Knuckle Changeup? (2)
Nam Kang-min was also watching Kim Yi-seon intently as he warmed up in a corner of the stadium.
After all, they'd spent all three years of high school together, syncing up as battery mates and sharing the mound as first baseman and starting pitcher. Sure, since turning pro the guy had shot so far ahead it was almost comical, but that didn't put any real distance between them. And watching him now, honestly, he didn't seem all that different from back then.
"That feller — he ain't changed a lick, has he? Reckon he's plannin' on livin' like that forever. Heard he's even got a young'un now."
"Hm? What was that?"
His seniors answered the muttering that had slipped out of him unbidden. Nam Kang-min shook his head, waving it off as nothing.
When he'd first heard he'd be starting as the first-team catcher, the veterans on the squad had thrown in the towel with thoughts like, Has the manager already given up on the season?
But over the last two games, once he'd shown some genuinely solid play, they'd gone right back to praising the manager's keen eye — and now their enthusiasm had overflowed to the point of treating him like the cornerstone of the franchise.
He was only human, so being treated like a key player didn't feel bad. But at the same time, having his every word and gesture become the team's great hope was more than a little awkward. The pressure was no joke, and he couldn't even crack jokes like usual. It took someone like that thoughtless fool over there warming up to actually enjoy this kind of attention and live however he pleased. Viewed that way, he could even understand why the guy hadn't grown up.
Anyway — setting aside all that nostalgia and familiarity, the important thing Nam Kang-min realized while observing Kim Yi-seon was this:
"Wamma, don't know what it is, but he's gone and prepped some other weird contraption again, ain't he?"
"Kang-min, what are you on about now?"
"Look there. He's scrunchin' his face up takin' some deliberately awful form like he ain't got a thing goin', but every now and then his expression breaks loose and there's a mighty sly look on 'im, ain't there? That there's one hundred percent somethin' fishy he brought along..."
In other words: that uncanny genius had undeniably prepared yet another strange thing.
Nam Kang-min knew that expression very well. The day he'd first taken the mound declaring he'd pitch, the day he'd shocked everyone by showing ambidextrous switch hitting for the first time, the day he showed up with a changeup, even the day he'd pulled a curveball out of nowhere.
And countless other days when he'd smuggled in some bizarre scheme without even his catcher knowing — every single time, he'd been hiding that exact mischievous look behind that exact expression.
This game is not going to be easy today. A sigh escaped him of its own accord.
Both of the starting pitchers he'd played behind in high school were geniuses, but they were a slightly different flavor of genius.
Kang Min-hyuk, first of all, was a pitcher who could do everything imaginable. His control, his breaking balls, his pacing, his game management, even holding runners with the infield. A guy who arrived at one hundred and ten percent of the ideal pitcher's ceiling you could conceive of — hence the word alien. His velocity was at least within the realm of imagination, though even that was remarkable for an underhand pitcher.
Kim Yi-seon was a different story. Some elements of his game were honestly just ordinary-genius (?) level, or barely a notch above average even in high school. His control to both corners, his breaking-ball command, the way he couldn't pace himself and threw full throttle from the first pitch to the last. If you tallied up only his flaws, they were serious enough to make surviving on a pro first-team roster — let alone dominating it — look dubious.
And yet Kim Yi-seon was the driving force behind high school baseball's first-ever Grand Slam, and the reason he's tearing the KBO apart now? Because the weapons he brings surpass human imagination.
There were the visible weapons — what high schooler throws 160? What pitcher fields a two-handed delivery in real games at that level of polish? — but his invisible weapons exceeded imagination too.
Especially his thinking. Nam Kang-min had caught his pitches for two years and still couldn't follow the guy's trains of thought. Throwing the breaking ball he'd learned the day before three straight times to strike out the opposing ace. Committing to pitching inside despite having no command there, and walking batters for his trouble.
That lunatic's way of thinking wasn't something you understood — it was something you felt, and rode along with.
And this hard-to-read fool was a handful even on a normal day. Now he'd gone and crafted some secret weapon?
"Ain't nothin' for it. Best thing today's to yank him outta there early..."
That was the only slightly cowardly answer he could give.
Just then, Bears manager Moon Ji-hwan ambled over to the less-than-enthusiastic Nam Kang-min and posed the question offhandedly. Not needling his pride, not really worrying about him — just genuinely curious.
Any ordinary rookie, knowing the manager meant nothing by it, would have tensed up and insisted of course he could hit him.
But Nam Kang-min possessed a heart far removed from ordinary rookies. He answered calmly, as if simply stating a fact.
