I Am the Breadwinner
"I'm home."
"Welcome back. Good work out there."
Ye-eun greeted me cheerfully the moment I stepped through the door. At the delicious smell drifting from inside, I turned my head toward the kitchen and found Min-ah in the middle of preparing dinner.
"You're home early today? I haven't quite finished dinner yet."
"Ah, it's nothing big. Practice just wrapped up early."
With the season entering its final stretch, the manager and coaching staff had shifted the team away from grueling conditioning work toward a recovery-focused approach.
Thanks to that, practice these days wasn't the old slog of drilling team chemistry or polishing mechanics to perfection — it mostly ran at a level meant just to keep our feel for the game sharp.
For my part, days that ended early like today suited me just fine.
"Haet-nim-i was waiting for her daddy too, wasn't she?"
"Yep. Haet-nim-i says she missed her daddy."
We weren't quite out of the delicate stage yet, so I greeted the baby with an extremely careful hand pressed against Ye-eun's belly. Ye-eun accepted the greeting with a soft, beaming smile she never would have worn in normal times.
"Go wash up first. There's still a little left to do for dinner."
"Got it. Oh, right — did Mother say anything?"
"She asked whether, since we went with a house for our newlywed home anyway, we'd consider a neighborhood near her brother's place. They're planning to get married after this season ends, after all."
"Really? How big a budget does Kang Min-hyuk even have?"
"Mom said she'd chip in if he's short."
"Ugh, a grown man buying a house with his mother's money? If it comes to that, I'll just loan it to him myself."
Having this oddly married-couple conversation with Min-ah, I made my way inside.
Apart from our home being a modest villa building, the whole vibe was that of an ideal middle-class family.
Honestly? I'm happy. I come home from work to a beautiful wife welcoming me, we discuss the small-but-important details of daily life, and my child is on the way. Isn't this exactly the life the vast majority of Korean men dream of?
And yet something... something felt off.
"Kim Yi-seon, your mother called today. She said it wasn't urgent, just to call her back after dinner."
"Hey, how long are you going to call your husband-on-a-pedestal by his full name? What's Haet-nim-i going to think, hearing that?"
"Says the guy— anyway, from what I could tell, Mother seems a little hurt. Her only son barely keeps in touch; even I think she has every right to be. Call her more often."
"Yeah? Then I might as well do it right now."
At Ye-eun's words, I picked up my phone without giving it much thought. Now that I mentioned it, I really hadn't been in touch with my mother much. When had I last called — a month ago?
She had every right to be sulking. With that thought, I listened to the ringtone, and then her voice came through.
"Son? What's this about?"
"Nothing in particular, I just wanted to say hello."
She was the one who'd asked me to call in the first place, and now she was pretending not to know why. Still, this was the kind of thing where I had to play along. Even someone as clueless as me wasn't about to say, Weren't you the one who told me to call, Mother?
Apparently I'd given an acceptable answer, because she immediately launched into the main event with an excited lilt in her voice.
"Well, good. Mom's doing fine. Your father, that man, he's never grown up even at his age — off camping with your father-in-law every chance he gets. Moms can't afford to be like that, you know. With the state of the world, and your wife carrying the baby too, and him still so carefree. Honestly."
"Well, the two of them were always close to begin with."
For the record, the father-in-law in that story is Ye-eun's father. Originally it was Ye-eun's mother and my mother who were friends, but as the two of them kept spending time together, apparently my father and my father-in-law grew close as well. When the kids are smitten enough to marry each other, I suppose it's only natural the dads would hit it off too.
Besides that, the call was full of warm, everyday topics — how grateful she was that she and Ye-eun's mother were on standby to help take care of Ye-eun, how she kept in touch with Min-ah's mother but hadn't actually seen her in person lately so could I arrange a get-together, how she'd only ever spoken to Seo-hee's family over the phone because meeting actual chaebol families in person made her nervous, and so on.
Listening to these genuinely important yet cozy slices of daily life, a smile crept onto my face without my noticing. Ah, how beautiful the world is.
