Tryout (2)
Hopeless. That was my honest verdict after watching Kanghyuk's fielding test.
The coach's face, which had looked reasonably pleased during the batting evaluation, had turned the color of dried mud barely three minutes into the fielding drills. Clearly, I wasn't the only one thinking it.
In baseball, a position player is judged on five tools: power, contact, speed, defense, and arm strength. Among those, his power and contact were genuinely decent, but with glove work like that... he was in trouble. Even factoring in the frozen winter ground kicking up bad hops, repeatedly failing to field routine ground balls showed he had a very long road ahead of him. His arm looked decent enough, which was a blessing, but second base wasn't a position where arm strength was particularly vital. Strong arms were essential for shortstops and third basemen; second basemen could get by with relatively weaker arms.
Honestly, this was the reality of your average developmental player. No, wait—given his respectable power and contact, shouldn't he actually be considered above average? There was always a reason players went undrafted. In most cases, having even two workable tools out of the five was a rarity. Still, whether his bat was enough to earn him a spot as a left-handed pinch hitter was difficult to judge, especially since I didn't yet know the exact standard of the KBO.
"That's enough," the coach called out. "We'll send the results to your phone later."
"Yes, sir! Thank you!"
Kanghyuk jogged back toward me, his face glowing bright red where a pop-up had caught him flush. Oof. Just looking at that welt made me wince.
"Hah... Guess I blew it again, didn't I?"
"Well, your bat is definitely above developmental tier, hyung. Wouldn't you say you've got a decent shot at getting picked up?"
"...Thanks for saying so, man. Mind if I stick around and watch yours?"
"Feel free. It's up to you."
Kanghyuk zipped his padded coat back up to stay warm, hovering nearby and chattering away to watch my trial.
"Alright! Yoo Seonghyun! Step up to the plate!"
"Yes, sir."
It had been a while, but stepping into the batter's box felt entirely natural. After nearly twenty years in the Major Leagues, how could it feel awkward? I'd spent the past few days checking my mechanics through shadow swings. My conditioning wasn't complete enough to launch towering home runs, but if I barreled the ball up with the sweet spot, driving a double into the gap should be well within reach. Besides, standing at a towering 197 centimeters had to generate decent raw power on its own.
"Where are your batting gloves?"
"Ah."
Damn it all. I completely forgot. I was already on the coach's bad side, and his expression curdled into pure disgust in real time.
"...Kanghyuk-hyung! Could you lend me a pair of batting gloves?"
"Uh, yeah! Sure!"
Startled by my sudden shout, Kanghyuk scrambled over in a hurry, rummaged through his duffel bag, and handed me his batting gloves. Making a rookie blunder like this of all things...
"Wait, you didn't even bring batting gloves?" Kanghyuk whispered, flabbergasted.
"...My bad."
The coach scoffed loudly. "Hah. Let's see if that vaunted talent of yours does the talking instead."
"Yes, sir."
I took my stance in the left-handed batter's box. In baseball, whether right-handed or left-handed pitchers hold the ultimate advantage is a debate with endless arguments. But when it comes to hitters—righty versus lefty—there is a definitive answer. The left-handed hitter holds an undeniable edge. The logic is simple: the left-handed batter's box is several strides closer to first base.
"Left-handed?" the coach asked. "I'll calibrate the machine for a right-handed release trajectory first."
"Understood."
Globally, right-handed people make up roughly 85 to 90 percent of the population. Naturally, right-handed pitchers were far more abundant, meaning hitters faced them far more frequently. Moreover, the slider—the absolute staple of any modern pitcher's arsenal—breaks favorably against same-handed hitters, making same-handed matchups far more comfortable from the mound. Factor in sightlines and the batter's instinctive flinch when a pitch starts inside, and pitchers universally preferred facing batters batting from their own side.
Conversely, hitters naturally found opposite-handed pitchers far easier to read. The sightline alone provided far superior tracking.
