Released
Crack!
"......155?"
Someone who had been leaning on the dugout rail shot to his feet.
The number frozen on the radar gun beside the scoreboard was 155 km/h. That was not a figure a Futures League intrasquad was supposed to produce — and certainly not in March.
"Hah! See? When it comes to velocity, he's the best there is!"
But the umpire's voice came right on its heels.
"Ball!"
The ball was nowhere near the catcher's mitt. It had already blown past, well left of where the catcher was set up, at the height of a left-handed hitter's helmet.
At the far end of the stands, a man with a paper cup in his hand let out a quiet sigh.
......That's the problem. A shoulder like that — if the ball would just go where it's supposed to, he could be looking at the major leagues.
The pitcher on the mound didn't so much as change his expression. A hundred and ninety centimeters, eighty-seven kilograms, sturdy through the frame, with the broad shoulders and long arms of a body anyone would have said was born to pitch. Kang Tae-oh, third-year developmental player for the Jeonju Sabers — and, as of that morning, a player who had been told he was released.
That morning, the second-team office.
"Three years. Thirty-eight innings in all. An ERA of 9.24. Twelve-point-one walks per nine."
Scouting team leader Nam Jung-ho set a single sheet of paper down on the desk. He was the man who, three years ago, had brought Kang Tae-oh in as a developmental player when not one club in the draft had called his name.
"That's more than one guy an inning just trotting down to first. You can't call that pitching."
"......"
"Tae-oh. I'm the one who brought you in. Back when nobody else would take you."
Nam Jung-ho broke off for a moment.
"So the release is going to come from me, too."
Released.
It was a word he'd always figured he would hear someday. A word he'd spent the whole of last winter bracing himself for.
Hearing it for real still hurts a little.
"If you've got something to say, say it."
"I was the one who couldn't pitch. I don't really have anything to say."
"......You don't even resent me?"
"It isn't your fault, sir."
Nam Jung-ho's brow drew tight. In three years, the kid had never once laid the blame on anyone else — not the coaches, not the catchers, not even the ordinary excuse that the umpire's zone had been tight.
That's a sickness too, you little bastard.
That was when Tae-oh lifted his head.
"Sir. Please let me throw one inning in today's intrasquad."
"......What?"
"For the last time. Even a single batter would be enough."
A player asking to take the mound on the day he'd been cut. In nineteen years of scouting, Nam Jung-ho had never heard a request like it.
"......I'll send you out in the ninth. You've already been released, so it won't go in the book."
"Thank you."
And so Kang Tae-oh climbed the mound in the ninth. Nam Jung-ho watched from the dugout.
Before he toed the rubber, Tae-oh closed his left eye once and opened it again. An old habit — one he himself couldn't remember picking up.
It's all right. It was working in the bullpen.
It really had worked in the bullpen that morning. Every time a pitch buried itself in the heart of the mitt, the bullpen catcher had yelled.
"You're actually out of your mind today. If you throw like this in a game..."
Coaches passing by let a remark slip as they went.
"In practice, everybody's Pedro."
Pedro Martinez — the legendary pitcher they used to call an alien. It wasn't praise. It was a sneer.
Pedro only in practice. I can't even argue. It isn't wrong.
The second pitch came with a dull crack, and this time it missed the other way — a ball that would have run behind a right-handed hitter. The third hit the dirt in front of home plate. The fourth sailed over the catcher's head and stuck in the backstop net.
A four-pitch walk.
An old man in the stands clicked his tongue and got up to leave. Calling it a crowd was generous: ten people, maybe, and half of them club staff.
The next batter stepped into the box with the bat already resting on his shoulder.
One-fifty-five or one-sixty, it's a ball either way. Only a fool swings.
Sure enough, smothered laughter leaked out of the dugout.
"Hey, don't swing. Stand there and it's a free base."
"Heard it's his last day. He's handing out gifts on the way out."
Every word of it reached Tae-oh's ears.
......Some gift. Just let one of them go in.
One-fifty-four, ball. One-fifty-three, ball. One-fifty-six, ball again. Three balls, no strikes.
And the fourth pitch.
Crack!
The batter who had the bat on his shoulder swung before he knew he meant to.
Whoosh!
It had been up. Even so, the bat had gotten out in front of it.
"......The hell. The ball's rising?"
The batter tugged his helmet straight, looking foolish. The snickering in the dugout cut off cold.
See? Standing there isn't as easy as it sounds.
The fifth pitch, of course, missed by a mile again. The catcher wasn't even sitting with his mitt open anymore. He was half on his feet, set on blocking the ball with his body.
Tae-oh looked at the mitt again. More precisely, he tried. Its outline seemed ever so slightly out of line — not split into two. If it had been that bad, he would have gone to a hospital three years ago. It was only that the edge looked shoved over by a single layer.
