There's No Set Order on the Road
Meanwhile, on the other side of the league, the front office was deep in its own back-and-forth with the manager as well.
Though in fairness, the atmosphere over here was a little different — positively heartwarming, in fact.
"Phew... we can finally breathe a little, eh."
"You're telling me. We're safely in the clear now."
"— Great work at the meeting, everyone! Oh, come now... you all worked just as hard..."
Unlike the Incheon general manager's office — where the mood was so goddamn toxic that if open hostility hadn't been strictly banned, somebody would have ended up dead — the Doubles' conference room was warm and familial, like one big family gathering.
The regular meeting between the Doubles' front office and the manager and coaching staff had just wrapped up.
In the early and middle stretch of the season, the room had been a gladiator pit where everyone grabbed each other by the hair and hurled abuse. But by this point in the year, it had transformed into a convivial social affair where everyone traded pleasantries over coffee.
The final three-game series against Incheon had come to an end, and the shape of the season was finally coming into focus.
With 108 games now played, the Doubles had that series completely behind them. What remained was a two-game set and a handful of rain-postponed makeups — comparatively light duty from here on out.
And the moment the championship was mathematically clinched, the Doubles intended to start giving their rookies real opportunities.
"Of course, the ones chasing titles will have to play right up to the end..."
Benching those players would have looked bad, so there was nothing to be done about it. And Noh In-seong — whose name was draped across half the title races in the league — was the one player they absolutely could not pull.
Rookie of the Year. MVP. Home run king. Golden Gloves at both pitcher and shortstop. There wasn't a single award he wasn't contending for.
"It would be no exaggeration to say this year's championship belongs entirely to that kid."
Even with roughly two months of season left, the MVP race was as good as decided. When a rookie is putting up MVP numbers on a legitimate contender, the regular-season title was a given. The human superglue who'd filled every hole in the Doubles' roster would be played exactly as much as he wanted to be.
"...Of course, we all know perfectly well there's another reason too, Manager Jeong."
"...Ahem!"
The truth was, this kid's rate of causing incidents and accidents on his days off ran even higher than that. Better to hand him rest at the tail end of the season than let him cook up who-knows-what elsewhere. This was, after all, a man who broke something big or small every single Monday. More rest? What would that be if not an increase in his disaster ratio?
"Let us pray this coming Monday passes without incident."
"Please... amen...!!"
"O Buddha... what did I ever do to deserve this...!!"
One by one, they clutched the symbols of their respective faiths. The Doubles' front office, having long since exhausted what could be smoothed over with the press, raised their prayers to the heavens.
The general manager's clasped hands — his hairline having retreated a noticeable notch since the start of the season — looked utterly pitiful.
Meanwhile, the presumptive 2051 MVP (genuine article) had, after work on Sunday evening, switched his own stream on.
The original plan for Noh In-seong was a chill stream — shooting the breeze with his fans to decompress.
Simply put: shoot the shit, demolish some late-night snacks, sleep in, and show up to work the next day well rested. The season was long, and a Tuesday game was right around the corner. Condition recovery was the top priority.
People come in all temperaments, sure, and there were indeed a few mild-mannered fans who knew better than to poke Noh In-seong's personality.
But this was the internet, and by the natural law of usernames, there were just as many unhinged people as there were handles.
"...Is that username for real? No, wait — is this a tradition now?"
OpposingTeamTortureMachineNohInseong donated 2,000 won!
Why do you play the game so brutally? What did you feel when you saw the opposing pitcher in pain?
"Feel what? You think I've got some kind of pain fetish? Sure, it's a shame, but that's where it ends."
A streamer's audience converges on the streamer's own average — and the cheap questions came flooding in by the bucketful. And every time he answered one, the chat would erupt all over again.
"Ah. To think my viewership includes people this low-brow."
He tried to ignore them, but his hate-watch traffic was simply too high — the aggro just kept flooding in. The trolls who'd shown up thinking this was a festival quickly realized it was a funeral, and started ladling out the funeral soup anyway.
Turning on the stream meant wading into a swamp of trolls brawling with each other nonstop.
"No, deliberately fouling off pitches is HARDER! How many times do I have to say it?!"
Driven to rage by this catastrophically brain-dead debate unfolding in real time, Noh In-seong finally snapped.
"Ugh, this is suffocating. Fine! Hey! Subscriber event! If you can foul off MY pitch, you win — I lose!"
