Handsome Guys Are Good at Their Actual Job Too
Gyeongju Commercial's head coach, Kim Hyeon-sik, was thoroughly displeased with the atmosphere in the stadium today.
From the start, even though his opponent was the relatively weak Wirye Jeil High, he had approached the game with utmost seriousness, pouring over analysis and preparation for days. No matter that they'd climbed up by beating two amateur teams — anyone who made it to the Round of 64 deserved respect.
In the course of that exhaustive research, he'd dug through every scrap of material he could find, and eventually stumbled onto the footage of their Round of 256 game on MiTube.
And what he saw there soured his mood considerably. It got even worse once he discovered the mash-up compilation video with the skyrocketing view count.
To a traditionalist like Coach Kim Hyeon-sik, who prized the old-school spirit of baseball above all else, both Kim Yi-seon clowning around with girls in the dugout and the crowds that had swarmed in just to gawk at him were nothing short of an insult to the sport.
Baseball was entertainment, sure. But didn't the sportsmanship within it deserve respect too?
He rounded up his players, who'd frozen stiff in the unfamiliar roar of a real cheering section, and bellowed at them.
"Gyeongju Commercial! Have you boys lost your damn minds? Did you come here to play baseball, or to be background extras for thosedamn show ponies over there?"
The players only shrank further, and the coach felt like his chest would burst from the frustration.
"Maybe we should all just quit! Aren't you boys the least bit resentful? Getting treated like this just because our faces ain't pretty — doesn't that make your blood boil?"
If Jeil High were simply better at baseball, he might have let it go. But Gyeongju Commercial was a respectable school in its own right, consistently marking fourth or fifth in the Gyeongbuk regional weekend leagues.
Moreover, in this very Bonghwangdae-gi, they'd pulled off an upset run, toppling established baseball programs that had qualified for the national tournament in both the Round of 256 and the Round of 128.
So why did we have no popularity while those pretty boys, coasting on their faces and playing lazy baseball, hogged all the attention?
Fed by their coach's spitting fury, the Gyeongju Commercial players, cowed just moments before, began to heat up little by little.
He's right. Anyone with eyes could see we had the stronger roster — so why were we cowering like this? If anything, weren't those pretty-face freeloaders the ones in the wrong?
That growing heat, fed by the crowd's cheers and the coach's fury, kept climbing until, by the time the game was set to begin, the entire team was practically ablaze.
Of course, the Jeil High players were every bit as earnest and desperate as their Gyeongju counterparts — but that was a hard truth to see. After all, don't the handsome ones always look like natural-born geniuses, while the ugly ones look like hardworking grinders?
This game would decide whether they advanced to the Central Rounds of the Bonghwangdae-gi — a critical match by any measure — yet the Wirye Jeil High players were hopelessly distracted, unable to focus in the strange atmosphere.
Then again, it was the first time any of them had experienced a cheering section like this, so the dazed looks were understandable. Especially since, through some manga-level twist of fate, these guys — good-looking enough even by my standards as a fellow guy — all had zero dating experience.
Guys like that, getting serenaded by a crowd of girls? Yeah, that reaction tracks.
Over on the Gyeongju Commercial side, whatever their coach had said to them had worked miracles — the same guys who'd been half-dead just minutes ago were now overflowing with fighting spirit. Almost too much of it, actually. Look at the murderous glint in their eyes.
The only one on our team with his head on straight was our starting pitcher, Kang Min-hyuk. Before the Bonghwangdae-gi began, I'd offhandedly told him he could go perfect in every game if he wanted, and judging by the resolve burning in his eyes, the lunatic had actually decided to try.
Good. You carry us all the way, and this dumpster-fire team might actually win it all. Hang in there a little longer.
Anyway, the game began, and as the home team, we took the field in the top of the first.
Standing on the mound, Kang Min-hyuk didn't show it on the surface, but his confidence had grown a lot lately. His height had been shooting up steadily — one of his old worries — and training and bulking up alongside me had pushed his velocity up significantly too.