But that happy mood came to an abrupt end at one line from my mother on the other end of the line.
"By the way, is everything alright with the team these days? I watch every single one of your games on TV, but I don't really know the inside story, so I can't help worrying."
"Uh... no problems at all. Everyone gets along, and the manager and coaches are good people."
"Is that so? Then thank goodness. When you said you wanted to play baseball as a boy, I figured you'd give up eventually. And now look at you, all grown up, playing professional ball, with three daughters-in-law—"
Mom had never been that interested in baseball, so she cut off there and moved on to the next topic.
But for me, it was more than enough to bring back the problem I'd briefly forgotten the moment I'd opened my front door.
Right. This life is happy and wonderful — but I'm a baseball player.
So what happens if baseball stops going my way?
The tail end of August giving way to September.
I had lost three consecutive starts.
"Goddammit."
"Cursing won't fix the games, Kim Yi-seon."
I was sprawled flat on the floor in a corner of the training facility, seething, when Kang Min-hyuk beside me offered that little rebuke.
Easy for him to say — the bastard was riding a winning streak in his own starts right now.
"Our runs allowed are basically identical. How does the gap in wins end up this wide? Explain that to me."
"You're always saying you're the true ace, aren't you? Then it stands to reason: if you, as the ace facing the opposing ace, allow a similar number of runs as me, an ordinary starter, the difference in wins is only natural."
This bastard is uncannily good at spouting nonsense that's impossible to argue with. And coming from a guy with three losses talking to a guy with three wins, it was even harder to refute.
In the end I had nothing to say, so I just let out a sigh and rolled over onto my stomach. Even so, my mind circled back to the awkwardness of our current situation.
The Seoul Twins were sitting in a delicately balanced spot.
The first problem was that the Southern Division standings had settled into a fairly solid order at this point.
The Gwangju Phoenix had wobbled briefly after I threw a complete-game shutout against them and their hitters went cold, but they quickly found their footing again.
The Incheon Mariners had chased the Phoenix right to their heels while Gwangju was stumbling, but they dropped a losing series in the head-to-head matchup, lost their momentum, and slid back down to second.
Meanwhile, the bottom three teams in fourth, fifth, and sixth didn't exactly lack for talent or momentum — but there was still a bit of a gap between them and actually threatening third place.
And so the Twins, wedged firmly into third between a second-place team good enough to stab the leader in the backside and an ambivalent fourth, were stuck in a strange position — not quite able to climb up, and not quite worried enough about being caught to panic.
What drained the motivation even further was this world's KBO postseason structure.
The second- and third-place teams from each division play a best-of-three Playoff, the Playoff winner faces the division leader in a best-of-five Division Series, and each division's winner plays a best-of-seven Korean Series.
The problem is that the penalty for finishing third in this format is practically nonexistent. If you really twisted my arm, the only difference is having to play the best-of-three on the road?
If you can't win the division anyway, second versus third changes nothing beyond home-field advantage — and this year being the COVID season, there aren't even any fans in the stands, so what little merit there was shrinks even further.
In other words, nobody felt fired up to overtake second place, and the environment practically invited the team-wide complacency of as long as we hold third, we're successful.
"Come on, this is too much even so. Is our hitting supposed to look like this?"
"It's not that they lack the will. They're exhausted."
And the Twins' offense right now was at a genuinely dire level.
Even at their best, our lineup had been roughly twelfth in the league, but now — aggregate stats aside — they were a flat, unquestionable twelfth. Bottom of the barrel in most hitting categories.
Kang Min-hyuk said the starters were worn out from a shortage of reliable replacements on the roster, but as I saw it, what they lacked was hunger. Sure, I understood the veterans were tired — but if so, couldn't the substitutes coming in for a breather step up and play well for once?
Most of them were the kind of guys who made me think I'd do better than that if I stepped in as a hitter, which had me seriously reconsidering my two-way dream. If our starters hadn't been devouring innings like madmen, and the freshened-up bullpen hadn't been holding down the back door so well, we'd have handed third place to Busan days ago.
