The Perfect Psychological Battle (Not)
While it wasn't quite the wailing that erupted among the fans watching the broadcast feed, cries and groans rolled through the Mariners dugout all the same.
...Huh? That's a thing that can actually happen?
Not that anyone could blame them. It was the sort of thought anyone would have had standing in that batter's box. The ball changed trajectory twice on its own — what, exactly, is a human being supposed to do about that?
On any ordinary day they'd have clicked their tongues — what a dirty trick — laughed it off or vented for a minute, then rallied: we'll get him next time!
The problem was that this time, there was no next time.
The number 1 sat squarely beneath an 8 on the scoreboard. Which meant they had exactly two turns at the plate remaining.
They could tell themselves they'd settle the score some other day — but this was the playoffs. Lose today, and tomorrow they'd have to beat Kang Min-hyuk without Harrison, their ace.
And above all, lose like this and they stood to be taxidermied into a record that might never be erased.
"... Kim Yi-seon hasn't broken yet, has he?"
"No, sir."
A perfect game. The first in KBO history.
And they were going to be the opponents in it? Come the day Korean baseball breathed its last, they'd still be hauled out as archive footage to be roasted over the coals — the 9-hole hitter especially.
Until moments ago, with the game still 0-0, everyone had played dumb — who knew what might happen if it went long and Yi-seon finally tired and came out. But now there was no escaping it.
Whether that truth had landed or not, the 9th hitter, Eo Young-joong, shot suddenly to his feet and shouted in desperation.
"Hey! We only need one run, that's it! Huh?! You're telling me we can't even f***ing do that?!"
They probably couldn't. No — honestly, the guy's stuff today was no joke at all.
Never mind how few pitches he'd thrown in the 7th; watching him dial up 160 for roughly half his total output had completely broken everyone's spirit.
But as had flashed through every head in that dugout — they couldn't just fold, either. Every single playoff game mattered, and to be preserved as a historic footnote on a stage this important...
Jang Soo-hyuk, already immortalized in an immaculate inning himself, declared boldly:
"That's the spirit! Who gives a damn — crank one home run and we're right back in it!"
With the man slated to lead off the very next inning declaring it so grandly, the mood lifted a little.
The manager and coaches, unable to sit idle any longer, rode that recovering momentum and each layered on a word of their own.
"Kim Yi-seon's human too. He's already past 60 pitches — this is the kid who always came out right around 80. He's a high schooler; his gas tank can't be that deep."
The premise was sound. The conclusion was wrong. Yi-seon could always throw more — it was only Manager Jeong Jin-haeng's terror of grinding a kid into dust and Director Jo Sang-shik's meticulous fatigue management that ever stopped him.
"What's our team's strength, in the end? The long ball, isn't it? One swing and we've tied it. Swing from your heels."
It was a reasonable analysis. The hitters were into their third time through the order and adapting nicely, and Mariners Park's friendly fences had always been generous with home runs. Worth a try, certainly.
If their opponent hadn't been a man who'd surrendered four home runs across an entire season, that is.
"No falling for any tricks to pad his pitch count, either. Waste your at-bats on gamesmanship and all you'll do is help him. Go at him head-on. Head-on."
By the standards of modern baseball theory, a perfectly defensible call. Even by old-school logic you need runners aboard before you can run anything — and they couldn't even manage that much.
Whether "head-on" was a viable approach against a man who could simply throw whatever pitch he pleased was, admittedly, up for debate.
But regardless — armed with the dread of being preserved for eternity, a boiling dugout, and coaching advice that sounded reasonable enough, the Mariners charged to the plate with courage at a hundredfold.
"Kang Min-hyuk, so that's what those Mariners bastards were doing. I've cracked their little scheme."
"And this scheme of theirs is... haaah... fine. What is it."
"They walked in planning to hit home runs from the very start. Our lineup's nothing to write home about, but our defense holds up well enough — so they figured they'd spend the early innings just getting a read on my stuff, then swing for the fences once it got familiar—"
"Understood. Now go throw the damn ball."
Which backfired spectacularly.
Kim Yi-seon was basking in the tremendous intellectual pleasure of a detective unmasking the killer in the final chapter.
No wonder something felt off — so THIS was the tangled strategy they'd cooked up.
By any common-sense measure, a bizarre scheme like that would be useless in real baseball — but this world was built on manga foundations to begin with. Preparing an outlandish ploy straight out of a comic panel was, frankly, entirely on brand.
Yi-seon had reasoned that if pennant races only ever got the manga treatment, they clearly weren't the important part — and it followed, logically, that schemes this outlandish would start surfacing in the postseason.
