Hey Henry, This One’s for You, You Chickenshit!

I left ARUN months ago. I built something new. But there are things about what happened that I still need to say.

I have written about leaving ARUN before. I have written about what came afterward, about starting Bangkok Catchball Club, and about everything I unexpectedly learned from building a baseball community of my own. But there is another part of that story I have never really put together in one place.

Henry, this one is for you.

I'm not writing this because I expect an apology. I'm not expecting you to read it and suddenly agree with my version of events. I'm certainly not interested in restarting an argument that ended months ago. I'm writing it because for a long time, you had plenty to say about me. You assessed my character, my motives, my mindset, my maturity, my commitment to baseball, the way I spent my own money, the way I communicated, and eventually whether my role and position on the team needed to be reconsidered.

So this time, I'm going to talk about what you did.

I also want to be fair about something from the beginning. Not everything you said was unreasonable. Sometimes you had a legitimate point. Sometimes I could have communicated better. Sometimes I was frustrated, and I'm sure that frustration showed. This isn't an attempt to rewrite our history so that I was right about absolutely everything and you were wrong about absolutely everything.

The problem was the pattern that developed around those disagreements. What I experienced wasn't simply coaching or criticism anymore. I experienced it as bullying, manipulation, and gaslighting. Small disagreements became assessments of my personality. My explanations of my own intentions were repeatedly replaced with your interpretations of them. And eventually I reached the point where remaining in the team felt worse than leaving it.

It started with money

One of the major turning points was sponsorship. I offered my own money to ARUN with a specific purpose: I wanted it used to reduce the financial burden on the people already playing. Lower fees. Make participation cheaper. Make baseball a little easier for people to afford.

You wanted something different. You wanted the money directed toward ambitions such as renting a baseball-specific stadium and transportation to that stadium. You were entitled to prefer that model. I was equally entitled to say that wasn't what I wanted my money used for and withdraw the offer.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, something changed in the way you treated what I did afterward. I began spending my own money directly on things I wanted to contribute: equipment, merchandise, apparel, things for other members. I enjoyed doing it. I wasn't asking anyone to worship me for it. I wasn't keeping a ledger of gratitude.

But you started interpreting my generosity for me. During one conversation about uniforms, you told me, “You can't win someone's heart just by paying money.” You talked about people experiencing relative deprivation, people accepting favors without gratitude, and favors eventually becoming perceived as rights.

I remember thinking: whose heart was I supposedly trying to win?

Sometimes I bought things for people because I wanted to buy things for people. That really was the entire explanation. But increasingly, my explanation of my own motives didn't seem sufficient. There always seemed to be another interpretation waiting underneath it.

A joke couldn't just be a joke

There was the uniform conversation. I made a joke in the group chat while secretly intending to pay for the uniforms myself. When you raised concerns about how somebody might interpret what I'd said, I explained that nobody was actually going to pay. The uniforms were my treat. I was going to surprise them.

That could have been a short conversation. Instead, it became a lecture about other people's feelings, gratitude, favors, human nature, leadership, and understanding people's minds. You constructed a six-point scenario about what people might think and feel, culminating in the possibility that people receiving something for free might somehow feel uncomfortable without being grateful.

This became one of the most exhausting things about dealing with you: nothing could simply be small. A joke became psychology. A gift became a discussion about motives. A disagreement became a discussion about mindset.

Even a changed profile picture became a major issue.

And yes, I can acknowledge the reasonable principle underneath that disagreement. If something publicly represents a team, consulting the other people managing it is fair. I could have handled that differently.

But there is also something called proportionality. Not every mistake requires an examination of someone's decision-making tendencies. Not every disagreement needs to become a management crisis. Sometimes the appropriate response to someone changing a profile picture is simply, “Hey, can we agree on these things first next time?”

“Sure.”

Done.

Instead, the cumulative effect was that I increasingly felt as though every little thing I did could become evidence in a much larger case about the kind of person I supposedly was.

Eventually, you stopped criticizing my decisions and started defining me

This is where, for me, criticism crossed into bullying.

You didn't simply tell me what you thought I had done wrong. You started telling me what was happening inside my own head. You told me I seemed to carry dissatisfaction internally and allow it to emerge indirectly. You told me that being mentally and emotionally exhausted wasn't an excuse to carry resentment and project it onto others. You told me to address problems “like an adult” and to take responsibility for my own mindset.

