Practice Game (Part 2)
As expected of an exhibition game, another four-seamer came in sitting in the mid-140s. Still, for a right-handed pitcher to crowd an inside fastball against a left-handed batter required immense confidence in his stuff. If nothing else, I had to respect that swagger.
Mm, that felt sweet off the barrel. At the end of the day, baseball was all about home runs and strikeouts.
My body wasn't fully built to form yet, but busting my ass during spring training was already paying dividends. I had pushed myself with the kind of desperate intensity I hadn't summoned since my grind toward the Major Leagues, so the results spoke for themselves. Truthfully, it was grueling work, but every time I thought of the baby growing inside Eunha's belly, my legs found an extra gear.
A certain KBO player who made it to the big leagues once shared his experience from his first spring camp over there. Thinking he would make a stellar first impression by showing up two hours before report time, he walked into the clubhouse only to find the veteran stars already drenched in sweat, grinding through their workouts. That was what the Major Leagues were—a ruthless proving ground where only the best of the best gathered, and where those elite few worked themselves to the bone just to climb an inch higher.
With my current bat speed and raw power, driving anything over 155 km/h out of the park would still be a struggle. Thank goodness I wasn't playing in the States right now. Over there, even Triple-A rosters were crawling with kids pumping 150 without breaking a sweat. If I scrapped my leg kick right now, my bat speed would crater, my pop would vanish, and the home runs would dry up overnight.
"Nice stroke! Way to go, nephew!"
"How about hitting one back-to-back, Jaehun-hyung?"
"Hell yeah. Just sit back and watch."
Hwang Jaehun was a slugger who had posted four years of respectable numbers in the Major Leagues. Having watched him closely throughout spring camp, I knew he maintained the brutal training regimen befitting a former big leaguer. A few first-team hitters had attempted to mimic our workload early in camp, only for the coaching staff to step in and put a stop to it. It was common sense, really. When your physical build was fundamentally different from birth, trying to match that workload was an express ticket to the disabled list.
Besides, this was a club that had earned the humiliating moniker of the 'Busan Invalids' last year due to an endless string of injuries—a crisis so severe that front office management had gutted and overhauled the entire athletic training staff during the offseason. Guys standing 170 centimeters and weighing 80 kilograms simply couldn't endure the physical toll handled by men who were 193 centimeters and 120 kilograms, or 198 centimeters and 110 kilograms. I understood their creeping anxiety when two absolute freaks of nature suddenly showed up to set the curve, but the professional world was cold and unforgiving.
"Seonghyun-ssi, give us a celebration for the camera!"
A staff member from the club's in-house YouTube channel thrust a lens toward my face. I gave the camera a perfunctory thumbs-up.
"...That's it?"
"It's just a scrimmage."
Returning to the dugout, I was greeted warmly by our stray-cat bench duo and the foreign contingent.
"You, damn it! Pack your bags for the Phillies next year!" Lucas barked, waving his arms. "Go run that bloated salary parasite out of town! The bum eats payroll like a pig and sinks the entire franchise!"
"That's my Papi," Luis chimed in with a grin. "You're gonna knock one out like that for run support on my start days too, right?"
Lucas was living up to his reputation as a rabid Philigan through and through. He was clearly ranting about Bryce Harper, who had just slogged through a career-worst season failing to hit even twenty homers. In fairness, with the calendar reading 2030, Harper was thirty-seven years old. He had run headfirst into the aging curve at full speed.
CRACK!
Another crisp explosion resonated across the field. Jaehun-hyung had launched a towering blast for back-to-back homers. Damn. That flew even farther than mine. The man's raw power had played against Major League pitching, so it was hardly a shock. Having surrendered two straight shots, Natsuki signaled toward the dugout and walked off the mound under his own power.
Apparently, his arm wasn't loose yet. Still, for a premier NPB starter boasting fifteen wins and an ERA in the two-point range, his stuff today had been thoroughly uninspiring. A reliever jogged in from the bullpen and promptly retired the fifth, sixth, and seventh hitters in order. That was always the trap for young hitters. Watching the two guys ahead of them crush majestic back-to-back shots stoked an eager fire to show off, causing their swings to get big and their front shoulders to fly open prematurely. When that happened, making quality contact was impossible. Either way, it was time to switch sides.
