The Pitcher Just Hits Home Runs Well [EN]: Chapter 68

68. Flaw (5)

I confirmed it while precisely measuring my athletic abilities.

In fact, I’d already suspected it to some extent.

My original batting skill was, of course, Hall of Fame level—or, to exaggerate slightly, worthy of challenging the GOAT [Greatest Of All Time]. However, considering my reduced muscle strength since returning to being seventeen, my recent batting performance seemed a bit *too* good.

Ultimately, a home run results from a combination of accurate hitting and power. Even if the hit is slightly off, overwhelming power can still send the ball over the fence. That’s often how I was before returning to this point in time.

But with a weight deficiency of nearly 40 kilograms [88 pounds], my home run pace was only slightly below my prime. Considering my current body is healthy and pain-free, and that I changed my batting form to focus on power, it was still a bit much.

“Your agility, coordination, and dynamic visual acuity are…”

Jack Washington continued his lengthy explanation.

He was so excited that about half of it was clearly English, a series of words I couldn’t understand. However, it was clear that my agility, coordination, and dynamic visual acuity exceeded his expectations.

As you get older, you can’t help but worry about aging. I even started diligently searching and researching related areas when I turned thirty.

The decline in athletic ability due to aging starts earlier than you think. Some abilities decline more quickly than others. Muscle strength and endurance tend to decline more gradually, while agility, dynamic visual acuity, and cognitive abilities decline quite early.

For example, the peak for sports requiring mental acuity, such as Go [a strategic board game] and chess, is usually around age 20. The aging curve for esports, greatly affected by agility and nerve reaction speed, starts very quickly.

The reason I changed my batting form in the Big Leagues was that I had enough power, so there was no reason to maintain a form disadvantageous for contact. But now, I was showing an absurd contact rate even with that contact-unfavorable batting form.

And in that sense, this healthy seventeen-year-old body already possessed a weapon comparable to the muscle strength I had built up over the years.

Baek Hamin, who measured athletic ability with me, clicked his tongue.

Baek Hamin wasn’t actually that bad either. He could identify about five digits when I could identify up to eight digits in dynamic visual acuity.

“Wow, Choi Soo-won. But why are you trying to be a two-way player? It seems like you could just be a hitter.”

“Well… the will of the Great Universe?”

“What are you talking about?”

Baek Hamin, who didn’t know my exact circumstances, dismissed my words as nonsense.

But I was neither talking nonsense nor joking.

It’s been over five months since I returned to this young body. I’ve been busy with baseball, but I’ve always been thinking about it.

Who on earth sent me back to seventeen?

Was it God? Or the devil? An alien? Or a robot cat from the 23rd century? I didn’t know. But it was clear that whoever it was, they were a being I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Therefore, I naturally focused not on *who* it was, but on *why* that someone sent me back to this time.

Why did that unknown divine being send me back to seventeen? Of course, if my return was just a coincidence, that would be fine. But what if someone really sent me back with intention?

Then that divine being must want something from me. Something only possible when I come to this time.

I fiddled with the Hank Aaron signed card in my pocket.

It’s a bit embarrassing to say it myself, but I was a hitter who could easily make it to the Hall of Fame even if I had continued as a hitter and retired.

The Hank Aaron signed card and my baseball skills.

The combination of those two things ultimately led to baseball. Something that only a Hall of Fame-worthy hitter could achieve by returning to seventeen.

Therefore, it was naturally speculated that it wasn’t just a simple Hall of Fame induction that the original me could have achieved, but a great achievement far beyond that.

Major League MVP [Most Valuable Player]? Well, I could have challenged that even at the age of thirty-five in the 2043 season.

What the transcendent being, whoever it is, wants is more than that. For example, dominating the league for a long time as a true GOAT, breaking the best records in Major League Baseball that have been tainted by drug users, or achieving great feats that are hard to imagine in modern baseball, such as leading the Phoenix or Marlins to victory.

-Knock knock knock

“Sorry for the wait. The results are out.”

William Washington appeared again, opening the door abruptly with another meaningless knock.

Jack Washington, who had been talking at length, quickly shut his mouth. He was talking about seriously considering a full-time hitter despite running a pitching lab, so it was a word he couldn’t possibly bring up where his partner was.

“We’ve roughly decided on the direction of training. Oh, and one thing. Baek Hamin?”

Baek Hamin looked at William, who called his name.

William smiled brightly at him and said.

“Baek Hamin will be prohibited from throwing for the time being.”

Did he think it was something good because the other person was smiling brightly? Baek Hamin smiled brightly following William. It was an unnecessarily refreshing smile.

***

The buzz around Choi Soo-won didn’t cool down.

As the competition at the bottom of the professional baseball league intensified, Choi Soo-won’s name was mentioned more and more frequently in the media. If he were attending school in Korea right now, reporters would probably be coming and going from Joongang High School every day.

[An anonymous informant from the national team opens his mouth about Choi Soo-won and Baek Hamin’s disappearance to the United States!!]

[Inside the U-18 national team: A power struggle between pitchers and hitters?]

[The boundary between pitcher and hitter: The youngest member of the national team is suffering.]

People’s imaginations are truly amazing.

They speculate on what they don’t see and add plausible details. Of course, in most cases, the story built up in that way becomes absurd.

But surprisingly, this time, the absurd speculation infringed on the truth just a little bit.