You told me I was looking at things too narrowly. You told me I was only looking at my own sacrifices. You told me some of my conflict might come from holding too tightly to my own perspective and that sometimes growth meant learning to let that go.

At one point, you even asked me to compare who I had been when we were simply playing catch under the bridge with who I had become once more people were around the team.

Think about how personal that is.

We weren't talking about whether I should have caught a fly ball differently anymore. We weren't discussing whether I should have consulted someone before doing something administrative. You were constructing a narrative about how I had changed as a human being and then asking me to reflect upon the person you had decided I was.

That is where I experienced gaslighting. When I tried to explain what I meant, I was told I was misunderstanding your point. When I brought the conversation back to our operational disagreements, I was told that wasn't what the conversation was about. When I explained that I was exhausted, exhaustion itself became part of the argument about how I handled my emotions. When I stepped away from operations, the conversation moved toward whether my attitude as a player was acceptable.

Whatever direction I moved, the frame seemed to move with me.

And that makes defending yourself extraordinarily difficult. If someone has already decided what your underlying mindset is, disagreement itself can become evidence that they're right.

Then came the threat to reconsider my “role and position”

One message stayed with me more than most. You told me that if improving as a player and contributing to the team did not become my priority again, then, “as a coach, I will need to seriously reconsider your role and position within the team.”

By that point, I had already stepped away from operations.

So what exactly was the role and position you were threatening to reconsider?

I was a player.

Maybe you intended something different. I can only tell you how I received it. After everything that had already happened, I read it as a threat: get back in line with what I expect from you or your place here can be reconsidered.

Earlier, during another disagreement, you had effectively suggested that if I wanted to make decisions independently, I should create my own team.

I'm not sure you expected me eventually to take that suggestion quite so seriously.

Closing the door behind someone who was already leaving

There was another moment that stayed with me. Someone who had been deeply involved in ARUN was already withdrawing from the team's activities and was going to leave either way. I want to be precise about that: you did not force this person out by removing them from the group chat. The decision to leave had already been made.

What bothered me was what happened afterward. You removed them from the team group chat before that departure had fully run its course. Perhaps you considered it simple housekeeping. From where I was standing, it felt like a very public way of closing the door behind someone who was already walking out of it. It gave me the impression that you were uncomfortable with someone who was leaving continuing to see what was happening inside the team.

I can't claim to know what was going through your head when you did it, and I'm not going to assign motives to you with certainty. I can only tell you how the action read to me. It looked defensive. It looked controlling. It looked like making absolutely certain that someone who was leaving was now unmistakably outside.

What made it particularly uncomfortable was that this wasn't some peripheral member who had simply stopped showing up. This was someone who had invested considerable time and effort into keeping ARUN functioning behind the scenes. Someone who had done the administrative work that tends to disappear the moment it is done properly.

And that is where the incident connects to something much larger about my experience at ARUN—and brings me back to one of your favorite words:

Sacrifice

You talked about sacrifice a lot.

During one of those long conversations, you told me that you had sacrificed far more for the team than I might realize. You said you wanted to catch. You wanted to pitch. You wanted to play freely in the positions you enjoyed. Instead, you picked up the fungo bat and hit balls for everyone else because you believed helping the team improve should come before what you personally wanted. You asked whether I had ever seriously considered your position. You told me real commitment sometimes means giving up what you want for what the team needs.

Here's the thing, Henry.

I don't deny your sacrifice.

You did sacrifice playing time. You did spend practices coaching. You did hit fungos instead of simply playing the positions you wanted. I'm perfectly capable of recognizing that.

But your story about sacrifice had a rather convenient omission.

What about ours?

While you were sacrificing your playing time on the field, Minseok and I were doing the work that nobody dreams about when they imagine running a baseball club.

We reconciled the team accounts. We collected attendance fees and membership fees. We contacted venues. We booked venues. We paid venue fees. We searched for alternatives. We contacted other venues to ask about their prices, their availability, and whether they even allowed baseball activities. We procured equipment. We dealt with the repetitive, boring, inglorious administrative work required for everyone else to arrive and play baseball.

