He Was Actually a Good Guy
Turns out this guy was actually a decent guy.
We're living through the grim era of COVID right now. Even professional athletes, unless they belong to a club or team, have nowhere proper to train. It's that kind of terrible time.
If you came up through a university program, you can at least tag along and train at your old college team's facilities. But for guys stuck with nothing but mediocre high school facilities — or worse, for the ones who came from across the ocean with nothing at all — even basic personal training is a logistical nightmare.
Which is why I get it, I do. Normally the custom is to head off to a nice warm southern rookie camp only *after* contracts are signed, but this year they've decided to throw this draft class straight into the second-team training complex and grind them before they've even put pen to paper. Under the circumstances, that makes sense.
"Good morning, sunbae!!"
"Hey, Kim—"
But understanding something and being happy about it are two completely different things.
It's already a busy season, and on top of that I have to prep for the wedding with Ye-eun within the year, and keep an eye on Min-ah as she crams for the CSAT. And now these fresh-faced rookies have already shown up making all this noise?
Anyone who's done military service knows: the relationship between the first senior class and the first junior class is the closest thing to family and the most distant thing at the same time. If those kids screw up, who do they come looking for first? The seniors right above them, that's who.
"Hey isn't how you say 'discipline is slipping.'"
"What?"
The guy has been a naturalized Korean citizen for over three whole months now, and he still can't understand even this level of simple Korean. The sigh just comes out on its own.
Look at that face, like he's saying *I honestly have no idea what I did wrong.* This Yankee bastard is really begging for a stern lecture from his senior.
It grates on me a little. Until literally seconds ago he'd been strutting around with his shoulders squared and his chin jammed up in the air like he was already a superstar. The guy radiates *I'm the main character!* everywhere he goes — and I've held the number one spot on Webflex and I never carried on like that.
"Hahaha! Sunbae, you're good at wordplay too."
"Yeah, Jun-soo. Sure."
But Jun-soo's reaction — whether it was pure-hearted or just simple-minded, who could say — let it slide. What could I do? He's going to be on our team starting next year, and he has nowhere to train as it is.
Besides, that PR team video got a pretty big reaction when it dropped, so I can understand why his shoulders are so tensed up and his neck's so stiff. His surprise cameo at the draft was one thing, but the kid's actually pretty quick on the uptake with an audience.
The guy doesn't know a word of Korean, yet he's checking the video's view count like clockwork. You can get a pretty good read on what kind of person someone is from that, honestly.
"Player Kim Yi-seon says Henry would like to join you for morning training."
And now this guy wants to cling to *me*? The reason is as obvious as a 4K video, no thinking required.
"Tell him I can't — I have my pitching routine. Honestly, I'd have thought even in America they don't toss out seniority like this."
Sure, the West loves to go on about flat hierarchies and anti-authoritarianism, but you really think athletes live that way? The age of romance is over. Even now, no rookie gets to share a table with a starting rotation pitcher.
When I let that unpleasant feeling show, Jun-soo laughed and said:
"Hahaha, just kidding! You're only a first-year yourself, sunbae, aren't you?"
That first year counts for a LOT, you little punk.
---
Our beloved relief ace Mr. Walker, it turned out, was irritatingly close to Jun-soo's position on the matter.
"Ha! Fair point. Rookie, doesn't matter how big a superstar you think you are — you're a first-year pro with one year in the starting lineup. Rookies should stick together and get along."
"Wow, this guy is unbelievable. Backing up your fellow Yankee or something?"
The interpreter looked mildly flustered at my remark, but whatever. Walker drops the N-word on the daily and occasionally mutters something about chinks, so this level of thing I can laugh off.
"Yankee? Watch your mouth there, rookie! I ain't no Yankee — I'm a Dixie!"
Right. Sure. You're very special.
"A Yankee's more like that kid. Says so himself — born and raised in New Jersey, he claims. Ahh, New Jersey. About as boring a fella as you'd expect from that trash state."
One single paragraph, and the rebuttal material is absolutely overflowing.
First, our f***ing racist Mr. Walker calling a quarter-Korean "just a Yankee" — fascinating. Second, a guy from rural Alabama calling New Jersey trash is a bit rich. And third, calling Henry *boring* is bordering on sheer nonsense.
"What do you mean, boring? There's nobody in this rookie class louder than that guy."
Of the nine draftees moving into the second-team dorms — all of them, in fact, except one guy with personal circumstances who'd joined from rookie camp — Henry was, looks aside, by far the most conspicuous in terms of behavior.
"Really? Can't say I noticed. Seemed like a surprisingly sensible kid to me."
That's only because all YOU ever spout is black-this and trash-that. The other kids don't speak much English, so they just flinch and move past it — but he's an actual mainland American, and if he reacts to your garbage, we've got a real problem, you idiot.
But Walker, refusing to accept my reaction, pressed on.
"Nah, that ain't the point. The kid's just... a sensible sort, is all..."
He grunted and groped for words but couldn't quite get them out. I don't know what he meant, but the one talking was Walker. I decided to dismiss the rest of it on principle and went looking for other opinions. Maybe Matt would be better?
