A Battery Is Like a Married Couple
This is an outrage. Fucking hell, does this even make sense?
Fine, I'll admit I came out of the game a little early. But I still threw five scoreless innings, didn't I?
So how are we down 0–2 by the eighth? Explain to me how that adds up.
"Two runs over three innings... yeah, that's a lot to give up, but it happens."
"Hyung. Even so, you can't seriously expect me to trust the Twins' lineup."
Look, holding a team to two runs through eight innings isn't just solid — it's good work. Against a normal team, that's a deficit you're supposed to come back from.
But there's nothing I can do about the fact that our lineup has all the offensive firepower of tap water. Our core hitter, Joo Byung-min sunbae, and our mercenary bat Max are the only two swinging like actual human beings, and two guys batting second and third fighting valiantly does not win you a ballgame.
"And the Bears came into this series with their knives sharpened too. Jaemin's already thrown three days in a row, and if it's not him, they're emptying the entire bullpen."
On top of everything, the Bears are clawing their way back into it like this is the playoffs, running a full bullpen siege — and the constant pitching changes are smothering our hitters even further.
"Maybe I just shouldn't have stopped hitting..."
This is the moment I find myself envying the National League, where pitchers still take their at-bats. If I'd stepped into the box myself, I'm pretty sure one home run would have changed the whole complexion of this game. Call it a feeling.
Whether he read my mind or not, Kang Hyun-seok sunbae chuckles lightly and pulls out a bat.
"Forget the hitters — it's been a while since I stretched out a swing anyway. All you boys who batted today, your uncle's calling a team meeting. One loving stroke of the paddle each."
Hold on, "loving"? Because that did not look light. His tone is all jokes, but there's a flicker of genuine irritation on his face.
The hitters see that murderous aura and apparently have nothing to say for themselves, shrinking back a little. Watching them wilt, I feel my own rising irritation cool slightly too.
Right. Even if we lose, it's the team that loses — I walk away with a no-decision. No loss attached to my record. I once dreamed of twenty wins in my debut season, but after dropping three straight, that ship has already sailed, so losing one more game today barely moves the needle.
After all, I've already cleared the ten-win bar that basically locks up Rookie of the Year for a high-school graduate.
Think positive. Positive.
And so, wearing the expression of a man half-achieved enlightenment, I blissfully unleash my trademark not my problem —
"..."
— only to find Min-soo hyung, of all people, suddenly showing a drive I've never seen from him before.
Wait. Why is he fired up all of a sudden?
If you had to classify him, Bang Min-soo is a defense-first catcher.
His arm is decent, his receiving is solid, his framing isn't bad either. Against any other submarine pitcher you'd call his stolen-base defense merely passable, but he manages it while keeping pace with Kang Min-hyuk, and the fact that he can handle a lawless freewheeler like Kim Yi-seon at all says his glove work is genuinely dependable.
But if he had it all, would he be splitting time as the backup catcher and personal receiver for the rookies? The man has already claimed a starting job and even sampled a taste of the national team.
His hitting, despite good analytical instincts and respectable raw strength, is nothing to write home about.
He's well-built and plenty strong, but there's a reason the game separates game power from raw power — and his bat suffers from a severe, almost crippling shortage of punch that leaves his swing flailing.
On top of that, he's excellent at guess-hitting, but the moment a prediction goes even slightly wrong, his bat control simply cannot catch up.
Add feet that aren't fast, and there's almost nothing to hope for offensively — his numbers are those of a guy who can just barely hold down a big-league lineup spot.
Granted, buried inside that is the dizzying fact that even this level of hitting slots him into the six or seven hole of the current catastrophic Seoul Twins lineup, but anyway.
Through his eyes, Nam Kang-min is his exact opposite.
On defense he can say with confidence that his side wins — he has the age and the experience — but on offense, no matter how he looks at it, that kid is better. And on top of that, star power.
Not just the fans — even people who had once eyed him with suspicion, even the professional clubs that left question marks next to his name.
If his hometown team hadn't picked him in the third round on the strength of him being a local boy, this is a player who might well have slid to the fourth or fifth round or chosen college instead — and he now carries the star power of a man standing shoulder to shoulder with the very best rookies in the league.
Fans hang on his every highlight, hope to see him board the national team, and consider failing to bring him to their own club a historic blunder.
Meanwhile Bang Min-soo, who through steady work has pushed past second catcher to claim a rotation spot on this very team, gets none of that attention.