Nobody grows up dreaming of reconciling the accounts of an amateur baseball club. Nobody buys their first glove thinking, One day, I hope I get to chase venue operators for their rates and availability.

There is no highlight reel for collecting membership fees.

There is no box score for paying the field invoice.

But without somebody doing those things, there is no practice for you to coach. There is no field on which to hit fungos. There is no equipment to use. There may not even be a functioning club.

And yet when you lectured me about sacrifice, your sacrifice became the reference point. You were the person giving something up. You were the person putting the team ahead of yourself. You were the one asking whether I had considered everything you had sacrificed.

So here's the question I wish I had asked more clearly at the time:

Did you ever seriously consider ours?

Sacrifice is easier to recognize when it's your own

Running Bangkok Catchball Club has taught me something about sacrifice that I didn't understand as clearly when I was at ARUN.

Your own sacrifice is incredibly vivid.

You know how tired you are. You know how many hours you've spent. You know what you wanted to do instead. You remember every problem you solved because you were the one who had to solve it.

Other people's sacrifice is much easier to overlook because you don't experience it.

Administrative work is particularly invisible. When it's done well, it almost disappears. The venue is simply booked. The money is simply reconciled. The equipment simply appears. The registration list simply exists. The announcement simply gets posted.

People arrive and baseball happens.

That's why I'm increasingly cautious whenever I find myself thinking about how much I sacrifice for BCC. Because there may be someone next to me contributing something I don't see. Their contribution doesn't become smaller simply because mine is more visible to me.

Minseok and I weren't necessarily sacrificing less for ARUN.

Our sacrifice just didn't look like yours.

And what happened after we left made the irony harder to ignore

The administrative work didn't disappear when Minseok and I did. Somebody still had to perform it.

But from what I have observed since leaving, you didn't suddenly absorb all of those responsibilities yourself. Duties such as social media were instead passed to other members.

I'm sure that can be described as delegation. It can probably even be packaged as giving members opportunities to develop leadership.

Running BCC has made me appreciate genuine delegation. One person shouldn't do everything. People should be trusted with responsibility. A healthy organization shouldn't collapse whenever its founder takes a day off.

But I've also learned that there is a difference between delegation and displacement.

Delegation is distributing responsibility because other people are capable of owning parts of the organization.

Displacement is consistently moving undesirable work onto somebody else while retaining the authority and status of leadership.

And I have become deeply skeptical of dressing the latter up as the former.

Leadership cannot conveniently mean that the leader performs the parts of leadership he finds meaningful while everybody else performs the parts he doesn't.

The boring work counts too.

The spreadsheets count. The invoices count. The venue inquiries count. The registrations count. The social-media posts count. The equipment procurement counts. The messages count. The repetitive administrative tasks that nobody applauds count.

If you're going to lecture somebody about sacrifice, you should probably understand what they've already sacrificed before explaining how much more you've sacrificed than them.

Sacrifice isn't a debt

This is probably the biggest difference between what you taught me about sacrifice and what I eventually learned from experiencing it myself.

If I choose to sacrifice something for Bangkok Catchball Club, that is my decision.

It doesn't mean BCC members owe me obedience.

It doesn't mean my ideas automatically deserve priority.

It doesn't mean someone who contributes less time than I do cares less than I do.

And it certainly doesn't give me the right to pull out an imaginary ledger during a disagreement and say, Look at everything I've done for this community. What have you done?

Sacrifice becomes dangerous when it becomes currency.

I gave this, therefore you owe me that.

I worked harder, therefore my opinion matters more.

I suffered more, therefore I have greater authority.

At that point, sacrifice has stopped being generosity and started becoming leverage.

You once told me that I was looking only at my own sacrifices and that you had sacrificed far more than I realized.

The irony is that I now think one of the greatest dangers of leadership is exactly that: becoming so conscious of your own sacrifice that you become blind to everyone else's.

Maybe that's why all the lectures bothered me so much

Looking back, I don't think any single message explains why I eventually had enough.

It was the accumulation.

