The Intrasquad Blue-and-White Game
Needless to say, the fact that the head coach and his staff had decided not to make an issue of it didn't mean there was no resentment brewing. These were middle schoolers in the full swing of puberty, hormones raging.
And Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk, cooing away with the cute girl managers right in front of their eyes, had become objects of pure fury.
Honestly, when word came that not one but two female managers were joining, everyone had let themselves hope a little. Of course, the vast majority of the members who'd flooded into Wirye Jeil Middle were painfully lacking in confidence and had a very healthy sense of self-awareness.
Meaning: none of them had seriously entertained the idea of actually getting anywhere with the managers.
But then what were those two? Watching the pair calmly do the very thing everyone else had written off as impossible even in their imaginations quietly bred a desperate demand for justice among the surrounding members.
At first, a few of them tried going about it the timid way — tattling to the head coach that those two weren't playing the baseball they were supposed to play, just messing around dating instead.
"Yi-seon, Min-hyuk. You two seeing your managers?"
"No, sir?"
"Good. Keep it up."
And that was the end of that, resolved with remarkable simplicity. It was in that moment they all understood: even the head coach and the coaching staff were on those two's side!
Next came the plan of lodging a direct protest, which ran into trouble from the very first step.
"So what exactly are you protesting? That the managers look after those two a little more than the rest of us? Both of them work their tails off at their actual jobs. They're just getting special treatment on top of that, that's all."
"There's nothing in the baseball club rules or the school code that forbids dating, and the two of them swear up and down they're not even together. We've got no case."
"And if you want to accuse someone of slacking at practice — Kang Min-hyuk is visibly the hardest worker on the team, and Kim Yi-seon, practice or no practice, he's just... good."
"..."
So how, exactly, were we supposed to teach those two a lesson? At any other prestigious baseball program, this would've been settled with a post-practice 'discipline session' in the name of restoring order.
But a baseball club all of four years old has no traditions to speak of, and everyone here knows perfectly well they only ended up at this school because they got turned away everywhere else. What authority were we supposed to be enforcing, exactly?
Then, at last, an opportunity arrived for all of them, groaning and seething in their anger and jealousy.
"All right, starting in April we'll be playing official games and entering tournaments, so for one final team check, let's hold an intrasquad blue-and-white game — mostly first- and second-years."
The coach's single remark sent the heat surging up at once. This was their hour of revenge.
"Wow, these kids are pretty tame, huh? I figured we'd get ugly words and thrown fists right off the bat."
I'm not completely oblivious, so I had a rough idea of the mood around me. I mean, put yourself in their cleats — watching the good-looking guys get cozy with the girls in front of a bunch of friends whose lives revolve around nothing but sports? Of course that stings.
I know exactly how it feels. I lived it in my past life.
Which is why, in true 2014 fashion — back when romance hadn't fully been purged from the sport — I'd been braced at all times for either a 'senior's discipline' bat to the back or a straight-up one-punch challenge. And against all expectations, it looked like this would be settled in a perfectly healthy way.
One glance at the blue-and-white lineups told the story: the guys visibly angriest about the situation were all stacked on the Blue team, while the White team had me, Kang Min-hyuk, and the guys who genuinely just wanted to play baseball. Clearly the head coach understood the situation perfectly well and had engineered it on purpose.
In a sense, he's minimized the team conflict in one move — should I be calling him a master strategist?
"Uh, Yi-seon? Aren't you scared? Those guys look more fired up than they ever did for nationals."
The one cautiously approaching me now was Choi Kang-cheol, a second-year senior. Going by his looks and his name alone, you'd expect a monster that devours everything in its path — in reality, he's a genuinely sweet, gentle guy.
In the original story, he goes on to Wirye Jeil High and appears as a senior to the protagonist, Kang Min-hyuk.
When the protagonist was a first-year, he couldn't even get through one inning and Jeil got knocked out of the Phoenix Flag in the next round. When the protagonist was a second-year, he took the mound as a starter in the Golden Lion tournament — after dragging himself through a brutal weekend league to qualify — got shelled, and sent the team packing in the early rounds. A man whose character and skill exist in perfect inverse proportion.
