Just an Old Rookie
The other foreign pitcher the Daejeon Phoenix had brought in for the season was an American, Jake Barnett.
From a frame that loomed nearly two meters, he hammered a violent fastball at the top of the nineties straight downhill—a pitch that, for a while, had been all the explanation anyone needed for why he had once stood on a major-league mound.
POP!
"Strike!"
Leading off for the Blue team, Joo Min-ho watched a ninety-three-mile-an-hour pitch bore in on his hands like an awl, a ball he was sure he could turn on with room to spare, and came up empty. He never even got the bat off his shoulder. Struck out looking, blind with his eyes wide open.
"Ah, shit. Who's throwing that hard in February? I get that it's his own living room out there, but come on—human to human, isn't that a little overamped? The ball's alive right to the end, so watch yourself. Whether he's just feeling it today or this is who he really is, his command's locked in too."
Grumbling the whole way, Min-ho came over to Do Kang-hyun in the on-deck circle and was kind enough to add the warning.
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Same velocity or not, the stuff's way better than what Jo Gi-hoon throws, so don't just stick the bat out there. Not that I need to tell you how to hit."
He gave Kang-hyun's shoulder a couple of encouraging pats and headed for the dugout.
Kang-hyun took his dry swings in the on-deck circle and studied Jake Barnett as the big man worked the two-hole hitter.
A two-seamer that runs in on the hands...
The velocity was one thing. The movement was another, and it was unmistakably a cut above. The two-seamer's path off the plate never held the same shape twice, so even if you timed it, finding the sweet spot looked like it would be anything but simple.
Definitely not a batting machine. Tracking the path and controlling the bat isn't going to be easy.
Still, his gift lived in his body's reactions, not in his thinking. However nasty Barnett's two-seamer got, putting the bat on it ought to be possible.
Tink.
The two-hole hitter reacted and swung, and that was all he managed—a tap off the bottom of the bat, a routine grounder to short, an out. Two away. Kang-hyun stepped in.
"Senior Kang-hyun, it won't be as easy as last time. You know I let my guard down that day, right?"
Oh Hyun-woo, catching for the White team and the Phoenix's starting backstop, the master of the plate, tossed the challenge at him. They had faced each other in the last intrasquad, too, and the result had been a rout. At the plate Kang-hyun had trampled the catcher's game-calling with a hit in every at-bat, two of them home runs.
In the field he had answered with a diving catch on a ball that should have been a hit, and on the bases he had stolen three, until Hyun-woo was ready to scream. It might have been the worst game of his life, and still, ever since, Hyun-woo had been sidling up to him, tossing off little remarks, quietly building a rapport.
"Maybe it's because he's a big leaguer. I'm a little nervous."
"You're serious, right? And I keep telling you—talk to me like a normal person."
"I'll get there."
"...Suit yourself."
Only after that brief exchange did Kang-hyun settle into his stance.
Barnett took the PitchCom sign through his receiver and went straight into his windup. Nearly two meters of pitcher unfolding on the mound came at the man in the box as a genuine threat, and the first pitch arrived on a stride as long as the frame that threw it.
Kang-hyun flinched—and killed the instinct to move, both eyes locked on the ball all the way to the end.
POP!
"Strike!"
Sure enough, the two-seamer he trusted bent right in front of the plate and cut the zone. It looked even nastier than it had from the on-deck circle, but Kang-hyun finished his appraisal with a small nod.
Barnett, having stolen a strike with ease, wore a looser look up on the mound. The leadoff man, a called strikeout. The two-hole, an easy grounder. And the three-hole—Do Kang-hyun, who in the last intrasquad had gone deep in back-to-back at-bats and added two more hits besides. But the first pitch had only drawn a flinch, not even a swing, and a man could afford to relax after that.
The thirty-three-year-old rookie, was it? Heh. Nothing special.
Set beside the hitters he had faced in the majors—no, even in the minors—Kang-hyun was ordinary to the point of having not a shred of presence in the box. That a hitter that ordinary had gone deep twice and scratched out two more hits under a pitcher's eye was simply laughable.
