A Debate Out of Left Field

Bottom of the sixth. The Dragons were down two runs, but there was still hope left in this game.

Seoul Dragons manager Kim Chang-hwan's face said otherwise. It was nowhere near bright.

"Hey, just sit down already."

"No, this one felt a little faster? Ha, shit. This is seriously screwing with me."

Everyone had lost their feel.

It was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a phenomenon you'd see in a handful of hitters whenever they faced a truly monstrous ace. Not only did they fall completely for the pitcher's deception — the very swing timing they'd brought with them to the plate started to come apart at the seams.

Right this moment, Jeong Min-byeong was taking practice swings, dragging his bat forward in a desperate attempt to force his timing back into place, his upper and lower body balance collapsing with every rep, while Shin Jeong-seop wore a sour, deflated expression, his fire visibly gone.

When a hitter loses his timing like this, even temporarily, the textbook answer is substitution. Facing the same pitcher won't help him recalibrate — it'll only shake him further. Bringing in fresh hitters who haven't been rattled yet would produce the better result.

It was better for the shaken players, too. Right now it was momentary confusion, but if you let this state drag on, it could become the seed of a full-blown slump. By any conventional standard, the correct move was to send in a wave of pinch hitters and defensive replacements right about now.

And yet.

"Striiike three! OUT!!!"

"Pitch number five, up in the zone! Called strike three! The triple-digit heater is blazing once again today!"

"Exactly. And given the times we're in — the Twins play in a domed stadium, so they've gone nearly the whole season without a rainout. Rookies and veterans alike are reportedly struggling just to keep their legs under them... and yet Kim Yi-seon shows none of it. None at all."

"Kim Yi-seon's overpowering fastball is alive and well in the sixth inning!"

Could the bench players really hit that? The Dragons weren't exactly a shallow roster with a gaping chasm between starters and reserves — but even so, there were limits. Pull the core of your lineup and send up pinch hitters... could anyone out there actually put a bat on that ball? He genuinely doubted it.

On top of that, this was the Seoul Series — the rivalry series, with the two clubs at each other's throats. A loss might be forgiven; giving up never would be. If he swapped out the starting lineup this early, the accusations that he'd raised the white flag would come raining down. Of course they would.

And so he was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠still hesitating over substitutions. Even after two full turns through the order, even watching his hitters gradually lose their timing and begin to creak at the joints.

Let's watch a little longer. The Dragons' core hitter, Go Byeong-yeon, was due at the plate next. Byeong-yeon hadn't lost his fire, and he came into today's game burning with purpose of his own — a ticket to the Major Leagues.

If Byeong-yeon could put up one genuinely good at-bat here, the whole atmosphere might turn.

Go Byeong-yeon stepped into the box. The light was still in his eyes. This made it the third confrontation between him and Kim Yi-seon.

By the third time a hitter faced a pitcher, he was supposed to have at least a rough read on the man's primary weapon.

"Foul!"

"First pitch, just barely off the barrel! Foul ball."

"Go Byeong-yeon is a hitter with genuine skill, you know. Kim Yi-seon may throw as hard as anyone in the league, but you absolutely cannot count this man out."

"The count sits at 0-1."

That's exactly what I mean.

The ball had tailed slightly toward the middle, and it was so fast that it hadn't been squared up — hence the foul. But considering how violently the ball came off the bat anyway, a clean barrel would have meant a double at the very least. Probably more.

Perhaps sensing the same thing, Byeong-yeon ratcheted his intensity up another notch. And Kim Yi-seon, feeling the first flicker of danger himself, let a slight frown cross his face.

That's right. You're not invincible either. However big your heart, however absurd your talent, you were still a rookie short on professional experience.

After that brief exchange of gamesmanship, the second pitch was ready.

"Foul!"

"The breaking ball! Go Byeong-yeon's bat chased it all the way down — foul ball again."

"A foul, yes, but look at the focus from Go Byeong-yeon. Kim Yi-seon's curveball genuinely falls off the table right in front of the plate — it's a brutally difficult pitch to handle. And he reacted to it."

"Still, the count is 0-2. He's fighting from behind in this at-bat."

So close.

It had been such a beautiful swing that if he'd read the curveball from the moment it left the hand, a home run wasn't out of the question. Instead, he'd swung at that ambiguous middle depth, then chopped down late and barely spoiling it away.

Most likely he'd been consciously laying off the changeup.

