The Butcher's Reckoning
Ha...
The conspiracy theory cooked up by Incheon's manager, Jeong Yong-jun, was actually a question plenty of people had been quietly wondering about.
With technology this advanced, is it even possible to stop something like that?
Ever since PitchCom was introduced to baseball, sign stealing had been steadily going the way of the dodo.
And it made sense. These days, a pitcher didn't flash signs at all — all he had to do was wiggle his fingers.
Stealing the signs by watching him press the buttons? That's a task even harder than peeking at the trajectory of the baseball itself.
You'd basically need to field a Mongolian ballplayer as your runner on second just to legally steal his hand movements.
Given that baseball was still a super-minority sport in Mongolia, that was flatly impossible.
Which begat the next thought: if humans won't work, why not use machines?
Not a Mongolian, but a machine — one that was slowly replacing the sum of human learning?
"Set up a high-performance camera in the stadium, film the PitchCom feed, and relay it back with some kind of signal. There you go."
That was the modern method of organized sign stealing.
An era where advances in technology had managed to check both boxes — camera miniaturization and functionality.
A camera the size of a pinky finger was now more than enough to pull off the sign stealing of the old days.
Of course, if anyone thought they'd found a loophole in that, they were dead wrong.
"Sure~ film to your heart's content~ All we have to do is make sure you can't deliver the goods~"
"What."
If there were front offices scheming and conniving nonstop just to manufacture a single WAR, then the baseball associations that had been conditioned by all those schemes weren't about to sit around like idiots — they busted holes in the loopholes and tightened surveillance.
Ever since primitive-ancient-Morse-code-via-trash-can-lids had been pulled off in the finals, the days of players being the main actors in sign stealing had all but vanished.
Naturally so. After all, who wants to spend an entire spring training getting fastballs driven into their bodies like they're begging hug me, all season long?
Shortening your career to win a single championship is a luxury only a veteran retiring that very year can afford.
So if players won't step up because of injury risk, the front office just passes the signs covertly instead?
Then all anyone had to do was keep that data out of the stadium entirely.
They straight-up installed cameras dedicated to filming the inside of the players' dugouts.
With surveillance personnel assigned to watch the feeds, any funny business was sealed off wholesale.
As a bonus, broadcasters would occasionally run "dugout observation diaries" mid-game, which boosted viewership too.
It settled in as one of the rare success stories a policy could boast — a genuine case of killing two birds with one stone.
The fact that Noh In-seong sprawling across the bench at the All-Star Game was broadcast live nationwide? That was this exact policy at work.
Players hated having their nose-picking air live on television, but with such noble justification behind it, there was nothing to be done.
Pasting paper sign-analysis charts at the entrance of the dugout — one of Korean baseball's most embarrassing moments in history? Impossible now.
Korean baseball had chosen to tighten surveillance to prevent sabotage.
Why else would there be cameras installed even in the hallways — out of fear someone might carry data outside to share?
Though they at least kept the last shred of decency and stopped short of filming nude showers inside the locker room.
But there will always be people in this world living as if conspiracy theories were gospel.
And these were guys who already rubbed everyone the wrong way just for being in first place — now they'd been cast as the targets of a conspiracy theory?
A convenient pretext had dropped right into their laps. Was there ever a sweeter moment to spin a juicy narrative?
"Exactly. There's no way that team is legitimately that good. It's all sign stealing, every last bit of it."
"Come to think of it, their record makes perfect sense if they already know every sign coming."
"Whether it's true or not, I just hope this shakes that team to its core."
They hadn't all been founded on the same day at the same hour, but in that moment, everyone pooled their strength for one purpose: tripping the Doubles at the ankles.
To hobble a team on a hot streak, they threw their full weight behind Incheon's manager and his 'sign-stealing conspiracy theory'.
For about long enough to rattle a team that cared about public opinion, it actually seemed to be landing.
The problem was a certain human being who gleefully concluded, 'If shaking them is legal, then my remarks are legal too!'
The fatal flaw: the team being shaken had Noh In-seong on it.
Blue bruises come from blue sources; suspicion comes from the one pointing the finger.
Merely shaking someone? That means nothing in front of a man who grabs you by the collar and rattles you.
The day after Game 1, at lunchtime.
