Right after game two of the division series.

The Quakes players all got on the bus to go home.

Cash took the corner of the very back seat, put his headphones on, pulled his hood up, and closed his eyes.

The conversation between the manager and Suho came back to him.

He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop.

He’d simply been getting on the bus ahead of everyone else, and the manager’s voice had been loud enough to carry.

But the content of it was genuinely interesting.

The Arizona Fall League…

A league only the prospects an organization has its eye on can get into.

Cash was certain the offer would come to him too.

Because nobody in Low-A could touch him right now.

Naturally the club would want to send him to Arizona, where prospects from higher levels gather, and see what he could do there.

But look at it closely.

He’s the one going first.

Wasn’t that so?

Even if it came by the manager’s recommendation.

In the end, Suho was the first minor leaguer in the Dodgers system with Arizona locked in.

He swallowed.

It wasn’t something he did often. It came out now and then, when he envied somebody.

And he couldn’t help it.

Being first meant being the best.

Whatever it meant to other people, it meant that much to him.

That was a place of honor, and it had been taken from him.

For a moment he felt his chest go hot, and then he put the feeling away easily.

There was a reason people called him a genius.

He had his own emotions under control.

So his head started working fast.

Has he earned it…

Cash’s eyes went forward, to Suho’s back, up where he was talking with Mark.

Then he nodded.

More than enough.

Cash decided to give him that.

Before this division series he wouldn’t have been able to.

And no wonder. The minor leagues are full of players with more ability than Suho has, and to spare.

But.

He’s got something the other players don’t.

The truth was that Cash still didn’t know what that something was.

Except that it ran in exactly the opposite direction from the road he believed in.

His own play drew the attention of the front office and the scouts — the organization, in other words.

But Suho was different.

He was the kind of player the rest of the team looked at.

He was having an effect on the other players.

Which of the two is better?

I don’t know.

Cash didn’t know.

Because the results weren’t in yet.

Still, the road he’d chosen had to be the better one of the two.

Because most minor leaguers were the same as him.

Stand out to the organization even a little and the promotion comes faster.

And that puts a man a step closer to the majors.

But does looking good to your teammates change anything?

If anything it’d come back on him.

Because it seemed to him the other players wouldn’t respect Suho so much as use him.

Not now, maybe, but certainly once he got to a higher level.

Enough of this.

Let pointless thoughts run too deep and they start pushing you around.

There was nothing good in it for a career.

But Cash was already being pushed around by it.

A man who had gone his whole life without taking an interest in anybody was paying attention to somebody.

Fortunately, though.

This would go on to have a serious effect on his baseball life later.

A good one.

A few more days went by.

There was nothing left between the Quakes and the trophy but the championship series.

And their opponents were the San Jose Giants.

The San Francisco Giants’ Low-A club.

They were the North Division champions. First place, in other words.

The Quakes were scheduled to be on the road this time as well.

Most teams going out on the road leave a day early.

It’s for the players’ condition.

Mark got to the old bus, took his head in both hands and wailed.

“Ah… I’m finished… my life is over!”

Suho patted his shoulder.

A few days back, riding the bus to the game against the 66ers, Mark had said something.

If they ever drew the northern teams, Fresno or San Jose.

Six hours locked in that prison of a bus with your backside destroyed, he said.

And as it happened, the Quakes’ destination now was the very San Jose of the San Jose Giants.

Which meant a six-hour road trip ahead of them.

It wasn’t only Mark, either.

The other players had their heads down like a column of beaten soldiers.

And was it only the players?

The manager, the staff, and the two men from the broadcast booth on top of them, all of them looked like the long trip was more than they wanted.

“Hah…”

Every one of them was sighing.

Suho alone was different.

He looked bright, like a man going on a picnic.

And apparently that was exactly it, because he had far more luggage than usual.

He normally left on a road trip with one very large sports bag.

Today, for some reason, he had three of them slung on him at once.

Mark shook his head at the sight of it and asked.

“Going on a picnic? Did you buy a pile of snacks or something? It’s six hours, so you’re going to get hungry, granted…”

“It isn’t that.”

Then the bus door opened and the players started getting on.

Suho wasn’t getting in line, which meant he intended to be last on.

Mark shook his head at that too.

“I’ll go save you a seat.”

Once everybody was on board.

Suho put the bag with his equipment in the luggage bay, as he always did.

The other two he carried on with him in his arms.

“Suho? What’s that?”

Bill the color commentator asked in surprise.

Suho laughed under his breath and opened a bag.

“Take one of these.”

Suho held out an object.

It was small, and it looked like a deflated inner tube.

There was a hole in it for air, at any rate.

“And this too.”

Suho handed over a pump to go with it.

“Wh— what is this?”

“It’s a cushion. It’s a long trip, so blow it up and sit on it. It helps.”

Suho went on.

“I sat on one at home before I ordered the rest. It’s really comfortable.”

The bus was old enough that the padding in the seats had given out long ago.

Bearable on a short trip, but six hours was much too far, and this was the answer to it.

