Rest Is a Luxury

It was still too early for Ye-eun's belly to show any real sign of swelling, and nothing stirred audibly inside her yet. But whenever she mentioned her chest aching these days, or her clothes feeling tight, it really did sink in—she was pregnant.

And so here I was, buried in that very chest, taking my rest like a good boy.

"There, there... Yi-seon get some milk-milk..."

"Honestly, I can't tell which one of us is the baby."

She said that, but Ye-eun's embrace was more tender than anyone's. It had always been this way—she could be snappish in everyday life, yet the moment I was genuinely down, she'd open her arms like this.

I decided to wipe complicated things like the trials of life and baseball out of my head and simply enjoy this slice of heaven. Honestly, isn't this what living is for? Why else would I work? It's not like I'm chasing some grand fortune and glory.

Today's schedule: nothing else, just lie quietly in bed and sleep...

"Yi-seon oppa. Our oppa is here."

"Ugh, that oblivious bastard."

But that peace was shattered by the visit of a most unwelcome guest.

Shouldn't he be busy with his own girlfriends? What business did he have chasing me all the way here?

Since I couldn't exactly snap at Min-ah, I quietly followed her to the front door and opened it to find Kang Min-hyuk standing there with an utterly serious expression.

"What is it?"

"What do you think? We need to review the Korean Series."

"Is there even anything worth reviewing?"

"You said it yourself once, didn't you? You can learn everything from defeat."

Unbelievable. This baseball lunatic. The season just ended and the manager gave us time off, so a normal person would rest—and he's already going on about series review.

"Hey, we both just went through hell. Let's rest. Honestly, I don't even know if we made enough mistakes to warrant a review in the first place."

Reviewing is, at its core, an exercise in feedback—what went wrong, where the mistakes were, what needs to change. If you asked whether Kang Min-hyuk and I were perfect in the Korean Series, no. But if you asked whether we gave our best, the answer is yes.

At the time, we squeezed out everything we had to give. There were no mistakes. There were no failures. That's the truth.

"And besides, who even compiled all this stuff? No matter how I think about it, this isn't something you'd do on your own initiative."

Kang Min-hyuk does reviews as a matter of routine, sure—but he's not the type to interrupt my rest with Min-ah. She's one of the very few ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠people Kang Min-hyuk actually tiptoes around. His little sister.

But then came the names behind the summons, and I heaved a sigh and quietly followed him out.

"Lee Hae-ryong sunbae called the meeting. Kang Hyun-seok sunbaenim will be there too."

"Haah... hold on. Let me tell them I'm stepping out. I need to change, too."

No time to rest at home, apparently.

It may come as a surprise, but the Twins fans were taking the loss rather calmly.

Which made sense, really. By most expert projections, this year's Seoul Twins were expected to finish somewhere around fifth or sixth in the Southern Division. Instead, that team hadn't just claimed third in the regular season—they'd staged one of the greatest underdog runs in history and punched a ticket to the Korean Series.

Fans would have felt awkward cursing out players who'd fought this hard. They'd done more than enough already.

To say it once more: the community reaction was calmer than expected. For a team that just got steamrolled 4-1 in the Korean Series, it was downright docile.

Nobody was calling for the team to be disbanded, or declaring all hope for next year lost—no bottomless negativity like that.

Quite the opposite. The lineup is the problem, so overhaul the lineup. Are you Seoul Group paupers? Go buy three big-name FA hitters right now. Actually draft a decent foreign bat this time. Nothing but extremely constructive discussion flowing back and forth.

In any case, the core of their collective conclusion was a simple realization: 'Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk? Generational rookies, absolutely elite—OK. But the team around them is so wretched it's an embarrassment to those two.'

The defense is solid, for starters. Center fielder Joo Byung-min gets torn down by a few antis as "domestic-only," but rephrase that and he's a five-tool player so dominant in Korea that it's practically unfair.

The keystone combo of Ha Joong-yeon and Jo Sang-goo sits at the top of the league in defensive skill alone, and add in Go Hyeong-joon—the excellent infield utility man unearthed this season—and the infield is complete.

On top of that, the catching corps is perfect too: Baek Joo-seon, seasoned with experience and in the physical prime of his career, plus Bang Min-soo, who served as the rookie duo's dedicated catcher this year and logged close to a fifty-fifty split of playing time with Baek.

Take each piece in isolation and there might be a position or two where another club edges out the Twins, but stack the entire center line together and they'd contend for first or second in the league defensively.

