Trial Run
Somehow the days had slipped by, and it was already Sunday — game day at Eonju Civic Baseball Stadium, where the weekend league was being held.
"Kang Min-hyuk. I heard you had a game today, so I came to cheer you on. Why didn't you tell me?"
Over in one corner of the stands, Kang Min-hyuk was sheepishly fending off a girl who wouldn't let him go.
That would be Jung Hyun-ah, the original manga's heroine. A second-year senior at our school, currently head of the discipline committee — and if the manga's plot holds, student council president next year.
From what I remember, the two of them got entangled like this: Kang Min-hyuk used to come to school early to train alone, crossed paths with Hyun-ah while she was doing morning attendance checks, ended up helping out with discipline committee work, and somewhere along the way love bloomed. Standard development.
But now that morning training is done as a group after training camp, shouldn't they have zero reason to run into each other? How they actually met is honestly impressive.
I turned to Min-ah, who had come to watch the game, and spoke with a hint of admiration in my voice.
"Your brother's something else too. Lim Song-ah's been sneaking glances at him this whole time and he hasn't noticed a thing."
"Quit talking nonsense and go get ready for the game. First, let me look at you over here. Let's see if you put your sunscreen on properly."
Min-ah cut me off like my words were of no interest whatsoever and began inspecting me all over. Sunscreen — check. Elbow and shoulder taping — check. The eye black re-checked, and even the condition of my hands examined with painstaking care.
These are things I watch out for myself, the things Ye-eun always double-checks when I don't. But back when my mental state fell apart, I kept forgetting them — and ever since then, Min-ah has checked them too.
So there I was, running through this routine that wasn't quite a routine, when a somewhat familiar voice drifted over from behind.
"Oh, isn't that Kim Yi-seon? It's been a while."
The most dangerous man to face whenever we drew Donghyun Middle — and now Donghyun High — since our middle school days: Lee Kyung-tae.
"It has been a while. Last time was the Shinmun Cup two years ago, wasn't it?"
"Wow, has it really been that long? Still, I figured I'd run into you sooner once you got to high school. You're a bit late, no?"
"The team had some things to prepare first."
"Wood bats are tough to adjust to, I'll admit. I struggled plenty when I first picked one up. And here I thought the great Kim Yi-seon would be different — I guess even you can't help it."
That signature style of his — deliberately scratching at you, just lightly.
Rising to the bait only loses me ground, and he's not the kind of guy who'd waver even if I tried to scratch back. Playing along just enough and moving on is the best play.
"So, is that your girlfriend?"
I was about to wrap it up there when this guy started testing the waters, trying to cross the line.
"Hey."
"Yeah?"
"Shut your mouth and get the hell back to your dugout. Why's your tongue so loose on game day?"
Lee Kyung-tae grinned like he'd finally gotten the reaction he wanted and retreated without pushing further. God, that guy plays dirty baseball. Kim Yi-seon was considered a villain in the original story too, since he was on this guy's side back then.
After gently reassuring Min-ah, who had stiffened slightly at my outburst, I walked over and snatched the back of Kang Min-hyuk's neck as he chatted away with Jung Hyun-ah over there.
"Hey, Kang Min-hyuk. If you give up a hit to Lee Kyung-tae today, you're dead."
"Lee Kyung-tae? Weren't we planning to simply let him hit and deal with him later?"
"Not today. Just strike him out every time he's up."
Kang Min-hyuk looked bewildered at why I was suddenly saying this. He nodded in agreement when I insisted, but clearly didn't understand the reason.
Part of me wanted to explain, but if I did, our starting pitcher would plug Lee Kyung-tae with a fastball and get himself suspended, so I held my tongue.
Before the game started, we lined up to exchange greetings with the opposing team, then each headed to our own dugout.
Donghyun High currently sat third in the weekend league, neck and neck with second place in wins. Desperate to punch their ticket to the second-half Golden Lion Tournament, they clearly couldn't afford to trip over a weak school like ours — they'd rolled out their full starting lineup.
Not only Lee Kyung-tae, whom I'd watched since middle school, but also Jin Hyeong-jun, a third-year who — though I'd never seen him in the manga — is regarded in this world as a prospect who could not only go pro but potentially go in the first round of the draft, took the mound.
