Win-Now (1)

At that moment, Kim Yi-seon was resolving to take one more step forward, casting off the anxiety and prejudice of a world trapped inside a manga that had gnawed at his heart; Lee Ye-eun was quietly savoring her happiness as the capture-Kim-Yi-seon plan she'd dreamed of since forever finally took concrete shape; and even Kang Min-ah, though this wasn't exactly the direction she'd wanted, was feeling a certain satisfaction of her own.

And Han Seo-hee, who by all rights should have been standing at Kim Yi-seon's side claiming her own place just like the other two women — what was she doing?

"Madam President, it's time for the meeting to start."

"Uuuuughhh..."

"Madam President?"

"Yes, let's go, Director Jung. You've reviewed today's agenda, haven't you?"

She was being worked to death. Plain and simple.

The baseball season was over, you say? Astonishingly, this was precisely the busiest time of year for a club's front office. The players could choose to attend team training camp, go on a far-flung vacation, or train on their own — no urgent business there. But for the club itself, the single biggest event of the year was still waiting on the calendar.

Its name known far and wide: the Stove League. A massive trade market was setting every club official in the league buzzing.

For a brief moment, the frazzled, threadbare Han Seo-hee mode she hadn't managed to hide vanished in an instant, and career-woman Han Seo-hee mode snapped back into place as she marched boldly at the head of the group and into the conference room.

Under normal circumstances, such a thing would never happen. That's how busy she was. No — did other clubs really go through this every winter? The workload was beyond suffocating; it was downright murderous. She hadn't gotten a proper look at Yi-seon's face in days.

Granted, this was largely Han Seo-hee's own doing. Baseball club presidencies are, in practice, sinecures handed out to be lounged in — the rank-and-file staff handle all the actual work, and the president, to put it kindly, is the final signatory, or to put it bluntly, a human rubber stamp symbolizing the parent company's approval.

If she'd lived like other club presidents — taking no interest in whatever the baseball club got up to, drifting between golf outings and business dinners, then slamming the stamp down whenever a final draft crossed her desk — there'd be nothing to tire her out like this.

But given how Han Seo-hee had come to hold this club's presidency in the first place, and given her personality — all I don't want to do this, I don't want to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠do this out loud, yet incapable of doing anything halfway the moment she sat down in the chair — it was inevitable she'd be driven to this point.

"All department heads are present for this meeting, I trust?"

"Yes, ma'am. First convening since the end-of-season review."

"Good. As you all know, just because this is a preseason meeting doesn't mean we'll only be covering on-field matters. Yes, we're a baseball club, and yes, this is a crucial meeting for mapping out next season — but we are also a company. There's plenty that demands our attention on the business side as well."

On top of that, both Seoul Group — which had only ever played the role of money bag — and Han Seo-hee herself were running a baseball club for the first time. If other clubs' presidents ever found themselves on the front lines for whatever reason, they had the luxury of picking their battles. Decades of accumulated know-how, after all.

With big data telling them what had to be decided and by when, they could simply knock out the urgent matters first and shove the rest down the road, working without breaking too much of a sweat. Han Seo-hee had no such safety net.

Seoul Group was, at the end of the day, a stone that had rolled into the yard. The club's staff had more or less been carried over intact, but even the most generous succession had swept away the entire presidency and board of directors. The previous president was her uncle, Han Jang-hyun — and the man was a restructuring specialist, not an operator.

In the end, Han Seo-hee was brute-forcing every single task in real time, and she had already been driven to her absolute limit.

So a few violent turns of phrase slipping out was simply beyond her control.

"Jung Jin-haeng, field manager. I'd like to offer my personal opinion. The current Seoul Twins are a team with tremendous growth ahead of them — one could say their future is extremely bright. That being so, I suggest we take the long view this season, pursue free agency to a reasonable degree, and—"

"So. What acquisitions do you want?"

"I— pardon? As... as manager, the most pressing need is the outfield. With this season as his last, Lee Hae-ryong will be stepping away from outfield defense entirely to become a full-time designated hitter and pinch hitter, and as for our foreign player Max, letting his contract expire looks better than extending it. That leaves Joo Byung-min in center, but the corners lose all their weight. We don't even have a serviceable fourth outfielder. So if we could land one heavyweight outfielder through free agency—"

"Per your own description, will one player be enough? General Manager. Minimum two outfielders. Start building a list of free-agent targets."

