When Yang Joo-il Came Calling
"Assistant Do! Check the materials on that paperwork and get them to Manager Kang, now!"
"Assistant Do! Could you tidy up last week's delivery list from Seonyeong Industries and send the file over?"
"Sir, Assistant Manager Hwang at the Osong warehouse says he's got something urgent about a shipment. He needs you to call him before three, no exceptions."
"Assistant Do, are these quantities actually right? You checked them properly, yeah? You know prices are swinging all over the place these days. Botch the order and the losses get ugly."
Assistant Do, Assistant Do, Assistant Do... All day long Do Kang-hyun was hounded by voices calling his name, hunting him down, never letting up.
He wasn't shouldering the company's work alone, but every so often, for no good reason, every last task seemed to come crashing down on him at once. Today, of course, was one of those days.
"Haa. Brutal."
The office had emptied out, and Kang-hyun was still at his desk, grinding through what remained. Another night of overtime.
Then maybe try doing the work a little faster, huh?
Manager Kang's voice seemed to keep circling his ear, needling in that particular way the man had of making every word grate, and Kang-hyun's irritation climbed another notch. Part of why he was still here was the manager himself, who'd hounded him over and over about nailing the material counts down to the last unit until the rest of his work piled up behind it. Checking quantities was the sort of thing you could hand to any other employee, but Manager Kang had made a point of dumping it on him. And then, bold as anything, the man had gone and preened in front of the department head—how he'd nearly gone blind tallying every last item himself, how the dust had left his throat raw—fishing for praise. Remembering the sight, Kang-hyun ground his teeth all over again.
"Smug bastard of a manager."
If the man were standing beside him, Kang-hyun would have loved to crack him across the back of the head. Since that pleasure existed only in his imagination, he let out a short breath, rubbed his dry, aching eyes, and turned back to the monitor.
Takatak, takatak, takatak.Click-clack. Click, click, clack.
In the silent office, the only sounds were the rattle of keys and the click of a mouse. A long while passed before Kang-hyun finally threw his arms overhead and stretched hard, trying to work the stiffness out of his shoulders.
"Hnnnngh!"
His whole body answered with a chorus of cracks, pleading for mercy. He rolled his neck left and right after his shoulders, coaxing the rigid muscles back to life.
"Eight-fifty... timing's a little awkward, isn't it?"
Ever since the day he'd first stepped into a cage and started swinging, Kang-hyun had been taking a bat to a ball whenever he could find the time. The place was only a fifteen-minute walk, close enough to home, but more than that, the clean, satisfying contact—something he'd never even felt back in his school days—had become his finest cure for stress, a hit of dopamine that went off like fireworks. And there was one more reason he kept going back.
The easy camaraderie he'd found with the people at the batting center had been quietly propping up his self-respect. Some of them were younger, some older, but every one of them called him the God of Hitting and treated him like one of their own. Reading the messages from the kid waiting on him, Kang-hyun wanted to sprint for the cages that very second. The clock, though, was tight. Even if he left the office at a dead run, the bus ride ran close to forty minutes. The center shut its doors at ten, which meant that by the time he actually arrived he'd have thirty minutes at the outside.
"I'll skip it today."
It had already been a long, exhausting day stacked with work, and he decided he'd be better off going home and resting. He couldn't bring himself to leave the kid on read, though, and he was halfway through typing a message to Young-jun saying he'd pass when another text landed.
"...Yang Joo-il's here?"
Home could wait. The batting center, it seemed, could not.
"Hello. I'm Yang Joo-il."
Kang-hyun studied the face of the man offering him a handshake, taking him in without a word.
"Uh, sir...?"
"Ah! Do Kang-hyun."
There was real strength in the hand that closed around his. The man was quietly testing his grip, and Kang-hyun muttered under his breath—same as ever—and squeezed back.
"Oh! That's some grip you've got."
"Not at all. Next to you, sunbae, it's nothing."
"Sunbae? Wait... you're a junior of mine?"
"Back when I was at Goryeo High, you came by to visit. I met you once, that day."
"Well, I'll be! A Goryeo High junior!"
Yang Joo-il had never graduated from Goryeo himself, but in his playing days he'd made a habit of dropping in on high schools all over, encouraging the kids coming up behind him. Kang-hyun had met him once during his sophomore year, when Yang was in his fifth season as a pro, and they'd shaken hands just like this.
"Who was your classmate?"
Kang-hyun hesitated for a beat over whether to say it, then decided there was no real reason to hide it and answered plainly.
"Jeong Hae-woon."
"Hae-woon? Now that's a connection. Mind if I talk a little more casually?"
"Of course."
A stranger might have called it rude, but Yang Joo-il simply had a way of closing the distance with younger players. He was never a senior without manners. Proof of that was right in front of them: knowing full well Kang-hyun wasn't playing anymore, he didn't bother digging into why.
"I saw the video of my junior here. And honestly, that swing was a work of art. Figured I ought to come see it for myself. Would it be rude if I filmed?"
Since retiring, Yang had been running his own broadcasts—coaching players, staging all kinds of showdowns, and, like today, going out in person to check on talented amateurs who'd made a name for themselves. Kang-hyun had already made up his mind to let him film on the way over, so there was nothing to refuse.
"Not at all. You came all the way here yourself. Ducking out on you wouldn't be right."
"Thanks! Thanks! And loosen up the way you talk. We're not here to crack the whip and run batting-practice boot camp. We're both old enough. Let's just be hyung and dongsaeng about it."
