Why the Defending Champions Are Terrifying

Here I was again, back at Phoenix Field, the home stadium of the Gwangju Phoenix.

Because nobody seriously believed the series would go all the way to Game 5, neither the rest of the squad nor the pitchers — myself included — had even started traveling until yesterday's game ended. That was how we found ourselves scrambling into Gwangju late at night.

Kang Min-hyuk, who shouldn't have needed to pitch in the early games of a Korean Series hosted at our home park in the first place, had tagged along to Gwangju too — just in case I got pulled early and he had to take the mound. In trying to take the easy road, we'd paid a very steep price.

I'd held my tongue until now, figuring I was crossing a line, but enough was enough. When this Stove League rolled around, I was going to beg Seo-hee to bring in some real hitters. Forget lines and boundaries — if next season looked like this, the sheer frustration would be the death of me.

With my simmering resentment suppressed by fantasies of whichever free agent might join us in the future, I made my way across the ballpark toward a player quietly watching Phoenix Park from a corner of the stadium.

Kang Hyun-seok.

"Is everything all right at home?"

He hadn't just been quiet today — he'd been off since yesterday. This was so unlike him that not only I but the other players were all walking on eggshells around him, visibly unsettled.

At forty, you'd never have guessed his age from the way he'd carried the starting rotation right up to the end of the season, though his stamina had collapsed in the second half and he'd finished with a 4.02 ERA.

Those numbers had pushed him out of the postseason rotation, relegating him to long relief duty for emergency situations.

Taken on its own, you might assume his pride as the team's ace and franchise star had been wounded. But Hyun-seok had always been the man who lifted the whole clubhouse with his boundless energy — someone who, even yesterday, couldn't take the mound yet still pumped life into the dugout, a pillar of the team through and through.

That man was now radiating a sharp, prickly air and holding his silence. The only other time I'd ever seen him like this was the day his daughter told him she was embarrassed to be seen with him.

So I asked whether something had come up at home, but he simply didn't answer — though he didn't seem to be dealing with any such problem. I tried to carefully probe what it was, but he had no intention of explaining. He just shook his head.

"It's nothing. Go get Hae-ryong."

And that was all he said, sending me off to find Lee Hae-ryong.

Honestly, before anyone could even start dissecting Hyun-seok's condition, the team's morale had already hit rock bottom. We'd won two straight, then dropped two in a row to limp into a full fifth game — the mood couldn't have been good no matter what. Even if the captain had been in peak form, rallying everyone, it might not have changed a thing.

Still, watching someone who was normally so bright it bordered on annoying sit there like that gnawed at me.

I hovered for a while, hesitantly stealing glances at his face, then gave up and went looking for our captain — thinking, at the very least, that I hoped the old man could find his fire again.

"You called for me?"

"Yeah."

A tucked-away corner of Phoenix Field, out of sight of the younger players. Rookies with little road-trip experience, or the ones no veteran from a given club had bothered to introduce to the spots, wouldn't know about places like this — but veterans of a certain caliber knew every ballpark's hiding places like the back of their hands.

Normally this was where guys slipped off to sneak a cigarette or trade quiet words with players from the opposing team, but today's conversation would carry more weight than any of those usual vices.

"You've got one year left on your contract, right? You gonna play it out?"

"My knees, my hips, my back — half my body's already stopped taking orders. How am I supposed to squeeze another year out of it? I've already decided this is my last season. What about you, hyung?"

"My contract was up after this year to begin with."

With a crisp crack-and-hiss, I — no, he — poured the can of coffee in his hand and passed it over. He'd occasionally had a drink in the old days, but he'd never touched cigarettes, so whenever these conversations came up, canned coffee was his poison of choice.

Lee Hae-ryong accepted the coffee, took a long sip, and kept going.

"Never thought I'd see the day the great Kang Hyun-seok buys me coffee."

"Watch it. Find me one senior who treated his juniors better than I did. Half my FA signing bonus went to feeding those kids."

"Feeding them, right. Nothing but kalguksu and gimbap. And even then it was only the promising juniors you treated — with the guys actually close to you, it was split-the-bill down to the last won, every single time."

