Awakening
I eased into my delivery, letting the tension drain from my shoulder until only the pads of my fingers rested lightly on the seams.
Tens of thousands of throws, and not once had the ball gone where I wanted it. I pushed it out anyway, loading into the pitch the last stubborn scrap of hope I still carried for the knuckleball.
And in that instant, what seized my eyes was a single butterfly.
Butterfly Ball—another name for the knuckleball. A beautiful nickname, earned from the way the ball seems to drift through empty air.
The ball that had slipped from my fingertips was trembling in midair, wandering with no destination, twitching left and then right as if it were simply swimming through the sky.
Thwack. It hit the net behind home plate, and I froze where I stood, blank.
Wh-what was that? A knuckleball? Did I… just throw that?
Throw something tens of thousands of times and, once in a while, one of them really does come out with no spin. A ball you could actually call a knuckleball does get thrown.
But that was a knuckleball with no value in a real game.
Put simply, it was batting practice. No spin, sure—but none of the big, signature movement. A hair too much rotation, and the kind of pitch a knuckleballer files under mistake.
Those were the only ones I'd ever thrown. So what was that just now?
It hadn't been a simple knuckleball. It was the path I had simulated in my head countless times and only ever imagined—the most ideal trajectory I had ever conceived—and the ball had flown it.
I didn't want to lose the feel of that instant. I snatched a baseball off the ground, called back as much of the sensation as I could, set again, and threw.
The ball left my hand and shook in the air once more, gliding through the emptiness the way a bird beats its wings. The red seams hung so still they looked frozen, razor-clear, and then it buried itself in a corner of the net.
I kept throwing knuckleballs, over and over. The pitch I had wanted my whole life—the knuckleball I had chased through tens of thousands of throws—was coming off my fingertips now.
How long did I throw? Breath climbed all the way to my throat, and the mind that had sunk into a trance came back.
…Wait. How in the world did I even throw that?
The moment my head cleared, something felt wrong, and I started turning it over with a cold eye.
Was the feel of the throw different? The release point? No. No way.
The sensation in my fingers was no different from ordinary practice. The force coming up out of my lower half, the arc of the arm swing—it was the same delivery I had always used. What felt most wrong of all was the path itself.
Even granting that I threw it… does it make any sense that it moved exactly along the trajectory I drew in my head?
A knuckleball is a gamble. Even the man who throws it doesn't know where it's going. Air resistance and the faintest currents decide the path. That is the essence of the pitch. If it had broken the way I wanted once or twice, I could have called it luck. But dozens of pitches, thrown without a thought, had all flown the line I had drawn.
And every last one of them, without a single miss, finished in the strike zone.
You aim a knuckleball at the middle precisely because you don't know where it's going. That doesn't mean every one of them becomes a strike. It can't. And yet mine had traced the paths in my head and, at the last moment, arrived dead center as if they had promised.
This was not a normal problem.
I tilted my head, slowly picked a ball off the ground, and settled a knuckleball grip around it, pouring every bit of feeling into the fingers on the leather. Even as I told myself there was no way, I pictured a path I had not drawn even once today. This time the target wasn't the heart of the zone. It was the upper corner on the right.
I drew a deep breath, revived the feel from a moment ago, and pushed the ball out.
The instant it left my fingertips—
…Huh?
A strange sensation reached me, as if I were tied to the baseball already in the air. As if my will had closed around its movement in real time. The ball seemed to read my thoughts and traced the very path I had pictured.
Thwack. The upper-right corner of the net. Exactly where I had aimed.
I locked up where I stood. Throwing in a trance, I hadn't felt this. This time I felt it for certain: an invisible thread strung between me and the ball hanging in the air. It was too unreal.
This doesn't make sense. A knuckleball that follows the path I draw and sticks exactly where I want it?
To settle it, I took a fastball grip, drove off the mound, and threw with everything I had at the lower-left corner of the zone.
The ball buried itself in the upper left.
I couldn't believe it. This was my command—I couldn't even put a fastball where I wanted it. The fastball won't obey, but the knuckleball, the one pitch that cannot be commanded, nails the exact spot?
This wasn't my stuff, and it wasn't my condition.
Scientifically, this cannot happen.
I grabbed ball after ball and ran through every grip I knew—slider, changeup, curve—firing them one after another. Not a single one flew the path in my head. The command was wretched on top of it.
…Only when I throw a knuckleball?
A hypothesis flickered past. I took the knuckleball grip again, and the moment my fingertips pressed the ball, that sense of connection returned. I rode it and pushed the pitch out.
Thwack. Once more it struck the exact square of netting I had chosen, on the movement I had drawn.
This time, to be sure, I pictured something completely different. Not a knuckleball that drops in front of the plate—one that lifts, rising into the air. I set and pushed it out. The ball left my fingers fluttering like a butterfly, and just before it reached where a catcher's mitt would have been, it defied gravity, shot upward, and slammed the top of the net.
Thwack.
