Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.
SALISBURY, Md. — The week he arrived in America, Seong Han Baek left his shift at the poultry factory each evening and bicycled the streets of Salisbury, searching for baseball fields. He spoke little English, but he had a map and purpose. Pedaling from stop sign to stop sign, he rehearsed a line.
Can my son play on your team? His name is Sang. He is a pitcher.
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It was the end of April in 2014 when the family of four immigrated from Seoul to Salisbury. Youth baseball rosters were full. When the father biked back to the family’s apartment after sunset, the son would be waiting for him. No, the father would tell the son, he hadn’t found a team yet. He’d try again tomorrow.
They’d come to this city of 30,000 at the center of the Delmarva Peninsula, between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, to write a new chapter. Salisbury was nothing like Seoul, and their new life nothing like their old one. The family found Salisbury charming and spacious, with a small but bustling downtown and leafy parks — a rural, small-town feel within a growing city.
But it wasn’t the East Coast that initially drew the family to the United States. When the father was in his 20s, he had flown to California to visit cousins and thought, I’d like to live here one day. Later, he married En Young Lee and honeymooned out West, seeing the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas and Los Angeles. She hoped to live there one day, too.
They waited for a door to open. None did. They had a good life and made a good living in South Korea. Seong Han worked as a fire inspector, and En Young was a classically trained opera singer teaching voice and piano lessons.
Then came the children — the son, Sang Ho Baek, in 2001, and the daughter, Sun Ho “Sunny” Baek, in 2003 — who stoked the parents’ American dream. The father and mother say they wanted their children to have better educational and economic opportunities. They saved as much money as they could, and when Sang and Sunny were toddlers, the father filed paperwork for a work visa and started looking for jobs in the United States.
Ten years passed.
Meanwhile, the son loved baseball. He was 8 when he first played, and for the rest of his baseball life he’d always ask to wear jersey No. 8. After work, the father would crouch and catch for the son. The son grew, and his fastball pounded the father’s mitt harder and harder. The son’s Little League coach, Kim Gun-Woo — a former pitcher who was once Korea Baseball Organization’s rookie of the year — told the father that his son had a strong right shoulder, a sign he’d grow into a great pitcher.
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In 2014, the father found work at the poultry factory in Salisbury.
“I gave up everything there,” he says now, “to come here for my kids.”
Leaving Seoul, however, was heartbreaking for the son. He asked his father, “Can I still play baseball in America?” The father promised to find him a team.
So the family’s first purchase in Salisbury was a beat-up black bicycle. As darkness fell one night that April, the father found a baseball field south of Salisbury, and asked a coach if there was room for one more. His name is Sang. He is a pitcher. The coach looked around and saw a field full of players. But he also saw a bicycle and a father’s love. Yes, he said, there’s room for Sang.
Sang’s dream was to pitch in the major leagues and buy his parents a house.
This was no secret; a child’s dreams rarely are. In a video from his mother’s birthday in 2012, 11-year-old Sang is seen wearing his Little League uniform, singing and dancing in their Seoul kitchen. In his birthday letter, he writes that he’ll work and study hard and become a famous baseball player, then ends it by reminding his mother to wake him early for practice in the morning.
Sang wasn’t a phenom, wasn’t the biggest or strongest player on his team at any level, but he believed he was bound for the big leagues, and he’d let nothing stop him. And why wouldn’t he believe that? Look at what his parents did. After all they sacrificed to see him succeed in the United States, why couldn’t a 5-foot-9 Korean kid wearing wire-rimmed eyeglasses pitch in the majors?
“He was stubborn in the sense that he’d never stop persevering,” says Josh Kwak, a friend from Salisbury. “He knew what he wanted, and he’d work toward it.”
Connor Lefort, the catcher for Sang’s first team in Salisbury, had never caught a pitcher like him. Though Sang had only a limited grasp of the English language, the two of them communicated like catchers and pitchers do — one finger down for fastball, two for curveball. Lefort would set up at the corner of the strike zone, and Sang hit his mitt. Sang threw smoke and buckled knees.
