An Instinct Never Seen Before
"You're telling me that batter joined a pro club for the first time this year—at thirty-three—with the Daejeon Phoenix?"
The question came from Uehara Koki, manager of the Chunichi Dragons. The chief coach seated beside him, eyes on the game, confirmed that yes, that was the story.
"Quit after high school, and only now he signs with a pro team... They must think a lie that obvious is actually going to fly. Tch. Gentaro. What do you make of that hitter?"
Yoshida Gentaro, the hitting coach, stared straight through Do Kang-hyun in the batter's box and spoke.
"He's an unusual hitter. There's clearly a great deal about him that still needs polishing, and yet the one thing he can do—put the ball dead on the barrel—is something he was born with. An animal instinct. I've seen plenty of hitters in America who were called natural talents, but set them beside this Korean and every one of them feels dull. I'll say it without hesitation. I am certain no hitter alive will ever surpass that man's genius."
At the extravagance of the praise, both the manager and the chief coach turned to look at him, startled.
They had already spent two years at his side, and neither of them had ever heard Yoshida Gentaro speak of a hitter like that.
Yoshida Gentaro was a hitting coach who had been recognized even by Major League clubs in the United States. More than one or two of the hitters who had passed through his hands were playing in the majors now. His eye for a player was exceptional, and so was the rest of him—the ability to shore up what a hitter lacked and finish the craft itself. To bring him aboard, the president of the Chunichi Dragons had flown to America in person. They had pried him loose only by barely stirring his patriotism: shouldn't he raise players from his own country, and show the world what Japan could do?
The effect had been immediate.
Yoshida Gentaro was given a new title—integrated hitting coach for the whole of the Chunichi Dragons, with no line drawn between the big club and the farm—and he coached only the hitters he judged to have real potential. The results showed at once. Last season, the finest batting champion in Japan had come out of the Chunichi Dragons.
Matsumoto Yuichi, shaped by Yoshida Gentaro's own hand, was that champion.
He had worn the label of Japan's genius hitter since he was a boy, and under Yoshida Gentaro he became, in name and in fact, the best hitter in the country. Gentaro had taught him himself, drilled him himself, and produced a result no one could argue with—and even then he had been stingy with praise for Matsumoto Yuichi.
For a man that cold to lavish such praise on a Korean hitter he was seeing for the first time, Manager Uehara Koki could not help taking the evaluation as a slight.
"Even so, he's nothing more than a hitter who's already thirty-three. If their story is true and he's only just entered the pros, then no matter how extraordinary the gift, there won't be enough time left to show it to the world. The foundation may be better. The player people remember in the end will still be Yuichi."
The chief coach, reading the room, nodded along and hurried to agree that the manager was entirely right.
Yoshida Gentaro paid no attention to any of it. He had already sunk into thoughts of his own.
Incredible. Truly incredible! That animal sense—reading a pitch and swinging the bat to meet it—is a talent I've never seen in any hitter. Rare, and utterly without peer!
CRACK!!
Once again Do Kang-hyun met Murakami Ryunosuke's high pitch in on the hands, caught it at the perfect point of contact, and with one explosive swing sent it sailing far over the fence.
The transfer of his weight. The timing with which he unleashed the strength in his core. The suppleness of his bat control. Even the eyes that never once lost the path of the ball. Watching him hit, Yoshida Gentaro felt, for the first time, a joy sharp enough to raise gooseflesh over his whole body.
In Korea... a hitter has appeared who will astonish the entire world!
Three home runs in three straight at-bats. Before a display that monstrous, Murakami Ryunosuke—the Chunichi Dragons' elite prospect—came completely apart on the mound.
Yoshida Gentaro didn't care. Eyes glittering, he was too busy following Do Kang-hyun as the Korean circled the bases in silence.
A mistake pitch really is a frightening thing.
Watching Murakami Ryunosuke stand on the mound with the look of a man whose soul had been shaken out of him, Do Kang-hyun thought back to his second at-bat.