No doubt left. This broke the laws of physics. A spinless knuckleball rising nearly straight up in front of home plate was a thing no physics could explain. With everything I knew, there was only one explanation.
Telekinesis?
A power that lets you steer an object wherever you want. Had I awakened it?
I kept throwing, testing it again and again, and after dozens of pitches the conclusion settled.
Yeah. This is telekinesis.
The conditions were clear. First, whatever I held had to be a baseball. Second, I had to throw it with a knuckleball grip. Meet both, and I could completely dominate a baseball in midair.
And once it kicked in, what came after was limitless.
If I wanted, I could hold a knuckleball grip and throw something over a hundred miles an hour. I could throw other breaking balls with that same grip—sliders, curves, the rest. Because I could draw any path I wanted, I could imitate them.
Even a big-breaking sweeper was no problem.
Of course I couldn't actually pitch that way. A knuckleball grip firing a hundred-mile heater, or tracing a slider or a curve—physically, none of it can happen.
I pressed the ball with my fingertips again, calm this time. The knuckleball grip, and my head went clear.
Right. In the end it's the knuckleball. A hundred-mile fastball, any breaking ball you like—none of it can satisfy me. All I need is the knuckleball.
I set the ball down and dropped into the chair in the bullpen. Head bowed, I dragged both hands down my face. A situation that had walked out of common sense—and yet the pound of my heart and the feeling in my fingers proved it was unmistakably real. A gift from God? Or something an alien out of a movie might do?
I looked slowly down at my trembling hands. Calluses sat thick and ugly under the nails and across the joints. The hands of a pitcher who had thrown himself at the knuckleball for four years.
Or else… heaven paying me back for those four years.
The reason didn't matter. God's blessing or a devil's temptation, the power had been set at my fingertips either way.
I shot up out of the chair and looked from the mound to my shaking hands and back. A thought cut through.
This ability… how long is it going to stay?
An unreal power that might vanish without a word of warning. I couldn't let a day slip past—not a minute, not a second. The moment was so precious it burned in my throat. Just picturing it raised the hair on my arms: my ball drawing a beautiful path through the air, and hitters whipping their bats at nothing in front of it. Imagination alone sent a thrill through me.
I didn't hesitate. I grabbed my baseball bag and hurried for my run-down studio.
Early April. In the United States, that meant the verge of high school graduation. Unlike Korea, American high schools finish the term and hold graduation in May or June, so joining a high school team now was impossible.
So what can I actually choose? A junior-college league… or an independent league.
Go back to Korea? Not worth a tenth of a second. My knuckleball wasn't a weapon meant to stall out in a league like that.
Play there once and you're stuck for seven years. And no club is bringing me over as an import, either.
Even if I got into the KBO and ate the league alive with a knuckleball, the press would hang a question mark on it.
A gambling pitch that only works because the league is weak.
In front of big leaguers, it's nothing but batting practice.
Seven years rotting under smears like that.
I'd rather not start at all than hear an evaluation that humiliating.
The knuckleball I meant to finish on a mound had to be the strongest pitch alive—one nobody would dare second-guess.
Right. There's only one stage that can prove it. The major leagues. I have to show that my knuckleball stands at the top of every pitch there is, and for that I have to take the route that gets me up the fastest.
Languish for years at the bottom of a college league or an independent league, and that same verdict would follow me there. I had no intention of taking my time when I didn't even know when this ability might disappear. Reach the upper minors with this knuckleball as soon as I could, then go straight to the big leagues. That was the first thing I had been given to do.
Even so, the minors are impossible from where I stand right now.
By the 2020s, all thirty MLB clubs had abolished public tryouts completely. With prospect data systems fully in place, rounding up unproven civilians for a test had become unnecessary.
The MLB draft is obviously out.
I had never made a high school team, so I couldn't even be named as draft-eligible. I could still make my case straight to a scout. Public tryouts were gone, but a club's own closed tryout was still possible.
The problem is there's no way to get a scout to look.
Some nobody sends a video of himself throwing well, and the odds they'll even watch it are small. Watch it, and there's still no chance they'll care.
No point using a method that might not work. And that route feels like whining—please, just look at me. I don't want it.
I didn't want to go find them. I wanted the clubs to come find me. Which left one last route worth considering.
In the end, it's the independent leagues.
Show well there and you can go straight to the minors. Scouts live in those parks. Putting on a show where they already are was the best move I had.
The moment I got back to the studio I opened the laptop and searched for independent-league open tryouts.
…Late April. The Frontier League spring combined tryout?
I let out a breath of relief. A month later and even an independent league might have been out of reach. Private tryouts still opened when a club got an injury or something like it, outside the regular windows.
Still, there's a world of difference between a sure way in and no way at all.
I could call this luck. I filled in the profile straight through, my name included, and hit apply.
Frontier League Spring Combined Tryout — registration confirmed
The moment the payment window came up, expectation swelled in my chest.
Heh. Can't wait to see what comes next.