The First Scrimmage
Arizona spring training slipped past in a blur.
In the first defensive workout, Do Kang-hyun had walked off with the fielding coach's heart entirely, and in the first round of batting practice he claimed the hitting coach's just as clean. It was no different in the cages than it had been in the indoor tunnel.
Crack!
Watching the ball rifle away like a bullet, hitting coach Park Seong-hu clapped on pure reflex and shouted.
"Yes! Yes! Beautiful!"
Every time Kang-hyun drove one, clean and easy, all the way to the wall, Park applauded like a trained seal and cried out in wonder — and every time he did, manager Lee Man-jae knotted his brow.
"Why's he carrying on like that? Somebody get him to quiet down."
At that, bench coach Kim Do-jin let a small sigh slip and set about talking Park down. All the while Kang-hyun kept launching every batting-practice pitch they fed him, farther and farther.
Lee Man-jae watched in earnest. His face stayed placid, but inside he was every bit as stunned and admiring as the hitting coach — halfway to panic, if he was honest with himself.
It's batting practice. They're throwing it to be hit. So why is he this exact? Sweet spot every time, no matter the location — how does that even make sense? Frame isn't even that big. Where's all this power coming from? Some kind of compressed, game-day muscle? That it? No? He does barrel everything, sure... but it's the burst. The instant he drives it, the thing just explodes. Ha! What kind of bastard is this?
Worked up as he was, Park had insisted Kang-hyun belonged in the Opening Day lineup, and Lee found he understood the feeling. But a manager had to hold an objective line, so he only nodded, small and spare — the faintest sign that the kid was doing all right.
"Honestly, I think he's past what we hoped for."
Bench coach Kim Do-jin, too, looked less like a man still harboring doubts than one quietly raising the bar. Fair enough. Lee figured that if you could watch what Kang-hyun was doing and still refuse to grant it, you weren't walking around with working eyes at all. You were walking around with a dog's.
Even with his own bench coach pushing the kid, Lee held to the same posture. A manager did not get to make a hasty call. It wasn't a simple question of faith in Kang-hyun, or the lack of it. If he failed to show a cold, neutral, objective eye, resentment would take root among the rest of the players.
"Our Blue-White is on the seventh, yeah?"
"Yes, sir. The seventh is the first scrimmage."
"Good. Then that's the day we take our first real look at everything Do Kang-hyun can do."
"Where do you want him?"
"White team. Center field. The order... hit him leadoff."
That Kang-hyun would play in an intra-squad game had been a given. That he would start — and bat first, no less, rather than come in off the bench — was something no one had seen coming.
And so, on the seventh of February, the Daejeon Phoenix opened their first Blue-White scrimmage at the club's first spring-training site.
When his name was called first, Kang-hyun felt his heart kick against his ribs.
Through Steel Baseball he had played in a game for the first time in the twelve years since high school, but that had only been a variety show. This was an intra-squad scrimmage, yes — and still a game inside a professional club, in name and in fact, and the nerves didn't compare. Depending on how this one went, the way people looked at him might shift, or it might set like stone, and so he stepped in determined to be better still.
The Blue team batted first, which put Kang-hyun in center field to open the game on defense. Filming Steel Baseball, the ball had never found him out there, and he'd never had a chance to make a play. The scrimmage was different.
Crack!
The Blue leadoff man lifted the first pitch of the game, a fly to the outfield. Kang-hyun broke the instant it left the bat, read the landing spot early, and settled under it clean. An easy fly — and still he let out a quiet breath of relief, fired the ball in to the shortstop, and trotted back to his spot.
The two-hole grounded to the infield. The three-hole dropped a hit in front of the left fielder. The cleanup hitter—
Crack!
Big. He'd turned on it with intent, and though the ball had missed the sweet spot by a hair, it still carried a Phoenix cleanup hitter's power, climbing and climbing. It sliced into the awkward alley in right-center, and Kang-hyun reacted faster than anyone, sprinting back and to his right on a diagonal. The man in right had quick feet of his own, but Kang-hyun's earlier jump gave him the better angle.
"Mine! Mine! Mine!"
He called it loud as he ran, heading off a collision before it could happen, and under his spikes the ground changed — not grass anymore, but dirt. He'd hit the warning track, that strip of dirt some ten feet wide along the fence, and he snapped his head around to read the wall, its height and the way it bent.
Straight into the fence?
The ball still hadn't lost its steam, and he judged it was going to slam the padding on the fly. The height was the problem. A big jump might get it. It also might not, and he couldn't be sure. Leap with his back to the wall, or play the carom and keep it safe. Even in that split, he decided.
I can catch it!
As the fence rushed up he stopped thinking. He jumped, glove rising to meet the ball.
Thud!
A heavy weight landed in his palm. He bumped the wall lightly on the way down, got his feet under him, and raised the glove with the ball in it.
"Nice!"
The right fielder, who'd chased it all the way over, let out something close to a cheer, marveling at the play.
"You all right?"
"I'm good. Haha."
"Man, that was seriously cool. What a play!"
"Got lucky."
Kang-hyun traded the words with last year's starting right fielder and jogged for the dugout.
