The next morning.

Suho walked into the academy with Mark.

Mark went off to his own individual work.

John picked up a bat, told Suho to follow him, and stepped into the box.

“I’ll demonstrate first.”

He loosened his shoulders lightly and set his stance.

Then his body moved with the smoothness of running water.

His legs drove off the ground, his hips turned without hesitation, and the force running out through his arms and wrists loaded entirely into the bat.

The way power gathered inside that swing had nothing extraneous in it.

It was the sort of perfection you’d expect to see in the majors.

Natural as water flowing without obstruction, and carrying enormous power at the same time.

A rush of air.

Crack.

Even the sound of the bat cutting through was artful.

Suho watched, transfixed.

It’s perfect.

He knew it instinctively.

If it looked perfect even to someone as poor as him.

Then it was a perfect swing.

Which meant if he could just learn it.

The carry will increase, exactly like Coach said.

But a small worry rose in the corner of his mind.

John’s swing was, by anyone’s reckoning, a perfect full swing.

And naturally a hitter has to swing full to produce good contact.

Suho’s body as it currently was couldn’t sustain a swing like that.

It felt like a slugger’s swing, unsuited to his own slight frame.

John seemed to read his expression. He set the bat down and came over.

“Questions about the swing I showed you? It probably felt like clothes that don’t fit your body.”

He looked Suho straight in the eye.

“But bear this in mind. A test is a test. And at a test, the result matters most. This swing may not suit your body right now. In fact, honestly, with your current frame it’ll be difficult to execute it perfectly.”

Then certainty came into his voice.

“But what you have to show them is the unexpected. The Dodgers scouts have already seen enormous potential in you. And they know you aren’t a player with perfect mechanics.”

What they wanted to see was whether Suho could execute the swing perfectly even once.

Whether he could produce major league-caliber contact.

John’s eyes burned.

“So if you can produce one overwhelming batted ball off one perfect swing, out of that slight frame — the Dodgers will be desperate to develop you. You’re showing them the hope of shoring up the weakness and building a complete player.”

Suho nodded.

Everything Coach says is right.

The diagnosis was precise, like a man picking at something with tweezers.

And if he could imitate that perfect swing even once, as the coach described, and produce overwhelming contact?

Then I really can pass.

Resolve burned in Suho’s eyes.

“Understood, Coach. I’ll get it done.”

“Good. Then it’s time to burn a new swing into your body.”

John started by setting his basic posture.

How to hold the bat, where the shoulders sat, where the eyes went.

And most important of all, the movement of the lower half.

John adjusted Suho’s body with the delicacy of a potter working clay.

“Right, grip the bat a little tighter, and cock the wrists slightly more.”

Suho put strength into his wrists and stood the bat up.

“Like this?”

“No, a bit more. There — one more inch from there. Keep the bat head from dropping too far.”

John took his wrists directly and adjusted the angle by fractions.

“Stance now. Your feet are too close together. Slightly wider than shoulder width. And bend the knees more! You’re too stiff right now. The weight has to load into the legs.”

Suho widened his feet and bent his knees further.

“Like this?”

“No, no. You can’t just bend the whole thing. Back knee slightly inward, front knee like it’s finding the balance point. There. About that.”

John took his shoulders and turned them by a fraction.

Everywhere the man’s hands landed, Suho’s own body felt stranger to him.

Postures he’d been comfortable in for years collapsed in an instant and were locked into a new frame.

“Hips now, and turn. Haa. You aren’t using your lower half at all. You’re like a block of wood. Drive off the ground! And transfer that force perfectly into the rotation.”

John seemed frustrated. He demonstrated again himself, showing the plant of the foot and the turn of the hips.

“Right, copy that. Like you’re pressing the ground with the soles of your feet. Then turn. You’re opening the pelvis.”

Suho worked at imitating him.

“Like this?”

He planted and turned, and something about it was awkward and unnatural.

“No, I’m not asking you to dance. Again. Use the ground force harder, and the hips faster. It has to connect like water flowing.”

“Like this?”

He tried again, and still didn’t satisfy John.

“No, no. Again! The weight transfer isn’t happening! More! More! More!”

John seemed tireless, pointing out and correcting the posture without stopping.

