Flower Points
So Noh In-seong had threatened the Gwangju Tigers with a cheery "See you soon, teach."
As it turned out, actually meeting Gwangju was going to take quite a while.
For starters, none of their games had been postponed as rainouts, which meant fewer makeups remained on the schedule — and the next two-game series with them wasn't penciled in until the middle of August.
When there was an enemy staring you in the face right now, who had the spare attention to worry about a guy you'd meet a little later?
"Hello, Incheon. No, scratch that — drop dead and go to hell."
Things were already miserable enough with their record buried at the bottom of the standings, and now a considerate funeral director had stepped up, offering to hammer the coffin lid shut himself as a complimentary service.
For Incheon, this was Game 106 of the season — the point where they might need to start counting their tragic number.
And with both teams playing out of domed stadiums, their schedules were so packed that the pace was brutal.
"We should be locking down first place soon and testing out the rest of the roster... If we start expanding the roster, the season might just be over?"
"If we cement ninth place like this, I'll probably get fired next year... Maybe we need to call the kids up and grind out some wins?"
Two teams dreaming completely different dreams — but both of them wanted to win. Naturally, though, the latter wanted it far more desperately.
"Mmm~ the smell of losers."
"...In-seong, could you at least keep the garbage talk to yourself when we're training at the stadium?"
"Too late. I've already declared I can't share the same oxygen as that team."
On the Jamsil grounds, batting practice had become an exercise in psychological warfare — delivering mental blows instead of line drives. Noh In-seong had eaten well, stuffed himself full, and started spouting nonsense from the afternoon onward.
July was slowly drawing to a close, but In-seong wasn't tired in the slightest. Not physically, at least. If anything, you'd have to say his battery for pulling dirty tricks just kept recharging itself.
"They already know it anyway. That whole team had its season derailed because of little old me."
"......"
Smashed a second baseman. Demolished a catcher. Made a manager eat dirt. And their center fielder's batting average was hovering somewhere around .180.
Since he'd shattered the very core of the team itself, he was naturally their number one surveillance target. You could tell just from watching them keep sneaking glances, tracking his every move — manager, players, coaches, all of them glued to Noh In-seong's every gesture and breath.
This spectacle, broadcasting to everyone exactly which player they feared most — it pissed him off.
"There's nothing I hate more than the furrowed brows of men older than me?"
Not because of their wariness, mind you. He just found them biologically unappealing.
Incheon was praying — genuinely praying — that Noh In-seong would come into this series in terrible condition.
CRACK!!
"That's it! Balls are screaming off the bat today! Attaboy, In-seong!"
His condition was the polar opposite of their prayers. Absolutely pristine.
He'd taken Monday completely off. His pitchers hadn't been run for seven straight games. He hadn't attempted a stolen base in a while. All of it added up to a golden opportunity — conserved energy he could now pour entirely into his hitting and defense.
And when no cracks showed up in defensive drills or the situational training by position either, the mood in the Incheon dugout sank to something truly rotten.
"Damn it..."
A shadow fell across the face of Incheon's manager, Jeong Yong-jun.
The days of contending for first place back at the start of the season were long gone — now he was fighting to stay out of dead last.
Back when things were still salvageable, he'd gotten swept clean in Game 3 of a series against the Doubles, and from that moment on, it had been nothing but a long, grinding slide. One step, then another, slipping further down until only teams more than ten wins behind remained beneath him.
The single consolation? His backup catcher had grown a little.
"Then what the hell am I supposed to do? I might not even have a job next year!"
SLAM!
His palm throbbed from slamming the table, but the pain in his hand was nothing compared to the agony in his head.
Unless the results rebounded, the front office would come calling for his resignation sooner or later — it was only a matter of when. They'd drag in some manager who did whatever they told him, and shatter the kingdom he had built piece by piece.
"...Before that happens..."
Because I was the one who designed this kingdom. At the very least, I will—
Jeong Yong-jun's eyes flashed with a feral light.
[Wait... is this right? Jin No-ryeok is being pulled after just three innings?]
[He hasn't even thrown fifty pitches yet — are we seriously at the point where a quick hook is necessary?]
"What the hell, has that insane old man finally gone off the deep end?"
Today our starter was Jeong In-young, and the opposing ace was Jin No-ryeok. A fifth-starter-versus-ace matchup meant today was a day to win with the bats, not the arms.
Sure enough, in the second inning Jeong In-young had gotten into a jam and coughed up a two-run single — 2-0, Incheon. And now the team that had been shutting us down cleanly had suddenly yanked their ace.
"Looks like it's started. Then again, for a Jeong manager, he held out longer than usual."
The manager's voice drifting from the corner of the dugout gave me a rough idea of what was going on.
"He's planning to start cycling pitchers to salvage his own record?"
"Exactly. I shouldn't really say this, but honestly he should've been doing it since early July — that's what a normal manager would've done."
Nobody waits until the tail end of the season to do this. In a bad year, it's all-out war by the midway point: swap pitchers and hitters in and out rapidly, keep the opposing team off balance, and snatch wins however you can.
Though I suppose when we last met, Jin No-ryeok had thrown over 130 pitches. No records on the line, terrible form, losing the game — and he'd grimly kept trotting out there until he was practically throwing at my body.
"Would've been kinder to just knock his jaw off back then and give him the rest he needed."
"...You lunatic. That would've just ended his season even faster."
Still, a season cut short beats a career cut short. Under a manager like that, your second act in life arrives ahead of schedule whether you like it or not.
"But why in the world does he only pull this circus act when he plays us?"
"""Because of YOU, you psycho!"""
Every single human being near the dugout shouted in unison at me.