The problem is offense. The quality of everyone outside this core is lacking, and even the center-line guys aren't much to write home about with the bat—that's the root cause of this whole catastrophe.

Of course, expecting a center line that's already league-caliber defensively to also rake would be asking for the moon. One of them, Joo Byung-min, actually is an excellent hitter—top-twenty-in-the-league among domestic bats, foreign players excluded.

In the end, the others simply have to do more. Isn't that the whole point of corner infielders and corner outfielders? Less defensive burden, and in exchange they contribute with their bats.

Acquisitions could solve it too. But baseball isn't exactly a sport where you can freely shop for players ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠whenever you like. Whether suitable trade chips or free agents even hit the market is anyone's guess, and plugging every hole through those means alone is a stretch.

Besides, it's not as if the Twins' current players are entirely without promise.

There's Park Myeong-gil, who went completely silent in the postseason and caught hell for it, but during the regular season woke up so dramatically—slugging and average both soaring out of control—that people genuinely wondered if he'd finally broken out. And the other players who've been making regular appearances in the first team are getting evaluations that they've got something worth developing.

That could partly be the bottom-feeder-team tendency to overrate prospects, sure—but the point stands that it's not as if there's no one worth growing.

Considering that FA signings can just as easily flop, the best-case scenario is for the internal prospects to somehow, mercifully, break out.

And so today, too, the Twins fans of the internet kept leaving posts like [~ is a fake talent, EU], [Isn't this guy secretly pretty old?], [Press agree if ~ looks like he should just go back to school lol]—displaying their twisted affection and attention all the same.

They're angry, or rather wound up, so they curse—but it's all attention in the end. That's why the emotions surface at all. Beneath it all runs the unconscious plea: please, please break out.

With one light spoonful of hope stirred in on the side: if you have any conscience at all, don't slack off this offseason—please, train.

In one corner of the Seoul Twins' front office stood the main conference room. Everyone who'd started in the Korean Series was gathered there—minus anyone who physically couldn't make it.

Well, to be precise, a handful of players were seated, while the overwhelming majority were prostrate on the floor, serving their penance. They'd been holding the position so long that even pro athletes—whose strength dwarfs any ordinary person's—were visibly faltering, bodies twitching as the power drained from them.

Watching over them all, Sunbae Lee Hae-ryong sat holding a practice bat and finally spoke.

"Right, and maybe that's just how it is. We were never favorites to win it all, the gap in talent was huge—falling short in the Korean Series was possible."

Then, with a face that said absolutely no such thing was acceptable, he roared.

"But a TEAM BATTING AVERAGE OF .100 IN THE KOREAN SERIES? IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MAKE SENSE? If you're going to be bad, be bad MODERATELY! How are you this much worse than when you faced the Fighters during the season?!"

He had a point. The hitting had been dire throughout the entire postseason, but in the Korean Series it reached another dimension entirely. The three-up-three-down innings came so often I genuinely started worrying we'd produce several perfect games against ourselves before it was over.

And Sunbaenim Kang Hyun-seok, standing quietly to the side, added his own word.

"And Ha-seop. Our pitching corps didn't exactly cover themselves in glory either. If the young one and the foreign boys held the fort that well, the bullpen should at least have protected things. How do you give up runs in every single game?"

"But hyung-nim, we still did better than the position players, at least—"

"Shut it. Nobody said you did well."

Fair enough. Considering the crushing weight of a Korean Series, a run here or there wasn't egregious—but the Seoul Twins bullpen had allowed at least one run in all five games after the starters came out.

One or two runs a game—hardly a blowout, by any standard. But that standard assumes your lineup can score, and from where the Seoul Twins stood, those runs were unbearably heavy.

"Anyway—originally, Hyun-seok hyung-nim and I were planning to hang it up after this year and retire for good. But I can't accept it. One more year. Just one more year as players. And don't even think about coaching afterward—I have no intention of it. Consider yourselves dead for one year and follow me."

Were we supposed to be happy the sunbaes weren't retiring, or sad about it, given the sorry state of the team?

Maybe because of that awkward ambivalence, nobody could manage a reaction and everyone just listened quietly. Ah, well—the guys prostrate on the floor couldn't react anyway.

Then Sunbae Kang Hyun-seok took over, adding the finer details.

