A One-Man Army (2)

It felt like barely any time had passed since the quarterfinals, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and here we were already in the semifinals. The back half of the Phoenix Flag Tournament comes at you so fast and relentless it almost leaves you breathless.

With only two days of preparation under his belt, Ha Kyung-woo was still racking his brain on the bus ride to the stadium.

"So what you're saying is, Jang Hyun is a right-handed hitter, and his swing─"

"That doesn't even matter. Don't wear yourself out over it. Just do an okay job and be done with it."

He seemed to be studying hard, taking his new role as catcher seriously, but honestly, I'd always treated Nam Kang-min's opinions as reference material at best and pitched however I saw fit.

"If anything, you receive better than Nam Kang-min does. That guy can't hang onto a curveball if it drops even a little too big."

As long as a catcher can catch the ball, that's all that matters — why work himself into a sweat digging up this and that? Nam Kang-min only ever earned a starting job because he could swing the bat. Judging purely by his receiving, you could train literally anyone in the baseball club for a year and they'd get at least that good.

At my grumbling, Ha Kyung-woo let out a small laugh and went back to his notes.

"Right. If our starting pitcher says so, then so it is."

Going purely by mental state, Ha Kyung-woo — thrust into the catcher's spot out of nowhere — was actually in better shape than the rest of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠us. Morale across the entire Jeil High baseball club was rotten, weighed down by Nam Kang-min's injury and the crushing pressure of the semifinal stage.

And as if that weren't bad enough, a final twist of the knife: today's game was an away game for us in practice as well as on paper.

"We've arrived! Everybody off!"

We climbed down from the bus and arrived at the stadium that would host today's game.

Mokdong Baseball Stadium. A 10,000-seat ballpark in Yeongdeungpo. A stadium this size would normally serve as the home ground for a corporate team at the very least, but Mokdong is used strictly and exclusively for amateur baseball.

An amateur-only venue and one of the epicenters of amateur ball, granted priority hosting for countless amateur tournaments. The Phoenix Flag semifinals are always held at Mokdong and Dongdaemun, and the finals at Dongdaemun and nowhere else.

"Talk about bad luck. If we want to set foot on Dongdaemun dirt, we've got to win this one too."

Not that Mokdong carries anything close to Dongdaemun's symbolism. And honestly, against Gwangmyeong High, playing the semifinal at Dongdaemun would be a hundred times better.

I turned my head to see that Gwangmyeong High had apparently just arrived as well — their bus pulling up, players streaming off with footsteps that looked awfully familiar with the place.

With good reason. Mokdong wasn't quite their home field, but it was the venue the western region teams used. They were probably feeling the same ease we used to feel at the Jamsil Auxiliary Stadium.

"Kang-chul hyung, you really should've won that coin toss. We're the actual visiting team here."

"Huh? Oh... sorry, man..."

It was a joke, and this guy just genuinely wilted. In any case, the team mood was already bad enough, and arriving as the away team only piled on the pressure.

If Nam Kang-min were here, he'd have tossed out some nonsense like 'Where do I put the relief fund?' and loosened the mood a little.

Inside the stadium, all 10,000 seats were packed. It just wasn't like before, when our cheering section drowned out everything else. It was roughly six to four — a genuinely even cheering battle.

Made sense. At the semifinal stage, even locals with no real interest in high school baseball come out to cheer, and the locals here who already loved the game tended to lean toward Gwangmyeong High, a team with a similar regional connection.

Even with our traveling fans out in full force, for those reasons the two cheers pushed against each other in a dead-even standoff instead of either side giving ground.

I tuned out the opposing crowd entirely, forced my way over to our cheering section, and started loosening up my shoulders.

"""Kim Yi-seon! Kim Yi-seon! Power hitter Kim Yi-seon!"""

Kim Se-yeon cheering with real passion. Except — what's with the chant? Kang Min-hyuk gets called the greatest in high school baseball, and I'm just a power hitter? What kind of favoritism is this from a cheer squad captain?

Anyway, I rode that wave of cheering straight up the mound. Bad luck had bent our momentum, but if the ace stands his ground, there are a hundred ways to flip the atmosphere back around. If I buckle too, though, things get truly ugly.

Trading warm-up tosses with Ha Kyung-woo behind home plate, I reviewed the opposing lineup once more.

The lineup on the submitted roster featured eight right-handed hitters and exactly one lefty. If I simply split arms by each batter's side of the plate, my right arm would wear out fast and I'd be forced onto my left.

Normally I'd have picked out righties with poor career numbers against left-handers and pitched them lefty, but these guys had almost no track record against left-handed pitching at all. The result of a brutally thorough platoon system.

In the end, I'd have to divide left and right by feel or by facing them directly. By contrast, the opposition had clearly done their homework off my stats. They knew full well that I was the key to this game, and they'd prepared for it with total rigor.

Before I knew it, the other team finished their warm-ups too, and the call to begin the game rang out. The leadoff hitter stepped into the box.

