The Intrasquad Scrimmage
The first hit of the day came from our side.
The opposing pitcher was Joe Grainski, who'd been the team's fourth starter last season. Against him, the batter hitting second in our lineup managed to slap out a short single.
Nothing much came of it after that. Still, in a game where the gap between the two sides was painfully obvious, just getting the first hit was enough to light up our guys.
You could tell by how fast their energy spiked.
But something about it rubbed me the wrong way. Getting that worked up over a single hit? Personally, I've never liked that kind of atmosphere. It's usually right about then that somebody makes a mistake.
"Well… not really my problem."
All I had to do today was win my battles against the hitters. Everything after that was on everyone else.
My job was simple: handle the nine batters assigned to me.
Batting fourth was Greg Mathis. The big man had joined the team a little before I had, another transplant. At thirty-three he wasn't exactly young, but he was the type who just quietly put in the work, day after day.
He was so tight-lipped I started thinking, Ah. So this is what it looks like when someone only says what's absolutely necessary. I'd always thought our Savers captain, Seo Gyeongmin, was quiet — but this guy was a full level above him. Two levels, even.
Greg Mathis stepped into the box.
Was that bat even legal?
A long time ago I'd seen a photo of this ridiculously tall Korean MMA fighter holding a beer mug. The mug looked like a shot glass in his hand — pure optical magic. That was exactly the feeling I was getting now.
Why was this man walking up to a baseball game carrying a laundry paddle…
Then again, if he connected, the ball was going a long, long way.
Eric put down the sign for the first pitch. I didn't even bother nodding — just went straight into my windup.
Truth was, we'd already talked it over before I took the mound. Since Greg Mathis had played for another team through last season, Eric knew more about him than I'd expected — where he was strong, where the holes were.
Crack!
"Foul."
The ball vanished into the distance in a blink. It sailed well clear of the first-base line, but the sheer absurdity of how fast it disappeared was something else.
Eric and I had gone with a slider off the plate for the first pitch. Eric had said Mathis struggled with pitches that broke laterally, and I'd trusted him on it, but…
"Shit… you call that struggling?"
If he'd gotten even a fraction more of that, he would've shoved it right out of the park.
Next pitch was a high fastball. It smacked into the mitt for a called ball. Then another slider, peeling off the outside edge of the zone — a little farther out than the first one.
Craaack!
"…The hell."
I swear I heard something shatter…
Thankfully, the ball sailed foul again, same as the first one, clearing the line by a mile.
That man was a monster. The silver lining was that even around here, you didn't run into monsters like him every day. If every hitter in this league were built like that… I'd pack my bags.
For the fourth pitch, Eric called for another changeup off the plate. Normally I would've shaken that off, but I gave a clean nod and threw exactly what he wanted. Mathis's bat started forward, then froze. Ball.
How many pitches did I even have again? So why did it feel like I was running out of things to throw?
Somehow Greg Mathis, standing in the box right now, felt tougher than Eun-hyung had the previous inning.
Eric, as if he'd been waiting for that ball all along, flashed the next sign immediately.
"Wasn't planning on throwing this…"
The ball left my hand and floated, lazy and soft — then dropped hard at the end.
Crack!
"……"
He reacted to that?
Eric had said Mathis was strong against dropping pitches, but tracking a knuckleball all the way through its final dive and lifting it? Come on.
The one mercy was that he hadn't squared it up clean. The ball climbed high, and the center fielder — who'd drifted all the way back near the wall — settled under it for the out.
"…How the hell do other pitchers get this guy out?"
I was pretty sure his batting average last season had been in the .290s…
Maybe it was just a bad matchup. Him and me.
I shook off the shock and faced the five-hole hitter, putting him away easy on two pitches. He flailed at a fastball in on the hands, and the ball rolled gently to the first baseman for the out.
Then came the six-hole hitter.
Gordon Perry. Captain of the Red Sox.
From the moment I'd been told I was pitching today, I couldn't even count how many hours of his film I'd watched. I wanted to shut him down completely, so for the first time in a long while I actually studied hard.
At thirty-five he was still recognized as an outstanding hitter, though his bat speed had clearly slowed compared to his prime. The reason he was putting up numbers just as good as before — better than when he was young, even — came down to one thing: his approach.
Gordon Perry considered himself the best guess hitter in the league. He'd apparently bragged about it in interviews, too — claiming that every at-bat was a chess match against the opposing battery, and that he won most of them.
Ho-min and I had studied him carefully and reached a conclusion.
"So he's just really, really good at rock-paper-scissors?"
"Pretty much."