Taking the mound as our starting pitcher was our fifth starter, Kwak Sanghyun. Armed with a versatile five-pitch repertoire consisting of a four-seamer, slider, splitter, curveball, and sweeper, the right-handed craftsman was prized for his durability, eating up heavy innings without ever missing a turn in the rotation. The catch was that his timid, frustrating approach on the rubber regularly drew the furious ire of the fanbase. Last season, his ERA sat in the low fours. At twenty-nine, he was the exact same age as Luis—the theoretical prime of a ballplayer's career.
Let's see what he's got. They often said baseball was a pitcher's game, and I wholeheartedly agreed. When a pitcher threw the game of his life, a hitter was virtually powerless. Batters capitalized on mistakes, so a pitcher who refused to miss over the heart of the plate was an impregnable fortress.
THWACK!
"Strike!"
Factoring in that his arm wasn't fully ramped up, the quality of the four-seamer wasn't terrible. Of course, that was granting a generous curve. High-130s? At least the location was solid, clipping the bottom of the zone right at the hitter's knees where bats rarely reached cleanly.
"Strike two!"
This time, he disrupted the batter's timing with a sharp curveball to jump ahead 0-2. Conventional baseball wisdom dictated wasting a pitch here, but throwing a ball with no tactical purpose was utterly useless. Either bury a splitter beneath the dirt to induce a swinging strike, or elevate a high fastball out of the zone for the chase. If you were going to burn a ball, those were the only two acceptable choices.
"Ball!"
He attempted the elevated fastball as a setup pitch for the splitter, but missed far too high. If he had kept it just above the letters, he might have coaxed a defensive swing.
"Ball two!"
Now he wasted a slider that broke miles off the outer edge. Why bother?
"Ball three!"
Sure enough, a sweeper sailed wide off the plate. Come on. Why couldn't you just bury the splitter at 1-2 and put him away? Full count. The advantage had flipped entirely to the batter, and the pitcher was backed into a corner where he was forced to challenge the strike zone.
CRACK.
The leadoff hitter waited back on a four-seamer that caught too much plate and laced it cleanly between the shortstop and third baseman for a single.
Watching Kwak Sanghyun instantly embody the scathing critiques written on his TreeWiki profile made an itch of profanity prickle the back of my throat. Seriously, why? Why waste pitches that fool nobody and run yourself into a corner?
"Sigh..."
"Frustrating to watch, isn't it, Seonghyun?"
"Ah. Seongwon-hyung."
The man who strolled up after catching my heavy sigh was none other than Min Seongwon, who had reported late to camp after fracturing his collarbone in an offseason car accident. As our primary bullpen arm and former closer, fans joked that whenever he shut down a ninth inning, his name was Seongwon, but whenever he blew a save, he was Wonseong—pure public outcry. Comically enough, despite hailing from Seoul, he was a die-hard, lifelong Titans fanatic who constantly trailed Hwang Jaehun around, which had allowed the two of us to hit it off immediately. Unlike Jaehun-hyung, who was dead serious about everything, Seongwon-hyung carried a laid-back, slick charm as a passive trait.
"If it were me, once I got two strikes, I would've spammed splitters until the cows came home," Seongwon remarked with a chuckle.
Seongwon-hyung relied on a heavy mix of four-seamers, cutters, and splitters, boasting an exceptionally sharp vertical bite on his fork. Word was he possessed the rare touch to throw both a get-me-over splitter for called strikes and a diving variant to induce whiffs, though I had yet to see him unleash it live. Still, having reported late due to rehab, slotting him into high-leverage closing duties right out of the gate in April seemed ill-advised. It would be infinitely wiser for him to open the season in the second tier to rebuild his arm strength before getting the call to the big club.
Against the following batter, Kwak Sanghyun fed a first-pitch splitter that induced a weak, rolling grounder, turning a slick double play for two quick outs. Looking strictly at the box score, getting two outs on eight pitches was economical enough. He ran the next hitter to a full count as well before finally punching him out to escape the frame. Why on earth does he insist on working full counts against every single batter?
"By the way, why aren't you manning the hot corner today?" Seongwon asked, leaning against the railing.
"The skipper told me to take the designated hitter slot. Since I'm ineligible to play regular-season games until June anyway, it looks like they want to audition other infielders at third."
