Does Jeil High Have Two Aces?
The Jamsil Auxiliary Baseball Stadium, hosting the quarterfinals of the Phoenix Flag Tournament. We'd been assigned as the home team at Jamsil for the third straight time, which had raised a few eyebrows, but it was long-standing custom to give metropolitan-area teams the closest available venue once they reached the main draw — and besides, home or away, Kang Kang-chul had won the coin toss three times running, so it was hardly special treatment.
Min-ah, yawning like she hadn't slept, was tucked under my arm as we walked slowly toward the entrance. Tents dotted the grounds here and there along the way.
Since this was a high school tournament, there was no online ticketing at all — everything was sold on-site. As a result, it looked like quite a few people had failed to get in despite the venue holding just over five thousand seats. The tents were the marks of fans who'd camped out overnight, determined to see the game no matter what.
"You're Kim Yi-seon, right?! I'm a huge fan! Could I please get an autograph?!"
Proof of that popularity: even though I'd come without my uniform, fans spotted me from a distance and came swarming. These were clearly devoted enough to sleep outside, and they recognized me in an instant, clustering around me like storm clouds. I could sign autographs, sure, but this was getting a little dangerous.
Pweeee!!
Just then, a whistle cut through the air, and a handful of students in our school uniform came sprinting over — students wearing armbands that read DISCIPLINE.
"Wirye Jeil High School Discipline Committee and Student Council! We understand your enthusiasm, ladies and gentlemen, but for safety and traffic reasons, we must ask you to disperse for the moment!"
At the head of the group, blowing the whistle and directing operations, was Jung Hyun-ah sunbae. I soothed the surrounding fans, promising an autograph session after the game, and managed to send them on their way.
"You've arrived. Is Miss Min-ah planning to watch the game with Kim Yi-seon today?"
"Yes. There's no point keeping someone who isn't even pitching stuck in the dugout, is there? I brought her along to cheer instead."
Hyun-ah sunbae hummed, considering it for a moment, then nodded.
"Very well. I'll escort you to where our students have gathered. From there, you can watch without interference from outside fans."
And with another blast of the whistle and a wave of her glow stick, the discipline committee members began managing the crowd.
"Please keep to the line!"
"Please take down your tents now!"
With so many spectators and fans flooding in, and the tournament at its highest stages, the school was supporting the event this actively. Drafting the discipline committee and student council to help with crowd control was one thing, but they'd also plastered posters all over school and even organized an official cheering section.
Needless to say, it was Hyun-ah sunbae over there who had pushed hardest for the student council and discipline committee support. She insisted it was simply the duty of students from the same school, but still.
"Ah, Min-ah! Over here!"
The moment we crossed the stadium entrance, Kim Se-yeon popped out — apparently she'd been waiting. When our eyes met, she gave me an awkward greeting.
Then, bursting with excitement about who knows what, she launched into a nonstop chatterbox monologue at Min-ah, who just listened one-sidedly — and somehow the conversation never stalled. I still can't wrap my head around how those two remain friends.
With Kim Se-yeon's chatter as background music, we made our way to the section where the Wirye Jeil High cheering squad had gathered. As we crossed the stadium and passed rows of seats, fans settled in around the field recognized me and offered easy greetings.
Everyone from casual fans who'd gotten interested from watching my MiTube videos, to female fans who liked the looks of us players, to older fans in their middle years and beyond who'd come all this way out of hometown pride and their affection for Kang Min-hyuk.
"Well now, if it ain't Kim Yi-seon! Is that your gal beside ye?"
"Yes, it is."
"Heh heh, cheer hard fer yer gal and yer teammates, y'hear!"
After that light back-and-forth with the fans, I took my seat, and the eyes of the students around us converged on me. Even a rough count put the crowd at over a hundred — this was the cheering section Chairman Yi had organized, wasn't it?
At the very front of the section stood Kim Se-yeon. She'd clearly seen plenty of this somewhere, because she made a fairly convincing cheer captain. Megaphone in hand, she was bellowing at the top of her lungs.
Atmosphere-wise, this genuinely felt like a pro ballpark. Thinking of it as the fruits of everything we'd worked for, I felt a little proud, honestly.
"""Kang Min-hyuk! Kang Min-hyuk! The strongest in high school, Kang Min-hyuk!"""
Never mind. I'd like to revise that statement. Not proud. Not proud at all. These people all came to see Kang Min-hyuk.
Buried under other news stories, but the performance Kim Yi-seon had put on in the Round of 16 was no ordinary impact.
A sophomore just hit 155 km/h — the fastest ever recorded by a high school southpaw. And apparently this is only his FIRST year as a pitcher.
His velocity's only going to climb as a junior, and his breaking stuff will keep improving too. If this continues, isn't Kim Yi-seon the high school GOAT, period?
Yoon Min-eum back in the day didn't put up numbers like this in high school, and neither did Jang Jung-boo, the guy everyone called the greatest high school talent of his era.
