The Thirty-Two-Year-Old Gamble
Once the news of Do Kang-hyun's signing actually broke, the fans' reaction turned inside out. Back when it had only been Yang Joo-il's footage, there were people who wrote his ability off as editing and fakery, but scorn this thick with mockery had been hard to find.
The Steel Baseball broadcast and the Titans tryout footage had drawn the same kind of awe, and more voices than not had called him an unscratched lottery ticket. The lean, on the whole, had been positive.
Then word got out that a professional club had signed a thirty-two-year-old rookie — thirty-three, if you counted from the year he would actually debut — and every favorable take up to that point vanished as if it had been a lie.
"Fuck, this is the normal reaction. Who the hell actually thought anybody was going to sign a thirty-two-year-old?"
"Except our club did."
"...What a fucking joke."
Two Daejeon Phoenix minor leaguers, in their second and third years, scowled at the posts on a well-known fan community. Both had pulled on a Phoenix uniform the moment they graduated high school. They were still in the minors, but they carried a professional's pride, and the hope of a call-up.
Their numbers on the farm this season hadn't been bad, either, which had fed a real expectation that next year a call-up might actually come. The second-team coaches had even told them that if they kept on as they were, a chance to play at the home park in Daejeon might open up next year.
It might have been nothing but pleasant noise. Even so, the two of them had swollen with hope, figuring that if this hot stove didn't bring in anyone new to compete with them, those odds would only get better.
The rivals already inside Phoenix were burden enough, and their guard was up sharp against a player from another club joining the mix — when some utterly unexpected presence shouldered straight in.
"God, I'm so fucking pissed. A thirty-two-year-old uncle with a guaranteed first-team deal? Does that make any sense?!"
"Life really is... huh?!"
The player who had been cursing his lot and the unfairness of the world, right alongside him, caught sight of someone walking over from a distance, and his eyes went round.
"Hey! Hey, isn't that the uncle? Do Kang-hyun?"
"Looks... like him. Wow. Ink's barely dry and he's already shoving his face in, doing the corporate dance?"
"Figures. Max-level office uncle."
While the two of them traded those lines, a facility staffer came over with Do Kang-hyun in tow.
"Jun-sik, Yeo-un, perfect timing. This is Do Kang-hyun, who just signed. I was showing him around the facility when the office called. If you've got a minute, could I ask you to finish the tour for him?"
It didn't sit well with Hwang Jun-sik or Kim Yeo-un. But they were minor leaguers, and the man asking was a staffer they had to live with, and there was no refusing him.
"Yeah. Sure..."
Kim Yeo-un, a year the junior, answered in his place. The staffer left a thank-you behind and vanished toward the office at a hurried clip. In the awkward quiet that followed, it was Do Kang-hyun who offered his hand first.
"Hello. I'm Do Kang-hyun."
They were the professional seniors, no question about it. But the man in front of them was thirty-two, a good deal older, and a senior out of high school baseball besides. There was no treating him casually.
"Hello, sir. I'm Hwang Jun-sik."
"Hello, sir. I'm Kim Yeo-un."
A senior from high school baseball was someone you hardly dared look in the eye. They offered their greetings with the same rigid courtesy they would show a veteran of their own club. After that, with little else said, Hwang Jun-sik and Kim Yeo-un led him through the facility, point by point.
"It's the offseason, and a break besides, so there aren't many people here. This isn't an official club schedule, so everyone's training on their own..."
Listening to Hwang Jun-sik, Do Kang-hyun looked the place over. It was every bit a grounds kept by a professional club — broad, clean, better than any private lesson barn or academy. There had been a time when they wouldn't even open the facility, let alone hold a workout.
Now, for players with no financial cushion, the club was at least providing the space. Coaches, though, were still nowhere to be found. On a club field, the best anyone could do was have teammates watch one another and lend a hand.
Jang Woo-seok, who knew the situation well, had offered to attach a personal coach to Kang-hyun. The Phoenix front office had allowed it. But Kang-hyun had not received anything you could call a proper signing bonus, and Woo-seok was already doing the work for a fee that amounted to nearly nothing. He could not bring himself to lay one more burden on the man, and so he'd had no choice but to refuse.
Thwack—crack!
Just then Do Kang-hyun caught sight of a player driving balls out of a pitching machine, and his interest sharpened.
"That is a pitching machine they use for training in the major leagues. It can be set as high as a hundred miles an hour, and it throws a full spread — curveball, slider, slurve, cutter, sinker, two-seamer, splitter, changeup — so the batting work sits close to a live at-bat."
As he said it, Hwang Jun-sik slid a look toward Kim Yeo-un.
"That is... on another level from what you see in that famous batting video of yours, sir. How do I put it. If the batting center you used was sandlot ball, that machine exists, quite literally, to train professional players."