"I was broke when I was young. Sue me."

"Oh, of course, of course. Anyway — so what's this about? You're really retiring after this year? Word is the front office shoved a contract across the table with money attached, begging you to play two more seasons."

The captain's usual gravitas was nowhere to be found as he bantered with Hyun-seok, all flip and easy. Hyun-seok, by contrast, answered with an uncharacteristic calm seriousness.

"This is far enough. Isn't that what they say — leave while they're still applauding? The young guys coming up behind me are this good already. A forty-plus fossil hogging a roster spot would be its own problem."

"Unbelievable. Where's the Kang Hyun-seok who never shut up about stockpiling his daughter's college tuition and wedding fund in advance? Or is this your way of sliding straight into a coaching gig?"

"They floated it, but... you know what coaches get paid. Peanuts. I'd rather just rest."

"Rest is something you earn after you've actually done it. From where I'm sitting, hyung, you're not the resting type."

And so the two of them talked long into their retirement plans and what came after, about which young players had real futures, until the coffee cans in their hands showed their bottoms and they ran out of words, settling into silence.

Then they looked at each other. The young national-team-selected pitcher who'd once been called the Twins' boy breadwinner and boldly chased his shot in America had, somewhere along the way, become a middle-aged man with a face full of creases.

The rookie center fielder who'd bombed the league from the moment he debuted, hailed as the next great slugger, had become a veteran clutching joints that ached every time it rained.

Hae-ryong snorted, then spoke.

"Seeing you like this, hyung — you really do look old."

"Hey, you're the older-looking one. I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠could still walk down any street and pass for a high school senior. Go ask a total stranger who looks older, you or me."

"Oh please. You're the great Kang Hyun-seok — like anyone in this town would dare tell you that you look old. Pathetic, riding your fame like that."

Still chuckling, Hae-ryong's face settled back into the captain's usual solemn mask as he asked again.

"When you're gone, who's the top dog in the pitching staff?"

"Ha-seob."

"Good lord. I actually have to live to see that punk run the pitchers."

"And what about you lot?"

"Ju-seon, obviously, hyung."

"No. Ju-seon's the next captain material. You can't saddle him with both jobs — someone else has to take position leader. Which makes it Sang-gu, doesn't it? We're doomed either way. Pitchers, hitters, same difference."

"That's a disaster. These kids can barely survive without us around... but still. The one who has to go, has to go."

"Yeah. And the one leaving shouldn't leave anything behind to regret."

With that, the two tossed their empty cans roughly toward the trash and headed back to the dugout.

They'd never once mentioned the thing that mattered most to each of them — but that didn't need words. How many years had they walked together, how many games had they played side by side? Some things you simply know.

In sports, there's a concept called winning mentality.

Whether it means anything scientifically or statistically is forever up for debate — it lives in the realm of the mind, after all — but players and coaches on the ground have insisted, year after year, that knowing how to win and not knowing are two different things. So the idea has spread everywhere.

And judged through that lens, the defending champion Gwangju Phoenix was a team operating at the absolute highest level.

"Forget everything that happened in the previous games. Win or lose today — that single result decides who goes to the Korean Series."

Quiet, yet not quiet at all — the Gwangju Phoenix dugout. Every player was locked in on the manager's speech.

Their silence was not the familiar silence of nerves or fear. It was a seething silence — fury, passion, and expectation compressed beneath the word discipline, a hot energy held down by sheer force of will.

"The media's out there whining — 'historic upset incoming,' 'dynasties aren't built in a day,' all that garbage. But you know the truth, don't you? In a one-game decider, nobody on this planet is more dangerous than us."

That was why the manager, feeling that atmosphere around him, never once considered bolting on extra motivation or calming his players' emotions.

The Gwangju Phoenix was the strongest team in the KBO right now. Bad luck and random variables might steal individual games — but the winner was always, always us.

As long as that fierce belief ran through the clubhouse, the manager's only job was to ride the wave of his players' fire.

"So today, throw out the scouting reports, throw out the small-ball schemes. Do what you do best. Do what you love most. Now go! Dismissed!"

