The Reluctant Mentor
A month had slipped by since Opening Day.
Unlike the early weeks of the season, the players had enough personal numbers on the board for their individual report cards to mean something. Having reviewed every one of them, the manager drew his knife.
"Choi Dong-hyuk. Lim Sung-min. Come to my office. One at a time."
"Yes, sir……"
He never said what it was about, but anyone on that list could guess: a notification of demotion to the Futures League. These were the guys whose recent numbers had gone cold.
When I saw that one of the names was senior Choi Dong-hyuk, a complicated feeling settled over me. We'd been competing for the same position, after all. There was a real sense of accomplishment in having locked down the starting job — and yet the thought that someone had lost his spot because of me left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I knew better than anyone that this was the professional world. Knowing it didn't make it easier.
But I only let myself drown in sentiment for so long. After dinner, I resolved to hit the weights.
Nothing resets your emotions like a good workout.
That was exactly how casually I was treating it — and then that evening, senior Choi Dong-hyuk came looking for me.
"Kang Hyuk."
"Yes?"
What's this about? The thought that he'd come to chew me out for sending him down to the second team was still circling my head when he finally opened his mouth, haltingly.
"Would you… be able to teach me hitting?"
"Me?"
For a second, I wondered if I was experiencing déjà vu. Senior Kim Hyeong-jun had come to me once before and asked the exact same thing.
"Did you already ask the hitting coach?"
"That's……"
When he shook his head, I answered him flatly.
"Then I can't help you."
"Please. I'm begging you. Just help me without telling the coach."
"……"
In the rigidly hierarchical world of an athletic organization, a senior asking a junior for help was never an easy thing to do. Which meant he had to be desperate beyond words. But I needed to make my position absolutely clear.
"I've talked with our hitting coach a lot. He's a genuinely good teacher. He stays up all night working on training programs for his players, and he's open-minded about modern and systematic approaches to hitting."
"I know, but……"
"I can't go around him to help you. It would come across as overstepping."
"……"
"If the coach gives his blessing, then I'll gladly help. Happily."
After a long moment of deliberation, the senior reluctantly nodded.
When the hitting coach heard the story, he let out a long, deep sigh.
"It's karma. Everything this organization let pile up."
"Karma? Did you do something to senior Dong-hyuk?"
"Did I—no! Not me. The club is the one who screwed up."
What followed was, quite simply, shocking.
It was widely known that the Hawks' front offices had run the team like a pack of career bureaucrats. The coaching staff had been no different — an infestation of incompetent coaches entrenched everywhere on the strength of connections and regional ties.
"You know the 'chop-down' swing theory?"
"You mean the backspin approach?"
Chopping down at the ball — also called the backswing-for-backspin method — was one of those theories that originated in Major League Baseball. The core idea was that striking the bottom of the ball generated backspin, carrying it farther. The only problem: it had been fashionable around the 2000s and was thoroughly dead by now.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because the old Futures League hitting coach used to force it on every player he had."
"……"
Hitting is the act of sending a ball that arrives in 0.4 seconds flying into the distance with a narrow wooden stick. And someone wanted hitters to deliberately aim at the bottom of a ball traveling in on a dot? Any player whose eyes and bat skills were good enough to do that on purpose could post great numbers swinging however he pleased.
Modern hitting theory concentrates on squaring up the ball squarely — producing barrel contact and hard-hit balls. It had long since left those fringe obsession points behind. And in an era when the velocity revolution had made pitchers' fastballs faster than ever, there was nothing left to say on the subject.
And yet here was a man still teaching a dead hitting theory — at the professional level, no less.
No wonder this place was called a graveyard for prospects.
If the White Room hadn't existed — if I'd been sent down to the second team myself — wouldn't I have been trained by a coach exactly like that?
"To be fair, the first thing our manager did when he took over was purge the second-team coaching staff. And he actually pulled it off, more or less. But a player like Choi Dong-hyuk who'd been stuck in the Futures League for so long — those guys can't help but build up distrust of every coach they get."
"I see."
The hitting coach turned to me with an earnest, almost pleading tone.
"I'll sit in and observe the whole time. Just lend us a hand. Please."
"Uh… well, that is…"
"I understand it's awkward — helping a senior with far more years in the league, and at your own position, no less. But I promise something will come back to you for it."
"……"
I was on the verge of declining under the weight of it all when memories of senior Hyun-woo and senior Jin-mo helping me surfaced. Was that just my mood talking?