“When you’re done with the pump, just pass it back. I wanted to bring proper cushions, honestly. But there are a lot of us and it would have been hard to carry them.”

Bill rubbed at the skin around his eyes with a finger, as though wiping away tears.

There were no tears, of course.

“Thank you! I’ll get some use out of this!”

Then Suho handed the rest of them out, to the manager, the coaches, and every one of the players.

But Suho’s strange behavior didn’t end there.

He sat down and handed Mark a very small box of medicine.

“Mark. Stick that behind your ear.”

“What’s this? How did you know I get motion sick?”

You whine every time you get on a bus. How would I not know?

Suho swallowed that one instead of saying it out loud.

“Take two and hand the rest out. Other people will need them.”

“First of all, thanks. But why are you this prepared for everything?”

“We have to win the game.”

Mark clicked his tongue.

He shouldn’t have asked.

It was an entirely Suho answer.

Even so, does anybody prepare like this?

He was grateful. Honestly, enormously so.

He wanted to hoist the man onto his back and carry him around the block that minute.

But he couldn’t help not understanding it.

That’s his own money…

Did Suho have a lot of money?

He did not.

He had done well in Korea, and the Dodgers were treating him decently enough, so compared to men his own age he wasn’t badly off.

But a few of the monsters here have dozens of times what Suho has.

That was generally true of the first-rounders.

The contract alone left them with enough money to retire on, to exaggerate slightly.

And do rich men like that behave the way Suho does?

No. The opposite, if anything.

They spend on themselves without hesitating, and they are viciously careful with everyone else.

And it couldn’t be any other way.

Spending money on a total stranger.

It isn’t easy.

America leans hard toward individualism on top of that.

Hard enough that people hold firmly to splitting the check whenever anything gets paid for.

So whether these things were cheap or expensive.

It wasn’t a question of a lot or a little, or of right and wrong.

Suho might have come from Korea.

But just because he came from a country with far more warmth in it than this one, that doesn’t make this something to take for granted.

Whatever anyone else did.

Mark, at least, had no intention of forgetting what Suho had done.

He was struggling a bit at the moment, so he’d pay it back slowly later on.

Because he had his own circumstances too.

But the surprising part is somewhere else.

It reminded him all over again that Suho’s determination to win a ballgame was outside anything reasonable.

“Mark. What exactly is the schedule?”

At Suho’s question Mark’s eyes went wide, like a chance had come to pay him back, however slightly.

He cleared his throat and answered as carefully as he could.

“First of all, I’m not going to bother explaining the six hours on this bus. Once we get there it’ll be a cheap chain hotel, or a motel.”

Minor league clubs have almost no revenue.

So they cut lodging and food on road trips to the bone.

They sign for the cheapest rooms available, in bulk.

Which meant the place they’d be staying wouldn’t amount to much either.

A man plays better in a decent environment, and unfortunately this was the reality.

You get treated as well as you play.

The reality in the country that invented the game was extremely cold.

Which made it an environment where everybody had no choice but to think of himself.

And even inside one team, they were competitors fighting over a place in the major leagues.

Mark went on.

“Then we eat, we rest, and the next day we go play.”

“Do they feed us?”

“Feed us? Nobody’s feeding anybody. Everybody buys his own. Now that it’s come up, though. Burgers? Honestly, burgers are a shame after a road trip this long, but what can you do.”

Burgers were never missing from a conversation about minor leaguers eating.

Because they were all busy filling their stomachs with the cheapest food they could find.

Burgers aren’t bad food, of course.

But eat them often enough and you get sick of them.

“What’s the most famous food in San Francisco?”

“That’s not even a question. Dungeness crab.”

“A crab dish? That sounds expensive.”

“It’s not a dish, it’s the name of the crab. Buy it at a supermarket and it’s on the cheaper side, but it’s still expensive. Fifteen to twenty dollars. Go to a restaurant and it’s three times that or more.”

Suho nodded.

Not a crab dish, but a crab.

So it worked the way blue crab and snow crab did back home.

“That is expensive.”

Mark blinked.

“You don’t want to eat it, do you? I’m not eating it this time even if you say you’re paying. I’ve got some shame.”

“I wasn’t planning to buy you any…”

“Th— that so? Sorry for dreaming on my own.”

The conversation ended there.

The truth was that Suho had asked the question purely because of the players’ condition.

He couldn’t help worrying about a road trip this long.

What was his goal?

To turn even one man around.

Unfortunately people are weak.

When the body feels extreme fatigue, a man wants to give the whole thing up.

And more so if the game might not matter much in the first place.

So I should assume nobody’s hungry to go win a championship on top of taking the division series.

Which was why he’d brought the cushions and the medicine.

The idea was simply to keep things from getting any worse.

But that alone wasn’t enough.

Because it only avoided the worst.

Three hours into the ride, after thinking the whole way, the corner of Suho’s mouth came up.

Found it.

Suho never slept a wink on that hellish trip.

He worked his mind without stopping, entirely for the sake of his own goal.

And thanks to that.

The players’ condition and their drive.

He had a trump card that would take care of all of it.

End of Chapter 33