Amateur Baseball Gallery
Word had come down that this was a serious problem, so I hurriedly called Ye-eun over and filled her in on the situation.
This was no ordinary matter. Yeah, getting attention was nice and all, but the world was full of deeply unwell people, and blindly celebrating a viral moment felt like tempting fate.
Ye-eun, however, seemed to feel none of that sense of crisis.
"Kim Yi-seon, look at this comment. Someone's asking when we're getting married. It's got ten thousand likes."
No — she actually looked pleased. She even seemed to be standing a little straighter.
"Now is not the time for jokes. What are you going to do if some lunatic latches onto you after seeing this? A stalker, or some freak spreading lies about you."
Was she seriously this oblivious to danger? The girl had zero survival instinct.
Ye-eun shot back with an air of are you kidding me.
"Why are you acting like this is all sudden? Weirdos like that existed long before videos like this one."
"What is that even supposed to mean?"
"Just counting recent ones... never mind. Fine, okay, I'll be careful. So all I have to do is stick close to you and dodge the weirdos, right?"
She clearly had a great deal more to say, but she'd shut her mouth. In my experience, pressing her when she got like that guaranteed she'd never tell me. And what had she almost said, anyway? A cold shiver ran down my spine at the thought of what she'd swallowed.
"There's actually a more pressing issue here."
That was when Min-ah, who had been quietly observing this whole exchange, finally spoke. She was the one who had found the video in the first place, and the one who'd flagged the danger — so maybe she'd have an actual solution.
"How long have you two been glued to each other in the dugout like that? Isn't the physical affection a bit excessive just because I'm not around, seniors?"
"Which is why I already gave up that spot, didn't I?"
Ye-eun said it to Min-ah — who was currently pressed against my side — with the magnanimous air of someone making a generous concession. Min-ah, was that why you decided to sit on my lap all of a sudden today?
So even Min-ah, normally the coldest head in the room, was less worried about the video than about her stake in my body. Wonderful.
"Min-ah. Can't we set aside the small stuff and seriously work on a solution for this video together?"
I said it with a trace of genuine disappointment. And here I'd believed you were the sane one...
"Oppa, if you hadn't been carrying on like that in the dugout in the first place, there would be no video to spread. Shamelessly pawing at each other in public is the core of the problem."
Shamelessly. Wait — did I transmigrate into a gender-swapped world instead of a manga?
I protested, injustice burning in my chest.
"Shouldn't the person who filmed it be the one at fault here? Is it really fine to record someone without permission and blast it all over the internet?"
Min-ah paused, then answered quietly. That pause was unmistakably a sigh rising all the way to her throat and being swallowed back down.
"Legally it's difficult to pursue, and when I contacted the tournament organizers, they said it didn't violate anything. I confirmed all of this before I came to you, so please just take it as settled."
That's legally fine? Well. You learn something new every day.
As Min-ah explained further, it turned out the video wasn't even the original footage — someone had clipped the dugout segments featuring me and Ye-eun out of a game recording taken by a student from the opposing school and stitched them together.
Which meant the uploader probably genuinely hadn't intended any harm.
And taking the video down wouldn't matter anyway — once clips and screenshots had spread this far, stamping them out was a losing battle. In the end, no brilliant solution materialized. All we settled on was a simple directive: watch out for suspicious characters, and do manager work in the locker room instead of the dugout.
This genuinely made me anxious. Right now the thing was spreading through MiTube and mainstream SNS, where the general public kept things civil — but if it reached some poison-soaked minor community where the truly unhinged congregated, God only knew what would happen.
Which raised the question: did this world even have such communities? I hadn't exactly been living my second life online, so for all I knew they existed and I'd never heard of them.
Of course they did. A community where nothing but the most venomous, deep-underground baseball obsessives gathered among high school baseball fans.
The Amateur Baseball Gallery. Aya-gal, for short.
Its inhabitants were unpaid scouts whose greatest joy in life was trawling high school and college baseball, dredging up every promising prospect in existence, and forecasting player ceilings and draft picks. Given that these bottomless pits devoured everything from industrial-league ball to Korean prospects playing overseas, there was no possible way they'd stay silent about Kim Yi-seon, the high schooler suddenly dominating the headlines.
Their early reactions, though, had been anything but kind. It started with a troll post claiming that a kid already chasing skirt was obviously riddled with disease and would be lucky to make it into college, followed by hostile threads asking why a guy with a face like that was playing baseball at all.