Of course, it wasn’t a power struggle between pitchers and hitters, and there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with Choi Soo-won. But it was true that some players on the national team ostracized Jo Gyu-hyeok, and they were the ones who leaked the story about this special training first.

At first, it was simply pleasing to see the media criticizing the coach for the special training, calling it an old-fashioned training method. However, recently, articles about internal strife within the team began to appear.

Of course, if you looked up the content, it was a truly terrible guess, and the focus was also on Choi Soo-won. In addition, the number of articles wasn’t that large. But a thief is inherently guilty, and the criticism of an unspecified number of people makes people shrink.

Thus, in a small cafe in Seoul…

Two young men, whose youthful appearances hadn’t yet completely faded, sat with two cups of coffee in front of them, with anxious faces.

“Hey, Kim Tae-yoon! You said it wouldn’t be a big deal. What are you going to do? This isn’t going to calm down.”

“You little punk! Keep it down. People are staring.”

Kim Tae-yoon glanced around.

No one was looking at them. But even so, he couldn’t shake the feeling that people around him were watching them.

“It’s not about us right now anyway. It’s just a common speculative article. If the performance is a bit bad, there’s a faction inside, or the pitchers and fielders don’t get along. It’s an extension of that.”

“That’s true, but what if someone does an interview?”

“Do an interview? Who? Hey, everyone knows that internal strife gets you targeted. Besides, didn’t they all ignore Jo Gyu-hyeok? We just stepped up a little more, but in the end, they’re all on our side.”

“What about Choi Soo-won? He’s Jo Gyu-hyeok’s junior.”

“Choi Soo-won? He’s in America anyway. He said it was a month-long schedule, so there are still more than three weeks left before he comes back. Besides, he’s going to keep playing baseball in the future, so if he has any sense, would he take Jo Gyu-hyeok’s side? If he stirs up internal strife, he’ll only get targeted.”

“Really?”

A nervously shaking gaze.

Perhaps it was a word that Kim Tae-yoon was saying to himself, not Yang Him-chan.

“That’s right.”

***

“Ah, power struggle? Well, it’s not really a power struggle, it’s just that the kids did some stupid things that they thought were loyalty.”

“So, Choi Soo-won is saying that the loss in the finals is due to that power struggle?”

“Hey, that’s nonsense. It was just the kind of hazing that kids usually do. If we were going to lose the game because of something like that, we wouldn’t have even made it to the finals in the first place. Look at the American national team. The guy with the lowest name value is a 3rd round draft pick. The fast ones will have their names going back and forth in the Major League in 1 or 2 years, and the slow ones will be up in the Major League in 3 or 4 years. It’s just skill, skill.”

Lee Young-joo, a correspondent for the Korea Daily in the eastern United States, was momentarily at a loss for words.

Of course, he had felt that Choi Soo-won was not an ordinary character when he interviewed him before. But this was too uninhibited.

He casually talks about what happened between players who are one year older than him, from a grand story like a power struggle in the team to just a stupid thing that kids usually do.

“But we clearly did well in the preliminaries…”

“Baseball is originally a game where if you have the skill to play in the same league, you should get 30% of the time. We were that 30% in the preliminary round, and the final was 70%.”

“I see… Then, would it be okay to ask what you think about the special training?”

“I think the special training was an appropriate choice. In fact, the difference in skill between teams was so great in this tournament. But a hitter’s batting is like a precision machine that is easy to break. If you keep hitting against pitchers who throw 130 kilometers [81 miles] per hour, you’ll soon get used to that speed. To adjust that again to a pitcher who throws 160 kilometers [99 miles] per hour, you need to adjust the zero point. It was a bit physically difficult, but at that point, the coach’s special training was that zero point adjustment, I think.”

“But even so, the result of the final was not good, so there are many opinions that it was a wrong choice. It would have been better to conserve stamina.”

“That’s a result-oriented story. And to be honest, even if we had conserved our stamina, the difference in skill was so great, as I said before. Everyone will admit that. As I recall, the seniors who talked about that special training also posted on Instagram saying, ‘I’m sorry for losing despite that,’ or something like that?”

The interview lasted about 30 minutes.

“Thank you so much for the interview today.”

“You’re welcome. Then, please write a good article.”

The recorded file and video, and the records organized in the notebook.

Those were materials that were enough to put reporter Lee Young-joo in a lot of trouble.

‘Senior, I got permission with great difficulty. So please take care of it. Honestly, you can feel that he’s a real hit, right? Don’t just look at the small things, let’s look at the big picture.’

Even if it wasn’t for the words of his junior Lee Ji-yeon, who had received permission for an interview from Choi Soo-won himself, going beyond Choi Soo-won’s current location, which many people are curious about, he was already very fascinated by the child Choi Soo-won on a human level.

“Ha, how am I supposed to sugarcoat this to write an article…”

[Exclusive interview with Choi Soo-won!! ‘Baseball is originally a game where you win once, lose once, and the game is decided in the remaining one. This U-18 final was just an extension of that.’]

─LiveWell: The kid definitely has a good mentality. Honestly, everyone would agree even if he said that the other guys lost because they couldn’t play baseball.

─GoldVaultRolex: Shocking breaking news!! Choi Soo-won says that the games that the Marlins and Phoenix play are not baseball!!

─8888577: Yeah, Soo-won!! We want to play baseball too!!

─886899: We still have a career winning percentage of 40%… I am happy. I am happy.