Officially a Phoenix
The hot stove league burned as hot as ever. The big-fish free agents who had spent the whole offseason pumping up their numbers for this very day lounged at their ease, stamping their names on whatever conclusion emerged from the taut tug-of-war between agents and clubs, and announcing a fresh start.
The next tier down swung between a day of hope and a day of disappointment, craning their necks for the agent who would finally come back with the best deal possible.
And everyone else—chasing a free-agent contract or a salary negotiation, standing at the fork between one more year of life in the game and retirement—lived out each anxious day praying that good news would find them.
"Hae-woon hits the jackpot and he can't even spring for a proper feast? Cheap bastard, going completely dark."
Joo Min-ho cursed Jeong Hae-woon, who wouldn't pick up no matter how many times he called, and set his phone down. Do Kang-hyun had just finished his interval runs. He wiped the sweat pouring off him with a towel and caught his breath, and Min-ho latched on at once.
"Kang-hyun, let's go to Hae-woon's place. Guy's rolling in money—we ought to eat him out of house and home. What do you say?"
"I haven't called him once in twelve years. You really think that's something I should do?"
Kang-hyun squinted at him as if to ask whether he was even serious.
"We're high school classmates! So what? Don't you know three years of high school run deeper than ten years of knowing somebody out in the world?"
Whatever anyone else might have said to that, Kang-hyun had no real answer. If someone asked whether he'd made a single friend his own age after graduation—someone he could actually call a friend—he would have had nothing to say. Min-ho might be shamelessly sociable, slick with people, but wiping out a twelve-year gap in barely four weeks had only been possible because they'd survived those hard high school years together.
"Even so, showing up at his house out of nowhere after twelve years doesn't sit right. And knowing Hae-woon, I doubt he'd welcome us with open arms."
"Yeah. Fair."
Truth was, Min-ho had only been tossing the idea out. If they'd been on the same team as Hae-woon, maybe. Barging in just because they were high school classmates, when they weren't, wasn't exactly a good look.
"God, I'm jealous. Sixteen billion! What do you think that bastard felt like, stamping his name on a contract like that?"
Kang-hyun was curious too, but thinking about it wouldn't tell him how Hae-woon had felt. Min-ho, though, had his own free agency coming in two years, and he couldn't quite climb out of the fantasy.
"If I ever stamp a contract like that, I'm out the same day looking at apartments with a full view of the Han River. Then I buy a car in the four- or five-hundred-million-won range, and I slap bankbooks with three hundred million each in front of my parents and my wife—after everything they've put up with—and tell them to spend it however they want!"
"Take out taxes and the rest, and there won't be much left."
"......I'm just talking. Talking. And honestly, for a guy like Hae-woon, it doesn't matter how big the tax bill is. He already made eleven billion over seven years before he was even a free agent."
Seven years and eleven billion won, and now six years and sixteen billion. A thirteen-year, twenty-seven-billion-won deal that would stand in the KBO record books. Facing that, Kang-hyun had nothing left to argue.
There was something he'd been wanting to ask, though.
"Speaking of which—why didn't Hae-woon ever take a shot at the majors?"
"The majors? Oh, you don't know? His seventh year, was it? A few MLB clubs were interested in him. Then his shoulder got in the way."
"His shoulder?"
"You didn't know? Pretty much every baseball person and fan knows about it......"
At the height of his run as one of the KBO's marquee hitters, Jeong Hae-woon was bound to draw serious interest from major-league clubs. But the shoulder injury he'd picked up playing defense in his sixth pro season was treated as a critical flaw. He'd been a third baseman then, and after the injury he'd been seen botching plays more than once—throws that were inaccurate and slow.
"They were even talking surgery. It was a complete mess. Once it got to that point, the MLB clubs started hammering his price down hard, and... man. You really see how cold American business can be."
"So did he have the surgery?"
"Nope. Hae-woon's a stubborn bastard. He gritted through treatment without going under the knife, and in the offseason he rehabbed his way back. He's not what he used to be, sure. But even after all that effort, the MLB clubs kept saying he might need shoulder surgery any day and still lowballed him."
