Cracking the Protagonist
Wirye Jeil High had closed out the first half of the weekend league back in April, topping the standings with sixteen wins against two losses over eighteen games.
Heading into May, they'd kept the momentum rolling, going four and one through the first five games of the second half.
There were still plenty of outside voices sneering that it was all short-term fireworks, that the team would come crashing back down to earth soon enough. But the teams in the southern Gyeonggi region who had actually faced Wirye Jeil High on the field wanted absolutely nothing to do with that opinion.
For one thing, the team was far more cohesive than anyone expected.
"Their team OPS is .85. Their fielding error rate is actually a touch *below* the high school average — and you'd know that if you'd watched their games. Those errors aren't coming from bad defense. They're coming from players aggressively attacking plays most teams wouldn't dare."
This was already the third time around. Po'eun High's head coach Kim Hyun-min, facing Wirye Jeil High again in the second half, jabbed a finger at his self-compiled scouting report and pressed down hard on his throbbing head.
"And on top of that, they've got *six* hitters over a 1.1 OPS. I suppose I should be grateful that two of them are pitchers, so at least they won't be in the lineup at the same time."
He still couldn't fathom where Coach Choi Sang-ho had dug up these monsters.
This was a gap no amount of coaching or analytics could bridge. Po'eun High was a respectable regional powerhouse, and even they had maybe two or three hitters of core-lineup caliber. That team had four or five of them. At least.
In the end, baseball is a game you win by scoring runs, and when the weight of the lineups differs this much, losing is the natural outcome unless your pitching is dramatically better.
The pitching coach, who had been listening quietly to Kim Hyun-min's lament, finally spoke up.
"So — is this one a full commitment?"
"Yeah. That's the only way."
But just because losing was the expected result didn't mean he could sit on his hands and forfeit the game in spirit.
They'd already gone 0-for-2 in the first half. If things kept sliding like this, going 0-for-4 against Jeil High in this year's weekend league was a very real possibility. This wasn't about pride. There was hard, practical stakes on the line.
In the weekend league, only the first- and second-place teams from each half of the season advanced to the national tournament. And when you're picking a top two out of an eighteen-game schedule, ties come up constantly. The first tiebreaker used to separate deadlocked teams is head-to-head record.
A minimum of one win and one loss — ideally, two wins against the team you're fighting for position.
"One game this week is Jeil High, the other is Gwangnam High Tech, right? Put Haram on the mound against Gwangnam. For the relief arms, use first-years where you can."
"Then Cheon-su and Yeong-taek will both be prepping for the Jeil game?"
"That's right. Pull each of them after three or four innings with quick hooks, then bring in Sang-wan to close it out."
Po'eun's Oh Cheon-su and Yun Yeong-taek — the one-two punch of innings-eating starters. And now, with closer Choi Sang-wan, the one pro scouts had their eyes on, the entire pitching staff was being loaded into the Jeil High game.
If this much couldn't slow down a lineup at least somewhat, nothing could.
But one problem still remained.
"Who's starting for Jeil High this time? Kim Yi-seon? Kang Min-hyuk?"
If Po'eun threw every ounce of its pitching strength at the plate matchup, maybe — *maybe* — they could stall out one game. Their arms weren't bad, after all.
But strength is always relative. The truly terrifying thing about Jeil High was that for all that monstrous offense, the lineup wasn't even their strong suit.
"Impossible to predict. Coach Choi Sang-ho prioritizes his players' physical condition over any fixed rotation or the stakes of the game, so we probably won't know until the day before."
"Either one is a nightmare..."
Jeil High's roster numbers were thin, but the bullpen quality was genuinely good. Choi Kang-cheol, the third-year, ran hot and cold, but he had respectable stuff and the stamina to start — on a weaker school he'd have been the number two, or even the ace of the staff.
Ha Kyung-woo, the second-year, didn't have the endurance for back-to-back appearances or anything beyond three innings, but as a closer he could simply delete an inning or two from existence.
An average 143 km/h four-seamer with beautiful late ride, paired with a low-110s 12-to-6 curveball that fell off the table and caught hitters blind — textbook, and effective.
And then there was Seo Jun-su, who oddly only ever appeared as a two-to-three-inning decoy starter. A first-year, but an extremely nasty type of pitcher.
His ceiling was 140 km/h with an average of 132 — nothing overwhelming. But the sheer rarity of a left-handed sidearmer, a natural two-seam riding action, and a slider that came in on the exact opposite plane gave bangers a maddening either-or with every pitch.
Even on names alone, that was more than decent pitching depth for high school ball. But the real problem was the two who came after.
"I'm looking at the numbers right now and I still don't believe them. How does anyone put up lines like this? Against pros-in-waiting alone you wouldn't expect these numbers, let alone amateurs."
Kang Min-hyuk — 8 appearances, 65 innings pitched, ERA 0.41
Kim Yi-seon — 8 appearances, 53 innings pitched, ERA 0.33
Special note: Zero losses recorded in any appearance to date.
Two players, utterly dominant. No wonder people were already saying their pro contracts out of high school were locked in and the only question left was which round they'd be drafted in.
