outstanding."
The coaches and engineers strolled off to dinner laughing in perfect harmony, as if the shouting match had never happened.
Am I actually safe trusting these people?
"Well, I'll be. The baby of the team comes looking for me first? Now that's a sight."
"How's the shoulder holding up?"
"The shoulder? Once you hit my age, something's always hurting. I'm just worn down — taking my little breather, is all."
So I'd gone hunting in yet another direction. Starting with Kang Hyun-seok sunbaenim.
When we'd stepped out of the rotation for a tune-up, sunbaenim had tried to gut it out anyway, but his shoulder wasn't in great shape, so the club had forced the rest on him.
As a result, the Seoul Twins' current starting rotation had replaced every homegrown starter who'd opened the season in May. The fans were already kicking up a fuss — the collapse is starting, we're gonna tank like dogs, that sort of thing.
Anyway, with him resting, consulting him had only gotten easier. After all, hadn't Kang Hyun-seok sunbaenim been the pitcher most similar in style to the original Kim Yi-seon? If anyone had a good alternative to offer, it should be him.
"A new pitch? Hmm... If I knew the answer to that, I'd have added one myself."
But his reaction was one of being stumped.
"It doesn't have to be anything special. You may have given up on them for game use, but wasn't there at least one pitch besides your current repertoire that suited you?"
"Let's see... I toyed with a two-seamer, but past high school nothing else ever panned out, so I dropped most of it."
His core repertoire was, at heart, a trilemma of three pitches: a four-seam fastball, a cutter with a slight vertical drop, and a sweeping vertical slider with a huge drop.
He'd mastered the slider to its absolute limit — but that's just another way of saying his aptitude for other pitches was so poor that a single slider had to do the work of several.
"You should've gone knocking on some other doors, not mine."
"Already made the rounds."
I'd asked the Olympians, all confirmed mainstays of the staff, plus Ho-yeol hyung, Dae-se hyung, and Ye-chan hyung — every last one of them.
Nothing good came out of that either, so I'd given up. Ha-seob sunbae, Ba-da sunbae, and Ha-neul sunbae had each mastered the one pitch that fit them like a glove and had been hunting for a second ever since — still no answer, apparently. They offered to teach me their own way, but that didn't appeal to me much.
Ho-yeol hyung knew plenty of pitches, but only in the sense of knowing how to throw them; the one pitch he truly commanded in depth was his splitter. Dae-se hyung and Ye-chan hyung were nothing new either — textbook sliders and a fuzzy set of three other pitches.
At this point there was no one left to ask, no one left to beg for help.
"Not those kids, dummy. The weird pitches were never something you learn from another Korean."
"Sorry? Then... the foreign pitchers?"
"Yeah. You get along with them, don't you?"
Not especially. That was less friendship and more the fact that none of them spoke a word of English — er, Korean — so without an interpreter they couldn't manage a single sentence. I was the only one who could sort of communicate, so they gravitated toward me.
But Kang Hyun-seok sunbaenim pushed forward like a bulldozer on the spot, utterly certain this was the surest path.
"No, hear me out — problems like this need a fresh pair of eyes. Just you wait, I'll gather them all for you. Hey! Paulo! Come 'ere!"
Sunbaenim bellowed for the foreign players in a thick, homey accent. Is this really right?
At that, Walker came bounding over with pure delight on his face.
"Ol' Captain, you got somethin' to say to me? Finally fixin' to introduce me to a woman?"
Oh, for crying out loud.
Matt and Paulo, apparently with time to kill before their next starts, ambled over at a leisurely pace.
"Ah, good timing. Our baby here's adding a new pitch. Everybody give him your two cents."
"What?"
Kang Hyun-seok sunbaenim turned his head toward me.
"Why me?"
"You're the interpreter. I don't speak English."
"...Didn't you play three years in the Majors?"
"Back then all I knew was survival English and a handful of baseball terms. Anything this complicated, we ran through an interpreter. And besides, you speak it just fine."
If you're the one who called them over, you should see it through to the end, sir.
