Just Win One More

Back when I still had the buff of original-story knowledge, before I ever set foot in the pros, I honestly wasn't sure I'd keep playing well once I got there.

I believed the potential was there, obviously. Even if someone tried to bury me, a high schooler already throwing over 160 km/h was guaranteed at least a full KBO first-team roster spot at worst. That much was a given.

But when it came to the question of whether I could become the kind of player who would devour the entire KBO whole — yeah, that part scared me. I won't lie.

It wasn't like I'd ever received evaluations at my level before, but I'd watched plenty of prospects with generous scouting grades on every tool flame out. Who hasn't seen that story a dozen times? So this hidden anxiety of mine was part of why I'd stayed in the KBO at all. Up to the KBO level I could still feel reasonably safe — but the majors genuinely terrified me.

And that fear, even as I racked up wins all season long, had stayed lodged in some corner of my heart, quietly feeding my unease. Why else would I have pushed myself so hard during the season — grinding new breaking balls, attempting that absurd four-way command split?

But now, that anxiety was gone.

The Gwangju Phoenix, the defending champions, had been dealt with effortlessly by my hand — in the postseason, no less, not even the regular season.

Min-soo hyung keeps claiming he pulled some kind of trick, but come on — since when is baseball something you win on tricks alone? After this game, I was finally able to throw off the unease I'd been carrying all this time.

I said a word to Min-soo hyung.

"Hyung, at this rate, aren't we actually going to win the whole thing?"

"If you get ahead of yourself, you'll jinx it. Knock it off."

Jinx it? This is the guy who's allergic to superstition — why is he talking like that? Come to think of it, just a minute ago he was clutching his phone doing what looked like a prayer. Did he suddenly find religion or something?

Just as I was about to ask Min-soo hyung about it, wearing a puzzled expression, Kang Min-hyuk sauntered over with an impressively shameless look on his face.

"Well, well, look who it is. If it isn't Kim Yi-seon, the man who couldn't even finish a complete game. I happen to have business to discuss with my personal catcher."

"Last I checked, does Min-soo hyung belong to you alone?"

"Who's to say. I couldn't tell you the details, but I do know that a no-hitter pitcher deserves more attention than a pitcher who couldn't even go the distance."

"By that logic, I threw a perfect game two starts ago, you know."

"Didn't you say my win from the last game was like yesterday's snow? By the most recent game, I'm the no-hitter and you're just an ordinary seven scoreless innings."

Kang Min-hyuk, smirking away. He never used to be like this. Who did he learn that from, that his personality had to rot along with everything else?

Still, the fact remains that he genuinely threw a no-hitter, so in the spirit of being the bigger man, I'll graciously let him have this one. It's no perfect game, but a no-hitter is still a monumental achievement for a pitcher, no? It's childish nonsense I'd never stoop to, but the more mature man is the one who has to tolerate it.

Look at that. Back when the two of us bickered like this, Min-soo ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hyung used to furrow his brow — but right now he's just laughing along like a benevolent Buddha, the very picture of adult wisdom.

For a moment I thought I heard the words signing bonus and incense money drift out of his mouth, but I'll let that pass too.

I tuned out Kang Min-hyuk's provocations, turned my head, and looked at the rest of the team instead.

Smiles here, laughter there. Even with the South Division Series still in progress, the mood of the team had gone past bright and landed squarely on optimistic. The younger rookies wore faces full of expectation, while the veterans roamed around looking every bit as benevolent and radiant as Min-soo hyung.

Seeing that, a sense of peace settled over me too. Looking at this scene, I lost whatever desire I'd had to snap at that idiot and trade barbs with him. With the world this beautiful, who has the energy?

Who was it that said victory is the miracle cure for team chemistry? The Seoul Twins had already banked two wins in this best-of-five, with only three games remaining. Win just one of those three, and our ticket to the Korean Series was punched.

And consider this: the five-game Division Series follows a home-home-away-away-home format in favor of the division's top seed. The Twins had already taken both road games and were now dragging their opponent back to their own yard.

In other words — we'd practically already won. Rather than burn mental energy on a South Division Series I might not even pitch in again, I decided to take one step further and start thinking about the Korean Series.

Gwangju Phoenix happened to be a team built, quite conveniently for us, around their hitters rather than their pitchers, so pinning down their lineup with me and Kang Min-hyuk had been enough to win comfortably.