What can you do. If they've prepared, then I smash the preparation to pieces. That's all.

Among the nicknames the fans had given him, Gwangmyeong High's manager Park Myeong-gil was fondest of one: The Legion. Strict discipline, with every single player functioning as one body against the enemy — his entire philosophy of baseball moved that way.

"Pitching coach. Who do we have ready for the next inning?"

"The next inning starts with Jeil High's eight-hole hitter. After that it runs righty, lefty, righty, righty — a mostly right-handed lineup, and the bottom of the order isn't much for hitting. How about first-year Chang-min?"

"Good. Get him ready."

All of this while Kim Yi-seon was in the middle of putting on a strikeout show against Gwangmyeong's hitters. Even though it was only the bottom of the fourth, manager Park Myeong-gil was already preparing his second pitching change.

It wasn't even a quick hook. The opener, trendy in America these days? Not that either. In his world, the starting pitcher as a position simply had no reason to exist.

He doesn't exist in this world, but in the world Kim Yi-seon originally came from, there was a legendary manager who more or less defined modern team management in baseball: Tony La Russa.

La Russa established the five-man rotation, the relief corps, and the modern closer role — and beyond that, he championed the importance of data and brought wave after wave of innovation to lineup management, platoons included.

Yet even that La Russa once said the most ideal use of pitching was three pitchers of similar ability, each throwing three innings.

Manager Park Myeong-gil's idea was similar, just twisted a few degrees further. High school teams don't have anything close to a pro-length season, so there's no reason to ration innings across months. A tournament even less so. Designating a starter and managing the game around him in this format? Grossly inefficient.

So he sliced the innings apart with surgical precision according to his creed. No pitcher on his staff faces the same batter twice.

"Strike three! OUT!!!"

Kim Yi-seon was tearing through our hitters like a beast caught in a hunting net. As if to prove his own theory wrong, he was facing Gwangmyeong's lineup for a second time through and still churning out strikeouts and harmless outs.

My side had constructed a righty-heavy platoon in hopes of overloading his arms, but it seemed to have no effect whatsoever — he was simply switching hands every single at-bat, as if to say platoons meant nothing, and carving up Gwangmyeong's order.

A pitcher of immense pride. Put another way: a player who, no matter what trick you bring, doesn't dodge — he detonates it head-on.

"Hitting coach. Feed the boys coming to the plate some instructions."

"Yes, sir, Coach."

In that case, I'll just have to throw an even wider variety of tricks at him.

I'd already seen this opponent in manga form, but meeting him as a real enemy made him an even more repulsive type.

Since the opening lineup had come out entirely right-handed, I deliberately alternated arms — partly to manage the workload across both, partly to send the message that platoons don't work on me.

When the very first batter started taking pitches to run up my count, I — aggressive by nature — got even more aggressive about attacking the strike zone. Go ahead and watch all three, if you can. That was the threat.

And so, whether they ran plays or tricks or anything at all, I was blowing up their lineup completely and steering the game along scoreless. It wasn't about measuring myself against Kang Min-hyuk's last outing, but I was maintaining a perfect game all the same.

Which is why I figured they'd run out of tricks by now.

But I was wrong. Squatting on the bat and hunting for a bunt single — that much I'd anticipated, having lived through it against the Won-san technical high schools. What they did this time, though, went beyond anything I'd imagined.

A pack of lunatics. They'd wait out the count to two strikes, and if they didn't like their chances on the next pitch, they'd force a surprise bunt. Every time, our corner infielders came charging off the bags, and their faces were by now smeared head to toe with irritation at the opposition.

Fortunately no bunt hits were getting through — but runs or baserunners were never the goal in the first place. The point was purely to manufacture defensive situations and grind away at our nerve and our legs.

A play soaked in malice, aimed at me alone, with the single stated objective of dragging me off that mound no matter what.

Conversely, by the time I finished recording the bottom of the fifth and walked off, a third pitcher of the game was already climbing Gwangmyeong's mound — in the sixth inning.

"Who's this one supposed to be?"

"Checked the roster — a second-year, submarine pitcher. Nowhere near Kang Min-hyuk, obviously, but the notes say his sinker's pretty good."

I asked Ha Kyung-woo, who'd come into the dugout and sat down beside me.

This is driving me insane.

Our offense was getting strangled in exactly the same fashion. It was only one man — Nam Kang-min — missing, but the loss of his weight in the middle of the order must have been enormous, because the opposing manager was splitting his pitchers between our bottom and top of the lineup.

Less experienced arms against the bottom of the order, the seasoned and skilled ones against our best hitters — an inning or two at a time.

I stretched out roughly and headed to the on-deck circle. Sung In-hoon and Kwon Ji-wook ahead of me were putting together decent at-bats, but without a single extra-base hit, nothing was connecting to actual runs.

And batting ahead of me in the three-hole was Cha Il-sung —

"STRIKE!! OUT!!!"

Cha Il-sung trudged back toward the dugout.

