Good Players Are Simply Good
Good players are simply good. That's all there is to it.
And so time slipped by, and before I knew it, I was in the sixth grade. The daily routine, if you could call it that, hadn't changed much from the usual. School, yoga lessons, some running, and strength training — the same cycle repeating over and over.
Sprinkled in between were the few occasions when Lee Ye-eun, still unable to tame that ferocious temper of hers, got into a huge fight with some other girl and dragged her parents all the way to school over it. But honestly, with a personality as wild as hers, who would ever want to take her away from me anyway?
As for me, I joined a little league baseball team. In my old world, anyone serious about playing baseball properly had to join their elementary school's baseball club — but this world was Heaven Korea, where recreational sports thrived and elite youth athletic programs simply didn't exist at the elementary level.
So every budding baseball dreamer in this world grew up practicing among kids at hobby-class level, chasing their ambitions through little league clubs. That was just how things worked here.
It was apparently similar for other sports too, and since these children's sports clubs held a position much like taekwondo dojangs did back in my original world, they flourished everywhere — you'd occasionally even find kids enrolled in two or three different sports at once.
Stack that on top of hobby-level teammates, an environment full of multi-sport crossover kids, and a curriculum that prioritized fun over rigorous training — because the club was terrified of losing its enrollment numbers and wanted to keep the parents happy — and the result was little league games that were chaos of the highest order.
I'd heard that the bigger little league organizations, which at least picked their members through tryouts, could field teams of decent quality. But the Sinhyeop Children's Baseball Club Wirye Branch where I played wasn't one of the large ones, so even the rosters they scraped together for tournaments weren't all that far above the hobby kids in skill.
Which brings us to today. My teammates still huddled together in the dugout looked for all the world like they were on a school picnic, utterly indifferent to whether we won or lost — even now, in the preliminary round of the Gyeonggi Province Governor's Cup Little League Tournament.
A tournament title might matter less in academy baseball than in the school sports system, but a coach who'd have to answer to headquarters if our results were an utter disaster was a different story. He heaved a long sigh, gripped my shoulder, and pleaded with me earnestly.
"Yi-seon, listen. Are you really not going to give pitching a try?"
"No, sir. I keep telling you, my shoulder hurts when I throw."
"You make throws across the diamond like that and you're worried about your shoulder? ...Fine. Then at least go out there and hit well for me. You're the only one on this team I can trust."
A while back, on a whim, I'd taken one light pitching lesson just to learn the basics, and apparently my form that day had made such an impression that the coach now begged me to pitch every chance he got. And every chance, I brushed him off.
While the coach and I were bantering, our batter stepped to the plate and struck out looking without so much as swinging the bat. Leaving behind the coach's please, I'm begging you expression, I got ready to take my turn.
Little league bats are much shorter than adult ones, but they're aluminum, so the trampoline effect isn't bad. They're also light enough for a child to swing — light enough, in fact, that to me they feel almost too light.
I was waiting in the on-deck circle taking my practice swings when the batter ahead of me put the ball in play. It was a poorly hit grounder, but the pitcher and second baseman crossed paths on their pursuit, and somehow it turned into an infield single.
Loosely swinging my bat, I stepped into the box. Bottom of the fifth, we were down five to three, runners on first and third, two outs.
The moment I settled into the left-handed batter's box, the opposing team's coach suddenly jogged out to the mound. After a brief conversation, the current pitcher came down — and the very next kid went up.
In little league, games run six innings total, and each pitcher is limited to three innings of work. So that pitcher had made his first appearance in the fourth inning and recorded exactly two outs this inning — and he was already coming out?
And the reliever warming up was a lefty. Well, look at this? A one-inning specialist, pulled out in a little league game?
I shot a glare at the opposing dugout and their new pitcher — a light protest, nothing more — then ducked back to the on-deck circle. I swapped out the protective gear fitted for a left-handed stance for the right-handed set and returned to the plate in short order.
The opposing coach frowned briefly at the sight, then just waved his hand as if to say get on with it. A half-baked switch hitter is usually worse than none at all, after all.
Even famous switch hitters routinely show a weaker side of the plate compared to their stronger one.
As always, I crowded as close to the strike zone as I could get. I knew absolutely nothing about this pitcher, so I decided to take the first pitch and see what he had.
The first pitch was a four-seamer right down the middle. Strike one. Had I known his velocity beforehand, it would have been well worth a swing, but I held off.
The perceived speed was somewhere north of 110 kilometers per hour. That's genuinely fast for little league.
The second pitch was a ball that grazed dangerously close to my body without hitting me. Another four-seamer, pumped in hard. Heat was starting to build behind my eyes.
Anyone could see it was a brushback pitch — a warning to back off the plate. So I leaned in even closer, flaunting it, daring him to try again.