"Can't rightly say till I try. But if that there Kim Yi-seon feller is bluffin', I'd knock one clean out of the park — so I s'pose I couldn't tell you."
There wasn't a shred of bluff in that answer.
"Streee-ike!"
"Streee-ike!"
"Streee-ike! You're out!"
Top of the first — the home-team Seoul Twins on defense.
As I climbed the mound, I did my best to keep my heart settled and went to work on the opposing hitters. Honestly, none of it was really my fault, but I'd just dropped three straight decisions in my last three starts. I needed maximum focus.
And so, throwing every pitch with my whole soul behind it, I'd racked up two outs in just four pitches. Deal with the number three hitter, and I'd wrap up a clean one-two-three inning and head back to the bench for a rest.
But the hitter who now stepped in against me was the Bears' number three.
So it was Nam Kang-min.
Asian baseball follows slightly different conventions, but in the American tradition the best hitter bats third. Recent statistical analysis has elevated the importance of the two-hole, sure, but the three spot still matters. And a high-school-graduate rookie catcher who'd barely played a handful of games was taking over that slot?
There was no way he had some hidden backing, so either the manager had lost his mind, or the manager was a certified genius who'd seen this guy's bat catch fire for real. One of the two.
Even back in high school, when his hitting got hot he was no pushover of a batter. Yeah, dealing with this guy isn't going to be easy.
Still, an old friend was worth greeting properly.
I called for a four-seamer down the middle from Min-soo hyung. He nodded without a word of protest.
First pitch. Full power.
"Streee-ike!"
As expected, the reaction was less than thrilling.
Right — he's seen this a thousand times. Why would he be surprised? Like I said, this was merely a greeting.
So now, let's see you handle something you've never seen before.
"Streee-ike!"
But even though he didn't offer at it, his reaction this time was just as lukewarm. And this was the knuckle curve — a pitch I'd only refined since turning pro, no less.
Someone who didn't know him might think he'd simply frozen up, bat welded to his shoulder. But how many hundreds of times have I watched this raccoon-faced fool? I can read his face fine. That was Nam Kang-min's trademark smug expression — all of this is well within my expectations.
And having it confirmed right in front of me was irritating, frankly. You only really find out whether a guy can handle you as a hitter when you face him in a live game — and today was our first meeting, which made him exactly the annoying type of hitter from a pitcher's perspective.
So there I was, dragging out the at-bat with longer-than-usual gaps, locked in a mental duel with Nam Kang-min, when—
Four-seamer up high.
The sign came in from Min-soo hyung. No wait — knowing his style, that call came from the dugout more than from him.
I'd already shown the curve once, so a high four-seamer riding up out of the zone wasn't bad. Throwing it high enough to register as a ball and extremify the rising action would work too.
It felt vaguely ambiguous, but with no clearly better option on the table, I nodded as called.
Pitch three. Full throttle again, same as the first.
Crack!
A foul. His timing hadn't synced.
But looking into Nam Kang-min's eyes, I was certain of one thing.
This bastard read that pitch properly.
Nam Kang-min tossed a casual remark toward the catcher crouched behind home plate.
"Catchin' that feller ain't easy, is it?"
He had no intention of playing mind games. He genuinely wanted to say this one thing to Bang Min-soo.
The guy was just the team's starting catcher, and merely receiving Kim Yi-seon's pitches once in a while had to be miserable. Being the dedicated Kim Yi-seon catcher, full stop? If it had been him, Nam Kang-min would have refused in no uncertain terms and asked to go train in the minors instead. It was that hellish.
The opposing catcher seemed to understand the sincerity, because Bang Min-soo answered with an enormous sigh.
"Yeah. How on earth did you do it for two years?"
Tacking together the weekend leagues and the national tournaments, Nam Kang-min had logged a staggering number of games behind Kim Yi-seon — enough to rival a decent pro starter's workload. Having caught all of those, Bang Min-soo had every right to be awestruck.
Two years as Kim Yi-seon's catcher was a burden ordinary human beings could scarcely imagine.
Though they were now on opposing teams, Nam Kang-min passed along a small piece of hard-won wisdom to this senior catcher whose path of thorns was already scheduled.
"First thing, you gotta stay in touch with Lee Ye-eun — and Kang Min-ah too, if you can manage it. Talk to 'em regular. That's how the feel starts comin' to you."
Kim Yi-seon was, by and large, an immature and wholly unpredictable human being — but the threads connecting him to those two women had a strangely predictable side. You had to squeeze every hint you could out of them.
Bang Min-soo's reaction to this explanation was faintly dubious, and Nam Kang-min understood. Even he, as the man's old teammate, had found schmoozing the guy's girlfriends a bit absurd — never mind being his junior.
