If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them
Tryouts are the standard way middle school baseball teams select their players. Sure, there are records from the little league stage before it, but the coaches never pay much attention to them.
The reason is simple. At this age, it's nearly impossible to tell the early bloomers from the genuinely talented.
It's not at all rare for a kid who matured early and dominated national tournaments in little league to hit a growth plateau the moment he joins a middle school team and stay at an elementary school level until graduation.
So the tryout process is absolutely necessary: filter out the kids who are either simply bigger than their peers or, to put it kindly, precocious — to put it unkindly, the ones who learned their tricks first — and confirm who actually has real growth potential.
But that's only true up to a point. Saying coaches "don't pay much attention" to little league records, flipped around, means they pay a *little* attention.
Kim Yi-seon. A kid about to enter middle school with a physical spec sheet reading 170 centimeters tall and 58 kilograms. That build would hold its own as average even against the third-years. What's more astonishing is his little league record.
Setting aside the minor local tournaments and his appearances back in fourth and fifth grade, his numbers as a starter in sixth-grade national tournaments alone were absurd.
As the starting first baseman, across the three major tournaments — the Park Sung-bin Cup, the Association President's Cup, and the Gyeonggi Governor's Cup — he'd gone 14 games, 42 at-bats, 20 hits, 9 home runs, 10 walks-plus-hit-by-pitches, and a 1.921 OPS.
Yes, the sample was padded with games against weak teams met in the preliminary rounds, but even granting that, it was the kind of stat line that suggested he'd gone through opposing teams the way a child twists open a candy wrapper.
If anything, the real problem was that his team wasn't a proper powerhouse little league club affiliated with a professional organization, but a weak squad under a corporate amateur team. The ten walks in that record proved as much.
According to the coaches who'd gone to watch his games in person, several of those home runs were comfortable homers even by middle school standards, not just little league. At that point, even if the kid never grew another centimeter for the next three years, he was a guaranteed starter.
And so, ignoring the whole notion of tryouts and admissions entirely, a full-blown scouting war broke out among the middle school coaches in the area. Calling Kim Yi-seon's parents was the bare minimum — some showed up at his school to meet the boy in person and pitch their own programs to him.
But the head coach of Wirye Jeil Middle School, located quite close to Kim Yi-seon's home, was absent from that scouting war.
After all, what use were tryouts and scouting at a school so desperate for players it couldn't even fill its roster if it accepted every single applicant? The realistic hope was that some kid who happened to be spectacularly good — a Kim Yi-seon — would drift all the way down to their school.
Even now, with the admission season nearly over, the roster stood at twelve slots with nine applicants. If there was one blessing this year, it was that they had a catcher and, amazingly, two pitchers.
Choi Sang-ho, head coach of Jeil Middle, had resolved not to expect anything grand from his baseball career anymore.
He'd barely squeaked into college, had the good fortune to play corporate league ball before retiring, and the man who'd been headed for a life of organizing the company warehouse had somehow climbed all the way to head coach of a middle school team, hadn't he?
This much was enough. Rather than dreaming big, his coaching philosophy now was to go thin and last long. Lofty dreams of national championships or producing professional players were things he'd never entertained in the first place.
"Yes, Vice Principal, I just heard from you, why are you calling again... Ah, another new applicant? That makes ten, so we might actually fill the roster this year. The profile? Honestly, it's all going in the trash anyway — just tell me the name. Yes, yes? Kim Yi-seon?"
Wondering if it could be a different kid with the same name, he asked for the other details. Hanbit Elementary, Sinhyup Little League. That was him. Wait — what the hell is *that kid* doing coming here?
"Why Jeil Middle of all places?"
Lee Ye-eun grumbled beside me. She'd been at this every single day since I decided on my school — weren't you sick of it by now?
"I keep telling you, I came here to play baseball."
"That one director from Donghyun Middle came by too, remember? Wasn't he offering you a scholarship and everything?"
"There's a reason for everything, I'm telling you."
She glared at me with a face full of mischief, but I had nothing more to offer. How exactly was I supposed to explain that I knew the future and this was the only way to play baseball without my shoulder exploding?
Realizing I wasn't about to give her a detailed explanation this time either, she kept grumbling.
"Jeil Middle's uniform is ugly as hell, you know."
So there she was, griping away — and when I mentioned I had to visit the school for my tryout, she'd tagged along whining and complaining the whole way, and now here we were.
The school was a decent distance away and the buses came infrequently, so we'd had to leave early. And now that we'd arrived and were killing time waiting like this, she had nothing to say about it.
Eight-plus years of knowing her, and I still can't figure out what sets her off.
"Kim Yi-seon. My hands are freezing."
"Then wear clothes with pockets next time."
"Not once have you ever taken care of me on your own. Fine — I'm just going to put my hands in your pockets, okay?"
It was still February, so the weather was genuinely chilly, but here she was, dressing thin and then making a scene about being cold. On top of that, she'd declared the bench too cold to sit on and plopped herself down on my lap, and now she was claiming my pockets too.
