The Devil's Talent
Maeng Seong-hwan, hitting coach for the Busan Titans' Futures club, flicked through the tablet in his hand and ran his eyes over the players who had applied for the tryout.
"Yeom Tae-ho? This kid's back again?"
Some of them punched their attendance card at every tryout like clockwork. Others had been genuine prospects through middle and high school, only to fall off a cliff so suddenly it felt like a bad joke.
"Hwang Seong-woo... man."
And then there were the ones short on talent and shorter on skill, old enough now that hope was, for all practical purposes, gone.
"Kim Jae-woong still hasn't given up? Tsk."
In the middle of that stack, a profile made Maeng Seong-hwan's brow crease.
"Do Kang-hyun? Who the hell is this? No pro experience, and at this age, what is he even..."
An unfamiliar name. An unfamiliar face. And an age that was stranger still. There was no official age limit on tryout applications, but players past thirty almost never showed up. If an injury or some incident had cut a professional career short, that was one thing. Even a man who had spent years as an amateur in an independent league ran into a wall at thirty-two.
"Attention seeker? Or did he just come for the experience? If he's actually trying to make the pros at this age... no. No way. Unbelievable."
Maeng couldn't tell what the man was after, but he knew he didn't like it. A tryout was not some casual test. It was closer to a battlefield, where men poured out everything they had to seize a dream they were desperate to reach. Plenty of them dropped their heads and wept over a single mistake. Some even went to their knees, begging for one more chance. That was the desperation filling the field, which was why Maeng Seong-hwan could not look kindly on a thirty-two-year-old named Do Kang-hyun walking into a tryout.
"Fuck this. He's not even joking."
The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. He swore that when Do Kang-hyun stepped into the box, he would watch with both eyes wide open and see just how good the man really was. If the swing was even a little sloppy, if he came up even a little short, Maeng would bury him in curses so thoroughly he wouldn't be able to show his face again. That was the edge he was sharpening.
The Titans' tryout hitting test was divided into three stages. Stage one was free batting: stand in the cage and hit whatever the batting-practice pitcher threw. They called them batting-practice balls, but this was not practice. It was an evaluation. Most of the time the pitcher bumped the velocity or mixed in breaking stuff. They were not simply lobbing it in and telling you to swing away.
Free batting let the staff judge swing mechanics, contact, power, and batted-ball direction as a whole. Clear that bar, and you advanced to stage two: live batting. In live batting, an active pitcher sometimes threw from the mound as if it were a real game. Other times a pitcher who had come for the tryout himself was evaluated in a head-to-head.
The hitter took a live-batting test while the pitcher took a live-pitching test at the same time, which saved time and gave both of them a cold, unsentimental read on how their feel held up in a real at-bat.
Stage three was a simulated game—a mini contest that felt like the real thing, with hitters limited by plate appearances and pitchers by pitch count. Beyond raw hitting and pitching, the staff checked how a player actually ran a game.
Crack!
Waiting for his turn, Do Kang-hyun watched the player taking free batting inside the cage. His timing's a little late. Shoulders are stiff—nerves, probably. He doesn't even have to hit a home run.
Whatever anyone said, the glory of hitting was the home run, and in free batting every hitter's basic desire was to send the ball over the fence. So the men being tested swung with too much ambition, desperate to prove how explosive their bats could be, and the ball flew even worse for it.
"That's enough."
A Titans coach watching from behind the cage said it coldly.
"Just... one more..."
"You think this is a batting cage? That's plenty. Step out."
Sharp eyes, a voice like a blade cutting the session short. The hitter's shoulders sagged at the knowledge that he had not shown what he could do, and he walked out of the cage.
"Haaaaah."
Do Kang-hyun let out a long, resigned breath as the man passed—a reminder to set his own greed down—and stepped into the cage.
"Number 51, Do Kang-hyun?"
"Yes. Do Kang-hyun, number 51."
For some reason, the coach's look of clear displeasure nagged at him. Probably the age, he figured, and he lifted the heavy wooden bat he had been swinging at the batting center until it felt familiar in his hands.
"Start."
At the coach's signal the batting-practice pitcher nodded and tossed an easy ball from behind the screen. Kang-hyun waited, calm, until the pitch arrived in a straight line with his front foot—then he whipped the bat through like lightning.
CRACK!!
The ball drew a huge arc and flew far and fast, so fast the pitcher who had thrown it had to snap his head around on reflex.
Thud—
A clean home run, clear over the fence. The BP pitcher let out a hollow laugh and looked Do Kang-hyun over again. The frame was hardly what you would call a slugger's, and yet he had cleared the fence with ease. Power like that was rare. Lucky? The timing lined up so perfectly it might've been a fluke.
Figuring it was just luck, the pitcher threw again. This time the velocity was a notch higher, and he ran it in a little on the hands. This pitch, if he squares it up, is a fly to left at best. Unless the hitter was a genuine power bat, it would never be more than a fly ball to left field. The BP pitcher was sure of that.
CRACK!!
A crisp sound, and once again a ball caught in perfect timing sailed over the left-field fence.
"......??"
He cleared that one too? The BP pitcher stared at Do Kang-hyun in shock, but the hitter only reset into his stance, expression unchanged, perfectly calm. That unruffled ease got under the pitcher's skin.
All right. Hit this one too.
