Squad Depth

Thanks to the unprecedented disruption of the pandemic, the delayed schedule pushed the North-South Exchange Series to a rather late start in early July — but the compressed calendar meant most of the games could be wrapped up by late July, right in the thick of the monsoon season.

At this pace, we'd finish even faster than the original plan of wrapping things up before early August.

To make that happen, the league had packed the schedule to bursting with no off days — not even the one or two per month even Major League Baseball allows — while minimizing rainouts by scheduling more doubleheaders and flatly ignoring home-and-away balance. Unavoidable collateral damage.

For the Seoul Twins, whose home is a dome, there wasn't much of a problem at first. If anything, we caught a small break with games that should have been on the road landing at home instead, and since our park had a roof, we racked up fewer rainout-mangled doubleheaders than any of the open-air teams.

But the monsoon — regarded by the people of this peninsula as less a weather event than a season, for thousands of years — was never a natural phenomenon to be taken lightly.

"What did the league office say?"

"For this Hamheung Tigers road trip, all the existing local dates are cancelled. We play one game the day after tomorrow's doubleheader to close out the series. Then, in the following series, we open against Hamheung as scheduled — but the final day gets a doubleheader instead."

"What kind of schedule is that?"

No matter how carefully you study the rain forecasts and shuffle the calendar, the maddening weather of the Korean peninsula and its monsoon season dump down unforecast rain without warning, and so the Seoul Twins' road games started getting rained out one after another.

And from the league office's standpoint, however extraordinary the times, they couldn't very well hand every game with even a slight chance of rain to the Twins' dome — not during an event as significant as the Exchange Series.

Especially not when whispers were already smoldering online about whether Kim Yi-seon was being unfairly favored for one reason or another.

A schedule twisting out of shape. Doubleheaders stacked on top of doubleheaders to untangle it. And short of that, a grueling march of games with no rest days at all.

Early on, the team's momentum itself was on an upswing, and with Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk in the fold, plus the growth of last year's underwhelming substitute starters, the pitching staff had breathing room to cope.

On top of that, Bang Min-soo — expected to be, at best, a third-string catcher when the season began — had finally blossomed at the first-team level, reaching the point where he could stand shoulder to shoulder with the first option, Baek Joo-won. That helped enormously too.

Surviving a crushing schedule comes down to the depth of the pitching staff — the sport's great consumable — and, on top of that, a sturdy catching corps, which burns through bodies faster than any other position.

Baseball demands less cardiovascular endurance than other sports, sure, and position players can survive playing every single game if they manage their conditioning well. But none of that means a schedule this brutal comes free of charge.

"Jo Sang-goo has collapsed during a rundown on the basepaths — he's still down, clutching his leg and calling out in pain."

"Looks like it's the hamstring area, doesn't it? The medical staff rushed out and are administering emergency treatment, but I'd expect he'll be substituted out of today's game. Let's hope it's nothing serious."

"And just as you say, Hwang Soo-hyung is being sent in to run."

Early August. Jamsil Dome.

Traces of a fiercely contested game were still smeared across every inch of the field, impossible to wash away. Yi-seon did his best to ignore them, glaring in at the batter as he readied his next pitch. The target was simple: a strikeout. Nothing else.

Kang-min sunbae called for a changeup down in the zone. He nodded and settled into his setup. One calm pitch, watching the tension written across the batter's face.

CRACK—!!!

"Ball four off the bat! He swung! A bounding chopper, toward second base—"

He'd aimed for the strikeout and gotten contact instead. The exit velocity ran a little hot, but off that barrel angle, the second baseman had more than enough time to field it and record the out.

Still, Yi-seon turned his head as if he'd just surrendered a base hit and readied himself for the next hitter.

"It gets away from the second baseman! It trickles all the way out toward right field — the throw to first... and he's safe!"

"That has to go down as an error on Hwang Soo-hyung. Watch the slow-motion replay — right at the moment of contact, see how he takes a false step backward? With a ball already hit that hard, and then footwork that awkward on top of it, there was simply no way he was making that play."

"And so the Cheongjin Mountains keep the inning alive on a bases-earned-the-hard-way baserunner."

This is a genuine fucking circus.

This is what the infield defense has become since Sang-goo sunbae went down. He was never the fleet-footed type, nor blessed with freak reaction speed — but his reads on batted balls were so sharp that he almost never took a false step like that.

The other candidates, though? Decent wheels, decent reflexes, sure — but when it came to the one thing that actually mattered, judging a ball off the bat, every last one of them turned into this.

