Knuckle Changeup? (3)

The fifth inning ended, and cleanup time arrived.

"Kang Min-ah. What the hell was that?"

"I'm not sure. It looks like a splitter, but it dives sideways in a weird way, and it seems similar to a curveball, except the trajectory is completely opposite... a screwball? Did Kim Yi-seon actually touch the forbidden realm?"

The moment the break finally came, the bewildered batters dragged Nam Kang-min off to see the team's analyst.

Even on the way there, the veterans kept firing questions at him, but Nam Kang-min had nothing useful to offer either.

"The way that guy brags about it, it can't be some common pitch... Judging by how he talks about it, I don't think it's a splitter, at least. He talks a lot of nonsense, but he's not the type to outright lie."

"So it really is a screwball?"

"Wow, I've only ever heard of screwballs. First time seeing one in a real game."

The veterans assumed that since Nam Kang-min was already friends with Yi-seon, and the two had talked at length back in the first inning, he must have picked up at least a feel for it — but Nam Kang-min wasn't some kind of psychic. How could he possibly know?

On the surface he seemed calm despite the absurd situation, which made the misread understandable, but the real reason Nam Kang-min was so composed was simple: with Kim Yi-seon as your opponent, anything could happen and nothing would surprise him.

That was exactly why, faced with far-fetched talk of screwballs from the veterans, he didn't bother arguing. A quiet well, if anyone could pull that off, it'd be that guy... kept his rebuttals in check, and the confusion only multiplied.

In the middle of that chaos, the Daejeon Bears' analyst finally cut through the noise with some force, settling the players down.

"Quiet, please. We're working off the stadium feed and the live broadcast footage for now."

Only then did the Bears' hitters fall a little silent.

But the fact that they were this worked up said everything — the pitch they'd just witnessed was a nightmare, plain and simple.

On its face, the ball came in on a trajectory like a fastball at the top of the zone. Then it just kept falling and falling, dropping all the way down to the thigh.

And it wasn't merely a slow pitch either — they'd just watched it touch 152 km/h at peak. On top of that, it broke hard laterally, boring in on the hands. How were they supposed to hit that?

Combine it with Kim Yi-seon's knuckle curve, which rode in on a similar upper-zone track before diving down and away until it nearly reached knee height, and suddenly batters had to hit a one-in-three guess.

And that was only counting the sequences built around his high fastball. Sprinkle in chase pitches and setup pitches that abandoned the zone entirely, plus the occasional sneaky middle- or low-fastball, and the batters had no earthly idea how to approach the at-bat.

The analyst understood exactly what was going through their heads. Having calmed them down as much as possible, his explanation was thoroughly refined — and a sharp breakdown of the new pitch's characteristics over the last five innings.

"First, the most important conclusion: the pitch Kim Yi-seon is throwing is not a new pitch. It's his existing circle changeup."

"A circle changeup produces that trajectory?"

"Why not? There's a guy in the majors who throws one like that."

"Ha. The more I watch that kid, the less I understand why he never went to the majors."

The broadcast cameras had captured Kim Yi-seon's hand in slow motion, and even the bare-bones video provided to visiting teams showed enough to catch his grip before release.

Getting that far hadn't been difficult. But —

"The problem is that everything beyond that is very hard to analyze."

"...What?"

The analysis team was raising the white flag: that much they knew, and the rest was a mystery.

"Come on, how can you just say that?"

"To be precise, we have the data. But the sample size is too small and too extreme, so it's difficult to extract anything meaningful from it."

Though clearly not by design, Kim Yi-seon's new changeup was still so raw in its development that its movement, location, and velocity showed almost no consistency — a chaotic mishmash from pitch to pitch.

Occasionally it would break so violently the batters were calling it a screwball; other times it moved less than that; sometimes it came out looking exactly like his old changeup. For the analysis team, the pitch was practically impossible to define.

Thanks to that, the analysts — and every Bears hitter's brain — were on the verge of detonation.

"Good grief. Looks like that brat hauled out another half-finished toy."

Nam Kang-min was the only one who managed to piece together roughly the truth, but there was little he could do with it.

After all, the old changeup had never been a bad pitch — it was Kim Yi-seon who'd been dissatisfied with it. If the new one was getting confused with that style of pitch, was it really something you could just size up and handle easily?

It wasn't only the Bears players who were thrown into confusion.

The ya-boong-i who fancied themselves deep students of the game plunged into total disarray trying to work out what pitch on earth could produce that grotesque trajectory.

Early on, quite a few users argued it must be a screwball, pointing to the unusual grip and that signature sinking, arm-side run — but the theory was snuffed out faster than expected.