"YES, SIR!!!"

At their manager's command, all the fierce emotion that discipline had been holding down erupted at once. The two straight wins had restored at least a baseline of confidence, and even the humiliation of dropping two straight to a bunch of kids had transformed into a single unified goal: revenge.

A manager obsessed with data, or with cold discipline, might have had a seizure watching this. But in the eyes of Gwangju Phoenix's fiery manager, the team had never been in more perfect condition.

And he issued one light instruction to a player who, though he might look awkwardly out of place, was psychologically as close to this atmosphere as anyone on the roster.

"Ostead. Don't dance around the edges today. Go straight through them. Blow it all up head-on. Understood?"

Today's starter: Michael Ostead.

He heard the order and broke into a grin, like a man who'd just been handed the best news of his life.

"Love it, boss. That's exactly what I've been waiting to hear. Those wobbly-legged hitters won't score a single run today — I'll shut them down perfectly."

The Seoul Twins. Undeniably a difficult opponent. Even if they'd met last year, a win would have been far from guaranteed.

But they were the defending champions. They intended to win — and win they would.

"You okay?"

"As long as it doesn't hit me, I'm fine."

"Is that punk trying to start a war with us?"

As always, the Twins' lineup had flown through the top of the first with a three-and-out.

But where an ordinary game would have carried a faint gloom and a cautious eye on the opposing pitcher, the mood today was sour from top to bottom.

"It really is right on top of us, I'm telling you? These bastards have zero respect, I swear."

It wasn't just about failing at the plate. It was the opposing starter's pitching — aggressive to an extreme.

Most pitchers, even when they throw chase pitches in off the plate, rarely do it with the fastball. Against a same-sided hitter, they'll use an inside heater as a setup pitch and follow it into the zone with a slider at most.

Throwing a slider into the middle of the plate like that? That's a pitch sequence no one chooses unless they have almost pathological confidence in their slider.

If the break runs shallow, you get punished on a hanging slider. Even if it breaks exactly as planned, a slider with that much movement needs to finish out beyond the batter's reach — but a slider that finishes its break inside the strike zone is right about where a bat finds it.

If a pitcher truly wanted that look, the sensible build would be a sinker that runs in off the inside — bury it in on the hands, then sweep the slider away — and so on. But this was...

"Yi-seon. I'm not even crowding the plate — I'm standing in a totally normal spot, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he's doing this anyway. He's trying to bait you into retaliation, I'm telling you. Do not take the bait. I'd rather one of us hyungs take one off the helmet than have you thrown out of this game. We're dead without you."

No — it wasn't even that. He'd just pounded four-seamers, and what followed wasn't a slider at all but more fastballs, or pitches with no connection to anything. Reasonable deduction: those were brushback pitches, thrown purely to intimidate.

The veterans in the top of the order, who'd stared down several of these so-called knockdown pitches, were raging at the opposing pitcher. But what I felt wasn't anger. It was alarm.

I could tell. Those weren't brushback pitches. There was no intent to intimidate behind them at all — he genuinely believed he needed to throw exactly that, right there. I was certain of it.

"Michael Ostead. He does like to work wide, east-west, with his pitching — but his command isn't actually that sharp. Balls leak often, and he hits batters more than you'd expect. If he didn't have that problem, he'd still be in the majors instead of coming all the way to the KBO."

Minsu-hyung, crouched beside me, slowly recited the scouting notes on their starter, as if agreeing with the thought in my head.

The balls Ostead was throwing in and off the corners right now were absolutely not intentional brushbacks or chase pitches. In his own mind, he was painting the border — and simultaneously training the umpire.

The pitch that just struck out Joo Byung-min to end the inning came in on a course nearly identical to one the ump had called a ball earlier. The zone was already widening, just slightly.

He might lose one and clip a batter — and he didn't care. He would take that risk to put on the best performance possible. That was the opposing pitcher's judgment.

It was there that I sensed the danger — the same off-key wrongness that had been humming under the opposing team's mood all day — and walked up onto the mound.

