Exhibition Game (Part 2)
Crack.
[“He got jammed, but the placement is tricky! It’s losing steam—looks like it’ll stay fair!”]
[“Out of nowhere, third baseman Yoo Seonghyun charges in! He barehands the ball on the run and fires across the diamond to first!”]
[“Whoa! Out! He’s out! What an unbelievable defensive gem!”]
[“Just now… what on earth did we just witness?”]
[“Honestly, leadoff hitter Lee Chanwoo is exceptionally fast. If Yoo Seonghyun had hesitated for even a split second, there’s no way he would have caught him.”]
[“I completely agree.”]
[“Wait, it looks like Lee Chanwoo has an issue with something? He’s stomping toward the mound!”]
[“Yoo Seonghyun quickly steps between them! I’ve heard he’s fluent in both English and Spanish, which has already made him quite close with the foreign players.”]
[“He’s mediating between Lucas and Lee Chanwoo. Seeing Chanwoo turn back toward the dugout, it doesn’t seem to be anything serious after all.”]
[“Now we head to the bottom of the first for the Titans. Leading off is the Titans’ vanguard, shortstop Choi Junhyung.”]
[“During his rookie season, he suffered through a batting average in the low .100s and frequent fielding blunders, but he showed tremendous growth last year.”]
[“Unfortunately, nagging injuries like lower back issues and an ankle sprain limited him to around sixty games. In the second half, his hamstring flared up as well.”]
[“Titans fans were truly heartbroken. In the early stretch of last year, he put on a clinic with his blazing speed and remarkable contact hitting.”]
[“Taking the mound for the Knights is their foreign ace, Justin.”]
[“This is his third year in the league, isn’t it? That makes him quite a seasoned foreign starter.”]
[“He posted very solid numbers last season as well, logging twelve wins, six losses, and a 2.91 ERA. But as always with Justin, the first inning is everything.”]
[“That’s right. He’s a pitcher who frequently loses his bearings early in the first.”]
[“And Justin starts off with a ball!”]
[“First pitch missed the zone in the first inning… Knights fans are probably having flashbacks, but then again, it’s only an exhibition game.”]
[“The second pitch misses as well.”]
[“You could call it Justin’s chronic habit. Seeing as it still hasn’t been fixed in his third year.”]
[“He watches the third pitch—but the ABS remains silent!”]
[“Oh, Justin must feel heartbroken about that one.”]
[“Ball four! And just like that, Justin’s familiar first-inning routine returns for another season.”]
[“If only he could eliminate this tendency, he’d be a truly elite starter.”]
[“Since it’s only an exhibition game, I doubt they’ll greenlight a steal here.”]
[“Indeed. Choi Junhyung suffered from so many injuries last season, after all. There’s no reason to take unnecessary risks in preseason.”]
[“Stepping into the batter’s box now is Luis.”]
[“Last year’s double-crown winner in hits and batting average.”]
Crack!
[“It was a ball, but he hacked at the very first pitch! A sharp grounder punches right through the hole between first and second!”]
[“You have to hand it to him—truly the league’s premier bad-ball hitter.”]
[“Runners on first and third! Nobody out, and stepping up to the plate is Yoo Seonghyun, who dazzled us with that defensive gem moments ago!”]
[“This young man’s expression barely shifts at all. Playing in front of a live crowd like this usually makes any rookie a bit jittery.”]
[“A truly extraordinary rookie seems to have arrived. Because he’s not yet registered as a regular player, he’s wearing a triple-digit jersey—number 133.”]
[“For now, Justin has to throw a strike before doing anything else. He needs to locate his release point.”]
[“Exactly. Waiting on deck is Hwang Jaehun, one of the premier sluggers in the entire league.”]
Man, it really is pretty chilly. Even with the clock ticking toward two in the afternoon—the warmest hour of the day—the weather carried a sharp bite for baseball. Well, it beat the sweltering, muggy furnace of midsummer by a mile.
Justin. A third-year foreign ace. Leveraging aggressive pitching and dependable stamina, he was the Knights' number-one starter who consistently ate up at least six innings per outing. A right-handed arm equipped with a three-pitch fastball arsenal—four-seam, two-seam, and cutter—along with a changeup and a curveball.
Ordinarily, commanding both a changeup and a slider with equal finesse was notoriously difficult, which likely explained why he didn't bother throwing a slider at all.
In every respect, he was a pitcher tailored perfectly to my strengths. My eyes naturally picked up low-spin off-speed pitches like changeups, splitters, and forkballs. Ninety-nine percent of my survival in Major League Baseball came down to this dynamic vision. Though my body had changed across lifetimes, being able to clearly track the seam rotation on the ball was an absolute blessing.
