Advice That Becomes Bone and Flesh
"Hello, and welcome to TwinsTV! Today we have a very special episode — drumroll please~ Joining our Twins next season, it's the rookies themselves! Please welcome Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk!"
The interviewer pressed forward with an energy that was honestly hard to keep up with.
Back in high school, the interviews were mostly handled by Seo-hee or reporters specializing in high school baseball, so I never really knew — I guess this is just what the social butterflies on a club's PR team are like.
I answered the camera with the most natural smile I could manage.
"Hello. I'm Kim Yi-seon, joining the Seoul Twins this year. It's a pleasure to meet all the fans watching on TwinsTV."
"I am Kang Min-hyuk."
"Yes! Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk — and seeing them up close, they are both positively glowing! Honestly, they could debut as idols. I'd say the next Jamsil idols are officially confirmed, wouldn't you?"
"Haha, thank you very much."
The insider-style questions and hype kept pouring out in a relentless stream. No wait — is it insider style, or M-Tube style? Either way, just being on the receiving end was enough to drain the life out of me.
Someone who didn't know any better might not notice, but even Kang Min-hyuk looked pretty worn down by it all.
"And here's the big news — both of these players have been called up to the national team! So TwinsTV is proud to present the first, exclusive! content with the players themselves~"
The reason we were filming content for the club's M-Tube channel wasn't just fan service. It was because of Seo-hee's standing order: get the rookies introduced to the club's people and pick up some national team know-how and connections.
The other draftees hadn't visited the club in person or officially met the roster before their induction ceremony — there was no real justification for making an exception for just the two of us. Unless, of course, you wrapped it up as M-Tube content.
That was the plan, anyway, but this staff member seemed dead set on squeezing every last drop out of the content, and her passion was no joke. I was sitting there wondering when this would ever end when, at long last, two men pushed open the door and walked in.
"Oh, is this our first time meeting? Good to see you. I'm Jeong Jin-haeng — I'll be managing you two going forward."
The first was Manager Jeong Jin-haeng of the Seoul Twins, the team I'd soon be joining. He'd taken over mid-season last year and had led the team through this season as well.
His record over those two years — dead last in the league last year, and this year not looking likely to escape last place either — hadn't exactly endeared him to the fans, but he wasn't a manager with a terribly bad image either.
He was famous(?) for knowing with uncanny precision which games his team was going to lose, and throwing them away quickly. You might ask how that counts as praise, but in baseball, it genuinely does.
In that spirit, the fans had hung all sorts of nicknames on him: "Bookie Manager," because he read the odds so well; "Reverse Manager" and "Bailout Manager," because the moment a loss looked likely he'd reverse course; and "Randong-nim," because he'd call up whichever random prospect happened to be on hand as a substitute player.
And the other man was —
"You know who I am. Don't need to say it."
"Hyun-seok, if I don't say it, how will the kids know who you are?"
The heart of the Seoul Twins. A former national team selection, a KBO MVP and wins leader — the ace of the Twins.
Kang Hyun-seok.
Kang Hyun-seok. Thirty-seven years old as of 2019. The number one overall pick, taken as the founding franchise's special designation in the very first draft the Seoul Twins held upon entering the first team as a professional club.
Despite that glittering résumé, his past hadn't been easy — a Tommy John injury in high school had forced him to delay his graduation by a year. And even so, the Seoul Twins had believed in him and named him their founding franchise's special designation pick.
As if to repay the organization's faith, he served as the ace of the brand-new Seoul Twins from his very first professional season.
His arm has come down a bit with age, but in his prime he threw a blazing 154 km/h fastball released from an arm angle of nearly seventy degrees, plus a slider he could command at will.
That alone tells you who the manga's Kim Yi-seon admired when he decided on his own style — the difference of pitching right-handed versus left-handed aside. He was one of those stars who represented not just the Twins but the entire league.
He even made it to Major League Baseball, where he ate up starts in a big league rotation and showed the world what he was capable of — until a final injury forced him to end the challenge. Even after that, he came home to the Twins and helped deliver a championship.
The Twins fans' love and faith in him run deep. Perhaps too deep.
Uh… yeah. Probably way too deep.
A player like that has collected plenty of nicknames over the years — the Heart of the Twins, the Franchise Ace, the Jamsil Bomber, Mr. Slider, and so on.
But on the community forums, everyone settles on exactly one: Teul-Hyunseok.
Look, sure — your late thirties is the age where a ballplayer starts thinking about retirement. But plenty of players keep going past forty, and "the age to think about retiring" is another way of saying it's still an age where lots of players are actively competing.
So age isn't the reason Kang Hyun-seok, specifically, gets tagged with "Teul." The real reason he's called that is —
"They say you kids are all cap these days? Wowie, every one of you is a genuine talent, aren'tcha?"
"Hey, Hyun-seok. Kids these days don't talk like that. What even is 'cap'? And nobody our age says 'talent' anymore either."