To be clear, the fact itself doesn't bother Min-soo. As he often says, baseball is his workplace and being a ballplayer is merely his job. He harbors no grand ambition or dream.
But what if that gap in attention translated into concrete, material damage?
That's the most extreme case — tabloid-grade trade whispers. But even short of that, there's the constant murmur of Twins fans pining for Nam Kang-min and sighing wistfully about Bang Min-soo.
No matter how chummy he gets with Kim Yi-seon — the power behind the throne, the true authority between the sheets — these are factors that could seriously poison his future salary negotiations and contracts.
Why does this gap exist? Sure, Nam Kang-min is far younger, the difference in star power is real, and offense simply catches the eye more than defense. But in Min-soo's judgment, the decisive factor is impact.
Because to this day, he has never once produced a moment of it.
A rational corporation would never fold such subjective elements into an individual's performance review — but Bang Min-soo is a baseball player, and even he admits that burning an impression into the fans' memories matters, rational or not.
In that case, the answer is simple: make one. He resolved to take matters into his own hands to defend his salary and his contract.
"Yi-seon. No need to be so crushed. The game isn't over yet."
First target: that strange junior who insists he doesn't care about twenty wins while quietly caring very much. He tries not to show it, but unlike usual, every run allowed has been wrung out of him with a genuinely anguished groan, and right now his soul has fully left his body.
Perhaps because a Kim Yi-seon like this is such a rare sight, the broadcast cameras have swarmed the dugout, trained on him. Min-soo gestures grandly, playing straight to the lenses.
"You want to snap the losing streak, don't you?"
"The mood's already six feet under, hyung. I don't see how."
Kim Yi-seon sits at fifteen wins. Even if the team wins today, it's a no-decision, so the twenty-win milestone he pretended not to care about has sailed out of reach, and honestly, a losing streak during his own starts does no real damage to a career.
But look at those eyes. Full to the brim with a hunger that says he knows he should let it go and doesn't want to. Scratch that surface even gently and the man will melt with emotion and raise hell.
"There's still nothing we can't do today. I'll bring us back, so just wait."
And with that, he strides confidently toward the on-deck circle.
Bottom of the eighth. Joo Byung-min — the one man on this team who manufactures wins these days with hitting that actually resembles hitting — leads off with a double. Then the four-hole hitter Myeong-gil, the captain in the five-hole, the whole lot of them go down on swinging strikes.
And now Bang Min-soo's at-bat. When a catcher famous for the words "defense-first" is batting sixth, you understand exactly how annihilated this team's lineup is. But thanks to that annihilation, a golden opportunity has arrived at the perfect moment — and for once, he is grateful.
The opposing pitcher, evidently uninterested in any of Min-soo's scheming, has retreated deep into his own world. A man muttering quietly to himself, not even glancing at his catcher's signs.
Based on that alone you might peg him as another lunatic from the same asylum as Kim Yi-seon, but Min-soo's scouting file says otherwise.
He tilts his head and steals a glance at Nam Kang-min.
"That guy gonna be all right?"
"Aigo, what's a kid like me supposed to do about it, yu."
The question isn't gamesmanship. Yes, Min-soo feels a twinge of rivalry toward Nam Kang-min — but before that, they are brothers in suffering who both survived the disaster named Kim Yi-seon. He has no intention of tormenting the kid more than necessary.
His question is, quite sincerely, an act of goodwill. But Nam Kang-min, having understood its meaning perfectly, slithers past it with a snake-oil smile.
"They're all my sunbaes out there. A young'un like me oughta sit quiet, yu-know?"
Or maybe it really is an embarrassed grin from a man with nothing he can do.
The pitcher in Min-soo's file, Gu Jeong-jun, is a streaky player — and his streaks are driven less by physical condition than by psychology.
"..."
Right now he's been lost in his own world, muttering away for a long while — and that isn't the sign of some unpredictable Kim Yi-seon-style chaos about to erupt. It's the signal that something obvious and textbook-perfect is coming.
On his good days he's not like this; he actually listens to the dugout to a degree. But down 0–2 with runners in scoring position is apparently pressing on him hard.
No reason to overthink it. Min-soo is a player with a simple creed: if he hasn't analyzed it, maybe he whiffs — but if he's analyzed it, he doesn't miss.
He chokes up the bat. Even a hitter devoid of game power can clear the fence on a pitch whose location he knows cold if he swings with everything he has. What he's hunting is impact — and plenty of it.
Nam Kang-min seems to have sensed his thinking, wiggling furiously and firing down signs, but it's useless. He's already burned two catcher's visits this game; walking out to speak to the pitcher directly is off the table.