Figures. That's the level of Korean baseball.
Jake Barnett was dreaming of the major leagues again. He had ended up in Korean ball by accident, but he believed, down to the bone, that he would be back—in a year if it went short, two at the outside. To a man with that belief, a thirty-three-year-old rookie was not even a hurdle worth clearing. Just something to step on lightly and leave behind.
Old rookie! You'd better be grateful you and I are on the same team!
The moment the catcher's sign arrived he went into an arrogant windup and showed them, once more, the pitch of a man who was going back to the big leagues. A two-seam fastball too much for any thirty-three-year-old rookie to swing at came in hard and rippled into a bend right in front of the plate.
And then—
CRACK!
"...What the fuck?!"
The two-seamer had buried itself perfectly on the inner half, and it jumped off the bat. Barnett spat the curse and whipped his head around.
The ball climbed, and it carried, fast, toward the outfield. High. Far.
But—
THUD!
It died just short of the fence. The left fielder picked up the carom and fired to second in a hurry, but Kang-hyun was a step quicker, touched the bag, and came up standing. Barnett could only stare at him brushing the dirt of the slide off his uniform, a look on his face that refused to believe what it was seeing.
Kang-hyun, for his part, was turning something else over.
I squared that up clean, and it still didn't clear the fence.
Worse, the fence it had found was the shortest stretch of the yard. Send that same ball to straightaway center and the center fielder might have caught it. That was how good Barnett's stuff had been, and it was something Kang-hyun had never once felt before. Resistance. He had hit the ball on the sweet spot, and still he had felt it, clear as anything—a hard resistance that did not want to jump off the bat.
I'm going to have to turn the weights up.
Once the season started, there would be pitchers with stuff equal to Barnett's, or better, and he would have to face them. Time the ball all you wanted; if you meant to stand up to a pitcher's overwhelming stuff, you needed power to match. The lesson landed fresh.
A double was all the at-bat had given him, and it felt like less than it should have. On the bases, though, there was still work to do. Barnett, meanwhile, took the stain on an inning that was supposed to be perfect and poured all his irritation and temper onto the cleanup hitter who stepped in next.
Whoosh!
The cleanup man swung with the same confidence Kang-hyun had shown and missed by a mile. Barnett let a sneer slip. On pure competitiveness he already ranked Korean baseball below Triple-A, and the Phoenix hitters, a club that lived near the bottom of the standings, felt shabbier still. The arrogance settled back onto his face, and he started into his second pitch.
"He's going!"
Kang-hyun, the runner at second, broke for third. Hyun-woo stabbed a four-seamer running away outside and fired to the bag in the same motion, and Barnett's eyes lit.
I've got him!
He jerked his head toward third.
"Safe!"
Kang-hyun had the bag by a hair. Before he knew it, Barnett had a glove over his mouth and was shouting.
"Fuck!!"
The arrogant face cracked a second time. His composure went with it, and in the end he gave up a single to the cleanup hitter and let Kang-hyun trot home from third. It was an intrasquad that would never make the books. Even so, Jake Barnett—who had been scored upon in his very first inning of the Korean baseball he had scorned—spent the rest of the day staring holes through him.
Second overall in the first round of the draft. A signing bonus of four hundred million won. A pitcher who had always drawn eyes as an elite high-school prospect—an easy, flexible body that could throw a high-spin fastball without forcing anything, and a slider that was genuinely special. The one they had praised as a premium rookie who would lock down the team's rotation for years to come was Baek Young-joon.
He had joined the Daejeon Phoenix on a wave of expectation from the club and the fans, and reality, unfortunately, was never pink. The professional game was not the high-school stage. Young-joon became a pitcher who surrendered too many extra-base hits, and he could not live up to what people had been waiting for.
To steady a mind that had shrunk, he decided early to settle his military service and enlisted. He made the baseball club under the Korea Armed Forces Athletic Corps, showed well enough in the Futures League to find his confidence again, and came back to the organization.