After the grand slam in that first plate appearance—where he had sneered at the hitter and dismissed him outright—Murakami Ryunosuke had come back the second time looking grim. It was competitive fire: he would face the man named Do Kang-hyun with everything he had, and he would beat him. Stripped of arrogance, his pitching turned exceedingly careful, and careful pitching is never easy to hit.
He had pushed his fastball up to ninety-six miles an hour and lived on the border of the strike zone, painting and stealing half a ball at a time with delicate precision. Rather than hack, Do Kang-hyun waited and hunted his pitch in earnest. Since the grand slam, Murakami Ryunosuke had been smothering the Phoenix hitters, and Do Kang-hyun needed one swing capable of dragging him off the mound.
But the pitcher was anything but easy.
He threw every single ball as if the game were being played for a championship, the whole of his strength behind it. When he snapped a forkball at a hitter buried in a deep count—a pitch meant to wrong-foot him—even Do Kang-hyun flinched for an instant and nearly turned the bat over. It was an outing so close to perfect that calling it the finest of Murakami Ryunosuke's life would not have been an exaggeration. And still, in the end, he was driven into the corner of a full count.
Where do I throw it? What am I supposed to throw?
Unlike him, Do Kang-hyun showed not the slightest urgency or tension even at a full count, and Murakami Ryunosuke bit down hard on his lower lip.
The fastball?
The thought had barely formed when a chill—some sharp, uncanny sensation—ran through his whole body. Instinct screamed that if he threw a fastball anywhere near the strike zone, it would be hit. One hundred percent. A danger signal that strong. From some point on, Do Kang-hyun had been pressing down on him with a very heavy weight.
Right. It has to be the forkball!
The forkball was the putaway pitch he trusted most, so he stopped hesitating.
The problem was location.
A forkball is brutally hard to command, but today his command was unusually sharp, and Murakami Ryunosuke was confident he could put the ball where he wanted it.
It can't be a ball.
Do Kang-hyun had twitched, yes—but he was laying off forkballs like a ghost.
A walk, and there won't be a reason or an excuse in the world. They'll just decide I ran from him!
If he couldn't throw the perfect chase pitch and make that bat miss, the only choice left was to put it in the strike zone. A forkball didn't have to be a ball every time. Get even half a ball of it over the plate, he told himself, and that would be enough. Do Kang-hyun had been spitting on forkballs with uncanny judgment, so he would turn that against him—steal a strike, and punch him out looking.
The thought alone sent a tingling pleasure, a thrill, running through his body.
Good. I'll make him stand there and take it with his eyes open!
Resolved, Murakami Ryunosuke drew a long breath and locked in his forkball grip.
Right on the razor's edge.
The burden of having to clip the border and still catch the zone was considerable, but in today's form he felt he could do it. He went into his windup and threw with everything he had—and too much strength went into the ball. So intent on burying it inside the zone by the barest margin, so Do Kang-hyun would never suspect it, he missed high of the spot he wanted.
A mistake.
A forkball that hadn't even reached eighty-one miles an hour was about to drop dead into the heart of the strike zone. Depending on the hitter, a forkball suddenly appearing in the middle can freeze a man—leave him staring, startled and blank. All the more so if the pitch just before it had been a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball. A slow ball like that is built to catch a hitter leaning the wrong way.
CRACK!!
"Damn it!!!"
Unable to hold back his fury at himself, Murakami Ryunosuke hurled his glove from the mound and roared with everything he had.
"Home runs in three straight at-bats... That monster. The pitcher can't hang on anymore either. They're changing him."
Joo Min-ho looked at Do Kang-hyun coming into the dugout as if the man were something unnatural, then shifted his gaze to Murakami Ryunosuke, head bowed, walking off after the manager's visit to the mound.
"Looking at him like that, I almost feel bad for the guy. If he'd come out when he spiked his glove after the second homer, he wouldn't have eaten the third. Got stubborn about it, and the ending's ugly."