Balls kept leaking through the second-base side, so the manager even floated a drastic measure: shifting Joong-yeon sunbae and Myeong-gil hyung over to second and short, respectively. But that only left the hot corner wobbly, and the two of them couldn't form a keystone as solid as the original pairing anyway, so the idea was shelved.

As if that weren't enough, Joong-yeon sunbae had started missing games here and there under the accumulated physical toll, so on days like today — Myeong-gil hyung at short, a question mark at second — the game simply couldn't be run properly.

Me, I got by, since my game leans on fly balls. But Kang Min-hyuk, who lives on grounders, and Paulo were having a genuinely miserable time of it.

Not that "getting by" was the honest description. Runs weren't exactly pouring in, but outs that should have been caught kept mutating into errors or error-flavored hits, which shrank my pitching options, inflated my pitch count, and dragged everything downhill.

And let's just skip right past Min-jeol sunbae's brilliant contribution to the conversation — "Did your pitching options ever actually mean anything?"

But just look at what's happening right now.

"Yi-seon. Good work out there."

"Already?"

The pitching coach was walking out to the mound, ball in hand.

"You're through five and two-thirds. You've thrown more than enough. Come on out and trust the boys behind you."

A sigh poured out of me before I could stop it. I turned toward the scoreboard and read the state of the game:

It wasn't even a real deficit — a perfectly bridgeable score. That lone run wasn't earned either; it had come around on an error. By any reasonable measure, I'd done my job as the starter.

And I could still throw. My pitch count was barely into the eighties. I had plenty left — so why was he yanking me this early?

"So who's coming in after me?"

"Gwan-yong."

Seo Gwan-yong sunbae? You have got to be kidding me. Skipper, we're giving up on this game already?

I stared at the coach in open disbelief, but his decision wasn't going to change. With no other choice, I came quietly off the mound and walked back to the dugout.

And then I took the temperature of the dugout.

"..."

Not one person was so much as breathing. The whole place had the atmosphere of a funeral. This team is going to drive me insane.

The Seoul Twins had collapsed.

Starting second baseman Jo Sang-goo was down with a hamstring injury, and shortstop Ha Joong-yeon's position was, by its very nature, one of the most physically punishing on the diamond. Through this stretch of back-to-back doubleheaders, he could no longer hold up — everyone could see him being swapped out in short stints again and again.

That alone would have been dreadful. But with the keystone broken open, the defensive burden pressing down on center field climbed with it, and the heart of the Twins' lineup, Joo Byung-min, began complaining of fatigue in turn. Bat and glove alike, he no longer looked like himself.

A domino line running from second base to shortstop to center field, and the Twins' fanbase was being driven to the edge of madness.

On the position-player side of the roster... there were no players.

During the Win-Now years, the Twins had sold off the farm to acquire mediocre aging veterans for instant impact — harpooning the farm system clean through — then, pivoting to a rebuild, spent the starters they'd gathered en masse as releases and trade chips. It was their karma, certainly. But the cupboard was bare to an almost alarming degree.

Filling out a starting eight was struggle enough; worrying about bench depth or a DH option was a luxury they couldn't afford to even contemplate. If Lee Hae-ryong weren't getting older and complaining so loudly about his body, he'd probably never have left the everyday left field job at all.

With the team in free fall, he was gritting his teeth and forcing himself into the lineup every single day, left field or DH, no exceptions — and at this rate, Hae-ryong was going to be the next one to lose his season to injury.

It was only thanks to Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk overperforming beyond all projections on the mound that everyone had breathed easy and never noticed. This had always been the true level of the Twins' squad.

Two consecutive last-place finishes overall don't build themselves, after all.

And for fans who had climbed all the way to second place — a handful of games out of first — giddy at the thought of making another run at the Korean Series, this collapse, dredging up two full years of trauma, hurt almost beyond bearing.

Trading for help wasn't realistic either. Never mind that the deadline had already passed — with the everyday roster stretched to its limit, who would they give up, and who would they bring in? Especially with every one of the Twins' weaknesses now laid bare for the league to see, there wasn't a sucker team in existence that would deal with them at fair value.

The Twins had to find an answer from within the squad they had. Even if the result was their manager earning the same "roulette manager" mockery he'd absorbed last season.

I can't remember the exact source, but I once heard that a pitcher accounts for somewhere in the mid-thirties percent of a team's defense.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Hearing that, most people would probably think, Wow, pitchers really are that important. Baseball fields nine defenders, and on simple math ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠each player ought to carry just over eleven percent of the load.

