Suho’s at-bat.

The pitcher on the mound started his windup.

His arm swept back, and a heavy ball came flying in toward the catcher.

Ninety-two miles an hour.

In the KBO that velocity would be called a power fastball. To major league scouts it was ordinary.

Suho put every bit of his focus on the pitcher’s fingertips.

His body didn’t move, as though he and the bat were one thing.

First pitch. A fastball headed for the middle of the plate. Suho swung without hesitating.

The bat extended clean through and cut nothing but air. A big swing and a miss.

A small groan went up from the stands.

Disappointment settled heavily back over the scouts.

“Yeah, the bat’s a real problem. Monster athlete, but the hitting is just…”

“Well, a .100 average in the KBO farm system doesn’t come from nowhere.”

“Shame. Hardware like that with a bat to match and he’d be signed today.”

The pitcher’s next offering was a curveball that fell like water off a ledge.

Suho swung again and missed again.

The count was 0-2. Two strikes in a blink.

Suho wasn’t rattled. If anything he gave a small nod, the look of a man who had found something.

It’s fine. I haven’t even started.

It was his first live at-bat in two and a half months.

Those two misses were nothing more than waking the feel back up.

So he had focused on nothing but finding it.

He could hear the disappointed muttering from the scouts nearby, and it didn’t cost him his composure.

His stuff isn’t all that.

He had thrown out the bad habits that had bound him up until now, and he could handle this.

The third pitch was a chase pitch off the outside corner.

Suho didn’t move.

“Ball.”

Next came a fastball in hard on his hands.

Suho kept his rotation to a minimum and put a short swing on it, laying the bat onto the ball’s path and fouling it off.

That brought some of the feel back, but not enough.

If something good to hit came, he would swing at it without hesitating.

But on anything borderline, fouling it off and building the feel was the better play.

Another breaking ball, low and away.

Suho read it as a ball and didn’t offer.

Then another foul.

It had been a breaking ball he was confident in, and Suho hadn’t so much as flinched at it. The pitcher blew out a breath on the mound, looking thrown.

And on it went. Fifth pitch, sixth, seventh. The at-bat kept going.

Suho laid off the chase pitches perfectly and stubbornly fouled off anything in the zone.

As it stretched on, his eye came alive, and whatever came he put a piece of it, pulling his timing up with every swing.

Ninth pitch. The pitcher’s arm came around slowly, as though he had hit his limit.

A slow curveball. Suho’s eyes flashed and he swung without hesitating.

Craaack.

This one was nothing like the mishits before it.

The ball came off heavy and carried deep into right field.

Suho got down the line like lightning and pulled into second standing up.

There. I got all of that.

He thought it as he came up onto the bag.

All he had done to get that result was throw out the stale, awkward thing forced on him in the pros.

And with it gone, the instinctive feel he had lost came back.

This was exactly the potential he had come to America to show.

The ball off Suho’s bat, carrying and carrying.

A small sound went up from the stands watching it.

Some scouts nodded. Others shook their heads.

The scouts assigned to an independent league tryout were not men with exceptional eyes.

There was a time when good evaluators did get sent to these.

Since the tryout system changed, clubs mostly sent the ones who didn’t matter. Which is to say, the ones who weren’t good at the job.

They lacked the ability to see through to what Suho actually was.

“All arms, right through the finish. Sure, swinging like that your contact’s going to be good, but there’s no force behind it. He got lucky that time.”

“And he’s twenty-four… no telling how many years just teaching him to hit. Is that worth the investment?”

“Doubt it. The hardware’s genuinely good, but I can’t see a club signing off.”

Other scouts pulled up film of him from the KBO farm system and talked it over.

“He was using his lower half here.”

“Using it like that, though? He’s worse off than if he didn’t.”

“Total mess then, total mess now. God. It’s painful just watching.”

While that disappointed talk went back and forth, an old man sitting off in the corner quietly spoke up.

His name was Frank Lambert. Among major league scouts he was called a living legend.

Over decades he had dug up any number of unknowns and turned them into major league stars.

To catch his eye was to have a chance at the majors.

As you would expect from a scout of his experience, nobody understood better how valuable a prospect is to an organization.

He had seen a single prospect change a team’s entire future more times than he could count.

He never looked at things the way the others did.

The young assistant sitting beside him spoke up carefully.

“They say this one washed out even in the Korean farm system, and honestly he does look like a complete mess.”

Frank wasn’t watching the game.

He was turning the pages in his hand, slowly, when he answered.

“That ball just now. Came off an arms-only swing, didn’t it.”

