0. You've Got to Be Kidding Me
Korea has exactly two kinds of utterly useless, unproductive games of catch.
Strictly speaking, they're only useless inside Busan. But for someone born in Busan, raised in Busan, and employed in Busan, Busan is Korea.
Exhibit one: the sport whose players spend every single year sprinting themselves into the ground on the solemn prayer of escaping the second division, only to get smacked down before they can even reach the playoffs and stall out in that eternally awkward middle ground. Football. That's the one.
Exhibit two...
"Strike three! Batter out!"
The accursed sport where one more pitch finding the strike zone is enough to send a boiling surge of rage straight up your spine.
Hey, you worthless pieces of trash!
Ugh, when am I ever going to see so much as a whiff of autumn baseball?!
Can't catch one pop fly? Passed ball and wild pitch. Can't throw one pitch straight? Walk. Can't put a bat on one hanging curveball? Strikeout, sit down.
"And so yet another challenge comes to a close. Tragedy visits Busan once more..."
"Ah... what a shame, really. The fans love this team so much. Why does this happen every single year?"
Baseball.
That goddamn baseball.
I started it as a kid, throwing a tantrum until my parents relented because I'd fallen in love watching it on TV. And now it looked like it would be the death of me.
"...It's over."
My final at-bat of my final season came in the last game of the year — the game that carved the year's tragic number into stone.
"Jung In-seong, thank you for everything you've given us."
"......"
And at this moment, it was also the sport I hated most in the world.
Thirty-eight years old. Former infield utility man for the Busan Marines. Jung In-seong.
Released. That was the word they used. But let a man get cut at this age, and there is no next opportunity. None.
It wasn't as if I had connections to fall back on, either. This team's old-boy network was slowly dying out, sure, but without school ties even a coaching job was out of reach. Franchise players got their coaching gigs handed to them — my career had been thin and stretched out, a thread pulled long across fifteen years.
I wanted to take the coaching certification course, but with the first team and the second team both staffed by fresh-faced young fielding coaches, there was no seat left for me.
All that remained was teaching little kids and nurturing the future of baseball, apparently.
"Ugh, I'm screwed... What am I even supposed to do? A coaching job, out of nowhere, at my age?"
That road is not an easy one. Nobody knows that better than I do.
"What prestigious academy wants a manager or coach whose only credential is a long pro playing career?"
The most important thing a coach needs isn't coaching ability. It's sales.
Back in my playing days, I was somebody! Ahem! — you needed the golden glove and the trophy shelf to prove it, that's your résumé.
Or failing that, you needed connections worth more than all of it, or at least a flattering write-up from whatever personality evaluation the front office ran.
A man who started thin and stretched long and ended thin and stretched long had none of those glorious artifacts to his name.
Even salary negotiations were a ritual of groveling in front of arrogantly smug front-office suits.
"Well, I could probably get in somewhere far lower down the ladder... but then I'd be worrying about making rent before anything else."
I was in the middle of mulling it over — maybe get an old hyung to pull some strings and land me a gig coaching a kids' team...
No, no magic happened. Nothing of the sort.
A truck to another world, a god descending to whisper heh heh, do you need it? Power? — that stuff lives in fantasy novels, not in real life.
The day the front office delivered my release notice happened to be the day they'd penciled out the team's budget. Which is to say: the dead middle of a bastard-cold winter, when what I needed most in the world was something warm.
So I drank alone. Made a night of drowning my sorrows, four bottles of soju downed alongside a single steaming bowl of my regular gukbap.
Sli—!
"Ah."
The way one mistimed swing drops your autumn baseball odds to zero...
One mistimed step, and the season of my short life simply called the game.
Behind the shock too great to even register sound, my memory cut off the moment my head hit the pavement. What remained were fragments, scattered thoughts.
"...What is this. Goddammit."
Ironically, I had become a child.
The last thing I remembered stretched enormously long, yet a child's brain retained nothing beyond those disconnected shards.
The brown leather shoes with the alligator emblem, worn only on special occasions. The brand-new white crackers from the day we first moved.
"HUUUURGH..."
"Oh dear, oh dear! He's throwing up—!!"
And how, immediately after eating those crackers, my upset stomach had laid out the entire digestive process across the floor for everyone to observe.
The first day I went swimming. The first day of school. The day I first saw baseball on TV and thought, oh right, that thing exists.
THWACK!
"KYAAAAH!"
And then — the day I hit a person with a ball for the very first time — the memories of my past life...? came flooding back.
Huh. Same name. So why does the vibe feel so completely different?
Formerly Jung In-seong. Currently Noh In-seong, age ten — the day he finally realized, in the middle of a crowded elementary school classroom, just how much he'd been screwed over in his previous life.