But people who know a little something about baseball think differently: Wait — pitchers only account for that much?!

And right now, I was feeling that sentiment down to the bone.

"Min-hyuk. The way I see it, a pitcher is like an egg. Think about cooking ramen — the water, the soup base, the noodles, the dried veggie packet all matter, right? And when every one of those is perfectly in balance, that's when the presence or absence of the egg decides whether it tastes great. I figure a pitcher is the same kind of thing."

"Quit spouting nonsense and go do your recovery work, Kim Yi-seon."

The guy who pitched yesterday and has nothing on his plate but rehab drills, stirring up trouble for no reason at all.

But even though he'd never say it out loud, I knew perfectly well he agreed with me wholeheartedly.

There was nothing I could do right now.

Run support had always been scarce, and as long as I simply refused to give up runs, things had a way of resolving themselves. Sure, the lineup going softer made the team's life harder — but that wasn't my fault, now was it?

The problem was the defense. I'd never pitched trusting my fielders, not even in high school, and today's Twins defense was still better than Wirye Jeil High's back in the day. At first I'd figured: if it's better than Jeil High — a team that was actually praised for its defense in high school — then we're fine.

Except the hitters had grown into professionals, and that changed everything. The velocity and angles of batted balls weren't remotely comparable to the high school level, and that half-baked defense simply couldn't hold up against them.

Stack on top of that a long-awaited shot at the first team and the crushing pressure to perform, and even defense that had been better than high-school caliber degraded right back down to high-school level.

If the game where the exasperated manager planted Myeong-gil hyung at short and Joo Byung-min sunbae at second was the best our infield defense had looked all season, what exactly was I supposed to trust? Never mind that the outfield turned into a full-scale disaster in exchange.

No wonder would-be outs kept turning into safes and wrecking the flow of innings, counts that should have ended in double plays kept bleeding one extra batter, and — not that I'd ever trusted the defense — I trusted it even less now.

The result: convinced I had to throw pitches the hitters couldn't touch at all, I leaned harder on my curveball, and my curveball's batting average against climbed right along with it. Go back to living off the four-seamer, and more hitters started trying to roll grounders behind our wrecked infield.

Hence the overwhelming, suffocating sense of helplessness.

"What are you two whispering about over here? Brother-in-law and brother-in-law, plotting to purge the roster?"

Just as Min-hyuk and I settled into a quiet two-man conference, Baek Joo-seon sunbae came strolling over with a bright grin on his face.

Setting aside the fact that my personal catcher had become Min-jang sunbae, he was the kind of senior who always came over on his own to chat and offer counsel whenever something weighed on me. And it wasn't just me — like a true catcher, he looked after the entire pitching staff. A genuinely good man.

Even Hyun-seok sunbae, the head of the pitchers' group, or Ha-seop sunbae, the top dog of the big-league staff, didn't go that far.

"Then again, you could probably pull it off, Yi-seon. March into the president's office, ask for a player, and anyone would come running. But not a catcher, you hear me? A man's got to eat too."

He had this mischievous streak, though.

"How many times do I have to say it — it's not like that. You know how strictly I separate my work life from my private life."

"Sure, sure."

Ever since Seo-hee's now-legendary ambush of the players' lounge, the story of our workplace romance had spread bit by bit through the grapevine until it was half-official. Malicious rumors leaking to the outside we could somehow keep dammed up — but the truth spreading from the inside was impossible to stop.

And the man who'd been the most shocked of anyone that day, and had since become my most relentless teaser, was Baek Joo-seon sunbae. Honestly, this might have been the better outcome — a few of the older players had always been slightly wary of me, and now they were flat-out terrified.

Especially the position-player group training over there right now.

"..."

"..."

Ten players in all — mostly the infield backups the manager kept cycling through tryouts, plus the guys classified as corner outfielders. Four or five starting jobs sat empty, and twice that many bodies were throwing themselves at the opening. You could measure from that alone just how agonizingly the manager was wringing out his roulette.

Truly living up to his reputation as the league's undisputed master of squeezing blood from the roster stone when there were no players to be found.

Anyway, they kept sneaking glances our way. Staring at me isn't going to fix anything, gentlemen. Do I look like someone who'd run to my girlfriend to tattle?

Given the current mood, maybe I ought to count it a blessing that nobody had yet come groveling to me trying to snag a starting job. It wasn't as if this was some Joseon-era royal consort squabbling over the king's favor.

Um... would you play catch with me?

That was exactly what I was thinking — and right on cue, here he came.