Jin Hyeong-jun's top velocity is 151. His average sits around 142, showing considerable fluctuation, but even that velocity outstrips the top speeds of every first-year pitcher we have right now.
Of course, velocity alone doesn't get you talked about as a first-round pick. Jin Hyeong-jun possesses above-average command and game management for the high school level, plus a serviceable slider and curve — a rare, fully-formed pitcher by high school standards.
Right before first pitch, Coach gathered us for his final words, doing his best to loosen the tension piece by piece.
"Like I told you yesterday — Jin Hyeong-jun is still just a high schooler. Yeah, people rave about his pinpoint control at the high school level, but at the end of the day he's pounding the zone. He's not like our Min-hyuk, painting corners with impossible precision.
They already say throwing 150 on the corner with accuracy gets you to the majors. So don't be scared. Especially going by the scouting reports, his slider command tends to slip. If you see a slider flattening out over the middle, don't hold back.
Hitters, you know the math, right? Fail three times and succeed once, and your average still counts. Even if you strike out, swing big and swing free."
Watching this, you'd never guess he shares a universe with the manga's coach — their styles are complete opposites. The coach in the manga demands his hitters fight tooth and nail against a pitcher like this to the very last out, while this man just tells them to swing away, whether it works out or not.
With those instructions, his message seemed to be finished, and Coach shot Kang Min-hyuk a signal with a flick of his eyes.
"Alright, everyone, let's give one cheer before we start. When I say Jeil High, you say Fighting. Jeil High!"
"Fighting!"
Still, shouting it out loud loosened the atmosphere a little. Everyone settled naturally onto the dugout bench, fussing with their equipment, doing their best to shake off the nerves.
This game began with our turn at bat. The batting order ran from Kwon Ji-wook through Kang Min-hyuk, Sung In-hoon, Kim Yi-seon, and Nam Kang-min.
Kwon Ji-wook stepped up to the plate. He's a hitter who enjoys psychological duels with opposing pitchers — and as readers of the manga know, if a pitcher simply overpowers him with pure stuff, psychology means nothing and he can go quiet.
Pop—
A sound like a gunshot rang out from the catcher's mitt. First-pitch strike. Gasps rose from both dugouts as everyone stared at the radar gun display.
149 km/h
Jin Hyeong-jun came out hammering from the very first pitch. Today, he'd clearly sharpened his blade for us.
Even a pitching machine would struggle to barrel up 150. And with that 150 km/h burned into everyone's mind, the next pitch came—
"Man, is he daring us to hit that?"
"He's daring you NOT to hit it."
"Fair point."
Cha Il-sung and Sung In-hoon traded their idiotic little banter as they watched the next pitch. That was the slider Coach had warned us about — the one whose command betrays him.
It broke viciously and caught the outside corner, and the home plate ump called it a strike. Gun reading: 137. That pitch was absolutely not meant to be hit.
And so Kwon Ji-wook found himself down 0-2 in the blink of an eye against stuff threatening enough to pass for professional.
Statistically, a hitter's average in an 0-2 count doesn't clear .100 even at the pro level. That's how brutal the situation is for the batter.
And yet there was still something alive in Kwon Ji-wook's eyes. No sign of resignation, no sign of emotion — none of it.
His gaze gleamed, as if determined to read every last thought in the opposing pitcher's head until the very end.
The pitcher couldn't have cared less. Not a flicker of concern for some first-year on a weak team — he just fired away, clean and decisive.
And then—
Crack!
"Go! Stop! Stop! First base only!"
It was a well-pitched ball, but he'd flicked it away with ease. More than watching the ball and reacting, that was a swing built on anticipating its path — the bat launched far earlier than it needed to be.
The ball split the center line, dropped in cleanly, and Kwon Ji-wook sprinted to first in a flash. A base hit.
The radar gun had caught that pitch at 150. The tension in our dugout dissolved all at once.
Nobody said it out loud, but the memory of our first weekend league game had clearly been haunting everyone. This time, though, the first domino fell completely differently.
With the tension gone, you could see the opposite — everyone burning with fight. Kwon Ji-wook hadn't won on a wild pitch; he'd squared up a genuine 150. Saying this after a single at-bat sounds ridiculous, but you could tell everyone was thinking, we can actually do this.
