“Before we start shooting, let me give you a quick rundown.”

The shoot’s director tapped at his tablet as he spoke. In their bodysuits, Suho and Mark listened closely.

“You’re probably wondering about this. Our game has an official Major League Baseball license, so why bother using minor leaguer data?”

They’d have already captured the motions of all the superstars, after all.

“There are two reasons. First, we need a standard.”

He put a complicated graph up on the screen.

“The superstars’ forms all have too much personality. Quirks, people call them, right? We need the most textbook form possible, with nothing extra, to be the baseline for the engine.”

“Ah…”

“Second is the new create-a-player mode we’re adding in this update.”

He smiled and added:

“The rookie a user creates can’t be as polished as a superstar. We want quick, full of energy, that raw, dirt-flying feel. We need the motion of a rookie with real hunger. Stars who’ve already got it made can never give us that.”

Suho and Mark looked at each other. When it came to hunger, nobody fit the job better than the two of them.

“Understood.”

“Then let’s start with hitting. The big guy first?”

He pointed to Mark.

Mark cleared his throat, picked up a mock bat fitted with sensors and stepped into the box.

“Just relax. Your own swing, exactly how you’d take it.”

Mark caught his breath. It was only a job capturing motion for a game, but there were dozens of cameras running right in front of him.

Still, this is nothing.

He’d taken this swing more than a hundred times. A few nerves weren’t going to be a problem.

He set his stance and cut loose with the bat.

A rush of air.

The sound of it splitting the air rang through the whole studio.

“…!”

The engineers and the director watching the monitors went wide-eyed.

“Whoa, did you see that speed just now?”

“That’s no joke.”

They’d seen a lot of players while making these games: college players, independent league players, even minor leaguers. But they could feel that the swing Mark had just shown them was on another level.

The director asked, his voice excited:

“Um… excuse me? By any chance, are you a top prospect?”

The director’s name was Ben.

Before he’d joined the development of this game, he’d actually worked as an analyst for a minor league club. Games like this cared a lot about realism, so it wasn’t unusual for someone from the industry to take on a role like his.

Above all, his eye, which had analyzed thousands of hitters and more, was sharp. And it told him the giant in front of him was on another level.

Mark tilted his head.

“Sorry?”

“That swing’s out of the ordinary. Do you have any titles or anything worth mentioning?”

Mark scratched the back of his head at the sudden attention.

“Aw, it’s kind of embarrassing…”

“It’s fine. We need it for reference when we sort the data. Go ahead.”

Mark hemmed and hawed shyly, then finally spoke up.

“Uh… I won MVP at the High School Invitational once.”

“…Say what?”

A stir went through the studio. Winning MVP there meant you’d been the best high school player in the whole country that year.

“Wow… no wonder. I knew he was in a different class.”

“We’ve got the real deal here.”

Under all those admiring looks, the corners of Mark’s mouth twitched.

It made sense. In the pro world, and especially in the minors, nobody cared about past glory. Only your numbers right now and staying alive mattered. He’d gotten a little attention at the tryout, but after that he’d been buried. So now that ordinary people were admiring him, plain and simple, the self-respect he’d forgotten about came flooding back.

“Let’s look at the results first. Want to come over here?”

Ben called the two of them over to the monitor.

On the screen was the skeleton—the model of Mark’s frame—tracing the path of the swing, along with all kinds of numbers laid out as graphs.

“You didn’t actually hit a ball, but if we run a simulation assuming you made solid contact with this much speed and rotation… exit velocity over 100 miles an hour. Distance, 450 feet. That’s major league slugger territory. Amazing.”

It wasn’t perfect, of course.

“The thing is… if you look here, your upper body tends to open up a little early, and there’s a stretch where your balance doesn’t transfer a hundred percent of the power—it leaks out a little.”

The high-tech equipment didn’t lie. It laid bare not just Mark’s strengths but the flaws he still hadn’t smoothed out.

But Ben clapped his hands, like that was exactly what he liked.

“That makes it even better! If it’s too perfect, raising a rookie isn’t any fun. Major league power, but a rough stone with room to polish his technique. I think you’re exactly the guy for the ‘power rookie’ model we’ve been looking for.”

Mark stared hard at his swing data.

The certainty that his power played. And hints about where to fix things. This side job was turning out to be a lot more worthwhile than he’d thought.