Minsu-hyung seemed to feel it too, because he was calling for pitches faster than usual. Before the batter had even settled into the box, he flashed the fastball sign.

Good. The high fastball — my single best weapon.

The hitter stepping in was Gwangju Phoenix's leadoff man, Seo Yo-han. A good hitter, but one who had often looked unsettled facing me. So the moment he set his stance, I fired the called pitch, hard and fast.

I'd planned to make him wait, draw out the staring contest like always — but there wasn't a flicker of a waver in the man's eyes, so I abandoned the idea. A brief meeting of the eyes, then straight into the windup.

A pitch delivered with zero interval, no breathing room — plus the high fastball he'd struggled with all series. Stack those together, and I could seize the momentum back from the very ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠first pitch.

CRACK!!!

"Hit hard! He jumps on the very first pitch of the at-bat! Over the second baseman's reach — the center fielder takes it in! Seo Yo-han can't advance to second and holds at first! A leadoff single on the first pitch of the ballgame!"

"Seo Yo-han, bold as ever. In a game this big, swinging at the very first pitch takes real nerve — and he turned on it like he'd been waiting for it all series."

"And the record is coming in now — Kim Yi-seon has, for the first time all season, given up a hit on the first pitch of a game."

And I got hit. Hard.

My first thought was that I'd mis-executed the pitch, but one look at the scoreboard said otherwise.

That was a perfectly normal fastball? And the trajectory had flown exactly where I intended.

I could feel it — not just in me, but in Minsu-hyung crouched behind the plate. Confusion.

Something was going wrong.

After that, the flow of the game refused to turn.

"Hit hard! Byung-min! He touches first, rounds for second — safe! An RBI double!"

"The first to break the balance today is the Gwangju Phoenix. Both teams live on their pitching, so this series has been full of games decided one run at a time — and this one stings."

"Deep fly ball — the left fielder settles under it. Out."

"Another scoreless inning of work for Ostead. He looks to be in exceptional form today, doesn't he?"

"Kim Yi-seon! He slams the door on the inning with a strikeout! Runners left on base — loaded, and stranded!"

"Ah, that's Kim Yi-seon for you. He's given up his share of hits and walked a batter too — anyone else would have cracked — but he battled to the very last out with fearless pitching."

The hitters couldn't get anything going.

And I... had to throw far more pitches than usual, and allowed far more hits. All I could do was be grateful none of them had left the park.

By the time the midgame cleanup break passed and the sixth inning ended, the scoreboard read:

The Phoenix led this game.

Two runs. Not an overwhelming lead in baseball — except this entire series, laughably, the Seoul Twins had never once scored two.

"... Yi-seon. Time to come out. You've thrown plenty."

"I'm not even at 110 pitches yet. I can go to 120."

"No. You can't. Come out."

So I had to come down off the mound. I'd said out loud that I could keep going, but I understood exactly why the manager was saying this.

In those six innings, for the first ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠time all series, I'd faced the opposing lineup a full third time. The fourth trip through was closing in.

I wasn't mowing hitters down untouched the way I usually did — I was bleeding hits. And with this much riding on the game, the manager couldn't afford to give me the benefit of the doubt.

I set my glove down meekly and had the team trainer wrap my shoulder in ice. Then I slumped onto the dugout bench.

Frankly, I wanted to flip the table and retreat to the locker room. But the atmosphere was already a trainwreck — if I added to it, we were finished.

So I bit it down and stayed in the dugout, ears open to the manager's and coaches' every word.

"All right, Yi-seon's out, so let's get Bada loose."

"Manager, that would be Bada's third straight day."

"I know. Bada's on three straight, Ha-seob's on two, Ha-neul's on three. Ho-yeol's not on consecutive days, but he threw three innings yesterday. Who in the bullpen has anything left in the tank?"

The scars of squeezing the relief corps dry trying to survive those two losses. The bullpen was already spent to the dregs — whoever walked out there, we'd be holding our breath.

And just as that quiet surrender started creeping up into the manager himself—

"I'll take the ball."

Kang Hyun-seok, silent until this very moment, spoke up.