Kim Yi-seon Reality Shock
The playoffs were now just one day away.
[PLAYOFFS — SOUTHERN DIVISION, GAME 1: INCHEON MARINERS (SP: Riley Harrison) VS. SEOUL TWINS (SP: Kim Yi-seon)]
And the Mariners fanbase detonated.
(a certain manga panel of someone wailing in despair)
What is this End-of-Dharma atmosphere. Buddha, are You asleep?
(Kim Yi-seon highlight compilation vs. the Mariners)
Wouldn't you say? Just concede Game 1 and move on lololol
(a GIF of a crab tumbling into a pot of boiling oil)
And every crab who thought that way has since committed suicide.
The 21,947,730th demise of the Mariners this season lmaoooooo
They were grateful for — and resentful of — the league's starting pitcher announcement rule, which required teams to declare their starters a day in advance. Grateful, because it gave everyone at least one day to brace themselves. Resentful, because it also delivered the despair one day early.
The Mariners fans, partly as a reverse jinx and partly in earnest, had resigned themselves to writing off Game 1.
And someone, somewhere, thought along these same lines: come on, Kim Yi-seon isn't the god of baseball — what's with all the screaming and hair-pulling? Weren't the Twins' hitters the so-called decorative lineup that ranked dead twelfth out of twelve in the league?
And their guy Riley was the Mariners' foreign ace, a pitcher who had thrown quite well all season. Surely they could scrap with him, no?
But the fans who had watched baseball long enough to actually understand it wanted nothing to do with that opinion.
(Kim Yi-seon's season statistics)
This guy's ERA is 1.93. Apparently some of you can't recognize how absurd that number is, so allow me to explain it precisely.
He doesn't show up on the official leaderboards only because he didn't throw enough innings to qualify — but among every season of 100 or more innings pitched, there is simply no lower mark in the entire 2000s. Not one.
In twenty years of baseball, Kim Yi-seon has been more destructive than any pitcher you have ever laid eyes on.
Kim Yi-seon was different. Of course, the league had seen dominant pitchers before. It had seen overwhelming ones, too.
But this wasn't the league's rough-and-tumble birth era of the eighties, and no pitcher in its modern history had carried anything close to this sheer weight of presence.
He was a natural disaster. A disaster whose damage a well-prepared team could minimize — but never eliminate. Just as no amount of preparation makes a typhoon cease to exist, the teams facing him had no answer beyond weathering him, holding him to as few runs as physically possible, and scraping across a single precious run of their own, however long that took.
And everyone had assumed that kind of monster wouldn't take the mound — and out he popped? The fans had spent the whole day running their happy little delusions about Kim Yi-seon maybe sitting out, which meant the shock landed twice as hard, and they wailed their despair into the forums.
And the chaos wasn't confined to the fans.
"So Kim Yi-seon is starting after all. It's quite all right. We've prepared for every eventuality, haven't we?"
Lies. They had not prepared for Kim Yi-seon. Not for a single pitch of him.
"Quite right. Baseball is hardly a one-man sport to begin with — and how are we supposed to climb any higher if we let a single player push us around?"
Except Kim Yi-seon seems to be precisely the exception to that. Wasn't there a stat floating around that the Twins' winning percentage swung by more than a full hundred points depending on whether Kim Yi-seon or Kang Min-hyuk took the mound?
"Our analysis of Kim Yi-seon is already complete, and there's plenty of time for counter-training."
Not an entirely wrong statement. Except the analysis produced no usable answer, and while the counter-training could certainly be ordered, there wasn't a single player on the roster capable of internalizing it.
If a human being could learn to handle a ball with a perceived velocity approaching 170 km/h through batting practice, why on earth would he still be in the KBO? He'd have gone straight to the majors.
Though it did remain a mystery why the man who actually threw those pitches — the one guy who didn't need to prepare for them — hadn't gone to the majors himself.
The Mariners' manager and coaching staff chatted away with studied nonchalance, but the single thought we are thoroughly screwed would not leave their heads.
Manager Jeong Jin-haeng. He'd never struck them as that kind of man, and yet he'd played a genuinely dirty trick.