I answered with just a hint of grievance in my voice.
"Excuse me, I'm the wronged party here? Dating who, exactly? She and I have known each other almost nine years now. At that point she's basically family. If I were actually dating someone, then I'd have something to feel guilty about."
"Oh... really? Well, that is unfair... yeah."
This man was starting for the White team today. Kang Min-hyuk was scheduled to come in as the closer rather than the starter. Also on our side were the second-year seniors who couldn't care less about first-year drama, and the first-year members who genuinely knew nothing but baseball.
"Senior, let's get started then, shall we? Any longer and your shoulder's going to go cold."
"Huh? Oh. Right. Okay, boys — let's begin!"
And so the top of the first inning began with Choi Kang-cheol's distinctly underwhelming battle cry. We were on defense. Up to the plate came some second-year — I've already forgotten his name. He's not particularly good, and he doesn't appear in the original story anyway.
True to his extra-status, he went down swinging cleanly against the pitching of Choi Kang-cheol, who occupies the 'supporting character' tier. Sure, the man is a small-pentagon pitcher — but against hitters with even smaller toolkits, he's basically hell itself.
Second batter. First pitch, four-seam strike. Second pitch, slider ball. Third pitch, four-seam strike. Fourth pitch, splitter — strike three.
The senior's stuff was better than I'd expected today. Judging by his face, he was feeling it too, getting into a nice rhythm. He came at the next hitter with a first-pitch slider—
Crack!
"One more gust of wind and that's gone."
The ball dropped just short of the hastily strung-up net fence and bounced over — an honest-to-goodness stand-up double. I turned to look back at the senior, and even from a distance I could see him freeze up, nerves seizing him after one big ball put in play. Man, this guy really is identical to his manga counterpart down to the smallest detail?
I called out to him, telling him to relax, offering a word of encouragement.
"Senior, you're fine! Just throw easy! I'll cover up to about five runs, no problem!"
Choi Kang-cheol ended up surrendering about three runs in the top of the first. If I hadn't robbed a couple more hard-hit balls, it easily could've been four or worse.
Going by the manga, when he's got his head on straight and his breaking balls are biting, he's a perfectly serviceable pitcher at the high school level — but get tagged for one big hit early, and this is what happens.
Our turn at bat in the bottom of the first brought us the opposing starter: Hwang Jae-seok, a fellow first-year. I don't think this guy appears in the original — presumably he ends up at some other high school instead of Jeil.
From what I'd observed over the past few days of practice, he throws hard gas — late-120s km/h, remarkable for his age.
But his control is beyond shaky — practically thrower-tier — and his secondary pitch, a slider, is slow, flat, and all over the place. In other words, he's essentially a one-pitch fastballer, a batting-practice machine.
Apparently he harbors particular resentment toward his fellow first-year pitcher Kang Min-hyuk, and maybe that's why he looked overamped out there today. Sure enough — leadoff hitter, ball four.
I loosened up my body, tried getting properly angry for once, and started attacking the zone, and this time the pitches landed more or less where they were supposed to. The next two hitters went down on consecutive strikeouts.
And then came my at-bat. I loosened up and stepped into the left-handed box.
Time for a confession: I don't actually seem to have any particular talent for hitting. Now, you might ask — what about the little-league bombing runs, all those batting-practice machines I've been relentlessly destroying? The answer is that what I have isn't a hitting talent so much as something narrower: raw power.
I can always execute a fast, big, clean swing — the kind that would clear a fence even on a mishit. Twisting the torso to generate force is fundamentally the same motion whether you're throwing a ball or swinging a bat, so even with mediocre hitting talent, a guy with my pitching gift can manage it.
The problem is that a hitter's greatest talent isn't swing power at all. It's the eye to lay off borderline pitches and the contact ability to square up anything that comes. And I am very, very lacking in both.
Once I've made my rough guess about where a pitch is headed, my margin of error covers roughly half the strike zone.
So how have I managed to hit at all until now? It's remarkably simple. I set my own personal zone even narrower than the pitches I can actually handle — about a quarter of the strike zone — and anything that looks like it's landing inside, I yank with everything I've got.
Bad pitch recognition, you say? Shrink the zone smaller than your actual hitting range, and even a margin of error leaves you connected.