Sure, the weekend league always had a wider gap between powerhouses and weak sisters than the national tournaments did, so you could argue some inflation in the stats. But this was beyond absurd.
Even after blanking the lineup, these monsters averaged seven to eight innings before leaving the mound — and Po'eun was supposed to score against *them*? And the bullpen behind them was hardly soft, even if you somehow forced an early hook. All Kim Hyun-min could do was sigh.
And then came game day. It was ridiculous even to himself, but Po'eun's coach Kim Hyun-min actually felt relieved.
No Kang Min-hyuk in sight, exactly as the starting announcement had promised — and out in the bullpen, Kim Yi-seon was loosening up for the start.
A switch pitcher who could touch 152 km/h even left-handed was warming up, and he was supposed to feel *good* about it. What an irony. But there was nothing to be done.
As he watched the opposing team go through their preparations, an analyst stepped up beside him with a few notes.
"Our players' swing speed and timing coming into today. Overall, they came out exactly as we prepped them."
"Good. Very good. Though I must say, our situation is downright comical. Better to face a monster like that, of all things."
"Well, that is baseball, isn't it? A monster you can run the numbers on gives you more of a path than a human being you can't."
Po'eun had already faced both Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk in the first half, and they'd reached a single conclusion: against Kim Yi-seon, at least, there was a crack of light. A method.
Coming from the man who'd thrown a scoreless game against Po'eun last time — or from Coach Choi Sang-ho, who'd deployed Kim Yi-seon as his special antidote against Po'eun specifically — that would earn nothing but a scornful laugh. But that was genuinely how they saw it.
"The more you break down Kang Min-hyuk, the less sense he makes. The kid simply has no weakness. None."
"Tell me about it. At first I chalked it up to luck, but the deeper I went into the film, the more it just left me in awe. What kind of underhand pitcher spots his four-seamer to six corners and his breaking balls to four? That's more astonishing than the wipeout stuff itself."
That was the basis of Po'eun's verdict: Kang Min-hyuk's absurd breaking-ball repertoire and his deranged command.
Underhand is fundamentally harder to command than any other delivery. It's why the legendary submarine pitchers all sit at the top of the hit-by-pitch leaderboards — command is that unforgiving from down there.
"I still can't wrap my head around it. He paints a slider that moves like *that* in and out of the strike zone at his catcher's whim. Is that something a human being can actually do?"
Kang Min-hyuk can. To four corners, no less.
"Honestly, analyzing him is pointless. The kid throws six different pitches, and if he can plant every single one wherever he pleases, what exactly is there left to analyze?"
And so — Kim Yi-seon. Because next to that, Kim Yi-seon was predictable.
Something about today's game kept nagging at me — a prickly, uneasy feeling that wouldn't go away.
For starters, our lineup was completely locked down at the plate. Their starter had thrown full-effort pitches for about four innings and come straight out, and then their number two had taken the hill and started throwing everything at max effort all over again.
A starter's job is to eat innings, so ordinarily you pace yourself — manage the tank, pick your spots, keep something in reserve for balance.
But Po'eun's pitchers today acted like none of that applied, hurling every pitch at closer-level intensity, as if they'd been brought in for the ninth inning of a tie game.
Burning both your top two starters in a single game was already unhinged. Pitch like *that*, and the guy's gassed after three or four innings, right? Then they're back to the pen for another arm?
Fine, top-tier teams have deep pitching staffs. But torching the staff like this in one game — who exactly were they planning to throw tomorrow, on Sunday?
Thankfully, my own stuff felt pretty sharp when I took the mound, and the game settled into a pure pitching duel. Score, 0–0.
But that crawling feeling was something different from the obvious culprits — the two strikeouts I'd already taken, or the total absence of run support. This wasn't about my hitting. It was about the mound. Something, something about the way their hitters were *looking* at me, and it was getting under my skin.
"What're y'all looking so sour about? Forget to lock the gas on yer way out?"
Nam Kang-min, reading me like a open book the moment I so much as frowned. Ye-eun, Min-ah, the whole team — is my face really that easy to read?
"It's just — ugh, it's hard to put into words. Something feels *off*. Their hitters over there."
"Now yer talkin' all artsy-fartsy. What are ye, a poet? Can't even say it in words."
"I'm telling you, there's something there! I don't know what it is, but their hitters are just... weird."
Having zero interest in my answer, Nam Kang-min started slapping my glove against his knee to wake my arm up.
"That's enough o' that. Yer up soon, so grab yer glove an' get movin'."
I looked up and glanced around — apparently our half of the inning had ended without me noticing. Man, these opposing pitchers really are throwing without a care for tomorrow. Isn't this how arms blow up?
I finished warming up roughly and climbed the mound, picking my train of thought back up. What was bugging me so much?
Stepping into the box was Po'eun's three-hole hitter.
Following my usual routine, I made eye contact with the hitter. Sometimes the batter meets your stare and it turns into a long staring contest; this time, it fizzled out blandly.
And *that* was when I finally put my finger on what had been crawling up my spine the whole game.
Oh, come on.
"No wonder the Coach has been so pissed off lately. If the players are like this, the coaching staff must've had it even worse."