"What? Even so, you'd think they'd want to feed you every scrap of game experience... Man, talk about living the easy life."
"You have to milk the sweet life while you can, hyung. Besides, I'm well past the age where I need to farm experience points."
"Listen to this punk. You're nineteen years old! What do you mean you're past that age?"
I really am past that age, though.
"It's only a scrimmage anyway, so the opposing arms aren't exactly pitching with fire in their eyes. I'll soak up plenty of experience once official pre-season exhibition games get underway."
"Fair point. You need to turn the manager's head during the pre-season so he calls your number the second June first rolls around."
"You don't need to worry about that."
"Look at this guy. The swagger on you is unbelievable." Seongwon-hyung let out an incredulous chuckle.
The roster was undeniably young overall, but naturally, there wasn't a single teenager besides me. The rookie pitcher selected in the first round had walked the ballpark during the intrasquad game before getting banished straight down to the Futures team.
When sides swapped, our eighth and ninth hitters rolled over routine groundouts. Then our leadoff hitter stepped up, only to hack blindly at the very first pitch and pop out softly. Classic cho-gu-ttak. Um... Given his slender frame, it's obvious he has zero power tools. Wouldn't it make far more sense to see a few pitches and work the count? Worse, his hips and front shoulder had completely uncoiled before his bat even cleared the zone. You couldn't barrel a baseball with any authority with mechanics like that.
"Hey, Junhyung! Get over here right now!"
Unable to stomach it any longer, our hitting coach, Michael, barked from the dugout steps, his round face flushed bright crimson.
"Coach Michael, Junhyung has to take the field for defense," one of the bench coaches pointed out.
"You! Grab your glove and cover short for an inning. You said you can play anywhere, right?"
"Huh? Well... sure."
Damn it. I was perfectly content chilling on the bench.
Grudgingly, I trotted out to the dirt to take Choi Junhyung's spot at shortstop. Ugh, shortstop. I hate this position. It was easily the most exhausting assignment on the diamond behind catcher, taxing your legs and knees relentlessly. Leaving the field without a filth-stained uniform was practically impossible.
"Sanghyun-sunbae."
Having navigated the first inning on fifteen pitches, Kwak Sanghyun had taken the rubber again to hit his strict thirty-pitch ceiling for the day. I called out to him softly from behind the mound.
"Hm? Me?"
"Yes, sunbae. How about you scrap the four-seam fastball entirely this inning?"
"...What? Ditch the fastball? Why?"
"It's just an exhibition. Would you mind trusting me just this once?"
"Uh... sure. Okay."
Sanghyun looked thoroughly bewildered, but come on, man. Your four-seamer simply isn't that caliber of a pitch. Rather than offering hitters hittable fastballs, pitching backwards by leaning into his plus breaking stuff to keep them off-balance made vastly more sense. He needed to shelve the four-seamer almost entirely, reserving it solely as a high heater to set up the diving splitter.
Sanghyun nodded and snapped off a first-pitch splitter right at the knees. The batter reached out and bit. The ball rolled softly off the top of the barrel, trickling across the infield toward the hole at short. It was a sluggish chopper, but my first-step read was spot-on.
I stretched my long strides to the absolute maximum, eating up the distance in just two monstrous bounds. Ha. Being tall definitely has its perks.
THUD.
Scooping the hop cleanly, I dropped into a forward slide to halt my momentum and whipped a sidearm strike across the diamond to first base.
"...O-Out!"
The first-base umpire was so stunned by the rapid sequence that he hesitated for a fraction of a second before pumping his fist. On the mound, Sanghyun-hyung spun around, his eyes wide with utter disbelief.
"Whoa..."
"Stay locked in. No fastballs. Just two more to go."
Following that blueprint, Sanghyun-hyung dismantled the second inning on a staggering five pitches. Because his pitch count remained ridiculously low, the coaching staff sent him back out for the third, where he required just nine pitches to retire the side in order, breezing through three full innings under his thirty-pitch cap.
By the time the final out was recorded and the scrimmage wrapped up, my stat line stood at four plate appearances, two at-bats, two hits, one home run, two RBIs, and two walks.
With production like this, they wouldn't have any choice but to start me in the official pre-season games, would they?