"I sat down with the GM about re-signing, and I heard the whole team plan. He said the people I've called together today are all faces he intends to keep seeing in the first team, even if only in supporting roles. You know what that means, right? Every one of you is enrolled in the Kang Hyun-seok Camp. I asked, and the club is even lending us the stadium."

Sunbaenim had always run private training camps, dragging rookies and desperate players off to train. True to form, this time he'd declared he was scaling up—a camp attended by the entire current first-team roster.

"Weather's turning cold, can't leave the country with this whole COVID situation—works out nicely, doesn't it?" he quipped. But everyone knew this was no joke.

The unwritten rule of baseball: a player takes roughly two months out of the year as an inactive period for rest.

It's not pure vacation, of course—but it is the season for recovery and for the personal lives you can't attend to otherwise. And now Sunbae Kang Hyun-seok was announcing he'd confiscate all of it for compulsory training camp. Several sunbaes' faces went pale.

Guilt kept anyone from voicing a refusal, and the room drifted toward simply letting it happen. Hard work is the natural response to feeling this deficient—and honestly, though they're my elders, I do think they had it coming after getting zero run support all postseason.

Still, that rest period is the only window a baseball player gets for a private life. Stripping it away this unilaterally felt like too much, even for a team that had so generously dumped excrement all over the Korean Series. So I cautiously raised my hand.

"Um, Sunbae."

"Yes, Yi-seon. What is it?"

"Even so, forcing everyone into it feels a bit much, doesn't it...?"

"Ah, right—well, we can't exactly force you into a training camp during your honeymoon. Just commute after practice ends. You're holding the wedding soon and setting up the newlywed place near the stadium, aren't you?"

"Yep! Understood!"

Honestly, whatever the sunbaes did was none of my business. I nodded politely and headed home.

Lee Hae-ryong and Kang Hyun-seok had pretty openly told me there was nothing to discuss about me or Min-hyuk in the feedback session, so I could just go.

Afterward, I was looking forward to settling back into a peaceful routine.

Losing the championship stung—of course it did—but I'd given everything I had. And as a bonus, the sunbaes were sticking around one more year.

As for the special camp, it wasn't overseas anyway—it was at the stadium. Commuting instead of bunking in meant, in practice, a daily life no different from the usual. I never skipped my baseline training on off days even before, after all.

On top of that, the most important personal matter—wedding prep—was already nearly finished during the season. When the date came, I'd just walk into the venue, have the ceremony, and be done.

Min-ah's college entrance exam was coming up in November, but her studying was already complete and she was in the final review stage—mental management was all that remained.

Seo-hee noona had the busiest stretch of the front office year waiting for her, the Stove League... but honestly, that was work she didn't strictly need to do—most of it belongs to the GM and operations team by default. This time I'd tell her to delegate and come play with me instead.

Perfect. All that was left on my plate was taking good care of our Haet-nim-i's prenatal health, looking after my women so none of them felt neglected, and sorting out the new house we'd be moving into.

On a whim, I thought—why not get everyone together and start setting up the newlywed place early? So I'd brought Ye-eun, Min-ah, and Seo-hee noona along, all three of them.

"See? This is going to be my room, and kind of a study..."

"A study? Kim Yi-seon, of all people, reads books? You're going to fill it with manga, aren't you?"

"I can read actual books too, what's your problem. And they say a dad should model reading so the kids study."

"Right. Like you'd ever."

Ye-eun had seen the house several times already, but apparently she liked it more each visit, because she kept grumbling at me for no reason. Look at her—right now she's sneaking a smile at the attached yard and the room that would make a perfect Ye-eun space.

Min-ah, seeing the house for the first time, looked at me with wide eyes.

"It's beautiful. How did you find a house like this?"

So her question wasn't about my ability to buy it, but about my taste and aesthetic sense—how did I manage to pick something this good? Should I take it as a compliment, recognition of my taste? Or did it mean my aesthetic judgment was considered so dubious that a decent result merited astonishment?

Given that she usually won't even let me pick my own clothes or accessories, probably the latter. It looks plenty stylish to me, though. Why do they all recoil like that?

Anyway, at this point, in the interest of banking some emotional credit, I dropped a line as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Well, whatever else, I know your tastes and Ye-eun's like the back of my hand. Min-ah, you once said you wished your home had a darkroom you could use as a home theater, remember? It's down in the basement."

There it is. That moved, gleaming look in her eyes.

