Raimondi Park, sun pouring down over the independent league tryout.

Roughly a hundred and fifty entrants, each with his own dream riding on the test.

The major league scouts in the stands looked to have lost interest early.

Blank-faced, skimming their sheets or half-watching the field.

The testing had been running since morning and it had come in under expectations.

Now and then a player showed a good arm and quick feet.

But nothing overwhelming enough to interest a major or minor league club.

Then again, an independent league tryout isn’t run by MLB itself, so the odds of a real gem turning up were slim from the start.

Most of these men had already missed their chances more than once, or were just back from injury.

The scouts’ eyes had long since gone cold.

“Nothing at this one either. Same story every year lately.”

One scout said it while swallowing a yawn.

His colleague nodded and flipped to the next player’s profile.

Then an unfamiliar name was called.

“Suho!”

The scouts’ eyes dropped to the profiles in their hands.

“Suho? Korean? Released from the KBO farm system? At this age?”

Twenty-four. Six feet, a hundred sixty-one pounds. Strengths listed as baserunning and defense.

On the profile alone he looked like a common Asian entry, and a failed one at that. Talent that never bloomed.

“Ha. Now we’re getting guys like this out here. Waste of time.”

“Look at the build. That’s a ballplayer? Looks like he’s trying out for a modeling agency.”

“And twenty-four on top of it. Way too old…”

“No point even looking at his numbers. He’s not going anywhere.”

Even the handful who had been giving Suho some attention pulled up his record and immediately frowned.

“What— what the hell is this average?”

“Wow. Hitting in the .100s in the KBO farm system? That’s serious.”

“That’s a level you’d hesitate to call amateur…”

The talk went back and forth, laced with mockery.

But through the sneering and the dismissal, Suho walked to his spot without a flicker.

Mark, up in the stands, watched him with a worried face.

He had overheard the scouts, and it set his teeth grinding.

Damn it. I called it. There’s nothing he can sell with that body…

Suho could read the mood around him too, and warmed up calmly regardless.

His eyes were fixed on the track in front of him and nothing else.

Trusting that all the work behind him wouldn’t betray him.

The first test was the 60-yard dash.

The core event for measuring a ballplayer’s quickness and speed.

On the line, slight as he was, Suho showed remarkable focus.

The other entrants, meanwhile, took one look at his frame and found hope in it.

That’s one guy I’ve already beaten.

To them too, Suho was simply a joke.

At the official’s call of “Set!” every body on the line coiled.

“GO!”

At the gun, Suho exploded off the line.

For the first step or two he was even with the rest, then the acceleration came and he was gliding over the track.

Light, fluid movement.

Crossing the ground like wind, showing exactly how thoroughly he had trained himself.

In that moment there was one thought in his head and nothing else.

It can’t end here. I’m not finished yet.

Baseball hadn’t thrown him away yet.

No — if he worked hard enough not to be thrown away, if he showed them, that would be enough.

The cold release notice. The scouts’ looks that said he fell short.

For Suho they were fuel on the fire instead.

The force coming off his toes was the blood and sweat of every day behind him.

And the desperation of knowing this was the last of it.

Suho might end his life right here, and even so he couldn’t give up baseball.

The scouts had watched him with disinterest at first. Before long, one by one, their heads came up.

“What— what did he just run?”

“No way! Check it again!”

Sixty yards in 6.42 seconds. The scouts’ eyes went wide at the number on the board.

Speed at a level only the very top prospects in the majors put up.

Given that 6.7 or 6.8 is generally rated as excellent, Suho’s time was astonishing.

“What— that speed, out of that body?”

“Is that possible? That’s nothing like the profile.”

“Hidden gem?”

It wasn’t only the scouts. The entrants who ran the 60 alongside him were left hollow.

What the hell… is he a sprinter?

Guy’s so damn fast…

Damn it. I got complacent. No — he’s just too fast. That’s not human.

The stir among everyone in the park only grew at the next test.

Next up were the vertical jump and the standing broad jump.

Events that measure a player’s lower-body explosiveness.

On the signal Suho sank deep into his knees, drove savagely off the ground, and rose.

The instant his toes left the mat, every eye in the place was on him.

Vertical jump: thirty-six inches.

The scouts were stunned.

“My God! He cleared thirty-five!”

A monstrous number, far past the thirty-to-thirty-three-inch average for major league prospects.

Explosiveness beyond imagining out of a frame that had looked slight, and the scouts lost themselves in it.

In the standing broad jump he used the ground perfectly and launched himself long.

Standing broad jump: ten feet four.

Another number even top-tier major league prospects would struggle to touch.

Anything over nine feet is generally rated as outstanding, and he had cleared that by a distance.

The scouts weren’t laughing at the profile anymore.

The sheet they’d been treating as worthless was back in their hands.

“What is this guy?”