"Nice one, Kang-hyun!"
Joo Min-ho, on the same White team, called it out from in front of the dugout, and the rest of the players were waiting with their hands up. One of them especially.
"Oh! Crazy man!"
Luis Cardoso — the White team's starter, and the foreign arm the Daejeon Phoenix had brought in for this season — flashed a white grin and welcomed him with open heat. Dominican by birth, Cardoso spoke no Korean, but nothing about him shrank from it. He had a buoyant streak, and he mixed with the others in English without a second thought.
"Thank you, thank you."
Kang-hyun answered him short and hurried to get ready for the plate. Leading off left him no time to linger in any case, and if he wanted the manager and the coaches to trust him, he needed to stamp his mark from the very first at-bat. In the on-deck circle he took a few easy swings, taking stock of his body, and tried to soothe a heart that was still thumping from the catch.
Calm. Loose. Swing it the way you swing at batting practice.
He blew out a short breath and lifted his eyes to the pitcher working on the mound.
If the White team's starter was Cardoso, signed amid high expectations, the Blue team's was Jo Gi-hun — thirty-two years old, a right-handed power pitcher. He'd turn thirty-three this year, the same age as Kang-hyun, but he'd reached the pros far earlier: sixty-seven career wins, and the Phoenix's fourth starter a season ago.
Never faced him in high school.
He'd heard plenty, though. Ace of Bangpung High. An elite high-school flamethrower. A first-round draft pick. The glittering labels had always trailed after Jo Gi-hun. Unlike Kang-hyun, whose only boast was having gotten into a baseball powerhouse, Jo had spent his entire school career in the spotlight and signed with a pro club the moment he graduated. A career line of sixty-seven wins and an ERA of 6.59, though, made all those glittering tags feel more than a little hollow.
A classic power pitcher. Velocity and stuff, trying to overwhelm you. And when he decides the man in the box is beneath him, he comes right after you. Reckless.
Kang-hyun pulled what he knew about Jo Gi-hun up out of memory. They were teammates, so he wouldn't see him in a real game all season — and still he was doing his best to gather, and to keep, something on every pitcher he could.
Hiss—pop!
Mid-140s, roughly? Kilometers.
The board wasn't flashing a number, but Kang-hyun had lived on a pitching machine long enough to guess the speed well enough. For February, the velocity alone was exactly what you'd expect from a flamethrower whose name always came up around the KBO.
Bench coach Kim Do-jin, calling balls and strikes behind the plate, gave him the sign to step in, and Kang-hyun did. He dug at the dirt with his right foot, settled into a stance that felt easy, and extended the bat to check the spot that lined up straight with his left foot.
His swing was simple. A tightly coiled takeback, and a short stride to match — not a high leg kick, but a toe tap, the left foot staying down before he stepped out just slightly. On form alone it was a swing built to give power away. Kang-hyun had reaction speed to spare, more than enough to win that loss back and then some.
He's coming after me with the first pitch.
The arrogant look Jo Gi-hun wore, staring down from the mound — the light in his eyes — said as much. No reason to nibble against a hitter like you. Kang-hyun could feel it plain: a fierce will to overwhelm him with velocity and with stuff. Against a pitcher who meant to challenge him straight up, running away would be failing as a hitter, so he decided to abandon the patient, seeing-eye approach of a leadoff man.
Turn on the first pitch. His body could catch up anyway, so he wouldn't hold anything back. He'd unload.
As Jo Gi-hun went into his windup and gathered himself, Kang-hyun torqued the core of his upper body as tight as it would go and set his takeback. Then the pitch came — a powerful delivery, stride flung wide, every ounce of force driven out to the fingertips to wring a little more out of the baseball.
Hissss!
The speed was up. What had looked like the mid-140s in warm-ups now came in at the high 140s, maybe even touching 150, it flew so fast.
The velocity, at least — that's real talent.
If he'd stepped in with only those warm-up pitches stored in his head, this was the moment an ordinary swing would have been a whiff, the bat still coming through after the ball was gone. If he'd been any other, ordinary hitter.
His body answered the pitch on its own. The weight planted on his left foot began to shift. His hips cleared, the wrists went forward with them, and his elbows stayed tucked before they released and the barrel came through.
He held his front shoulder from flying open, both eyes burning a hole through nothing but the ball's path, and he met it dead on the sweet spot. Last of all he let the coiled muscles of his core explode outward with everything he had, and sent the ball.
CRACK!
And then the follow-through, beautiful, drawn only after every stored ounce of force had been spent. Kang-hyun's swing was perfect. The ball was just as perfect, screaming for the far side of the fence.
"...Ha."
On the mound, Jo Gi-hun wore a face that said this was absurd, and all he could do was follow with both eyes as Kang-hyun ran toward first. He'd been tagged. Tagged flush. That was what he was thinking. He'd never imagined the guy would come up hunting the very first pitch, so he wrote the whole thing off as his own mistake — a flat one, born of taking the at-bat far too lightly.
He could not, and would not, admit he'd lost on ability. So he swore that the next time Kang-hyun came to the plate, he'd sit him down on strikes.
If he got the chance.