Three straight home runs off the same hitter is, for a pitcher, a shock cruel enough that he will never forget it. No one could say how sturdy Murakami Ryunosuke's mind was, but today's damage might leave a long aftershock.
"A hitter who just struck out in back-to-back at-bats isn't really in a position to pity anyone, is he?"
"...You son of a bitch."
Joo Min-ho spat the curse at Do Kang-hyun, snatched up a bat with a thoroughly sour face, and stalked out of the dugout.
"Senior Min-ho actually looks mad. Are you sure?"
"He's not that small-minded. He'll be fine."
They were high school classmates, so Do Kang-hyun could speak that freely, and he didn't believe Joo Min-ho was truly angry. Even if he were, an apology and a little soothing would unwind him easily enough. Do Kang-hyun wasn't worried.
"Being classmates really is something. The way you treat Senior Min-ho—it's just different, Senior Kang-hyun."
"I... guess so?"
"It is."
Do Kang-hyun thought back on his high school days.
He'd been a little more cheerful then, and quicker with a joke. Of course, from the second semester of his second year the gap between him and his classmates had widened sharply, and he had started burrowing away on his own.
Then came graduation, the army, a job, and the cheerful version of Do Kang-hyun disappeared. He lived that way for twelve years before baseball started again, and the strangeness and anxiety of it had him tense and stiff. Things had gone better than he'd expected, though, and little by little his personality was brightening with them.
Joo Min-ho's help in that had been anything but small. If his words had truly hurt the man, Do Kang-hyun meant to apologize from the heart.
He had definitely been thinking that.
"Heh heh heh! Pictured some unlucky bastard's skull and just smoked it! You hear that melon pop?"
Joo Min-ho, fresh off a double that slammed the fence, stood right in front of him and needled him openly, and Do Kang-hyun wiped the apology clean out of his mind.
"If it had been me, it would've gone over."
"Next time I'm definitely putting it over!"
"By then I'll have put two over."
"...You son of a bitch!"
Watching Do Kang-hyun and Joo Min-ho bicker like children, Baek Young-joon, seated beside them, muttered under his breath.
"So this is what real best friends look like. I'm jealous."
"...What is this?"
Lee Seok-jun, a reporter for Daeil Sports, felt as if someone had clubbed him across the back of the head when he saw the result of the exhibition between the Daejeon Phoenix and the Chunichi Dragons' farm team.
He had expected today's game to be very tight, or for the Dragons' second team to hold a slight edge. There were several reasons. The farm club had the more familiar ballpark. They had started a pitcher who, though assigned to the second team, was a strong candidate to make the big club this season, and their hitters were closer to a big-league lineup than a true farm squad.
The Daejeon Phoenix, by contrast, had shown no meaningful upgrade over the hot stove. Their newly signed foreign pitcher didn't look especially impressive next to the arms pitching in Japan, and they had put a controversial thirty-three-year-old rookie into the starting lineup. Lee Seok-jun had taken all of that as reason enough to expect a loss.
The result was the exact opposite.
"What on earth is this Do Kang-hyun?"
Three at-bats. Three hits. Three home runs.
And the damage had been done against Murakami Ryunosuke, the pitcher the Chunichi Dragons were pinning so much hope on starting this season, which made it all the more shocking.
If Do Kang-hyun had been overwhelming at the plate, then on the mound the starter, Luis Cardoso, had pitched beyond expectation as well. Most evaluations had the Daejeon Phoenix, with no notable additions over the hot stove, finishing somewhere near last year's mark.
Do Kang-hyun—suspicion running well ahead of expectation—had exploded from the very first exhibition. Luis Cardoso's minor-league numbers hadn't been anything special either, yet his pitching was good enough to stir real anticipation. Watching the game, Lee Seok-jun was already looking forward to how Korean fans would react to his article.
"This is fun. This is fun! At this rate I absolutely have to see the exhibition against the Yomiuri Giants' farm team in two days, don't I?"
As he typed without pause, a grin kept breaking across Lee Seok-jun's mouth—the look of a man who had, for the first time in a long while, walked into something genuinely interesting.