Three years ago, he had already given the thing a name of his own.
Nerves.
Call it that, and there was an explanation. And if there was an explanation, he could endure it well enough.
"That guy's an ace in practice. The second he gets on the mound, he's somebody else."
"At that point, isn't it the yips?"
Things he had been hearing at his back for three years.
Until the spring of his senior year, Kang Tae-oh had been the undisputed ace of Gwangil High — forty-four innings, sixty-two strikeouts, an ERA of 1.02. A high school pitcher whose fastest pitch touched 157 km/h. A month later, the line read eleven innings and twenty-four walks. In the space of barely a month, he had become someone else entirely. No one knew why. Not even he did.
And in that year's draft, through eleven rounds and a hundred and ten names called, his was never among them.
Tae-oh faced three batters. All three walked. He threw fourteen pitches, and only two of them were strikes — and those only because the hitters had chased balls well out of the zone. A pitcher who averaged 155 km/h and still could not put that pitch in the strike zone. That was Kang Tae-oh.
The pitching coach came up the mound and held out a hand without a word. Tae-oh gave him the ball.
"......I'm sorry."
"No. You worked hard."
The coach patted his shoulder twice. That was the last goodbye the three years with this club would get.
The locker room was empty. Two pairs of spikes, two gloves, a half-used roll of tape. In three years his belongings had hardly grown, and five minutes was enough to pack.
Three years of a life, and it all fits in one suitcase. Moving out will be easy, at least.
When he reached into the bottom compartment of the locker, his hand closed on folded cloth. A plain white jersey, without a single logo. Two digits were stitched across the back.
57.
The stitching was conspicuously crooked. The gaps between the stitches were all different, and the thread had changed color twice along the way — white to ivory, ivory back to white.
Three years ago. The day he had put his stamp on the developmental-player contract and gone home. The moment he opened the front door, his mother held this jersey out to him.
"They haven't given you a number yet, have they? Mom went ahead and made one."
By then she was already at the point where she could barely make out the shape of a person. She had stood twelve hours at the laundry plant, come home, and sewn this every night by the feeling in her fingertips alone.
"But Mom — why 57?"
She only smiled.
The number the club actually issued was 106. A three-digit number tossed at a developmental player like an afterthought. So he had never once worn the jersey.
Tae-oh folded it with care and laid it at the very bottom of the suitcase. Beneath the spikes. Beneath the gloves.
Mom... what do I tell her.
Ten days later, in a back alley of Jeonju, Tae-oh sat in a gosiwon the size of a closet — a pyeong and a half, barely five square meters — and stared down at his call history. Nineteen calls in ten days. Every KBO club, and the independent teams inside the country besides. Only two of them had even picked up, and both had been rejections.
"Sorry — what were last year's numbers? Ah, one second. How many walks?"
What followed was about three seconds of silence.
"I'm sorry. We're not looking at right-handed relievers right now."
The other seventeen had never been answered at all.
So this is the end of the road at home.
His body was fine. Neither his shoulder nor his elbow had hurt even once in three years, and his velocity was the best it had ever been — looking at average speed alone, he was throwing harder than before. There was exactly one reason a pitcher who threw 155 km/h had been released. He could not throw a strike.
Do I actually start looking for a job now?
Brrrt. Brrrt. Brrrt.
The smartphone he had left facedown began to vibrate. The name on the screen was Nam Jung-ho.
"It's me. You're calling around the clubs right now, aren't you."
"......How did you know?"
"Your name's making the rounds in the scouts' group chat. Looks like you knocked on more than ten doors."
Tae-oh couldn't get a word out. From the other end of the line came the click of a lighter.
"Ever heard of a joint tryout for the independent leagues?"
"The one they hold in America?"
"Yeah. Early April, Arizona. I'll text you the link."
Without quite meaning to, Tae-oh found he was holding the phone in both hands.
"Don't get your hopes up. Entry fee, airfare, a place to stay — every bit of it comes out of your own pocket. More than two hundred guys pile in, and you'll be lucky if twenty of them get assigned to a team."
"......"
"Even if you make it, that isn't a contract. It means they'll let you play. It doesn't mean they'll pay you."
"Then why are you telling me?"
"Because you won't be able to put it down until you've seen it with your own eyes. You go all the way out there and it still doesn't work — then you fold it. Clean. For real."
The instant the call ended, a text arrived.
He tapped the link, and an application page opened, every word of it in English. There was no chance he could read it fluently. Even so, one word in the position field was a word he recognized.
Pitcher.
A pitcher.
He didn't know English. He knew that.
......America.
Tae-oh leaned his back against the narrow wall of the gosiwon. Spread his arms, and his fingertips touched both walls.
If no one in Korea is going to take me.
Then—
I can always throw on the far side of the ocean.