Time to Pull Myself Together

May, that disaster of a month, slipped away before I noticed, and early June had arrived. Hanbat Baseball Stadium.

Spectators were now allowed in, capped at ten percent of full capacity, and while organized chanting was still off-limits, applause at least was permitted — so a faint heartbeat of professional sports was finally stirring back to life.

And on a day like that, I sit here meekly in the players' lounge.

"Hey, rookie. That's what I've been telling you. You gotta learn how to get angry, too."

"Shut it, Walker."

Walker has apparently gotten comfortable enough with the team to go around striking up conversation with everyone. Even so, I'm still the one he latches onto most.

But whether he's oblivious or doing it on purpose, he'd latched onto the very starter who'd just been yanked from the game, too.

"Phew. Applying the lesson the second I teach it — what a genius. Alright, I'll go fetch the captain."

Still, one word from me and he backs off. Look at him — quietly shuffling out of the lounge even now.

With Walker gone, silence settles over the room.

I lift my head toward the TV broadcasting the game.

Still the fifth inning. No further runs allowed since.

Which is another way of saying I'd gotten shelled for four runs in four innings and pulled from the game.

The lounge door bangs open — Kang Hyun-seok sunbae.

"Hey, runt. Still breathing?"

"Yes, sir. Days like this happen."

"They do. Days like this happen. But word around here is this is the first time you've ever taken a beating this bad?"

It's true. Forget high school — even after moving up to the pro team, four runs was a first. And in four innings, no less.

"Couldn't be helped. The Bears hitters were reading me like an open book today. My changeup wasn't listening to me either."

"Fair enough. Some days the ball does exactly what you want, and some days the other team swings like they're reading your mind. Happens."

He nods along, exaggeratedly — then stops mid-nod, looks at me, and grins.

"But it still pisses you off, doesn't it. Hm? And here I thought our runt was a damn ice prince — turns out this part of him is human after all. Yeah? Those bastards banging out your pitches on pure dumb luck, that feels like shit, right? And you want to make that luck run dry. Don't you."

"Oppa. They say the big shopping mall near here is reopening soon. Would you come with us?"

"Sure. There's the card Seo-hee gave me, isn't there? Money like that exists to be spent on things like this."

I come home from my place to find the two of them so conspicuously trying to change the subject. As if they needed to walk on eggshells around me.

"Alright, let's go. What day works?"

"Whenever's convenient for you. It's not like we have anything going on."

"That's right. School's still all remote classes."

It wasn't that I wanted to go and they were ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠humoring me — the outing was entirely their idea, so refusing would've been petty. We decided to just go.

Truthfully, given the COVID risk, the smartest move would've been avoiding places like that altogether. But my head was a tangled mess.

And I hated watching the two of them fidget like that.

"So, Min-ah. Is the prep going well?"

"Yes. Mother has agreed, so I plan to move forward quickly."

There — I steered the conversation elsewhere. With the pandemic looking like it would drag on, Min-ah had decided that rather than pointlessly grinding through the rest of high school, she'd take the qualification exam early and enter university ahead of schedule.

Unlike my thoroughly middling brain, Min-ah is genuinely brilliant — at this rate she could realistically set her sights on Seoul National University, couldn't she? What a contrast with her dear oppa, Kang Min-hyuk. Did the entire intelligence gene pool get funneled into her?

Come to think of it, I wondered whether I should invite Kang Min-hyuk and his girlfriends along too. I pulled out my phone to text him.

And a headline on my news app caught in my throat.

Teams and players alike all have their cycles — rising and falling is just how it goes. And yet here they go again with the slump talk.

The moment my face scrunched up at my phone, Ye-eun snatched it right out of my hand.

"Don't let it get to you. It's all a load of crap."

I know it's crap.

But Ye-eun — and Min-ah too, mind you — came swarming over like I was some wounded baby deer, and I had no words left.

"Don't be too upset about it."

"That's right. Your talent is proven, oppa. Even Hall of Fame pitchers have days where the runs come in bunches."

I'm telling you I'm fine, though. The veterans, Seo-hee, and now these two on top of it — everyone's coddling me like I'm gravely wounded or seething with rage. It's overkill, I'm saying.

Still, if I snapped at them here, the two of them would only worry more, so I sat there quietly. THIS is the actual stress.

