The Root of Being Rootless (2)
"Yi-seon? Don't get me wrong, it's great for the club and all, but... will this actually work?"
"Noona, I'm telling you, this is going to land. There's no way it doesn't."
Kim Yi-seon's face radiated pure confidence. Not long ago he'd suddenly shown up at the president's office asking her to produce a few pieces of content centered entirely on him, and she'd agreed without a second thought — ever since, he'd been strutting around like this. Like he'd become some kind of expert on public opinion.
"The masses only ever see what they want to see. Heh heh heh."
Watching him carry on like that was honestly kind of adorable... but hadn't he said the boy needed to grow up and act more mature? Somehow, the further along they got, the more his mental state seemed to be deteriorating.
With that thought, Han Seo-hee turned her eyes to the screen. Ever since the Wirye Jeil High documentary, the Twins' official MyTube channel had become the most successful of all twelve clubs' channels. Their first variety-style planning video in ages had gone up on it, and the fan response was excellent.
No — maybe it wasn't that the fans were responding well, but that the fans were watching precisely because the response was good.
Even Han Seo-hee had to admit it was a safe concept with genuinely high impact. A "this or that" battle — wasn't that a theme everyone loved, young and old, man and woman alike?
The problem was Kim Yi-seon's answers.
She already knew what he was going for. Still — if all he did was pile up lies, wouldn't that come back to bite him later?
He apparently didn't like the "no fundamentals" nickname and meant to twist its meaning into something else entirely, but she wasn't sure that was achievable — and spouting nothing but lies from start to finish only made the mess harder to clean up.
If he were some unremarkable player who just played baseball in obscurity, fine. But Kim Yi-seon was a superstar among superstars whose every private moment drew scrutiny. What would he do if fans eventually felt betrayed over some trivial detail?
Otherwise, he'd have to consistently claim he'd pick Dr. Pepper between cola and cider, pick sushi between chicken and pizza, answer "my girlfriend" when asked whether he loved his mom or dad more, and insist in a romance-comedy manga that the rival's girlfriend appealed to him more than both the childhood-friend heroine and the student-council-president heroine.
Settings so contrived she wondered if anyone could actually keep them straight. No such human being existed.
She let out a sigh and watched Kim Yi-seon gazing at the video with a deeply satisfied expression. Sensing her eyes on him, he whipped his head around.
"What is it, noona?"
"Nothing. Never mind. So, Yi-seon — shall we go get something to eat?"
"Love to. Didn't you say the head chef from a Chinese restaurant at a Seoul Group hotel is coming in to cook today?"
"Yeah. He can make all the classic Korean-Chinese dishes, so just tell me what you want."
"Then udon, please."
"...Sorry, what?"
"The foundation of any Chinese restaurant is udon, obviously."
Han Seo-hee heard that and studied Kim Yi-seon carefully.
"What? Staring at me like that is a little embarrassing."
"Yi-seon. You don't have to keep up the act in front of me, you know."
"The act? What act would that be?"
It was the same thoughtless, blank-airheaded vibe Kim Yi-seon always gave off — far too unbroken to be a performance.
In that instant, Han Seo-hee faltered.
Uh... wait. Is it real?
Obvious as it sounds, he hadn't rushed blindly into things just because he'd heard Hayul's opinion. You needed preparation, a script drafted to perfection — otherwise how would it have any effect?
And if it was staged too obviously, people wouldn't think, what a fascinating human being; they'd think, this guy is rigging his own image.
So he had quietly passed Hayul's idea and his own concept along to Ye-eun and Min-ah — but contrary to expectations, the response was utterly underwhelming.
"Really? If that's all it is, it hardly seems worth dressing up. Just act like you always do."
"Oppa, sometimes I genuinely can't tell whether you know yourself or not. Does something like this really need a whole script?"
Excuse me? Your heaven-sent husband is currently being treated as a degenerate womanizer by the entire public, and this lacks seriousness?
This was something that might not work even if he threw his full weight into an airtight plan, and there they were, acting like the world was at peace. The authority of the head of the household had collapsed so long ago that talking to these two was pointless.
