Scout Lee Jong-hwa, who had climbed into the car alongside Manager Yun Seong-geun after leaving the run-down arcade, opened his mouth.
“Manager.”
He wore an expression that said he simply couldn’t wrap his head around it, no matter how hard he tried.
“It’s true that Player Chae Gang-u had been a skilled player. However, wouldn’t switching from right-handed to left-handed pitching be difficult? And if it’s a knuckleball….”
Scout Lee Jong-hwa’s face was grave.
“Isn’t this a story with absolutely no possibility?”
Realistically, it was a story with truly no prospects. He wasn’t ambidextrous, and for a right-handed pitcher to suddenly become a left-handed pitcher—well, nothing was impossible with effort, but.
Even if he succeeded as a left-handed pitcher, a knuckleball of all things. Furthermore, Manager Yun Seong-geun had called it a high-speed knuckleball.
“Manager. What on earth are you thinking?”
Lee Jong-hwa had worked as a scout and strategic analyst alongside Manager Yun Seong-geun for ten years. He knew the manager that well.
He knew that Manager Yun Seong-geun hadn’t told Player Chae Gang-u to throw a knuckleball for no reason.
Manager Yun Seong-geun, who had been listening with his arms crossed, burst into a hearty laugh.
“That kid. Did you see his shoulders?”
“His shoulders?”
It was a given that a pitcher would have good shoulders. The only thing particularly noticeable was that his left shoulder looked bigger than his right. That was all.
Scout Lee Jong-hwa furrowed his brow.
“Other than his left shoulder being larger, there was nothing that particularly stood out.”
“Right. His left shoulder is good. So good, in fact, that it makes you wonder why he’s been throwing with his right arm all this time.”
His curved eyes instantly turned serious.
“A long time ago, I saw an interesting video. It was of a kid who looked around twelve; his father had filmed and uploaded it, saying the kid hadn’t started baseball long ago.”
As if recalling the memory, Manager Yun Seong-geun’s gaze drifted into the air.
“He was trying to throw the ball, but the kid was gripping it in an interesting way.”
“Interesting… you say?”
“Yeah. He threw the ball about five or six times, but he bent his fingers and pushed it.”
Not grabbing the seams with his fingers, but bending his fingers as he threw? And pushing it?
It was exactly the grip of a knuckleball.
“At twelve years old, he should know some baseball. At that age, wouldn’t he just be throwing it because he thought it looked cool?”
It was obvious. Knuckleballs were often seen as a magic pitch, and there were plenty of kids around that age who tried to learn them because they couldn’t throw regular fastballs well.
“Or maybe he really didn’t know anything and just threw it. Well, he held it in a comfortable grip, and it unintentionally happened to be a knuckleball grip,”
“Right. That’s the important part.”
At Manager Yun Seong-geun’s words, Scout Lee Jong-hwa flinched.
The comfortable grip of a kid who hadn’t been playing long just so happened to be a knuckleball grip?
“If the ball he threw like that had been ordinary, I would have forgotten about it.”
At Manager Yun Seong-geun’s meaningful words, Scout Lee Jong-hwa’s expression slowly hardened.
“Don’t tell me. Was the ball good too?”
Manager Yun Seong-geun nodded leisurely, his eyes flashing fiercely.
“The fatal weaknesses of the knuckleball are control and velocity. But what if there were a knuckleballer who possessed both?”
It was an utterly unrealistic story. A high-speed knuckleballer with good control too? The faster the ball, the more it should spin; if it spun, it couldn’t be considered a knuckleball.
“…If there were one, he’d have chewed through not just the KBO, but the MLB by now.”
If there truly were a knuckleballer who could throw with high speed, minimal spin, and command to boot, there wouldn’t be a batter capable of facing him.
“The twelve-year-old kid in the video I saw was none other than Chae Gang-u.”
At those words, Scout Lee Jong-hwa asked back in surprise.
“Chae Gang-u? You mean Player Chae Gang-u?”
“And in that video, he was throwing with his left hand.”
