For the players who never made headlines

Every May, Seoul’s Mokdong and Sinwol ballparks host the Golden Lion National High School Baseball Championship, the tournament that crowns the strongest high school team of the first half of the season. It is the first of the country’s four major high school baseball tournaments, followed by the Blue Dragon Flag, Presidential Cup and Phoenix Flag. This year, 57 teams took the field in the tournament’s 80th edition. When I first covered the Golden Lion tournament 10 years ago, I found it surprisingly difficult.

Professional baseball is familiar territory. You can often recognize players before seeing their faces. High school baseball is different. Most of the players are complete strangers. Learning their names, positions, batting orders and uniform numbers takes concentration. By the time you finally figure out who is who, the game is over. Then come the interviews, the deadline and the next game already underway.

The players reporters remember first are usually the standouts. The ones whose names appear in stories are typically those who deliver the decisive hit, the key strikeout or the winning play. Most players leave without being quoted or mentioned at all. Still, some faces stay with you.

The player who dove headfirst into first base on a routine grounder even though he had little chance of beating the throw. The player who sprinted through the bag after taking a pitch off the body as if he had just driven in the winning run. The player sitting alone in a ballpark hallway after a round-of-16 loss, wiping away tears with his face buried in his arm. The players in the dugout who kept cheering despite trailing 10-1 at the start of the ninth inning of the championship game. In a tournament, tomorrow is earned only through victory today.

For weaker teams especially, every game demands everything. There is no reason to save anything for later because later may never come. Tournament baseball is played one game at a time and with full commitment.

Even in this year’s final, neither team had its ace available. Chungam High School had already leaned on its top pitcher to survive the quarterfinals. Daejeon High School needed its ace to get through the semifinals. That means most of the games played during the tournament reflected each team at full stretch.

You see it in players throwing their bodies down the line, dirt flying behind them. The phrase “giving your all” becomes something visible. It is one reason tournament staff members, after joking over delivery lunches that they hope for a quick mercy-rule game, end up shouting encouragement to the very teams facing that possibility.

Jung Min-cheol, a Daejeon High School graduate whose number was later retired by the Hanwha Eagles, offered some advice to his alma mater before this year’s championship game. “Winning is one measure of success,” said Jung, now an MBC commentator. “But if you gave everything you had, that is success too. Decades later, you will still be proud that you were there. The best pitches I ever threw in high school came at the Golden Lion tournament. I started against Gyeongnam Commercial High School, the strongest team in the country at the time, and struck out 14 batters. I still talk about that game.”

In the Japanese basketball manga Slam Dunk, Shohoku High faces powerhouse Sannoh Technical High in the second round of the national tournament. After collapsing while playing through an injury, protagonist Hanamichi Sakuragi argues with the elderly coach trying to pull him from the game. “When was your prime?” he asks. “When you played for the national team? Mine is now.”

To the countless players whose names I never learned and whose stories I never had the chance to hear, thank you. Those two weeks in Mokdong and Sinwol were memorable because of you. Watching what may have been the best baseball of your lives was a privilege.