The God of Hitting
A soft tap.
Do Kang-hyun turned at the light slap on his shoulder and found Joo Min-ho grinning at him.
"So what the hell happened?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You left one hell of a mark in defensive drills today."
"A mark?"
"Yeah. I hear Coach Jeong Tae-hoon was laying the praise on pretty thick."
At the mention of defensive coach Jeong Tae-hoon, Do Kang-hyun let out a short breath of a laugh, as if it were nothing.
"What's with that face? Just how good did you have to look out there for the D-coach to go that far? Was your defense... actually any good?"
High school was the whole of what Joo Min-ho remembered, and even that was so faint he wasn't sure it would surface at all—Do Kang-hyun's defense back then had never been anything special. He had gone looking for the tryout tape too, but if anything, the man on that footage felt even further from the teammate living in his memory.
"Anyway, you stamped your name on day one. How's it feel? Pretty great? You dying over there?"
"What are you, still in high school? Grow up."
"Childish or not, you're thrilled out of your mind."
"Well. It's not bad."
"Heh heh heh! Knew it!"
Just as Joo Min-ho said, there was no way the news could sit badly with him. His defense had burned itself into the defensive coach's memory on the very first day of camp. Peeling the prejudice off one layer at a time and earning their trust—that was exactly what Do Kang-hyun had planned.
"Choi Woo-sung give you any grief?"
"Not really."
"Yeah? Good. Still, watch yourself. Like I said, the guy's petty as hell."
Choi Woo-sung had picked a fight right before defensive drills, only for it to get cut short, and afterward—though he looked like he had plenty he wanted to say—he had simply ignored Do Kang-hyun and walked on without a word. From where Kang-hyun stood, the meaning of that, and the feeling behind it, was plain enough.
In the working world, ability is the baseline. No matter how much a boss or a senior cusses and carries on, if you actually have the skill, there's a line they won't cross. Of course, he had also seen plenty of people who trusted that skill too far, mouthed off, and watched their careers die for it. Either way, the moment Do Kang-hyun put on a performance that clearly outclassed the rest of them, Choi Woo-sung had decided not to touch him and moved on.
Not that this ends here.
Once someone takes a dislike to you, they don't let that feeling go easily. Do Kang-hyun had learned that over a long life in an office. At first, all he'd felt was the injustice of it—why me, what did I even do that was so wrong. Time passed, and he got used to it, and once he understood how thin and mean that hostility usually was—petty pride, or plain inferiority—he had found a way to answer it. A question occurred to him, and he put it to Joo Min-ho.
"What would you do? Some senior hates you for no reason at all, just because he's your senior, and he rides you and makes your life miserable."
"Senior, my ass. You think I'd just sit there? I'd go right back at him!"
"...Right."
He might as well not have asked. Some people would cheer that answer, but in the working life Do Kang-hyun had lived, it never helped. It might bleed the stress off in the moment. Later, most people ended up regretting it—should've just swallowed it. He had been one of them. Only after living through that regret had he understood how you were supposed to handle it.
February 3.
As on the day before, the work was defense and baserunning. If the second had been a simple session broken out by position, meant only to wake the body back up, the third was a full-camp block built around fungoes. Everyone took easy ones with no distinction between infield and outfield, and then the outfielders fielded in the outfield and threw to their assigned bases.
Here, too, Do Kang-hyun stamped himself into the coaches' eyes.
"He gets a little unsteady setting himself, but the reaction speed is ridiculous. No question."
"Footwork's sloppy too. Straight high-school level."
"And the chain from the catch into the throw feels chopped up. Stop-start."
"Even so—the way he reacts to the ball, the way he finds a glove on it no matter what. And above all, that arm is the best in the league. Line anybody up next to him. There isn't a cannon like that."
The coaches judged him more coldly than anyone. He had walked onto a professional field at thirty-three, so they believed they had to be far stricter, far more exacting, than they would ever be with a twenty-year-old rookie.
Even in pro ball, a first time is a first time. A player can make mistakes, stumble, come in less than polished, and still be understood, forgiven, and coached through it. That mercy is reserved for the young. It does not extend to a thirty-three-year-old Do Kang-hyun. Even if the manager and the coaches wanted to understand him and shield him, the fans were unlikely to accept it.
From where the fans sat, better to hand the chance to a twenty-year-old and let him stack experience until he became a pillar of the club than to spend it on a thirty-three-year-old rookie.
When would you develop him, when would you grow him, and how long would you wait before he started helping? And if you waited—would he even grow? What kind of upward curve can you expect from an aging player whose body is only going to fade with every year that passes?
Putting Do Kang-hyun on the field, then, demanded a heavy sense of responsibility from the manager and the coaches. It might feel unfair from his side of it, but set even against veteran players his own age, not the smallest mistake would be forgiven.
"If he were at least twenty-nine, I'd be seriously thinking about putting him in the first-team lineup."
Defensive coach Jeong Tae-hoon let a note of regret slip.
"Coach Jeong, sounds like Do Kang-hyun's really won you over."
At that from Choi Ha-neul, the baserunning and strategy coach, Jeong Tae-hoon glanced sideways at head coach Kim Do-jin and hitting coach Park Sung-hoo, both standing beside him with their arms folded.
Right up until they had left for camp—even as recently as yesterday morning—he had been voicing the same distaste for Do Kang-hyun as the rest of the staff. Showing how far his feelings had swung in a single day made him self-conscious. Fortunately, the men he was watching for gave no particular reaction, and Jeong Tae-hoon said what he thought.
"When you watched that Titans test tape, was there really anyone who wasn't shocked? Sure, it was a tryout, but if you go by the video alone, anybody would have expectations. That's just a fact. And it's something even you have to admit, Coach Choi. Am I wrong?"