It went all the way down to a hot post that consisted entirely of a photo of Kim Yi-seon captioned with a single word: die.
Almost nobody said anything about him as a player. Even on Aya-gal — a place that devoured everything from fringe school games that had never produced a single pro all the way down to unofficial winter leagues — Kim Yi-seon was a player they had never seen before.
And the uniform he was wearing — was that really Wirye Jeil High, the school they'd only ever heard the name of? A school even the gallery regulars didn't know.
The reason those baseball-starved degenerates knew nothing about Kim Yi-seon or Wirye Jeil High was simple: Wirye Jeil High wasn't famous in a bad way either. At least the school functioned like a normal institution.
Korea was a wide country, and among the 150 specialized baseball clubs that the commissioner had strong-armed into existence, there were more than a few schools so dire that people asked, "THIS is a baseball team?" By comparison, Wirye simply never made waves. It was just a boringly bad team that lost in the most unremarkable fashion imaginable.
Still, the time-rich curious types couldn't leave it alone. They searched the high school baseball records database, found Wirye Jeil High, and finally dug up the starting first baseman, Kim Yi-seon.
(Kim Yi-seon's game-by-game scorecard)
Yeah, the sample size is tiny, but he's a first-year, so even at a total scrub school that's understandable. Moving on. But even in those limited chances — is this kid's ISO for REAL? He's got three home runs as a first-year, for crying out loud.
His average couldn't even limp past .300, and with so few games under his belt he apparently never pinged the Aya-gal radar, but his batting output gap sits around .120 — and this kid's slugging is right in the same neighborhood as Lee Joo-hyuk, who just went over .500 in the weekend league this year LMAOOO
Not hitting above .300 even against weekend-league soft-tossers is honestly a fake-talent red flag, but this kid's power tool looks like the genuine article. Three homers in eight games with that raw slugging? Just making contact basically guarantees an extra-base hit.
True to form for a gallery that gnawed on the deepest, most obscure players imaginable, the Amateur Baseball Gallery's tastes had their own peculiar quirks.
Their preference ran, across the board, toward the unbalanced — not the well-rounded do-it-all player, but the screw-loose kid with one blazing tool and a sky-high ceiling, or the freak who possessed a single world-class ability and not much else.
Their logic, as they loudly argued it: being an all-rounder at the high school level meant nothing the moment you turned pro, so the guy with one properly forged weapon actually had the higher success rate.
Of course, plenty of polished finished products from their high school days go on to develop even better in the pros, which meant this was mostly hipsters rationalizing their taste for the obscure. Everyone who runs an online community is like that.
And so the gallery poltergeists — who until now had been stewing in fury and loathing over nothing but a pretty face and some cozy student romance — laid eyes on Kim Yi-seon's stat line and abruptly discovered that here was a kid missing half his screws but with legit power. Their favorability shot vertically upward.
Before long, they started dragging in the high school and KBO prospects they personally rooted for, and whenever their guy had fewer home runs than Kim Yi-seon, the threads flooded with gleeful roasts — "fake talent," "one-trick power hitter, and even that gets ^outdone^ by Handsome God" — decorating the boards like confetti.
Honestly, they were probably less fond of Kim Yi-seon than they were desperate to trash their own teams' prospects. But the point stood: public opinion on him had turned friendly.
Female fans were already gathering over his looks and that faintly tingly student-romance atmosphere, and now the core baseball crowd had taken notice too. The two audiences collided, and a massive chemical reaction began.
"Coach, how many fans are actually out there today?"
"We don't sell tickets, so how would I know? But eyeballing it, we're well past three hundred."
Bonghwangdae-gi, Round of 64. Our opponent: Gyeongju Commercial High — a proper, specialized baseball school.
Despite the video fiasco back in the Round of 256, the seniors had taken care of the Round of 128 without incident, and suddenly here we were on Round of 64 day.
Roughly a week had passed since that whole mess, and I genuinely hadn't expected to be drawing this kind of attention already. Short clips had gone viral plenty of times before and been forgotten — so why was I the only one this kept happening to?
The stands of Eonju Civic Baseball Stadium, which normally struggled to crack a hundred spectators — the usual smattering of players, coaches, family friends from both teams, and a handful of freelance scouts — were packed full for the first time I'd ever seen. The place didn't even have two thousand seats, I was pretty sure, but filled like this, it actually felt substantial.
