Kim Yi-seon League — Either Way, the Twins Tank

Park Young-chul had worried that multiple teams would resort to deliberate tanking and set off a full-blown Kim Yi-seon League, but as it turned out, the worry was groundless.

The very moment Wirye Jeil High clinched the first-half weekend league championship and punched its ticket to the Blue Dragon National Championship for the first time in school history, the Seoul Twins were, on the flip side, all but locking up the title in the Kim Yi-seon League.

"Well then. If any of you have mouths, feel free to use them."

An executives' meeting at the Seoul Twins front office. A sports newspaper slapped down hard onto the conference table.

Han Jang-hyun, president of the Twins, swept his gaze around the room with the expression of a vengeful demon.

On one side, department heads sitting tall and defiant as if to say this isn't my problem; on the other, department heads buried chin-deep in their collars as if they had nothing at all to say. It took only one glance to see the winners and losers crossing paths in that room.

Up until now, Han Jang-hyun had played the good-natured listener, chuckling along. But he was a manager dispatched directly from Seoul Group, and he had absolutely no intention of letting a situation like this slide.

"Hmm... nothing to say, is that it? Fine. Team president — do you remember how opinions split over Lee Jung-hoon's free agency during the last stove league?"

"That... um..."

"You don't seem to remember? Well, I remember it quite clearly. The performance analysis team said he was an overpay, that Lee Jung-hoon wouldn't help reinforce the Twins' roster — while the scouting team was all for it. Am I right?"

"Th... that's correct."

"Ah, of course, the drunk driving itself was an act of God. I'm not questioning the scouting team's competence for failing to predict it. However — when a situation reaches this point, someone needs to answer for it. That's all I'm saying."

The already frozen atmosphere froze even harder.

"I trust everyone here understands I'm not doing this just because things happened to go south. Trust the field experts. Baseball men understand baseball best. With a bit more investment, we can challenge for the title this year."

Every last one of them — words the existing Twins leadership had begged the president with, time and again. Not one of them could bring themselves to open their mouths.

"I can't confirm anything here and now, but consider this advance notice of a sweeping personnel overhaul. I can no longer stand by while this club hides behind the shield of 'expertise' and runs itself into the ground."

It was, for all intents and purposes, a mass-layoff announcement — and not a single person raised an objection. Then again, they were hardly in a position to.

The Seoul Twins. The youngest franchise in the KBO, having joined the first team in 2002.

Naturally befitting a rookie club, they languished in the lower ranks early on, but thanks to the expansion-draft privileges afforded to new franchises — favorable treatment in the draft and the second draft alike — their roster climbed slowly, steadily upward.

Above all, Kang Hyun-seok, whose status as the first overall pick in the club's very first draft after joining the first team carried its own symbolism, grew into a homegrown ace starter who represented not just the team but the entire league, becoming the very pillar of the franchise.

Then came 2014. Kang Hyun-seok returned from three years on the American stage, and the players the club had been nurturing all that while had quietly ripened into veterans, carrying the team all the way to the Southern Series.

The franchise's first-ever Southern Series appearance. They'd made the postseason once or twice before, but this was the first time they'd advanced as far as the Southern Series. Even their regular-season record was formidable — second in the Southern Division, third overall when the Southern and Northern Divisions were combined.

The front office went berserk and declared Win-Now. And that was where the problem arose. Even with a Win-Now declaration, unlike the other clubs the Seoul Twins had no rich parent company waiting in the wings to transfuse them with cash.

At its founding, the Seoul Twins had proclaimed themselves "the people's club," declaring that no single corporation would ever hold more than twenty percent of its shares, with the goal of running a professionally managed baseball franchise. They had even allocated a full thirty percent of shares to public subscription from citizens, cementing that people's-club pledge beyond any doubt.

In ordinary times this structure allowed freer, more flexible, more baseball-appropriate management — but it was a fatal handicap the moment the club needed outside capital to bankroll an investment this massive.