Riding the momentum, Kang Min-hyuk stepped in next, worked the count a little, then ripped a clean hit of his own.
The opposing defense was quick, so the runner couldn't stretch it to second — but we had runners on first and third, nobody out. Then Sung In-hoon fought off a few pitches and struck out, leaving it at one out, first and third.
My turn came around.
With one out and runners on the corners, we were at maximum double-play risk. I don't hit that way as a rule, but try to sneak a dinky contact play to scratch out a run in this situation, and you're rolling into two.
At the youth level, the truly dominant hitters bat .370-plus as a baseline, crack .400 as a matter of course, and occasionally post .500 for a season. Unlike those genuine prodigies, all I am is a half-finished product who hits hard when he makes contact.
I gripped the bat tight and looked to do damage. Honestly, power is the only tool in my hitting kit worth a damn. As long as I drive it far, even a flyout just costs us one more out — the inning doesn't die.
The opposing pitcher had clearly done his homework on me too, because he had no intention of giving me anything good. Ball one.
That was probably the slipping slider Coach mentioned. Like every pitcher I've faced, he seemed to want to ride me inside and make me back off — but the slider broke far too early and hard, and I read the whole trajectory.
The next pitch came right down the middle for a strike.
I hadn't even thought about swinging. The gun read 151. His personal best, apparently.
I rolled my shoulders loose, took a couple of light practice swings, and stepped back into the box. Then I locked eyes with Jin Hyeong-jun.
After showing a 150 fastball, most pitchers go heavy on breaking balls next. It's only logical — no human being can time a 150s fastball and a 130s offspeed pitch on the same rhythm.
Throw the breaking ball while that visual afterimage still lingers, and you can steal counts with ease.
But that's theory, nothing more. A whole conversation passes between pitcher and batter through the eyes. Hitting is, above all else, a one-on-one duel between the man on the mound and the man at the plate.
What matters in this duel is beating your opponent — it's not an exam judging who throws the prettier pitch, who swings the prettier swing, who's more faithful to the textbook.
The pitcher sensed that the moment he threw a breaking ball for a strike, I'd be ready to jump on it. And I knew, in my gut, that he'd lost confidence in his breaking ball and would never give me one.
The instant our instincts locked, only one option remained. He would throw the fastball for a strike, and I had to square it up at exactly the right moment.
Of course, it's nothing but my gut — I could be wrong. No, being wrong is the norm. Countless times I've felt that thunderous this is it, I've got it! only to be dead wrong.
Still, I swing. Because like Coach said, a hitter only needs to succeed once out of three failures.
CRACK!!!
A sound so deep it echoed as if the bat itself had split in two.
I actually took a peek to see if it really had cracked, then gently set the bat down on the ground. This thing was expensive, you know. And apparently there's no more equipment allowance coming either.
By the time I rounded the bases and came back, the whole team had poured out of the dugout to pound on my head.
"You actually crushed one, you bastard!! No wonder you spend all your time flirting!"
"Dang, bat near 'bout split in two. What'd ya hit that thang so dadgum hard fer?"
"Kim Yi-seon, gonna be the Home Run King in high school too, huh?"
A few of those head slaps definitely had some emotion behind them. Should I be worried?
As I was shaking my head back into place, Kang Min-hyuk — who'd reached the dugout before me — came over with a smile.
"Kim Yi-seon. For you, that first home run came a little late, didn't it?"
"Hey, wood bats are a different beast, all right? Is now anything like the days I was launching 130-mph swings off aluminum for 70-plus meters? On distance alone, I've already got a couple more home runs than you're giving me credit for?"
"Well, now that you've finally started your engine, I'll have to show you something too. Just you wait."
Oho, a victory declaration from Kang Min-hyuk. In the original manga, whenever he pulled that line, he usually won.
That confidence... did he equip some new weapon or something?
"Well well, Min-hyuk, somebody's full of confidence today~ Did you eat something good before the game? If you've got something good, how about sharing?"
This Cha Il-sung guy spends every waking hour insisting he's no country bumpkin while radiating the exact vibe of a country bumpkin past his prime. When will he finally admit it?