A starting pitcher only has so many pitches. Even the ones with deep arsenals mostly lean on a handful during a real game — a fastball and two or three off-speed looks, give or take.
So if you sit on one and time it up, you can do damage…
"You're the exception, though. You throw all of them."
Right. And here stood that exception.
"Strike."
I stole strike one with a slow curve that drifted up like it had all the time in the world before dropping off a cliff. Judging by Gordon Perry's face, he hadn't expected that for a first pitch. It was a good look on him.
Second pitch.
"Strike."
I could throw two slow curves in a row if I wanted. What was he glaring at me for? Glaring wouldn't help.
Out of that whole arsenal, I'd thrown him nothing but slow curves — two of them. So what did he think was coming next?
Sit on another slow curve? Or something else?
His head had to be spinning.
Whap!
"Swing. Out."
A max-effort high fastball. Whiff. Strikeout.
"Easy."
Rock-paper-scissors. I won.
The third inning.
My last inning of the day. Grandpa Manager had told me I only needed to face nine hitters, no matter what, so one way or another this was the end of the line.
In the third, I decided to put the kids I'd been neglecting to work.
Cutter.
"Foul."
Splitter.
"Strike."
Two-seamer.
"Out."
Tried a power curve, too.
"Out."
And for the last batter — four straight knuckleballs.
"Out."
Just like that, my first appearance was over.
When I came over to the States, Han Song-yi and Ho-min came with me. Of the three of us, who was adjusting the best?
Han Song-yi, hands down.
The house the club had set us up with was in a neighborhood that felt… well, like a quiet little country town. Hardly anyone walking around, barely any cars on the road — just well-off people in big houses hanging out among themselves. Textbook small-town vibes.
I'd worried we might stick out as the new arrivals, but what do you know?
"Song~ take some of this home with you."
"Song~ you're coming by a little later, right?"
"Song~"
"Song~"
"Song~"
Apparently the whole neighborhood lit up and started waving the second they spotted my wife. The old man next door practically treated her like his own granddaughter. Every time he saw her, he tried to send her home with something.
"Why, though?"
Ever since I'd joined this Grapefruit League circus, Song-yi had been busy socializing with the neighbors in all the free time I didn't have. How on earth had she charmed an entire street in the short time we'd been here?
"But why does the old man next door hate me?"
The neighbor was a Red Sox fan. Claimed he'd been one for seventy years — and since he was seventy years old, that meant he'd been a fan from the day he was born.
"Said the money went to your head."
Ho-min fired off the answer before I'd even finished the question.
"……Americans actually say it like that?"
"I paraphrased."
"Don't paraphrase freely. There's no way he said it like that."
"I'm serious. Want the direct quote? Fuck!—"
"I'm good."
So he didn't like that some unproven guy had shown up pulling down that kind of salary.
"Then how come he's friendly with you?"
Song-yi I could understand. But why was Ho-min buddy-buddy with the old man next door? Ho-min hadn't even been around that many days.
"Because I'm adorable."
"……"
My hand moved on its own. That was not my fault.
If Song-yi was that pretty and Ho-min was that cute, the least they could do was cut me a little slack too.
"Isn't this bullying at this point?"
"You love that. Getting left out."
"What is wrong with you."
That had been my conversation with Ho-min a few days earlier.
And then!
The day after the intrasquad game!
"Honey~ Jim says you pitched really well!"
Song-yi called out of nowhere and led with that. From the sound of her voice, she was practically buzzing.
"Who's Jim?"
"The grandpa next door!"
"Ah…"
Well. I had thrown pretty well.
"But why all of a sudden?"
"He watched you pitch yesterday."
"Huh? Yesterday?"
"Yeah. You guys had that practice game thing, right?"
"Ah… how did he even watch that?"
"They were showing it online?"
How had I not known that?
After the call with Song-yi ended—
"I knew about it."
"……For real? Then why didn't you say anything?"
"Why would I?"
"……"
This bastard was definitely hiding something.
And whatever he was hiding, I found out soon enough.
"Kang! It's chaos out there!"
"What is?"
"Your outing yesterday. The fans are going nuts! All that talk about you being overpaid? Gone. Vanished."
"Huh?"
Eric held out his phone. Of the three language skills, listening was my strongest, speaking came next, and reading was dead last. So I stumbled through the fan community posts, grinding the gears in my head as I went.
He wasn't wrong. The tone around my name had gotten a lot warmer — and all I'd done was throw one intrasquad game.
Hold on. Come to think of it…
"Why'd you hide it?"
"Ah, no? I didn't hide anything?"
There was no way Ho-min hadn't seen this.
Gotcha.