Worse still, a hefty chunk of money had already drained away to maintain and renovate Jamsil Baseball Stadium. In the end, the Twins' leadership abandoned their founding principle and decided to stretch out their hands to a single corporation. That corporation was Seoul Group.

They bowed their heads to Chairman Han Tae-gun of Seoul Group, who already held twenty percent of the Twins' shares.

Chairman Han, who had been lying in wait for his chance to break into professional baseball at every opportunity, readily promised his support — and promptly cough up hundreds of billions of won at once in the form of a paid-in capital increase.

Chairman Han's stake in the Twins shot skyward, but with their first championship glittering before their eyes, the Twins' leadership decided to simply run for it.

Thus reborn as the big spender of the free-agent market, the 2015 Twins poured everything into reinforcing their roster — and in the end, they seized the championship of their dreams.

The franchise's first title, thirteen years after its founding. It was, quite literally, an ocean of tears and emotion.

Fans and front-office brass alike made no attempt to hide their joy and exhilaration at that first championship.

And that was the beginning of the calamity.

"The Seoul Twins' competitive cycle has very clearly run its course. Our core players are already entering their mid-thirties; some of our aces are late thirties, staring down forty.

Against that, the farm system is barren — years of Win-Now meant gutting the farm to acquire win-now talent, so there are no new faces in the pipeline at all.

This is what the performance analysis team has been arguing since the last stove league, and in my judgment the team is due for a full-scale overhaul and rebuild. That is now."

"Understood. Performance analysis team, please prepare a report for the future roster reorganization. HR team?"

"We are searching for candidates for the new manager and general manager positions. The season has already begun, which makes finding the right people difficult, but since we're hiring to fit the rebuild, we're focusing on younger managers and figures who've been sidelined by the baseball establishment."

"Good. Let's end it here for today. Ah — PR team leader, please stay behind a moment."

Unlike the big meeting held earlier in the conference room, this was a gathering of only a handful of team leaders in the president's office. By some criterion impossible to decipher from their job titles alone, a strange assortment of team leaders had assembled.

Management support. Human resources. Performance analysis. Public relations.

The team leaders of every other major department were absent. The reason these four alone were meeting in the president's office was simple: they were Seoul Group appointees, installed alongside Han Jang-hyun's arrival as president.

The management support and HR teams were vetted outside professionals handpicked by the Group's secretariat; the performance analysis team was made up of mechanics and analysts with little prior connection to the baseball world; and the PR team consisted of marketing specialists poached from Seoul Planning — plus one parachuted-in scion of the Group's own bloodline.

Only team leaders distant from the old Twins establishment were sketching the next blueprint together with the president.

After they filed out of the office, only two remained — two people who were now, more than ever, family. Han Jang-hyun and Han Seo-hee.

"So, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Seo-hee. Doesn't it look to you like tearing the whole board down and starting fresh is the better play?"

"Mr. President, first—"

"Ah-ah. It's just the two of us, so I told you to call me Uncle."

"Yes, Uncle."

He wore a pleasant, avuncular smile — but within Seoul Group, Han Jang-hyun was famously the Knife. A restructuring specialist.

"There's always that breed of person who clings stubbornly to their own little field. Expertise.Craftsmanship. Lovely sentiments. But the moment they've run their business into the ground and come crawling to grab the chaebol by the trouser leg, suddenly the ones begging to be saved turn around and call us money-crazed bean counters."

The reason the president's chair at the Seoul Twins was now occupied not by a professional manager or a baseball insider but by a member of the owner's family, dispatched from Seoul Group, was the Twins' own greed.

The ambition to build a dynasty after the 2014 title.

Having already abandoned the ownership cap, they might as well keep reaching out to Chairman Han Tae-gun.

And so it went — runners-up in '15, third in '16, then in '17 a third-place division finish and fifth overall while still chanting nothing but Win-Now.

Over the course of that process, wave after wave of paid-in capital increases pushed Chairman Han's stake in the Seoul Twins up to forty-eight percent — but so long as it stayed short of the majority needed for sole voting control, everyone breathed easy.

Then Chairman Han acquired Hanul Publishing, a small company holding four percent of the shares, and filled his quota to a clean fifty-two.