"Madam President? There are hardly any outfielders on the current FA market worth being satisfied with. On top of that, teams looking to strengthen their rosters are planning to open their wallets, so we should expect heavy competition."

"Irrelevant. Next."

"...The Power Analysis Team. The field staff has flagged the outfield as the Twins' biggest weakness, but in my personal assessment, this team's true weakness is designated hitter. If Lee Hae-ryong moves to full-time DH, it may be better than before, but it still won't be enough. Compared to other clubs, our DH's WRC+ is—"

"Do you have a recommended player?"

"Er... from the analysis team's perspective, two of the free agents meet our criteria, but we judge there are significant constraints, both on defensive position and on the realistic feasibility of signing them. That's why, in the long term, we'd suggest pursuing a trade or internal player development to—"

"We have neither the time nor the need for that. General Manager — sign them via free agency if possible, and if that looks difficult, attempt a trade. Outside the club's protected 25-man list, I authorize the use of any player on the roster as a trade chip."

"I— pardon?"

"Next."

Han Seo-hee's remarks, hurtling forward like something possessed, froze the mood of the conference room solid in an instant. If she were a salaried figurehead president or an internal promotion, someone would have barked at her to stop spouting nonsense.

But who was the woman sitting at the head of that table? The granddaughter of the parent company's chairman, wasn't she? If she spoke that forcefully, surely there was substance behind it.

"...In that case, what about a sign-and-trade? As it happens, one club is—"

"He's serviceable as a gap stopper. I heard they're planning to release him with age catching up, so if you just pick up an annual salary in the low hundreds of millions of won—"

"What about a two-for-four trade with the Giants — no, a one-for-four? As for trade chips, we've stockpiled plenty over the past two years!"

The moment that calculation landed, the very staff members who should have been reining her in suddenly got fired up and started throwing out one wild idea after another.

"Approved."

"Ahem... we'll reach out to the agent in question."

"We'll hear the field staff's opinion, but we'll review it favorably."

And Han Seo-hee approved every last one of those too.

A chaotic, compounding feedback loop was unfolding right there in the room.

What the club officials didn't know was that the reason Han Seo-hee was carrying on like this was a mind slightly frayed at the edges from self-inflicted overwork, and that it had all started with a quiet favor that began, 'Noona... I really ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wasn't going to bring this up, but...' whispered from her bed by Kim Yi-seon. In their heads, only a single word surfaced.

Win-Now!

"Seems the chairman found last season pretty unforgettable."

"Ha, that was a miracle, plain and simple. Our roster's still miles short. Throwing money around for a year won't close a gap that big."

"Still, there's potential, isn't there? We made the Korean Series even with this roster. If we actually reinforce it properly, who knows..."

"Oh, come off it, Section Chief Kim. A man of your standing should know better. We finished third in the Southern Division — sixth overall."

That one word convinced everyone, positive and negative alike, that the club was gunning for a win-now push — and that it reflected the will of the parent company, and by extension, of Chairman Han Tae-gun of Seoul Group himself.

Of course, had Chairman Han Tae-gun — who was, at that very moment, at home diligently combing through the company's cash flow — overheard it, he'd have asked what breed of nonsense that was. But to the Seoul Twins' staff, it was self-evident.

Otherwise, why would Han Seo-hee — charismatic yet gentle, and devoted to this club — hit the gas like a runaway truck? She was talking about the budget as if it were infinite, standing there bold as brass. Could even the chairman's own granddaughter really do that?

The reality was that Han Seo-hee, running on the addled logic of if I just act cute toward Grandpa, something will work out, had fired first and aimed later — but the ones doing the speculating were, if anything, the weirder bunch here.

And so General Manager Jung Gi-hyuk and Manager Jung Jin-haeng of the Seoul Twins felt their headaches coming on.

"This is my third year in the post — next season will be my fourth. I know the KBO is a league where one foreign signing or one FA contract can rock a team's whole competitive balance, but can a club that ran itself into farm-system ruin in a mere three years really recover?"

"What choice do we have, though? The parent company's will is that firmly set. There's no talking them down."

Jung Gi-hyuk and Jung Jin-haeng were conference-room skeptics of this whole win-now affair.