Lately, whenever I took the mound, opposing hitters were visibly rattled. Sure, they'd only faced us a handful of games, but my game footage and stats weren't exactly hard to find. Over the last three or four starts, every batter had either frozen up in fear or come at me swinging with this desperate I'll-be-the-one-to-beat-him fire.
These guys were neither. They didn't fear me, and they showed zero hunger to take me down. They just stood in the box, calm and composed, like they figured they could handle me just fine.
Suddenly I understood exactly why Coach looked like he'd been chewing glass every time Po'eun came up on the schedule. Hold on — didn't I already stomp these punks last series? Or does one game against Kang Min-hyuk instead of me make me look like the easy option?
People who ignore every unquantifiable thing — an opponent's aura, momentum, presence — and see the world purely in data and numbers. I now understood, precisely, why everyone who played Po'eun High walked away feeling dismissed.
And with that, today's swings finally made sense too. They hadn't whiffed way underneath my fastball because I was sharp and the ball was riding. These punks had come out hunting changeups and nothing else.
They were swinging plenty aggressively at fastballs too, so I hadn't caught on — but once you saw it, it was painfully obvious. Honestly, which side is the simpler bunch of idiots here?
Alright then. Guess it's time to show you fine gentlemen what you ordered.
I flashed Nam Kang-min the changeup sign. Not what he was expecting, apparently — he hesitated for a second before giving a rough nod.
"Strike threeee!"
A changeup clipped the bottom edge of the zone. The gun read 136.
It was clearly a changeup, the batter couldn't even get the bat around, and it was a strike — but the guy didn't look the least bit flustered. Huh. So they're not just reading the pitch type, they're grading location too?
At that point even Nam Kang-min seemed to catch on to the opposition's game plan, and he shook off my changeup sign. Doesn't matter. Changeup again.
"Foul!"
This one drifted slightly toward the middle, just the way they wanted it — though it came in a touch slower than the last, and he avoided squaring it up.
Then I sent the next sign.
Nam Kang-min looked at me again, double-checking I meant it. Yeah, yeah, that's the one.
When he actually pulled off his mask and started to rise out of his crouch, I went straight into the set position. Kang-min looked visibly uneasy, but he had no choice and resettled behind the plate.
And then, the third pitch.
"Out!"
Kang-min couldn't hang onto the ball, but the batter had flailed at a full, ugly hack — the dropped ball stayed close enough to scoop up, and the tag was applied in time.
The hitter looked like he had no idea what had just been thrown at him.
That one? That was a curveball.
"A curveball? *That* was a curveball?"
"Yes, sir. I'm quite certain — a curveball."
Hearing the pitching coach confirm it, Kim Hyun-min felt like tearing his hair out. In eight appearances, the kid had thrown nothing but fastballs and changeups. And now, suddenly, a *curveball*.
Po'eun's strategy for the day had been beautifully simple.
Kim Yi-seon was a textbook archery pitcher — he picked his locations in advance and hammered the same spots over and over, like an archer putting arrows into a fixed bullseye.
His fixed locations broke down to this: fastballs up in the zone and bored in middle-middle; changeups disguised as high fastballs that dropped toward the middle, and changeups disguised as middle fastballs that dove toward the bottom.
Four patterns, period — a pitcher who just shuffled the order and played shell games with the batter. On paper, laughably simple.
The problem was that even knowing the fastball patterns, you couldn't hit them. When a fastball that makes up eighty percent of his pitch mix is unhittable even when you know it's coming, the changeups woven in between are just as hard to touch regardless of their quality.
So Po'eun had abandoned any hope of covering all four patterns and concentrated everything on a single one.
"Fundamentally, Kim Yi-seon's WHIP is absurdly low — but the hits he does give up skew heavily toward extra bases. Classic trait of archery pitchers: they don't get hit often, but when they do, it hurts."
"So you're saying — pick one pitch and commit to it completely?"
"Correct, sir. It's the approach with the highest chance of success."
Hence the changeup. More specifically, the changeup coming over the middle. They'd spent an entire day custom-tuning everything from swing timing to follow-through around that one pitch. Land it clean, and it turns into extra bases.
Naturally, they hadn't told the hitters to sit on that pitch alone. If a pitch felt right, swing — on anything. That misdirection was what would keep the strategy buried.
But the core of the plan was this: if anything resembling a changeup came over the middle of the plate, don't judge it, don't think — swing out of your shoes.
Except.
"That curveball, frankly, isn't anything special in terms of quality. The trajectory's an obvious, readable parabola. But here's the problem."
"What problem?"
"That parabola matches — at least through the first half of its flight — the release look of Kim Yi-seon's high fastball and his middle changeup. I can't say whether he can hold that arm angle every time. But if he can? It's a nightmare."
In plain terms: a ball leaving the hand at eye level could bury itself at the top of the strike zone, or suddenly die and drop in middle-middle — or crawl in so slowly it'd bounce before it reached the plate. And from the batter's box, there was no way to know which until it was too late.
As the analyst finished, Po'eun's coach Kim Hyun-min squeezed his eyes shut.
God, baseball is hard.