The First in History
It was the hour when Game 1 of a playoff series kicked off — a lion summoning a bear into its own den.
Meanwhile, we were in the middle of a practice game against the Superstars.
"Honestly, I really don't get why we have to play a game against you people."
"I know why, but I'm not telling you."
"You little punk?"
As I watched the opposing catcher's blood pressure climb, I kept poking the bear for fun.
"By the way, are you seriously okay leaving your infield looking like that? I'm on base with nobody out here."
Tik-!
"...Ah! That damned bastard just laid down a bunt in a practice game...!!"
What does it matter? Go find me the rule that says you can't bunt in an exhibition game.
The opposing catcher, Kim Soo-ho, grumbled at us for dragging him into a practice game he never asked for, but think positively — you're going to be our backup next year, so shouldn't you be happy about it?
Sure, he'd survived the season just fine, but players deemed unusable for the following year didn't even get sent out for practice games at all.
Looking at who took the field, it felt like a mash of prospects sprinkled with a few first-teamers — a messy, disjointed thing where the team chemistry just didn't click.
'...Kang Ji-hoon didn't come out. So he really is trade bait after all.'
Ever since the Superstars had been flipped upside down over rumors that they were selling off their only All-Star, one way or another.
But if he wasn't included in next year's roster, there was only one answer.
If they wanted to make a fall baseball run, they'd need starters and a batting lineup more than bullpen arms, clearly.
Jeong Jae-yoon, was it? He sold off the good stuff, so now the good stuff's coming in. Felt like that kind of deal.
"Well, in a sense the hunt ended there, so does that mean I get to live? How heartless."
"...It's all fine, but please, please stop saying that while secretly scooting your foot off the base..."
Seol Ho-jin, who normally played third base, was standing at first.
"Are you Song Jin-wook's understudy or something? Weren't you a third baseman originally?"
He hits a home run off me and still eats well off it, apparently. Next year, I'm putting you on special watch.
Meanwhile — just like the opposing catcher, who'd been driven half-mad by Noh In-seong's dazzling bat work — this time it was the Doubles' starting pitcher who was about to lose his mind.
"...OH. MY. GOD. That was a ball any seventh-grader — no, any eighth-grader should have caught, guaranteed."
Caleb James closed both eyes and replayed what had just happened to him.
'The shortstop, In-seong, fielded it and threw to first. Off the glove, two fouls. Runner takes second.'
It was defense that had always fed him the biggest steaming piles of misery, but seeing it again after so long made the shock hit that much harder.
"Song! Stop catching balls like it's some borderline miracle and put your body in front of the throw if you have to!"
Noh In-seong, who'd made the throw, waved his middle and index fingers in an elaborate flourish at the first baseman who'd fumbled something so easy, but—
"You think that's easy?! Do you have any idea how fast that throw was coming in?!"
Reality, meanwhile, had apparently transplanted feet where his hands should be — Song Jin-wook, unable to even receive a proper throw, was the one yelling back.
"SSONG! You—ugh! Miss even one and you're DEAD!"
For Caleb, already hypersensitive about defense to begin with, practice game or no practice game, his blood was boiling.
In a short series, the big swing and reliable pitching are what decide everything.
Jeong Im-taek had run an experiment: with Caleb dealing, could he maybe stick Song Jin-wook at first base?
"...Yeah, forget it. Two errors in three innings. Unbelievable."
Just as the manager had judged — it had not gone well.
"It works in theory!" — it reminded me of the people who tried to bottle nitroglycerin.
Everything exploded, is the point. Damn it.
"The guy memorizes hitting theory and opposing pitchers' data like it's nothing — why can't he memorize defense?"
Is it the power of love? If you can't field, you might be saying goodbye to your butt — permanently — any day now.
"Ugh, and now whenever I go to smack him, he sees it coming and dodges. So clearly the learning is working somewhere."
"You maniac! Why can't you learn not to just beat on people?!"
The difference was that Noh In-seong had no intention of learning at all. Still, the two of them were pretty much the same.
I once heard that the things a person can't do are hardcoded into their genes.
"Ah! He dropped that one...!"
"Damn it, the ball and the glove were more than twenty centimeters apart. What exactly was there to 'almost' catch?"
Looking at it that way, this man seems to have been born without the defense gene entirely.
"Haah... Please, just don't screw up during my starts. That's all I ask."
Noh In-seong grumbled, a little full of himself.
This was a man whose oWAR could win an MVP in any given year.
"Hey, hey — you and I are the only ones who ever come through with clutch hits in each other's games anyway."
"...And you're the only lunatic who's thrown back-to-back passed balls in my games, you insane bastard!"
PEO-NG-!
In the history of Korean baseball, his dWAR ranked among the ten worst stone gloves of all time.
2051 season totals. Thirty-one errors.
Second-worst ever recorded — and this lunatic's combined starts at first and third base across that campaign? Twenty-six.
"...He played fewer than thirty defensive games...!!"
The more fans, managers, and Noh In-seong himself looked at it, the more they wanted to slap their own foreheads.
While the Doubles were slowly focusing on getting their own condition up to speed—
"GRAAAGH! Look at these crazy bastards, clinging on until the bitter end!"
"Please, just stop...!! Keep this up and you'll die AND we'll die...!!"
"Heheh. You're not going anywhere! No — I'm not letting you go! We're bleeding out over here, so why should you get to thrive?!"
Daegu had no choice but to focus on prying off a bear that was hanging on for its life, soaked in blood.
When they'd won Game 1, and then Game 2 as well, the bears had been thinking rather differently.
'These guys must have burned through all their stamina fighting Gwangju!'
'Let's wrap this up fast, conserve as much energy as we can, and get ready for the Korean Series!'