His top speed at his pitching debut was 151. Half a year later, it's 155. And unlike other high school pitchers coasting through, he's already made 16 starts.
His changeup quality has gotten way better than at the start, and he picked up a curve mid-season that he didn't even throw before — and he's actually using it well.
At this pace I can't even imagine what he'll be next year
The players usually hyped as the biggest southpaw pitching prospects in high school baseball sat one or two tiers below the Kim Yi-seon of right now. And Kim Yi-seon, as a sophomore, had already blown well past that level.
Considering what a single year's gap means to prospects at this age, baseball fans had every reason to be excited. Setting aside which team he'd land on, a player of Kim Yi-seon's caliber was the kind of prospect you'd talk about as the future of Korean baseball itself.
(bait template image)
Nope. It's entertaining every single time. Feels fresh every round.
And yet, even now, Wirye Jeil High's fans wouldn't flatly declare Kim Yi-seon the ace.
It wasn't simply that Kang Min-hyuk was more popular with the local community and the older generation while the fireballing Kim Yi-seon got slotted into the "raw-talent freak" frame. (For the record, Kim Yi-seon hated that frame. His position: compare me to that monster and I'm clearly the hard worker — so why am I the talent freak?)
Anyway, it wasn't only factors outside the game. Watch the games themselves, and the received wisdom was that Kang Min-hyuk's evaluation had no choice but to climb on the merits too. Which meant the question of whether the ace was Kim Yi-seon or Kang Min-hyuk was, half the time, a question that flipped on a schedule: who'd taken the mound most recently.
In that spirit, this round was Kang Min-hyuk's turn.
Wirye Jeil High's quarterfinal opponent was Daedeok High School. Their pitching staff was, to put it kindly, ordinary — but the explosive bats of their position players had torn through the weekend league and sent a shockwave through the Phoenix Flag on their way here.
Except, facing that lunatic on the mound right now, none of those strengths meant a thing anymore.
Wirye Jeil High 2 : 0 Daedeok High
Daedeok High had yet to score a single run, and the game was already past the top of the fifth. Not once all season — in any game Daedeok had played this year — had they gone four innings without putting a run on the board.
Daedeok's batters were clawing at their heads, choking on the frustration.
Now stepping to the plate was Daedeok's premier hitter — third-year Han Ga-ram.
Despite the pro-draft's pitcher-first bias in Korea, his first-round selection was already guaranteed; the only question left was the overall pick number. The biggest position-player prospect in high school baseball this year.
And that player was nervous.
The way he stepped into the box, bat gripped tight, showed how unusually rigid he'd become.
This was his second at-bat against Kang Min-hyuk — but to him, it felt as good as the first.
After all, in his first at-bat he'd barely grazed the sinker that came screaming in on the opening pitch and grounded out, tame as could be.
Not that groundouts like that were anything new. He'd suffered plenty; sometimes it wasn't bad luck but simply the opposing pitcher's design. And yet here he was, this tense. The reason —
"Ah, Kang Min-hyuk. What tremendous pitching through five innings, isn't it?"
"That's right. And he's managing his pitch count beautifully along the way, cruising through this game."
Because that pitcher wasn't just cooking him — he was effortlessly carving up our entire lineup. Five innings, not one hit or walk, the order turned over, and now he stood as the leadoff hitter of the second pass.
Han Ga-ram was the standout, sure, but the players around him all carried hitting ability well above the high school level too. College scholarship offers were the baseline, and beyond himself, a few teammates had real pro-draft aspirations.
And yet none of them could put a proper bat on Kang Min-hyuk's pitches.
Even now, Kang Min-hyuk's eyes were fixed on him. According to the scouting reports, Kim Yi-seon had a routine of glaring down batters like he meant to devour them before throwing — engaging in little staring contests. Kang Min-hyuk, the analysis said, did nothing of the sort. It wasn't a routine at all. He was simply, slowly, dissecting him.
A shiver ran through him at the feeling of being taken apart piece by piece. But he couldn't keep getting dragged around like this. Fine — he'd give up on extra-base hits entirely. First, he'd back as far off the plate as he could, set his contact point deep, and focus purely on making contact.
He choked up far up the bat from the knob, narrowed his stance to nearly a straight line. And Kang Min-hyuk, utterly unmoved by this extreme posture, simply prepared his first pitch.
The ball came in — and his strangely coiled body swung upward like an uppercut —
"Striiiike!!"
[141 km/h]
"Strike one! Kang Min-hyuk's stuff is really working today."
"Yes. Most underhand pitchers throw considerably slower than their overhand counterparts, but Kang Min-hyuk generates serious velocity from a remarkably low arm slot. Factor in the two-seam-style run on top of that, and he becomes extremely tough to deal with."
The ball looked like it would drift off the outside of the zone, then bit back and clipped the border for a strike. He'd known about the natural two-seam movement, but it was a course almost impossible to react to.
Still, he refocused. If he hunted for something slower — a mistake pitch — and just tried to make contact, there was still a path forward.
The second pitch came.
"Striiiike!!"
