PLAY BALL | minsung

one

America.

Jisung was having a difficult time deciding about how he felt about America.

There's a certain thing about the United States, an aura, a feeling foreigners have about it.

His whole life, America was this far away land that was, for lack of a better word, 'cool'. The place where the celebrities and the music came from, the birth place of rap.

Don't get him wrong, he's excited off his ass to finally arrive in the US, but now that he's here, he was having second thoughts on how glamorous it would actually be. It honestly hadn't hit him what would really be happening until he landed, now all he could do was sit and stare out the window at the passing plane lanes, trying to take it all in.

He was going to be training in America, with one of the biggest baseball teams in the world.

In a shocking turn of events, this year, the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) is paying good money for a few players from a few of its teams to travel to America for a few months to be trained and play for one of the most well known MLB teams in America, the Los Angeles Angels. It didn't quite make sense to others when it was first announced, but when you pay attention to baseball as much as the fanatics do, it starts to click. Really, as much as Jisung hates to say it, Korean and American baseball have distinct differences, not only in the way they play, but in skill level.

The program is aimed to improve the KBO's players technical skills and bring back new techniques and opportunities for Korean baseball as a unit.

It wasn't that he was exceptionally nervous to play baseball, that's what he does, and he has to admit where he came from, he was one of the best. But he's going to be living and playing in America, a place full of hopeful players, trained to a much more intense extent than he was.

Sure, living in the United States was a great childhood dream, but the more Jisung overthought it, this was scary shit.

The culture, the language barrier, the pure idea of living in a foreign country, it was absolutely terrifying.

But now as he lands in the United States, the trip of a century, he has no choice. All he can do is try to decide how he feels about where he'll be living for the next months, so far he's come up empty handed.

All his teammates tell him is that it's a opportunity of a lifetime, that he should be jumping with joy, to even to picked for this opportunity was an honor, but what awaits him in the home of the free, he is unsure of.

If anything, he has a bad feeling about it.

Whatever is going to happen in his time here, it absolutely can't be good, he can just feel it.

"Yah, Han Jisung, get your ass in gear, there's people waiting to get off this plane." As soon as Seungmin mentions the line of people waiting with their carry ons, forming behind a pissy Seungmin, he scrambles to his feet, grabbing his things.

He slightly bowed to apologize and mustered up a quiet "sorry" in English, only to realize the irony of the two actions put together and feeling a bit awkward.

He wasn't sure he could get used to this.

Checking his bags instead of carrying them on seemed like a genius idea now that he had a hoard of people waiting for him to get out of his seat. If he made the line wait for him any longer to haul his carry on out of the overhead bin, he was sure they would throw a fit. He quickly grabbed his backpack from under his chair and speed walked down the aisle to catch up with the rest of his team. Woojin and Changbin stood near the exit of the plane, waiting for Seungmin and Jisung.