Because of these inherent advantages, baseball was inundated with right-throw, left-bat players. Shohei Ohtani himself threw right and batted left. And because teams desperately needed arms to neutralize these dangerous left-handed hitters, southpaws were treated like precious royalty. The baseball world even casually coined the term Jwasurachi—a cheeky blend of 'lefty' and Joseon-era 'bureaucrat'—to describe the absurd privilege afforded to left-handed pitchers.
The coach finished adjusting the Traject Arc and barked for me to get ready. I settled into the back corner of the batter's box and set my stance. Because my height was completely different from my previous life, I'd had to overhaul my swing mechanics from scratch.
Fortunately, I had the ideal blueprint: Shohei Ohtani. His swing was the textbook model for a modern power-hitting lefty. Our frames were similar enough that he served as an excellent reference. However, incorporating his subtle toe-tap timing mechanism proved impractical. Because my muscle mass wasn't fully developed yet, a mere toe-tap couldn't generate the explosive bat speed I needed.
That left me with no choice but to utilize a high leg kick. The obvious drawback to a high leg kick was a slower reaction time against fastballs exceeding 155 km/h. During my MLB days, I naturally used a toe-tap... but if the average KBO four-seam fastball sat around 148 km/h, a leg kick should more than suffice.
Inhale.
The Traject Arc projected a full-scale hologram of a pitcher delivering the ball—a true robotic pitcher copier. On the digital display, the holographic pitcher wound up and uncoiled his motion.
I took a deep breath and held it. Chest open, bat held high, back elbow raised. Tension coiled through my entire body, yet I kept my muscles loose enough for the kinetic chain to fire fluidly. Ohtani's signature swing gathered power over the back hip before planting the front stride, driving the elbow down into the slot, snapping through the zone, and sweeping into a dramatic, high-finish follow-through with the torso tilted back.
Barring the leg kick substituting for the toe-tap, I executed a nearly identical swing, viciously pulling a four-seam fastball right down the heart of the plate. Of course, my bat speed lagged far behind Ohtani's, but—
CRACK!
"...Huh?"
A sharp, explosive sonic boom resonated across the park, snapping the heads of Kanghyuk and the remaining participants right toward me. In a single instant, the coach's sour scowl evaporated.
That was baseball. A game where a single swing could turn the entire world upside down.
Yet the ball didn't clear the outfield wall. Instead, it split the gap in right-center, skipping once off the turf and rolling all the way to the warning track. An unmistakable extra-base hit. As expected, my raw physical strength was still lacking; even with the momentum of a full leg kick, I couldn't muscle it over the fence. To hit a home run here, I needed a higher launch angle and far more bat speed. For now, brute force was out of reach. Still, the exit velocity wasn't terrible. Was that launch angle around 15 degrees? Until my conditioning peaked, maintaining that line-drive launch angle and focusing on piling up base hits seemed like the smartest approach.
"...Again!" the coach ordered.
"Yes, sir. Just a moment."
Stepping out of the box, I readjusted the borrowed batting gloves and reset my feet. Hmm, I really need to fine-tune my bat weight, too. But lacking the funds, buying brand-new custom bats was a pipe dream. That was the eternal annoyance of baseball: the gear cost an arm and a leg.
The coach tapped at the machine's console, and the next pitch came buzzing tight to the inside corner. This particular swing path was tailor-made for turning on inside pitches. If there was an inherent weakness, it was the low-and-away corner, but any pitch painted there was a nightmare to hit regardless.
CRACK!
Another crisp echo rang out. The following pitch was an outside four-seamer, so I adjusted technically, punching it cleanly the other way through the hole between third and short. Trying to yank an outside pitch with my current strength would result in a weak second-base grounder or a lazy flyout nine times out of ten. Because the exit velocity was sharp, it was an indisputable base hit.
Watching the ball's trajectory, the coach's face lit up with sudden excitement—only to immediately contort back into a scowl the moment our eyes met. Man, did my first impression really tick him off that much?
"Now I'm setting it for a left-handed pitcher," the coach announced.
"Understood."