"Ah, nothing like that. Today, a brand-new secret weapon is fully operational."
"Secret weapon?"
"That's right. Through Hyun-ah's senior connections, I received hard-won instruction. A new pitch specially passed down to me by a coach at a nearby university. The shootbal—"
"It's not a shootball, it's a two-seamer, you idiot!"
AAAARGH! Go play soccer if you want a shootball!
Apart from one minor incident involving my brief breakdown, the game unfolded smoothly from there.
There were a few small wrinkles — like Jin Hyeong-jun apparently awakening from the fury of giving up a home run and pitching a perfect stretch from the second inning on, despite being no shounen manga character; or Lee Kyung-tae grinding out a run the ugly way, drawing aggros and making a menace of himself on the basepaths. But in the end, both starting pitchers came off the mound in the seventh inning having allowed just three runs and one run respectively.
Donghyun's reliever after Jin Hyeong-jun was no pushover either, but when your benchmark is a projected first-rounder, everything else feels considerably easier.
We tacked on two more runs, and after Ha Kyung-woo took the mound in relief, absorbed a bit of a beating, and surrendered about a run, we walked away with a 5-2 victory.
MVP of the day... sure, the guy who hit the three-run homer deserves a mention, but between me going 1-for-5 (one home run) with a walk, the true man of the match was Kang Min-hyuk. His freshly installed secret weapon, the two-seamer, had movement that was downright terrifying — a completely different animal from his previously bland breaking balls.
Even sitting barely over 130, it would suddenly dive hard toward a hitter's hands just in front of the plate — and if you can hit that, go pro already.
Today alone, the opposing team snapped at least two bats. Especially Lee Kyung-tae's — one look at his face in that moment told me exactly how far his pride had sunk.
That two-seamer churned out ground ball after ground ball, and our infield defense — now at a fairly respectable level after three months of training camp — gobbled up every single one of them.
Every now and then some crafty hitter would manage to slap the diving two-seamer the other way, but those bled infielders usually came off the bat on a trajectory just barely over my height.
And that's where Cha Il-sung, monster arm and all, would snag it and erase them with a laser throw — turning would-be infield hits into outfield-free groundouts.
So we won, but there was still plenty of obvious roughness to iron out.
The three friends who came up from Jeil Middle go without saying, and our keystone combo of Kwon Ji-wook and Sung In-hoon both still lack extra-base power.
Cha Il-sung clearly has the strength, but his contact skills lag behind.
Nam Kang-min's hitting now shows about eighty percent of what I remember from the original manga, but his consistency behind the plate as a catcher still falls short.
Ha Kyung-woo, even now, can only throw a fastball and a curve. That curve is genuinely nasty, but with our catcher's reliability shaky, his usable repertoire stays limited.
Still, this much is excellent. Some luck smiled on us today, sure — but didn't we just beat a strong team in Donghyun High? And it wasn't like they took it easy on us; they came at us with everything.
Just look at how ugly the mood got for the teams fighting for second place after today's result.
Feeling cheerful, I opened the locker room door, intending to tell Kang Min-hyuk thanks for a great game today—
"Kang Min-hyuk. Where are you hurt? And what's that wrapped around your shoulder?"
"Hyun-ah, this is called icing. When a pitcher throws a lot, heat builds up in the shoulder, so this treatment cools it down quickly. I'm not injured."
"That's a relief to hear. But you're truly not uncomfortable anywhere?"
Absolute cancel. Delete. Rewind.
This guy has a girl latched onto each side the second the game ends. Unbelievable.
"Hey, Nam Kang-min! Tell Kang Min-hyuk to handle himself, and let's go get dinner, just us animals!"
"Boy, ain't ya got no sense? He's doin' that on purpose, ya know?"
"What?"
"Ahh, nothin'. Anyhow, looky over yonder — Lee Ye-eun's waitin' on ya. Reckon ya oughta go see?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah, I should. Hey, sorry — tell the infield crew to eat without me today."
"Figured. Wasn't a soul plannin' on ya comin' anyhow."
Even though we'd won our first game, Nam Kang-min didn't look particularly happy or excited. If anything, he seemed a little deflated. Is everyone from Chungcheong really this bodhisattva-like?