The Gwangju Thunders, by contrast, threw themselves behind his rehab and treatment and built real trust along the way. On one side lay a cold major-league world where he'd be treated as an outsider and could be written off as a non-factor at any moment. On the other, staying in Korea and retiring as a franchise player—maybe even a legend. Between those two roads, Hae-woon, in the end, couldn't turn down the Thunders' offer of stability.
"So it worked out for both of them. Hae-woon put up steady, solid numbers all through the multiyear deal without any real problems, and the club paid him back by going big on this free-agent contract."
"And the shoulder's all right?"
"Probably? The Thunders wouldn't have given him sixteen billion if they thought there was a problem."
"Yeah. Fair point."
You could shout about loyalty and trust all you wanted. Business was still business. If there'd been even a hint that Hae-woon's shoulder was off, the Thunders would never have invested that kind of money. Min-ho called it a win for both sides, but Kang-hyun wondered whether Hae-woon saw it the same way.
Giving up the majors, of all things—could that really have been easy? No way.
The Jeong Hae-woon in Kang-hyun's memory had wanted baseball, and clung to it, harder than any of their other classmates. An English vocabulary book was always tucked in the front pocket of his bag, and the sight of him pulling it out to study during breaks had stuck with Kang-hyun. Thinking of how enormous a decision it must have taken for that Hae-woon to walk away from the majors, he found, somehow, that he understood.
And who am I to go around understanding people? Nose so far in other people's business it's a bumper crop.
Give up the majors or not, Hae-woon had become a KBO superstar rich enough to earn twenty-seven billion won by the same age. Set next to that, Kang-hyun found himself pretty pathetic.
Stop thinking about other people. Take care of your own business.
He cleared his head and stepped back onto the treadmill. A few days ago, once real training had started piling fatigue on him, he'd realized his swing timing was slipping—just a fraction late. Min-ho and the other players still didn't hold back their praise, calling it insane hitting talent, but Kang-hyun could tell his stamina fell well short.
I have to drag my conditioning up, tooth and nail, before the season starts. With a body this weak, I'll never survive a long year.
Baseball was a sport that demanded you endure a very long season. Even batting practice alone was already exposing the cracks in his stamina. If he had to play center field on top of that, his body would burn down even faster. That much was as plain as watching a fire.
If I blow the chance I finally got because I ran out of gas, there isn't a stupider way to lose it.
Kang-hyun started his interval runs again. Beside him, Min-ho chattered on—wasn't he tired, shouldn't they quit already and go eat something good.
A December that had been cold to some and hot to others passed, and 2026 began. Another two weeks went by. January 15.
"Welcome. As of today, you're officially, completely a Phoenix."
Kang-hyun took the hand the front-office staffer offered and answered.
"Yes. I'll be in your care."
"Originally the general manager and the others meant to come themselves, but......"
The staffer launched into a long explanation of why he'd come alone. Kang-hyun let it pass. He was thirty-two—no, a year older now, a thirty-three-year-old late-blooming rookie. How grand a reception could a player like that really expect? More than that, the official contract period was only starting today. He'd already heard the general manager's welcome the day he stamped the contract, and he'd been training at the Phoenix facility ever since. There wasn't the slightest reason to feel slighted.
Someone else, though, did feel slighted.
"My dear junior, if you betray me and walk off like this, what am I supposed to do? Do you have any idea how much grease I laid down for you with the Titans? You think you'll make it just because you ran off to the Phoenix? I'm cursing you to fail, I swear it!"
It was Yang Joo-il—the man who had, in every practical sense, given Kang-hyun the courage to live a new life, helped him without holding back, and cheered him on. When Kang-hyun had called as a matter of courtesy to say it looked like he'd be signing with the Phoenix, Yang hadn't bothered to hide his disappointment.
"Ha ha ha. I'm kidding. My junior, you have to succeed. Make the Titans beat the ground and regret it—show them up, you hear me? You can promise me that, can't you?"