Even after seizing voting control, Seoul Group didn't move too brazenly. President Han Jang-hyun took office in late '17, various Group appointees came down — but the core baseball operations were left untouched.

The old club executives, however, appear to have read that restraint as the wrong signal. Still refusing to come to their senses — reasoning that the club had already changed hands anyway, so they might as well take one last swing at Win-Now and mortgage the future to sprint through the stove league — they collapsed spectacularly barely a month into the season.

For Seoul Group, which had until now contented itself with modest restructuring for lack of justification to purge the old leadership outright, this was a golden opportunity to repaint the Twins organization entirely in the Group's colors.

"So — Kim Yi-seon. Is it true the kid isn't going to the States?"

"That's what he says — he claims he hasn't given it much thought. Though no official offer has been made and no scout has visited him yet, so nothing is certain."

"Do a good job sweet-talking him, then. From what I hear from Section Chief Park, you two have gotten rather close, hm? Honestly, I wonder if the boy isn't just smitten with his noona and tagging along. He's a handsome one, I noticed."

"That will not be happening."

"My, my. Kid doesn't take a joke at all. Stiff as a board."

Han Jang-hyun smacked his lips and continued.

"That boy is perfect for laying down a new board. Eh? The face is marketable, he's a local product, and as for skill — I don't know baseball from chopsticks, but even I can see the scouts' reports all say he's the real deal. Isn't he precisely the new flagship for a brand-new Seoul Twins under Seoul Group?"

"But rookie acquisitions have to come through the draft, so we can't simply bring him to our Twins."

"Why not? Doesn't baseball have that thing — tanking, was it? Perfect time to sweep out all the old-timers."

A remark that would make anyone who knew the first thing about baseball recoil in horror. But the title of restructuring specialist had not been earned in vain.

"Seo-hee. Commit this to memory. When you begin the cutting — if you cut the man who must not be cut, you'll regret it later. But if you fail to cut the man who must be cut, there is no later. Even if it looks excessive in the moment, you finish the job thoroughly."

Rumors of the Twins rebuild began seeping, ever so slowly, through the baseball communities. The source of the leaks was, naturally, the existing Twins staff most likely to be swept out in the purge.

The club itself made no particular effort to shut their mouths, and so news of the Twins' massive overhaul spread far and wide in the form of articles and community leaks.

And the ones who flew into the greatest fury over the news were, of all people, the Royals fans.

Their team was mired deep in a dark age, scraping along the very bottom — but the current draft pool was rated thin on talent, meaning their rookie haul was about to get butchered on a technicality.

And this year, for once, they were putting up respectable numbers, sitting fourth in the Northern Division — while next year's draft pool was rated highly. It was enough to make them leap around foaming at the mouth.

The Twins fans, by contrast, felt a flicker of unease but no real rage.

Well, to be fair — they had won a championship, their souls had ascended to peace, so they could afford the serenity.

And even to the fans, the team's aging was plain to see. Rebuilding the club at a moment like this didn't seem like a bad call, really...

...though maybe, just maybe, this particular move had crossed a line or twelve.

"The Ape" was veteran slugger Choi Hyuk's nickname — pinned on him because his face bore an uncanny resemblance to the ape in a certain Hollywood movie. When he was slumping, it meant his head was at ape level and he couldn't hit water falling out of a boat; when he was hot, it meant his raw power was ape level and the home runs flew in droves.

Nickname aside, he was fundamentally one of the core players Twins fans loved and hated in equal measure. And now that very man was being shipped out — so plenty of fans voiced their heartbreak.

The departures of key players mounted one after another, along with trades that defied all reason. Three trades already this season, five players shown the door — and according to the rumors still swirling, more trades were yet to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠come.

At first the Twins fans had reacted with a shrug — about time for a rebuild, a little late but fine — but public sentiment grew uglier by the day.

The entrenched old guard inside the club and the fans outside it were turning their backs on this overhaul in growing numbers. Whether it would succeed, no one could say — but Seoul Group intended to push it through to the end regardless.