“Great! Save the data. Next, let’s have this gentleman go.”

Ben’s eyes turned to Suho.

With the power hitter’s data in hand, they needed a contact hitter now, and as it happened, Suho looked like one. Built the way he was right now, he didn’t look like he could produce any power.

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Suho loosened up lightly and took the bat.

The mood in the studio was a lot different than it had been for Mark a moment ago. The staffers were checking equipment or chatting among themselves, and nobody paid Suho much attention.

That made sense. Mark had just put on such an overwhelming show. Next to that, the Asian player’s build was bound to look ordinary.

But Suho was so happy he didn’t even notice what was going on around him. He’d seen Mark’s data come out in black and white. All he wanted was to test himself, fast, in front of the machine that could pinpoint his exact problems.

Suho steadied his breathing and set his stance.

Exactly the mechanics Alex taught me.

The most efficient path, with nothing extra.

His bat cut through the air with a short swish.

It was a compact swing.

But the reaction was lukewarm. It had none of the roar that ripped the air apart like Mark’s, and none of the intimidation that made people watching shrink back.

Hm, pretty ordinary.

The staffers were all thinking the same thing. They weren’t baseball experts, and the yardsticks they judged by were sound and wind. How much wind kicked up in the space the bat passed through. How big the sound was.

By that yardstick, Suho’s swing was far too quiet and well behaved.

Naturally. Mark was a lot bigger than Suho. And he was stronger by nature, too.

Ben was no different.

The bat speed was really fast, but… the form is too honest, I guess?

It didn’t seem to have any personality. Put badly, it was bland. Put nicely, it was true to the basics. There was something unfinished about it. It gave off a strong whiff of a rookie who hadn’t found his own style yet.

Ben’s eye was right. Suho had only drilled the mechanics Alex handed down to him into his body. He hadn’t reached the stage of building a batting form that fit him perfectly on top of them. No—if anything, he had no information at all about what kind of form would get more out of his mechanics.

But Ben liked that, if anything.

Yes! This is it. This is exactly what we were looking for!

A flashy form didn’t fit the rookie a user created at the start. A form like this one, white as a blank canvas with just the basics down, was perfect.

Ben smiled, satisfied, and called out:

“Very nice! That was exactly the rookie swing we were looking for! Want to come look at the data first?”

Ben walked over to the monitor without a care. He figured it would show a set of ordinary numbers.

But—

“…Huh?”

Ben’s eyes slowly widened as he looked at the screen. The engineer next to him stood there with his mouth hanging open.

“Wh-what is this?”

The data was telling the exact opposite of the story they’d expected.

[Energy Transfer Efficiency: 99.8%]

[Wasted Motion Loss: 0.0%]

[Weight Shift at Impact: Perfect]

The graph had shot up like crazy. It meant that in carrying the power his body made all the way to the end of the bat, not one bit of it had been lost.

“Boss, the graph is… a straight line? There’s no place where the power leaks.”

“What? Is this an error?”

A chill ran down Ben’s spine.

That swing, which had looked so ordinary on the outside, turned out, when you took the internal data apart, to be running on mechanics more precise than a machine’s. It hadn’t been loud because it wasn’t weak. It had come through on the shortest path, cutting even air resistance to a minimum.

“H-hold on. I think the sensors are off!”

Ben’s voice was urgent. He couldn’t believe it. Even major league MVPs didn’t get this kind of efficiency.

“I’m sorry, but would you mind taking a few more swings?”

Suho nodded without knowing what was going on, went back to the box and swung again, and again, and again.

The swing was still compact and quiet. But Ben and the engineers watching the monitors went whiter and whiter in the face.

“…No way.”

On the screen, the graph lines tracing Suho’s swing path overlapped. Two swings, three, five—every one laid itself exactly over the path of the swing before it, without a single millimeter of difference.

“Th-the machine’s not broken.”

Ben muttered it, his voice shaking.

The machine wasn’t broken. This machine, known for having no margin of error, was saying something. It was saying that Asian player’s mechanics were perfect.

Without taking his eyes off the monitor, Ben asked in a rush:

“D-did you, uh, win MVP at the High School Invitational something like four times?”

