The Pros Come Courting, America Trembles
Compared to usual, the press coverage was surprisingly tame. Which made sense — Wirye Jeil High had served up sensation after sensation on their climb, so even winning the championship wasn't enough to manufacture a fresh, dopamine-spiking headline.
They did cobble together some feature articles about Kang Min-hyuk and the backstories of the other players, but with the finer details blocked by Min-ah's mother — his agent — and the Seoul Twins organization holding exclusive rights, only watered-down filler made it to print.
And of course, the place where dopamine truly detonated was the community.
The result was exactly as predicted, exactly as the fans wanted — a Wirye Jeil High championship. It lacked the dramatic flourishes of the semifinal, the twelve-inning marathon that looked like something out of a stat sheet's fever dream, but the game itself had been so relentlessly gripping that everyone was losing their minds with excitement.
The established core baseball fans loved it, obviously, and even the new fans who'd discovered the sport through Wirye Jeil High — never having watched a comeback win before — were tasting heart-pounding victory for the first time and completely losing their composure.
Meanwhile, other fans were in an entirely different kind of chaos.
The festival atmosphere naturally carried on through the day after the final, and word was the school had gone so far as to rent an open-top double-decker bus for a victory parade.
Frankly, my first thought was: what parade? Who around here is even going to care? Aren't we just going to end up standing there awkwardly by ourselves?
"WAAAAAH—!!!!"
"JEIL HIGH! JEIL HIGH! JEIL HIGH!"
Okay, this crowd is no joke.
The plan was for the parade route to start at Dongdaemun Baseball Stadium and carry the championship trophy all the way back to the school, and I'd wondered why it had to be so elaborate and so long — but the turnout was far better than I expected. There'd been a decent response even at the Dongdaemun departure, and a fair number of people lined the streets as we crossed through Seoul, but the moment we crossed the Han River bridge into Wirye City, it genuinely felt like the entire town had poured out onto the streets. Um, excuse me, isn't it the middle of a weekday afternoon right now?
"Kang-cheol! You're the captain — get up front and wave at people already."
"Coach, I think those people came to see Min-hyuk or Yi-seon, not me..."
"This sort of thing is the captain's job. Go on, take the trophy and get out there and wave it around!"
Shoved forward by the coach, Kang-cheol hyung shuffled toward the front of the double-decker bus and stood there waving the championship trophy, trembling like a leaf.
But apparently even that was endearing, because the crowd roared all the louder for it.
Manager Park, who'd been filming the whole scene beside us, had even brought along a megaphone.
"Alright! To celebrate this championship, our captain has agreed to say a few words!"
"OOOOH—!!!"
Wow. Manager Park, I never took you for this much of a sadist. No wait — are you such an insider that you just assume everyone can handle this?
Seo-hee noona, filming alongside her, seemed to share my horror as she watched on aghast. Aigoo, poor Kang-cheol hyung. By now, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake had erupted in his pupils.
But with all eyes locked on him, he had no escape — so trembling violently, he forced the words out one agonized syllable at a time.
"You see... honestly, I didn't really do all that much... it was all our Min-hyuk, and Yi-seon, and Coach, and our friends and juniors, and everyone out there cheering for us... they're the reason this happened. Thank you, everyone!!"
That was Kang-cheol hyung's speech, delivered haltingly through a voice shaking like a leaf. The crowd fell quiet for a brief moment —
"WAAAAAAAH—!!!!!"
— and then burst into thunderous cheers, celebrating the parade with everything they had.
It was, truly, a festival.
It wasn't only the players and the fans who rejoiced at Wirye Jeil High's championship.
The Seoul Twins front office. The president's office.
"That's it! That's the one! That's what watching baseball is all about!"
President Han Jang-yeon of the Seoul Twins had shown little interest in baseball before taking office. The reason a man like him had ended up following the Bonghwangdae-gi all the way to the finals was nothing else but this.
"At this rate, my judgment is vindicated all the more, wouldn't you say, Director of Roster Analysis?"