No one assessed the current Seoul Twins' roster more objectively than they did.

"The Twins right now are a team that survives by leeching off its starting rotation while the bullpen scrapes together one man's worth of contribution. That's the only reason we roll at all."

"Don't I know it. Do you have any idea how my breath catches every time I write out a starting lineup? Every time I pencil in a kid who's already exhausted from carrying too much, telling him to just gut it out — a sigh comes out with it."

Excluding the mercenary foreign players with whom any club might, on a lucky draw, roll out a league-best talent, the current Seoul Twins roster — best case — is entirely sub-par beyond the starting nine.

And even that best nine: the pitching staff can compete for the league lead, but the position players, if not for their defense, would be undisputed bottom of the league. Anyone who disputes that has no conscience.

The bench holds not a single piece of instant-impact talent, and the roster is overflowing with scratch-off lottery tickets — prospects in name only, whose ceilings are starting to show.

As for the promising youngsters the farm system is supposed to produce — they show possibility, and nothing more. The odds of that possibility ever materializing don't look particularly high.

A veteran who can contribute a man's worth to the team right now? This team's entire veteran corps consists of Kang Hyun-seok, past forty and turning forty-one next year, and Lee Hae-ryong, thirty-seven, whose offseason physical just confirmed a hip abnormality.

After them come players like Ji Ha-seob and Baek Joo-seon, only around thirty-two. The farm system's state is a perfect match for the word devastated.

And this team attempts a win-now? Even if you wanted to sell the future to buy the present, you'd need a future worth selling. They're hardly going to trade away Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk for reinforcements, are they?

If the team has one advantage, it's that the compensation players it would surrender after FA signings would be relatively less fatal — beyond that, this club possesses the worst possible reality for roster reinforcement.

"Who's available on the outfielder market right now?"

"You know the list. The only players you could call A-grade are Lee Byeong-yeon and Sa Moon-jik. But they're saying Sa Moon-jik re-signs with his original club even if it costs them two billion won more."

"Now that's something to envy."

"Even setting win-now aside, we need to focus on Lee Byeong-yeon... the problem is Pyongyang has their eye on him too. The President's sign-off came down, so the budget's nothing to sneeze at, and we've got the home-territory advantage — but they've got a championship premium on their side, in Pyongyang of all places."

And even the FA market itself was not kind to the Twins.

It's not that this year's market lacked players. Quite the opposite — there were plenty of outstanding names that most teams were drooling over.

"Well, this year's biggest FA fish are Gu Hyeok and Sung Yeon-joon, aren't they? If those two move, the dominoes fall and money flows out of the other clubs' coffers, no?"

"True enough. But even so. Our rivals will have budgeted for exactly that."

The problem was that those marquee free agents were all either starting pitchers or middle-of-the-diamond players.

If you asked which positions the Seoul Twins needed to reinforce least, the very first names out of anyone's mouth were the ones flooding the market. What a horrific coincidence.

Free agency doesn't spring up out of nowhere — it can be roughly forecast in advance — so this market landscape had been anticipated for years. The plan was to reinforce moderately next season and go all-out the year after. And then the President and the parent company suddenly rolled their eyes back into their heads.

Too few trade chips for trades, too little inventory on the market ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠for free agency. Any sensible front office — and a general manager and manager, leaders of the baseball operations, firmly in the opposition camp — would never have allowed a Stove League to proceed like this.

But with the parent company's will set in stone, what could a couple of salaried men do about it? Jung Gi-hyuk and Jung Jin-haeng spent another day chain-smoking, still agonizing over what the best possible move might be under these circumstances.

There's no answer to this one. Short of an A-grade free agent falling out completely with his old club, money alone can't solve it.

The general manager of the Hamheung Tigers was in a very foul mood indeed.

"Kang Min-hyuk here, Kang Min-hyuk there. What a circus. Is something wrong with him, or is something wrong with our Ye-chan?"

"Not at all, sir. Ye-chan's form has been trending up lately, hasn't it? And it seems he's been spurred on by it all — he says he's flying to the States himself this winter to take lessons."

At last year's draft, the man had selected Park Ye-chan with the second overall pick — a future ace left-hander.

And viewed up to now, the Park Ye-chan pick had been anything but a mistake. Though still a prospect who'd never thrown a proper first-team inning, he was already showing upper-tier stuff in the minors, and the coaches' lavish praise kept coming: he'd be more than ready to slot into the first-team rotation from next season.

