The Quakes’ home ballpark.

The light towers of LoanMart Field came on bright.

It was a weeknight, and even so the place was buzzing with local fans out to enjoy a ballgame.

—Good evening, everybody! Quakes baseball at home in Rancho Cucamonga, and I’m your play-by-play man, John Miller!

—Hello there. Bill Heywood alongside him on the analysis. Beautiful weather again tonight.

This was a long way from the polished national broadcasts of the major leagues.

These voices went out over the official streaming app, MiLB.TV, and nowhere else.

That, and a small local radio channel in the Rancho Cucamonga area.

They were called a broadcast team, but most men in the job were prospects themselves, dreaming of a major league booth.

They traveled exactly as the players did and were paid about as little.

Another kind of minor leaguer, off the field instead of on it.

And since everybody roots for his own, there was the fun of openly partisan commentary on top of it.

—The Quakes take on the Stockton Ports tonight. Bill, we’ve got a lot of new faces in this starting lineup. Mark Williams batting fourth in particular — this young man has quite a history behind him.

—Ha, he does. You saw last night’s game, didn’t you? First day with the club, comes off the bench, and puts one out of the ballpark in his first at-bat. If it weren’t for the injury this player wouldn’t be here at all. There’s a new monster in the minor leagues.

The play-by-play man turned to the next name.

—And the man who tore the place up last night, Suho Oh. He’s out there hitting leadoff. Worth keeping an eye on as well, wouldn’t you say?

—I would. He’s out of Korea, came through some hard times in the KBO over there, and joined this club through the tryout.

—A man who lays a bunt down against a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball and then steals his way to third. In all my years calling games I’ve never seen that.

—You certainly won’t see it often. The baserunning instinct and the speed alone, you could put those in the major leagues tomorrow and nobody would complain. But there is a weakness.

—And what’s that?

—I had a hard time getting my hands on a report, and the hitting side of it was a little concerning.

The color man let a beat go by before he said it.

—When we grade a player we generally use the 20-to-80 scale. As most of you know, 50 is major league average. And prospects tend to score reasonably well even against a major league standard. Suho Oh’s hitting grade comes back at 20.

—I’m sorry? T— twenty? There isn’t a player signed by a club anywhere with a 20 on him, is there?

—There is not. That grade says the man is below the level of this league. And yet the Dodgers signed him. I have to assume they had their reasons. Whether he shows us that smart baseball again tonight, or whether he runs into that cold wall of data — I’m very curious about this first at-bat.

And as the bottom of the first came to an end, Suho straightened his helmet in the dugout and walked slowly out toward the on-deck circle.

Suho stepped into the box and met the first pitch.

A slider came in.

A rush of air.

The bat came around with force behind it and went through nothing at all.

Suho stepped out of the box and cocked his head.

H— hold on… what was that?

But a man can’t stay out of the box for long, so he stepped back in and set himself again.

Second pitch. A fastball this time.

Suho started his timing a little earlier and swung.

Thump.

“Strike two!”

Another swing and miss.

On both of those, his swing had come around before the ball had even reached the mitt.

Which meant his timing was early.

I’ve got it…

For the first time in his life he was swinging a bat properly.

He was swinging one that suited him.

So what he felt in his body was a long way from what he was used to.

Does that mean I can afford to swing a little later?

He gathered himself on that and got back into his stance.

Third pitch.

Thump.

He swung through a changeup.

“Strike three!”

Suho knocked his fist lightly against his helmet like a man who regretted it and walked away from the box.

But the truth was that Suho didn’t regret anything.

If anything, his heart was burning with excitement.

He couldn’t have helped it.

Suho had failed once in this game, that much was true.

But failing at baseball doesn’t mean not knowing baseball.

He had lived the professional life, so if anything he knew it better than most.

This is… this is insane.

It was the feeling of wearing clothes that fit his body for the first time.

Which was the whole reason he’d struck out — he had no feel yet for how fast his own bat was.

And until a few hours ago what he’d had in his hands wasn’t a bat at all. It was an axe.

But this was beyond anything he’d imagined.

It sounded like bragging even inside his own head, and he didn’t want to think it.

It’s fast. It’s much too fast…

Bat speed was an enormous advantage.

Speed lets a man drive the ball farther, certainly.

And it buys time in the box.

Because a fast bat means being able to watch the ball that much longer.

In a fight between a pitcher and a hitter, a tenth of a second is everything.

With a fast bat a man can lay off a chase pitch inside that instant.

He can adjust to a breaking ball.

And he doesn’t miss a mistake pitch.

So what Suho had just gotten his hands on was the one weapon that would put him ahead in the battle of moves against a pitcher.

Time.

But Suho pushed the excitement rising in him back down.

Alex’s warning had gone through his head.

He told me not to get drunk on this feeling. That’s right. Whatever anyone says, I’m still a 20 at the plate.

Finding mechanics that fit doesn’t turn a 20 into a 50 or a 60 overnight.

He couldn’t get drunk on this new strength and start swinging big, or start trying to be a hero.

Take it one step at a time. Start with just putting the bat on the ball.

He had to climb it in stages.

Twenty becomes thirty, thirty becomes forty, and there’s a process to walk through to get there.

Then, in the bottom of the third, Suho’s chance came around again.

One out, a man on first, the team down 1–0.

Stepping into the box again, Suho went quickly back over that first at-bat.

His slider and his changeup were sharp. The fastball wasn’t much, though.

Around 90. The stuff on it hadn’t looked like much either.

But the pitcher clearly knew his own strengths and weaknesses, because he was working smart with them.

And that wasn’t all.

Hm?

The third baseman and the first baseman were coming slowly forward.

Playing in?

They were conscious of the bunt.

Suho nodded to himself.