"Kang Min-hyuk. You too?"

"Regarding what, exactly?"

"Your girlfriends swarming you."

Back at the team dorm, at the practice facility. By my usual routine this would be rest hours, but sleep wasn't coming tonight, so I'd come out to throw a little and coax it along.

Kang Min-hyuk was there too, so the two of us were playing catch.

"Hold on — how would I... If you say 'you too,' then you're in a similar situation, Kim Yi-seon?"

"Yeah."

So his camp was in chaos too. Well, it figured — Lim Song-ah's overprotectiveness, if anything, ran hotter than Ye-eun's. And Jung Hyun-ah sunbae and Kim Se-yeon were hardly the emotionally restrained types either.

I heaved the ball harder than necessary and asked him.

"So what are you going to do?"

"For now, we've agreed to go to that shopping mall you mentioned. Spending time together should help a little."

Right. And what exactly does this guy know about romance that I don't? His idea is barely a step beyond mine. Wasted my breath asking him.

"People have off days. I don't get why everyone makes such a spectacle of it."

The root cause wasn't romance anyway. Huh? The man himself brushes past it this naturally — so why is everyone around him losing their minds?

Min-hyuk listens quietly all the way through, and the moment I finish, he snaps my own pitch back at me with a sweeper.

"Hey! I'll let the underhand stuff slide during catch, but I told you not to throw sweepers!"

"And there you go about the sweeper again... Never mind. That isn't the point."

Then, wearing a faintly sulky expression, Kang Min-hyuk drops a bombshell on me.

"Everyone making a spectacle? Isn't that only natural. It's the first time the great Kim Yi-seon has ever looked... unsteady."

"Me? Unsteady?"

What is this now—

"Hey, when have I ever been unsteady?"

"Am I wrong? The guy who used to treat a catcher's signs as mere suggestions and only opened a scouting report to pick his lefty-righty matchups is suddenly asking the catcher's opinion mid-game and poring over hitter data?"

...Isn't that just a normal baseball player, though? What exactly was my image before, that this counts as nonsense?

"Well, you're one to talk, Kang Min-hyuk — sounds like you're scared out of your damn mind too. Threw out all that gyroball fairy-tale garbage you used to babble about, and now you're glued to Dr. Cho and the analytics team."

For all the help he'd gotten from Dr. Cho, for all he'd personally witnessed the power of scientific baseball, Min-hyuk had always just done the bare minimum he was told — the guy couldn't retain a single page of theory no matter how it was drilled into him.

And that guy is now the one seeking advice from data analysts and studying theory on his own? Give me a break.

"...Isn't studying the game normal for a professional?"

"This, from Kang Min-hyuk?"

What started as conversation ended in mutual glaring and bickering. The mood thoroughly soured, we gave up on catch and tramped back to our rooms.

Even out in the community, whispers of a Kim Yi-seon–Kang Min-hyuk crisis had begun to smolder. It wasn't the mainstream take yet — but still.

First, the Seoul Twins fans:

The Seoul Twins fans were genuinely worried. The win rate had sagged a bit since June rolled around, but the team still sat third in the Southern Division — and after two years of wallpapering the cellar, the Twins' rebound had compressed the gaps between clubs so much that even first place wasn't far off.

In that context, the Wirye Jeil High one-two punch — the engine of that opening-month whirlwind — inspired gratitude in equal measure with worry, honestly speaking.

Especially for the fans who'd caught every single game live and catalogued every pitch, their flaws were plain to see.

Of course, as the other fans kept saying, it was all bellyaching. Scrutinize all you want — both men's ERAs still sat in the low threes, a small sample barely a month into the season, and they were eating innings just fine.

Take away the one game where everything blew up at once, and the numbers looked even better — which, to rival fans (the Kaesong Royals faithful above all), made them gaslighting deceivers who deserved to be put down.

And the second group to pour fuel on the fire was the individual fans who'd come to baseball through Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk.

Granted, the two of them did have visible flaws — but this was their debut season, their first year. With flaws and all, they were performing at this level, so the prevailing argument ran: is there really any reason to nitpick?

The debate quickly caught fire instead over our precious kids pitching their hearts out while getting carried by a dogshit lineup that couldn't win them a single game — at which point fans of the other eleven clubs put aside their differences, joined hands, and commenced a collective rolling pinning of everyone involved.