Common sense said that a screwball, long extinct due to its brutal injury risk, was the last thing Kim Yi-seon — a switch hitter who could face same-handed or opposite-handed batters at will — would ever need to dig out of the attic. And once the broadcast had shown his delivery in slow motion even once, it was clear this was something else entirely.

But was it an ordinary changeup then? Nobody could quite bring themselves to say that either.

However many variant grips the changeup family had to offer, nothing in it came with grips that distinctive.

So the debate raged on — it's a brand-new pitch, it's a modified changeup Kim Yi-seon invented, no wait, there was a guy in America throwing something similar — the game itself forgotten while the argument over the pitch's identity stretched on and on.

Meanwhile, what was the state of Kim Yi-seon himself — the man throwing a pitch that had opposing players and community baseball fossils alike gasping in awe?

"Aargh, Nam Kang-min, that guy is so damn tenacious."

He was living hell.

On the whole, the sudden appearance of a new pitch had scrambled the opposition's brains, which was great. Most of the batters were so preoccupied with that bizarre pitch that dove off a cliff while boring in on their hands that they couldn't deal with his plain old fastballs and curves.

And it wasn't as if anyone could just mentally delete that pitch and move on — so Kim Yi-seon dutifully tossed one in whenever they might be starting to forget about it.

That was why every other Bears hitter was giving him relatively little trouble.

"Yi-seon. If you're gassed, want to come out?"

"...Just let me finish this inning."

Nam Kang-min, of all people, was absolutely impossible to get through easily.

Seriously, did the guy have a wiretap in my skull? How does he win every single mind game?

Call it fortune or misfortune — he couldn't beat him outright; his best was a cut, and the duels dragged through foul cuts and full counts. A strikeout on ten pitches in the first at-bat, a flyout on nine in the second. Nam Kang-min had cost him nineteen pitches across two plate appearances.

Thanks to that, the game had only reached the end of the fifth, and his pitch count was pushing eighty.

The manager was the type who'd already start hinting at a change if he hit seventy in the fifth on a normal day. At eighty, the question was guaranteed.

But he couldn't come out. No matter how he looked at it, Nam Kang-min's timing today wasn't just good — it was absurd. Yi-seon would stake his life on it: unless the team shut them out completely, nobody else was stopping that guy.

The thought gnawed at him — if he came out with zeroes still on the board, he might dodge the loss, but the team's defeat might not be avoidable at all.

And then, standing before him, appeared Ji Ha-seob.

"Yi-seon."

"Yes, sunbae."

Ji Ha-seob was looking at him with eyes that were somehow lukewarm. Behind him stood Ba-da and Ha-neul too — apparently the entire high-leverage crew had come calling.

"No starter can throw to the very end every time. Especially not this late in the season, like now."

"Yeah, Ha-seob hyung is dead right. And thanks to you starters — you, Min-hyuk, Ye-han, Ho-yeol, all of it — the bullpen's gotten plenty of rest this season."

Chimed in Ha-neul hyung, grinning about how the season was nearly over and the forty-inning threshold was still just barely within reach.

"Honestly, five scoreless innings from a starter means he's done his job. Right, Walker?"

"Damn right, Curve ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Man. The dumb starters drag it out and get their skulls caved in by homers. But the smart ones hand the ball to a great bullpen and take a seat."

With Lee Ba-da and Walker both here too, all of them shouting believe in us!, the whole thing had the atmosphere of the final episode of an anime.

Even the manager seemed to agree — approaching him with a resolve firmer than usual.

"Yes. As a fellow baseball man, I know how you feel. You're afraid everything falls apart without you, and that makes you feel you have to be even better. But we're one team. Trust your seniors just this once, and get some rest today."

When even the manager put it that way, what more could he possibly say? Normally he'd have had the authority to pull him by fiat — instead, the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠man was trying to talk him around, mindful of his feelings.

A residue of anxiety lingered, but looking at the faces of the bullpen arms — genuinely top-tier by league standards — Kim Yi-seon resolved to trust them, just this once.

He wasn't about to throw complete-game shutouts in every game just because he was the ace, and trusting the team like this was necessary too. Especially with the season heading into its final stretch.

So he nodded, said he understood, and was slowly making his way toward the back room for rest and icing when —

CRACK!!!!!!

"Hey, what are you DOING!!!"

He would come to regret those words very, very shortly.

Kim Yi-seon had called him a nightmare to face, but Nam Kang-min felt exactly the same way about Kim Yi-seon's pitching.

Granted, he knew a fair bit about Kim Yi-seon, so he fared better than most — but Kim Yi-seon was a creature fundamentally incapable of being predicted. Yet today, whether from good condition or plain luck, Nam Kang-min's guesses had been almost eerily on target.