His condition had been too good that day at the tryout. The weather had happened to help the throws. Maybe it was one of those once-a-year days when a player produces something far beyond what he actually is.
The Phoenix staff had evaluated Do Kang-hyun's test footage while stacking every possibility of that kind at the very top. They had no choice. If the ability on that tape was his everyday ability, there was simply no explanation for why he had never come to pro ball in the first place.
It happens sometimes. A player who has been nothing special in real games suddenly produces a performance that belongs in the history books. Fans call it crazy mode, and for the player himself, that day becomes the one he will never forget for the rest of his career.
For Do Kang-hyun, maybe the day of the Titans tryout had been exactly that—a miracle that could never come again in one lifetime. They had tried, as hard as they could, to believe it.
"The test tape wasn't a lie. Why the Titans tried to lock him up, why the GM went so far as to hang contract terms nobody could make sense of on him just to get the deal done—I think we have to admit it now, and accept it."
Silence followed. After a long moment, hitting coach Park Sung-hoo spoke.
"There's something I heard. If it's actually true, then once I've seen it with my own eyes, I'll do what Tae-hoon says. I'll go to the manager and argue, seriously, that we put Do Kang-hyun in the first-team lineup."
"What did you hear?"
At Choi Ha-neul's question, Park Sung-hoo hesitated over whether to say it, then decided it wasn't something that needed whispering.
"The second-team kids at our complex have been calling Do Kang-hyun the God of Hitting."
"The God of Hitting... isn't that just what people have been saying online since Yang Joo-il's broadcast?"
"That's the thing. The second-team guys are saying the exact same thing."
"Come on. They're supposed to be professionals, and they're—"
Like the players, the first-team coaches had taken no rest through the season and had finally gotten a break once it ended. After their own time off they had been buried in camp logistics, with neither the time nor the reason to go out to the complex.
So not one of them truly knew what kind of work Do Kang-hyun had been doing there all winter. It was only after the camp schedule came out, and some of the second-team players slated to travel with them started talking, that hitting coach Park Sung-hoo heard about him.
"Kang-hyun is actually insane, I'm telling you!"
"That bat is filthy!"
"You'll see it yourself, Coach, but Senior Kang-hyun is the real deal. The real deal! Hitting alone, he'd chew up half the first-team roster!"
"I think he's a god. Just like they say online—Senior Do Kang-hyun is the God of Hitting."
"I mean, tech can advance all it wants, but we're not actually sticking an AI chip in somebody's head like a novel or a movie and having him hit, right? That still doesn't make sense?"
The last one had been talking such nonsense that he'd been cursed out and run off, but either way, Park Sung-hoo couldn't help being shaken. Second-team players, idolizing Do Kang-hyun—a competitor who should have been anything but welcome to them. If he had followed his heart, he would have called Kang-hyun straight to the complex and checked that supposedly insane bat with his own eyes.
Tomorrow I'll see it myself. Then I'll know.
Tomorrow, February 4, the schedule was hitting. A light weight session in the morning, and in the afternoon, in the indoor cages, a check and a breakdown of swings gone stiff through the winter. Hitting coach Park Sung-hoo was looking forward to tomorrow more than anyone.
"...Is that a human being? No—goddamn it... what kind of person hits nothing but the sweet spot, that clean, that constant, every single time!"
Hitting coach Park Sung-hoo was thunderstruck. His eyes had gone wide, as if a UFO had just hung itself in the sky, and his mouth fell open so far a fly could have flown in and out without him noticing.
A 98-mph fastball, in on the hands and down. Even if you sat on it, squaring that pitch up was no easy thing. For Do Kang-hyun, it was. He swung with perfect ease. Whatever the pitch, whatever the location, his manner said it didn't matter, and the swing that followed was as mechanical as a machine.
Crack!
The clean, bright sound of the barrel slammed through the entire indoor cage, and the ball held an ideal launch angle as it screamed off and punched the net. Do Kang-hyun, meanwhile, took the hand off the bat and flexed his fist open and shut, chasing the feel left in his fingertips.
The ball has a different weight. No question.
A batting machine is only a batting machine. Even the newest one was nothing next to a ball thrown by a human being. A pitcher's ball is never this simple. The machine at the Phoenix complex and the one here at the Peoria Sports Complex spit out the same thing: a pitch type set by a program, a velocity locked in, a trajectory that never changes, fired with mechanical sameness.
A ball thrown by a man is different. Ten pitchers, ten completely different baseballs. There is no such thing as the identical four-seamer, the identical curve, the way a machine throws them.
Honestly, it isn't even as lively as what Hong Jun-oh throws.
Even the newest machine felt weaker than the ball Hong Jun-oh threw on Steel Baseball, the retired pitcher now making his name in variety. A batting machine exists for training, nothing more.
The same ball comes in, over and over, on a fixed path, and the hitter swings at it over and over—to clean up his mechanics, to sharpen his precision, to train his reactions on a specific part of the zone. Which was to say—
For me, with Spider Sense, this isn't really meaningful training at all.
Because the machine never stopped feeding him baseballs, and because Do Kang-hyun was swinging off old memory, it could still serve to settle his swing into something consistent. But the most important thing other players took from a machine—the training of raw reflexes—was meaningless to him.
Still... it feels good to hit.
Crack!
He barreled another one dead-center and let a smile touch his mouth as he watched the ball fly off like a bullet. And after that session in the indoor cages, defensive coach Jeong Tae-hoon was no longer alone. Hitting coach Park Sung-hoo had become Do Kang-hyun's fervent believer too.
At the evening meeting, hitting coach Park Sung-hoo was on his feet and shouting, wound all the way up. At that half-mad cry, Manager Lee Man-jae took the mouse in his hand and hurled it.