But the Pyongyang Fighters coming up from the Northern Division were balanced on both sides of the ball. Scoring runs against them would be even harder.

In that case, even if shutting them out got a little easier for me, the odds of losing a scoreless pitchers' duel simply because our bats went cold would shoot way up, wouldn't they...

What I was thinking wasn't so different from what the fan communities were thinking.

Before you even get to statistics and probabilities — we'd already banked two wins in a best-of-five. One more win in the remaining three games and it was over. On top of that, those were two wins on the road, and the next two games would be at the Seoul Twins' home park.

What kind of fan would be thinking about defeat at this point? And even if one existed, daring to say it out loud would get you cursed out by the Gwangju Phoenix fans for egregious reverse-jinx fraud.

The gap had already reached the level where Phoenix fans were giving up on victory and deciding what congratulations and curses to leave behind instead. No matter how you looked at it, the win was sealed — the only question left was what came next.

So who's coming up from the North Division Series? The South won the interleague games this year, so the home-field advantage goes to the South, right? That means Yi-seon gets plenty of rest — can we pencil him in for a Game 1 start in the Korean Series?

Questions and worries of that flavor. The kind of talk worth having in advance once the Korean Series berth was all but locked up. On those topics, the Twins fans and neutral baseball fans spun tales and waited for the next game.

And it turned out there was no need to have those conversations at all.

"Just win ONE more game!"

GRAAAAAAGH!!!

How do you fail to win even ONE?!

As I thrashed around, mad with the sheer injustice of it, the manager — who had called me in for a meeting the moment the game ended — looked visibly taken aback.

"Yi-seon, I understand you're frustrated, but this is the situation we're in — we can't afford to save our cards. Before we start arguing about who starts Game 1 of the Korean Series, we first have to win the South Division Series..."

The manager apparently mistook my convulsion for nothing more than sulking over the fact that if I pitched Game 5, I wouldn't be able to start Game 1 of the Korean Series.

Really, now. I don't know how he sees me, but I'm not that immature.

This is beyond the whole Game 1 starter debate — it's just flat-out absurd.

"...Matt and Paulo — neither of them has any physical issues, right?"

"Right. They look a little worn down mentally, but physically there's nothing wrong. And it's not as if their Korean is good enough to read the malicious comments, so that helps too."

Objectively speaking, Matt and Paulo aren't bad pitchers. In terms of eating innings, they'd both passed 180, which makes them genuinely valuable.

But were their stuff or their run-prevention absolutely dominant in this league? Not even close. Their actual numbers sat at a perfectly respectable mid-tier foreign player level, and that was it.

If you lump in the foreign players who'd already been released, they ranked somewhere in the middle of all the imports to play in the KBO this year — and if you lined up only the ones currently active, they'd be closer to the bottom of the pack.

Then again, they're paid about a third of what other imports make, so at that price you can't complain.

Anyway — from pitchers like those, six innings with two runs and five scoreless innings were more than decent outings. The point is, with performances like that, the lineup is supposed to score enough to win.

The Twins' batting is truly, seriously hopeless.

"I've racked my brain over this too. I wanted to protect you and Min-hyuk, thought about calling up Hyun-seok instead, or maybe Ho-yeol with his recent hot form. But even though we grabbed two wins early, let's not forget — coming into this series, we were the underdogs."

The manager's point: a team with superior roster depth has the luxury of gambling on the future, but for an underdog whose survival depends on winning right now, that kind of gamble is plain foolishness.

And he was absolutely right. Honestly, we weren't in any position to get cute against the Phoenix. If we can win now, we throw everything we've got. I'd decided long ago that I would take the mound — that part was never in question.

The problem was that my gut was telling me this one wouldn't come easy.

"So — who's starting for them?"

"Word around the league is Park Dong-min broke down crying after the game with you. So it'll probably be Michael Ostead."

Come to think of it, Park Dong-min sunbae did hold on to the very end for the complete game, then let out a howl when it was over. Hmm... yeah, crying tracks.

But the man stepping in — Ostead — was every bit as frightening as Park Dong-min sunbae. If anything, more so. I'd just been saying Matt and Paulo sat somewhere in the middle of KBO imports, but Ostead was arguably the single best import pitcher in the league this year.