His top speed through the end of his third year of middle school had hovered in the upper 120s. Now his max sat at 139, and he could consistently throw in the low 130s.
Maybe riding that confidence, he came right out of the gate and jammed a four-seamer into the upper edge of the strike zone.
"Strike!"
A fearless four-seamer up and in. His velocity had climbed, but his stuff was still the mediocre in-between type — and yet he had the guts to paint that corner. Eonju Stadium's dimensions are on the small side, so a mistimed swing there means a home run. Say what you will, the boy's heart is iron.
The batter at the plate, apparently furious with himself for missing that pitch, choked up hard and glared daggers at nothing but Kang Min-hyuk.
Kang Min-hyuk's second pitch.
Thwack!
"Out!"
This time, a two-seamer.
The pitch caught the knob end of the batter's bat, dribbled weakly off toward the mound, and settled neatly into Oh Se-hyeong's glove. Out at first.
Normally this guy would be jittering all over the place the instant a ball came anywhere near him, but his mind was clearly somewhere else — his whole body had gone slack, and he just wobbled over to the base.
Next batter.
Thwack!
"Out!"
And the one after that.
Thwack!
"Out! End of the inning!"
The pattern repeated itself: each batter would load up with maximum tension after a pitch or two from Kang Min-hyuk, take a mighty swing, and get hilariously jammed by yet another perfectly placed two-seamer — a harmless grounder or a little pop-up into the infield, easy out. Three up, three down.
Kang Min-hyuk, you sly little weasel. The moment the opposing hitters started muscling up and swinging from their heels, he just fed them that nasty sinker and retired them one after another.
Having pulled off a three-and-out on just nine pitches, he had every right to get a little cocky — instead he walked back into the dugout without a word, quietly holding his focus.
Cha Il-sung seemed about to say something to him, but sensing the intense mood, he slyly pivoted to me instead.
"Hey, Kim Yi-seon, you see that? That's the pitch I was telling you about, right? The shoot ball—"
"It's a two-seamer."
Great, this idiot caught the bug too. That's one lesson you didn't need to learn.
Over on the Amateur Baseball Minor Gallery, Wirye Jeil High was becoming the talk of the town. One Ya-boong-i was even live-streaming from the stands.
With a mediocre phone camera and a single fixed angle, the broadcast conditions weren't great — but a whopping forty Aya-gallers had gathered to watch Kim Yi-seon's game.
It was peak Bonghwangdae-gi season, the time of year when bait and drama overflowed from every corner of the baseball world, and yet forty gallery users had set aside all the marquee schools' games to come watch Kim Yi-seon. That's how fresh and buzzworthy a topic he was.
Even something as minor as a Kim Yi-seon strikeout would generate its own little chatter — but the utterly unexpected Kang Min-hyuk, a stunning style of pitcher in his own right, was practically wallpapering the entire gallery.
Too early to judge in the first inning, sure — but he's retired the side on grounders, matching every single bat with a two-seamer in under ten pitches.
The gun shows his four-seamer topping out around 134, a textbook high school soft-tosser. No telling yet whether this is a fluke or intentional.
But wait, if it IS intentional, doesn't that mean the HandsomeGod's school also has the best control master in high school baseball?
Perfect games do pop up in high school ball now and then, but usually it's some program steamrolling a patsy — against a legitimately solid baseball club like this? Doesn't happen often.
He's literally painting every single batter out with the two-seamer. And he's already racked up four strikeouts in the process. Seriously, is this a perfect game brewing?
Baseball fans usually cheer for blazing fastballs and flashy breaking balls. But there's a fetish for everything under the sun — and the veterans tend to have the weirder tastes.
That's why there's a surprisingly real demand for the efficient pitcher archetype: the guy with impossible command who hunts grounders and weak contact instead of chasing strikeouts.