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“His curveball made batters fall down,” Lefort says, “and it’d be strike three.”
Away from the ballpark, transitioning to American life was difficult for Sang and his sister. Sunny didn’t speak for all of fifth grade. Sang came across as shy, but friends say once he opened up he was goofy, curious and kind.
Baseball offered Sang a fraternity and a universal language. He always wanted to talk baseball. His favorite team was the Dodgers because his favorite player, Korean left-hander Hyun Jin Ryu, pitched for them at the time. One day, during health class in seventh grade, classmate Max Taylor wore a T-shirt from the Cal Ripken World Series in Aberdeen, Md. Sang said, “I played there.” He’d been on the Korean team in the 2013 Cal Ripken World Series.
“I didn’t even know he played baseball,” Taylor says. Later, they played each other in a tournament. “I was like, Hey, that’s the guy in my health class!”
When moving to Salisbury, Seong Han had planned to work at the poultry factory for a year to receive his green card, then move the family to California. But that first year came and went, and the kids were settling in at school. Sunny had friends. Lefort had invited Sang to play on his travel ball team, the Delmarva Aces. En Young was working at a factory assembling cables and wiring. And the family had found a community at the Korean Presbyterian Church of Salisbury, halfway around the world from Seoul, that had embraced them — helped them line up their first apartment, ferried them around the city before they had a car, and eventually got Seong Han a new job installing flooring, where he works to this day. Salisbury was starting to feel like home.
“I thought, Maybe it’s not a good idea to move again,” Seong Han says. “So, we stayed.”
Sang was an eager learner. He took drum lessons and joined the youth group’s worship band. He’d hear slang or an unfamiliar word and immediately ask his friends to explain it. (An example: “We went through a phase of saying ‘gander,’” says Jun Lee, laughing, “like, take a gander at that.”)
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On a church mission trip to Nicaragua, Sang, Lee and Kwak ran a Bible program for local children, sanitized houses, laid a foundation for a new building and sprayed pesticides. At night, they were teenagers. Kwak and Lee taught Sang card games. He taught them Korean wordplay games. They stayed up late and pulled harmless pranks. And then, when everyone else was asleep, they talked about the future.
One night in Nicaragua, Lee noticed the calluses on Sang’s pitching hand and asked, “Yo, are you making it to the MLB?” Sang just smiled.
Jesse Serig, the co-head baseball coach at James M. Bennett High School, remembers first seeing Sang pitch in the seventh grade. Serig was tossing batting practice to high schoolers; Sang was throwing to his dad in the bullpen. Serig couldn’t decide who impressed him more: the 13-year-old with that fastball, or the father with the guts to catch it without any gear.
Two years later, when Sang’s name appeared on a list of freshmen interested in Bennett baseball tryouts, Serig told the other coaches to keep an eye on him.
Temperatures were around 40 degrees in the first week of March, and Sang was the only one of the 60 players in short sleeves. The day tryout results were posted, Sang didn’t bother bringing baseball pants to school. Only varsity practiced that day. Taylor read the rosters first, then he tracked down Sang in a hallway and said, “Dude, we made varsity. Go get your pants!”
The varsity team that year was a rowdy bunch, but they embraced Sang. He was quiet, a little quirky, and a secret weapon on the mound.
In his first start against one of Bennett’s rivals, Sang threw six scoreless innings. “It was just ridiculous,” Taylor says. This was a theme over Sang’s four years at Bennett: He always appeared calm and composed. He laughed when friends got nervous riding on a roller coaster. He took off his shirt and belly-flopped into a foot of freshly fallen snow without flinching to win a $5 bet. He went to a haunted house and fist-bumped the zombies and slashers trying to spook him. And he barely broke a sweat pitching in big games.
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Serig started to think Sang simply didn’t understand how important these games were. But when Serig mentioned that to Sang’s parents, they laughed.