---
Matt, Paulo, the hitter Max, the pitching-coach seniors, even the position-player veterans — I went around warning them all about that sigh-inducing attention-seeker of a kid, and every single one of them was lukewarm about it.
The foreign players brushed it off like that's just what kids that age are like. The Korean players just avoided him because they couldn't speak English. This is why athletes should be forced to actually study in school, I'm telling you.
And in the end, with nothing to show for it, I had to retreat awkwardly, having left behind nothing but a signal that I'd be watching him and a petty, snippy attitude.
Then came team practice time. Normally the squad runs in three groups — starters, backups, and the second team — but today, with a whopping nine baby chicks in attendance, things were being run with the groups a bit mixed.
"Hyeong-jun hyung, at this rate you'll be playing shortstop too."
"What, still not good enough?"
Practice proceeded with everyone laughing and joking — a far cry from the usual. With rookies mixed in, if you clamped down hard on the atmosphere, the kids were already nervous enough that they'd only freeze up and fail to show their real ability.
Sensing the need to deliberately loosen things up, the first-team regulars were doing their best to keep the mood light.
But there was one guy participating with a perfectly relaxed expression, as if none of that consideration applied to him in the slightest.
"The training is more systematic than I expected."
That Yankee bastard, appraising everything like he'd been appointed an official evaluator.
I had no choice but to issue Henry a warning, carefully calibrated to stay within the bounds of our smiling atmosphere.
"Hey, Henry. Your tempo seems a touch slow right now?"
"It didn't seem to affect my defense in the moment, so I took it slow. Pouring too much strain into practice isn't good for you, is it?"
Fine. Burning out or getting hurt from wasted effort in practice IS the bigger loss. But what does that have to do with playing defense so alarmingly lazy you never stray more than three steps off first base?
Hyeong-jun hyung was covering all the way out to first range — throwing in diving catches he never normally attempts, mind you?
I smothered my boiling gut one more time and, factoring in the possibility that the interpreter was mistranslating, delivered my message in the simplest vocabulary possible.
"Try. Little. Harder. Okay?"
"Come on, Kim. You of all people should get it. This kind of practice is about syncing up with each other and learning the standard patterns — there's no need to grit your teeth and hunt down every single ball. Especially not for players like us. Don't you think?"
Henry said it all with the breezy air of a self-evident truth. The interpreter beside him was glancing nervously at my face as he translated — sir, you really don't need to read my expression for this one.
Because he's not entirely wrong. If we were doing serious infield defense work, we'd skip the pitchers entirely and just run fungo drills. This practice is, first and foremost, about confirming pattern plays.
But still.
"Then for f***'s sake, QUIT GRAADING THE PRACTICE!"
Either shut up about the training entirely, or if you're going to offer critiques, at least participate like you give a damn. He wags his finger telling everyone to do it the Korean way, then conducts evaluations over the Korean-style training — how am I *not* supposed to blow up?
The others can't understand English and let it slide. I can't. If I didn't personally educate this pretentious, celebrity-complex bastard, I was never going to sleep easy again.
In accordance with the time-honored, hallowed tradition of the Twins (established the day I joined), I issued a formal Makgora challenge to Henry.
"Yo! Let's settle this with a home run derby!"
Baseball players settle things with baseball. That's just how it works.
---
Henry didn't quite understand what he was seeing: Kim Yi-seon grinning as he picked up a bat.
Of course, he was aware he'd been behaving arrogantly. It was even somewhat intentional — no point pretending otherwise. But he'd assumed the one who'd get angry at that behavior would be a veteran, not a rookie star like Kim.
Instead, the veterans like Kang, and the players like Kim, had rattled off a few short phrases in hard-to-parse Korean accents, barked out a laugh, and waved him off. That was all.
*This is running a bit off-script.*
His obnoxious act had in fact been a calculated strategy. No matter that he'd been drafted — he was a complete outsider who'd learned nothing of the language beyond a greeting.
Back in America, he'd vaguely wondered if his unusual looks might pass as ordinary here. But contrary to what he'd imagined, there were hardly anyone who looked like him. Well — the population leaned far more toward white, so that was only natural.
And yet he needed to be accepted into this group as one of its own — and in the long run, to become someone who represented them. And as quickly as possible.
So the plan he'd devised was the *"this bastard might secretly be a good guy?"* strategy.
He'd read it in some psychology book: do someone a hundred favors and mess up once, and you're branded as bad; do a hundred terrible things and help them once, and people decide you were a good person all along.
The plan was simple.
1. Act the arrogant, nose-in-the-air Yankee. Fortunately, he'd grown up around plenty of that type back home, so the imitation wasn't hard.
2. Once he'd drawn pushback from the veterans and incumbent players, and someone picked a fight, demonstrate undeniable, superior skill.
3. Once his skill secured him a first-team spot, show genuine teamwork and establish himself as *"still a bastard who treats his own team right."*
How flawless was that? The dog who's only kind to his own pack is a position that always wins. It was exactly how he'd become the heart of the baseball team at the first high school he'd enrolled in.