“Seriously, why would Korea release somebody with athleticism like that?”

“The athleticism is top-tier, no question. That’s born, not made.”

“You don’t get numbers like that on birth alone. He put the work in.”

“With this you just teach him to hit, don’t you? What was the club that had him doing?”

“Doing what? It’s the KBO. Come on, everybody knows. They’ve been getting better lately, but compared to us they’re a long way off. They still force the old methods on players, and they ruin talented guys more often than not.”

“Honestly the bigger reason they haven’t adopted the modern game is that they don’t have the technology. And acquiring it costs an astronomical amount.”

In practice, when major league clubs brought over a KBO player, they tore his mechanics down and rebuilt them from scratch.

The first reason was that he couldn’t adjust to the velocity.

Second, the variety and movement of the pitching.

And last, a question of efficiency.

The KBO leaned hard on uniform positioning rather than the traits of the individual player.

The majors pursued whatever was most efficient for a given man and maximized him — an approach built around the player.

“This one must be that type. Still… did they have something wrong with their eyes?”

“You really throw away athleticism like that?”

“Honestly, though, he played in the KBO farm system and the numbers are a disaster… that’s not hitting at all, is it.”

“He’d have made something of himself in track instead of baseball. Shame. Well. Worth watching a bit longer, I suppose.”

The dismissal and mockery of the start were gone, replaced by faces mixing surprise, interest, and a certain amount of confusion.

There was even a faint greed in their eyes now — the thought that this might be material they couldn’t afford to miss.

For the moment, anyway.

In baseball, and for a hitter above all, the cardinal virtue was hitting.

And the man who had just stunned them hadn’t shown them any hitting yet.

Even so, what he’d done mattered.

Because major league scouts rate natural athleticism above everything else.

However fine the technique, a shortfall in base athleticism puts a hard ceiling on how far a player grows.

A player with overwhelming athleticism like Suho, on the other hand, could carry technical flaws and still grow explosively under the right system and coaching. That was the belief.

His natural speed and explosiveness were the finest qualities a ballplayer could have, and no amount of technical training could manufacture them.

In truth, athleticism like Suho’s couldn’t be explained by talent alone.

In childhood, baseball had been survival.

The orphanage years, with no decent equipment and no professional coaching.

With no money, Suho conditioned his body for one reason: so he could keep playing.

On cold asphalt, on vacant lots throwing up dust, using nothing but his own body as the tool, he drove himself to the limit.

Which is why there wasn’t an ounce of waste on him. Hard muscle packed only where it was needed.

Nothing in his movement was spent for nothing.

Even the smallest motion carried the accumulated force of years of grinding.

Until the hitting coach’s instructions threw all of it off, Suho had played the game the way his body instinctively and efficiently responded.

Swinging a bat day and night, throwing, sprinting over grass slick with his own sweat — through all of it, his body had already laid the foundation of a supremely athletic human being.

Though once he turned pro and mechanics unsuited to his body were grafted onto him, even that athleticism faded.

When Suho came back to the stands after the first round of testing, Mark greeted him with a face full of feeling.

“Suho, you were unbelievable! You son of a— what were you hiding?”

Mark shot to his feet without meaning to and shouted at the people around him.

“That’s my friend! That guy right there is my friend! We— huh? We already agreed we’re grilling pork belly and kimchi later!”

Then he threw Suho a wink.

“Soju too?”

Through the scouts’ attention and Mark’s cheering, Suho stayed level.

There wasn’t a flicker on his face.

All of it was what he’d expected, and no more than the start of what he had to show them.

A short while later the announcement went out that the tryout’s final test, a live game, was about to begin.

Suho had pulled the scouts’ attention onto himself with the physical testing.

Now he was called as the leadoff designated hitter, first man into the box.

Tension drew tight across the park.

Every scout’s eyes turned to him at once.

They admired the athleticism, and they still remembered the cold fact printed on the profile. An average in the .100s.

Suho stepped up to the box and took his familiar grip on the bat.

The solid feel of it wrapping into his hands brought a smile up.

He took a light practice swing.

The smooth sense of rotation running from shoulder to elbow.

No trace left of the awkward swing forced on him in the farm system.

In the freedom he’d gained after the release, he had swung endlessly for a single purpose. To recover the instinctive feel that belonged to him.

A left-handed hitter, settling into the left-hand box, his eyes sharpened like a predator sighting prey.

His gaze locked onto the pitcher on the mound.

There it is. That’s the feel.

The swing full of promise that had made him a first-round pick out of high school.

It hadn’t been perfect then and it wasn’t perfect now.

It was a mess, if anything.

It didn’t matter.

What he had to show the world right now was his potential. What he might become.

So.

Bring it.

The presence coming off him in the box swallowed the whole park.

It was the presence of a predator hunting to survive.

End of Chapter 3