Naturally, there were also plenty of contrarians who hated the hype and piled on twice as hard to push back — but that, too, was just more fuel for the buzz.
These command connoisseurs recognized that Kang Min-hyuk's slow-but-steady pitching wasn't luck at all, but pitching executed with deliberate, unmistakable intent — and promptly descended upon the gallery in ecstatic celebration.
Of course, none of them were actually discerning judges of talent. They froth at the mouth whenever anything looks vaguely special; they'd simply gotten lucky this time. Still, the gallery's mood was gradually settling around Wirye Jeil High, driven by its resident hype-loving old-timers.
And then came the moment that pushed that mood to its absolute peak:
The hitters riding an adrenaline high, muscles maxed out with tension, Kang Min-hyuk had butchered with ease by baiting weak contact — but the opposing pitcher was a different beast entirely. He came at our hitters with everything he had, as if there were no next inning, no next game.
The scouting report said his top speed was 142 — and apparently that meant nearly every pitch sat in the high 130s to 140. The man was quite literally emptying the tank on every single throw.
Thanks to his rage-fueled pitching, our guys kept reaching base but never crossing the plate, inning after inning. If my one lucky swing hadn't cleared the fence to make it 1–0, the mood might have turned ugly.
Kang Min-hyuk was still holding his perfect game, and even now, at the end of the seventh, his pitch count stood at just 68.
The awkwardness from the early innings had melted away too — with Kang Min-hyuk throwing the game of his life and me, after all, putting us on the board with a home run, the team snapped back to its usual self.
"Hey, you get one too? A girl in the stands threw a note over during the pitching change. Snuck it right to you."
Correction, everyone. These idiots never got their heads on straight at all.
"Cha Il-sung, you absolute lunatic. You picked that up and you're happy about it? Throw it in the trash."
"I was gonna toss it! You think I picked it up dying to read the note?"
"Mm-hmm. Sure."
"...Hey, how do you know me so well?"
Dude, you're a country boy from Hongcheon with maybe three girls your age in the whole town — of course your eyes spin the second any woman pays you attention. No malice involved, but even the first time you met Lim Song-ah, you tried to lay down moves on her.
"Those girls in the stands came to see me and Ye-eun, got it? Honestly, it's been ridiculous since before first pitch. Why are YOU getting all giddy about it?"
"Easy for you to say — you've got Ye-eun AND Min-hyuk's little sister over there. Heartless bastard, drowning in girls and acting like you don't care."
Just as I was busy educating this hopeless country bumpkin, Ha Kyung-woo strolled over and cut in.
"Funny how you say all that while grinning ear to ear yourself. Oh, and the manager in the waiting room has a message for you. Word is, if Kim Yi-seon can't keep his eyes in one place, he dies after the game."
Ever since that day, Ye-eun had agreed to stay out of the dugout entirely and keep to the waiting room. Ha Kyung-woo, likewise, had been holed up in there until just now, finally crawling out — probably to scout whether his own moment to take the mound was coming.
"...She's serious?"
"Does it sound like a joke to you?"
Okay. I might genuinely be dead.
Seeing me brush him off and keep cracking jokes, Cha Il-sung huffed and marched off to the on-deck circle.
"Just you watch. I'm gonna launch one over the wall, and then I'm laying claim to my share of the ladies who came to watch today's game."
'Ladies,' he says. He always says it with a scoff, but the way he talks reeks of a desperate old bachelor from the countryside.
And a moment later, stepping into the batter's box, Cha Il-sung pointed his bat brazenly over the outfield wall and—
CRACK!!!
He actually hit it?
Wait, wasn't that his first high school home run?
...Sigh.
The game ended 3–0. Kang Min-hyuk, heartbreakingly, gave up a single in the ninth — the perfect game and the no-hitter both slipping away — but he still sealed the complete-game shutout on 93 total pitches.
Cha Il-sung, fresh off his home run, and the rest of my classmates may have looked a little shaky early on, but when it mattered they played clean, solid baseball.