In a sense, baseball was an absurdly simple sport: the pitcher won if he threw three strikes, and the batter won by swinging at strikes while letting balls go. Yet, paradoxically, it was also infuriatingly complex. A pitcher didn't need three strikes if he induced a reckless swing on pitch one for an easy out, but grooving a strike could just as easily surrender a mammoth home run.
Crushing a strike didn't guarantee a hit, nor did hacking at a ball mean an automatic out. That unpredictability was what made the game so compelling. A well-struck liner could die in a glove for an out, while a mishit squibber could trickle through for the game-winning run.
“Hey. You that super rookie?”
“…”
Ugh, why is he trying to strike up a conversation? Better to just pretend I hadn't heard. Answering felt like far too much effort.
“Look at this punk. You ignoring me?”
The Knights' catcher prodded again, but seeing zero reason to engage, I kept my lips firmly sealed.
“Little bastard thinks he can disrespect a senior?”
The home plate umpire stepped in before it escalated. “Hey, you two. Just play baseball.”
“Ah. Yes, sir.”
Why was he even striking up small talk? We weren't even wearing the same uniform. Settling into the left-handed batter's box, I held the bat upright. If the first pitch was any variation of a fastball in the zone, I planned to turn on it with full force.
Attacking the first pitch was always a heated debate. Should you swing, or should you take? From a hitter’s standpoint, the verdict was clear: swing. If you gathered a hundred pitchers in a room, every single one of them wanted to start the count with a strike.
If more players had experience on both the mound and at the plate, understanding each other would be so much simpler. But in modern baseball, two-way play demanded superhuman conditioning that virtually nobody possessed.
The sturdy pitcher came set, kicked into his delivery, and hurled the ball. I held back my swing.
“Hup!”
Thwack!
“Ball!”
The pitch had tailed aggressively toward my ribs.
“Ah, sorry about that,” the catcher muttered, tossing the ball back to the mound. “His control is a bit wild right now. Cut him some slack.”
“…”
Well, he had just thrown six consecutive balls, so the erratic command was hardly a shock. The ball had dug far too deep inside, but the sharp, late bite off the trajectory made it clearly a cutter. I had already committed all of Justin's pitch profiles to memory through the Traject Arc simulator. That machine really was worth every penny.
Justin's repertoire was fairly evenly divided: four-seamers, two-seamers, and cutters each made up about twenty percent of his arsenal, with his changeup commanding thirty percent and his curveball roughly ten.
When a right-handed pitcher faced a left-handed bat, an ambiguous cutter was prone to catching too much of the plate. The optimal location was either burying it right on the hands like the last pitch, or painting the extreme outside corner.
I wouldn't mind if he offered up a changeup. Having already burned its movement into my brain using the Traject Arc, I knew the break. While a changeup was a pitcher’s deadliest weapon against opposite-handed hitters, it was fundamentally a pitch meant to deceive. Guess right, and the moment a hitter sat on it, the ball was as good as parked in the seats. Low velocity, minimal spin—it was essentially batting-practice meat.
Hmm.
“Time!”
“Time! Time!!”
I called time to throw off his rhythm. All right, let’s run the numbers. Against lefties like Choi Junhyung and Luis, he had mixed in cutters and changeups, but his release point was completely lost, resulting in wild misses. And now, the first-pitch cutter to me had missed badly for ball one.
That left his four-seamer, two-seamer, and curveball. The curveball accounted for barely ten percent of his pitches, so I could throw that out entirely. Scouting reports also noted that he rarely threw two-seamers to left-handed batters.
He had thrown six consecutive balls. His first-pitch cutter had misfired, and he had zero feel for his changeup. Which meant?
Here it comes!
KRA-AAACK!
A four-seamer caught slightly too much of the inner half, and I uncoiled, violently pulling the barrel straight through the zone.
Hey, pal. Who told you to serve up a meatball like that? Even with an unfinished body, that’s gone.
Well, it was only an exhibition game anyway.
[“A lightning-fast swing! Every fielder freezes! That ball—that ball is carrying! Deep to right! Deep to right! It demolishes the right-field wall in the blink of an eye!”]
[“Whoa… He completely dismantle’s the Knights’ number-one starter with a single swing!”]
[“An absolutely magnificent swing! A gorgeous, soaring arc! It may only be an exhibition game, but Yoo Seonghyun just annihilated Justin’s 148-kilometer four-seamer on the very first strike he saw!”]
[“Wait, is this player truly a rookie? His expression hasn’t changed in the slightest, even after blasting a home run like that!”]
[“A thunderous blast heralding the arrival of an absolute monster! Exit velocity: 165.3 kilometers per hour!”]
[“A launch angle of 25.7 degrees—practically textbook perfection!”]
[“Projected distance: 105 meters!”]