Then who should he consult? Seo-hee noona? The new PR team leader? Or Manager Yeongcheol? None of them inspired much confidence either...
"Hyung, what are you worrying about?"
"Oh, Hayul. Welcome."
Hayul came over carrying a smartphone and a laptop so brand-new the plastic shine practically gleamed.
Apparently he'd decided that if his mother-in-law caught him holding the allowance Kim Yi-seon had handed out as an idea reward, there'd be hell to pay — so he'd immediately converted the cash into goods. As expected, his cunning wasn't at Lee Ye-eun's level, but it was at least at her little brother's level.
Anyway — whether the allowance had done its job or not, Hayul was now showing a measurable degree of respect, offering Kim Yi-seon after-service care of his own accord. Deeply moved, Kim Yi-seon lodged a formal complaint before this one loyal brother-in-law — the only person in the house who still respected its head — about the total collapse of domestic discipline.
"Well... I can't really judge you the way noona does. If noona said it, she's probably right, isn't she?"
"Hey, that's betrayal again! Is there seriously no good way to do this?"
"It's not betrayal... Hmm, I saw something online once — something that bad guy from Germany, whatever his name was, said..."
"Hitler? Goebbels?"
"Something like that, anyway. He said a lie mixed into the truth works even better."
And the plan Hayul laid out from there was, building on his original idea, extremely plausible.
"So — be honest for most of it, but at a few key points, say things that sound completely without fundamentals?"
"Exactly. If you only talk about one or two topics, the discussion gets funneled there and you're easy to catch lying. But if you talk across tons of topics and lie about all of them, the lore contradicts itself sooner or later."
...Wasn't this the kid who averaged a grade-6 on his June mock exams and had his mother-in-law sighing her lungs out over what to do with him?
Good heavens. So Lee Ye-eun's gift wasn't her own talent at all — it was hereditary?
Awestruck by this astonishing little schemer, Kim Yi-seon seized Hayul's hand and shouted:
"Allowance: two hundred percent raise!"
"Really? I knew it — I'm Kim Yi-seon's little brother, not Lee Ye-eun's!"
"Hahahaha!"
It was a perfect plan.
"So what went wrong? It was a perfect plan."
Having already burned through the MyTube comment section, Kim Yi-seon logged onto the community forums to gauge the reaction — and was forced to taste despair.
The reaction itself was unquestionably explosive. Relative to the amount of interest in Kim Yi-seon, he kept no personal SNS and rarely appeared in club content, so every time his face showed up, the response had always been huge. On top of that, he'd scraped together every "versus" topic the forums fought over day in and day out — there was no way this couldn't land.
The problem was that the reaction he'd aimed for was supposed to be "this bastard has absolutely no fundamentals." Instead, what kept popping up was "chuunibyou," "adorable," and "how does acting like THAT get you girls?" — enough to make a man tear his hair out.
No, this shouldn't be possible? I meant every single word! A few answers he'd thrown out deliberately to stir up controversy — why was nobody paying attention to those?
Rushing to Hayul produced no real solution; Ye-eun and Min-ah had nothing useful to offer either; and Seo-hee noona just said she'd known from the start it wouldn't work. What a mess — there was barely any way to clean this up.
Had the plan completely failed? But he'd come too far. If he couldn't salvage it now, wouldn't the degenerate-womanizer image only get stamped in deeper?
As he heaved a great sigh over all this, Min-soo hyung, who had been sitting quietly, finally spoke.
"So. What exactly is the reason you're telling me all this?"
"Because you're my personal catcher, hyung."
Bang Min-soo was a highly analytical man. His own teammates and opposing players, of course, but also the opponent's coaching staff and front office — even the currents of fan opinion — all went into the puzzle from which he conjured his strategies. A possessor of astonishing analytical power.
His one flaw was that outside of meeting hours, he hoarded all that analysis to himself rather than sharing it with anyone... though weren't geniuses of that caliber always eccentrics? Maybe he simply disliked having his ideas bandied about.