The pitcher's mumbling cuts off all at once — and in that instant, Min-soo just knows. This one is leaving the yard.
Never mind swinging the bat. The intuition arrived before the ball was even thrown —
CRACK!!!
"WOOOOOAAAH!!!! WAAAH!!!!"
"...Hyung, has the kid ever gotten this worked up before?"
"Leave him be. A guy who's won fifteen games since his debut almost dropped four straight. How happy would you be? I still remember Hyun-seok hyung sobbing like a child the day I snapped my ten-game losing streak."
"That's true, yu. Honestly, I feel less guilty looking at his face now. Until just this minute the kid looked completely dead inside."
It's officially an empty-stadium game with not a single fan in the stands, but a roar rises anyway — one voice accounting for a truly disproportionate share of it — as the ball sails far over the wall.
The score is tied, 2–2.
Under normal circumstances showmanship belongs to the crowd, but with the stands empty thanks to COVID, the cameras are the only audience that matters — and leaving an impression on them is everything.
And how does one leave an impression on a camera? Advertising yourself directly, the way a fringe player like him would, is strictly amateur hour. The pros leave the viral moments and the word-of-mouth to the stars.
"Bang Min-soo! Bang Min-soo! Bang Min-soo! Mom, when I grow up I'm gonna be Bang Min-soo!"
Exactly like that. Kim Yi-seon, bouncing up and down in delirious excitement whether the cameras catch him or not. Who was it that looked at this man, said he was about to become a father, and predicted he'd turn serious and mature from now on? Ah — not that he ever honored that promise even before the baby.
Bang Min-soo let a refreshing smile bloom across his face.
With impact delivered and the satisfaction of being the power behind the throne thrown in for free — at this rate, he thought, this winter's salary negotiation might actually be pleasant.
"Bang Min-soo! Bang Min-soo! Bang Min-soo! He is a GOD!"
Watching them scrap out the winning run on a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the tenth, I pounced on Min-soo hyung, victory declared at the top of my lungs. Ah, and of course I'd already administered the single largest dose of Indian Bab in franchise history when he rounded the bases after the homer. That's baseball.
Seriously, if it hadn't been for Min-soo hyung, who knows how that game ends. The Bears' lineup wasn't exactly a juggernaut either, but they'd clawed and scratched their way to two runs while our offense played like it was constipated, stranding runners in bunches and slowly asphyxiating.
The moment Min-soo hyung cracked things open, we barely squeaked out the win — without him, we were staring down a 2–0 loss, plain and simple.
I was floating back toward the team bus, grinning like an idiot, when —
"So? What was that pitch, then?"
Nam Kang-min had wandered back over to our dugout out of nowhere. Nice face and all, but no means no.
"You think I'd actually tell you?"
"Fair enough, yu."
And just as expected, he lets it slide — then turns to Min-soo hyung as if this had been his real objective all along.
"Aigoo, guess I betrayed you today, yu."
"You got lucky."
"You think that was just luck, yu?"
There's something oddly heartwarming about the two of them — trading pleasantries, but with a whiff of one-upmanship underneath.
Wait. Didn't these two meet for the first time today? How are they this chummy already?
Stunned by this sudden development, I short-circuit for a moment.
"Well, if you're catching that punk's pitches, doing that much comes with the territory, yu."
"Fair. Anything's easier than that, I suppose."
But the follow-up exchange snaps me right back to reality.
Oh. It's that.
"Aw, come on, Min-soo hyung. All that pretending not to care — so being my personal catcher meant that much to you?"
It's exactly that. Mutual recognition: if you can catch for a pitcher the caliber of Kim Yi-seon, you've earned each other's respect.
A high-school rookie grinding through a full-time rotation from his very first season, an ERA sitting at two and a half with its heart set on breaking below one — and sixteen wins already on top of that? Catching for an arm like that is no easy job.
It's the kinship felt between men who have all run batteries with the very best pitchers there are. Huh. I suppose that's how you become fast friends overnight.
"What kind of bullshit is that now."
"Close, but not quite... Actually, no. Let's go with that."
The two of them go stiff the moment they hear me — embarrassed, apparently. Honestly, two grown men getting flustered over me is slightly unnerving, but I'm just that magnificent, so they'll have to live with it.
"No, it's — it's not like that at all."
"Give it up. Spend three years around him and you'll learn: nothing you say works at times like this."
"He's really gonna be a dad?! The man didn't grow up — he just got more childish, yu!"
Mmhm. Fair enough.