Not that it was impossible, they conceded. Even with the expanded postseason rosters registered, keeping him on the active squad — rather than stashing him on the injured list or shipping him back down to the minors — was an unexpected call. So yes, the possibility that Kim Yi-seon might pitch had always existed in the back of their minds. Jeong Jin-haeng's psychological warfare had simply been that much sharper.
No — it wasn't even that Jeong Jin-haeng's mind games were brilliant. Anyone would have taken the bait in that situation. It was Kim Yi-seon, after all. The man didn't get notably easier to face no matter how much you prepared, yet devoured enormous resources every time you tried. The very definition of terrible cost-effectiveness.
So the moment the faintest possibility appeared that Kim Yi-seon might not pitch at all, a voice was bound to rise: "Why waste our prep time analyzing Kim Yi-seon and training the kids to handle his heat, when we could be studying the rest of the Twins' staff instead?"
The hitters, too, would rather keep their timing tuned to the tempo they'd carried all season than throw it off chasing fastballs over 160 km/h from the one man in the country who actually threw them — the only pitcher of that kind in Korea, mind you.
The result of that comfortable judgment was the situation they now found themselves in.
And still, the Mariners organization's happy circuit had not finished its loop.
"Still... by all accounts he came back from a fairly vicious case of the flu. His stamina can't possibly be at a hundred percent, right?"
"Surely not. No position in baseball depends on stamina the way starting pitching does..."
"And since this is a short series anyway, if we run the game plan around small ball..."
Yes — they accepted that Kim Yi-seon would pitch. But the fact that his body had genuinely been wrecked was no trick. That part was cross-verified fact from multiple angles; the times being what they were, even a common cold meant the league office would run a COVID screening on the player.
So they built their game plan on the perfectly reasonable inference that a man who had spent days bedridden with fever could not possibly be back at full strength already. He was obviously forcing himself onto the mound ahead of schedule — so they would prepare the optimal strategy for tormenting a man in exactly that condition.
Mariners Park — the home ballpark of the Incheon Mariners.
There, today, the playoff series between the Seoul Twins and the Incheon Mariners was set to begin.
As the second-place team of the Southern Division, Incheon held the privilege of forcing the third-place Twins onto the road. The best-of-three playoff would be played out over three days, right here at Mariners Park.
It was finally the start of October baseball — a day when, in any normal year, the stands would be packed with frenzied fans. But with the pandemic still dictating empty-stadium games, the bleachers once again sat in sterile silence.
Veteran players might have felt the awkwardness of that void. At this particular moment, none of them did.
"...Hey!"
THWAP───!!!
[153 km/h]
The ball smacked into the mitt alongside a catcher's yell that somehow lacked all conviction — while the radar gun beside it spat out a number every bit as heavy as the sound. He was clearly loosening up, deliberately taking something off for his pregame long toss. And it read 153? Was the gun generous, or was he flexing? Or was his arm genuinely in such absurd shape that this counted as a warm-up toss?
While the Mariners' players spiraled into confusion, Kim Yi-seon was busy complaining to his personal catcher with an expression of utter dissatisfaction.
"Ugh, I rested too long. My feel for the ball is completely dead."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
Bang Min-soo opened his mouth to inform him exactly what kind of nonsense he'd just heard, remembered that the lunatic in question was Kim Yi-seon, and let it go with a sigh.
The man could declare that a ball which — lazily tossed, in warm-ups, would rank as a lifelong dream pitch for the overwhelming majority of KBO hurlers — was merely some half-formed thing his hands hadn't found yet. The sheer, bottomless genius of this idiot revealed itself in moments exactly like this one.
"Look, you were holding the target low just now, hyung, and the ball ran back to the middle. Then you put it up high and it sailed even higher — way out of the zone."
But then came the nitpicking: the command was a touch off, the breaking balls had fine shapes but no bite, the ball wasn't sticking to his fingertips the way it should. Even knowing full well that he was a genius, Bang Min-soo found it very difficult to empathize with complaints of this caliber.
For an ordinary human being like him, the correct response was a level-appropriate "uh-huh, sure" and a polite nod.