In that instant, a legendary shitshow convened itself, Alexander-style, to cut the Gordian knot clean through.
"Well, whatever. Works out fine. Seeing as it's come to this, subscribe to my channel and enter the event."
Whether it would end in a funeral remained to be seen, but an event was an event. So, yeah.
This was the moment Noh In-seong's fan meet-and-greet mutated into the World's Best Foul Contest.
The next day — Monday, the ballplayers' day off.
A subscriber-only notice went up on Noh In-seong's gaming channel.
A public execution for everyone with a loose mouth was about to take place at In-seong's alma mater.
It really had been a long time since he'd set foot on school grounds.
How long had it been since graduation? Seven months now, give or take?
So much had happened in that time... so very much.
"Quit the fake nostalgia act, you bastard. Why'd you drag a busy man all the way out here?"
Whether or not he understood the sanctity of my sentimental little heart, this old classmate of mine just kept prodding away.
I'd called in Deok Jin-man to serve as today's assistant — and, secondarily, to make a donation to the school. Among the two of us, you're the only one who became a genuinely successful businessman, after all.
"...No, you lunatic. If that was all you needed, I could've just dropped off the money and left. Why strap me into full catcher's gear?"
"You'll balloon up too if you never move and sit at a desk all day. Let's get some exercise in."
"...Squatting behind the plate is still sitting, so I'd say this is actually worse for me?"
Fair point. A direct hit, even. Going from backstop to ordinary citizen sure had given the man a mouth on him, though.
After all, to run the World's Best Foul Contest, I needed a dedicated ball-receiver of my own.
"When the crowd shows up, all you have to do is catch. From this moment forward, your name is Deok-choon."
"Back then and now, you're good for my life in some way or another — and annoying as hell in equal measure."
Still, a toast to you — you're the only one whose food company can run product placement in my videos, after all.
Thus the two benefactors of their alma mater stepped into a school gone empty for summer break, each profiting off the other.
Noh In-seong was popular for his assorted antics and acts of pure madness, with results layered on top. For the casual fan, you might say he sprinkled fun onto a sport that otherwise offered nine innings of dopamine drought. The moment things looked even slightly dull, he'd bust out a dance at first base, sprint hard for second, and humiliate the pitcher on the way. He'd launch a home run and follow it with a side flip, a front flip, and a backflip — from his celebration routines on down, there wasn't a single dull moment to be found.
A low murmur rippled through the grounds....
"...Agh, damn it. I figured a handful of guys would show up."
"Your shoulder's gonna pop out at this rate. Keep grinding, champ."
A production built to roast a handful of people had, predictably, metastasized into a full-scale spectacle in the blink of an eye. The crowd poured in, and In-seong scrambled to requisition additional equipment with the school's enthusiastic cooperation.
"Oh my, of course we simply MUST lend it out! To whom, you ask? Why, to our greatest benefactors!"
To the two patrons of the school baseball team, the school declared a grand amnesty and threw open the equipment warehouse doors.
Call it a blessing — not everyone in attendance had actually come for the World's Best Foul Contest. There was the reporter who'd been dying to know what the hell this was all about, and plenty of locals who'd shown up simply because it was close by.
The format: eight of yesterday's trolls, plus eight chosen on-site, battling through to a final showdown. Since In-seong would only pitch in the finals, the preliminaries required the contestants to pitch to each other in a desperate attempt to manufacture foul balls.
THWACK--!!
"KYAAAAGH...!!"
"Wh...whoa?! I'm so sorry!"
Of course, even just hurling a ball some seven-and-a-half centimeters across and roughly 145 grams forward — in the intended direction — was no easy feat.
Which is to say, a free-for-all carnage unfolded in which every participant gave their absolute all to destroy their neighbor. The basic protective gear went on, but the balls flew wherever they pleased, and people started dropping left and right.
And yet not one of them could breathe a word of complaint to Noh In-seong.
Because of the thing fluttering so jauntily in his hand!
"You did... sign the waiver, after all."
Liability rests with the signatory — so go ahead and take your DAMAGE, gentlemen.
A malicious fan event planned with exactly this outcome in mind from the very first minute — the kind of thing only Noh In-seong could have cooked up.
Be that as it may, once the every-man-for-himself cull had run its course, sixteen warriors remained standing. From that point on, Noh In-seong took the mound personally.
"STEP INTO THE BOX SHOUTING YOUR USERNAME AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS!"