“Huh? I saw him whiff on the first pitch and lost interest, so I wasn’t really watching. It was awful. He got a hit out of it somehow, though.”

Frank huffed a laugh.

“Then watch the next one properly.”

Suho’s second at-bat came around.

Crack.

The heavy sound of it rang out across the park.

Again Frank spoke without looking at the ball.

“Line drive, right at the shortstop. Yes?”

The assistant checked the field, startled.

It was a line drive right at the shortstop.

“Yes. And he really did swing with just his arms. Why would anyone play the game like that?”

The assistant grumbled it, still not understanding.

Frank shook his head.

“That’s the wrong way to look at it. It went right at a fielder, fine. But he swung with nothing but his arms and still produced a line drive at that speed. You don’t understand how remarkable that is?”

“Predicting exit velocity off the sound alone… you always did do that…”

There was a faint charge of excitement in Frank’s voice now.

“Hitting is about the whole body working together. You take the ground force through your legs, rotate the hips, transfer that up into the arms and wrists, and maximize bat speed. That boy is barely using his legs or his trunk at all. Arm strength and quickness alone, and that’s what he produced.”

“Is that really so impressive? Isn’t it just stupid?”

The assistant asked it, still unconvinced.

His eyes stayed on Suho’s slight frame and on the line about being released from the KBO farm system.

The assistant belonged to the generation raised inside modern American baseball culture, and a swing that didn’t use the whole body looked abnormal to him.

Nobody in America hit like that.

Frank saw straight through the easy assumption and kept going.

“You know that American prospects learn perfect mechanics from a very young age.”

“Sure.”

“That boy doesn’t have the frame. He’s producing quality line drives on natural strength and pure athleticism and nothing else.”

It was a car with an engine good for a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour running with a limiter on at sixty.

For most players, an arms-only swing doesn’t square the ball at all, and when it does the result is a weak fly ball or a grounder.

“He’s generating exit velocity I’d be very happy with on arm strength alone. Twice in a row, no less.”

Frank lifted himself slightly out of his seat, eyes not leaving Suho.

“Think about it. What happens if that boy learns to use his legs and his body properly?”

The quality of contact would be beyond anything comparable to now.

Not simply producing base hits. Extra-base power, and home run power beyond that, was within reach.

Natural athleticism and raw strength at that level.

Rough stone no technical training could produce, and cut and polished it would be a jewel.

Frank’s eyes glinted like a predator that had finally sighted something enormous at the end of a long hunt.

The assistant still didn’t get it.

“But there’s more to it. He’s not old exactly, but he’s not young either. And the KBO farm system is still professional baseball. He already failed there…”

Could he survive in America, at a far higher level than that?

Honestly, wasn’t it too late for him to have a playing career at all?

The assistant thought it flatly impossible.

The same as every other scout there.

Frank smiled a little.

“You don’t trust me?”

“That— that’s not it. But this is a strange one, you have to admit.”

“How so? KBO or not, first-round picks are the kind of talent the majors pay attention to. Those are men who could have come here instead of playing in the Korean league.”

“That’s— that’s true, but…”

“Unless what you’re really doing is insulting the history of Major League Baseball.”

“When did I ever!”

“Before this league understood the importance of mechanics, half the men in it looked like that. And that understanding arrived in the 2010s at the earliest, then took off through the 2020s as the technology developed. Put simply — some of the legends from before the 2000s, the Babe Ruths and the Rickey Hendersons we all know, weren’t so different from that boy.”

Frank went on, low.

“What do you suppose Babe Ruth does with modern technology?”

“Hits more home runs…”

Babe Ruth finished with 714 career home runs. Third all-time.

“And Rickey Henderson?”

The assistant thought about it.

Henderson already owned overwhelming stolen base and on-base numbers. His 1,406 career steals were first all-time by a distance.

He carried an outstanding .401 career on-base percentage. His career average was .279.

But if the modern game had been fitted to him.

He was already great enough to be enshrined, and he would plainly have put up numbers past all reason.

“You’re— you’re saying he’s legend-level talent? Isn’t that going way too far?”

“I’m talking about potential. Nobody knows how the future goes.”

“Ha. Right.”

“But the ceiling on that potential could reach the men I just named. That depends on the player, and on luck. And we’re scouts. What is a scout’s job?”

“To— to find players with potential…”

“That’s right. You find the ones with potential and you sign them. It’s that simple.”

Suho was locked into the game.

So he had no idea that in a corner of the park, a legendary scout’s deep read of him — and his expectations — had just begun.

End of Chapter 4