"Really? Then what do the kids say nowadays?"
"'Jjang,' I think…?"
"Well, close enough. Cap-jjang."
"Good grief… how is it that you're somehow decades younger than I am?"
Because the way he talks is literally an ajumma's grandfather in a ballplayer's body.
"Huh? I already did it all~ I even went to Jaewon's very first rock festival!"
"His… rock festival?"
"His first-birthday party! The doljanchi!"
He was cracking up at his own joke while the club staffer and I stood there seriously debating whether we were allowed to laugh.
The manager, for his part, was covering his face with his hand, apparently ashamed on the man's behalf.
It was the middle of the season, so most players couldn't spare the time — and since the whole point was for someone with plenty of national team experience and rock-solid connections to help us out, having Kang Hyun-seok show up like this was genuinely something to be grateful for.
The stories he was pulling out right now actually had a fair amount of useful material in them, too.
It's just that I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to react to them.
"A dol… janchi… a rock festival… Ah! A play on words. Understood."
And unlike me, Kang Min-hyuk was diligently writing each and every dad joke down in his notebook. Uh… I really don't think those need to be recorded.
Whereas I clearly couldn't cope with the awkward atmosphere, his eyes were sparkling with bright, earnest attention.
If this were the original story's Kim Yi-seon, he'd have been locked in like that too, dad jokes and all, on meeting his idol. But seeing Kang Min-hyuk react this way was a little surprising. The guy loves baseball, sure, but he doesn't root for any particular team or player.
And so, after a long, hearty lecture doled out at a ratio of roughly four dad jokes, four national-team-veteran TMI tidbits, and a grand total of two actually useful tips, he finally seemed to run out of things to say some thirty minutes in.
"If there's anything you're curious about, ask away. Just don't go taking bites out of me because your bellies are hungry for answers."
Kang Hyun-seok roared with laughter and clutched his belly at his own joke.
Utterly unmoved by any of it, Kang Min-hyuk's hand shot straight up.
"All right, all right — Min-hyuk, was it? What's on your mind, kid."
"Senior Kang Hyun-seok! Might I be permitted to see your gyroball?"
"Aw, c'mon!"
"So anyway, back then Kawaguchi… You know Kawaguchi, right? He's retired now, but there was this Japanese pitcher tearing it up back in the day. Anyway, Kawaguchi—"
Kang Hyun-seok was hopeless with modern contraptions like M-Tube or Webflix — he'd never even seen that famous documentary everyone talked about, and had only read the newspaper articles about it. But meeting the two of us in person, he'd apparently decided we were pretty entertaining kids.
Kang Min-hyuk, earnestly chasing after a gyroball that only belonged to the era when Kang Hyun-seok himself debuted, was entertaining. And Kim Yi-seon, who'd straight-up declare it nonsense to a living legend's face, was very entertaining.
No, I don't mean that as mockery — I genuinely like them. Kang Hyun-seok has a personal creed: a pitcher has to have his own particular brand of grit. His own stubborn flavor of crazy.
"—and so the pitch I learned from all that is this here gyroball. Whaddya think?"
One kid, completely unbothered that he was asking a senior who'd started just yesterday to show him a pitch right now. The other, who couldn't care less about any of it and just shook his head vigorously like the whole concept of the gyroball was wrong, heaving a sigh before he even spoke.
Weren't those two walking, talking lumps of pure grit?
Their sheer nerve put me in a wonderful mood. I was feeling good enough that a one-liner came out naturally — 'You know what a crab in the freezer is called? A lazy crab! Hahaha!' Of course, the gyroball was a little premature to teach just yet, and we'd be seeing plenty of each other going forward. Later, then.
Every single thing I said got such a fresh reaction out of them. That's the spirit! These rookies who come in these days just tiptoe around their seniors. A pitcher needs a little screw loose, I tell you.
Originally I'd planned to stop there, but looking at these adorable little runts, I changed my mind about something.
First I told the club staffer we'd wrap the footage here, then I quietly asked the manager to excuse himself for a bit. This kind of talk isn't something a manager or coach can give — it's what a senior tells his juniors.
He seemed to catch my drift, and quietly slipped away. Now, time to lightly establish some seniority over the runts.
"It's lunchtime. You two not hungry? I know a place that does it right — let's go eat. My treat, and I don't say that often!"
"Ah — my apologies, but I am currently managing my diet."
Shot down before we'd even started. Yep. These two were born pitchers, no question about it.
So after insisting the place was genuinely delicious, he'd dragged us to a kalguksu noodle house. When a rich, legendary senior says he's treating, I'd braced myself for a BBQ joint or some swanky restaurant — but it turned out to be a noodle shop where a bowl runs you a few thousand won at most.
Kang Hyun-seok slurped his kalguksu down to the very last drop of broth, then patted his belly with an expression of pure contentment. He even made off with the mint candies sitting on the counter, sweeping the whole dish into his pocket. Efficient to the end.