But flip that around, and it meant Byeong-yeon's senses were sharp enough right now to handle both the sweeping changeup and the curveball. Honestly, anything could happen. Wasn't Kim Yi-seon's expression hardening considerably? This really might flip the whole game.

Go Byeong-yeon, overflowing with fight. Despite two strikes, he choked up confidently on the bat, swinging for the fences.

And for reasons nobody could explain, Kim Chang-hwan was certain: fastball. The will of two men who refused to give an inch, determined to settle it face to face.

The throw. The swing.

"Striiike three! OUT!!!"

"...Swing and a miss! Strikeout! Kim Yi-seon's 164 four-seamer!"

"Oh... isn't that the all-time KBO record? It was always a slightly inglorious one, I'll admit — he set it plunking a Canadian national team batter. But he'd never managed to show it on domestic soil, and now, at last, he's done it in an official league game."

"Kim Yi-seon shatters the KBO all-time velocity record! He closes out the sixth inning by carving his name into history!"

"Jang Su-seok, you there?"

"Yes, Manager."

Kim Chang-hwan had hemmed and hawed for a long while before he finally forced the words out.

"... Get the pinch hitters ready. About five of them."

"F-five of them?"

The bench coach had to ask twice. But there was nothing for it. Rivalry series or not, the league season wasn't going to be over after today.

Going up against a 164 km/h fastball for no reason would do nothing but wreck the kids' swings.

The Seoul Twins had pulled off the first-ever Seoul Series sweep. On the road, no less.

If it had been at home — or at the very least in front of a live crowd — the stadium would have shaken with screaming, and the festival would have spilled out across every street in Seoul. But the times being what they were, everyone simply gathered in their online communities to share in the joy of victory.

And with the sweep carrying the Twins all the way into second place in the Southern District, the fans' euphoria showed absolutely no sign of dying down.

Of course, this process meant the in-crowds and ordinary people who had never cared about baseball communities came flooding en masse into a handful of the bigger ones... but that was a sad story for only a small tribe of natives.

The club and the league office, after all, were actively pushing and promoting the arrival of a buzz-generating superstar in a baseball world battered by the pandemic — as if anyone could have stopped them.

Having your territory overrun was something you simply had to accept with equanimity.

And as general public interest, star marketing, and a new fandom entirely separate from the old baseball fandom kept on expanding, topics that had nothing whatsoever to do with baseball inevitably found their way to Kim Yi-seon as well.

The flagship result of that whole trend was sitting right in front of him at this very moment.

"So you're telling me that right now, I have to pick one of... these?"

"Hani and Tani, sir. Our club mascots — you know them."

And that was how he found himself dragged into a conflict that had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

The Seoul Twins were, from the club's very name, twins. And while their nominal home was Seoul, the actual ballpark sat in Wirye City, south of the Han River.

Because of that complicated background, instead of taking a single mascot design and splitting it into a male and female version the way other clubs did, the Twins had decided to run two mascots with completely distinct designs side by side.

Those were Hani, named for the Han River that symbolized the Seoul area, and Tani, named for the Tancheon stream that symbolized Wirye City.

Befitting a brand-new franchise, Hani and Tani had broken from the traditional mascot playbook at every turn. They were built around overwhelming cuteness with strikingly individual silhouettes, and the designs were packed with all manner of audacious ideas.

Which earned them a fairly cult-like popularity — and also created exactly one problem.

Cute, and with genuinely different design philosophies — all well and good. The problem was that because each one catered to a slightly different taste, plenty of people who adored one felt nothing for the other.

If it had ended at "so which one do you like better," there'd have been no issue. But when has an internet community ever let anything end that lightly?

An exchange that had begun as a joke kept escalating, until it eventually reached the level of people sincerely shredding the opposing mascot. And when this corner-of-the-forum squabble rose into the real world on the backs of the incoming in-crowd... it metastasized into a meme too big to contain, and now the two sides were openly at war.

"Are you sure that's really a good idea? The reaction is not going to be a joke."

There was no upside to poking his head into this. These "~Wars" always started out as fun, and then filled up with people who got far too invested and turned into full-blown villains.

But the PR team, staffed as it was by in-crowd types with apparently no grasp of community ecology, seemed to view all of this as a golden opportunity.

"If the reaction is big, that's a win for us! Kim Yi-seon is the hottest thing going these days, after all. He and his friend Kang Min-hyuk each pick a mascot — wouldn't that be fun?"