There was, however, one important question he actually had to ask out loud.
"So? How's the body, since the flu?"
As it turned out, Kim Yi-seon himself hadn't known this — during his time off, he'd spent three days flat on his back with a fever spiking past 102 degrees. He'd recovered since, and a few more days had passed on top of that, but the human body didn't simply snap back and forth like a light switch.
Starting pitchers who turn over a full season's rotation carry enormous physical loads, which makes them surprisingly vulnerable to exactly this kind of illness. And everyone kept forgetting, but Kim Yi-seon was a rookie fresh out of high school, barely debuted as a pro. A kid that age going straight into the first-team rotation? Of course something was going to give.
In other words, even if he looked fine on the surface, there was every chance that some residue of it still lingered somewhere in him.
"Body's fine. The feel's just a little rusty, that's all."
But Kim Yi-seon declared himself perfectly healthy. And he was such a transparent creature that Bang Min-soo could tell this was neither bluster nor bravado. His body really was, apparently, in full working order.
Then that was that. Filtering out this man's nonsense was Bang Min-soo's job; throwing the ball perfectly was Kim Yi-seon's. As long as he did the latter, he'd done everything asked of him.
"Good. Need to loosen up any more?"
"No. Let's get ready for the game."
And when Kim Yi-seon did his job? They usually won.
Incheon Mariners leadoff hitter Yoo Kang-hyun stepped into the box with a sigh. Standing on the mound was the very last man he had ever wanted to see up there: Kim Yi-seon.
Even now the guy was muttering to himself, visibly irritable as he went through his pre-at-bat routine — none of which reached Kang-hyun's ears, though it was, once again, him cursing about wanting a three-and-out first inning — and stacked on top of everything else, it only made him more dread-inducing.
As his selection to the Premier12 national team before the season made plain, Yoo Kang-hyun was a hitter who represented the league itself. And this year, his bat had done nothing to shame that reputation.
His average sat at a robust .323. The mere fact that he'd produced a number like that told you everything about how refined a hitter he was.
Layer on solid pop for a leadoff man and genuinely excellent pitch recognition, and by any modern measure, Yoo Kang-hyun was an outstanding table-setter.
Against everyone, that is, except Kim Yi-seon.
Maybe the matchup simply broke wrong from his debut series onward. Whatever the reason, against Kim Yi-seon alone, Yoo Kang-hyun shrank.
Three hitless at-bats the first time they met. Not much better ever since. His career average against Kim Yi-seon had since cratered into the double-zero range.
A leadoff man cruising past .300. A man famed, no less, not as a feel-bad-ball hitter but as a guess hitter.
So the whispers that Kim Yi-seon might miss this series had thrilled him, just a little. The less he faced that man, the better for his sanity. Facing Kim Yi-seon did nothing but sour his mood and shake his swing loose.
And out he came anyway? While Kang-hyun had half-assed the counter-training on the assumption he wouldn't?
He exhaled and settled into his stance. What could he do? The man was on the mound. Fall baseball was far too important to forfeit just because one pitcher was a nightmare.
He tossed a word to the catcher crouched there, quietly studying the pitcher.
"Is he gonna blow off your signs and freelance again this time?"
The catcher had been behind the plate the first day Kang-hyun ever faced Kim Yi-seon, too. Back then, he said, the final pitch of the at-bat — the kill shot — hadn't matched the sign at all.
The catcher was silent a moment, then shook his head.
"No. He'll probably go with the called pitch."
The fact that he had to tack on probably was, frankly, absurd.
Right. This was exactly why facing Kim Yi-seon was so hard. Guess hitting was, at its core, nothing more than narrowing the odds through rational deduction —
"Striiike!!"
[162 km/h]
—"First pitch of the ballgame — and he attacks! Down at the bottom of the zone. Called strike!"
"Striiike!"
[159 km/h]
—"Pitch two — swinging strike! Strike two!"
—"Ooh, he was very, very late on that. The bat cut through empty air."
—"The count runs to 0-and-2, and Kim Yi-seon has this duel firmly by the throat."
"Striiike THREE!!! You're OUT!!!"