The sponsorship disagreement. The interpretations of why I spent my own money. The uniform joke becoming a lesson about my understanding of people. The profile-picture argument. The repeated assessments of my mindset and character. Being told I carried resentment. Being told I projected frustration. Being told to behave “like an adult.” Being told I was looking at things too narrowly. Being told to reflect on how I had changed. Being told that my role and position might need to be reconsidered. Being told how much you had sacrificed and how I needed to understand sacrifice. And eventually watching Minseok be removed from the group chat as he was already withdrawing from the team.

Any one of those things can be explained away. Put together, they became the environment I experienced. That's why I call it bullying. That's why I call it manipulation. That's why I describe parts of it as gaslighting.

Whether those were your intentions is another matter. Maybe you genuinely believed you were mentoring me. Maybe you believed every long message was for my benefit.

You eventually described yourself to me as not only my coach, but an “older brother, a friend, and someone who has walked this baseball path before you.” In the same message, you said that if you saw less than what you believed I was capable of, you might become even harder on me.

Perhaps you thought that was encouragement. By then, I was exhausted by you. Intent matters. But intent doesn't erase impact.

Here’s the thing: you’re not my friend and you sure as hell aren’t my older brother.

So I left

Eventually, there was nothing left for me to accomplish by continuing to argue.

I could have kept responding to the messages. I could have kept trying to convince you that you had misunderstood me. I could have fought over my reputation inside a tiny amateur baseball community. Instead, I left.

And then, on May 23, 2026, I went to Lumphini Park with a bag of baseballs. Bangkok Catchball Club began. There was no grand revenge plan. I wasn't trying to destroy ARUN or prove that I could build a better baseball team. In fact, BCC wasn't supposed to be a conventional team at all.

I wanted somewhere people could play baseball without all of this. Somewhere accessible. Somewhere inexpensive. Somewhere beginners didn't have to prove they were serious enough to belong. Somewhere someone could simply show up and play catch.

People came. Then more people came. We outgrew the public parks. We started renting fields. People who had never played baseball found somewhere they could try it. Experienced players helped beginners. Friendships developed. The club eventually received media attention. Members found pathways into competitive baseball if they wanted them.

And throughout all of it, there was one thing I remained unusually conscious of.

I didn't want to become you.

That's the part I owe you

Running BCC has actually made me more sympathetic to some aspects of leadership. It's difficult.

People disagree with you. Plans fail. Somebody has to make the final call. Sometimes the answer has to be no. Sometimes you put in hours nobody notices. Sometimes you sacrifice your own enjoyment because thirty other people are relying on you to make something work.

I understand that now better than I did when I was at ARUN. But understanding the difficulty of leadership hasn't made me reconsider what happened between us. It has made me more determined not to reproduce it.

You taught me not to turn every disagreement into a character assessment. You taught me not to tell people what they're secretly thinking. You taught me not to confuse criticism with mentorship simply because I believe my intentions are good. You taught me that responsibility doesn't mean ownership. You taught me that recreational sports should never become so consumed by hierarchy and politics that people forget why they wanted to play in the first place. You taught me that administrative work is still leadership even when nobody sees it. You taught me that somebody contributing differently isn't necessarily contributing less. And you taught me that sacrifice becomes poisonous when a leader uses it as leverage over the people supposedly benefiting from it.

Most importantly, you taught me to keep asking myself a question I hope I never become too proud to ask:

If somebody decides that leaving a community I lead feels better than remaining under my leadership, what did I do to make leaving feel like freedom?

Henry, I did learn from you

Probably not what you intended to teach me.

For a long time, you had the authority to tell me who you thought I was. You told me about my mindset, my attitude, my commitment, my perspective, my sacrifices, my supposed resentment, and the person you thought I needed to become.

You don't have that authority anymore. And I don't need you to agree with this account for it to be mine. I'm sure you have your own version of everything that happened. I'm sure there are things in mine you would dispute. There are probably moments you remember completely differently. That's fine. This is what the experience looked like from my side of the field.

And perhaps the strangest part of this entire story is that buried among all the lectures, arguments, assessments, and messages was one piece of advice that turned out to be genuinely useful.

You suggested that if I wanted to do things differently, I should create my own team.

So I did.

And building Bangkok Catchball Club taught me something that all those lectures about leadership and sacrifice never could:

Leadership isn't proving how much you've sacrificed for your community. It's making sure the community never has to sacrifice itself for you.