Prologue
Third year of middle school.
It was an ordinary day. I came home still in my baseball-club practice uniform, washed up, and lay on the bed with my phone, and that was when a single video rose out of the YouTube algorithm — the kind of video I never would have tapped on any other day.
I've been playing baseball all day. The last thing I want is more of it on YouTube.
And yet, for no reason I could name, I wanted to press it. I clicked as if something had taken hold of me.
That video led me into a new life.
In old footage the past had given back, restored to sharp clarity by AI, a man threw the ball with an almost careless ease. The path it drew once it left his hand was beautiful. The spin had died completely, so the seams showed in full. The ball drifted on like a butterfly at its leisure — and then, in an instant, it sank. The batter swung and never even touched it.
The moment I saw the beauty of Phil Niekro's trajectory, I drew in a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
Spellbound by that arc, I had come straight to the United States to learn the knuckleball. Four years had passed since then.
Looking back now, that video was the death of me.
I let out a sigh as I walked the asphalt. I had come to America on nothing but nerve, and life here had never run smooth. I didn't know a word of English and got by on a translation app. The walls of culture and language were far too high, and to everyone around me I was a foreigner. Higher still was the wall of American baseball.
To join a high school team you had to pass an entrance test — a tryout — and the competition was past anything I could have imagined. Hundreds of kids who had been called monsters back in their home states packed the place and drilled explosive fastballs, one after another, straight into the mitt. In Korea I had been a real prospect. I still could not clear the threshold of American baseball. And through all of it, I had wasted four years insisting on nothing but the knuckleball.
In the end, I had no talent for it.
Mad for the pitch, I squeezed a grip trainer until my fingers bloomed with blood-bruises. The skin between thumb and forefinger hardened into callus. I hunted down retired knuckleball pitchers with no introduction and begged them to teach me, and I drifted from one training center to another in a country that was not mine.
I did everything a person could do. My stuff only got worse.
The more I trained the knuckleball, the more the fastball I had once owned fell apart — its life, its velocity. My command wavered. The readings dropped. As a pitcher, I was sliding toward the bottom. I had given it everything, and in four years I had never once thrown a knuckleball I could be satisfied with.
Now it was early April, and high school graduation was close.
Mom told me to stop and come home to Korea.
A bitter smile touched my mouth. I could still hear the worry in her voice through the phone, clear as if she were standing beside me. For four years my parents had believed in my stubbornness and borne every cost. What all that enormous support had produced was the person I was now.
Have I been throwing my life away for too long?
I dropped onto a battered wooden bench left alone at the roadside and tipped my head back. Sunlight struck my eyes, and I squinted.
The sky over America, the sky over Korea… they're the same.
Since I had come to this unfamiliar land I had been so consumed by the knuckleball that I had never once let the feeling in — homesickness, rising from the bottom of my chest.
Homesickness…
I knew it at once. Whatever I was calling homesickness was not simply a longing for home.
I've hit my limit, and I want to run. I never thought I would feel something like this.
Honestly, it was fucked.
I worked so hard. Harder than anyone. I wrung everything I had into every pitch.
I forced down the anger boiling up inside me. There is a saying in baseball: a knuckleball is not something effort can buy. It is a talent heaven appoints. The fine sensation at the fingertips, the instinct that reads how a ball wants to move — only if the sky allows it does a trajectory draw itself off your hand.
"Why… why is it that I can't? Why can't I throw it even once?"
Why was the world so cruel to me? All I had wanted was to throw one ball that did not spin, and I had poured four years into it.
Four years. Someone might say four years was nothing to whine about. For a baseball player, those four years meant more than that.
That was the time I ground my whole baseball life into.
The life on my fastball, built up since I was a kid. The refined mechanics. The years when a player is supposed to grow as fast as he can — I had burned all of them on a single pitch. And the price of that reckless gamble was wretched. I had not even cleared the door of an American high school team.
College ball? An independent league? Not a chance. What club in its right mind would take a guy who couldn't even make a high school roster?
I lifted a hand and slowly curled my fingers. Knuckles thickened by grip work. Fingertips hardened from pressing seams. Against a future I could not see, a thought I had never once imagined began to circle.
Should I… just stop?
Not once since I had crossed the ocean had I wanted to give up baseball. Even on nights when my fingers bruised purple and my shoulder felt ready to come apart, I had kept going by picturing it — the ball leaving my hand and rising like a bird on wings, that beautiful path. And now I wanted to go back to Korea.
I want to quit.
The obsession that had carried me for four years had gone cold.
I got up from the bench, hauled my heavy body upright, and walked. I had no destination in mind. I only stared, blank, at whatever passed, and let my feet take me wherever they would, one dragging step after another.
I don't know how long I walked. When I stopped without thinking, a familiar building waited just beyond my toes. I looked up, and a familiar sign met my eyes: the private pitching center where I had stamped my attendance every single day without fail. Four years of training, for a kid who had never made a team at all. The place that had kept those four years of effort company.
Does the body remember?
On the very day I had decided to quit baseball, my feet had brought me here on their own, and a hollow laugh escaped me. Under it, though, a quiet stubbornness rose in my chest.
No. Maybe this is better.
My baseball life was already over. There was no better place to shake off whatever was left of it.
Today, right here, I'll throw as much as I want. Forget reality. Empty myself however the feeling takes me, and walk out without a single regret. That's how this ends.
I opened the door of the pitching center, returned the counter clerk's greeting, paid the fee, and stepped into bullpen lane three — the one I always used. I picked up one of the baseballs set out in the pen, a white leather ball rolling across the palm of my right hand. I bent my knuckles and pressed it gently with my fingertips. The knuckleball I had regripped hundreds of times and thrown tens of thousands of times across four years, down to the familiar feel at the edge of my nails. Ball in hand, I stepped onto the mound.
"Hoo…"
I let the strength drain out of my body with the long breath. Thinking of it as my last pitch, even the familiar bullpen suddenly seemed like something I would miss.
Yeah. I should throw it. It's the last one.
There was no pressure left to throw it well, and no restless need to prove anything. I went into my windup, slow, and pushed the ball off my fingertips so it would take no spin, flicking it away as if I were only letting it go.
A thin hiss cut the air.
And in that instant, the ball that left my hand split the empty space without rotating at all, the seams plain to the eye.
The Butterfly Ball.
That was the nickname — given because a knuckleball shuddering this way and that in flight looked like a single butterfly on the wing. It was the knuckleball I had wanted for so long. The ideal trajectory.