Anyway, the current Twins were at the point where we couldn't breathe easy over surrendering even a single run. At least if I held them to zero and came out, even in a losing effort I'd take a no-decision instead of a loss — but lately, these freak accidents where exactly one run kept slipping through were piling up too.
I stared at the three inglorious new entries added to my rookie-season record and groaned.
"I just want to quit baseball. This rotten-ass game — even when I pitch well, we can't win. Huh? Is this seriously a sport where a Hall-of-Fame-caliber, straight-up-cheat-code pitcher only buys his team nine wins a year?"
Honestly, thinking about how my bank account was filling up in real time even now, twenty-four times a day I debated throwing in the towel on this boy-breadwinner gig and becoming a househusband raising Haet-nim-i at home instead.
What else am I supposed to do here? Post a zero in ERA? Is that what it takes to win? It reminds me of some position from some game where no matter how many times you break through the enemy front line and rush back to base, if your teammates are trash you just can't win — and the thought makes me want to cry.
But Kang Min-hyuk, who had been quietly absorbing my earnest lament, answered with a perfectly blank expression.
"Isn't that obvious, Kim Yi-seon? The only pitcher entitled to complain about run support is one with an ERA of exactly zero."
Ugh, for real.
I'm done talking to this guy. We are not speaking the same language.
"Besides, you yourself believe your pitching isn't perfect right now, don't you? If it were you, you'd be pursuing perfection."
But capital-T Kang Min-hyuk wouldn't stop talking — speaking as if, for a 100-percent T-bastard, he already knew everything there was to know about me.
"There's a month left in the season. Perfection? Where exactly are you going to find time to prepare that? Even if you managed it, you'd only get a handful of starts out of it."
"That handful of remaining starts is the Playoffs."
Seriously, how does he make everything so annoyingly hard to argue with?
"As always, I'll help. Watching over your training benefits me as well."
"Haa..."
I let out a long sigh and pulled out my phone. Then I texted both Ye-eun and Min-ah: Might be home a little late today.
"Alright, let's do it. Let's go get some more training in."
"There's the Kim Yi-seon I know. Since when have you ever leaned on anyone else? You've always handled it yourself."
Bang Min-soo had lately found himself wondering why, somehow, he kept getting dragged out to these gatherings by that weirdo more and more often.
He'd given up on the name-switching game when it stopped getting a rise out of him — so had he decided to replace that particular harassment with summoning people at will?
Not just Bang Min-soo himself: Kim Yi-seon had called in his and Kang Min-hyuk's personal instructor, the first-team pitching coach, the second-team coach, and Kang Min-hyuk as well, until they were all gathered in the pitching analysis room, looking around at one another.
Having assembled this crowd, Kim Yi-seon cleared his throat and began his explanation.
"So, here's the thing. I've got a problem I've been mulling over lately."
A problem again. Was the man's entire life a ball of anxieties? Why did he come crawling back with a new one every other day?
The coaches, apparently sharing Bang Min-soo's sentiments, waited for the rest with slightly weary faces.
"Actually, 'lately' isn't quite right. This is something I've been trying to fix since spring camp, and eventually gave up halfway through the season."
"Since spring camp... the changeup?"
"Exactly, the changeup. The point is, it's mutated into a pitch with a completely different intent from what I originally designed."
At the mention of the changeup, the coaches' expressions soured slightly. Frankly, Bang Min-soo sympathized.
The man whined that the pitch couldn't properly do an off-speed's job, but considering its trajectory and velocity, judged simply as a sinker it was a genuinely excellent pitch.
A ball that darted horizontally with a sharp break, averaging nearly 150 kilometers per hour — what exactly was there to complain about? Most pitchers who could throw something like that would happily sell off everything they owned, if not their souls.
But the ever-greedy Kim Yi-seon pressed on with his own explanation regardless of how anyone reacted.