"Yes, sir. The trade of Park Min-woo took its share of criticism at the time, but from a long-term perspective it was the right call."
Heh heh. President Han wore a satisfied smile.
Ever since his sweeping restructuring declaration, the Seoul Twins had been overhauling not just the front office but the entire roster. The targets had been the awkward middle-tier players clogging the squad after years of win-now posturing, and the fan-favorites with murky, middling results — but the cleanup had extended to cornerstone veterans like Choi Hyuk and Park Min-woo as well.
"The Royals stalled and dithered so much over it. Would have been nice if it went this smoothly from the start."
The Park Min-woo trade in particular had dragged through sluggish negotiations and only closed recently, with the trade deadline bearing down on them.
"So where do you project the Royals to finish?"
"Honestly, their current standing has already exceeded our projections, so it's hard to forecast... but under the original model, we had them fourth in the Northern Division, eighth overall."
"Good. Even a bit higher than that, the pick would still be safe for the Kang Min-hyuk draft, yes?"
"Yes, no problem at all."
Park Min-woo was a top-tier, homegrown closer in the league. But he was already thirty-four, carried a hefty salary, and had two years left on his contract — the kind of asset that, even when it hit the trade market, rarely found a buyer.
"More than that, it's fascinating. The Royals this year — they might actually play October baseball?"
And then, out of nowhere, a buyer had appeared.
The Kaesong Royals, forever scraping the cellar, currently sat third in the Northern Division as of late July — third, and only two games back of second place.
With their eyes glazing over at their first hot streak in ages, the Royals' board had probed the trade market here, there, and everywhere, desperate to cash in on this season by any means necessary. They'd tried every combination of assets to acquire the instant-impact closer Park Min-woo and shore up their bullpen weakness, but the Seoul Twins' position was unshakable.
One first-round draft pick and one decent player. Beyond that, no interest in dealing.
At first the Royals bristled and shoved a pile of prospects across the table, but the Twins didn't budge an inch. In the end, the Twins' take-it-or-leave-it negotiation style closed the deal on the original terms.
"One can't just serve up stew and then hand it to the dogs, after all. Next season, the Twins bring in the Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk one-two punch, exactly as planned."
Straight trading a homegrown closer ranked top-three in the league for a single first-round pick — not even the first overall — flew in the face of common sense. But President Han Jang-yeon had confidence.
He couldn't say whether he'd get better at baseball, but he was absolutely certain he'd make a lot more money.
The Seoul Twins weren't the only ones with their eye on the Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk one-two punch.
Domestic clubs had taken note of Kang Min-hyuk too, but their interest sat at a surprisingly modest level. The Twins were the only organization acting this aggressively.
His current rough evaluation: somewhere around late first round to second round, first pick. Underhand pitching was a style slowly being phased out of modern baseball, and the prevailing wisdom held that its ceiling was limited.
Except, incongruously, a Major League club had started making serious moves on Kang Min-hyuk.
"Hm? Who is this Korean prospect? This isn't the kid who's been in the news lately, is it?"
Philadelphia Phillies scouting department. A scouting report on an unexpected player had landed on the meeting agenda.
"The switch-hitting kid? Why on earth would he come to us. Even if he reaches the big leagues, he's going to a big-market or West Coast club, no question."
Kim Yi-seon had long since been caught in the radar nets of all thirty MLB organizations — a far too hot commodity. Emptying their entire bonus pool was a foregone conclusion; the only question was winning the inevitable bidding war. The Phillies weren't a small-market club, but with fewer inherent selling points for an Asian player weighing his options, they had a real chance of losing that race.
But in the course of observing Kim Yi-seon, they'd stumbled onto this hidden pearl of a player.
"Let's see. Arm slot of minus thirty-one degrees? A perfect submarine style. Release point within a foot of the ground, too... certainly distinctive."
Distinctive even on paper alone. Mmm-ing and hah-ing over the report, the scout began murmuring his impressions bit by bit to the colleague beside him.
"Fair enough, boss. I'll agree he's a remarkably polished pitcher for a seventeen-year-old junior. But is he really someone we need to land on an amateur contract? The profile shows a max of 88 mph, averaging 84... he looks well short of big-league material."