Granted, the two of them were nearing the twilight of their playing careers, and they were generous men with room to spare — of course they could afford to help me. But having accepted their help so freely all this time, being stingy toward others didn't sit right with me.
"…Fine. Let's give it a shot, then."
"Whatever happens to me down the line — no holding it against me, alright?"
"Of course not!"
The evening after a game, I stepped into the batting cage with senior Choi Dong-hyuk and passed on the hitting theory I'd learned at Drive Baseball — with the hitting coach observing quietly at my side.
"There's no single right answer in baseball. But there is probability."
Unlike the past, there was a reason the swings and mechanics of recent Major League hitters all looked so strikingly alike. Where early sabermetrics had worshipped on-base percentage, modern baseball prioritized the quality of contact.
The pitcher-dominant era brought on by the velocity revolution and a tangle of other factors played into it, but that's beside the point.
"In the end, two or three singles are worth about the same as one home run."
In fact, the number of .300 hitters in the majors was dwindling year by year — and the few who remained weren't treated with any special reverence anymore.
"Senior, would you say you're a fast runner?"
"Better than most catchers, but…… no, not particularly."
"Then let's take a look at your at-bats."
I played him slow-motion footage of his in-game swings.
"Watch this moment, right at contact. Your body is already facing first base. You're sprinting with everything you have, trying to survive however you can."
"……"
"There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But is that style really a good fit for a catcher who runs slow?"
"Guess not."
To generate extra-base power, your center of gravity has to stay behind you. Level swing, uppercut — it doesn't matter. When you close your hips and coil your torso back, the swing path naturally takes on an upward plane. But if your body is already lunging toward first at contact? Your hips open up, and extra-base hits fly right out the window.
"That's why direction — your intent — is everything. Senior Jin-mo doesn't obsess over slugging percentage for nothing, even after his speed and average fell off."
Of course, I understood senior Dong-hyuk's heart. He wanted to reach first base by any means necessary and survive in this league.
But this was hardly different from head-first sliding into first base. In the old days you could dress it up as hustle. In the data-driven era of modern baseball, it was closer to wasted motion.
"So the training you need to start with is……"
Listening to Kang Hyuk's surgical, almost brutally concise hitting theory from the side, the hitting coach couldn't hide his astonishment.
Is this what they mean by a genius who actually works for it?
There was a famous saying among athletes: a naturally gifted player rarely becomes a great coach. To geniuses born with talent, the obvious fundamentals came so effortlessly that to ordinary players those same things had to be understood, ground through, and earned. The result was constant friction — mutual incomprehension dressed up as instruction.
It wasn't for nothing that the infamous "watch the ball, hit the ball" blunder existed.
But Kang Hyuk is different.
He explained things step by step, at a level an ordinary player could actually grasp. You could feel it — he hadn't simply coasted on talent. He'd studied the theory, hard. And this from the kid who trained harder than anyone else on the roster.
He really is the player I decided to believe in.
…Of course, this was a misunderstanding born of not knowing about the White Room, or the brutal hours of education Kang Hyuk had endured at Drive Baseball.
Then again — this might turn out to be a real opportunity for Dong-hyuk.
There were precedents, after all. Players who came back from army kitchen duty and exploded into their potential. Guys whose hitting improved while they were serving with the police Athletic Corps. The real problem had always been the confidence drained away by constant, endless batting-form overhauls.
At his core, Choi Dong-hyuk's raw power tool was genuinely good. If he took Kang Hyuk's advice to heart and actually put it into practice, he could climb back to the first team quickly — and then he'd be there as the backup catcher or a designated hitter, supporting Kang Hyuk himself.
By the time Kang Hyuk's extended lecture finally wound down, every flaw had been laid bare and dissected — and a clear direction forward laid out. Choi Dong-hyuk's face was a storm of tangled emotions.
And still, he offered Kang Hyuk his heartfelt thanks.
"Thank you. I actually feel like I know what to do now."
"…It's just my opinion. Take what's useful and leave the rest."
"No. That was advice worth its weight in bone and blood."
Choi Dong-hyuk held out his hand.
"I won't forget what you told me. Not even in Seosan."
"A player like you will be back in the first team before you know it, senior."
Kang Hyuk stood there for a long while, watching the older man's back as he trudged away.
The series that followed was played on the road against the Daegu Kingdoms.
Both were clubs with traditionally devoted followings outside the capital region — and both were teams dreaming of the leap from mid-table to the top of the standings. The media paid close attention accordingly.