"Man, I can't get a read on anything. Last at-bat the curveball was falling straight off a cliff from up top, and this at-bat the ball's climbing up from underneath and then running sideways."

That's the effect of constant pitching changes. Part of it is that Cha Il-sung is unusually weak against breaking balls, but more broadly, when a pitcher's style shifts so drastically before a hitter can adjust, his timing falls into total chaos.

This was my third plate appearance, and I'd faced a different pitcher every single time. You deal with this on pure animal instinct and nothing else.

I stepped into the box and gave the opposing pitcher a long look.

Their game management, the strategy behind it — I cleared all of it out of my head. Not my problem. My only job was to unload one big swing in this suffocating lineup and flip the atmosphere. Once I'm standing in the box, that's the only thing that exists.

I gripped the bat hard and locked onto the pitcher's motion. Most hitters rarely see submarine pitchers, so that sheer unfamiliarity becomes a huge weapon.

But I spent every day buried in the submarine-pitching archives of our very own underhand fanatic, Director Cho, staring at Kang Min-hyuk — an underhand pitcher of frankly alien caliber. For me it wasn't unfamiliar at all; in a sense, it was more natural than a textbook over-the-top delivery.

Watch — his arm's starting to lift right about there, and if it comes flying this way,

CRACK!!!

It's this easy to square one up.

"""Ahhh...─"""

The crowd let out a deflated groan, disappointed too. Still — I'd found my timing. At this point the opposing pitcher would start avoiding a head-on showdown.

And a guy who ducks the challenge has his own set of answers, so that's not a bad develop─

"Pitching change!"

What?

Kim Yi-seon stood in the batter's box wearing an expression of pure incredulity, but from manager Park Myeong-gil's seat, it was the obvious move. Why leave a pitcher on the mound once he's been read? Especially one now carrying the risk of extra-base ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hits and home runs.

Plainly, pitches with horizontal movement weren't doing much against Kim Yi-seon.

"Get Ki-su ready."

"Yes, Coach."

So he'd call up Kim Ki-su. A curveball specialist who worked the corners — he'd show Kim Yi-seon pitches that broke vertically, slipping past his contact swing.

"A slippery one, this kid."

Manager Park Myeong-gil murmured it without meaning to. Kim Yi-seon was, without question, the most monstrous high schooler he had ever faced.

Normally, once you ring this much defensive attention around a single ace, you couldn't guarantee a win — but you could certainly tie that player down.

Kim Yi-seon, though, refused to be contained on either side of the ball. Pitch or hit, he kept breaking the knot and lunging for the exit, like a beast that had made up its mind to escape at any cost.

"Pitching coach. Is Yo-han available?"

"He is, Coach. His cold seems fully gone, and he looks to be in good shape today. Shall we get him up?"

"Not yet. All nine might have to go up today."

In which case, so be it. If one man isn't enough, send several. If several aren't enough, bury them under even more bodies. That's all there is to it.

The sixth inning.

The seventh.

The eighth.

And then the ninth.

"...Yi-seon. Good work out there. Come down and get some rest."

Bottom of the ninth. Score: 0–0.

A pitcher's duel of truly spiteful proportions had unfolded.

The plays aimed at me were endless. The bunts never stopped, and they crowded home plate until there was no room left to crowd — one of them even tried to throw his body onto the ball on purpose. All he'd get for that is an ejection, but they were willing to go that far just to rattle me.

When I came to the plate, they not only schemed against my hitting but rolled out one-inning relievers, inside fastballs that flew at my body while pretending not to be intentional, and pickoff throws — over and over — after deliberately walking a batter on.

Every tactic that stopped short of breaking the rules, deployed for the sole purpose of chewing through my stamina and my focus. Thank goodness I hadn't allowed a single baserunner. If I had, who knows what fresh madness they'd have shown me on the basepaths.

"Coach. I'm going back out for the tenth."

"You're nearly at your pitch limit as it is."

"I'm throwing a perfect game right now. You know the pitch limit doesn't apply while a record is in progress."

The Coach opened his mouth to object, then closed it again. By any sane measure, this is where Kang-chul hyung should take the mound.

But a pitcher throwing a perfect game through nine innings, pulled off the mound without receiving a single run of support? Against an opponent that gnawed at us viciously and hunted me and me alone?

That would be throwing a bucket of cold water over the entire team. Even if our dugout could stomach it, it would hand the other side a dangerous signal.

Baseball is a sport of statistics — but the players who execute it live in a sport of the mind. With that kind of air in the stadium, I couldn't begin to promise that Kang-chul hyung could shut down opposing hitters suddenly riding a surge of momentum.

"I'm not coming off this mound until the perfect game is broken. Tell Kang-chul hyung to keep resting."

Leaving those words behind, I started shadow pitching so my shoulder wouldn't go cold. Having come this far, it was a game of chicken: whichever gave out first — Gwangmyeong's pitchers, or me being dragged off this mound.