A Challenge to Korean Baseball
"Haa... what am I supposed to do when they just dump a player in my lap like this?"
Lee Man-jae, manager of the Daejeon Phoenix, found Do Kang-hyun's very existence more than awkward. It was offensive. Player acquisitions might be the general manager's exclusive right, but never once had a contract been shoved through without so much as asking the manager what he thought.
"That damned advanced baseball. Advanced baseball, my ass!"
The trouble started with the club president, a man who'd landed the chair through family ties to some corporation and then drawn a hard line between the GM's authority and the manager's, insisting they run things the way Major League clubs did.
Even if the deal had been too urgent for a proper talk, it might have been different with a player everyone could accept. A thirty-two-year-old rookie, though? From where Lee Man-jae sat, it felt like nothing but a thorough slap in the face.
"From what I'm hearing out of the front office, Scouting Director Hwang Wook pushed for this very hard."
At those words from head coach Kim Do-jin, hitting coach Park Seong-hoo nodded and offered something more concrete.
"I heard there was quite an argument between Operations Director Shin Yoon-ah and the GM over this signing."
"Weren't Director Shin and the GM thick as thieves?"
"Which is exactly why even Director Shin had no choice but to oppose bringing Do Kang-hyun in. That's how I read it, anyway."
"Then what the hell did Director Hwang say that made the GM ram this contract through without even properly talking to Director Shin? And the president's no better. Fine, he handed over full authority — but shouldn't he have killed a deal this stupid?"
"From what I hear, the first priority was not losing Do Kang-hyun to the Titans, so they rushed it."
"The Titans? That's what I'm saying. Yang Joo-il was working behind the scenes to shove Do Kang-hyun at the Titans in the first place, wasn't he?"
"Joo-il did push him. That's true. And it's also true the Titans were trying to sign him."
"Then he should've gone to the Titans! Why the hell did he stamp his name on a Phoenix contract?"
"You know the GM always folds the second Director Hwang opens his mouth. Hwang must have rated Do Kang-hyun that highly. And it wasn't just any club — it was the Titans. From the GM's side, I think he felt the clock running out."
Talking it through, Lee Man-jae found he could understand GM Lee Jong-woon's heart, if only a little. Any other club, maybe not. But it had to be the Titans.
For seven years now, the Phoenix and the Titans had been locked in a vicious fight over the title of the KBO's official last-place club. When other teams opened a season aiming at a championship, the Phoenix and the Titans did too, in theory — but the more realistic goal was simply not to finish dead last. So if the Titans were about to climb out of the cellar by any means, the Phoenix was obligated to get in the way. The Titans felt exactly the same.
"I get it. But this isn't some marquee free agent on the market, or even a second-tier one. Competing over a thirty-two-year-old rookie... this is why the team's looked like this for seven straight years."
Lee Man-jae spat it out like an accusation and sneered, as if the whole thing were pathetic. Ask whether the Phoenix was broke, and the answer was no. Every year they brought in a free agent — not a true big fish, but a solid second-tier piece. The idiotic part was pouring near-marquee money all over second-tier talent.
What else can you do? If you don't throw money at them like that, they won't even think about coming!
What player wants a team that's a perennial favorite for last place? Even a man who swears he loves money will watch his own career get wrecked if the club is gasping along the bottom every year. And so young free agents wouldn't so much as glance at a Phoenix contract unless the overpay was truly absurd. The Titans were no different. The one thing they had on the Phoenix was that they didn't spray money around so wildly the fans mocked them for it. The Phoenix pissed cash away and still finished last. The Titans didn't even piss cash away, and that's why they finished last. The fans' scorn had grown as familiar as a morning hello.
"I looked at the contract. There's a clause guaranteeing him forty games with the first team... that was his agent throwing a fit, wasn't it?"
That was the part that made Lee Man-jae angriest of all. If the GM held exclusive authority over signings, the manager held exclusive authority over who played. You could not leave that point out of this damned advanced baseball, this Major League way of running a club. And Do Kang-hyun's agent had thrown down a direct challenge to it.
"Still, it isn't a guarantee that he starts, so that's something to be thankf—"
The hitting coach, blind to the room, had started pointing out a loophole in the clause when Lee Man-jae's terrifying glare snapped his mouth shut. Starter, substitute, whatever. What Lee Man-jae could not stand — what genuinely soured him — was the simple fact that someone else was dictating his authority.
"Ungrateful little bastard. If I could do what I wanted, I'd send him in as a sub once or twice at the very end of the season and be done with it."
Realistically, a stunt like that would bury him in abuse he couldn't handle from inside the club and out — and that was the lesser problem. Do Kang-hyun's agent, and the GM besides, would raise absolute hell, so stirring up pointless trouble would do him no good.
If the team were sitting in the upper ranks, he might hide behind that excuse and truly not use Do Kang-hyun until the back half of the year. He knew better than anyone that it wasn't going to happen. The owner had already announced, before this offseason began, that he would not open his wallet. Which meant one thing.
We're heading into a new season with a roster that barely crawled out of last place...
How much better could things really get? Lee Man-jae's head was already pounding. The only comfort was that they'd decided to clean house on all three foreign players who'd been next to no help the season before.
"His position's the outfield? Center field?"
"Yes. This is the tape from the Titans tryout. Would you like to see it?"
Lee Man-jae hesitated, then gave a crooked nod, as if to say he might as well see what kind of player had the scouting director leaning so hard on the GM. The head coach found the video and hit play. Lee Man-jae fixed the opening frames with a glare meant to hunt down nothing but flaws, and it didn't take long at all before that expression began, subtly, to change.