Because the attention was so unexpected, my first thought was that maybe this was simply what the Bonghwangdae-gi drew once you hit the Round of 64. It wasn't. These people had genuinely come for me.
Women hauling in enormous telephoto cameras, and men who looked like they watched baseball exclusively from the corner of a dark room.
Apparently, every time a spectator who was clearly affiliated with neither school filed in, the discipline-department teacher volunteering as a daily helper checked their reason for visiting. And every single time, the answer was that they'd come after seeing my photos or that video on a community site or SNS.
Now, the women coming to see my face — sure, that tracked. But the men? Just from the way they sat out there in the stands, they looked like the genuine, hardcore baseball otaku article?
I started my pre-game warm-up in a daze, and from the very first stretch the crowd's reaction was anything but a joke.
For me, every movement drew a chorus of high-pitched female voices. But even the other guys were getting a pretty enthusiastic response.
Hold on — why them too? If these were eolppa who came for me, shouldn't they be the toxic solo-stan type?
The eolppa fans who had drifted to the ballpark, bewitched by Kim Yi-seon's video, could not get their bearings.
For people who had come all the way to a high school baseball stadium to look at a pretty boy, their conclusion was surprisingly reasonable: if all you wanted was a handsome face, there was no reason to come watch baseball.
After all, a truly handsome man was far more likely to be a celebrity — nobody that good-looking needed a reason to become a ballplayer. If eye candy was the goal, the correct destination was a music broadcast, not a stadium.
Kim Yi-seon was certainly handsome, but held against the absolute top tier of celebrities, he was a half-step behind. Of course, he was still more than good-looking enough, and the fresh-faced boyishness of his age had pierced straight through their hearts — but that wasn't the point.
They had come because that ridiculously good-looking kid also played baseball. Today was about verifying how good he actually was. At least, that was the official line from the eolppa who swore they only ever followed pretty ballplayers.
But this once, even that principle deserved an exception.
"Wow, look at that one. Doesn't he look like someone famous?"
"He's totally got that A-list actor vibe, right?"
The girl chatting with her friend beside her carried an old credential: back before she became a baseball eolppa, she had been an idol fangirl in her younger days. Even then, her habit of chasing the obscure had run deep — rather than frontline idols, she'd trailed fresh rookies and trainees on the cusp of debuting.
She still vividly remembered the astonishing scenery around the practice rooms of the big agencies back then: turn your head in any direction and the view was simply wall-to-wall beautiful people.
And today, that long-lost sensation had come flooding back to her — of all places, at a baseball stadium.
"Did that school's coach draft these kids by face?"
"He should quit and run an entertainment agency. How do a bunch of non-idols have concepts this sharply defined?"
Kim Yi-seon, the boy who had lured her into this stadium, had a slightly delinquent edge to his handsomeness, the sort of mischief-grinning troublemaker look that made you want to ruffle his hair.
The pitcher off to one side, loosening his arm, had the face of a model student — guaranteed a free pass at any meet-the-parents dinner. Obviously handsome, too.
The other pitcher warming up beside him radiated burning passion, the kind of face you'd cast as a group's dance position.
The catcher receiving his throws had squinty eyes and a sea-otter cuteness at a glance — and was somehow also handsome.
And that outfielder way out there in sunglasses — the dorky, aging-rocker kind of sports shades that usually made anyone look dated — somehow managed to radiate pure, polished city sophistication.
Beyond them, one had the intellectual-handsome look, another the cute-boy look, another a wild, untamed sort of charm.
Wasn't most of the Wirye Jeil High roster warming up on that field good-looking enough to be slotted into an idol debut by even a mid-tier agency?
And with not a single overlapping concept among them — every last one felt different — it was like watching a meticulously planned idol group.
Honestly, with looks this good? She'd have confidence fanning over them even if they played baseball holding their bats upside down. No — forget baseball. Just quit and hold fan meetings with us noonas already.
She captured the astonishing spectacle without reservation — photo after photo, video after video — and shared it to her community in real time. From there it leapt past the communities she frequented, spreading rapidly through other forums and even the male-dominated boards.
Little by little, Wirye Jeil High began trending online not as a baseball team, but as a gathering place for beautiful boys — idols who happened to play baseball.