National Team Debut (1)

"Did you remember to say thank you to him?"

"Of course I did. What kind of shameless person do you take me for?"

That was Ye-eun's response — like she couldn't trust me at all. Honestly, it stung. Where else would you find a rookie who got along with the veterans as well as I did?

"Got it. See you tomorrow, then."

"Ye-eun. Are you really sure it's fine to skip the CSAT?"

The college entrance exam was only two days away. And yet Ye-eun was in Japan. Even now, she was out of the team lodging, on the phone with me.

Originally she'd planned to stay back in Korea — if only to pick up her exam admission ticket and submit at least one college application — but at the last minute she suddenly changed her mind and announced she was coming to Japan, which turned finding her a plane ticket into a scramble. Thank goodness Si-hwan hyung stepped in to help.

And honestly, I could more or less understand why she'd changed her mind so abruptly.

I'd assumed my national team debut would come as a modest one- or two-inning relief appearance, and I could have lived with that. But hearing that I'd be starting? There was no way not to worry.

"Your husband's national team debut matters more than some exam ticket. Which one's actually more important here?"

But still. It was the CSAT. Ye-eun said it so lightly, yet the guilt wouldn't leave me.

"You loved the campus tours, remember? You were so excited about what you'd do with that admission ticket."

Ye-eun had her own dreams about college life too. Sure, she'd let her studies slip a bit lately, but if she actually sat the exam, she could comfortably get into a decent four-year university in the capital region.

Ye-eun pondered for a moment, then asked me with a mischievous lilt in her voice.

"Then it's fine if I go to college while you're off playing baseball, right?"

"Obviously. I can look after myself. Stop worrying about me and go do what you want."

That was exactly why I'd asked Si-hwan hyung for help — I was holding a plane ticket for tomorrow in my pocket right now. If Ye-eun changed her mind even at this late hour and decided to take the exam, I could send her home immediately.

But contrary to all my agonizing, Ye-eun just let out a low, humming hmph and said something I never saw coming.

"Really? Then I suppose it's fine if the upperclassmen at the freshman orientation stare at me like a pack of creeps?"

"Huh?"

"It'll be fine if they cling to me at the membership training retreat pushing drinking games on me, and it'll be fine when they offer me old exam files and ask me to grab a meal, right?"

Her question dripped with playful teasing. I knew it was a joke — but it wasn't a joke I could just laugh off.

"And I suppose it won't be a problem when I tell them I have a boyfriend — no, a husband — and they just snicker behind my back going, 'so what, the goalkeeper means the ball can't go in?'"

"Yah. Lee Ye-eun."

I knew she was joking, but the heat shot straight to my head. If I weren't cooped up in the national team lodging, I'd have chased her down right that second and gagged that mouth of hers with my own hands.

"Don't like it? Then I guess Lee Ye-eun just shouldn't go to college at all and should quietly marry Kim Yi-seon and become a housewife. Right? Right?"

"...Lee Ye-eun. Wait for me after the game."

Right now, the mood in the Korean national team camp was good and not good at the same time. If that sounded contradictory, it was because good news and bad news had piled up on top of each other — overall, the atmosphere was great, but for a handful of players, it most decidedly was not.

The reason for the good mood was painfully obvious.

We'd won all three of our preliminary games. And not just any three games — against the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, the very teams everyone had flagged as the toughest in our group.

Of the opponents left, the Netherlands and Canada were hardly pushovers either, but compared to the other three, you could call them relatively manageable.

So what was the bad news souring the mood?

It was because of the starting rotation the manager had so boldly declared.

"...Therefore, Game 4 is scheduled as a 1+1 start between Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk. The exact usage may shift somewhat depending on how the game unfolds that day, but we have no intention of changing the basic plan. That is all."

"Seoul Sports! We have a follow-up question!"

"Korea Daily with a question as well!"

"We will not be taking further questions."

The press conference room at that moment had been close to pandemonium. Sure, both of us had started in the evaluation games — but those were evaluation games, nothing more.

People had assumed the club stuff was good enough that the team would use the surprise factor and slot us into the bullpen. Instead, we sat out three straight games and were suddenly thrust into a 1+1 start in Game 4 of the actual preliminaries?