[164 km/h]
—"Pitch three! Strikeout! He goes down without so much as lifting the bat!"
—"Whew... bold as ever, that young man. Maybe the rest did him good — the ball looks even heavier than before. The Mariners' hitters could be in for a very long day."
—"Kim Yi-seon retires the leadoff hitter on just three pitches!"
That was what it meant to face a pitch you simply could not predict — or whose prediction only ever revealed something beyond your ability to hit. A hitter of his caliber ended up like this: paralyzed, toyed with, contributing nothing.
With eyes gone just slightly damp, he asked the catcher again.
"That one was off the called pitch, right?"
But the catcher just dodged the answer with an awkward expression.
He didn't need to hear it. He already knew what the answer was.
I hadn't expected the postseason to feel dramatically different — but honestly, this was almost indistinguishable from a regular season game.
—"Lofted into the air, and that's an out! Riley Harrison closes out the inning in order!"
—"Riley's a wily old campaigner. It's his first postseason in Korea, but you'd never know it — he looks completely unbothered out there."
Meaning our hitters still couldn't buy a run, and had just gone down 1-2-3 in the first.
"Striiike! You're OUT!!!"
[149 km/h]
—"Pitch five! Swinging strikeout! The bat flails out, utterly helpless against the changeup that dives sharply in off the hands!"
—"That's Kim Yi-seon for you. It's been barely a month since he unveiled that modified changeup, and look at it — already fully mastered. That, folks, is what genius looks like."
The opposing hitters could handle me just well enough to keep the balance of the game delicately intact, and so the scoreboard stayed frozen.
INCHEON MARINERS 0 : 0 SEOUL TWINS
"Yi-seon, you're doing great out there. Say something if the stamina starts to go."
"It's the second inning, sir."
The manager fussing over my physical condition — just another gloriously ordinary day at the ballpark.
Hold on. Weren't the playoffs supposed to come with crushing pressure, a body that felt heavier than usual and refused to move right, a dugout full of unfamiliar faces making everything awkward and strange? Our own veterans drilled that into us constantly, and even the seniors I'd met at national team camp lectured me about it at length.
So why did absolutely nothing feel different from any other game?
As I sat there chewing on that question, Kang Min-hyuk — starting tomorrow — crawled into the seat beside me.
"What is the matter this time, Kim Yi-seon."
Spending years alongside this guy had granted me one peculiar ability: these days, I could roughly read his mind from his voice alone.
What he'd just said translated to: 'There he goes, spouting bullshit again.'
So naturally, my answer was not going to be polite. Look, I'd allowed myself a little excitement because it was the playoffs, and instead I was sitting through one flavorless game after another — I was mildly disappointed, and now Min-hyuk wanted to give me grief on top of it. How was that fair?
But true to form, the oblivious bastard didn't register my mood at all. He plopped down beside me and launched into an explanation, droning on in that stiff, textbook cadence of his.
"What exactly were you expecting in the first place? The hitters failing to score is entirely natural — it is the postseason, so the opposition has prepared more thoroughly than at any point in the season. As for the substitutes slotting in without looking out of place — is that surprising? The manager gave them first-team exposure in advance while preparing for the playoffs, and these are all faces we came to know living together in the second-team dorms, are they not?"
Huh. Now that he said it out loud, that... actually tracked.
Chafing at it though I was, Min-hyuk's logic held up, so I nodded along — but he still didn't look satisfied with my state of mind.
And then, with a sigh, he added one more thing.
"And you may not have noticed, but the opposing hitters already look like men crushed beneath the weight of the postseason."
With that, he pointed toward the Mariners players going through their swings, preparing to take the field.
Uh... hmm.
"Doesn't that Mariners roster have a ton of veterans over there? Guys who've been to the fall classic plenty of times. Then why do they look like the ones squeezing the bat to death?"
Shouldn't it be the Twins — the side that hadn't tasted October baseball in ages, with a core full of postseason virgins — who were supposed to be rattled?
At my genuinely baffled question, Min-hyuk stared at me like an absolute idiot for a long moment, then simply got up and walked away.
Hey. Why do you always stop talking right in the middle of—