The Twenty-Sixth Man
"A camp invitation?"
"Yes! It's not a contract. For now they just want you to join the team at camp."
Jae-min began relaying the general manager's words one by one, and with every line his voice drew in a little smaller.
"You're outside the roster, hyung. So there's no salary. A place to sleep and meals — that's the whole offer."
The chance had come out of nowhere, and for a moment Tae-oh could only stare. He gathered himself quickly enough and asked what he needed to know.
"Where's the housing?"
"A host family's place, about a fifteen-minute walk from the park. I live there too."
"How long?"
"Until they announce the Opening Day roster. About five weeks left."
"If I don't make it in five weeks, I have to leave. Isn't that right?"
Jae-min glanced at the GM, then back at Tae-oh.
"...Yeah. That day, it's over. You pack your bag and go."
The GM laid one more sentence on top of it. Jae-min hesitated, then translated it exactly as it stood.
"The roster's twenty-five right now. You'd be the twenty-sixth."
The twenty-sixth.
A spot that mattered just as much empty as occupied. No pay, and not so much as a promise of anything past those five weeks. And still Tae-oh's eyes brightened.
They'll feed me, give me a bed, and on top of that let me throw? Angels like this actually exist...
Not having to touch the savings book his mother had given him was satisfaction enough, and a chance to pitch besides made it two blessings at once. One question still nagged at him.
"Jae-min. Could you ask him why he called me?"
Jae-min interpreted. The GM looked Tae-oh straight in the eye and answered, and the voice carrying the words back sank lower and lower.
"He says he saw you still at the park the evening of the live-pitching day."
"...What?"
"Ten pitches, a run out to the foul pole and back, then throwing again while you were choking on your breath. And smiling up on the mound after all of it. He saw the whole thing."
Tae-oh couldn't get his mouth shut.
I was sure it was the 97.5.
The GM grinned and added one more line, and Jae-min grinned along with him as he passed it on.
"He says he likes a man who works hard more than he likes a genius."
For the past three years, a single sentence had been enough to explain Kang Tae-oh.
An independent-league GM was the first man to see anything else.
Jae-min, who recognized my habits, and a GM who actually looked at the work... The country that gave us baseball really is different.
The GM had one thing more to say. This time Jae-min broke off in the middle of translating and pointed at his own face.
"...He wants me catching you. Says when he watched that evening, the battery fit perfectly."
"If you're the one receiving me, I couldn't ask for better. I don't know why, but... it puts me at ease."
The corners of Jae-min's mouth were hitched practically to his ears. Tae-oh picked up a pen. The form was crammed edge to edge with English, and in the name field he wrote, stroke by careful stroke, Kang Tae-oh.
Twenty-sixth for now. In five weeks, that changes.
The clubhouse was a long, narrow room with some thirty lockers lined along it. Sunflower-seed shells rolled across the floor, and one fluorescent tube in the ceiling would not stop flickering.
Jae-min pointed to the locker farthest from the door, the very last one.
"You can use this."
Inside were a single gray practice uniform and two towels. That was all of it.
"What about a uniform?"
"...They give you one if you make the roster."
"And a number?"
"That too. If you make the roster."
Tae-oh shook the gray jersey open. No name, no number, no logo. Nothing but gray cloth.
First uniform without a number I've put on since I started playing.
Even the one his mother had stitched three years ago, feeling her way along every seam with her fingertips, had carried a number.
"Hyung... you're not upset, are you?"
"No. I'm grateful just to have been given the chance."
It wasn't an empty courtesy. What he needed now wasn't a uniform. It was a mound.
The clubhouse door banged open. The man coming through stopped short at the sight of Tae-oh standing in front of the last locker. Kyle Beck. His eyes caught on the gray practice jersey in Tae-oh's hands — no number, no name. There wasn't a man in this game who failed to understand what that meant. Outside the roster. Someone they were keeping around only until Opening Day, just to see.
Kyle smiled with nothing but the corner of his mouth. This time he spoke slowly enough, and clearly enough, that even Tae-oh could follow.
"You. Why. Are. You. Here?"
Tae-oh didn't answer. He couldn't have managed it in English, and he had no reason to try.
You don't prove it with your mouth. You prove it on the mound.
Kyle snorted and headed for his own locker. Throw a hundred miles an hour all you like. If it isn't a strike, it doesn't mean a thing. Five weeks from now I'll be in the front row when you pack your bags.
That night, in a second-floor room at the host family's house, Tae-oh dropped to the floor for two hundred push-ups, added a hundred more, and only then lay down. His legs were still knotted tight and his chest still burned, but he felt as if he might lift clean off the ground.