Manager Yun Seong-geun laughed heartily again and let out his final words.
“Don’t you think he’ll be an interesting one?”
***
I was doing something I hadn’t done since elementary school. Right now, a rubber band was looped around my left wrist. And that rubber band was hooked to the doorknob.
“This is killing me.”
After Manager Yun Seong-geun’s visit, I threw myself into practice with a do-or-die mindset. The baseball still felt foreign in my left hand, to the point that I even slept while gripping the ball.
Worried that my strength was lacking compared to my right hand, I had even looped a resistance band around my wrist. I did shadow pitching hundreds of times a day and checked my throwing form.
I was cautious because I had ground down my right shoulder from overuse, but this was no time to be picky.
This might be my last chance.
My last chance to play baseball.
And I realized it. That my left shoulder was stronger than my right.
“Is it because I’ve been hitting the punching machine since I was little?”
It was natural for a shoulder to ache after more than fifty repetitions of shadow pitching, but strangely, mine didn’t hurt.
I had definitely thought something would be grinding and wrong, but my arm motion was actually smoother than my right.
Just in case, I went to the hospital. The only thing I heard was that my left shoulder was incredibly sturdy. Moreover, compared to my injured right shoulder, the difference was severe—the bones were thicker, and the cartilage and muscles were in good shape, they said.
After all that pounding on the punching machine, it was sturdy and good instead? Had it been trained or something?
Questions arose, but after staring blankly at the baseball in my left hand, I sprang up from my seat.
The tryout was right around the corner, and every second was precious right now; even thinking about other things was a luxury.
I should be throwing balls at a time like this.
I ran straight to the arcade. I held out my glove toward Dad, who was sitting at the counter.
“Dad, catch for me, please.”
Then Dad raised his head, rubbing his jaw, bruised black and blue.
“You can say that even after seeing my face?”
“…I didn’t do it on purpose, I told you. It’s because you’re getting old. You should exercise. You used to catch well when we played catch in the past.”
“Hey, you brat!”
Whether he felt wronged, Dad raised his voice.
“Your ball is weird! It floats up and then suddenly drops…! It’s not even an Arirang ball.”
“It’s because I’m still not used to throwing left-handed, but it was like this back in the day too, when I first started baseball.”
Now that I thought about it, that was true. When I was young and knew nothing, I had thrown with my left hand as soon as I started baseball because I heard left-handed pitchers were more valuable than right-handed ones.
The problem was that the ball couldn’t be predicted. The ball that went straight as a fastball when thrown with my right hand would dance when thrown with my left.
Of course, in my childish mind, I had liked it thinking it was a breaking ball, but after an incident where a friend playing catch got hit in the head and fainted, I cleanly gave up throwing with my left hand.
Dad let out a sigh.
“Yeah, that’s right. It hurt getting hit a few times back then too, but now it hurts even more, since I’m old.”
Even so, watching Dad get up to help me, I cracked a grin.
“I’m definitely going pro.”
“Sure, brat.”
Under the darkening sky, we started playing catch in an empty lot where no one was around. But we had to stop before long.
“Agh! That hurts, you little punk! Really.”
This time, it was because the ball smacked into Dad’s chest.
“Ah. Sorry, Dad!”
Regret welled up at the catch session ending so flatly. In the end, I sent Dad home first and stayed behind to throw alone.
A pitcher needs a catcher to receive the ball.
“But I feel bad asking him to help more.”
I couldn’t ask the baseball players I was close with for help anymore either. Everyone had taken a hit from my ball.
“Let’s just throw for now.”
If there was no one to catch, I just had to throw anyway.
I grabbed the ball with my left hand and was about to get into my pitching motion, but I straightened my fingers, which were habitually bending.
“Huh, wait.”
Then, Manager Yun Seong-geun had asked me what I thought about becoming a high-speed knuckleballer. I lowered my gaze to my left hand. The grip on the ball right now exactly matched the knuckleball grip.
“Huh…?!”
