The Roots of Having No Roots (4)

"Kim Yi-seon... this guy... is an absolute lunatic.... posted."

Hard at work composing her latest masterpiece on the forums was Ms. Lee Ji-min, granddaughter of old Lee Young-gil. She'd been watching baseball since the Wirye Jeil High days, and she was a devoted personal fan who'd trailed after Kim Yi-seon ever since.

But here was the thing about the dark little desires of personal fans: deep down, what they really wanted was for everyone — not just fellow fans, but the general public and the experts too — to acknowledge their beloved oppa's greatness.

And so she studied baseball earnestly, quietly picked up the lingo of male-dominated baseball forums, and infiltrated those communities like a spy. Every day she posted articles praising Kim Yi-seon and breaking down his play, satisfying her cravings one thread at a time.

Fortunately, Kim Yi-seon was, even in the eyes of mischievous gallery lurkers, a flawless player with ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠no holes in his game whatsoever, so her true identity remained undetected.

If someone hyped up a mediocre player like that, people would sneer, 'Here come the pretty-face fangirls spewing nonsense again.' But when the subject was Kim Yi-seon, it wasn't fangirling at all — it was simply habitual worship.

Of course, a few dim bulbs did get caught. Those were the ones whose phrasing reeked of female-dominated communities, who randomly tore down other players on the team like toxic stans, or who gave themselves away as newbies who clearly didn't understand baseball.

But there was no way she'd fall into those traps. Not when she had the ultimate quality-control inspector at her disposal.

"Grandpa!"

"What is it this time? Let me guess — you want to ask how Kim Yi-seon's pitching looked again?"

Because that inspector was her grandfather — an old-timer among old-timers who'd been watching baseball since the days of liberation itself.

With the pandemic making it hard to attend games in person, and with no way they could risk taking a grandfather to crowded venues when catching the virus would spell disaster, a grandfather-and-granddaughter outing to watch the Seoul Twins live simply never materialized all year.

But perhaps as compensation for that — or perhaps, deep down, because he'd come to enjoy it — this year the old man faithfully tuned in to every Seoul Twins broadcast, as long as it didn't overlap with a Seoul Dragons game.

Even when the times did overlap, he'd leave the TV on the Dragons game while listening along to the small broadcast feed his granddaughter was watching on her phone.

In any case, when a grizzled veteran of the game was following along that closely, the accuracy of his analysis went without saying. The man had even been a professor once.

He was fluent in foreign languages and kept up with the latest theories by digging them off overseas websites — knowledge even the gallery dwellers acknowledged. Thanks to that, her account, which posted columns built on her grandfather's expertise, had become a famous name on the forums as a well-respected old-school veteran fan.

Which was why she'd planned to ask him today, too, how to frame the analysis of Yi-seon's perfect outing so she could spread the gospel of Kim Yi-seon's utter godliness to the masses —

An ominous-sounding alert chimed from the phone in her hand.

She checked it — a livestream notification from the Twins' official YouTube channel. It even kindly left a thirty-minute buffer before start time.

"Grandpa, would you like to watch this one with me?"

Plan changed. Sure, she'd been intending to analyze this game itself and write it up, but there was no way she could pass on bait this juicy.

Ms. Lee Ji-min began devoting every fiber of her brain to one question and one question only: how to squeeze her grandfather dry of information so she could package this livestream beautifully and unleash it upon the forums.

"We're really doing this?"

"Yep."

The PR team's content studio, where Min-soo hyung had dragged me to sit down. It sounded grand, but strip away the camera set up in the corner and it was basically just an ordinary meeting room.

I'd been coming here a lot lately to shoot this content and that, so the place didn't put me on edge or anything. I was used to it.

And yet something about it just wouldn't sit right in my gut, and I found myself getting a little fidgety.

Min-soo hyung looked at my fidgeting and, without so much as a flicker of reaction, simply repeated what he'd already told me several times.

"Nothing embellished, nothing hidden, no pointless asides. Just say exactly what you were actually thinking out there during the game. As close to verbatim as you can."

"Which is exactly why I keep telling you I don't know if that's okay."

Ha-yul had supplied the idea, and the plan I'd built on top of it was this: stop being dismissed as a guy with no fundamentals ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠as in a slacker or a skirt-chaser, and rebrand as someone whose every action was, quite literally, fundamentally unhinged.