But when it came to the next method, this one was downright heavenly by comparison.
"And once you've built up enough hints... from there on out, it's just a matter of guessin', 'Now, what would Kim Yi-seon do?'"
Kim Yi-seon's everyday behavior, observed over years. His relationships with the girlfriends — the closest thing to a predictable variable. You gathered hints from there, and reasoned the rest of the way.
At first, Nam Kang-min hadn't understood a single hint or scrap of it. Truthfully, he still didn't understand Kim Yi-seon's way of thinking even now.
Instead, as time passed, he'd gained something else — not understanding, but the ability to gradually feel the flow of the man's thoughts.
"And once you've got it runnin' on the rails like that... you go like this!"
Crack!
Not perfectly, but he could now make educated guesses at Kim Yi-seon's pitch sequencing too.
That aside — a monster really was a monster. He'd predicted the general location, but he'd failed to square it up because he couldn't gauge just how vicious the stuff actually was.
That was Nam Kang-min for you — better barometer than any hitter I'd ever known. He was clinging to my pitches with remarkable tenacity.
No — tenacious wasn't the right word. I was barely surviving on foul balls. With just a little worse luck, I'd have already surrendered a home run and given up a run.
Against anyone else, I might have struggled to handle this guy with my existing arsenal alone.
The plan had always been to test it against Nam Kang-min, but I'd intended to save that pitch until the lineup cycled around a full three times. Still, it seemed I'd have to bring it out now.
I slowly relayed the changeup sign to my catcher. Low in the zone.
Min-soo hyung, who had been hesitating slightly, didn't push back hard the way he usually did — after a brief moment of consideration, he nodded right away. Fair enough. This guy's timing was locked in today; without a new weapon, there was no dealing with him.
Once the catcher was set, a brand-new grip closed inside my glove.
From a delivery indistinguishable from everything before it — identical arm slot, identical arm swing — I unleashed something entirely different.
"Streee-ike! You're out!"
It had taken roughly four days to birth this grip, and even within that short window there had been a truly impressive number of failures.
First, following Henry's idea and Director Cho's argument, I'd tried the simple approach: throwing with my middle finger entirely off the ball.
Predictably, the ball refused to sit properly in my hand — it kept squirting out, the spin axis wobbled on its own, and in some cases the ball clipped the slightly raised middle finger and ricocheted off it. A genuine disaster. Effectively unusable in a real game.
The second solution was to extend the middle finger sideways, circle-changeup-index-finger style, in the direction of the throw.
This leaked fewer balls than attempt one, but the result was nothing but a bastardized splitter thrown off the ring and pinky fingers — complete scrap. The ball needed to lose a sensible amount of velocity and drop like a proper off-speed pitch, whereas this thing slowed down too much, and its fall wasn't the fall of a breaking ball but a dead free-fall, like some rec-league gravity ball.
After chewing through a few more ideas, I finally settled on the final grip.
The spiked grip — or, as it's otherwise known, the knuckle grip.
Come to think of it, I'd already adopted this exact solution for my curveball and reaped the rewards. The changeup had the same problem — an unstable spin axis and trouble with drop, just like the curve used to have. So what possible reason was there not to apply it here too?
Instead of pulling the middle finger fully away or angling it sideways, I bent the finger and pressed it down onto the seams, pinning it there. I also tried folding the finger completely knuckle-style, but even with these hands of mine, doing that with the circle grip's middle finger proved impossible.
Anyway — once I tried it, it genuinely worked. The velocity dropped decisively, and the ball fell off the table with a huge, sharp break.
Normally I'd have trotted quietly back to the dugout to end the inning, but instead I walked over to Nam Kang-min, who was heading back to the plate-side gear with a look of sheer bewilderment on his face.
"What's the matter? Scared?"
"What in tarnation was that. A splitter? When'd you learn a thing like that?"
Dummy. Even the great Nam Kang-min, it seemed, hadn't sniffed out my new weapon.
"A splitter? This is way classier than a splitter, pal. It's my shiny new toy — so bring your best and see what you can do with it."
"Good grief. This feller really ain't changed one bit since comin' to the big leagues, has he."
Grumbling for a moment more, Nam Kang-min then broke into a grin and said,
"Still — I'm gettin' the feel of it now. Throw it one more time, why don't ya? Next one, I'm sendin' it clean over the wall."
"You think I don't know you? Not a chance."
Yep — having said that, I'd absolutely test it on him one more time.
The game was still a long way from over. Time to have some fun with my new toy.