Coming Into His Own
The bat met the ball with a sound that was neither a dull thud nor a clean crack, and the ball climbed toward the left-field wall.
Seoul Dragons2 : 4Daegu Tigers
"Strike three!"
I shook off the shock of giving up my first run and closed out the bottom of the eighth with a strikeout. My scoreless streak had ended at 12.1 innings.
"Nice pitch."
"...The ball was a little high."
"Don't worry about it. That wasn't a well-hit ball. If you let homers like that get in your head, you won't survive a road trip to Daegu."
"Understood."
Park Ujin was trying to talk me down. I'd only ever heard about them, but actually surrendering a Daegu Stadium special left me pretty stunned myself.
"Hey. Were you trying to go the whole season without giving up a run?"
This time it was Kim Junsu, calling over from the dugout.
"Haha. Of course not."
"Then act like it. We'll flip this game for you."
Gang Daeho was the captain, but the job of coming in hot and lighting a fire under people belonged to Kim Junsu.
The comeback, of course, never came. I hadn't expected it to.
The Tigers' closer was Yun Seunghyeon. He would turn forty any day now, but he was, by every measure that mattered, the greatest closer the league had ever produced. One of the rare Korean players who had actually held his own in the majors — and even now, at this stage of his career, he was still the undisputed number-one closer in the game.
True to form, Yun Seunghyeon wiped us out in the top of the ninth, and we headed back to the team hotel.
I showered at the hotel and went straight to bed. I'd steeled myself for it, but a schedule that had you bouncing from city to city all year was still a genuine hassle. At least this was Korea. How did major leaguers hop all over that enormous country?
What made the restlessness worse than it needed to be was the fact that we were sitting on a three-game losing streak. Twenty-four games, fourteen wins, ten losses — not a bad place to be this early in the season, honestly, except the skid had cost us first place.
And today we had sent our number-two starter out against the eighth-place Tigers and lost. That made it sting even more.
I'm bored.
I didn't think sleep was coming anytime soon, so I pulled up YouTube to kill the quiet. Ever since Song Hyeonji and I had started talking, I found myself looking up her videos every now and then.
Just like she'd said she would, she had worn nothing but a jersey with my name on it in every ballpark vlog since we'd met. There wasn't exactly a breakout star among the Dragons' existing roster this season, so I doubted anyone watching thought it looked strange.
The comments mentioned me a lot, that much was obvious. Though most of them were just about how pretty she was, or how cute.
It wasn't only her channel. Every so often I searched my own name too.
All of that was fine. I still couldn't bring myself to read the comments on the official channel, though. Too embarrassing.
I'd already watched all of it... Should I text Yu Suhyeon? Never mind. If she didn't message first at this hour, it meant she was on night shift.
Huh?
While I was still turning it over, a text came in from Song Hyeonji.
Song Hyeonji and I hadn't seen each other in person since that first meeting, but texting back and forth had brought us reasonably close. She seemed to have long since forgotten about all that talk of me helping with her channel.
Setting it up had been easier than I'd expected.
A date with a college freshman... Song Hyeonji was a genuinely great girl in her own right, but that was another point in her favor.
Song Hyeonji was supposed to go to bed early, the way she always did, so she could actually enjoy her weekend. She couldn't sleep a wink.
The moment she locked in the plans with Lee Junseong, she unilaterally blew off a Monday lunch with a friend. Then, trying to calm the hammering in her chest, she opened YouTube.
Whenever Lee Junseong showed up on the Seoul Dragons' official channel, the comment section filled up with young women. Even fans of other teams were starting to take an interest. Unless a player was a genuine jerk, someone who debuted early and produced like this tended to win people over across the league.
Ugh, but why doesn't anyone just ask if he has a girlfriend...
Nothing in Lee Junseong's texts confirmed whether he was seeing anyone. He certainly didn't seem like he had a girlfriend — but Song Hyeonji couldn't be sure, and that little sliver of doubt sat uneasily in her chest.
He is interested in me, right? Or is he not? Is he just being nice because he's grateful? No — he asked me out this time.
She set her phone down, pressed her hands to her cheeks, and lay back on the bed.
Song Hyeonji didn't just watch baseball games. She watched the lifestyle shows too, the ones that followed players through their everyday lives. Those programs always made room for the wives, and she had fallen into those stories without even meaning to.
The couple that grinded through the minors together and loved each other just the same after they reached the majors. The couple that started dating at the very beginning of a career and went all the way to marriage. The stories Song Hyeonji loved were never the ones about a baseball star paired with some famous woman. They were the romantic ones. The ones like that.
And a story like that might be about to unfold for her. The other person in it was a rookie already being called generational — tall, and honestly pretty handsome besides. Ever since that first meeting, Song Hyeonji had found it hard to focus on her own work.