Having seen me handle opposite-handed fastballs, he wanted to test me against same-handed velocity. Still, had he put Kanghyuk or the others through this kind of scrutiny?
As I crossed over to the right side of the plate, the coach blinked. "Wait... are you a switch hitter?"
"Yes, sir."
"Hmph. Is that so?"
When looking for a big-bodied, right-handed slugger of similar physical dimensions, nobody beat Aaron Judge. However, attempting Judge's swing mechanics without his monstrous raw power would likely produce an endless parade of harmless flyouts to right field. Deciding against it, I pivoted to an alternative.
Unlike my past life, this body was naturally left-handed. Batting right-handed meant sacrificing natural leverage and power compared to hitting left-handed. So my compromise was Albert Pujols.
Pujols was famous for his wide, equestrian-style stance. With his weight loaded onto his back leg and his feet spread wide, he generated power almost entirely through rotational torque and an explosive torso twist, relying on a minimal toe-tap and virtually zero forward stride. The undeniable strength of this approach was exceptional pitch tracking. Combined with a compact, fundamentally sound inside-out swing, its mechanical efficiency was through the roof, making strikeouts exceedingly rare.
Unlike my left-handed at-bats, I opted against the leg kick here. Being naturally left-handed, my follow-through lacked the whip to drive extra-base hits from the right side anyway, even with a leg kick. Besides, Pujols's stance used the lower half merely as a stable fulcrum; adding a leg kick offered zero tangible benefit.
Exhale.
CRACK!
The Traject Arc shifted its display, projecting a left-handed pitcher onto the screen. Once again, the opening pitch was a four-seamer right down the pipe. With a short, compact swing, I pulled it into shallow left field—a clean bloop hit, though a left fielder with exceptional range might have had a play on it.
When an inside fastball tailed into my ribs, I turned on it fiercely, ripping a screaming line drive down the third-base line. The exit velocity was fierce enough that only an elite defensive third baseman would have had any prayer of snaring it. In Major League Baseball, it might have been flagged down more often than not, but the contact quality was stellar—a textbook barreled ball by the sound alone.
Finally, an outside four-seamer. I stayed inside the ball, slapping it cleanly through the hole between first and second. If an extreme defensive shift were on, it would be an easy out, and the exit speed was modest. Silently, I cemented my approach: as a lefty, I would operate as a gap-to-gap spray hitter gunning for doubles; as a righty, I would stick strictly to contact and slap-hitting.
"What in the world...?"
Watching from a few paces away, Kanghyuk muttered under his breath as if he'd just seen an apparition. I did my best to ignore him.
Our baseline experience and physical attributes were simply on different planets. After spending two decades in the Majors tracking running fastballs effortlessly exceeding 155 km/h and four-seamers touching triple digits, straight four-seamers sitting in the mid-to-high 140s felt practically sluggish. Moreover, even accounting for my hiatus, this body possessed a physical ceiling far superior to my past self's.
...Though given that both my parents were ordinary Koreans with zero athletic background, did I have Viking ancestry somewhere down the line? I was measured at 195 centimeters in the middle of last year, yet I'd grown even taller this year. A truly mysterious body that was still actively growing.
"...Fine!" the coach barked, clearing his throat. "You claimed you could play every defensive position, right?"
"Everywhere except catcher, sir."
"Good! Take the field!"
Technically, I had filled in behind the dish in an emergency before, but catcher wasn't a position fit for human beings. Veteran catchers were walking medical encyclopedias: shredded meniscus, herniated lumbar discs, and worst of all, chronic hemorrhoids. There was a reason people in the dugout referred to catchers as indentured servants.
"Wait a second," the coach noted, eyeing my hand. "That doesn't look like an infielder's glove."
"It's fine, sir. This is plenty good enough."
"...Right. Show me what you've got, then."
Phew. At the very least, I had to make sure I didn't take a line drive off the face like Kanghyuk. Just imagining Eunha's endless barrage of nagging gave me an anticipatory migraine. When it came to my physical wellbeing, she was utterly merciless.
"Start at third base!"
Time to lock in.