Swing Ten Million Times
They say that if you study hard, you end up at Seoul National University, but if you play baseball well, you end up with the Hawks or the Marlins.
Maybe that's why.
"With our first pick, the Daejeon Hawks select Kang Hyuk of Bomun High School."
When the Hawks — a team whose catching had always been their glaring weakness — called my name, I failed, spectacularly, to keep a straight face.
I'm the number one pick overall?
The players expected to go first in the draft were the three pitchers everyone called the Next Generation. They threw over 150 km/h at their best, and they'd been showing off fully polished pitch designs since their high school days. By even the most generous estimate, my draft stock sat somewhere in the middle of the first round.
"The Marlins request a timeout."
With the very first pick already defying everyone's predictions, the draft hall naturally erupted into a buzz of murmurs.
That said, the Hawks' choice wasn't entirely incomprehensible. My pitch-receiving was rated as beyond anything the high school level had to offer, and I was a local kid from Daejeon. For a franchise that had traditionally boasted a deep rotation of starters but a perpetually thin catching corps, I was a tempting option.
Just not one I was happy about in the least.
I wanted to go to a good team, damn it!
I'd grown up in Daejeon, and it was true that my father — a diehard Hawks fan — had instilled some affection for the club in me. But liking a team as a fan and playing for it as a professional were two entirely different matters.
And for good reason: weren't the Hawks called the graveyard of prospects?
Worse still, this was a world where players who deserved to be remembered as legends for their individual numbers got treated as ringless nobodies if they never won a championship.
I spent the entire draft doing my best to hide the gloom on my face.
That evening.
My father called me over with an expression caught somewhere between pride and resignation.
"Kang Hyuk. Come here and sit down."
"Yes, sir."
"Here. Take it."
He held a shot glass out to me.
"I'm still a minor, you know."
"Once you join a pro team, there'll be times you have to sit through drinking parties. If you're going to learn how to hold your liquor, you might as well learn from me."
"Yes, sir..."
My first taste of alcohol was bitter beyond words.
"Congratulations. Either way, this means you're the finest prospect of your whole class, doesn't it?"
"I wanted to go to a winning team."
"I know. I know."
Call me a bandwagon fan if you like — I had no rebuttal ready. But as the saying goes, even a three-thousand-li move begins with a single step. (And in this case, that step was toward a stronger team.)
The strong teams, as a rule, had their player development systems for young prospects fully built out.
The Hawks, on the other hand...
Players who'd joined the Hawks through free agency from other clubs all said the same thing: the training volume was absurdly low. Of course, through several different managers the club had tried to improve on that, and it was equally true that none of those efforts had amounted to anything.
"Look at it the other way, though — it means a little hard work is all it takes to crack the starting lineup, doesn't it?"
"Then what about a championship ring?"
"...Let's have another drink."
Talking about this and that with my father, before I knew it the empty bottles had stacked up one after another.
And so, having drunk alcohol for the first time in my life, when I rose from my bed—
A white space shaped like a baseball stadium was there to greet me.
<Perform a swing.>
(0 / 10,000,000)
— along with those words, inscribed on one of the walls.