Frontier League Tryout (2)
Once the first round of bullpen sessions and the free-batting schedule had both run their course, people gathered in a conference room inside Wintrust Field. Profiles and pitching data lay stacked thick across the table. The Frontier League's official scouting director was there, together with the managers and coaching staffs of all sixteen clubs in the league. This was where they would choose who had cleared the first test and would move on to tomorrow's second.
The process was methodical. The scouting director would first draw up a list of qualifiers from the data and from the ability he had seen with his own eyes. After that, any player left off the list could still earn a pass: if even one club's manager, looking over the rejects, said he wanted another look in tomorrow's second test, that was enough.
The director read out the names he had screened, one after another. As the announcements drew toward their end, a manager seated off to one side raised his hand.
"The pitcher who threw the knuckleball in the first bullpen session—you didn't select him?"
The director answered with a mild smile.
"Ah, yes. It's such an unusual case that I wanted to hear your opinions directly. Kang Moo-baek. The pitcher who threw the knuckleball in the first test. Is there any manager here who'd like to see him in live pitching?"
Knuckleball.
In modern baseball the pitch was, for all practical purposes, extinct. This was an era ruled by fastballs pressing a hundred miles an hour and by variant breaking balls with wicked movement. A pitcher might mix a knuckleball in now and then, but a specialist who threw nothing else—who lived on the knuckleball alone—was almost impossible to find. Out on the field, skepticism about whether the pitch could survive a real game was simply the prevailing view.
And Kang Moo-baek's wasn't even the hard knuckleball they use now. It was the old kind. Slow. In a game drowning in hundred-mile heat, can something like that actually live?
That was precisely why the director had held the name off his first list. A knuckleball pitcher was difficult to evaluate in live action, and you also had the nuisance of finding a catcher built to receive the thing.
If all sixteen clubs decide they don't need one, he's gone. No mercy.
The director's expectation missed, lightly and completely.
He had barely finished speaking when every one of the sixteen managers in the room lifted a hand at once, as if they had agreed on it beforehand.
"Kang Moo-baek. I want to see that pitcher's ball in the second test. I have to."
One manager spoke for the rest.
The scouting director's eyes went wide. A moment later he nodded.
"Yes. Understood. Then we'll pass Kang Moo-baek through the first cut. Manager of the Schaumburg Boomers—does your club have a catcher who's received a knuckleball? We'll need someone to catch him tomorrow."
Rick Hernandez, manager of the Schaumburg Boomers, nodded without a flicker of hesitation.
"I'll bring our starting catcher. He's never caught a knuckleball, but as a receiver he's as good as anyone in the league."
"Good. I'll leave it with you."
The next day. Day two of the Frontier League tryout.
I had come through the first test cleanly, and I walked back onto Wintrust Field with a light step.
"Participant forty-seven, Kang Moo-baek! You're in!"
The staffer's voice carried across the park. I didn't linger. I walked out onto the field and set my foot not on yesterday's bullpen mound but on the mound of the main field itself.
When I looked toward the plate, a massive Black man with a hard face was stepping in. I remembered the talk the other participants had been trading in low voices back in the waiting room.
Jake Williams. Of everyone at this tryout, he carried the flashiest résumé: six foot five, an overwhelming frame, a slugger who had launched fifteen home runs in Single-A. Poor numbers the year before had gotten him released, and so he had shown up here.
Jake loosened up in the box and rolled a heavy bat in slow circles. That alone was enough to make the plate feel packed, the pressure of him filling it. I toed the dirt with my spikes, worked the mound until it sat right, and stared straight in at him.
I wasn't particularly nervous.
Closer to excited. I get to show a hitter like that my perfect knuckleball.
Still, I couldn't quite kill the strange stir in one corner of my chest. I slid my hand quietly into the glove and pressed the tips of my index and middle fingers into the leather, locking down a knuckleball grip. Like a lie, my heart went still. The baseball was sharp and clear against my fingertips. Feeling that peculiar sense of connection to the ball, I looked at Jake again, and a laugh came out of me on its own.
No. There's nothing to get excited about. He's a Single-A hitter, that's all. I'm going to be throwing knuckleballs off a Major League mound before long, and I'm fluttering over someone at this level? Don't be ridiculous.
I settled into an easy motion and let the ball go. The delivery was so spare it almost looked lazy. What came out of it was anything but.
The ball drifted through the air like a butterfly, riding toward the catcher's mitt. Whoosh— Jake turned his hips with everything he had and swung. Whiff! A heavy rush of air split the field. But in the exact instant the bat came through, the ball moved without pattern and dropped. The lumber cut nothing. The ball kicked dirt, then died in the catcher's mitt.
"Strike!"
Jake stood there with the bat in his hands, staring blankly at empty air. He plainly had no idea what had just happened.
He already knew I throw a knuckleball.
There was no way the rumor hadn't moved through the players gathered for an independent-league tryout. An Asian pitcher over from Korea who threw nothing but a knuckleball would have made fine conversation. Of course he had stepped in knowing what the pitch was. And still his face had looked like that.
Which means the path on my knuckleball is that good.