"Well, look at it this way — other teams have made submarine guys of that caliber work, so it's not a bad bet. And the price is right, too. Korean rookies typically sign for somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars as a posting-fee-free signing bonus. We could move on him at that level."
At that price, it was a lottery ticket worth scratching for the Phillies.
In the Majors, since the sabermetric revolution, it had become fashionable to build bullpens out of every conceivable pitching style. Within that trend, the preference for sidearm and submarine arms had been quietly climbing, purely for the sake of variety.
And besides, nobody was proposing to rush in with a contract today — this was a preliminary meeting for further observation. There was no pressure at all.
The Phillies scouting team voted without objection, unanimously deciding on serious additional scouting of Kang Min-hyuk. They passed a formal observation request and a background-check filing along to their overseas scout.
The only problem: rather than operating its own Asia scouting network, the Phillies worked through something closer to an outsourced arrangement.
Once a document like that existed, the information leaking was only a matter of time.
And that, roughly, is how the article came to be — the one announcing that both arms of the Wirye Jeil High one-two punch were now drawing the attention of Major League teams.
Even with the Bonghwangdae-gi won, theWirye Jeil High fans' high showed no sign of wearing off. Their numbers were large to begin with, and the tournament had funneled in a flood of newly converted fans, so the incidents and unruly behavior that followed were no laughing matter.
At its simplest, the friction came from poking at Gwangju Jeil High — a school with deep history and tradition, one of the top two all-time producers of professional baseball talent.
There was also the issue of basic baseball knowledge being in short supply while the Wirye Jeil High players got hyped beyond all reason.
And so the fans sank to comparing them against pro teams and trash-talking the pros themselves.
Not every Wirye Jeil High fan was this breed of walking chaos — but the villain tier kept popping up one after another, scraping baseball fans' nerves raw like a sanding block.
And yet there was one proposition even the thoroughly aggrieved fans couldn't deny.
That was the Grand Slam Kim Yi-seon had so boldly declared to the press. The reason no team had ever completed it owed a great deal to baseball's inherent element of chance, but the scheduling of the national tournaments was a problem too.
The Cheongryong-gi and the Hwanggeumsaja-gi take place only after the professional draft has concluded. Considering that thirty to fifty or so high school seniors are typically drafted each year, that means some forty of the nation's best high school players leave their teams mid-tournament all at once.
On top of that, among the college-bound players, scholarship recipients are selected around the time of the Bonghwangdae-gi, so even players who've committed to universities routinely sit out the later tournaments to protect their bodies.
With the structure built this way, team strength can swing wildly from tournament to tournament, making it nearly impossible for any one team to dominate a full season.
But Wirye Jeil High was different. The team's core being sophomores was a given to begin with —
"Kang-cheol hyung, you're really not entering the draft?"
"Yeah... I'm planning on going to college first."
— and not a single player had left the existing roster.
"Hyung, come on. You're the captain of a Bonghwangdae-winning team — surely some team would take you?"
"Well, the Twins did say they'd go as high as a sixth-round pick on me... but you know how it is. Going pro out of high school with anything below a fifth-rounder feels a little risky."
Unlike my past life's world, where high school draftees were the norm, this world favored college attendance a bit more heavily. Prospects generally hesitated to go pro unless they were projected within the first five rounds, and for anything lower, the smarter play was to enroll in college and aim for the Early Draft instead.
There were all sorts of tangled reasons behind it — corporate amateur teams preferring degree holders, the difficulty of landing youth coaching jobs without a diploma — but in any case, with a middling draft projection on the table, every single senior at Wirye Jeil High had chosen the college route.
Even Choi Kang-cheol and Lee Dae-hyun, who'd received scholarship offers, had decided that once they enrolled, they'd still come back and compete in the national tournaments to help their younger brothers.
At this point, the picture was genuinely one of Wirye Jeil High completing the Grand Slam without so much as a real competitor in the way.
That is, until a completely unforeseen variable barged in.
— right up until now.