The opposing pitcher, brimming with confidence, wore a cocky grin as he readied the next pitch. The ball left his hand — and any fool could see it sailed right over the middle of the plate. Elementary school baseball, ladies and gentlemen.
Crack!
A slight inside-out swing sent the ball soaring into the distance. I savored the feeling in my fingertips, flipped the bat casually, and began my leisurely stroll around the infield.
The little league fence, a little over sixty meters out, was left far behind long before the ball came down — it kept rolling all the way to the fence of the adult field beyond.
When I returned to the dugout, the coach greeted me with an ear-to-ear grin.
"That's my treasure! Who needs you pitching when you can hit like this! Baseball's always belonged to the sluggers, not the pitchers, right? Look at the majors — the big boppers get paid more, too. Hey, Yi-seon, when you make it to the pros, you won't pretend you don't know your old coach, will you?"
Our dugout was in full festival mode, while the opposing team's was practically a funeral parlor.
Well, fair enough. If you were losing six to five because some kid launched a three-run homer from the left side in his first at-bat, then turned around and hit a three-run shot from the right side in the very same game, you'd be a little speechless too.
Even with little league's short fences, a home run is never an easy thing — and blasting two in a single game is hardly an everyday occurrence.
But what could they do? Good players are simply good.
The new injury-prevention plan I'd come up with was simple: don't pitch.
If you're going to get hurt pitching, why not just hit instead? That said, this wasn't me swearing off the mound forever. After all, even in the original manga, Kim Yi-seon was a pitcher who didn't bat.
In real high school baseball, too, if a player's hitting stands out even among his teammates, even prestigious baseball schools will let him do double duty as a pitcher-hitter. If Kim Yi-seon's hitting talent had been strong enough to overwhelm the Donghyun High lineup, he probably would have batted as well.
In fact, the protagonist did both — because his teammates' hitting was just that catastrophically bad.
Kim Yi-seon wasn't a home run type due to his build and raw power, so he couldn't pump out runs in bunches, but he was a gap hitter with uncanny ability to spray doubles and triples — which meant that whenever the team got locked down by an opposing ace, he'd often step up and solve it himself.
The standard pattern went like this: his teammates, armed with nothing but fighting spirit and passion, wrung out tears and snot grinding their way to first base — sacrifice bunts, walks, hit-by-pitches, infield singles, headfirst slides — and then Kim Yi-seon would bring them all home with one extra-base hit for a one-run victory.
In the late-game matchups against powerhouse teams, this formula got milked so relentlessly that readers complained about it.
Back to Kim Yi-seon. In the manga, Donghyun High fields an excellent position-player corps by high school standards — but going by the in-story evaluations, they're a middling bunch: safe bets for college ball, but questionable prospects for going pro straight out of high school.
Claiming I'd stick to hitting only, with talent that couldn't even overwhelm players like those, was clearly pushing it.
But surely, up through middle school at least, that level of hitting talent would be more than enough to get by on?
On top of that, I'm a perfectly symmetrical human being. Unlike other switch hitters, I have no weak side — left box or right box, it makes no difference. Considering how much high school hitters struggle against left-handed pitching, that's an absurdly powerful advantage.
So I'd resolved to play as a hitter during my elementary years... and this? This is more workable than I expected. Maybe I'll get serious about the two-way thing, like a certain major leaguer did?
I was picturing my future self as the next great two-way star, wondering just how high my salary could climb, when the coach sidled up beside me.
"By the way, Yi-seon. Just between us — you are planning to keep playing baseball in middle school, right?"
"Of course. Baseball's the whole point."
"Then tell me. Have you thought about which middle school you're going to?"
In this world, elementary school offered only recreational sports, unlike my past life's elite youth athletics — but from middle school on, the situation changed.
You could certainly play in your school's baseball club as a hobby through middle school, but if you wanted to get serious — to aim for high school advancement and a professional career — the standard route was to join a dedicated baseball club starting in middle school.
Little league clubs were, at the end of the day, a kind of private academy, and their students' advancement records were a major selling point. Which was presumably why my choice of baseball club interested the coach so much.
Or maybe the middle school coaches he knew well had been asking around about me.
"Hmm, not sure yet. Still thinking it over."
"Really? Because I happen to know someone who..."
That was a lie, of course. I knew exactly which middle school I was going to — I'd decided long ago. Baseball is a sport where even one overwhelmingly dominant individual struggles to flip the outcome of a game.
If a team could win a championship just because one player was brilliant, then that certain angel of a franchise — the one that fielded the captains of both the American and Japanese national teams in my old world — would actually have won it all in reality.
And if stacking talented players guaranteed victory, then no team blessed by a random convergence of cosmic energy would ever pop out of nowhere and win a championship. But they do.
So what's the easiest way for me to win? For a reincarnator who knows the future, the answer is simple. If you can't beat them, join them.