What he chose was a curveball. Usually you loosened a hitter up with four-seamers, then dropped in a curve once or twice to see his bat-to-ball sense. Put another way, the BP pitcher had taken a dislike to Kang-hyun's attitude and was throwing the curve to make him look foolish. And because the pitch would pass through the zone rather than miss it, taking it for a ball would only prove the hitter's contact was lacking. For a batter, that meant a bad grade.
CRACK!!
With a sound like the ball splitting apart, the drive screamed over the BP pitcher's head and cleared the center-field fence. By now even his pride was starting to bruise.
This is bullshit! I'm just gonna jam one right— huh?
His eyes caught Maeng Seong-hwan, the Futures hitting coach, standing behind the cage. A light lift of the left hand was the signal to throw something the hitter would have a hard time squaring up. It only came out on the rare occasions a batter was teeing off too easily—an invitation that meant, You hit batting practice that well? Try this.
No idea why Coach Maeng's doing that, but I'll take it!
The BP pitcher flashed a smile you could barely see, then ripped a fastball far too hard to call a batting-practice pitch. What had been an easy toss from well in front of the mound came in like a pitch in a real game. The ball left the pitcher's hand and rushed in faster than anything before it. For a moment Do Kang-hyun was thrown—but his body reacted quicker than he had expected.
CRACK—!
As the pitch sped up, the sound off the bat grew louder with it, and the ball tore across the field just as fast.
"...son of a— goddamn..."
The BP pitcher's raw, dumbfounded curse carried all the way to Do Kang-hyun's ears in the box.
What kind of guy even is this?!
Maeng Seong-hwan tracked Do Kang-hyun's back as he left the batting cage, unable to make sense of what he had seen. He had watched countless players in his life and evaluated their hitting, but the ability Kang-hyun had just shown was astonishing talent of a kind he had never once witnessed.
He had been lying in wait. The moment Do Kang-hyun stepped in, Maeng had been ready to find the smallest flaw and critique him so viciously the man would cry. Instead, from the very first pitch, Kang-hyun had timed it lightly—perfectly—and sent the ball over the wall. The second pitch, harder than the first, was the same. On the third, the BP pitcher had deliberately tried to embarrass him with a curve, and Kang-hyun had not wavered an inch. He had driven it as if he meant to split the ball in two.
That third swing especially—waiting on the curve, then lifting it at the exact moment—was the most perfect swing Maeng Seong-hwan had ever worn his voice out demanding from hitter after hitter. From the instant he saw it, every bit of displeasure and every sour feeling he had held toward Do Kang-hyun vanished clean.
At the same time a hunger rose in him to find the floor of that bat sense, to see just how good it really was. The BP pitcher looked as if his pride had been nicked over nothing, so Maeng sent the signal: throw something beyond a batting-practice pitch. The result was better than he had hoped. Even on a pitch he had not seen coming, Kang-hyun's bat sent the ball over the fence without mercy.
Contact and power go without saying. Composure and flexibility are elite too. More than that, the reaction speed on the path of the bat, the technique with not a single wasted movement... why didn't a guy like this go pro?
After that, there was nothing left to see. Even the BP pitcher, pride scraped raw, seemed to acknowledge the other man's hitting and went back to ordinary batting-practice tosses. Do Kang-hyun toyed with them as he pleased—pushing, pulling, lifting—producing batted balls that made any further evaluation meaningless.
"Ah. So that's the guy."
A front-office staffer had come up beside him. Maeng looked over as if to ask what he meant.
"You didn't hear, Coach? That's the player Yang Joo-il rushed in a late application for."
"That Yang Joo-il?"
"Yes. The age was honestly a problem, but it wasn't just anyone asking—it was Yang Joo-il—so we took him. And just like on Yang Joo-il's channel, the hitting really is something else."
"What do you mean?"
The staffer explained that Do Kang-hyun had appeared on Yang Joo-il's personal broadcast.
"Watching the stream, I honestly wondered if it was some trick or an edit. Even if it was an aluminum bat in a batting center, it didn't make sense. But wow—if he can do this with a wooden bat, this power and this precision, isn't this straight-up the devil's talent? How did a hitter like that never make the pros?"
At the staffer's words, Maeng wanted to pull up Yang Joo-il's channel right then. Twenty home runs in a row, dead on the target, even in a batting center? Was that something a human being could do? Did bat control that absurd actually exist? He could not bring himself to believe it.
One thing, at least, was certain. Just as the staffer had said, the hitting Do Kang-hyun had shown in free batting a moment ago really was the devil's talent. How many hitters in pro ball right now could put on a free-batting session that perfect?
"Five... no. Maybe three?"
In other words, Kang-hyun's ability to hit batting-practice pitches sat in the very top class—inside the top five, at minimum, among current KBO hitters. Of course.
"Free batting isn't the same as a real game."
Even so, on free-batting skill alone, there was no arguing that Do Kang-hyun was a hitter worth watching.
"Do Kang-hyun... what was he doing all this time, until he got this old?"
The man had nothing to do with him, and still Maeng found that age—thirty-two—painfully regrettable.
"Hooo. Thirty-two... what am I supposed to do with him?"
He had evaluated countless players across countless tryouts, but he had never met one who left his chest this tight, his gut this stopped up. Then a thought struck him.
"Don't tell me he's a one-tool hitter."
A perfectly reasonable suspicion: maybe the reason Do Kang-hyun had never become a pro was that hitting was the only thing he could do.
"We'll know when we see it."
Wanting to check the man's defense, Maeng Seong-hwan felt his blood run hotter than it had in a long time.