But you only pull the ball — what happens when someone paints three called strikes on the outside corner? I guarantee you: there is no pitcher, at least through the high school level, who can do that consistently without a single wasted pitch and without walking anyone.
If it were that easy, why would the guys who can't do it even in the pros still be on the first-team roster?
So, every at-bat, I crowd as close to the strike zone as I can and choke way up on the bat. Opposite-field hitting doesn't suit me, and I'm not good at it anyway.
High leg kick, and the pitch comes in. It looks a touch outside my zone. The result: called strike on the outside corner.
When I didn't so much as flinch, he seemed to rethink his locations — second pitch, a slider. It crowded in on my hands but drifted off just enough for ball one. Judging by his expression, it was meant as a brushback — a message to back off the plate.
If you're scared off by a threat that sloppy, you've already lost. I widened my eyes and waited for the next pitch.
The sign exchange with the catcher stretched out long. In a lifelong baseball fan's experience, this usually means the pitcher wants to throw something hard while the catcher asks for a bait pitch. In the end the pitcher apparently got his way — another leg kick, and he lets it fly.
The ball leaves his hand and the feel alone tells me it's the fastball. The location? He was probably aiming inside again — but my instincts are telling me this one's drifted a little toward the middle. The bat comes around.
Crack!
I admired the soaring fly ball for a moment, then took a leisurely trot around the bases, bat still in hand. In little league the fences sit a bit past 60 meters, but middle school fields stretch out to well over 70. If you can't clear that with an aluminum bat, that's the bigger problem.
Despite my two-run homer, there was no applause, no cheering. Only the head coach, who'd been watching, clapping quietly to himself. The Blue team, until just now burning with rage, looked like the wind had been knocked clean out of them after I mashed a homer in my very first at-bat.
The score was still 3 to 2 against us, but I could feel the momentum shifting. Two runs every at-bat might be a stretch, but if we just scratched out one at a time, we'd win this.
And that intuition didn't fail me. Kang-cheol senior went on to give up three more runs, but Kang Min-hyuk, who took the mound in the fourth, slammed the door scoreless until the final out. As for me, my first-inning homer turned out to be my last, but I swept up three more RBIs across my remaining plate appearances on a double, a single, and a walk.
Final score: 8 to 6. The defeated Blue team players sat slumped in little huddles, hollow-eyed and glum. Looking at them like that, I almost felt sorry for them. When you think about it, they hadn't actually done anything all that terrible.
I went over to Lee Ye-eun, who was tidying up, and passed along a quiet word.
"Go tell them they all worked hard. Cheer them up a little."
"Now you say this? You know handing someone the knife and then the bandage is the most vicious move there is, right?"
"They're teammates we'll be seeing every day from here on out."
"Ugh, fine..."
Having heard me out, Lee Ye-eun went off to whisper with the other manager, Lim Song-ah, then turned back with a bright smile and a lively voice.
"Great job out there today, everyone! Um... you, sitting over there — what's your name?"
"...Hwang Jae-seok."
"Hwang Jae-seok? You looked really hardworking out there today. I've got a friend who says she wants to date a guy who's into sports these days. Interested in a blind date?"
"A... blind date?"
"Yep. And she's pretty cute, for the record. Double eyelids, looks just like that celebrity, what's-his-name. Want me to show you a photo later?"
"Song-ah, didn't you have someone in mind among your friends too?"
"Huh? Oh! Right! One of my friends keeps saying she wants a boyfriend these days—"
The baseball club's morale, which had been face-down in the dirt, shot back up in literally the space of a heartbeat. Nobody said it out loud, but wasn't this our managers telling us, plain and simple: play hard, and we'll set you up with someone we know?
In-bound kids really do operate on a whole different level when it comes to conflict resolution. I was standing there marvelling at the sight when Lee Ye-eun mouthed the words 'keep up the good work' at me. Huh... should I take her to an amusement park or something?
As for the head coach, watching the baseball club not only resolve its conflict but come out with morale higher than before, he seemed thoroughly satisfied, nodding along again and again. And that was the face of March — the last calm stretch before the tournaments began in earnest.