"...He's not bad."
"His read off the bat is good. He picks up the ball from the sound and the flight alone, so his reactions are quick and his range is pretty wide. And more than anything—"
"That arm is the real thing."
"Yes. A cannon. His throwing accuracy is quite high, too. Even if we only used him as a defensive replacement, I think he'd be fine."
"They didn't hand out a contract like that just to hide him on defense. How many more videos of him are there?"
The head coach ran them in order, from the hitting footage through a highlight reel of his appearance on Steel Baseball. When it was all over, Lee Man-jae sat with his brow knotted tight, and only after a long while did he ask, as if demanding an answer.
"Why is this bastard deciding to play baseball again now? This guy... is this some kind of challenge to Korean baseball?"
"...Is that even possible?"
Kim Woo-ram, twenty-two and still down in the minors, stared blankly at Do Kang-hyun, who was gleefully teeing off on a pitching machine that even the first-team players called too stiff for training — like a boy come face-to-face with an alien.
Thwack— crack!!
A 138 km/h curve, nothing like the 156 km/h fastball a moment before, hooked down and in on him, and Do Kang-hyun still drove it as if he'd been waiting. People said a gap of about twenty kilometers an hour between fastball and curve was ideal, because even when the eyes could react, the body couldn't. And yet the timing he'd just shown could only be described, no matter who was watching, as his body answering on the spot. Unless—
"Did he know a curve was coming?"
Just in case, Kim Woo-ram craned his neck and looked around, wondering if somebody was standing behind the machine. Ridiculous. Do Kang-hyun had set the thing to random, so nobody could know what pitch would come out, or how.
Thwack— crack!!
This time he barreled a 140 km/h slider tailing away outside, dead on the sweet spot. The crack sounded like the ball had split in two, and it flew hard enough to punch through the netting. On a real field it would have slammed the fence flush and still had plenty left — that good a piece of contact.
"Jesus, that bat is fucking filthy..."
Kim Woo-ram turned toward the man who'd come up beside him, envy and awe tangled in his voice.
"Ah! Senior! Hello, sir!"
"Yeah, hey. Name was..."
"Kim Woo-ram!"
"Ah, right — Woo-ram! While everybody else is out packing on the fat and messing around, you're in here training. I like that. We'll be playing together in Daejeon this year, huh?"
"Thank you! I'll work hard!"
Joo Min-ho looked at Kim Woo-ram, bowing with stiff propriety as if the greeting itself were an honor, and found him rather endearing. These days — this whole MZ-generation business — handling juniors was harder than handling seniors, so a kid who acted like Kim Woo-ram just looked cute to him for no good reason.
"So, our Woo-ram. What were you doing?"
"I was watching Senior Do Kang-hyun train."
"Kang-hyun's hitting? Yeah? What do you think?"
"He's incredible. He doesn't miss anything. He squares up every pitch, and..."
"And you're wondering why a guy with that kind of skill spent all this time clocking in at an office and fooling the rest of us?"
"I... honestly, yes."
"Me too. Why'd he waste all those years getting that old? I've been thinking it the whole two weeks I've been watching him. He wasn't like that when we went to school together for three years. I'm telling you, the guy's insane."
Playful, but not a joke at all. It was Joo Min-ho's completely honest feeling. For the past two weeks he'd been helping Do Kang-hyun settle into the team, and he'd started training with him in case he could be even a little help with life as a pro.
From Kang-hyun's side, there was no reason to refuse work alongside a clubhouse veteran like Joo Min-ho. And in those sessions Min-ho had lived through one impossible thing after another, until he even doubted whether this Do Kang-hyun was the Do Kang-hyun he thought he knew.
"Be honest with me! Where's the real Do Kang-hyun? You alien bastard!"
Even granting that the work was as close to a live game as training could get, Kang-hyun's hitting was so far past sense that even Joo Min-ho, a pro, had barely seen anything like it.
A pitching machine and a real person were completely different, of course. You couldn't compare a machine that spat balls out on a fixed timing with a human armed in irregular timing. But watch Do Kang-hyun hit, and you had to wonder how many pitchers in the current KBO could even get away from that terrifying bat.
Once the season opens — no. The circus is going to start at spring camp.
Intrasquad games, exhibitions, all of it. Just picturing the eyes popping out of every player and coach who'd been ignoring Do Kang-hyun and freezing him out was enough to put a stupid grin on Joo Min-ho's face. After that, the fans.
Everyone who'd ripped the Phoenix for signing an old rookie like him would have to shut their mouths once they saw that bat in the exhibition games. The ones still insisting that exhibitions were only exhibitions would clamp their jaws the moment the season began.
And anyone who won't even grant him that is hopeless anyway. No need to care.
Either way, training beside Do Kang-hyun had left Joo Min-ho with no choice but to trust what he'd seen of that bat. Looked at coldly, through the eyes of a pro heading into his thirteenth year, Do Kang-hyun's hitting was real. Just like right now — even on a 160 km/h fastball up and in, the bat came around easy and launched the ball on an ideal angle.
"...Senior. Since you said you were classmates with Senior Do Kang-hyun, could I ask one favor? Could you ask him to teach me a little hitting?"
When Kim Woo-ram made the plea with a desperate face, Joo Min-ho frowned and cut him off flat.
"No. I'm first. I've got a five-billion-won free agency to blow up in two years. I learn first, then our Woo-ram can learn. I'll put in a good word for you then."
"..."
Against the cold arithmetic of the pro game, Kim Woo-ram had no choice but to taste disappointment all over again.