Now that he'd decoded their strategy, there was no need to rack his brain any further.
Not that anyone would buy the phrase "racked his brain" — Bang Min-soo would have demanded to know exactly what agonizing a man who threw fastballs over ninety percent of the time could possibly have done. Regardless, that's what Yi-seon believed.
He knew what they wanted now. So he'd simply cook it up for them — served exactly to their taste.
Stepping into the box was the opposing catcher and 6-hole hitter, Jang Soo-hyuk.
Yi-seon decided to show him precisely what he wanted first. Reel him in, gently.
"Stee-rike!"
A high fastball up in the zone. Had the opponent known, he'd have blown his top — since when does a high heater flirting with 100 miles an hour count as bait? — but Yi-seon genuinely believed the man was hunting exactly this pitch.
And look — even now, there went Jang Soo-hyuk winding up another monstrous full swing. Yi-seon had even thrown this one deliberately high for a ball, and the bat whistled through empty air a hair beneath it.
Show them what they want — then came the hope torture.
"Stee-rike!"
"Stee-rike three! You're out!"
A brand-new changeup and a knuckle curve. Velocity dropping 10 km/h at a time, trajectory diving down and away — for one instant Jang Soo-hyuk's soul left his body; he flailed twice more at nothing, then trudged back to the dugout wearing the expression of a man who'd been lied to his whole life.
The next hitter fared much the same. Three straight breaking balls this time, finished off with a single fastball.
The one after that? His command had abandoned him today anyway, so Yi-seon simply ignored the zone and looped breaking balls until the man swung through one. Three found the strike zone first, but — details.
Yi-seon congratulated himself: a flawless psychological battle. Cerebral pitching that turned the opponent's own strategy into a weapon against them.
"... No matter how I look at that, he read every pitch, right?"
"Yeah. Watch the bat path on his first swing — he was on everything. The movement was just even better than he expected. That's the only reason he whiffed."
"Genuinely overwhelming stuff really doesn't need a strategy, huh. They say when the body's weak, the head suffers — guess when the body's like that, the head gets a paid vacation."
The whispers of his teammates never reached him.
"Invincible Seoul Twins, we shall prevail! Grandpa, did you see?! Yi-seon threw a perfect game! A PERFECT game!"
In a household in Wirye City, a grandfather and granddaughter had watched the game together.
Grandpa Lee Young-gil chuckled indulgently at his granddaughter's ruckus. Even to him — no fan of the Seoul Twins — it had been a genuinely historic, magnificent ballgame.
"A real shame, though. A player like that should've been wearing a Dragons uniform... Pitchers these days are all limp noodles. Nothing but junk balls and flailing about."
Even as he said it, the regret gnawed at him. Once a talent reaches a certain level, a man starts scheming about signing him in free agency someday — and as Grandpa Lee saw it, Korea currently housed a player who belonged in the majors right now. When free agency came, he wouldn't be headed to the Dragons. He'd be headed to an American club.
"Still... for the sake of national prestige, couldn't we ship him off to America nice and quick?"
So of course that inner voice slipped right out. Anyone whose team can't have him wishes he'd hurry up and get lost. Who doesn't?
The words were barely out of his mouth before he winced — what on earth was he saying in front of his own Twins-fan granddaughter?
"Mm-hm. A guy like Yi-seon would do just fine over there."
Come to think of it, these individual-player fans seemed to have remarkably little loyalty to the team.
For one fleeting moment, Grandpa Lee's devoted granddaughter looked like quite the ungrateful brat — but he held his tongue. She wasn't a Dragons fan, after all.
And so, while grandfather and granddaughter exchanged this heartwarming(?) banter, the internet went completely nuclear.
If you exclude the scrappy weekend leagues he wasn't credited in, make it 2 more on top of that.
Please. PLEASE. Get the hell out to MLB already...
The Twins fans were partying like lunatics, the fans of the other ten clubs were genuinely praying for the man's departure, and the Incheon Mariners — his actual opponents — were dying of pure indignation.
Then again, after conceding a run in the most absurd way imaginable and then suffering this humiliation, they were probably choking on their own rage.
This year the meltdown starts from game one
Trash talk is simply forbidden. The problem with this team isn't the players — it's the club itself lmaooo
This team's cycle is simply done
Just rebuild, it's already over — we can still do it, just win the next two — forget all of it, just disband — every species of nonsense and venom in existence blanketed the Mariners fan community, and at this rate, blame was bound to start flying even inside a Mariners organization that had posted a perfectly respectable second place in the division.