To do that, I'd let a few oddball quirks slip out here and there to whet the fans' curiosity.

But a broadcast where I just said whatever was actually going through my head during a game? That didn't match the plan at all. If anything, it felt like a recipe for the exact opposite effect.

Min-soo hyung almost never pushed this hard, so I figured I'd go along with it for now... but honestly, I'd have to chalk the whole thing up as fan service and write off its chances of success as roughly fifty-fifty at best.

By this point I was seriously debating whether my time would be better spent figuring out how to keep Haet-nim-i quarantined from the internet until she was old and gray, rather than rehabilitating my own reputation.

Oblivious to — or perhaps fully aware of — my inner turmoil, the PR team members handling the camera buzzed with the barely contained excitement of people thrilled by their own brainchild.

"We're starting now, okay? You can see the game footage fine from there, right?"

For this explanation segment, they'd set up not just the monitor but also handed each of us a tablet. Apparently we were to draw on it, zoom in and out, roll the slow-mo back and forth, and walk through our thinking whenever something came to mind. It did feel like a format I'd seen on some other sports channel. Should be fun, at least.

Fine. Min-soo hyung was that confident, so it had to accomplish something. Honestly, analysis videos like this always looked cool when soccer, basketball, golf, or even baduk channels did them. Might as well give it a shot.

Lee Young-gil was now deeply, sincerely pondering whether Kim Yi-seon was playing a prank on the entire nation.

"Uh... the count here was 2-and-1, right? By the book, you'd probably work in another decoy pitch or two here. But I couldn't stop staring at Ji-hyun hyung's belt up at the plate."

"Oh, so the belt lets you read some kind of tell? And that's why you went with the straight challenge?"

"The belt? The belt's just a belt. Anyway, that's why I threw the fastball next."

"...I'm sorry, what?"

Tally it up as roughly eighty years if you count the Japanese-league games he'd watched half-blind as a little kid back in the colonial era, and about sixty years of watching baseball with a grown man's head and properly working eyes here in the liberated homeland.

Having watched the game for that long, Lee Young-gil knew there were pitchers of every conceivable style, and that their decision-making processes varied just as wildly. Some of them, god help him, threw on pure gut feeling whenever inspiration happened to strike.

And yet Kim Yi-seon's explanation was harder to follow than any of those human random-number generators.

"Oh, and I remember this at-bat too. The moment the next batter walked in, the belt was bothering me again."

"Ah... the belt. So fastball again here, then?"

"No? I'm telling you, the belt was annoying me. Here I obviously went with a slight fade and painted the changeup in on his hands. Min-soo hyung argued with me to the very end on that one, but I was confident."

...Hmm.

If he'd ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠simply said it felt right in the moment, Lee Young-gil could have let it slide. If the kid had laid out some intricate theory, he'd have concluded that the minds of geniuses were simply beyond mortal comprehension.

But Kim Yi-seon was neither. What this was, was the rambling of a madman.

Identical explanations, completely different results. And according to the man himself, this wasn't gut-feel throwing — these were the outcomes of rational judgment. Excuse me? Same situation, same inputs, different outputs — how is that rational?

And the belt obsession was only the beginning. The belt looked too long, so once he threw three fastballs in a row; another time the belt looked long and he threw three straight curveballs. One tall batter got low pitches because he was tall, while another short batter — you guessed it — got low pitches because he was short.

Yet he didn't throw exclusively by that lunatic logic, either. A few times, he sheepishly admitted, he'd thrown certain pitches emotionally. And for the life of him, Lee Young-gil couldn't tell which ones were supposed to be the emotional ones.

How was dropping a curveball down and under the zone at 0-and-2 an emotional response? Same with showing a setup pitch inside and then going outside — where's the emotion in that?

There were some pitches that didn't fit any logic at all, sure — but the ones that actually looked rational were the ones he insisted he shouldn't have thrown but did anyway because he got emotional. If that counts as emotional, then what on earth counts as rational?

Clutching his throbbing head without even having played a single inning himself, Lee Young-gil glanced aside for a moment. He'd half hoped his granddaughter, sitting next to him, might have had her rose-tinted glasses knocked loose by this much drivel.

"Whoa... so this is the kind of mind games pitchers play with each other..."

She had not.

In that instant, a terrible question seized old Lee Young-gil: Am I the strange one? Is it that I'm old and can't keep up with the young folks anymore — is this just how kids think nowadays? — and, desperate, he turned his eyes to the chat window.