Without realizing it, I had been throwing knuckleballs with my left hand this whole time. At first, I had definitely gripped the seams and thrown, but the more I threw, the more my fingers straightened. Eventually, I was gripping the ball only with my fingertips.
“Ah, no wonder. The ball was going everywhere.”
Then, something struck my mind.
“Wait. Have I known how to throw a knuckleball all along?”
If the ball I had thrown so casually as a child was a knuckleball.
“If it was a knuckleball from the start, it’s only natural that it wouldn’t go where I aimed, no matter where I aimed.”
Then, I just had to graze the borderline. The question was whether a knuckleball could be controlled.
But I had no other way.
Manager Yun Seong-geun had told me to throw a high-speed knuckleball with my left hand.
It wasn’t a matter of “I can do it,” but “I have to do it.”
“I have to.”
That way, I could make it to the pros, shove it in the faces of those good-for-nothing coaches and managers, and let my mom and dad—who’ve suffered so much—live in comfort.
Besides, when it came to control—
“It’s what I’m most confident in.”
A right-handed fireballer. They hadn’t all favored me just because I was a fireballer. It was because of my insane command.
There was no reason a knuckleball would be an exception.
With a triumphant expression, I gripped the baseball again. This time, quite intentionally, I bent my fingers and held the ball with my fingertips.
Yes. I would throw. A fast knuckleball with control.
My arm drew back. With my expanded chest, I took a short breath. I drew a box in my head. If I could just clip the borderline, I had a chance.
Fixing my gaze straight ahead, I held my breath. So that no tremor would reach the ball.
My left hand, cocked back toward the sky, shot straight forward. At the same time, I pushed out the ball held by my fingertips, ensuring it caught as little spin as possible.
Fwick-.
No spin could be felt from the ball moving through the air. In reality, it would be rotating slowly; by the time it dropped, the number of rotations would only be two or three at most.
The ball that had been veering to the right seemed to suddenly dart to the left before—tock—dropping.
“Phew.”
Something hot surged from within my chest. There was no one to catch it. Even so, I could instinctively tell.
That the ball I had just thrown was a perfect knuckleball.
And—
“Ha, this is killer.”
—that the ball I had just thrown matched the high-speed knuckleball Manager Yun Seong-geun had talked about.
***
The huge sign visible before my eyes.
[ ER Hawks Park ]
And the moment I saw that sign, my heart began to race.
It was the exclusive training ground and stadium used by the ER Hawks second team.
They said the ER Group chairman who founded the ER Hawks was a massive baseball fan. He seemed to have poured an enormous amount of money into it.
Calling it a second-team training ground felt inadequate; its scale was staggering.
A stadium that would make jaws drop even if the first team used it, auxiliary practice fields, and a five-story clubhouse equipped with coaches’ and players’ dormitories, amenities, and even indoor training facilities.
There was truly nothing missing.
I didn’t care at all that I hadn’t even taken the tryout yet, nor that I didn’t know if I could make it as a development player.
Because I was definitely going to pass today’s tryout no matter what.
“Phew.”
From the day Manager Yun Seong-geun came to see me until today, the day of the tryout, I had practiced like crazy for a month, cutting back on sleep.
I woke at dawn and ran for two hours, then shadow pitched until my arm hurt. After spending the daytime in a blur, I threw balls alongside weight training at night.
In the past, I would have spared my shoulder and avoided throwing when I was alone, but this time was an exception.
Rather, the more I threw, the more my shoulder felt conditioned. Thanks to that, I threw until my arm muscles trembled.
And today. The long-awaited day of the tryout had finally dawned.
I wasn’t nervous. I just had to throw like I did in practice.
I entered the clubhouse confidently. Looking around, there were many players like me who had come after receiving tryout offers.
College, independent league, high school.
The players all had one thing in common: they were wearing their affiliated team uniforms.
Another thing they had in common was that they had all been passed over in this year’s rookie draft.
I was scanning the room to see if there were any familiar faces when a voice called out.
“Hello.”
I raised my head at the voice.
It was Scout Lee Jong-hwa.