Reality was still not gentle. He was an emergency arm for the big-league roster, called up whenever a hole opened in the rotation or the bullpen and sent to the mound with no say in the role. Each time he failed to show anything you could call a result, and each time he was told to go back down.
"Young-joon, you think too much up there. Just see the hitter, look at the catcher's mitt, and throw your pitch. That's all."
"Quit reading the room. A pitcher's gotta have backbone and shove it in there on nerve!"
"Hey! You gonna keep running? All you throw is balls—no wonder the defense loses focus!"
"Why's this guy so gutless? For crying out loud!"
"What a waste of stuff! What a waste!"
Scolding came more often than praise, blame and mockery more often than either, and somewhere along the way Young-joon's pitching drew him even further into himself.
On top of that, whenever he specifically took the mound, some unlucky little circumstance had a way of arranging itself. The defense made plenty of errors, and every time it did, the pitches he threw in a panic to fix it himself only got worse. Alone, replaying the games, he would mutter the same line until it became a habit.
"If the defense had played behind me, I wouldn't have pitched like that."
Of course the words reached no one. They were a coward's excuse, good for an audience of one. A pitcher does not get to blame the defense. The job demands the confidence and the nerve to throw your pitch and stand by it, whatever the situation. Even so, Young-joon kept losing that confidence, until the simple act of throwing a baseball from a mound had become a heavy burden.
"Think of this spring training as the last one. You know it too, Young-joon. You're not the only guy trying to climb. Understand?"
The Double-A manager had said it before they left for camp, and he had said it because he was thinking of Young-joon in particular. The Phoenix fought for last place every year, which meant that every draft brought in another player with potential like his—always a first or second overall pick, and most of them pitchers. A prospect whose talent never popped, the way Young-joon's hadn't, had nowhere to finish but the worst ending of all: his release.
"Hooooo."
On the mound, Young-joon let out a long breath the way he always did, worked the rosin bag, and checked where his fielders were standing. There was a peculiar tension in his face when he looked at the outfielders. Then one spot caught him and held him. At the end of the center-field line, standing easy in center, was Do Kang-hyun.
The defense Senior Kang-hyun showed in the last intrasquad—that's not a glove you see in a Phoenix outfield. If I could get that kind of help behind me...
Young-joon was a fly-ball pitcher more than a ground-ball one, and just calling up the memory of that defense was enough to settle something in him.
"Play ball!"
At the senior coach's call from behind the plate, Young-joon blew out one more long breath and delivered to the catcher's lead. The velocity was only in the upper eighties, but his four-seamer carried above-average spin and cracked into the mitt. The leadoff man showed a patient eye and worked the count to seven pitches, then struck out swinging and walked away. The two-hole hitter followed him, an infield fly on the fifth pitch.
The three-hole stepped in. Oh Hyun-woo, the Phoenix's starting catcher, a man who every year hit in the mid-to-upper .200s and still punched out somewhere around twenty home runs.
Up and away. Four-seam.
Young-joon took the sign through his receiver, wound, and threw with everything he had. The feel of his fingertips ripping the seams was good. The location, unfortunately, drifted—not up and away, but up and over the middle. Hyun-woo knew the strengths and weaknesses of Young-joon's repertoire better than anyone, and he turned on the first pitch as if he had been sitting on it, the bat whipping through.
CRACK!!
The ball jumped, climbed, and carried fast toward the outfield. Young-joon chased it in a jolt of panic, already afraid it was gone.
Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!!
No matter how he looked at it, the flight was wrong. Hyun-woo, rounding the bases, was already sure enough of a home run to give his right arm a light, cheerful pump around his chest. The sight drove the despair in deeper, and Young-joon was just about to drop his head—
"Whoa—?!"
Joo Min-ho, at second, let out a startled cry. Young-joon looked up, startled himself.
Tap—spring—thump!
Do Kang-hyun had planted a foot on the fence, launched himself, and stretched his arm to its limit, and the ball was in his glove.
"WAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!"
For the first time in his life, Baek Young-joon forgot himself. From the mound he let out something closer to a scream than a cheer, and he clapped his glove like a man who had lost his mind.