"Yes, sir."
"All right, I'll get the broadcast set up. You go loosen up."
The batting center shut its doors at ten without fail, but with Yang Joo-il in the building the lights stayed on. A man who'd claimed the home run crown three times in his pro career was free publicity the place had no reason to turn down. Kang-hyun shrugged out of his coat and started warming up, and Young-jun, who'd been hovering nearby, darted in at once.
"Hyung, you played organized ball?"
"Only through high school."
"I knew it! That swing looks exactly like a guy who came up through the system. And your classmate was Jeong Hae-woon? Whoa, with Jeong Hae-woon you..."
Young-jun caught himself mid-sentence and clamped his mouth shut. A flash of excitement, and he'd lost track of what he should and shouldn't say. Fortunately Kang-hyun's expression barely shifted, and Young-jun pivoted as if nothing had happened.
"Hyung, aren't the slacks and dress shirt going to get in the way? I've got a spare tracksuit I carry around. Want to borrow it?"
"I'm just hitting a few balls off the machine. It's fine."
Kang-hyun waved him off.
"That's our Kang-hyun hyung! The God of Hitting! What would clothes matter to you? Fighting!"
The moment Yang Joo-il finished setting up and started over, Young-jun slipped away just as quickly as he'd arrived.
"Nothing fancy about the broadcast. You just hit the machine the way you did in the video, and I'll stand behind you and run my mouth. Easy, right?"
"Yes."
"All right, junior. Mind if we roll?"
Neither Kang-hyun, nor Yang Joo-il, nor anyone else watching had the faintest idea that this broadcast—the one that was supposed to be nothing special—was about to turn Do Kang-hyun's life inside out.
Yang Joo-il had only seen Do Kang-hyun's video because a member of his broadcast staff put it in front of him. For anyone running a personal channel, forever needing fresh content on a schedule, new faces and new material were a constant thirst. And for Yang, stuck building variety inside the narrow box of baseball, the broadcasts had somewhere along the way started to feel like a burden.
One of those shows, Yang Joo-il Is Going, sent him out to size up the talent of non-elite players—ordinary people playing amateur ball—and from his side of the camera, most of those trips turned up nothing worth remembering.
Then a video landed of some God of Hitting who'd supposedly bombed a batting center, and that one actually caught his eye.
"This kid can hit. Oh, and the stance is pretty stable too. Wait—he's a former player. Look at that. The swing's got 'taught' written all over it."
One look and Yang was certain the guy had come up through organized ball. It cut against the point of the show, but the face was a stranger's, so a onetime elite who'd never made the pros seemed close enough. More honestly, he'd already been wondering whether it was time to widen the net. Finding amateurs worth putting on Yang Joo-il Is Going was getting harder by the week.
"Even for a former player, hitting machine balls this clean is no small thing. Let's meet him once."
Parched for content, Yang locked in the broadcast and called the owner of the batting center to book the place. The remaining problem was landing the man in the video, and Yang handled that the way he handled most things: he'd just show up. The center said Kang-hyun dropped by all the time, and even if he didn't turn up, there were people there who had his number. Ask them, and it'd work out. That was how the broadcast began.
Crack!
CRACK!!
Yang had started the stream talking nonstop, and it didn't take long before his mouth snapped shut like a clamped shell and stayed that way.
Timing, bat control, dead-center on the sweet spot, and the impact where he unloads—it's too perfect.
It was exactly what the video had shown. The difference was that a video could be cut and manipulated however you liked, so he'd still carried a grain of doubt about taking the performance at face value. Reality was another matter.
CRACK!!
A curveball that dove late, low and in, and Kang-hyun sat on it and drove it dead into the home run target. Even Yang Joo-il, who'd seen just about everything a bat could do, had never witnessed control that looked possessed.
"Was that nothing but curves in a row?"
Half afraid he was imagining it, he asked a staffer, careful and quiet.
"No. The machine's set to throw fastballs, curves, and sliders at random. The same pitch can come twice, but that curve was a changeup in the sequence—it'd been only fastballs and sliders until then. Velocity's randomized the same way."
The staffer had barely finished when a slider bent away toward the outside corner, and Kang-hyun barreled that one too, right on the sweet spot. Watching the ball rifle toward the home run target like a bullet, Yang couldn't stop the curse that jumped out of him.
"...The fuck is this?"
Right there, in real time, the face of a retired pro—a man who'd taken the home run title three times—shifted through disbelief, through fluster, into the look of someone watching something that shouldn't be possible. The pitching machine stopped. Twenty balls, all of them thrown. And Do Kang-hyun had put every last one of them into the home run target. Finished with a display of hitting that defied sense, he turned back to Yang with the mild expression of a man who'd done nothing remarkable and was waiting to be told what came next.
"...Why didn't you go pro?"
The honest question slipped out before Yang could catch it. Kang-hyun didn't answer—just rolled his eyes—and Yang, as if he couldn't stand it another second, spoke again.
"Let me take a turn. Somebody get me a glove."
Years had passed since he'd retired, but running a baseball channel meant he still had a bat in his hands all the time. He'd pounded machine balls more times than he could count, and he had a fair bit of confidence in what he could still do.
"Uh... how should we set the pitches?"
A staffer leaned in and asked it almost in a whisper.
"Same as my junior."
Ordinarily he'd have locked it to fastballs. But Yang Joo-il was a former pro, a home run king, and his pride left him no choice but to swing under the exact same conditions as Do Kang-hyun.