No one was more disappointed than Yang that the Titans hadn't grabbed Kang-hyun as boldly as the Phoenix had. More than anyone, he wanted the man he'd talked into quitting his company at thirty-two to succeed with the Phoenix and leave Yang's old club, the Titans, sick with regret.
"And I've got my hands full too, thanks to stuffing my junior onto the show. I ended up playing baseball again when it was never in the cards. If I can find the time during spring camp, I'll come see your face. Fighting!"
Shoehorning Kang-hyun into Steel Baseball had dragged Yang back into the game himself, and he was in the middle of getting his body into shape. It might have been a sports variety show, but he was dead serious about the baseball, and if he wanted to carry even a scrap of the reputation he'd had as an active player, he had to grind with everything he had.
More than anything, the fight for a starting spot was fiercer than it had been in his playing days, and Yang was dead set on one thing: a backup would never make it onto TV.
"And this is the spring training schedule."
When Kang-hyun took the sheet the staffer held out, it felt as if a real baseball life were finally beginning in earnest.
"Camp one is Arizona, in the States. Camp two is Okinawa, in Japan. If you look over the schedule and anything's still unclear, call the number written there anytime and we'll walk you through it. Once again, we're counting on you this season, Do Kang-hyun."
"Yes. I'll work hard."
The staffer left. Alone, Kang-hyun was going over the spring training schedule line by line when agent Jang Woo-seok walked into the facility. As his agent, Jang was tending to every detail outside the game so Kang-hyun could focus on baseball alone—finding a place to stay in Daejeon, the Phoenix's home city; equipment sponsorships for training and games; contact with the press for the sake of his image.
The reason Kang-hyun could pour himself into training with no interest in the rest of the world was Jang Woo-seok, living up to the word agent with perfect support.
"We've finalized the contract with the bat company you chose last time. The owner himself has agreed to make your bats personally, so you don't need to worry."
"Wasn't that a fairly large company? I heard they make bats for well-known players, too. You're saying the owner is really going to make a rookie's bats himself?"
"Yes. I got a firm promise out of him, and we put it in writing."
Through his old classmate Min-ho, Kang-hyun had heard the company president was no easy man. He realized all over again that Jang's touch was anything but ordinary.
Same as the Phoenix contract. Agent Jang really does know how to get things done.
Having lived the company life, Kang-hyun understood better than most just how exceptional that ability was. On top of everything else, Jang seemed to have this spring training memorized down to the last detail, and he walked Kang-hyun through it from one end to the other.
"The Arizona spring camp is largely about building stamina and training, so it'll suit you perfectly. Okinawa, though, is less about training and more about practice games—really, about sketching out the starting lineup. If you don't make a real impression there, there's a good chance you won't be given many opportunities in the exhibition games after that, either."
"Is that so?"
"You've met Manager Lee Man-jae, haven't you?"
"Yes. We had our first meeting last week."
"The atmosphere wasn't exactly welcoming, was it?"
"I figured that was inevitable."
Nothing in the way Kang-hyun spoke suggested his confidence had dropped, or that he'd drawn in on himself, and Jang smiled as if that were enough.
"Manager Lee can be a rigid type, but once you break through, he backs you without hesitation. He does tend to lean on a player's name value. Flip that around, though, and it means that from the moment he puts his trust in you, you basically don't come out of the starting lineup all season unless something truly goes wrong. You follow what I'm saying?"
"Yes, I understand. At the company I used to work for, there was a boss who only handed work to the subordinates he could trust—stubborn about it, almost."
"Ha ha ha! Exactly. Someone you can trust enough to hand things to. It's working life. Of course it ends up that way. Think of it like that, and the company you worked for and this Phoenix club aren't so different."
In a short time, Kang-hyun had come to trust an agent named Jang Woo-seok completely. In the same way, he understood one thing clearly: even if Manager Lee Man-jae didn't look kindly on him, he had to catch that man's eye. And on January 28, Do Kang-hyun boarded a plane bound for Arizona.