It was to see that exact expression that I toured literally every detached house listed for sale in Seoul and the Wirye City area. Photos alone couldn't convince me, so I visited over thirty of them in person—honestly, that's probably why I collapsed with the flu.

Now I had a house, three wives, and my child on the way. Somehow, only now did I truly feel like a grown man—that strange, brimming fullness.

Overwhelmed by the moment, I moved to wrap Ye-eun and Min-ah in my arms when—

"Yi-seon. The house is lovely, but... why on earth did you pick one this big, with this many rooms?"

Seo-hee noona, soon to be one of the residents, raised the question.

It was true—the house had a lot of rooms. It was closer to a mansion than a house; the floor space was vast, three stories tall, and even excluding the kitchen, storage, and other unlivable rooms, there were roughly twenty of them.

Seo-hee noona added that a place this big is inconvenient to live in and lonely, too. And to her, Ye-eun answered with a meaningful smile.

"Really? It feels like it won't be enough to me."

Min-ah, standing beside her, nodded along—rarely one to agree with Ye-eun.

Seo-hee noona asked again, clearly lost.

"Not enough? I counted—it looked like there'd be twenty rooms?"

"Well, of course. I mean, I alone have Haet-nim-i on the way right now, and after that there's Dal-nim, Byeol-nim, Saetbyeol-i, Cloud-nim, Wind-nim... plus Ye-eun unnie and Min-ah here, so you couldn't count them on two hands, and then—"

"Huh?"

Seo-hee noona froze completely, unable to keep up with Ye-eun's explanation.

"It seems you didn't understand. Let me put it simply—as the children grow, each one needs a room of their own for their emotional development, so a house with many rooms is necessary in advance. Thinking about the future, even this might not be enough. Or does Seo-hee unnie not want children of her own?"

When Min-ah kindly spelled it all out for her, Seo-hee noona finally grasped what was being said—and her face turned scarlet from ear to ear.

In my opinion, actually bearing that many children would be brutal on the one doing the bearing, and it'd be plenty hard on me too... but hey, it's just a wish list for now. Minds change when the time comes.

Setting aside all these complicated thoughts about the future, I'd ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠joined in teasing the delightfully flustered Seo-hee noona when the doorbell rang.

We'd signed the contract on this house, but it wasn't move-in ready yet. A property manager, maybe?

I went to the front door and opened it to find someone entirely unexpected.

Kang Min-hyuk. Again.

"What now? Is it another Hyun-seok sunbae assembly?"

This guy really can't stand watching me rest in peace, can he?

But behind stiff, awkward-looking Kang Min-hyuk, a crowd of people began appearing one after another.

"No assembly. We came ourselves."

Sunbae Kang Hyun-seok appeared with a grin stretching across his face.

"Sunbae? How do you even know where I—"

"Ah, Min-hyuk told me. Said this is your newlywed place? Wow, fancy as hell. This had to cost more than the deposit alone—how'd you swing it? Your family rich or something?"

"No. Someone helped me out. More importantly, what's this about?"

Then the other sunbaes poured in behind him—mostly position players, though a few of the pitchers were there too, foreign players aside.

"Well... you didn't exactly invite us to your housewarming, but our youngest found himself a home. What kind of sunbaes could know that and pretend not to?"

Looking at what the sunbaes were carrying, I saw rolls of toilet paper like housewarming gifts, along with various cleaning supplies—and burlap sacks and trash bags.

Seeing this, I remembered the old baseball story about players whose teammate transferred to their club—how the whole team would show up together to help him move.

Experiencing it firsthand, I didn't know where to put myself. I was grateful, but it was a little much, honestly.

"Sunbae, I haven't officially moved in yet. I don't even have my things here... you really don't have to go to all this trouble."

But the sunbae laughed heartily, as if ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he knew something I didn't.

"Aw, of course we'll come help on moving day too."

And then that laugh began to curdle—growing servile, wheedling, until he was actually bowing and scraping toward me.

"So, uh, Yi-seon... there might be a teensy favor I need to ask..."

"A favor?"

"Yeah... it's not like it'll be a big bother or anything... but until you move in—could we maybe, temporarily, put some of the guys up in this house?"

I looked straight into my sunbae's eyes to figure out what kind of nonsense this was.

And there I saw a gaze equal parts shame and desperation.

Then I looked at Kang Min-hyuk standing beside him—and saw a man who couldn't meet my eyes, his own screwed tightly shut.

What the hell is this.