“(Sang) always said he was so nervous,” Seong Han says, “but nobody knew.”
As Bennett headed into Maryland’s 3A state tournament in his junior season, in 2019, Sang was deployed as the closer so he could pitch every game. Bennett had started the season 10-0 and then stumbled down the backstretch, losing five of its last six games. Taylor remembers thinking the team would be one and done in the playoffs. But they defeated Chesapeake at home, and the dominoes started to fall: conference rival Stephen Decatur, Atholton, then defending champion Thomas Johnson. Sang, who like the rest of the team had bleached his hair blond, escaped a bases-loaded jam to send Bennett to the 3A state final against C. Milton Wright at Ripken Stadium in Aberdeen — the same complex where Sang had played with the Korean team in 2013.
Bennett led 5-3 when Sang entered for the seventh and final inning in the championship game. For the first time, his father felt no nerves as he watched.
“That night, he looked confident and happy,” Seong Han says, “so I felt happy, too.”
Sang hit the leadoff batter on an 0-2 pitch — just enough to raise blood pressures in the Bennett dugout — and then settled in. He got back-to-back groundouts, then pumped a fastball for strike three and the third out. Before the game, he had told his sister, “Everyone throws the glove in the air when they celebrate. I’m going to do the opposite.” So, Sang spiked the glove. He raised his arms in the air. Teammates dogpiled.
The elbow pain started last fall.
Sang was a freshman at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His senior season at Bennett had been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic — no repeat championship run; no prom; no graduation — but not before he’d gone to George Mason’s prospect camp and impressed head coach Bill Brown and pitching coach Shawn Camp, a former major league pitcher. The two coaches watched as this undersized right-hander mowed down one hitter after another.
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“You could see the incredible potential in him,” Brown says.
So, after spending a year pitching in the backyard in Salisbury, throwing into a net 60 feet 6 inches away from a makeshift mound his father had built, Sang left for college. As he started his preseason throwing progression, his right elbow hurt. He’d been injured before, like the time in middle school when he broke a finger on his right hand sliding into a base and still pitched the rest of the game. But arm injuries were worrisome. And unlike any elbow aches he’d had in high school, this one wasn’t gone in a day or two.
Sang wondered if he’d ramped up too quickly after a year without baseball. He was itching to pitch, to prove himself to the coaches as fall practices began, but he needed answers about his elbow issues. The first arm specialist he saw recommended Tommy John surgery — a repair of the ulnar collateral ligament, or UCL, which typically has a 12- to 18-month recovery. A second specialist prescribed physical therapy instead. Sang opted for the latter, for rest and rehab, hoping to recover before the spring season.
Pitcher Matt Henson transferred to George Mason mid-year and became Sang’s daily throwing partner. Though the time off had helped relieve some of the pain, there still were days when Sang said his arm felt terrible. Henson encouraged him not to push it. As they played catch, Sang and Henson, who is a quarter Korean, bonded over Korean food and culture. Sang was missing his mother’s cooking and his favorite dish — Gamjatang, a spicy stew with pork and potatoes.
As a freshman still finding his way away from home, on a new team and a college campus, Sang said little but had an infectious energy. Brown laughs as he remembers Sang working the bucket during batting practice. Most pitchers stand in center field waiting for teammates to throw them baseballs to collect. “The grass dies underneath them,” Brown says. Not Sang. He’d race across the outfield, chasing fly balls, then book it back to the bucket.
The jitters Sang had suppressed in high school bubbled to the surface at the idea of staring down Division I hitters. Before George Mason’s season opener in late February, Sang told senior pitcher Jonathan Kaiser, “Jon, I don’t know what’ll happen if I go in. I’m so nervous I might throw up on the mound.”
Sang didn’t pitch that day. He debuted against Maryland Baltimore County two weeks later, coming out of the bullpen to fire 1 1/3 scoreless innings. He wore No. 44 — 4 plus 4 is 8, his favorite number — and was buzzing when he bounced back to the dugout. Teammates came to expect this from Sang, the kid who once told his father he felt like a different person when he stepped on the mound. Off the field, he was innocent and gullible. On it, he was fiery.