Jeong Yong-jun had appeared at a joint press conference hoping to seize control of the narrative.
The star of the show, however, was not him.
"You know, there was this one guy who got fined once over sign-stealing stuff... the name was... huh? It's the same?"
God only knew where he'd dug up the details of In-seong's past fine,
But Noh In-seong—the man who thought “polite speech” was short for “polite comment-section talk”—ended up stealing the entire spotlight.
"And besides, would I really need to steal signs to break somebody's team? I just throw the ball at their ribs and it's over."
"......"
"Oh, sorry. That was your team, wasn't it. He's out with a rib injury, right? Should I send some galbitang soup to the hospital?"
It began with an exquisite act of teabagging — the smug declaration that he had no need to stoop to such petty tricks —
"So like, in that situation, how would anyone even know to throw the ball there, when the sign was—"
"Right? How'd you get fooled by a fake sign and throw it there anyway? Guess he shipped without a brain installed."
—followed by a courteous, bowing counterattack: Why, you've self-destructed all on your own! Much obliged!
"You know, watching our manager, I used to think managing was some incredibly difficult profession..."
But the pièce de résistance was the time-honored, history-steeped 'Mom's Friend's Son' technique.
"Watching you, though? I'm starting to think managing is just grinding your pitchers' shoulders into dust for results. Sounds stupidly easy."
Rant after rant, severe enough to plant genuine doubts about his chosen profession, carved deep gashes into the old manager's heart.
Faced with the Confucian precept that there is a proper order between elder and younger,
the law of the primordial age — from before Confucius, where who goes first had no particular order at all — came roaring back.
In the end, all Jeong Yong-jun had to show for it was a mass production of humiliating meme screenshots. The first gambit had failed.
So how did gambit number two — Beehive Baseball — fare?
"Is this acceptable?! It is NOT! Baseball gets abolished after this year, effective next season, is that it?!"
He found himself cornered into a situation where the pitching coach he himself had brought in was defying him to his face.
"Are you serious? If the manager gets fired, you think you'll walk away unscathed?!"
"Never mind me losing my job — do you think the pitchers are going to be safe?!"
They were screaming loud enough to make the veins in their necks bulge, and that told you everything:
the lame-duck situation was deepening by the hour.
The front office had always wanted to slap restrictions on how he used his players, here and there.
But because he kept proving himself with results,
they'd merely been forcing their smiles — heh heh... grrz... mleargh... — and biting their tongues.
Now they were flipping him the bird to his face: "Ha ha, if you're senile, stop smearing your filth on the walls and retire already."
Then again, with a 9th-place finish this year compared to last year's postseason run, that level of treatment was exactly what he deserved.
As for the pitchers — the results were there, so they kept quiet, but the relationship had been sour for a long time.
There used to be a strange tradition of venerating the manager as one's mentor for "giving you a chance."
Now it was the era of self-promotion and objective metrics. The baseline assumption was, 'I'd have made it just fine without you.'
Cho Hyo-jin, now with the Doubles, had been one of the players who defied him constantly.
When the manager told him to sit ready from the 3rd inning, he'd ask why he had to do that and protest nonstop.
He openly exploded at the front office — "If this is how it's going to be, trade me before free agency" — and got himself traded.
Between trades and releases, In-seong had assumed every pitcher who couldn't stomach his bullpen management was long gone.
FWOOSH—!!
"What do you gain by making Sa-rang pitch like this?! Can't you even manage your own players properly?!"
"Defiance mid-game?! This son of a—?!"
A pitcher had appeared, hurling his glove right next to his own manager's head, beside the broadcast camera drone.
It was the moment Jin Woo-jeong's coup d'état went live nationwide.
Rolling back the clock — why was Jin Woo-jeong this furious? That deserves some explanation.
After second brother Jin Noh-ryeok had been knocked out after three innings, today was the youngest, Jin Sa-rang's, turn in the rotation.
Jin Sa-rang was still green, sure, but he was a fine pitcher whose name was already circulating on the national team's reserve list.
A steady hurler who mixed four-seam fastballs, cutters, and curveballs.
Even Noh In-seong couldn't stay hot forever, and through five innings today, Sa-rang hadn't allowed a single hit.
The fans, who'd been verbally tortured by that devil all series, cheered wildly at the sight of him trudging back to the dugout in dejection.