She knew it was childish, but watching female fans show interest in him on social media gave her a quiet little rush of superiority. No matter how hard she looked, she couldn't find a single story of anyone who had even met Lee Junseong, let alone someone who had any kind of personal connection with him.
And the Lee Junseong she had seen with her own eyes was not a man who bounced from one woman to another. He had that wholesome, unguarded quality of a young athlete, and she liked that about him.
I wish the weekend would just hurry up and end...
Song Hyeonji closed her eyes, already living in Monday afternoon.
"Hah... it's just not working."
"We're winning. Don't beat yourself up."
Kim Junhyeok came back to the dugout after the inning with his head down.
I had never put much stock in the idea that some pitchers had ice in their veins and others folded. What mattered was stuff, that day's condition, and how well the team had done its homework.
Our Kim Junhyeok, though, had a habit of punching holes in that theory.
For some reason he pitched just fine when nobody was paying attention, then came apart the moment the game actually mattered. Early in the season, while the team was grinding out wins the hard way, he had held his own well enough. Today was a different story.
After yesterday's three-game skid, our lineup had exploded and we'd thought this one would be easy. It wasn't. We had led by seven after the top of the first. The bottom of the fourth had just ended, and it was 7–5.
We were still ahead. Which way the momentum had gone didn't need explaining.
"Lee Junseong. How does the body feel?"
It wasn't the pitching coach who had come over. It was the manager.
"I feel great, sir."
"Didn't you pitch yesterday?"
He was the one who had sent me out there. I had no idea what he was getting at. And he didn't look the least bit worried about me.
"That's not a problem."
"You might be out there a while today."
"...No problem."
Just how many innings was he trying to squeeze out of me, laying groundwork like that? Fine by me. I wanted the ball, and I wouldn't have to sit there watching Kim Junhyeok's sorry outing either.
I headed for the bullpen. We didn't score in the top of the fifth.
"Even so, I didn't think he'd send you out as early as the fifth. The losing streak must have the skipper rattled."
"Yeah. But I think the timing's right."
I traded a few words with Park Ujin and climbed the mound.
The leadoff hitter was Carlos, the three-hole who had taken me deep yesterday. I didn't feel any extra weight from that. The Tigers' real damage lived in the one-two-three, so if I could get past Carlos, the rest of the inning opened up. Of course, you always had to stay locked in against another professional — but still.
Park Ujin and I exchanged signs.
I had given up a homer yesterday. I had no intention of changing my patterns.
The curveball dropped out of the zone. Carlos swung through it.
"Strike!"
He had always taken a big cut, but after the homers yesterday and today he looked like he was muscling up even more than usual.
Keep swinging like that. I appreciate it.
Another curve, almost the same spot. Carlos swung through it again.
"Strike!"
The tricky thing about Carlos was that he took full cuts and still squared the ball up reasonably well at 0–2. Which meant...
I went inside with the fastball. Carlos froze.
"Strike three!"
A perfect setup.
I finished the other two hitters with a strikeout and a ground ball and came off the mound.
"Whoa. How do you even think to jam him inside in that count?"
Kim Junhyeok caught me on my way back into the dugout.
"He was swinging so aggressively it made the chess match easier."
"Haha. That's just ridiculous."
One more inning and I would have been in line for the win, which should have soured his mood — but Kim Junhyeok just laughed and enjoyed the pitching. No sharp edges on the guy, that much was certain. Reliable was another question.
Top of the sixth now. I was ready for some insurance runs.
Crack.
"Out!"
Gang Daeho squared one up and the first baseman gobbled it up. If that ball finds grass, we tack on. A shame.
"Alright. Get back out there."
"Yes, sir."
Just as the manager had hinted, I was going back out for another inning. Back-to-back innings for the first time since my debut.
The Dragons' six-seven-eight weren't pushovers, but they didn't carry the same weight as the top of the order. That was just a fact.
Crack.
"Out!"
The lineup still couldn't push anything across. The Tigers had decided this was the game's hinge point too, and they were running their core arms out there — everyone except Yun Seunghyeon.
Bottom of the seventh, still a two-run game. I was already in. What were they going to do from here? Let Han Yongjun go through the eighth and turn it over to Go Junyong in the ninth? Or go to Park Yeongchan, the one they could actually trust?
A minute ago I had seen two guys warming in the bullpen: Han Yongjun and Park Yeongchan.
"Junseong."
The pitching coach came over.
"We're going to need you to hold them again."
I genuinely had not seen that coming. And yet...
"No problem."
I had been hoping, privately, that they would send me back out.
If we had scored, they probably would have pulled me.
Alright. If this was how it was going to go, I would push past two innings and give them three scoreless.