Thankfully, Grandpa Lee Young-gil's impressions appeared to be entirely within the realm of sanity.

"Grandpa, Yi-seon really does seem to be good at everything, huh? What do you think? I want to pick out a few of the most impressive moments, and I was wondering — from your eyes, which parts look the best?"

The greatest conundrum of the man's life.

'I saw the rosin pattern on his fingers looked like a ~ shape, so I threw the curveball,' or 'I looked into his eyes and could tell he wanted a breaking ball, so I threw one' — those, comparatively speaking, had been the most coherent-sounding nonsense of the whole broadcast...

No, wait. To say they sounded coherent is not to say he understood them.

He did briefly wonder whether, in truth, the players simply skip over all the factors that are common knowledge and only explain the additional variables, which is why the explanations came out such a mess — but even setting this bizarre commentary aside, Kim Yi-seon's pitching genuinely did lack consistency.

Until today, Lee Young-gil had attributed that to the kid's exceptional psychological warfare and his uncanny ability to read his opponent's intentions. Apparently not. Not even close.

The only conclusion the old man could now reach was: That boy isn't an ordinary nutcase — he's simply so deranged that the other players can't comprehend his thought process and therefore can't counter him. But there was no way he could say that out loud to the granddaughter currently gazing up at him.

"Heehee! They're doing a raffle in the comments for a video fan meeting too! Grandpa, you'd better help me pick out some good lines to submit, okay?"

How could he say anything, when she was beaming like that? She might be hopeless when it came to baseball, but in daily life she was one of those increasingly rare devoted daughters who actually listened to her grandfather.

Lee Young-gil swallowed a sigh and thought: I haven't the faintest clue how I'm supposed to package any of this.

Huh. It actually worked?

This is... getting a massive response.

The whole 'no fundamentals' meme from before wasn't just absent — it was being washed, laundered, scrubbed clean in exactly the direction I'd wanted. Or rather, it wasn't that it disappeared; it was being actively repurposed.

Laundered... is that the word for it? Either way, the image of a skirt-chasing slacker was gone.

Honestly, part of me felt it had resolved a little too cleanly. But then, when does the world ever arrange itself neatly in exactly the direction I want? This much had landed every single objective, so I figured I'd take the win.

I turned to Min-soo hyung, who had orchestrated this whole situation, and asked with a healthy dose of awe mixed in.

"Hyung, how did you pull this off? Did you talk to the front office? Get them to steer public opinion a little?"

Truthfully, the review video itself had been nothing special. The channel's been running hot lately so plenty of people watched it, but it was still just a YouTube livestream — hardly a viewership explosion.

And yet it spread to every corner of the forums, AND all the sentiment supposedly converged in the same direction?

Threads like these usually get swept along by whatever the first reactions happen to be, so thinking about it now, I couldn't help but suspect the organization had deliberately seeded the communities with accounts and nudged those first reactions with a bit of sock-puppetry.

"No. I never said anything of the sort."

But Min-soo hyung denied it flat.

"The organization just filmed the video, nothing more. They never mentioned doing anything else. You'd know better than anyone — the PR team's been drowning ever since you kept ordering up one content project after another."

In other words: they were too buried just filming and uploading to have even conceived of such a scheme.

Really? Then why is the response so uniform?

Admittedly there's plenty of mockery of me being an idiot mixed into these threads, so could anti-fans have banded together and cleverly whipped up the discourse? Going at me openly is risky when my image is this good right now, so dressing up attacks as praise or memes isn't out of the question.

Or maybe Ye-eun or Min-ah gave things a little nudge? Or Seo-hee noona, or my mother-in-law, or someone on the Seoul Group side?

As I spiraled through the possibilities, Min-soo hyung let out a long sigh.

"Why does no one ever consider that everyone genuinely felt that way?"

"Oh, come on. It's obviously not to that degree."

I hadn't just bulldozed through with pure nonsense — I'd backed everything up with some fairly elaborate reasoning.

Laypeople who don't understand this stuff are free to nitpick it, but I didn't believe the consensus would land on "he's stupid" or "he doesn't think."

"...Fine. If you say so, then so be it."

Min-soo hyung, apparently agreeing it wasn't quite that extreme, conceded the point in the end.

Either way, the results were good. That was all that mattered.