"The thing is, since my third year of high school, my muscle mass has gone way up and my velocity kept climbing, and the changeup got truly wrecked in the process. If I force the speed down any further, the movement vanishes completely and it becomes a gravity ball I can't use at all. But if I throw it with the movement intact, the speed gap with my fastball shrinks to under 8 kilometers per hour — a pitch in no-man's land."
He went on to argue that, in fairness, the amount of break was slider-grade, so it wasn't as if the stuff was so good hitters knew it was coming and still couldn't touch it — hence his dissatisfaction. He added, as an aside, that since the circle changeup was an arm-side breaking pitch, its big lateral run offered little advantage to a switch hitter like him who could face same-handed batters whenever he pleased.
"So what I'm saying is — if at all possible, I want to take real speed off it while keeping this same arm swing and arm slot, carving out a gap of at least 12 kilometers per hour. My curveball sits about 20 off. Or, failing that, I'd rather it morph from the current lateral movement into vertical drop."
If problems could be solved just by setting your mind to them, what pitcher in the world would be unable to throw breaking balls? However he looked at it, Kim Yi-seon was greedy. Just how much did a guy who hadn't even finished his rookie year already want?
"For now, judging from my own observations and the club's analytics, the issue with your changeup looks twofold: your spin axis stands too vertical, and your wrist rotation is so good that it's putting excessive spin on the ball."
Director Jo Sang-shik, who from the start hadn't cared one whit about the underwhelmed reactions of Bang Min-soo and the coaches, spoke matter-of-factly.
"I was never a player, and I'm weak on the know-how side of things, so I can't hand you a step-by-step method. But to solve this problem in principle, you need to adjust the spin axis as close to pure gyro spin as possible, and reduce the spin itself."
"I've been hearing that since last spring camp."
"And that's still the only solution there is. Otherwise, throw the changeup away and learn a different pitch. A splitter, say."
"I did try the splitter, actually. The drop wasn't all that different from the changeup, and the velocity came out faster, if anything."
His case for rejection: compared to the changeup, the splitter's horizontal movement dropped off dramatically. To be fair, a Kim Yi-seon already commanding a decent changeup had little real need to learn a splitter.
While the instructor and Kim Yi-seon traded views at length like this, the coaches — who, since a player had asked for help, ought to have been racking their brains alongside him — could only wear sour expressions and mutter their regrets.
"Yi-seon, honestly, we've already given you every piece of advice we have. If you're after something new, it's hard for us to offer more. In the first place, none of us were guys who really worked a changeup back in our playing days — we're not better at throwing it than you are right now."
"That's right, what Coach Choi says. We're all old-school. Chen-jyeng? Don't know it well. We studied up a bit to help you, but studying only gets you so far — no real know-how to pass on."
To be sure, the changeup only began taking root in the KBO sometime after the nineties — a comparatively modern pitch. Even in the 2000s, when these coaches were in their prime, it was the weapon of a handful of natural talents and foreign imports fresh off the boat from America, the changeup's motherland. It was never a pitch everyone threw.
They might have the knowledge stored in their heads, but they had zero feel for it learned through their own bodies. It was a completely different situation from the curveball overhaul.
And as for Kang Min-hyuk — the man in the room with the best changeup and the most know-how —
"As I've said before, if you want the changeup to drop more, throw it while staying loose with your middle finger."
"What does that even mean?"
"You simply focus on your middle finger less. That's the feel."
"And how exactly am I supposed to do that?"
Whether that made him a genius too, who knew — but Kim Yi-seon aside, even Bang Min-soo himself couldn't make heads or tails of the bizarre advice being handed out as if it were a pro tip.
How were they supposed to untangle this mess? Normally you'd ask the foreign pitchers for input on problems like this, but none of the Twins' imports threw a circle changeup worth a damn.
If the foreigners had no answer either, who on earth was left to ask? Bang Min-soo was in the middle of a long, fruitless deliberation when—
"Oh! Could this be it? I saw it on a Korean TV show. They said Koreans fight in factions at the workplace. Then this must be the faction of the new superstars!"
Henry had arrived.