The unrest spread through the inside of the team just as much as the outside.

"Hey, Super Round qualification's already locked up anyway. This is a breather game — the manager's just letting the kids get their feet wet. So square those shoulders up! He's keeping them fresh because he plans to use them in the games that actually matter."

"...You really think so?"

That exchange was between Dong-ho hyung, the national team's resident mood-maker, and Yoon Young-il, the veteran starter from the Incheon Mariners.

"Eh, the manager knows what he's doing. Don't read too much into it. Besides, I already threw in the USA game. If you've thrown even one inning, resting up is the right call."

Speaking with an air of settled resignation from the other side of the room was Oh Ju-hyun of the Royals.

Beyond them, the pitchers who'd been penciled in as alternative starters — and everyone close to them — were collectively in a sour mood.

When the national team roster was announced, the brass had paid lip service: it's infinite competition, no roles have been decided yet. But anyone with eyes could see how the picture would shake out. Once you excluded the players who'd gone stateside and the starters lost to injury or a down season, fielding a solid five-man rotation was never realistic to begin with.

Which meant that calling up this many guys who served as their clubs' number-one or number-two domestic starters was effectively an announcement: one of you will be given a start.

So they'd been burning with ambition, dreaming of that most honorable of posts — a national team starting job. And then two kids who'd just strolled in the door had snatched it away.

Yes, the pros were a place where you proved yourself with skill and nothing else. But the veterans were stewing in gloom and quiet fury at the thought of being passed over by a rookie who hadn't shown them a single thing yet.

Lee Si-hwan, watching all of this unfold firsthand, had sirens blaring in his skull.

Was he annoyed and bitter that the rookie had claimed a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠starting spot? Sure. But national team players were all professionals. They weren't petty enough men to torment a kid over something like this.

But what if that rookie kid was something else entirely?

Speak of the tiger and it appears — there was Kim Yi-seon, sauntering lazily out toward the hotel lobby. In the distance, he could see Kang Min-hyuk had come out too, running through his routine checks.

"Si-hwan hyung."

It had been only a few days since he'd started talking to this infuriatingly smooth junior as hyung and dongsaeng. He'd handed over a rush-ordered plane ticket and a hotel room, and things had snowballed from there.

At the time, he'd assumed it was the kid's parents flying in after hearing about the starting assignment, and he'd felt a swell of pride helping out. Then he found out it was the kid's girlfriend. This absolute lunatic.

Ever since that incident in the past, regulations on outside activity during national team duty had tightened considerably. In that climate, inviting your girlfriend over was not going to sound good in the veterans' ears. And that kid was already in the public's bad graces at the moment, no less?

For that junior's sake, Si-hwan spent his days plugging every leak before word could spread, and today, once again, his insides were burning away. At this rate, he seemed to be fretting harder over it than the kid himself.

But it was this brat's next sentence that nearly broke him.

"Is there any way I could sneak over to that hotel tonight?"

"Do you want to die by my hand?"

November 13th. The day Korea and Canada faced off. The game was being held at the Tokyo Dome.

"Kim Yi-seon. Why do you look like you're at a funeral first thing in the morning?"

Today's starter was me, with Kang Min-hyuk slated ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to come in right behind me. The moment I began my warm-up with an impressively professional air, Min-hyuk came over and struck up conversation for no good reason.

Some part of me wanted to snap back with something like yeah, you're real irritating, you know that? but I just waved a hand as if it were nothing and refocused on stretching.

Yet even at my clear signal to get lost, he didn't budge an inch. He frowned, and then abruptly began deducing out loud.

"If you're this upset, it can't be the team or the press... Min-ah called you recently, so it's probably not her... Did something happen with Lee Ye-eun?"

This is the problem with knowing people a long time. They learn to read you.

I answered curtly.

"It's nothing."

And it really was nothing. Ye-eun pulled this kind of stunt all the time.

Whenever some guy approached her, or she dressed a little too boldly and drew stares, all it took was one word from me before she'd taunt me in that needling tone — oh? Are you jealous?

Before we were dating, I'd denied it. After we got together, I owned up to it outright — yeah, I'm jealous, so stay away from other guys — and issued my warnings. But either way, Ye-eun lived for my reactions.