American high school is four years. And the High School Invitational is held once a year. So winning it four times meant asking whether he’d been a blue-chip prospect who tore through the whole country every year from freshman year to graduation.

Because that was what the data was saying: this wasn’t the kind of efficiency a human being had.

But Suho calmly shook his head.

“No.”

“Sorry?”

“For one thing, I went to school in Korea.”

“Ah… then you must have torn it up in Korea, huh? Swept the high school tournaments and the MVPs?”

“I did, yeah… but after that, I failed.”

“What?”

Ben’s face went blank.

Suho went on, unbothered.

“I got drafted as a pro, but I never got out of the farm team, and they released me. That’s why I came to America.”

“…”

Ben’s mouth hung open.

They’d thrown away a player with mechanics this perfect?

For a second, a crazy thought crossed his mind.

Is Korean baseball better than the majors? Enough to throw away a player like this?

That couldn’t be right. Which left only one answer: their scouts or coaches had all gone blind together, or had missed what this player was really worth.

He had a lot of questions, but right now the job came first. Ben cleared his throat to get things back on track.

“Ahem. Anyway, come on over and look at the results. I’ll walk you through them.”

Suho stood in front of the monitor, delighted.

“First, to be honest with you, even the machine didn’t find a problem. This equipment is flagging it as needing no corrections. Your energy transfer efficiency is perfection itself.”

But Ben’s eyes quickly sharpened. From here on, he was looking not as someone reading data but as a former analyst.

“But I’ve got two questions. First, your batting form isn’t getting the most out of your mechanics.”

“…My form?”

“Yes. To put it simply, your mechanics are a hypercar, and your form is an economy car. It’s too by-the-book and too tame. That actually works against you. It’s holding back the explosive energy efficiency you’ve got.”

Suho nodded. He was exactly right. Suho had been keeping his form as compact and safe as possible so he could drill the mechanics completely into his body first. That had been his plan all along.

“And the second is… your swing path.”

Ben pointed at the slope of the graph.

“It’s too flat. It’s a perfect level swing, but it doesn’t match your mechanics. Hitting like this, I get the feeling you’d hit a lot of ground balls. Is that on purpose?”

“Ah…”

Suho let out a short breath. For one thing, he was impressed that a game director had such a great eye for baseball.

And yeah, it was on purpose.

It was just that he’d been so set on sticking to the basics that he hadn’t gotten as far as applying them. He hadn’t had time to make any changes to begin with, either… He’d joined late in the season, and a little while later it had rolled right into the playoffs. There’d been no room to try changing anything.

Ben seemed to read Suho’s face, and he smiled gently.

“You haven’t had these mechanics long, have you? So you’ve been swinging carefully so they don’t break down, and that’s flattened out your path.”

“…That’s exactly right.”

“Which is why I’m telling you this: I think you can afford to be a little more confident now.”

Ben said it with conviction.

“Your mechanics really are perfect. I’ve never actually seen a player who could handle mechanics like this in my life. And I think they’re drilled into your body now. Do you swing the bat a lot, normally?”

“Yes. Two hundred times a day.”

“But… which swings are you talking about?”

Suho tilted his head. He was the one who’d asked, so what did he mean?

“Oh, I mean, a hitter’s usual daily swing routine goes like this, right?”

Tee work. Soft toss. Live batting practice in the cage, and so on. Usually somewhere from 150 to as many as 250 swings, and then the game. That didn’t mean 150 to 250 full swings. It counted easy swings and full swings together.

But—

“Oh. I do two hundred swings just on my own and keep the rest separate.”

So that meant he was swinging 350 to 450 times a day?

Was he lying? Or was he crazy?

“D-doesn’t that wear you out? That’s not something a human being should do.”

Ben shook his head. This was no time for small talk.

“No, that’s not the point. Anyway, you don’t have to hold yourself back or be careful. Just adjust the swing path a little. In other words, if you lift the ball just a little more, much better batted balls are going to come pouring out than they do now.”

Ben tapped Suho’s perfect graph on the monitor.

“I think you’ve been waiting until the new mechanics felt natural… but the data’s telling you. It’s time to move forward.”

Suho’s heart dropped.

With all the ground balls he’d been hitting, he’d had a vague sense of a limit. And now a machine had offered a plausible answer to it. He had no intention of trusting it blindly, but it was more than worth taking into account.

End of Chapter 46