He'd landed a rare commodity — a left-handed starter — so praise should have been in order. Why on earth was he catching flak instead?

"And besides, the one raising hell back then to take Lee Seung-kwon at second overall was you, wasn't it? Why come crawling now looking for Kang Min-hyuk?"

Of course, that was nonsense. Kang Min-hyuk was simply the most-cited name because he'd delivered the best debut of anyone since the second pick — but ask anyone to choose between a left-handed starter who was all promise and a shortstop who'd just gone 20-20 in his debut season, and everyone would take the latter.

No — the truth of the general manager's grudge was this: had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he gone chalk, he'd have had the 2020 shortstop; had he made the clever pick, he'd have had a pitcher with a 2.02 ERA who earned a spot in the starting rotation from his very first season. Instead he'd made a pointless half-and-half choice and landed a lukewarm player, and now he was eating the criticism for it.

Layer on a season that finished dead last in the Northern Division — dead last overall, too — and it was no wonder the verdict on the general manager had been condensed into a single word: catastrophe.

But as they say, even a doomed nation produces three loyal subjects. Even within these Hamheung Tigers, there was one player who could be called loyal.

"Oh, Moon-jik. Come on in."

"Yes, sir. You called for me?"

That player was Sa Moon-jik.

He was no flashy star. But: sound hitting. Steady defense. An exemplary professional ethic. Loyalty to the team, down to the bone.

A casual fan might not know him, but core fans who watched baseball closely would love him more than the actual stars — a compact, no-waste player, packed edge to edge with every fantasy of the baseball purist.

This year, too, he hadn't managed to save the sinking Hamheung Tigers, but he'd put up a thoroughly respectable season and handed the fans a sliver of hope.

And now that man had earned his free agency. At twenty-nine — not young, but a perfectly reasonable age — a first-time FA applicant could fairly expect proper treatment.

"It's about your negotiation. That's why I called you in."

"Yes, sir."

Yet the general manager had begun negotiating with Sa Moon-jik right there in his own office, no agent present, in a sloppy, off-the-cuff fashion. Verbal or not, this crossed the line by a country mile.

Sa Moon-jik, being the consummate Tigers man he was, didn't seem to give it a second thought — but had it been any other player, this was a danger signal that would have justified walking straight out the door.

And the general manager's first words lived up to that danger signal, betrayal and all.

"You know as well as I do the team's finances are tight these days. Between the COVID situation and our record this year, the money's dried up. But we can't just sit on our hands either — we've got to reinforce the roster. You follow?"

With the runway laid that far, even the biggest fool would understand in one beat. And Sa Moon-jik was no fool. He'd known all of it long before the man ever brought it up.

"I understand, sir. I'm not hungry for money just yet. Pay me only what the club can afford right now. When the team's situation improves, I'll look forward to what comes in my second FA."

But Sa Moon-jik was one of the Tigers' few loyal men. Before the club-legend-turned-GM could bring up something ugly and shame them both, he preemptively said the thing the player was supposed to swallow. Had an agent been sitting in that room, he'd have clutched the back of his neck and collapsed on the spot.

"Thank you, Moon-jik. As much as you've sacrificed, we'll reinforce the roster properly this year. And you've heard how the younger kids are doing in the minors, haven't you? Some of them are coming up to the first team this year — add them to the mix, and autumn baseball... hell, a Korean Series isn't even a dream for us, just like those Twins over there."

Egging him on, that garbage of a human being peddled nothing but a future he wasn't spending a won on and couldn't begin to guarantee, waving Sa Moon-jik's sacrifice away with a flick of the hand.

It was fine. For Sa Moon-jik, the team's victory came before everything. He was the team, and the team was him — what else would he bother securing for himself?

Steel made firmer still, Sa Moon-jik concluded his talk with the general manager and returned home with a stony expression.

"Honey. Let's have a talk."

And it was that very expression that had to crumble.

"I know how much the team means to you. I do. But isn't this going too far?"

What she held out to him was a document, formatted into a tidy report — apparently organized by his agent. And beneath it, summarized as headlines, as if the lines alone were all one needed to read:

Sa Moon-jik had to squeeze his eyes shut.