And every single time, it drove me up the wall. Except — one word from me, and she'd stop talking to that guy entirely and start avoiding him, or only wear the outfit I'd flagged when the two of us were alone, or layer something over it. So I was holding out.

...Truthfully, it wasn't just suppression. Watching her like that gave me a satisfaction I couldn't quite put into words, too.

Anyway, that was our couple's established pattern. It genuinely was nothing.

"Whoa! What the heck, Yi-seon! That ball is no joke today!"

Maybe I'd muscled up so much that command had abandoned me — the pitch sailed long and high. The national team catcher receiving it just beamed and said I was in great form, but this is what happens when a pitcher fully gives up on locating: the velocity spikes.

Fine. Let me be honest with myself. Pattern or no pattern, this time I'd been genuinely, thoroughly needled.

I'd done the college thing in my past life. I'd seen plenty of those repulsive campus parasites in all their glory. Even if Ye-eun went to college, she wouldn't spare those bastards a single glance — but just imagining them orbiting anywhere near her made my skin crawl.

In a bid to vent some of it, I'd even tried sneaking a preview of Ye-eun's face — and got chewed out by Si-hwan hyung for it. I'd thought he was a good man. A poor junior asks for one little favor and you can't grant it?

Having barely soothed that seething fury overnight, I was now preparing to take the mound, and Sung Yeon-joon hyung's final briefing on the opposing hitters drifted into my ear.

"Let's go over it once more. Their leadoff hitter, Brandon Tyler. Right-handed. In the American college leagues—"

"College leagues, you say?"

"Yeah, college. In the college leagues—"

I honestly can't remember the rest. I was never the type to obsess over hitter scouting anyway.

Only one word stuck: college.

Brandon Tyler. A prospect good enough to draw a ninth-round draft pick out of a Major League club straight out of high school.

But as many such players do, he'd refused to swallow that awkward number — nine — and chose college instead.

Why go pro in a low round when you could polish your game at university and get drafted higher? For that one reason, he was grinding away in the college leagues, playing for exactly zero dollars.

Which was precisely why the Asian pitcher standing on the mound right now was a thorn in Tyler's side.

Eighteen, was it? He knew the kid had already been offered astronomical signing bonuses by the Dodgers and other major clubs. He knew he'd been rated a top prospect by BA, by Pipeline, by all of them.

In a way, they weren't so different. Hadn't Tyler himself come all the way to this fringe international tournament just to catch the clubs' attention?

But his own motives were purely about impressing big-league eyes. Even though the Dodgers had been so devoted to him personally that they'd traded away a prospect to clear the path and prepare his signing bonus — and he'd still scurried back home like a coward, hiding in his own country's league.

It disgusted him. To receive an offer Tyler himself had never gotten — and never would — and then choose some soft Asian league instead?

The calculation that beating this guy down would drive his own stock price even higher, fused with all that festering inferiority, lit a fierce fighting spirit inside Brandon Tyler.

He'd always crowded the strike zone, but this time he edged in until it was practically absurd.

"Hey! Back!"

The Asian catcher barked at him in a strange accent, but Tyler merely shrugged, ignored him, and made eye contact with the umpire alone. The ump, apparently, still considered it a gray area.

He squared into his stance, bold and unbothered. A hundred-mile four-seamer? Bring it. Anytime.

Then their eyes met. Wasn't this kid's routine supposed to be a staring contest with the hitter? Fine. Tyler locked in with the absolute will not to blink first.

The staredown stretched on far longer than it felt like it should — and then ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the first pitch came screaming in.

I was already in a foul mood, and their leadoff hitter was grating on me from the very first batter. Wasn't that guy the only college kid on the Canadian roster?

In a sense, we were both amateurs who'd come to an international tournament, so I might have felt some kinship — but his timing was atrocious. College kid? I just didn't like him. Simple as that.

Worse, it seemed the senior had pulled some strings for a VIP seat, because parked in the catcher-side seats right behind him was Ye-eun.

The guy already looked like some American football quarterback caddie-cast as the villain of a teen drama, and now he kept flashing into view right beside Ye-eun, which made him even more intolerable.