Sang’s fastball sat at 90 mph, climbing a tick or two higher when he was amped, but his bread-and-butter pitch was an eephus-like curveball.
“I remember one game, he came in and was just throwing fastballs by guys,” outfielder South Trimble says. “And then he threw the eephus-style curveball. The dude swung so early and absolutely whiffed. The other team’s bullpen was talking to me, saying, ‘Wow, this is insane. This guy has it all.’”
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“When he’d throw that curve, our guys would go crazy,” says Brown, chuckling. “The hitters were absolutely, completely paralyzed by it. They’d double-clutch and could never pull the trigger on it.”
Sang allowed only two runs over his first five outings, and his confidence grew with each pitch and punchout. He phoned his father after each game to fill him in.
But the elbow pain persisted, and eventually it was too much to pitch through. After Sang was hit around by Dayton and Virginia Commonwealth, the coaching staff shut him down for the rest of the season. Sang returned to the arm specialists. This time, there was consensus.
“It was getting worse,” his father says.
To pitch again, Sang needed Tommy John surgery. He told teammates the surgery scared him. What if he wasn’t the same pitcher when he came back?
Once Sang decided on surgery, though, he didn’t waver. He sketched a rehab plan. He’d stay in shape until he could start throwing, then take private pitching lessons for the first time. When the spring semester let out and George Mason’s season ended, his family says, Sang wasn’t anxious. He was relieved, rejuvenated by a new thought: He wouldn’t be the same pitcher when he came back. With a healthy elbow, without the pain, he’d be even better.
In the days after surgery, Sang’s leg hurt worse than his arm.
This isn’t entirely unexpected. Tommy John surgery is a two-part procedure in which a surgeon takes a tendon from the leg or another part of the body and uses it to replace the damaged UCL in the elbow. But Sang was in significant discomfort. He couldn’t climb the stairs to his bedroom, so he temporarily moved into the downstairs bedroom, trading places with his father.
Sang phoned the Washington, D.C., medical center where he’d undergone surgery June 8 and asked if the leg pain was typical. According to Sang’s family, the surgeon who had performed the procedure was not concerned.
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“We just believed that it was normal,” Seong Han says.
As Sang rested, his little sister kept him company. Sang and Sunny had always been close. He was her confidant. “He would just listen to me,” Sunny says. “I could tell him about my problems.” While Sang was attending George Mason, they spoke all the time. Sunny’s friends teased her about it. Who FaceTimes their brother for hours? On one of their calls, Sunny was fretting about finding the right college. She woke up the next morning to a long text from Sang. It was so sweet and supportive, Sunny says, that she immediately accused their mother of putting Sang up to it. (En Young swears she didn’t.)
The two weeks between Sang’s coming home from school and having surgery have a hold on Sunny’s memory now. The brother and sister flew through the first five films of the Harry Potter series. They made plans for the summer. They drove to Assateague Beach, Sang’s favorite place to swim and surf, in his truck, a 1996 Toyota Tacoma. It was early June, the water chilly and the wind whipping. After a while, Sunny was tired and cold. But Sang ran back into the water again and again. Sunny snapped photos of him and laughed. He looked like a puppy running on the beach, Sunny says. He was so happy.
On a Friday, three days after surgery, Seong Han gave Sang his medications at 10 p.m., then turned off the lights. “Good night, Sang,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”
When Sunny stopped by the downstairs bedroom two hours later to see Sang, she found her brother unresponsive. He wasn’t breathing. Sunny raced upstairs and woke her father, who phoned 9-1-1 and started CPR.
An ambulance arrived within minutes and, as paramedics tried reviving Sang, carried him down the long driveway and to Peninsula Regional Medical Center. The family car followed.