[135 km/h]
"Strike two! Same-looking course, but this one changed its trajectory mid-flight and bored straight down into the heart of the zone!"
"Ah, beautiful pitch. That looked like a sinker to me. When the natural-run four-seamer and the sinker fly on nearly identical paths only to diverge at the very last instant like that — from a hitter's perspective, it's maddening."
He blinked, trying to process what he'd just seen. It was the same flight path, without question. And yet the first pitch had clipped the top outside corner while the second dropped dead center in the zone. Judged on location alone, it was exactly the mistake pitch he'd been hunting.
Even when Kang Min-hyuk teased him, dangling a hittable pitch like bait on purpose, there was no way to touch it. The sheer, open-faced mockery of it left a sour taste in his mouth.
But fine. He'd already resigned himself to being the underdog here — pride was a luxury he couldn't afford. He'd swallow as much ridicule as the man cared to serve. So throw it again, same course. Underestimate me. Go on.
Jaw clenched, Han Ga-ram waited on Kang Min-hyuk's third pitch. There it was again — that same trajectory. He couldn't tell whether this one would end up outside or middle, but if he kept that much in mind, he was confident he could adjust with the barrel at the last moment and make contact.
Your little taunt — I'm going to swallow it whole.
He gritted his teeth and swung.
"Striiiike!! You're out!!!"
[123 km/h]
"Swing and a miss — strike three! Strikeout! What an pitch that was!"
"Ah, that's the circle changeup, isn't it? It dropped even harder than the sinker, diving so far it nearly clipped the bottom of the inside corner — an incredible trajectory. At that angle, it's practically a left-hander's curveball shape."
The bat sliced through empty air. The ball had come in below his own front knee.
How in the world am I supposed to hit that?
Kang Min-hyuk's arsenal wasn't impressive merely for its quantity. Each of those countless breaking balls was chained to a different pitch, and together they generated their true power.
First, the four-seamer: his fastest pitch, with natural two-seam run that made it ride noticeably sideways. Layered on top of the underhand delivery's signature illusion — the ball appearing to climb up out of the dirt — it looked like a snake writhing through the air.
Then the sinker, the four-seamer's partner: it broke a little more laterally while dropping sharply as well. Against a hitter with poor contact skills, it produced whiffs; even a hitter with good contact skills, if he was sitting on the four-seamer, would roll over into an easy out.
And then the circle changeup, which dove even harder than the sinker and completely bamboozled the batter.
Underhand pitchers are traditionally miserable against opposite-handed hitters. But when these three pitches came in on near-identical paths and only swapped their diagonal drop at the last instant — a three-way guessing game — even left-handed hitters had no prayer against Kang Min-hyuk.
Right-handed hitters?
"Swing and a miss — strike three!! Strikeout!! What a slider that was!!!"
"Wow, Kang Min-hyuk. Did you see that? It looks like he's adjusting the degree of the slider's break himself. Three sliders in a row, and each one broke at a different angle."
Right-handed hitters were just a free meal.
This was Kang Min-hyuk's talent: overwhelming pitchability. No wonder that even when Kim Yi-seon staged his own high-wire act with insane velocity and filthy movement, the people insisting "Kang Min-hyuk deserves to be called an ace too" never went away.
With Kang Min-hyuk still weaving his mad masterpiece into the seventh inning, the community posts naturally wrote themselves:
Kim Yi-seon plays baseball within the bounds of humanity. Kang Min-hyuk has left humanity behind. Seriously, someone should dissect the guy and check his screws.
Thanks to Kang Min-hyuk's heroics, the Wirye Jeil High cheering section was in full festival mode.
"""Kang Min-hyuk! Kang Min-hyuk! The strongest in high school, Kang Min-hyuk!"""
So that chant was Kim Se-yeon's handiwork, huh. I'm remembering this, kid. Mark my words.
Anyway, Kang Min-hyuk was taking the mound in the ninth, dead set on finishing the perfect game.
I wasn't in the dugout, but I didn't need to be to picture it. The manager would have told him to conserve some strength with the next start in mind and come out — and Kang Min-hyuk would have dug in his heels, insisting he was staying in.
This time, I understood. What kind of starting pitcher has no appetite for a perfect game?
Wirye Jeil High 2 : 0 Daedeok High
Since the fifth, our lineup seemed to have lost the feel at the plate, stranding runners and producing nothing — but not a single person looked worried. Naturally. The man on the mound was Kang Min-hyuk.
And so Daedeok's seventh hitter stepped in against him. The deficit was still only two runs, so refusing to give up, he flailed his way into deeper and deeper retreat from the plate, desperate to just make contact somehow.
Except... isn't he backing up a bit too far? At that distance, hasn't he stepped clean out of the batter's box?
The tension of the game was so crushing that nobody called it out. The umpires were locked onto the ball and nothing else.
And Kang Min-hyuk's first pitch came screaming in.
CRACK!!
"Hey! Call an ambulance!"
Nam Kang-min, the ball having smacked into his mitt, collapsed to the ground clutching his hand.