Set aside me and Min-hyuk, who didn't even qualify for the innings minimum — in a normal statistical race, this monster was trading first and second place across every single category.

Min-hyuk did no-hit him into silence in Game 2 — but flip that around, and it meant this was an opponent so stubborn that nothing short of that kind of performance would do.

"Manager. I'm guessing the slider parlor tricks are done now?"

"We settled that in your last one-on-one. Like Min-soo said, it's a weapon for catching someone off guard once — ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠not something you can keep using."

So that too was sealed: the pitch that Min-soo hyung so boldly demanded before the perfect game — the slider pretending to be a cutter pretending to be a fastball. Such a pitch only works when the opponent doesn't know it exists; once they catch on even a little, it's nothing but a home-run vending machine.

God, this wretched team really can't win unless I do literally everything. What even is this Korean Series. At this rate, I genuinely have no idea whether we'll win it all before I leave for America.

While Kim Yi-seon was learning the sorrow of the boy-breadwinner ace, the mood inside the Gwangju Phoenix clubhouse was murderous.

"Who is it this time?"

"Kim Yi-seon."

"...Is that so?"

Two wins in the books, and yet the atmosphere simmered and boiled as if they'd taken two losses instead. Like warriors whose pride had been spat upon, they quietly prepared for the game, faces heavy with rage and shame.

"He won't throw that slider again this time, will he?"

"Let him. We'll sit on the fastball and put it in the seats."

Their voices were quiet, but the tone underneath was rough as gravel, like something being ground down and swallowed between clenched molars.

The reason their pride was wounded was obvious. They'd been beaten completely by a pair of kids, and though they'd gotten their revenge against the next two starters, the results had only left a bitter aftertaste.

On paper the series stood 2-2. But to the hitters, it felt far closer to 4-0.

"That son of a bitch had us so tuned to his fastball and slider that the next day we're swinging at some freakish breaking ball rising up from the second basement level..."

"And after hunting 160 fastballs, Min-hyuk's pitches felt like nothing but changeups? I swear I knew what was coming and the timing still sailed way off."

On top of it all, what the Gwangju Phoenix hitters had felt in their losses to Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk came closest to a single word: toying.

Kim Yi-seon hadn't even been showing off — he'd walked out against them with pitches barely a notch above garbage and dismantled the game without surrendering a single run.

Kang Min-hyuk called it strategy, but the truth was he'd pitched with a vicious, maddening persistence, relentlessly exploiting the timing gap his teammate had carved into their swings.

Who knows what the actual intent was — from the receiving end, it was pitching spiteful enough to make you believe the man was openly mocking you.

Flip it over, and it was the highest praise for how brilliantly they threw. But it was also undeniably true that it made fury surge and fighting spirit blaze.

Amid that boiling atmosphere, Michael Ostead glanced around the room and let out a whistle.

"Whew. Every last one of you looks like a wounded wolf."

"Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk are fine players — but defeats like this have been rare for us."

Gwangju Phoenix shared a division with the Seoul Twins, so they'd faced the pair a number of times. But the title of KBO's most feared lineup hadn't been handed out for free — every time, they'd scratched out at least a run, or at worst piled up plenty of hits.

And now? Seven scoreless innings on one hit, followed by a no-hitter. A team like the Mariners, who'd been perfect-gamed, or some cellar-dweller might have shriveled up and gotten steamrolled by the momentum — but in Gwangju Phoenix, where the winning mentality lived and breathed, this was nothing but premium fuel for the fire.

And it wasn't just the hitters. The coaching staff who drilled them... and even the pitcher standing on the mound, scheduled to go head-to-head with them.

"Still, if I don't give up runs, even you wolf-boys will come back to your senses. That little runt over there can do it, so surely I can too. They faced Korea's best lineup — I'll be facing Korea's worst one, after all."

"Attaboy, Michael. The manager is asking exactly that of you."

Stripped to its bones, those first two losses had happened for one simple reason: their pitchers had failed to match what the opposing pitchers did. What's that? No pitcher can shoulder the blame for every run alone? Save that talk for a world where those two rookies didn't exist — rookies who ended scoreless games against lineups far stronger than theirs.

And so Ostead, his pride every bit as wounded as the hitters', smiled a wolfish grin. This time, he intended to pay it all back with interest.