The mother, father, sister and a few family friends, helping to translate, huddled in a hospital room and watched helplessly as doctors and nurses tried saving Sang’s life. At first, there was hope. But as minutes turned into hours and darkness into dawn, that hope evaporated.
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At 9:12 a.m. on June 12, Sang was pronounced dead. He was 20.
In the hospital room, resuscitation attempts turned to funeral preparation. Two men in suits wheeled a gurney into the room and took Sang’s body to the funeral home.
The medical examiner would later list the cause of death as a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot that resulted as a complication of the surgery. But the family is still waiting for more answers. They say a third-party investigation is ongoing and incomplete, which is why they’re choosing not to name the surgeon or the medical center at this time. The family wants to know how a surgery performed on so many baseball players had killed Sang.
Serig, the Bennett baseball coach, was getting ready for the high school’s graduation ceremony at the minor league Delmarva Shorebirds’ stadium in Salisbury when a colleague called to tell him Sang had died. “I was stunned,” he says. “Devastated.” Many of the 300 students in caps and gowns knew Sang. During the ceremony, Serig’s phone pinged with messages from parents asking if what they’d heard was true. Serig couldn’t confirm anything yet. He sat there lost in thought, his mind replaying old memories. Sang had pitched at that ballpark, which was almost a mirror image of Ripken Stadium in Aberdeen where he’d thrown the last pitch of the championship game two years earlier.
Serig was glad the ceremony was outdoors, so he could wear sunglasses.
“I was crying the whole time,” he says.
The next morning, the George Mason players got a group text from an assistant coach setting up an impromptu Zoom call. The players — scattered from New York to California to Alaska playing collegiate summer ball — weren’t sure what to make of it. When the meeting started, they caught up and cracked jokes. Then they quieted, and Brown broke the news.
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“Honestly, it’s the worst thing I’ve had to do,” the coach says.
Camp, the pitching coach, spoke next. He reminded the players their feelings would hit them at different times and in different ways. When it happens, he said, let those emotions out.
Henson, Sang’s throwing partner, turned off his camera and cried.
For the rest of the day, the team group chat was filled with memories and photos of Sang. Love you guys. Sang will always fly high. Kaiser had missed the Zoom call. He was at the grocery store when the texts started coming through. He thought back to the last few days of the season. Kaiser was a senior, headed home to northern Virginia and life after baseball. “I’ll miss you,” Sang kept telling him. “I’m going to need to call you for advice.”
“This is sort of tough to say,” Kaiser says now, his eyes welling with tears. “I don’t think I realized how much he impacted my life, and how much I’ll miss him.”
Teammate Scott Morgan organized a GoFundMe to help the Baek family pay for medical and funeral expenses, and it drew widespread attention, raising more than $50,000. Brown says George Mason plans to make a lasting memorial for Sang, “something that will be here long after all of us have moved on,” but no further details have been announced. “We have to move forward, and we will,” Brown says, “But Sang will always be with us.”
The day of Sang’s funeral, the George Mason baseball team bused to Salisbury. Sang’s parents had expected a small ceremony, but more than 400 people — friends, coaches, teammates and even some teachers who never had Sang in class — attended. The parents hugged everyone they saw. “I didn’t want to let go of them,” Henson says. “I couldn’t even imagine the pain they’re going through.”
The ceremony painted a portrait of Sang’s beautiful baseball life. A brief biography laid a timeline of Sang’s career and ended with the line, “He left us and went to heaven, leaving behind his dream to throw a ball from a major league pitcher’s mound.” Lefort gave the first eulogy, and Serig the second. Both were also translated into Korean. Behind the podium was a painting of Sang, with his bleached-blond hair, pitching in the championship game.
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After the ceremony, walking around the chapel, Henson came across a display of Sang’s baseball gloves. Henson saw that one — Sang’s favorite — was missing. He wanted to be sure the family had that glove. But when Henson approached the open casket, he noticed two things. Sang was wearing his George Mason baseball jersey. And the glove was in the casket, on Sang’s left hand.