And even so, the best he could manage was to stretch out the duels. Not once in two plate appearances could he square up a ball dead-center.

"So what do you call the guys who actually hit that thing for base hits and score runs off it?"

"Eh, they're basically swinging with their eyes closed. Get the timing roughly right, pray, and swing from the heels."

Summed up in one line, the difficulty Nam Kang-min felt against Kim Yi-seon was this: knowing didn't mean hitting it.

He could predict, roughly, the location and the pitch. His timing eye had absorbed enough reps that, absurdly, he'd even developed a feel.

And still, hitting Kim Yi-seon's incoming pitches squarely was beyond difficult — even cutting felt like a struggle.

How did it make sense that even when he predicted the pitch, the location, and swung at the exact timing he'd called, the bat got shoved back or the ball clipped the very edge of the barrel for a foul?

He'd felt it catching from behind the plate too, but facing him as a batter confirmed it: this was truly a bottomless level of filth. Apparently, back in their high school hitting practices, Kim Yi-seon had been loafing through it at half effort.

Still — two plate appearances in, half of him was confident he'd do better next time up, and half of him worried whether anyone could handle Kim Yi-seon at all, as he waited for his turn to bat in the sixth.

But that Kim Yi-seon was nowhere to be seen. Not only had he come down off the mound — he wasn't even in the opposing dugout. Gone to rest already, apparently.

"Whew, now I can finally breathe. Seriously, how are you supposed to face a kid blazing 160 past your eyes."

"Honestly, that gas ripped my hitting approach to shreds worse than any velocity ever could."

"Still beats staring at that one pitch over and over."

The veterans looked mildly relieved that Kim Yi-seon was gone. Nam Kang-min felt nothing of the sort.

Instead, somewhere deep in his chest, an uncomfortable feeling wriggled.

"Kang Min-ah, you all right? You feeling sick somewhere?"

"Nah-yu. Just concentrating, is all."

That emotion of his must have shown on his face despite himself — uncharacteristic for the usually easygoing Nam Kang-min — because the veterans started subtly watching his mood.

Kim Yi-seon had been pulled? That was perfectly normal in modern baseball. The opposing starter's pitch count had climbed faster than expected, and Nam Kang-min had contributed heavily to it — if anything, this was as good as him having felled the opposing ace. A good thing, really.

And yet. Didn't it feel like Nam Kang-min had lost both of their duels, while Kim Yi-seon had walked away the victor, mid-fight?

It was a completely irrational thought, but the resentment dominated his mind. With anyone else he could let it go, but with Kim Yi-seon he had to be conscious of it. He could hear it already — that smug voice filing it away to needle him with, every time they met from now on.

Doing his best to smother the simmering in his gut, Nam Kang-min focused on the game.

"Str-ike! You're out!"

And the state of the game mirrored the churning in his gut almost exactly.

If they'd yanked Kim Yi-seon after five innings, shouldn't the next pitcher at least be easy pickings? Instead, his seniors were getting retired on pop flies and strikeouts in the blink of an eye.

Nam Kang-min steadied this nameless anger as best he could and stepped into the box.

Go Ye-han. Last year's Twins' fifth starter, now squeezed out by Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk into a long-relief role. Even so, the opportunities kept coming, and he'd logged innings on par with last season.

His main weapons: a four-seam fastball, a slider, and the splitter added this year.

The pitcher was wary of him too, apparently — for a moment the two simply studied each other, letting the clock run.

The best way to attack Go Ye-han was to sit on a hanging slider.

However much the splitter had been added this season, it was fundamentally a weapon for opposite-handed batters; against same-handed hitters he only used it as a sneaker once the setup was thoroughly established.

But maybe it was because he'd just spent the whole game staring at that uncanny pitch of Kim Yi-seon's — similar to a splitter, yet not?

He wanted to jump on a splitter from the very first pitch. It ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wasn't rational. It wasn't some razor-sharp instinct kicking in, either. It was pure spite.

But it felt like if he didn't take his revenge on Kim Yi-seon somehow, he wouldn't be able to hold himself together.

Whether it knew his thoughts or not, Go Ye-han delivered the first pitch. Nam Kang-min didn't overthink it — he simply swung, at somewhere down and in.

CRACK!!!!!!

The ball sailed away, clean and satisfying, into the far distance.

Nam Kang-min couldn't help himself — he flashed a grin straight at the direction where he knew the cameras would be watching. And then, from somewhere, he thought he could hear the sound of a certain someone having a seizure.

Now I feel a little better. And if that ridiculous brat comes over to needle me about it, I can just fire back: 'You're next, no-decision boy.'

His thoughts were starting to sound suspiciously like Kim Yi-seon's, but Nam Kang-min decided to let it slide.