Anyway — if Lee Ye-eun herself couldn't solve it, nor his beloved Min-ah or Seo-hee noona, nor Hayul, the staff, or any of the other assorted people around him, then the only person left to cling to was Bang Min-soo.
Who on earth understood pitchers better than a catcher did? Surely Bang Min-soo, if not quite on the level of his girlfriends, possessed a real understanding of who Kim Yi-seon was.
Faced with Kim Yi-seon's desperate plea, Min-soo hyung muttered something like "this is overtime, you realize..." under his breath, then answered with visible displeasure.
"Fine. Because if I don't help you, you'll either go torment people or get into one of your weird states and torment the teammates instead."
"Aw, come on. When have I ever tormented my seniors?"
"Save it. So, from what you're saying — you need people to perceive you as something other than an ordinary human being. A man who doesn't possess the things everyone else calls fundamentals or basics. That's the image you're trying to plant?"
Hearing it said out loud like that left a strange taste. He wanted to say no, that's not it — but when he actually broke it down, every word was true.
"I... suppose so?"
"Then I think I understand why your wife said what she did. Stop overcomplicating it. People don't hear words like yours and think, ah, so that's the kind of man he is. They think, he's lying. So show it through action instead."
Action? So did he have to start raising a guinea pig now? Film shrimp-burger mukbangs? There was a pregnant woman and a college-entrance-exam student in that house — pets were a bit of a stretch.
While he sat there groaning over the problem, Min-soo hyung let out yet another sigh and added one more thing.
"I don't want to know what you're imagining, but that's not it. Your next start is in two days, right?"
"That's right. You'd know, hyung — you're my personal catcher."
Min-soo hyung gave a small nod. Then he said, perfectly flatly:
"Tell the PR team. After this game, you and I are filming a game review video together."
"A review video?"
"Yeah. The kind where you talk through it — what judgment you made at this moment, what you were thinking at that one. Those exist, don't they?"
Certainly. It was a video-review style that showed up now and then in sports other than baseball, and the team sometimes ran internal game feedback that way too.
"But wouldn't that be leaking team strategy? There'll be a plan the team drew up, and if we say it all out loud, the manager won't approve it. And look — I'm supposed to come across as having no fundamentals, but if I break plays down citing reasons and logic, wouldn't that produce exactly the opposite effect?"
But the reason such reviews didn't exist in baseball was clear enough. Almost every small play flowed from a dugout instruction, which made this a kind of team-strategy leak.
And he was supposed to look like a man without fundamentals — laying out judgments this sophisticated for ordinary fans would only reinforce the genius image. No way it earned him the "rootless" label.
"What do you— ...Never mind. Just trust me and film it. The manager will approve."
But Min-soo hyung only started to explain and then swallowed it, offering nothing more.
He said it every time, but to Bang Min-soo, baseball was simply a workplace. Life counseling for a junior colleague was something he might cheerfully provide, depending on the person — but in Min-soo's case, he would have declined.
Except this particular junior was the boyfriend of the company president — the one man whose mental state sent the entire organization into a cold sweat the moment it wavered. What choice did he have? Feeling the timeless plight of the salaried man who lives off someone else's money, Bang Min-soo dutifully joined Kim Yi-seon's plan.
More than that — whoever had dreamed this up, it was an utterly moronic plan. Didn't like the lazy-genius-womanizer image? Then the solution was to flood the world with opposite heartwarming anecdotes — but no, instead someone had decided to swap it for a similar-but-different image? Who thought of that?
It was hard enough as described, and the further the man himself was from actually being that kind of person, the harder it got. You could fool people for a little while, but a lie didn't last a lifetime, did it?
As one small mercy, after hearing the plan from Kim Yi-seon, Bang Min-soo had been able to arrive at the solution immediately. Because it wasn't a lie at all.
"Hm? Is that so? Well, do as you like. Yi-seon, just speak however feels natural. On one condition — only talk about what happened in the game. Keep the pre-game meeting content and the dugout instructions out of it as much as possible."