I held the beautiful line it had drawn and let myself sink into the aftertaste.
This is it. A knuckleball doesn't taste right until the hitter whiffs.
A batter fooled clean, the bat cutting nothing but air. That exquisite instant was the vision I had hungered for.
Jake wiped the sweat away and glared at me with a frightening heat. Pride stung, he reset his grip and crowded in tight against the inside of the box. I came set again and pinched the knuckleball grip at my fingertips.
Pitch two.
Whoosh— The ball left my fingers and rose once more, this time high and in. It swam through the air as if it had wings, but the flight path alone was plainly out of the zone. Jake felt it miss and pulled the bat back, tipping his head away.
That instant, the ball that looked ready to sail out of the zone dropped like a lie and knifed in over the plate. Thud! It slammed the mitt and fell to the dirt.
"Strike two!"
"What?!"
Jake's eyes went wide. He spun on the umpire, the look of a man who had been robbed.
"You're calling that a strike?! That was a ball, up and in!"
The plate umpire shook his head, flat and final.
"It came in. The ball danced, but at the end it was clearly in the strike zone!"
A knuckleball's path is so lawless that calling ball or strike is never easy. This one, though, had buried itself perfectly in the zone at the last moment. Up on the mound, I grinned.
This is it. My knuckleball is a pitch no hitter can ever touch.
Within the limits of physics, a pitch whose path I shaped in real time while I read the hitter's reaction. If he looked ready to swing, I could yank it out of the zone, draw the whiff, or simply refuse him a square hit. If he held up, I pushed it into the zone and that was the end of it.
A pitch that probes, and answers. That's all it is.
In truth this one had wobbled, but it hadn't strayed so very far outside the zone. It had only broken toward the hitter's head on the way in, and Jake, ducking in surprise, simply hadn't seen it clean. Ride the borderline and shove it in, or slip it just back out. All of that belonged to me.
The count: no balls, two strikes.
Jake stood in with the count against him and choked the bat, swallowing hard. I came set and threw the third pitch without hesitation.
Whoosh— A spinless ball cut the wind and came in low, down the middle. Impatient, Jake swung in a frenzy, and the ball dropped away, down and out. He couldn't control the heavy torque of a bat that had found nothing. His balance went completely, and he sat down hard on the dirt.
"Strike! Out!"
Rick Hernandez, manager of the Schaumburg Boomers, was watching Kang Moo-baek's pitching with close attention. He flicked a glance to the TrackMan monitor and checked the numbers.
Spin rate, 120 rpm... this is anything but ordinary.
A knuckleball generally lives between 150 and 300 revolutions. Even that range was territory you could command with any consistency only if you were someone like R.A. Dickey, who had won a Cy Young throwing nothing else.
And if it's sitting even lower than that...
It meant there was no room left to doubt how complete the knuckleball itself was. Kang Moo-baek had thrown nearly thirty pitches and had not offered a single mistake. Not one hitter who stepped in had barreled a ball.
Hm. At this level, does he go somewhere in the second round?
It was true he was putting on a show from the mound. Being taken with the first pick of the draft was another matter entirely.
For an independent-league club, the tryout is the stage that decides the whole year.
This was not the Major League draft, where you take prospects. You were selecting players who could help at once, and whoever you named here decided whether the season bore fruit.
In the end, you're more likely to spend the pick on someone who's already been proven than on a high-risk arm like a knuckleball pitcher.
Kang Moo-baek didn't have a single line of formal baseball on his record.
He couldn't even make an American high school team. No matter how good the ball is, you don't name him first on a whim.
Of course he wasn't going to pass through every club untouched. High-risk knuckleballer or not, nearly thirty pitches without allowing one squared-up hit was remarkable.
A first-round selection is a different story. Spend a first-round card on a knuckleball pitcher and then find you can't use him, and the damage to the club is enormous.
Rick Hernandez spun the pen in his hand and frowned as if none of it sat right.
The problem is there just aren't enough usable arms and bats in the pool. The overall level is below a normal year...
It wasn't that no one stood out. There was a power pitcher who threw a hundred with command that was a mess, and hitters whose other tools were thin but whose power tool was real. There were proven pieces with verified minor-league track records, too, Jake Williams among them. Even so, Rick Hernandez, manager of last year's champions, could not smile at his ease.
We won last year. That puts our pick dead last.
The tryout the Frontier League hosted ran as a draft. Selections went in reverse order of the previous season's standings, and every club was required to take at least two players.
The proven talent will be gone in the early slots. None of it is lasting until we pick.
Once the first-tier names were cleared out, you were left naming whoever came next.
Kang Moo-baek... do I file him as a second-tier piece? My gut says he's closer to a round and a half...
Even so, the thought of spending a first-round pick on a knuckleball pitcher left a bad taste.
What if a personal catcher, or the receiving itself, means I can't use him in games? What if the ball doesn't play against league hitters a cut above the ones who showed up here?
The fundamental risks a knuckleball pitcher carried flickered through his mind. Rick Hernandez could not hide the unease. He clenched both hands tight.
Please. Just leave me one.