Ah. This is the minor leagues. This is America.

Dozens of clubs and hundreds of players, all competing.

The moment one player does anything that stands out even slightly.

His past gets stripped bare and laid out in the open.

Information in American baseball was fast and it was cold.

So they already know about the bunt I reached on yesterday.

And he had gone down on strikes in his first at-bat without doing a thing.

So they’d decided they could ignore his hitting entirely and defend the bunt.

This wasn’t in the plan.

The truth was that Suho had intended to use a little more of what had worked for him in the KBO.

But with the infield coming at him that openly, he couldn’t lay a bunt down even if he wanted to.

A shame for you, of course.

A faint smile settled at the corner of Suho’s mouth.

I’ve only just gotten a new weapon myself.

The pitcher’s strength was his breaking stuff.

But the man standing here now could follow that breaking stuff all the way in with his eyes and still handle it.

It was the worst possible matchup. For the pitcher.

First pitch.

The pitcher threw a slider.

Suho felt the speed of it in his body.

Slow.

So he didn’t swing.

“Ball!”

Second pitch.

A changeup this time, to take his timing away.

Slow again.

Suho didn’t move a muscle.

“Ball!”

Two and oh.

A count entirely in the hitter’s favor.

The pitcher’s face said he was sweating it now.

The chase pitches that had worked earlier weren’t working.

Now that he’d found what he was good at, Suho kept his composure and put pressure on the man.

About time it came.

With the count in his favor he had that much more room.

Suho decided to hunt one thing and one thing only: the fastball.

And the pitcher would have no choice but to throw one to get a strike.

Because nobody wants to walk a hitter this bad.

Third pitch.

The ball left the pitcher’s hand and came in hard.

Fastball!

Suho swung like a man who’d been waiting for it.

And cut through empty air again.

“Strike!”

The pitch he was hunting had come, and he hadn’t been able to hunt it.

Suho blinked at the shock of it.

No. I swung later than last time and I’m still early?

But in that moment he smiled.

Which means… I can wait until my eyes confirm it’s a fastball and still be on time?

Fourth pitch.

The pitcher, convinced now that Suho couldn’t hit, drove another fastball with everything on it right down the middle.

Suho watched the ball come in, confirmed it with his eyes, and started his swing half a beat late.

He gathered every bit of force in his body into one thing and drove off the ground.

He turned his waist.

And put everything he had into the bat.

Craaack!

A sharp burst of sound went up.

The ball went out between first and second.

In an ordinary situation it would have been a routine ground ball out.

The course took it close to the second baseman.

But.

Zzzip!

The ball was a bullet.

It was what came out when the strength Suho was born with met the mechanics he had found that afternoon.

The minor leagues.

At Low-A, this was an exit velocity nobody could reasonably expect to see.

The second baseman couldn’t react at all.

The ball was past him before he could get his glove out.

And that wasn’t the end of it.

The right fielder had taken it for a routine ground ball too and was coming in slowly.

He turned late, caught flat by a ball that went straight past him.

While it rolled to the outfield fence, the runner from first came around and scored easily.

Suho sprinted the whole way and pulled up at second.

1–1. The tying run had come off Suho’s bat.

The Quakes dugout.

The players were frozen in place, unable to understand what had just happened in front of them.

And the one most astonished of all was Mark.

What? Was that really Suho?

Mark knew Suho.

He could say with confidence that here, at least, he knew the man better than anyone except Suho himself.

He had watched the man train closer than anybody.

He thought he knew his strengths and his weaknesses.

But that swing just now…

That wasn’t the Suho he knew.

On the surface the form still had some awkwardness left in it.

It was unmistakably the form he knew.

But the way the bat came out, and the path of it, and the speed of it…

It’s like somebody else is in there.

He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what had changed, but one thing was certain.

That guy… he really is a monster.

Another step up.

No — several steps.

While Mark was lost in astonishment and confusion, Taylor, down at the end of the bench, was in the grip of a completely different shock.

Is this… right?

Before assigning Alex to him, he had gone carefully through the old video on Suho.

It was a mess of a swing with no force in it anywhere.

A 20, honestly?

No. If there had been a 10 he’d have given a 10, and if there had been a zero he’d have given a zero.

And that bullet of a laser had just gone straight past the second baseman’s glove.

There was no believing it had come off the same player as the one in that video.

In a single day. No.

In a matter of hours he had come back a completely different player.

Alex… what in God’s name did you do to that boy?

At the same time he sent a look up toward Alex, watching the game from the stands.

Alex turned his head toward where he could feel it come from.

His eyes met Taylor’s, and he shrugged.

The sunglasses were hiding it.

Because the one who was actually most astonished was Alex.

That permanently arrogant smile was gone, and his face had set hard in shock.

Why is he looking at me?

Because Alex hadn’t known it would be anything like this either.

Let’s be honest about it.

What exactly had he done?

He had put an axe in the man’s hands instead of a bat, and that was the whole of it.

All right, I gave him a few pointers.

But these were mechanics ordinary players couldn’t handle.

No — mechanics even the best players couldn’t handle.

And Suho had the talent to take them in.

All I meant to do was give him the opening to understand it.

Reaching that understanding was a job of under a month.

But working the principle into the body and using it in a live game — that he had expected to take several months at the least.

That was the common knowledge he had, and the data behind it.

Which meant this wasn’t down to him.

That kid was properly ready for it. Though he’s still got a long way to go, of course.

And Alex shivered all the same.

He couldn’t have helped it.

Ultimate mechanics or not… he produces a ball like that on a ground ball?

What happens when he becomes a finished article?

Even the specialist couldn’t begin to imagine what Suho was going to turn into.

And the more astonishing thing was that Suho’s night didn’t stop there.

End of Chapter 25