Excuse me? Because of me? What does that even mean.
Did I hold a knife to anyone's throat and threaten to ruin their stats? Did I ever throw the first punch? This was a disaster of their own summoning — so why am I the one being blamed?
Unfair. Utterly unfair.
"You can't do anything but pitch around me anyway, Jin Woo-jeong. Come on, just throw the fastball."
Leading off the next inning, Noh In-seong launched a psychological assault on the Incheon catcher.
Even a backup, at the end of the day, is a catcher — a player who has mastered the art of deception and reading deception. So of course, the man answered with shameless confidence.
"Haha, what are you on about? We're not scared of you at all."
But an opponent was still an opponent. Naturally, the first pitch dove well below the zone.
Against a man who had already shattered the all-time rookie home run record in Korea, playing games was a risky business.
"Knew it. So that's two more out of the zone — all three remaining pitches are balls, right? Go on, throw them."
"...You are genuinely insufferable."
The second pitch was a ball too — and something flickered across the weathered face of the veteran pitcher, a rising irritation.
It laid bare exactly what he was thinking: why shouldn't I challenge him?
Ball three. But this one came in different — drifting toward a spot that was actually hittable.
"The manager wants me pitched around, the pitcher wants to challenge me, and the catcher's stuck in the middle having a crisis. Rough gig."
"...!!"
Judging by the caught-red-handed look on the catcher's face, this was the last chance. If he fouled this one off, he'd be pulled on the spot by his own manager — the picture painted itself crystal clear.
I loosened my body and watched the ball sail toward the upper-outer corner of the zone. Not a hint of break in it — a straight four-seamer, right down the barrel.
Ah. So it looked like I'd been talking a big game about never swinging.
CRACK!!!
[That ball is—! Noh In-seong's thirty-second—!! HOME RUN! It's GONE!]
[Haha, technically that one could've been called a ball... well, I suppose he judged it hittable enough after all.]
Noh In-seong was not a machine. Naturally, among the pitches that became his hits, there were balls — pitches out of the zone. And the ones he turned into hits more than any others were those drifting from the upper-outer corner down toward the middle.
The urge to challenge me, colliding with the obligation to carry out his manager's orders — a contradiction in the batter's box. The veteran, handed the worst possible outcome, was yanked from the game in lonely silence.
"So what you're saying is, he had a rough idea what we were going to throw?"
"He displayed absolute conviction that he was being pitched around. Yes."
When Jeong Yong-jun pulled Jin Woo-jeong right after that home run, it was part rebuke — but he'd also sensed something else: that Noh In-seong had swung at a ball with genuine certainty.
Currently number one in the league in lowest swing rate on balls out of the zone. Among the physical tools, plate discipline is the one that demands the most from the eyes and the brain — meaning this man's strike-zone judgment was elite.
A guy like that suddenly swinging at a ball? Even if it was close to the zone, something was deeply wrong.
"Somehow... somehow, I get that he knows what pitches we're throwing through some method or other."
"But then how does he know the location too? Doesn't that strike you as strange? And it's only that one hitter who's crushing us."
The backup catcher's perfectly reasonable questions never reached the manager's ears.
Jeong Yong-jun just kept muttering something under his breath, sinking deeper and deeper into his own thoughts.
The game was a tight one, but in the end it closed as a two-run victory for the Doubles.
Jeong In-young holding Incheon scoreless through the sixth after those first two runs mattered a lot — and no matter how Incheon churned through their bullpen, Noh In-seong kept reaching base after the home run, plunked by pitch after pitch. Song Jin-wook and Dustin kept driving him home with one big swing at a time, stacking runs with methodical patience.
Final score: 5-3, a come-from-behind win.
Up to that point, it was a script you could have predicted from the two teams' relative strength. What nobody could have predicted was what came out of Jeong Yong-jun's mouth afterward.
"The Doubles... they gave off the feeling that they roughly knew where and what we were planning to throw."
Jeong Yong-jun began the interview in a tone crafted to be heard by both the cameras and the reporters.
"That insolent little brat talked as if he had a pretty good idea of the signs coming out of our dugout, I'm told."
The phrasing was clever — he'd carefully stripped out anything that could be pinned on himself.
"Something about it feels off... I don't know. Maybe it's just because our results are so bad?"
He chuckled for the cameras, but his eyes weren't laughing at all. An interview loaded to the brim with malice.
Jeong Yong-jun's specialty — the silent art of destabilizing another team — had begun.
Watching reporters swarm me the second the game ended, I figured I'd committed some fresh atrocity again.
"Noh In-seong, could you respond to Manager Jeong Yong-jun's remarks?"
"...Oh, so it's not my fault this time. Thank god."
Turned out the target was the fossil on the other side, not me.
Once they walked me through it, the gist — for all his meandering — was: you guys were running a trash-can operation, weren't you?
"Classic him, really. Why is it that man can only ever find an escape hatch in that one particular direction?"
"...So to confirm — is your answer YES, or NO?"
The reporter looked desperate. Understandable — in situations like this, my usual move was to screw the press over too.
But this steaming pile had been handed to me courtesy of Jeong Yong-jun. If I blew up here and answered defensively, I'd be the one swallowing it whole.
To savor the meal and then grind my opponent into the dirt, I had to operate on a first-class level myself.
"Well, one thing I'm certain of — that old fossil's got maybe a week left before he's fired, don't you think?"
— Since he won't be around much longer, you reporters should go back through your archives and collect every interview with him while you still can.
There. My answer is silence. Consider the interview returned, with interest.
Go on — speculate all you like about how I'll show up in the next game, and plan accordingly.
Noh In-seong gazed out at the trap his opponent had so carefully laid — and smirked.