And so, despite having the whole mercenary squad assembled, the two of us spent the next three minutes emitting nothing but um... er... until an interpreter arrived and the conversation could finally resume.
"Simple. Just throw a curveball."
When we finally managed to explain the situation, that was Walker's breezy reply.
This son of a bitch is calling it easy because it's not his problem.
"I already throw a curveball, and I haven't gotten good results with it. And you're telling me to throw a curveball?"
"Rookie, you crack me up. What you throw ain't a curveball. It's a Little League practice ball."
Okay, my curve is a bit underwhelming, but surely it doesn't deserve a roast that brutal.
Then Paulo and Matt both gave a small nod, and that stung. Do I really look that bad?
"Right. I can see it with my own two eyes, so the engineers must've told you what's wrong with it?"
"Roughly, yes."
He gave me a long, detailed breakdown of my pitch's flaws — theory I'd only ever half-understood, surface-level, back when I was just a baseball fan — laid out with detailed equations and numbers to boot.
"You know the problems now. So all that's left is throwing a proper curveball, and your troubles are over."
This guy sounds just like Min-hyung sunbae. If I could do that, don't you think I'd have done it already?
That's just how breaking pitches work. Fans toss around advice like "just add a new pitch" like it's nothing, but actually slotting one into your repertoire means mastering its movement, obviously — and then integrating it into the balance of your existing delivery.
My delivery was something Director Cho had engineered with painstaking precision to maximize stability and my body's natural advantages — which, put another way, meant there was zero slack in it. Adding a new pitch without substantially reworking that was no small feat.
But Walker remained supremely confident. Then, unusually, he started speaking in a dead-serious tone.
"First off, the problem with your curve's drop and location is in your fingertips. You need to rip off enough spin and control it, and that all lives and dies at the ends of your fingers. Your command's shaky left and right too, so I'd bet there's an axis-of-rotation issue in there as well. Camera analysis'll tell us for sure, but there might also be a problem with your release point not settling into one consistent spot through your arm swing."
I'm sorry, who is this?
In the span of a breath, Walker had transformed from an uneducated, foul-mouthed redneck bigot into a baseball expert out of the University of Alabama.
Point by point, grounded in genuinely technical analysis and scientific theory, he was dissecting everything wrong with my curve.
"And that float on the ball — that means your spin's decelerating early, the same phenomenon can show up in your other spinning pitches too. Sliders, sweepers, that kind of thing. There, it's usually the fingertips gripping too hard, so the movement comes from raw force on the ball instead of the spin... Hey. Rookie. You listenin'?"
The poor interpreter was sweating over how to render each technical term, relaying it one sentence at a time. Was this really the same Walker whose skull supposedly contained nothing but women and the N-word?
When I snapped back to attention at Walker's pointed reminder, only then did he deliver his conclusion.
"So here's my one conclusion, rookie. I'm sure the engineers and coaches have considered all this already, but you're in a hurry, so — sometimes you just gotta slap training wheels on for the fundamentals."
"Training wheels?"
"Yeah. 'Cept here, it wouldn't be training wheels. Training knuckles."
Knuckles?
"You mean a knuckle curve?"
"That's the one. Well, look at you, rookie. You meet the minimum requirements to start this conversation."
That faintly condescending gaze really grated on me. But come on — of course I'd practiced a knuckle curve.
"Walker. I've already tried the knuckle curve plenty."
The knuckle curve might be a little unfamiliar in Korea, but it wasn't some mystery pitch nobody had heard of. The KBO had its share of pitchers who made names for themselves with knuckle curves even back in the 2000s.
"Oh yeah? Then show me the grip."
At his word, I took the knuckle curve grip with total confidence — the one that had felt best of all the ones I'd experimented with.
Walker made a thoughtful hmm... sound, then told me to throw one as slow as I possibly could.
He was the one I'd come to for advice, so I showed him, nice and obedient.
"Goddamn. Do all you Asians got hands the size of a damn pecker? That ain't a knuckle curve, that's a Little League curve!"
And just like that, Walker the bigot was back in the room.
Unbelievable.