As they lavished praise on Jin Sa-rang — he'll inherit Incheon's ace mantle someday —
"...Ah, my shoulder feels stiff..."
the man himself was feeling a fatigue beyond anything words could describe.
Holding the opposition scoreless through five innings was all well and good — except his pitch count had already blown past one hundred.
"That doomed bastard burned seventeen pitches on me all by himself."
Noh In-seong was the biggest problem, forcing eight and nine pitches in his two plate appearances respectively.
A man whose philosophy was: if my condition's bad, let's detonate the opponent's condition together — grinding out at-bats with maddening, stubborn persistence.
He'd managed to hold them scoreless in the end, but Sa-rang's stamina reserves were already scraped down to bedrock.
Still, I'm a young pitcher. I need managing. Surely this is where it ends? — he'd let his guard down, and that was when—
"Sa-rang, I'm counting on you for the sixth, too."
Jeong Yong-jun clapped him on the shoulder and invoked his sacred doctrine: shoulders grow stronger the more you throw them.
Jin Sa-rang was neither a veteran nor a player with overwhelming numbers who could throw his weight around inside the clubhouse.
In other words, all he could do was gulp and head back out — y-yes sir, I'll give it a go!
He hung what little hope he had on the thought that if he just threw a bit longer, they'd pull him.
Fortunately, he still had something left in the tank; through two outs, he hadn't burned many pitches.
The problem was this guy.
CRACK—!!
Whether by design or not, another pitch thrown right down the middle smacked into the backstop netting,
and watching it slide slowly down the mesh,
Jin Sa-rang found himself wishing he, too, could slide slowly down like that.
"Hah... hah..."
In-seong's relentless endurance game made the fatigue pile up faster and faster.
Just as Jin Sa-rang — feeling the sensation slowly draining from his shoulder — gripped the ball and threw once more,
POP—!!
a strange sound echoed from somewhere inside his body.
Noh In-seong's foul-ball campaign (?) had finally left a fatal wound on the opposing pitcher.
The ball he was supposed to throw slipped with a soft tap out of a hand that could no longer form its grip.
"Ah... ahh!"
Unable to bear the pain, the young pitcher clutched his shoulder with his opposite hand.
It was a rotator cuff injury.
Grind, grind, grind....
Jin Woo-jeong had been gritting his teeth this whole time at a manager who still refused to pull the youngest after a pitch count like that,
and after Jin Sa-rang walked off clutching his shoulder, Woo-jeong took the mound as the next pitcher.
He'd been out in the bullpen, so he didn't know the details — all he knew was that his little brother had gone to the hospital.
"...Hurry. Get there as fast as you possibly can."
Sign exchanges and whatever else could wait. Whether anyone got a hit off him or not, he prayed for nothing but the end of this inning as he threw.
Perhaps it was the power of sheer focus.
He disposed of a thoroughly out-of-sorts Noh In-seong with a single pitch, closed out the inning,
then sprinted to the dugout and hurled his glove straight at the Human Butcher's head.
"You insane bloodsucking bastard! You think you're the manager here?!"
And what came next was the turn of hair and collars.
"GHHKAAAH...!! Somebody get this guy off me!!"
"Grab him! I said grab him! Why aren't you holding him back, you guys...?"
The pitchers all watched with bitter, knowing eyes — tacit agreement with Woo-jeong —
while only the position players made a show of holding him back, broadcasting to the nation the current state of Jeong Yong-jun's authority.
Thus, after an incident lasting a full minute and more,
a barely-calmed Jin Woo-jeong declared he was going to see his brother and walked straight out of the stadium.
Jeong Yong-jun, who had endured everything from the hair down to far less dignified regions of his body right there in the dugout, sat staring blankly for a while.
"...The pitching coach will take the boys and finish out today's game."
"...Understood."
He led his dust-covered body away, off to somewhere unseen.
With the team called the Incheon Astro quite literally split in two, what could anyone possibly still accomplish?
The manager had been overthrown by his own subordinates, and all that remained was an interim skipper.
"...Haah."
What else could he do? He had no choice but to lose.
As the Doubles trampled Incheon — a team whose teamwork had crumbled into scattered grains of sand —
they capped off the final game of July with a victory.