"I am OpposingTeamTortureMachineNohInseong! You insane foul-machine bastard!"
"...So it was YOU?! You absolute lunatic!"
A student wearing a perfectly normal face over a completely alien psyche settled into his stance.
And Noh In-seong delivered the first pitch — off-speed, with his opposite hand.
WHUMP--!!
"...AAAAAAGH!!!"
Inside, burying itself deep — a modest ~135 km/h toss, but its trajectory was pure terror. Pitching machines don't throw at your body, and they certainly don't throw anything that looks like it's hunting your elbow. The confidence of the student who'd prepped with a high-speed machine — the one sporting a username along the lines of ThatLongOne — evaporated on the spot.
"I forfeit! FORFEIT!"
"Good. Don't ever cross me again."
One ball was more than enough to eliminate one man.
Next up, an unexpected face took the box — and lent the occasion a certain shine.
"You seemed to be having such a wonderful time asking me questions the other day, Reporter Jeong. What happened?"
"Ah... I'm dead. You remember me."
The reporter who'd relentlessly grilled him about whether the fouls were intentional turned out to be one of the trolls all along. Apparently the man genuinely believed that fouls could be produced on demand.
Not even a troll — just a reporter who asks the same stubborn question forever. Unbelievable.
So this is why ignorant people with unshakable conviction are so exhausting to deal with.
"You're no stranger to baseball, sir, so I'll be throwing with my real arm."
"Why am I the only one getting special treatment?!"
"Give it a swing. So much as graze it, and I'll personally supply you with clickbait for the rest of your career."
"Then let's begin immediately."
To a reporter, story material is pageviews, and pageviews are money. That was more than reason enough for Reporter Jeong's eyes to spin in their sockets as he lunged at the box.
"Alright! Throwing at exactly that punk's level! 150!"
The ball breaking toward his body sounded different from the very first instant — and hit differently too. Swing? A swing makes a sound, sure. To survive, the only option was to flee the batter's box.
Reporter Jeong's survival instincts moved his body for him, naturally and without consultation.
"Tch, you coward. NEXT!"
And so he proudly inscribed his name onto the list of the one-and-done.
From there, one ball per troll remained the going rate. The fella who'd strutted around bragging about his company-league experience couldn't even get the bat around on a single 140 km/h slider. The thirty-year-old who'd shown up with a bunt strategy in his back pocket was treated to vivid hallucinations of his fingers shattering.
"If that terrifies you, then how exactly do you imagine I go about fouling pitches off on purpose?"
"......"
The reason Noh In-seong survived despite running his mouth like that was simple: his talent for fleecing everyone around him. A realistic, scientific, utterly merciless philosophy of baseball was engraved into every brain on the field that day.
As for the general-admission entrants — well, watching all that had filled them to the brim with survival instinct in place of fighting spirit.
"Oof, yeah, I'm forfeiting."
"One hit from that thing and I'm a dead man."
"SPARE ME, PLEASE...!! I was wrong...!!"
One after another, they all bowed out in a tidy line.
In truth, In-seong's plan had always been to cut things off once they reached the round of sixteen — hand out the appearance fees and the subscription gifts, and send everyone home happy. He distributed the prizes one by one, snapped a friendly group photo with the whole crowd, and sent them on their way.
"By now, I trust you all understand that if you're going to run your mouths like that, this is the kind of sit-down you'll be having with me?"
"YES, SIR!"
And so Noh In-seong's viewer-taming program appeared to draw to a successful close.
But the world is full of madmen — and madder men still.
OpposingTeamTortureMachineNohInseong refused to yield and kept fanning the flames, while Reporter Jeong stayed hard at work grinding out articles dripping with dopamine.
"...This absolute lunatic?!"
Everyone else had gone quiet? Utterly meaningless.
Because these two simply got that much louder to compensate!
"You want this to happen to you AGAIN?! Have you people learned nothing?!"
No matter how hard In-seong raged, this was the kind of answer he got back:
"So what you're saying is, a few weeks of bed rest and the exclusive scoop is mine. When's the next event? I'll need to talk my trash again."
What they had chosen, in essence, was this: sure, eat a momentary humiliation — then just show up and get humiliated again next time. One of them was a genuinely certifiable madman; the other was a man chased by his own livelihood, so his position was to squeeze his eyes shut and take the beating.
"...Ah, you absolute bastards."
For the first time since he'd turned professional — a rare occurrence indeed — Noh In-seong felt the crushing taste of total defeat.