Suho repeated the same movement on his instruction dozens of times, hundreds of times.

John broke off the correction work and stopped the session for a moment.

Beads of sweat stood on his forehead, and his eyes were as hot as ever.

Mark took the opening and came over.

He tapped John’s shoulder and asked, sounding worried.

“Coach, isn’t this a bit hard on him? This is less teaching than discipline. Honestly, I knew you were passionate, but I’ve never seen you go this far.”

John caught his breath and nodded.

Mark’s point was correct.

American baseball, and prospect development academies in particular, had a strong culture of valuing autonomy and avoiding coercive training.

If the majors and the minors don’t force things on players, would an academy?

Here it was standard to respect individual will and generate motivation through scientific data.

Which made the method he was putting Suho through nearly doctrinal, out of step with American coaching culture.

“True. I know my approach right now isn’t what it usually is.”

But there was no waver in John’s eyes.

His gaze went back to Suho.

Even in the break, Suho was holding a bat and repeating the swing.

“But if I don’t go this far, that boy is going to fail.”

Mark’s eyes widened.

“Coach, come on, you know his talent. He caught Frank’s eye. Isn’t that top-of-the-league potential? Honestly I’d say his chances of succeeding are much higher than failing.”

John smiled faintly.

“High chance of success? No. There are too many penalties against him. He has to look more complete than any other player at that test.”

“Because of… his age?”

“Yes.”

“So the chance of failing is higher?”

John stared off into the distance as though recalling his own past.

Deep regret came into his voice.

“Let me tell you an interesting story. There was a prospect once who people called a genius. His natural talent was so exceptional that he coasted through training and never much concentrated in practice. But the moment he got into a game everything seemed to resolve itself. So he came to doubt the value of work. He thought what you were born with was everything.”

His eyes darkened.

“But he hit his limit, and in the end he quit baseball. The professional world was high, and that was when he understood it. Talent runs into the wall. Work goes through it. He was twenty-four at the time. Unfortunately, he thought it was already too late. He spent three years as a wreck after that.”

John looked at Suho again.

There was old regret in his eyes and expectation for Suho at the same time.

“But look at him. He has talent and can’t use any of it, which is a situation that would justify giving up, and he never does. This right here. That’s the thing that boy didn’t have. If he’d had that kind of makeup back then… he’d certainly have become a major leaguer.”

Something about the conversation struck Mark as odd.

John kept saying that boy, and something about it felt far too familiar.

“Coach…”

“What?”

“Is this about you?”

John nodded slowly.

“Yes. It’s about me. My life ended up nowhere near the majors — here, working as a coach at an academy. I didn’t want to quit baseball twice. And I had to eat, if I’m honest.”

John was entirely satisfied with his life as it was now.

Teaching prospects and helping them grow gave him a great deal of fulfillment.

It would be a lie to say no regret was left, but he understood perfectly well that it truly was too late now.

Past the middle of his thirties, his body could no longer knock on the door of the majors.

He had folded up the dream of playing long ago, and now he dreamed a new one as a coach.

And at the summit of that dream stood Suho, arrived out of nowhere.

John was projecting himself onto him.

If he’d had that indomitable will, that pure passion for the game.

That unbreakable, savage stubbornness.

I could certainly have been a major leaguer.

John winked at Mark.

“The swing I’m teaching Suho is my swing. And I want to complete him, with my baseball life staked on it. Inside two weeks.”

Which was why John wanted to wash the regret of his past.

Out through Suho.

He was governed by a fierce certainty that what he had failed to do, Suho could.

John was trying to project his past self onto Suho now.

To achieve the abandoned dream, even like this.

Mark scratched the back of his head.

“So basically you’re saying Suho can pull it off?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. It’s out of my hands now. Suho needs to imitate that swing perfectly inside a week at the latest… that’s the only way he gets the second week to make it fully his own.”

He had already taught Suho for six hours today, and Suho hadn’t once managed to follow it properly.

“I believe in him anyway. He’ll definitely give it everything he has.”

John’s expression stiffened, faintly.

Give it everything he has.

John knew that was harder than anything.

Because where exactly the limit of everything lies is something no human being can possibly know.

But he would soon learn, through Suho, that the limit of a human being runs far past anything you would expect.

End of Chapter 10