"I'll handle that part carefully, sir."
"Good. I'm sure you will, Min-soo."
By rights, this was the kind of thing that would expose a manager's tendencies and dugout strategy, but the manager approved without a single restriction — go ahead, do as you see fit. Bang Min-soo nodded as if it were only natural. And not one person raised an objection.
Kim Yi-seon wanted to be called a man without fundamentals? There was no easier job in the world.
All he had to do was play the game exactly as he always did, indulge in his usual nonsense, and show it to the public.
If anything more was required... well. For this one game, perhaps simply loosening Kim Yi-seon's reins a little more than usual?
Bang Min-soo sent a small, silent prayer of sympathy toward the Gwangju Phoenix, who would be facing them in the next game.
First place in the Southern Division meant nothing today. The poor bastards who had to stand across from Kim Yi-seon.
The Gwangju Phoenix's power analysis team meeting was spinning its wheels in total neutral.
"So you're telling me there's no pattern at all in Kim Yi-seon's pitch mixing?"
"Correct. If you force a conclusion, the fastball share runs high — but it swings anywhere from the mid-forty percent range up to eighty percent depending on the game. Whether we should read any meaningful tendency into that..."
"Still, wouldn't a fastball-first approach be the most realistic option we have?"
"Preparing for it is one thing — how do you game-plan for a fastball averaging 2,700 rpm and touching 164 km/h? And even if you manage it, as I just said, this is a pitcher who can suddenly drop his fastball usage below half. It's pointless."
"Then what, we just sit on our hands? Do something."
"That's exactly why I proposed targeting the curveball, didn't I? The angle's a touch sharp, but it's fundamentally a curve — if we sit on it and swing..."
"You analyzed it alongside us and you're still saying that? Kim Yi-seon's curve — whether the location is unrefined or deliberate, who knows — gets thrown as a count-setter, a chase pitch, up in the zone to disrupt timing, down and over for a straight challenge... The locations vary wildly and the intent behind them has never been standardized. Did we not cover this?"
"Even so, it beats chasing that monster fastball, doesn't it?"
It was a disaster.
The analysts had all gathered, and for three hours straight they'd done nothing but argue, each insisting that Kim Yi-seon's X was hard to attack because Y, so let's target Z — with every one of them claiming the exact opposite of the others.
The biggest reason was simply that Kim Yi-seon's stuff was overwhelming. Against a pitcher with lesser stuff, a hitter could afford a looser approach and still find a way to cope.
But how were you supposed to take it easy against a fastball well past 160 and a knuckle curve over 140?
And the bigger problem wasn't even the stuff. It was the pitch mixing and the patterns.
"Let's stop here for today. So, to summarize — both Manager Lee and Assistant Manager Park are telling me that no tendency or rational plan whatsoever can be found in Kim Yi-seon's location, pitch mixing, or pitch selection by count and situation?"
"Yes, sir. We did identify one extreme tendency toward favoring strikeouts, but outside of that, nothing about his game follows any fixed form. Even the strikeout preference isn't absolute — we've repeatedly caught him boldly throwing chase pitches in three-ball counts."
"For the love of..."
Human beings develop patterns even unconsciously, and as long as count pressure exists, pitch sequencing inevitably converges, to some degree, on what everyone calls the standard book.
Kim Yi-seon showed none of it. The record of his pitches sprawled across the page at random, like paint flung carelessly onto a canvas somehow resolving into shapes no one could predict.
"We still have to find a way. Even outside the club, people are saying the Phoenix is wobbling these days. The group's steady investment to rebuild the Phoenix dynasty is finally bearing fruit — we cannot stop now."
But they had to analyze. They had to contribute to the team's victory. For all its long and storied prestige, the Phoenix had gone ages without tasting a championship. Last year's title notwithstanding, measured against the long years of parent-company investment, it still wasn't enough.
The head of the power analysis team, a man who dreamed of a Phoenix dynasty, fluttered the printout of Kim Yi-seon's data in his hand as he thought this. And yet — you were still human. Somewhere, there had to be a pattern.