But for some reason, the veterans — the very people who should have been pushing back hardest — had laughed off his behavior, and the second-teamers and rookies who should have been showing petty jealousy seemed utterly unbothered. And only Yi-seon Kim had gotten angry like this.
He still didn't understand why. Honestly, his remarks shouldn't have stung Yi-seon Kim at all — if anything, they were the kind of thing that should've irritated the coaches or the players without a guaranteed roster spot.
Having lived in America his whole life, and having heard his agent explain that *"Koreans understand English better than you'd think,"* Henry would never arrive at the truth: that the only player on the team who understood any English at all was Kim Yi-seon.
Nor would he ever learn that his slightly arrogant attitude had been waved away with a cultural-relativist shrug — *ah, Americans just have a different sensibility than us!*
At any rate, Henry sensed that his original plan had come off the rails — but the broad strokes were still intact.
So the person getting angry wasn't quite who he'd expected. But he'd spent all this time being insufferable; now he just had to show his skill and flip the situation. Simple as that.
Kim Yi-seon stepped into the batter's box. The bullpen pitcher who'd been suddenly dragged over had no idea what was happening and stood there dazed, but at Yi-seon's firm insistence, he readied himself to throw.
And the way Yi-seon set his stance was genuinely beautiful. The man was tall to begin with, with those long limbs of his — framed in a proper stance like that, it was a picture.
Certainly he looked confident enough to challenge any hitter to a home run derby. But then, who was Henry? Henry Dwight Irwin.
The man Major League scouts had graded a 70 for raw power. No matter how gifted Yi-seon Kim was, no matter how impressive his power, he was — first and foremost — a *pitcher*. And a pitcher could hardly be expected to surpass an actual hitter like himself—
*CRACK—!!!*
"One!"
*CRACK—!!!*
"Two!"
*CRACK—!!!*
"Three!"
*...There aren't any more, are there?*
---
Ahh, that felt incredible.
Maybe it was the anger talking, but I launched a whopping thirteen home runs in today's derby. He kept pace up to eleven, which did send a brief chill down my spine — but so what? Contact ability aside, my raw, filthy power was rated the best in all of high school baseball. Was Kim Yi-seon really going to lose to that?
A shame, truly. If I'd had just a bit more hitting technique, I could have shown the world a once-in-history spectacle — the ambidextrous, switch-hitting, two-way monster.
I was humming my way back to the dorms, savoring that nonsense and the memory of Henry's world-collapsing expression at the end, when—
"Don't take it so hard, Yankee rookie. That guy's a monster. Always has been."
"...Walker. You wouldn't understand. A hitter losing to a *pitcher*? That's game over. Completely."
Passing through the hallway, I caught a familiar voice.
Ah, this is going to be a brutal English listening test.
There were words I didn't know, sections spoken too fast to parse at all — but channeling the memories of my past life's Yi-seon Kim, who'd watched his share of American dramas, I focused as hard as I could and listened.
"Alright then. Let me tell you my killer life story. So, see, when I was entering high school—"
"I know, Walker. Heard it last time. The bitch who ruined your life and dragged you all the way over here."
Wait, what. Since when were these two this close?
It had been barely a week since the draft — when had they gotten to the intimate-life-story stage of friendship? The two of them were chatting away in what looked like a genuinely close relationship! *That* Walker!
Walker smacked his lips, then offered his consolation in an oddly gentle tone.
"Yeah, well. Even a badass like me — man's lived a rough life, sure — I get along fine with the team just the same. You're downright cute by comparison, Yankee. Nobody's got a single bad feeling toward you, I'd bet."
"Walker, I appreciate the comfort, but I have to face reality. Every town, every group, it's all the same. The fact that they're never kind to an outsider."
A damp, deflated register — somewhere noticeably off from his usual swagger.
Um... is that really the same guy?
But Henry's unexpected side didn't stop there.
"Damn it, I *have* to be a star. A mediocre ballplayer can't change anything. You know that better than anyone."
"That's right. Even us redneck Dixie boys sing praises for the black linebackers over at Alabama."
The two of them let out a long, deep sigh. And then Walker opened his mouth in a tone so tender it was almost disorienting from a man like him.
"But listen here, Yankee. Being a star doesn't only belong to the special ones."
"That sounds rather contradictory."
"'Cause baseball's a team sport, son. There's plenty of players out there who're loved without being special — loved even being ordinary. So quit fixating on some flashy highlight reel, rookie."
The conversation ended there, and I heard Henry quietly footsteps-ing his way off in the opposite direction.
I hadn't expected to overhear something with this kind of weight behind it. The guy had a story, apparently?
And there I stood, debating — should I quietly slip away, or walk over and join Walker like it was the most natural thing in the world?
"Rookie, you listening? Nah, just calling you 'rookie' gets you confused with the Yankee rookie... Yellow rookie?"
"F*** you, Walker. My skin's whiter than yours anyway."
And that was Walker's voice I heard in that moment.
Look, the earnest part of it had genuinely moved me a little, and I was startled trying to figure out how he'd known I was there. But seriously — how does the man have a gift for killing a moment's mood with a single sentence?