She grabbed the hand I'd been about to pull out, declared it warm, and squeezed it tight, then started wiggling her fingers around inside my pocket. This is the same kid who's so sensitive to cold, yet she'd waltzed outside in February without even a light jacket.
She seemed to have put some effort into her outfit, since it was her first time meeting middle schoolers and all. Dressing up just to freeze to death, huh.
So there we were, waiting along with the other club members and the coaches, when a pair of kids — a boy and a girl — appeared in the distance and headed our way.
They walked straight toward us chatting pleasantly, not breaking stride until they were right in front of me. Lee Ye-eun, who'd been sitting on my lap until two seconds ago, startled and scrambled up to stand at my side. Shame, really — she'd been nice and warm.
"Nice to meet you. You're joining Jeil Middle's baseball team too, right? Looking forward to it."
The boy stuck out his hand with those words. Technically I wasn't an admitted student yet. Even if the applicant pool was small enough that everyone passed the tryout, the coach here would be miffed to hear it put that way.
"Yeah, nice to meet you."
I took the offered hand and gave it a casual shake — and this punk clamps down. Even in the original story, he'd grip every baseball club member's hand like he was testing their grip strength. So it started here?
I didn't back off either — I squeezed down hard right back. Neither of us let up, the standoff stretching taut, and sensing this wasn't going to end on its own, the other side finally conceded.
"Wow, your grip is seriously strong? You're the first kid my age I've ever seen with a grip like that. Could I ask your name and position?"
"Kim Yi-seon. First baseman."
"Kim Yi-seon... I'm Kang Min-hyuk. Pitcher."
He didn't need to tell me — I already knew everything. I recognized him on sight. If anything, I was quietly stunned by how *exactly* he matched the manga. Even more than I'd expected.
Kang Min-hyuk. Born 2001. Father passed away early; a three-person household with his mother and younger sister. Notable special fact: he's the protagonist of The Weakest High School Ace.
Someone once said that in baseball, the team the universe's energy gathers around is the one that wins the championship. So who, then, has the most of the universe's favor? Obviously, it's this guy — the one who crawls all the way to a national tournament final dragging eight useless dead weight teammates and one semi-reliable second-string pitcher.
The original Kim Yi-seon had blown out his shoulder forcing himself to pitch, desperate to win a title just once. But me? I could just ride this guy's carry and win a championship the easy way, couldn't I? That's the single most reliable injury prevention there is.
Coach Choi Sang-ho, watching the tryout, was beginning to doubt whether his own eyes were working.
"Alright, here comes another one?"
Thwack. The ball shot off the machine. The pitching machine was so old its control was completely shot — even aiming for the middle of the zone, the ball refused to go straight. A 120 km/h fastball, drifting slightly low and in.
Crack!
With a crisp, ringing sound, the ball kept rising and carrying, sailing all the way to the soccer goal at the far end of the field.
"...Pitching coach. Roughly how far is that to the goal?"
"Hmm. I'd say at least seventy meters."
"So in a real game, that's a home run?"
"Most likely, yes."
That kid is the real deal. Granted, it was a batting machine, but 120 km/h is average four-seam velocity for middle school pitchers. That wasn't a meatball served down the middle — that was a ball darting in on his hands, and he still turned on it and drove it out anyway?
And it wasn't a one-off. He was batting right-handed at the moment, but from the left side he'd ripped three straight extra-base hits. Call it aluminum bats all you want — middle schoolers swing aluminum — but this was a different dimension entirely.
"His throwing test earlier — he nearly one-hopped the ball from the outfield fence all the way home. In the infield drills, he fielded every one of those garbage throws clean. And now in batting he's pumping out extra-base hits from both sides of the plate? Why on *earth* is a kid like that coming here? I still don't get it."
"Probably... because of those two over there? That's about the age when puberty hits its stride, isn't it?"
The hitting coach pointed to where two girls sat side by side, watching the tests. Whenever a break came between drills, they'd dash over — one to each boy — dust the dirt off him, dab the sweat from his face with a towel. Devotion didn't get more devoted than that.
"Seriously? He's making his girlfriend a baseball team manager and picked our ragtag little club *specifically* so he could fool around with her on the team?"
Those girls had shown up just now asking to be made managers of the baseball club. *That's* what they meant?
"If not that, is there any other explanation?"
"Well... fair point."
A proper coach would have delivered a stern lecture here and straightened the kids out. A young punk getting way too big for his britches.
Baseball first — how did it make any sense to be playing boyfriend and girlfriend inside the club? Even a team that ran as loose as this one had lines you didn't cross.
"Man... that one would've gone out in a real game, though."
The problem was that these love-struck punks happened to be one guy who was a precious, precious pitcher at the youth level, and another who was a certified maniacal talent lofting home-run blasts in real time.
Fine. If a kid can rake like that, he can do whatever the hell he wants — what's it to me?
Coach Choi Sang-ho stopped worrying altogether.