The PR staffer's eyes sparkled. The other employees around her looked much the same.

Come to think of it, Seo-hee noona was so ridiculously overprotective of him that the club had barely shot any content with him at all. He did feel a little guilty about refusing them forever.

So from their perspective, they had apparently settled on the least burdensome option they could find — something simple, and easy to stretch into plenty of footage. Which, fair enough...

"Alright. Fine, let's do it."

Right. This was professional work too. It wasn't good to keep refusing everything. As long as the fighting stayed firmly in joke territory — the ones who got way too invested were their own problem, weren't they?

It would probably be fine. Probably.

The plan the PR team had drawn up was exceedingly simple. Declare yourself Team Hani or Team Tani, post proof that you watched a game alongside a mascot plushie sold at the official store, and you were in. Afterward, they would hold a lottery among the Hani-pickers and Tani-pickers for an online fan meeting with whichever player shared their taste.

According to them, the club's reasoning was this: even once the pandemic ended, if fans grew reluctant to spend money on watching games, it would be a devastating blow in the long run — so this event had been planned to keep fans in the habit of spending. Whether it would actually land, he had no idea.

In any case, an "online fan meeting" amounted to little more than a phone call, so it wasn't any real burden. The problem was that he, personally, would have to declare which mascot he supported.

The PR team would keep his choice under wraps at first while promoting the event, so he didn't have to decide this second — but the fact remained that it required thought.

"Honestly, neither one does anything for me."

He stared at the two mascots, utterly unable to grasp what sensibility had birthed them. Baseball club mascots were supposed to be built around baseball gear, or the animal in the team name, weren't they?

Hani and Tani of the Twins were a little different.

Hani first. Overall, a round, fluffy thing that gave the impression of a giant ball of fur. Up to that point, you could generously call it cute. The problem was that the facial features were so aggressively individual that the overall effect landed closer to frightening.

In fact, during a stadium event, a child had burst into tears at the sight of Hani, and the moment had been immortalized on M-Tube. It really was a slightly scary-looking face — though the people whose taste it matched insisted those very features were its charm.

And Tani. This one was long and lanky for a mascot, which set it apart — most mascots went for the chubby, super-deformed look. As for proportions: the head was certainly large compared to a human's, but the body looked less like a costume and more like... just a person wearing clothes?

It looked... deeply suspicious. Which was presumably why a strange contingent of male fans had latched onto it, too. On pure looks alone, Tani was easier on the eyes than Hani — but for exactly that reason, uncanny valley was the only way to describe it.

He truly had no clue who to pick.

The players' mascot choices would only be revealed after the event ended, meaning every fan who won the lottery for an online meeting with him would be a devoted fan of that mascot. It would hardly do for him to secretly feel nothing for the thing.

When he laid all of this out for Kang Min-hyuk — the man he'd have to coordinate with for this event — Min-hyuk answered with the ease of a man handling a trivial matter.

"That is why I intend to ask my girlfriends. Even if a mascot is not to my own taste, if it is to my girlfriends' taste, then I will have something to talk about at the meeting, will I not?"

"... You're not the real Kang Min-hyuk, are you."

There was no way this bastard was this smart?

Ignoring my shock entirely, Min-hyuk rose from his seat, leaving behind one final piece of brilliance: 'Ask around, then come back to me. Since we must choose different mascots, let us coordinate accordingly.'

What was this? Was someone slipping him a baseball and a working brain?

It bruised the pride a little, but Min-hyuk's plan really did look like the best option. Fine — pretending to like whatever your girlfriend liked was doable even if you didn't actually like it. It wasn't a hard thing, and all he had to do was ask. Better to decide quickly, too, so the PR team could run the event smoothly.

Once the decision was made, the rest was easy. He'd go with whichever mascot his girlfriends chose, listen to them explain why, and come to understand it well enough. If there was one thing he never forgot, it was anything his girlfriends told him.

Though if he got too invested in their arguments, he might just end up brawling with the fans himself.

"Isn't it obvious? Hani's better. Tani's kind of a whatever."

"Isn't it Tani? Hani looks a little scary, don't you think?"

"..."

"..."

"Min-ah, isn't Tani a little... off? People say weird stuff about Tani online all the time too, and honestly it kind of creeps me out?"

"Well, by that logic, isn't Hani the stranger one? A child cried just from looking at it, you know."

What I had not counted on was the two of you going to war over it.