A Lottery Worth Scratching
"……Why didn't he turn pro? Was he badly hurt back then? Or had he simply stopped wanting to play?"
Only after he had gone through every last clip of Do Kang-hyun did Hwang Wook, scouting director of the Daejeon Phoenix, ask it — and his face said he genuinely could not understand.
"I know. That's the question. Team Leader Hwang, how does Do Kang-hyun's hitting look to you?"
Fans had taken to calling that bat a devil's gift, and even Hwang Wook could not find a single flaw in it.
"I've never seen hitting that raised the hair on my arms like this. Slow the tape down and he meets fastballs and breaking balls alike with the barrel dead in line with his front foot. His contact point barely moves. I've never seen a hitter like him. It's as if the pitcher promised him the pitch and the velocity before he ever swung."
"Is it really that extreme?"
"Even if pitcher and hitter had made a deal, matching up that perfectly would still be nearly impossible. That's how unusual Do Kang-hyun's hitting is — more precisely, his reaction speed, out of everything in his athletic profile. That's the greatest strength he has. That's the heart of it."
He said it with the certainty of a man who had already made up his mind over the footage, and the numbers backed him without ambiguity: the tryout records from the Busan Titans.
"Look here and you'll see it. Do Kang-hyun's physical reaction time is so far past ordinary that you start to wonder whether he's human at all."
There was the start on the sprint test, a reaction-time mark of 0.02 seconds that belonged on the far side of human, and the agility test clocking how fast he answered a signal. Every one of those figures lived in the realm of instantaneous response. The raw physical tools themselves were nothing extraordinary — but where reaction to a stimulus was concerned, the sheet made you doubt the numbers could be real.
"It's that absurd reaction that makes his athleticism look so much better than what he actually has. And at the plate, especially, I think it's more than enough to produce exactly the results we're seeing."
"No matter how good your reactions are, knowing the exact path of a pitch and actually hitting it are two different things, aren't they?"
"You could think that. But if he played through high school, the swing ought to be grooved deep enough that even a fastball at ninety-nine miles an hour is hittable — so long as he knows it's coming."
Swing a bat hundreds of times a day, thousands, from elementary school through high school, and there is no pitch in the strike zone you ought to miss, however fast it comes. Hitters still wave at air for a simple reason: the pitcher owns the chess match and picks the fight on his own terms.
From the pitch he chooses to the spot he means to throw it, the hitter has to guess which option is coming and commit — or else see the pitch and its direction and get the barrel there in the four-tenths to five-tenths of a second the ball spends traveling from the mound to home plate. That is why a man who collects three hits in ten trips to the plate is praised as one of the best in the league.
Turn it around, though. If the hitter could order the pitcher to rear back and throw, with everything he had, exactly the pitch the hitter wanted, what would the result look like then?
Get the hitter out three times in ten, and they'd still call you one of the very best pitchers alive. With room to spare.
That conviction sat so firmly in Hwang Wook that he had no doubt about Do Kang-hyun. With a reaction speed like his, fastball or breaking ball, the man could set the ball in front of his contact point and meet it square.
"His reaction speed shows itself just as plainly in the field. General Manager, does Do Kang-hyun look fast to you?"
Lee Jong-woon, general manager of the Phoenix, compared the defensive test footage still rolling with the sprint numbers and answered.
"The figures on the sheet put him at an upper-tier level, but the speed you actually see when he runs doesn't look like that."
"You've read it exactly. Do Kang-hyun's speed is, in truth, nothing like the test sheet. It's ordinary — hard to call upper-tier at all. And yet the numbers come out high, and he can cover a wide range in the outfield, because…"
"Because of that same reaction speed. Is that what you're saying?"
"Yes. Watch this clip. The crack of the bat has barely sounded and he's already moving. The reaction is outstanding, and his eye for where the ball will land is excellent too. That's how a man with ordinary speed can still defend at the very highest level."
"A genuinely rare type of player."
"Rare doesn't cover it. And you can't leave his arm off the list. A shoulder strong enough to throw from center field all the way home on the fly, no bounce, with the accuracy to match — that alone is a precious talent."
Hwang Wook lifted his teacup, wet a dry mouth, and went on.
"More than anything, the part of him that frightens me most is this. The talent he has will not allow a slump."
"Won't allow a slump…… Is that even possible?"
"His greatest gift, that reaction speed — a kind of reflex — isn't a matter of will. It's instinct. His balance can fall apart. His mind can shake. Instinct does not go dull. An injury might keep him out of the batter's box and off the field, but if he is standing in that box, if he is standing on that grass, Do Kang-hyun will hit, and he will play defense. That's the player I saw."
Was there really such a thing as a player without a slump? General Manager Lee Jong-woon understood at once how much weight those words carried. They meant that thirty-two years of age could not be treated as a weakness.
"If I'd come home even a little sooner, I would have dug in my heels and insisted we sign him before the competition figured this out."
He was honestly sorry that a business trip to the United States had kept him from forcing the contract through in time. Hwang Wook prided himself on being second to none in the country when it came to reading a player, but by now the other clubs had surely found Do Kang-hyun's greatest strength as well. What price each of them would hang on that strength was, of course, another matter entirely.
"You said the condition his agent demanded was an Early FA Acquisition Clause?"