All through the meal he'd kept it light — the food, the neighborhood, that kind of chatter. Then, all of a sudden, his expression changed, and he said one thing.
"This national team call-up. You planning to go out there and give it absolutely everything you've got?"
This was not the same man who'd looked like a silly old geezer a moment ago. The weight of a legend settled over the table — something I hadn't felt at all while he'd spent the whole day spouting nonsense.
Kang Min-hyuk answered immediately, as if it were obvious.
"Yes."
"No. Don't. That right there is the single most important piece of know-how I'm passing on to you two today. Remember just this one thing, and you can forget every national-team tip, every veteran's personality quirk, all of it."
I wondered if he was joking and studied Kang Hyun-seok's face again — dead serious. Kang Min-hyuk, apparently displeased with that answer, voiced disagreement for the first time all day.
"I do not believe one can take the field wearing the nation's name with such a casual mindset."
"So what, if it's not the national team you just half-ass it?"
"That is not what I mean. But all the more reason to carry a greater sense of responsibility—"
"No, your point's the right one."
He crunched down on the mint candy he'd been sucking on, then fixed Kang Min-hyuk with a sharp glare.
"Is the national team your employer? Do they cut your paycheck? A ballplayer, kid, is an independent business owner — every single one of us. We're contract workers who sign with a team in exchange for providing a service called baseball."
In other words: you can't neglect the league games for the sake of the national team, either.
I was starting to get a feel for where this was going.
"Now, representing your country — that matters, obviously. But some guys get crushed under all that weight and go all-in on the national team. Even the ones who don't push at least one step harder than they should.
Did it pay off for them? Honestly, I don't think so. But even grant that it did — those guys? Most of them fall apart the second the season starts and can't tell up from down."
This time, Kang Hyun-seok turned to me instead of Kang Min-hyuk as he kept going.
"Right, Yi-seon. From what I've seen, you know your English and you've got some book smarts. So you know what the Americans call baseball, don't you?"
There were plenty of ways to answer — America's national pastime, the first professional sport, the American myth. But given the flow of the conversation, the phrase he wanted was this one.
"Everyday sport."
"That's it. Baseball is a sport you play every single day. There's no game, no single day, that doesn't matter. But if you empty the tank every single time, no human body can hold up."
Even without going as far as Major League Baseball and its 162-game season, the KBO in this world plays 156 games a year. Stack a postseason on top of that — plus a national team call-up like this one — and the number of games you have to play only keeps climbing.
"And it's not just about the national team. Your first game in the first team. Your first start. A chance you haven't had in ages. A game the team's whole season hangs on. There's always some guy who wants to grind his body into dust to win games like those. I get the feeling, believe me. But does baseball end that day? You got no games tomorrow, next month, next year?"
This was the advice a veteran who'd lived seventeen years as a professional ballplayer left for a pair of hot-blooded rookies. Kang Min-hyuk sat there quietly organizing his thoughts, visibly struck by how brutally practical it all was.
"So wipe the words 'give it your all' and 'work hard' right out of a pro ballplayer's head. What a professional needs, always, is a different word: normal. Business as usual."
Having said his piece, he snapped right back into his usual old-man persona.
"Aish, damn it, this isn't the kind of thing I hand out to just anybody. Look — the guys with no future, I tell them to bust their asses and crap blood on that mound even if it kills 'em. I'm saying this to you two because you're the kind of kids who'll be great even if you pace yourselves."
So he'd delivered the message he'd absolutely needed to give — but he couldn't quite be sure the kids had actually absorbed it.
The one called Kim Yi-seon had the air of a kid who'd known what he wanted to say all along. As for the earnest-looking one, Kang Min-hyuk — he had a face worth its price, sure, but he still didn't look completely convinced.
Still, somebody had to tell them this stuff. Left alone, these two seemed like exactly the type to grind themselves into the ground, and everyone around them — the fans, the staff, everyone — did nothing but shout try harder.
The games are long. The season is longer. And a career is longer still. Baseball isn't a sport where one moment of reckless overexertion produces results.
"So — did you get everything you wanted to say out of your system?"
"Will you be visiting us again?"
After sending the runts off and turning to head home himself, the manager appeared out of nowhere on the street and struck up a conversation. How on earth had he known where to find them?
Truly, the entire organization coddled those runts like precious treasures. Even he, he noted, had never been treated this well.
"I said everything I had to say. Though honestly, coming from a towering great senior like me, they didn't exactly give off the vibe that it landed…"
"Hyun-seok. And you're saying that? The single most stubborn rookie this organization ever drafted."
Back in high school, he'd pushed himself to the breaking point chasing a national championship, only to need Tommy John surgery in his second year. After turning pro, he'd thrown a tantrum insisting he could keep pitching through his debut season, ground out a full 190 innings, and promptly collapsed in year two.
Naturally — it's always the worst student in class lecturing his own kids to study, isn't it?