Both sides had their own logic, and both worried about Kim Yi-seon and Kang Min-hyuk in equal measure — so they argued passionately, chests full of grievance. Then the anti-fans who'd never much liked the two of them quietly pulled up a chair and added their ladle to the pot, and fan opinion itself went flowing off into pure, unfiltered chaos.

"Hey! Walker! How is it this bastard's never around when I actually need him."

Normally not even the community's worst bad-faith takes could raise a welt on the man — but genuine, earnest concern, it seemed, landed differently.

My mood was foul. The community, the media, everyone around me — all of it, all of it about worrying over me. Open mockery or a good stream of insults I could handle.

So I went looking for Walker — the man who'd spent all day poking at me about learning to get angry — meaning to test that anger out. And he was nowhere to be found.

I turned the place over top to bottom; he'd clearly slipped off somewhere unseen, and the game was over anyway, so I had to head back to the reserve-team dorm like a good boy.

I couldn't see the girlfriends like this. They'd caught even the faintest flicker of irritation on me before — how would they react to the state I was in now?

Twisting inside, I gulped down water straight from the bottle. Maybe I really should just smash everything to pieces, Matt-style.

And right as I was chewing on that thought, someone spoke to me — someone unexpected.

"In the next game, we'll be pitching together again. I've prepared the scouting data and projected starting lineup for that day — read them. We'll go over the rest in the meeting the day before the game."

It was Min-wan sunbae. Seok-hyun sunbae, the original second-ranked catcher, had been slowly working his way back from injury too — was sunbae still the backup, then?

Not a trace of emotion, blunt as a printed memo, he handed over the stack of papers and turned to leave on the spot.

And watching his back, I did something a little impulsive.

"Min-young sunbae!"

"It's Bang Min-soo."

"Ah. Anyway, Min-soo sunbae! Could we have a talk?"

"A talk?"

"Yes."

If I'd learned anything from the whole business with the foreign pitchers, it was that a conversation could resolve far more than you'd expect.

That expressionless face gave nothing away as to whether he was pleased or not. But he'd always answered readily when spoken to, so this was probably an affirmative.

Sure enough, without a word he left the seat beside him open on the team bus, and I plopped down and launched into the question I'd been rehearsing.

"So, um — sunbae, you've caught my pitches before."

"I have."

"Then lately my form has bent a little from where it started — what do you think the problem is?"

To turn this disgusting situation around, the surest fix was for me to return to the game-dominating ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠pitcher I'd been on opening day. Simple as that.

And a catcher who'd caught my pitches for an entire game — and who grinded away at his own hitting — was the single best person to advise a pitcher. So there was no reason not to ask Bang Min— sunbae.

Truthfully, I'd secretly run this question past the other pitching-group seniors too. Kang Hyun-seok sunbae had given me the magnificently textbook answer that you have to feel it out with your own body, and the Olympus Trio had each just said they didn't know. Said that if it were them, they'd have worked on throwing harder — but velocity wasn't exactly my problem, was it.

Min-jung sunbae, who always had an instant answer for everything, took an unusually long time to think.

Then came the reply — one I'd been circling in my own head for days, but never expected out of him.

"I could talk about velocity or pitch selection, but the biggest problem is that your changeup has broken down. By the numbers, up through your second year of high school, the gap between your four-seam and changeup averaged around 13 kilometers an hour. Now it's 8. On bad days, not even 5."

The man was so clinical he'd apparently dug into my high school records. Surprise, surprise. He knows this?

"The movement seems to have grown a little... but the break itself barely differs, so the league's top-tier hitters can force contact against it if they put their minds to it. So, call it a changeup all you like — right now you're a two-pitch pitcher. Four-seam and sinker."

Dead center. That was exactly what I'd been agonizing over since spring camp, consulting Dr. Cho and the coaches, trying to correct. I'd sensed something was off roughly since the national team days, but I had no idea how to actually fix it.

"Min-sung sunbae. Then is there, by any chance, a solution..."

"It's Min-soo."

"Yes. Min-soo sunbae."

Min-baek sunbae spoke in the same unruffled tone as ever. Then, in exactly the same unruffled tone, he delivered his answer on the spot.

"From now on, throw something other than the changeup."

"No, I mean — but how do I..."

Like I'd be going through all this hell because I didn't know that much.