At Kim Yeo-un's words, Hwang Jun-sik allowed himself a small smile, as if to say well done, and nodded. Both of them had seen the footage of Do Kang-hyun shelling the batting center. They hadn't said so, but both had gone to that same center and taken their cuts. Of course they hadn't tattooed the home-run target again and again the way he had. That didn't mean they were incapable of hitting the balls there.
It's all a trick. A trick! Unless he's got some knack nobody else knows — how to swing an aluminum bat so you can steer where the ball goes — how the hell do you get contact that insane?
Swing an aluminum bat as pretty as you want, it's still sandlot ball. Take a heavy wooden bat to something north of ninety-three and your body will teach you what the pros actually are.
They caught each other's eyes and quietly resolved to bait him. Kang-hyun had shown his curiosity as well, and the timing was kind — the player who had finished his round was stepping out of the box.
"Would you like to try it yourself, sir?"
Hwang Jun-sik's tone was perfectly polite. The intent packed inside it was not, and Do Kang-hyun was not a man who would miss that. It had been the same all through the tour. They had addressed him with due respect and walked him through the facility, but it wasn't hard to feel that none of it was kindness, and none of it was welcome.
They don't think I can hit it.
He knew Hwang Jun-sik was baiting him, and he nodded anyway, readily. Jun-sik's intent didn't matter. The machine itself — a professional club's pitching machine, different in velocity and in the very path of the ball — had lit a hard competitive fire in him. He wanted to learn with his own body just how far it sat from the machine at the batting center. Before he quite noticed, he had taken the batting gloves Kim Yeo-un was holding out.
"What weight bat should I get you?"
For a professional hitter, the weight of a bat was no small thing, and Kang-hyun had turned the question over with care. He had gained an ability called Spider Sense, but it did nothing to strengthen his body. If he meant to answer a professional fastball with precision, he had to swing a bat his body could actually carry. The bat he had settled on—
"Do you have a thirty-one-ounce? A little lighter is fine if you don't."
At that, Kim Yeo-un went straight to the rack of practice bats and brought back an ordinary one at thirty-one ounces. Kang-hyun took it, stepped into the box as if he belonged there, and took a few easy swings, reading the weight and then the balance. Light. Definitely light. If he were chasing raw power, thirty-two ounces would have been better. But he knew that with the body he had, extra-base power built on contact would be far more productive, and he had already let go of any obsession with weight.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Hwang Jun-sik and Kim Yeo-un took in a practice swing with nothing professional about it, and their voices dropped.
"Pfft. Look at that. That swing is fucking amateur."
"The bat's dancing. Nothing like aluminum."
"A first-team guarantee for a guy like that. The GM's a fucking lunatic."
"I know, right? Not even Opening Day. The fans are going to riot at the exhibition games, aren't they?"
"Obviously!"
They whispered it, watching him. Meanwhile Kang-hyun, having gotten a rough feel for the bat's balance in his hands, signaled that they could start the machine.
"To start, just to get you loose, I'll set it to fastballs only. Eighty-seven to ninety-three miles an hour."
If he had been looking out for Kang-hyun, he would have started him somewhere around eighty and let him adjust. Kim Yeo-un had no such kindness. He said his piece and threw the switch at once. The machine woke with a long mechanical whine. On the big screen mounted behind the taut net, a pitcher went into his delivery, and the ball fired out with him.
Thump—
An eighty-nine-mile-an-hour fastball came in hard. Ordinarily you let the first pitch go, just to read a machine's speed and its line. Kang-hyun was already set. He had taken a light load, and he turned the bat into the incoming ball with exactness.
CRAAACK!!
It met the sweet spot and left faster than it had arrived, climbing on the twenty-five-degree launch everyone called ideal, and it struck the net as if it meant to tear clean through. Hwang Jun-sik and Kim Yeo-un snapped their heads toward him, startled by a ball that had flown like a bullet. A man who hadn't even warmed up properly, opening with contact like that — their eyes were full of the bewildered sense that it couldn't be real.
"Th-that was a fluke, right?"
"Must've been a fluke."
But the second pitch, too.
CRAAACK!!
And the third.
CRAAACK!!
The fourth, and the fifth as well. Do Kang-hyun did not miss a single fastball between eighty-seven and ninety-three, and he sent every one of them to nearly the same spot. Then, as if the drill no longer meant a thing, he turned to Kim Yeo-un — half the sense knocked out of him — and made a request.
"Would it be possible to set it to maximum velocity, mix in the breaking balls, and have them come at random?"
"O-of course. Shall I set it?"
"Yes. Please."
Kim Yeo-un changed the settings, certain that this time, at least, even Do Kang-hyun would swing and miss — or else spray a wild thicket of contact that had nothing to do with a hit.