Which was precisely why the Incheon Mariners had prepared, meticulously. Kim Yi-seon may have been ensnared by Manager Jeong Jin-haeng's psychological warfare, but they had been ready for Kang Min-hyuk's start all along. No — they'd prepared even more thoroughly than that, since they'd predicted Yi-seon wouldn't appear at all.
Yes. This had actually worked out for the best. It wasn't as if Yi-seon were some monster who'd beat you no matter how you prepared — maybe giving up Game 1 and taking Game 2 was the better outcome. Burning their ace starter Harrison in that first game stung, but the rest of the Mariners' rotation wasn't bad either.
Hearts set like soldiers marching into a last stand, the Mariners advanced to Game 2.
There was just one small problem.
They were not the only ones who could beat any amount of preparation.
"Y-yes, Madam Chairwoman."
—"Good. The Group is preparing all of this for a variety of reasons, so don't you dare refuse. None of your funny ideas, now."
"I'll accept it gratefully."
—"Glad we understand each other. Come to think of it, I never asked about Kim Yi-seon's tastes. Would he prefer a metal band? Men rarely care for anything too bejeweled — shall we go with a simple model?"
"I'm sorry... what?"
>—"Well, I can't very well choose until I know Kim Yi-seon's preferences, now can I?""No, the perfect game watch goes to the catcher, not the pitcher who threw it... And didn't you say this was a sponsorship? Are you really free to just pick whatever model you like?"
The day after the game, I was bowing and fumbling through a phone call from Seo-hee's mother, with absolutely no idea where to put my hands.
She'd showered me with gifts plenty of times before under assorted pretexts — Group-level sponsorship, publicity purposes, "a star must maintain his dignity" — so I'd predicted this call would come too. I just hadn't expected her to dive straight in like that.
Look, I still owed Min-soo a Rolex, and I'd already pocketed a hefty signing bonus — I was hardly in any position to be crowdfunding off fans like back in my high school days, which meant spending my own money, and that had stung a little. The instant she said the word sponsorship, I'd accepted on the spot... and then this tangent came out of nowhere.
Flustered, I asked her to clarify, but she paid my predicament no more mind than a passing breeze and simply kept going.
—"Does the Seoul Group really strike you as that penny-pinching? The models for every single player who took the field that day, and the one to be presented to the catcher, are already decided. The only one left to choose is the model for the pitcher who threw it."
"No, this award traditionally only goes to the—"
—"What kind of small-minded soul would that make us? When you give gifts at all, everyone should receive one — that's how feelings stay unbruised. Now listen carefully. When giving gifts, giving to some and withholding from others breeds resentment, and a gift without proper hierarchy is poor form. That is precisely why we call it ye — courtesy."
From there it somehow melted into an elder lecturing the young on the philosophy of gift-giving, with the watches themselves treated as a settled given.
Only after a long stretch of me going "Of course, ma'am," "Absolutely right," and relaying my personal preference against flashy timepieces (I knew precisely nothing about watches to begin with) did I finally, barely, manage to hang up.
Along the way she did ask for an autograph or two and a thank-you voice recording... but she'd mentioned them so casually, in passing, that surely they weren't anything important.
Thus, thoroughly wrung out, I heaved a weary sigh of complaint and turned to the man sitting beside me.
"I really don't get what the big deal is. Why's everyone making such a fuss over this?"
"Try saying that with the corners of your mouth pointing down for once."
Min-soo's merciless reaction. Not a shred of belief in it.
"Look, I know a perfect game is a big deal. But it's still a one-game record. Why exactly is my treatment so different before and after?"
Truthfully, Seo-hee's mother wasn't even the exhausting part. The postseason wasn't over yet, and since the Twins had advanced, the media access should reasonably have been dialed back — yet it felt like the crowd of nuisances had doubled overnight.
I'd already booked a restaurant for the very moment the postseason ended; thank God I'd gotten the wedding preparations mostly finished before the break. I'd collapsed from body aches back then as it was — if I'd tried planning a wedding in this atmosphere, it wouldn't have been body aches. They'd have carted me off on a stretcher for real.
As I grumbled on, Kang Min-hyuk drifted up quietly behind me.
"Indeed. You are correct, Kim Yi-seon. A perfect game, a team victory — nothing more than yesterday's fallen snow. We must devote ourselves to the Southern Series that lies ahead."
"Says the guy who's never thrown a perfect game in pro ball."
Ah, right — "it doesn't matter" is a standard only the man who actually did it gets to set.
Kang Min-hyuk — no perfect game, no no-hitter, merely a shutout — had no standing to chime in here.
At my words, even that rigid face of his finally crumpled. And what exactly are you going to do about it — get mad?