The low score made our offense look anemic, but we actually strung together a fair number of hits. We just kept stranding runners, over and over.
Call baseball a mental game all you want — at the end of the day, a player's actual skill is the single biggest factor. Teams of underperformers suddenly awakening through pure rage and winning? That's shounen manga fantasy. Just look at Cha Il-sung today.
Long after the final out was called, the Gyeongju Commercial players stood frozen in place. Even watching from the opposing dugout, I could tell they'd given everything they had — and to lose by such a narrow margin, on two home runs no less, must have stung badly.
And as if those Gyeongju players didn't even exist, the crowd's cheers came crashing down on us, the victors.
It was everyone's first time experiencing this, so our side just stood there stiffly, unsure what to do with ourselves. On one end of the field, players rolled on the ground weeping with regret; on the other, players who'd technically won stood frozen, having no idea how to react.
"What are you all standing around for? Those people came to see you, didn't they? Go out there, sign some autographs, take some pictures."
With the whole team standing around like stunned fools, Coach Choi finally spoke up.
"Come on, no sense standing around the field looking dumb — get out there, the fans are waiting. I've already contacted Mr. Kim Gwang-wook. He'll help manage the crowd, so don't worry about a thing."
When had he even gotten in touch with the discipline teacher? The man had everything arranged before we'd even noticed. And with that, he began physically hauling players out the gate one by one.
"All right, Yi-seon, you're the main event. Let's go."
I followed Coach Choi obediently, but turned back once to look at the Gyeongju Commercial players. They were slowly picking themselves up, gathering together, consoling one another.
"Coach. You're doing this for their sake, aren't you? Having us leave together with the crowd."
Because otherwise there was no explaining it — this was the same man who'd always warned us never to get tangled up with strange girls, and now he was suddenly preaching fan service.
Coach Choi nodded, his face lined with something bitter.
"That's right. I've been there myself, so I know. Nothing on this earth feels as miserable as the sound of a crowd cheering for the team that just beat you. And think about it — how do you know that's not us in the very next round?"
Then, as if a thought had struck him, he brought up something else entirely.
"Yi-seon. When we scouted our boys, I told you I didn't pick you for your faces, didn't I."
"That's right."
"Well, after today, I don't think that anymore. Turns out handsome kids play good baseball too. Look at them. Next to our boys, they look like bandits straight out of the mountains."
Coach? Weren't we having a touching sportsmanship moment just now? Respecting the opposing team, that whole thing?
"Next year's scouting, I'm picking them by face alone. If it flops, we'll just ride the popularity wave like we do now. Then the school would boost our funding for the great publicity work, wouldn't they?"
"...Are you serious right now?"
"I have never been more serious in my life, Yi-seon."
The face of absolute conviction. Did clinching the Central Rounds break something in him? He genuinely seems a few screws loose now.
"Hear me out. There's hard scientific evidence behind this. Look at yourself, Yi-seon. Why did you start playing baseball?"
"Uh... because I wanted to play baseball...?"
"Exactly. But knowing you, even if you'd never played ball, you'd have made a living off MiTube alone. Just look at the view count on that video right now."
That's quite a leap, Coach. Going viral once is not the same as running a sustained MiTube channel? I had a laundry list of rebuttals, but he looked so earnest that I couldn't bring myself to say any of them, and just stood there meekly.
"So if a handsome kid chooses baseball, doesn't that mean he gave up a life of coasting on his face and chose the sport instead? Where are you going to find kids who love the game more, or work harder than that?"
What manner of madman's logic is this? Was the shock simply too much for the poor man?
"All that talk about ugly kids being the real grinders — garbage, every word of it. The handsome ones are the true hard workers. Because they play baseball when they don't have to!"
Now he'd escalated all the way to, 'The reason I never made it as a pro player is because I wasn't handsome.' Coach, do you actually want to run a talent agency instead of a baseball team?