"He said he won't even set a table unless we accept it."
"If you truly understand Do Kang-hyun's greatest strength, that's the obvious ask for an agent. If you don't want to lose him, General Manager, you have to put something on the table he can't refuse — more than what he's asking for."
"……Do we really have to go that far?"
"As scouting director, I've laid out the possibility of a player who might be the best hitter in the league as soon as next season. Whether you bring him in is your decision."
Unlike Hwang Wook, Lee Jong-woon could not bring himself to certainty.
At the quiet recitation, Lee Jong-woon's face went hard. He could not fail to know what those numbers meant, and hearing them was enough to send the fury climbing out of his gut.
Then Hwang Wook laid down another string.
"Team Leader Hwang……"
"The man who recommended Do Kang-hyun for that tryout was Yang Joo-il. Do you honestly believe Yang Joo-il handed him to the Titans out of a clean heart, with nothing in it for himself? For the last seven years, the Titans have been the only consolation this franchise has had. If they sign Do Kang-hyun and their standing rises — if that happens even once, against every odd — then even our fans, patient enough that people call them bodhisattvas, may not sit still any longer. I'm only saying."
For seven full seasons the Titans had traded last place with them, polite as you please. If, just as Hwang Wook said, Do Kang-hyun performed even once like the best hitter in the league, and the Titans climbed the standings because of it?
That, at least, can never be allowed to happen.
Lee Jong-woon made up his mind. He would do what the fans were always telling them to do: even if the price was steep, he would buy the lottery ticket that had never been scratched. It wasn't as if the Phoenix had heard the taunt for a day or two that they were the league's champions at setting large sums of money on fire.
Let them make us a laughingstock if they want. I will not stand by and watch the Titans succeed.
Once the hot stove began, no one drew more eyes than the players who had jumped into the free-agent market. This winter there were two premier names, and beneath them a crop of solid regulars a cut below the stars, and which club would sign whom was the chief concern of the industry and the fans alike. Then an absurd figure called Do Kang-hyun popped up out of nowhere, and the offseason started to drift in a strange direction.
"The Phoenix?"
Seong Woo-jong, general manager of the Gwangju Thunders — first place in the 2025 regular season, and champions of the Korean Series on top of it — had been watching Do Kang-hyun's tape with more than a little interest of his own.
The problem was the age they kept leading with, and the condition hung on it: an Early FA Acquisition Clause, deeply unpleasant from a club's point of view. Given Do Kang-hyun's age, the demand was understandable to a point. Setting that kind of precedent, though, could turn to poison for a franchise someday, and so he hesitated.
Scratch the ticket even if it meant getting poison on his hands, or leave it alone — he was still turning that over when word came that the Phoenix, hard on the heels of the Titans, had thrown itself into the pursuit in earnest. His appetite began, slowly, to stir. Was there something he was missing? General Manager Seong Woo-jong went back over the scouting report, line by careful line.
"High school numbers are nothing to speak of. The sample we've got is so small you can only treat the rest as projection…… If it weren't for that poison-pill clause, I'd jump into the bidding whether it worked out or not."
Even so, the Early FA Acquisition Clause kept snagging in his mind. It was a condition no one would dare speak aloud unless the case were as peculiar as Do Kang-hyun's, and still, when he thought of a general manager's duty and the responsibility that came with it, he could not bring himself to say yes.
"What do you think, Team Leader Park? Do you believe we ought to get into the fight for Do Kang-hyun?"
The Thunders' scouting director shook his head, his face already set against it.
"Our outfield was the backbone of this year's combined championship, and it's the best in the league. The backups are good enough to step into the lineup whenever we need them, and they still have room to grow. Same for the rookies we're developing on the farm. I don't see any reason to sign an unproven thirty-two-year-old rookie when the outfield pool is already full."
"That's true. But this isn't just any player. If Hong Jun-oh went so far as to recommend him himself, couldn't we at least put contract terms on the table?"
"Jun-oh has a good eye for talent, I'll give him that. This time, though, I think personal feeling has tilted him too far."
The man was a veteran who had scouted for the Thunders for nearly twenty years, and a capable one, and in the end Seong Woo-jong could not ignore him. Just as the scouting director said, the Thunders were not a club in need of an outfielder. Drag in an older rookie at the cost of fairness itself, and the likeliest result was a ruined clubhouse and nothing else.
"All right. We'll close the matter of signing Do Kang-hyun here."
The Gwangju Thunders were the first to let him go. After them, the Seoul Duonex — second in the standings and runners-up in the Korean Series, and just as deep in the outfield — cut their interest as well.
No room in the outfield. Terms they could not accept. Too old. Tools that had never been proven in any objective way. One by one, the clubs took a step back from signing Do Kang-hyun. Only two did not.
"The Titans' position is that they'll accept the Early FA Acquisition Clause. The fine print would be adjusted by mutual agreement, of course, but from the feel of that club, they'll swallow most of whatever we put in front of them."
"So the Titans are the most likely landing spot?"
At Do Kang-hyun's question, Agent Jang Woo-seok twisted up the corner of his mouth and smiled.
"The Phoenix has come in with a very interesting offer. Honestly, I didn't think they'd go this far. I believe even you will be surprised."