On a warm weeknight in Salisbury, the father, mother and sister sit in the living room of their home and laugh and cry as they tell stories about the son whose ashes are in a decorative wooden box across the room. It’s been three and a half months since Sang died. A memorial grew along one wall in the living room after the funeral, with trinkets and paintings and photo albums and a Bible and the wooden box, and stayed there all summer.
They tried returning to normal — the father and mother went to work; the sister is back in school — but their lives are locked in stasis. They started to clear out Sang’s bedroom but got lost in their grief and gave up. Sang’s beloved truck sits under a tree, next to the driveway. The wood bordering the pitcher’s mound in the backyard rotted, and the father threw it away.
Sang found fame, like he always said he would, but not in a way any of them wanted. News of his death spread on social media and then to Sports Illustrated, the New York Times and People magazine. Who’d heard of someone dying after Tommy John surgery?
Sunny is now a senior in high school. The girl who didn’t speak in the fifth grade is now her school’s student government president. She and Sang had made plans to road-trip in Sang’s truck later in the summer to visit four colleges Sunny is considering. She never took that trip. Instead, she and a friend painted a toy truck black, glued a baseball glove and bat into the bed of the truck, and added it to the memorial in the living room. It sits on the floor beside a card Sunny gave Sang on his last birthday, Jan. 31, in which she wrote about how they’d grow famous one day and buy their parents a house.
Little things hit Sunny hardest now. She’ll be driving and break into tears. She’ll eat dinner and remember how much Sang liked that meal. She’ll think of an inside joke and pick up her phone to text him. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever finish Harry Potter. “I know it’s not going to be the same anymore,” she says.
The father comes home from work each day and parks beside the black bicycle that is leaning against a wall in the garage. His mind is overrun with memories. More than anything, he says, he is thankful for the time he had with Sang. When they lived in Seoul, the father and son went on camping trips together. When Sang’s travel-ball trips took them up and down the East Coast, the two of them would share a hotel room and talk as they sat in bed watching TV.
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In Korean culture, Seong Han says, fathers and sons rarely tell each other, “I love you.” They feel it, but they express it in different ways. So, when Seong Han spoke to close his son’s funeral service, he had something he wanted to tell Sang: “It seems too late. However, there’s one thing I want to say out loud to my son: Thank you for being born to me, and for having been my son. I love you forever.”
Still, the father can’t sleep. Only after visiting doctors has he been able to sleep a few hours each night. The mother is struggling, too. She has developed a skin condition, and she’s losing hair. They’ll have some days when they think about Sang and smile, and others that break them.
“It takes time,” Seong Han says.
The mother has been quiet. En Young speaks less English than her husband and their daughter, and she’s relying on family friend Hyo Jung Choi to translate the conversation for her. The mother is sitting in an armchair, a blanket pulled over her. She is tired. She says something softly, in Korean.
“I’m consoled by the fact that he is in heaven, yet …”
Choi chokes up, then finishes the sentence.
“I miss him.”
The room is silent as everyone wipes their eyes. The mother continues. Fall is a difficult season, she says. Sang should be starting his sophomore year. You learn a lot about a loved one after they die; people tell you things you’d never heard before. “I didn’t realize it when he was here,” the mother says, “but now I can tell that wherever he went, that place became richer, bigger, happier.”
Each morning, the mother gets out of bed and kneels on the living room floor. The Bible sits open in front of her. She holds a framed image of Sang — his high school senior class photo — close to her chest, closes her eyes and prays. She sings a hymn she sang the last time she saw her son, at the funeral home just before his body was cremated.
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This morning, the mother says, she held Sang’s photo close and sensed something different. “I felt a warmth swelling from my heart,” she says. She clutched him tighter, and it was like he was there with her, like he was waiting for that moment to comfort her. The mother rocked back and forth, and tears rolled down her cheeks. For an instant, her sadness lifted. She felt lucky that Sang was her son.
(Illustration: Avinash Weerasekera)