Knock, knock.
The door opened almost in the same instant as the knock.
"Hyung, you asleep?"
If you're going to come in anyway, why knock.
Jae-min leaned his face in through the gap. A small notebook was in his hand.
"There's something I really wanted to say today."
"Come in. I had something to say, too."
"What is it?"
"Thank you, Jae-min. I don't think I've said it yet."
Jae-min's eyes went round.
"Ah, come on! I did it because I wanted to."
Two men trading thank-yous left a brief, awkward quiet in the room. Jae-min cleared his throat once and opened the notebook.
"There's someone who can look at your problem properly. His name is Yoon Se-ha. But..."
"But?"
"...Around here everybody treats him like a lunatic. He thinks the most important thing in baseball is the eyes."
"The eyes?"
He's trying to introduce me to a lunatic...?
Tae-oh nodded all the same. For three years, not one piece of advice from the famous specialists had done him any good. A lunatic's counsel might be the better bet.
"Could you take me after practice tomorrow?"
"Seriously? You're going to meet him?"
"I found the cause thanks to you. I'll trust you this time, too."
The next morning, 8:40. When Tae-oh reached the clubhouse, more than half the players were already there. They'd been told to come by nine, so he was twenty minutes early, and it still wasn't enough.
So the talk about American baseball taking it easy was a lie.
Everyone who'd arrived ahead of him had his name locked onto the roster. It was a club where the men with a guaranteed spot showed up before the man who had none.
"You're late, hyung."
It was Jae-min, who had left the house at six that morning. Sweat soaked him through. He wiped his face with a towel as he spoke.
Twenty minutes early, and I'm late.
He had no argument. Even the third-string catcher who had hit .180 the year before had already finished his own work.
"Starting tomorrow, I'll come earlier."
"You should. Everybody here has bet his life on baseball."
Before practice began, Manager Derek Hall gathered the players. A small voice, and few words in it. Jae-min translated quietly at Tae-oh's side.
"Forty laps today. Skip's of the mind that the more you run, the better."
Forty laps. I show up the day I learn stamina's the problem, and it's forty laps. The timing couldn't be better.
Through ten he was fine. From twenty on, the pack ahead had a full lap on him. Past thirty he was more than two laps behind.
If this were short track, I'd already be disqualified.
When his breath climbed all the way into his throat, Tae-oh looked at the track some twenty yards ahead. The white line was smearing into two.
...Right. Get tired, and it doubles.
It was the symptom that had frightened him most for three years. It didn't frighten him now. He knew the cause.
Then I build a body of iron.
Players who had finished their forty drifted one by one into the shade tent. Tae-oh made up every lap he'd fallen behind and still didn't stop.
"Hyung! You're done! Why are you still running?"
Laughter drifted out from under the canopy, the kind that said he couldn't even count. Kyle, water jug in hand, jerked his chin toward Tae-oh and said something, and a few of the players around him laughed along. Jae-min burst out of the shade and fell in beside him.
"What are they saying?"
"I don't think you want to hear it..."
"It's all right. Tell me."
"...That you're thrashing around, desperate to make the roster."
"They're not wrong."
Tae-oh grinned. Jae-min blinked as if he couldn't believe his ears, then simply ran alongside.
"Why are you running, Jae-min?"
"It'd be boring if you ran alone."
On the fiftieth lap his lungs screamed.
Fifty's the limit. For now.
The two of them stepped off the track side by side. Jae-min braced his hands on his knees, gasping.
"Hyung... you're running tomorrow too, right?"
"Tomorrow I'm going to try fifty-five."
"...I've got a stomachache scheduled for tomorrow."
At the joke, Tae-oh let out a short laugh.
From behind the shade tent, Derek Hall had been watching.
Three years I've had this club, and not one player has finished forty and then kept going on his own.
The pitching coach beside him asked.
"Skip, we don't need to stop him? He's not even on the roster. If he burns out on the first day..."
"Leave him. Now I see why the GM brought him in."
Derek Hall glanced down at his watch.
"Write it down. Number 187. Fifty laps, day one."
"...Yes, sir."
When practice ended, Jae-min's old sedan stopped in front of a row of shops fifteen minutes from the park. A second floor with no sign. On the door, nothing but a single sheet of paper stuck down with tape.
"This is it. Mr. Yoon Se-ha."
Jae-min opened the door. Broad daylight, and still the office was dark. From the gloom inside, a man with hollow eyes lifted his head.
"I heard. Sit."