But anger doesn't do much for your baseball. This was a sport where keeping your equilibrium was everything. So calm down, I told myself. Settle it.

"Hey! Back!"

Right at that moment, that gravelly English reached me. It was Sung Yeon-joon hyung, protesting that the batter was standing far too close and needed to step back.

Brandon Tyler just shrugged his shoulders and stayed exactly where he was. Oh, I was going to enjoy dealing with this punk.

"Play ball!"

The game began with their leadoff man stepping into the box — where, to put it mildly, his forearm was practically dangling over the strike zone.

And in that situation, Sung Yeon-joon hyung was calling for a first-pitch fastball down in the zone. The scouting said the kid was weak down there.

But you know what? I didn't like it.

My head shook side to side almost on its own.

Don Drysdale, the legendary Dodgers pitcher, once left behind these words: if a batter crowds the plate, you knock him down — even if that batter happens to be your own grandmother.

I signaled to my catcher for a fastball in off the hands. Sung Yeon-joon hyung visibly faltered.

Well, of course he did — in all our pitch sessions, I'd never once asked for an inside sign. My entire career to this point had been two-zone pitching, high and low. Inside and away? I'd almost never thrown those locations deliberately.

But I wanted it inside. There's a first time for everything. Everybody's got a first, don't they?

I came set immediately.

This should go without saying, but I had absolutely no intention of hitting him. I wasn't a murderer, and what reason would I have to do that over a sour mood?

It was a big tournament and a crucial first pitch, that was all — I figured I'd sacrifice a sliver of command and just let it fly. And sure, my side-to-side command was shaky, so the ball might drift in and clip him... well, wasn't dodging that entirely his own problem? As long as he kept a reasonable safety margin from the strike zone, there'd be no issue at all.

I drew my shoulder blades back. Normally I kept about ten percent in reserve for the sake of balance, but I threw that caution out and committed everything.

The ball left a slightly more vicious arm swing than usual—

WHACK—!!

"Hittt by the pitch!"

Hm...

Thankfully my height command — the up-and-down — held true, but the horizontal command drifted a touch. Nothing more than a shame, really.

Kim Yi-seon, that absolute lunatic.

Watching his junior stroll back in after finishing the inning, Lee Si-hwan realized — yet again — that this kid was no ordinary human being.

What pitcher on God's green earth throws a beanball at the first batter of the game — on his senior national team debut, his adult baseball debut, no less?

To the casual eye it might have passed as a command meltdown, but Si-hwan had felt it in his gut. The fact that the kid went on to throw a spotless inning afterward said as much — and so did the way he'd been drilling holes through that batter's thigh with his stare before ever releasing the ball. Not noticing that would have been stranger.

He sprinted over to Kim Yi-seon as fast as his legs would carry him.

"Yi-seon...! Did you do that on purpo—"

"LEE SI-HWAN! What exactly are you trying to say to your starting pitcher?!"

A thunderous roar cut through the dugout. It was Sung Yeon-joon hyung.

"On purpose? Did you not see that punk sneering at me when I told him to back off? Our rookie took the banner and made a statement, that's all. Do you not know that winning the battle of momentum is everything at an international tournament?!"

Then he smacked Kim Yi-seon shamelessly on the back and bellowed loud enough for the whole dugout to hear.

"Myeong-seok! You get ready to answer back if they retaliate. Everyone else, have your gear for a bench-clearer ready. Our rookie's standing up for himself — let's not have the veterans be the embarrassment here. Got it?"

The other national team players, who'd been quietly unsure whether that first pitch had been intentional, flipped wholesale — suddenly it didn't matter one way or the other.

After shooing Kim Yi-seon off to the preparation room to rest, Sung Yeon-joon hyung leaned in close and murmured quietly to Lee Si-hwan.

"...That kid is not a normal brand of crazy. Follow him around on the down-low and keep an eye on him."

"Sorry — what?"

"This kind of duty belongs to the senior-most junior, that's the rule. And you're the closest to Yi-seon, aren't you?"

Lee Si-hwan drafted a few dozen rebuttals in his head — and then simply swallowed them all.

Apparently, his only national team junior was Kang Min-hyuk.