They'd trusted their own weight class, pushed hard and straight through to victory — so it wasn't an unreasonable read. The Grizzlies really were out of gas.
"We gave away the first two games on purpose. We'd planned to start the series for real from Game 3 all along."
That's what it meant — right up until they started throwing J-Lo and Hector out there one after another while spouting this kind of insanity.
"Tch."
"First time back at Jamsil in a while, isn't it? You did us quite the entertaining favor at the end of the season."
They'd handed over every away game they could afford to lose — but this place was the cave where the lion lived.
Jamsil's absolute, overwhelming pro-pitcher tendencies had cleanly snuffed out the firepower show of Games 1 and 2.
"A hitting battle in a dome this cavernous? There's no such thing."
Handing a slugger's team a park they despised, then beating them down with two well-rested mercenaries — it was sharp, ruthless chess.
Buoyed by their starters' length, the Grizzlies showed real staying power, snatching two straight games right back.
Only after the rested pair of aces had dragged the series to 2-2 did the lion come back to its senses.
"Damn it. Fine — we pour out everything we've got! This is no time to pace ourselves!"
"...Understood, sir."
Every scrap of available strength, every scrap that wasn't — they dumped it all in and prepared for total war.
Pitchers stacked shoulder to shoulder in both bullpens from the very first inning.
"We will win. Anything less than a championship is last place — isn't that right, Daegu's manager?"
"I believe our seniors of the past have missed enough opportunities when they came. We won't be missing ours."
And above all that, a mutual roast session of extraordinary intensity.
Two predators with nowhere left to retreat came out to tear the flesh from each other's bones.
Game 5 of their playoff was about to unfold in Daegu.
After everyone had finished checking their fundamentals, we settled in to watch that final Game 5.
"Ugh, I'm heading in first!"
"You'll be dripping blood on the way. Whoever you are."
A situation arose in which the married men bailed first.
It was mostly the guys who couldn't bear to face their wives if they stayed up too late—
"Hey. Great work out there, everyone. Haha..."
Even Choon-sik couldn't escape this fate. Ah, poor Choon-sik.
"Thank god it's somebody else's playoffs."
Did the captain just say that? This is the guy who's usually all 'let's work even harder, everyone.'
"...Well, seeing you look at me like that, I get why that sounds weird..."
But I agreed with him. Because even in the bottom of the ninth, it still wasn't over.
Jong Min-soo was trudging slowly back toward the dugout from first base, lamenting his fate.
"Unbelievable. Those filthy bastards. They didn't hesitate for even a second before catching him."
Noh In-seong shuddered. The bears really were frighteningly good at playing baseball with zero romance in it.
Ever since the Gwangju series, they'd shown no reluctance whatsoever about walking the opponent's big bats.
Rather than letting a man take a mighty swing, they'd rather he take a mighty jog to first — that was their judgment.
If there was nothing to be won from the matchup, they simply refused to try it. Genuinely shrewd.
"Honestly, I'll probably end up walked like that someday too. Should I be stealing more bases?"
That gentleman over there was so fat that if he tried to steal, his knees would explode — so he never had to worry about it.
Vowing to make him pay with an intentional beanball if they ever walked him, Noh In-seong lay in wait.
Meanwhile, Daegu, too, bluntly removed one man from a scoring chance.
Except this time it wasn't the opponent's most dangerous hitter — it was the man batting in front of him.
Walk Seong Ji-chang, face Kim Seong-ju. Having just been Sung-Geo-Kim'd, Kim Seong-ju went red in the face.
"You bastards. Do I look like a pushover to you?"
Tik!
"Hey! If you're mad, just walk on by! Who told the rookie to come over and pick a fight?!"
"Back off! Don't stick your chest out! You want a punch?!"
A crowd swarming in, bellies out, fists conspicuously not flying — a thoroughly pathetic bench-clearing.
Usually, viewers would split down the middle and litigate 'whose fault was it.'
But somehow, this time they couldn't.
This was an era when a half-hearted bench-clearing barely registered anymore.
Setting aside whether the players themselves got fired up — from the fans' perspective, it was a letdown.
They'd expected at least a few punches thrown, and instead it was exactly the same old theater as ever.
The umpires waded in, and after dispersing with nothing of substance accomplished, both teams' momentum simply fizzled out.
The tenth inning passed without incident on either side.
And then, the top of the eleventh. Regardless of whether a bench-clearing broke out or not, there was one man who stayed calm.
CRACK-AAANG---!!
He drove out a single swing — and succeeded in changing the score of an extra-inning war.
The old warhorse, at the moment of greatest need, scored the run he'd wanted most desperately.
The only man on the team still capable of keeping his cool tore loose the single run his team required.
"Swing — strike three! Batter out!"
The youngest pitcher on the staff protected that one run, and at last the exhausted bear collapsed on top of the lion.
The bear was worn down, too — too spent to do anything more.
Aside from the minor detail that the lion, crushed beneath that weight, had cracked several ribs and could no longer breathe.
The outcome being decided was thrilling in its own right — but there was something even more symbolic waiting beyond it.
With the Grizzlies now set to sit across from the Doubles in the Korean Series—
A freak record — one that had never materialized even by the year 2051 — had finally come to pass.
"Whoa. This is real?"
On the day Game 5 was played, that thing so many outlets had hedged over with 'this year? Really? Could it be?'
The Korean Series, held at Jamsil—
At long last, it would open in the very year Noh In-seong made his debut.
"So this is when Korean baseball starts its decline. The year they start hosting circuses like this."
Song Jin-wook answered the mutter.
"Things went downhill the moment you debuted, if you ask m— KUGH!"
"Shut up! Go field your position! Six errors across two practice games — you, of all people!"
Can we really entrust first base to this lunatic? Noh In-seong was genuinely agonizing over it.
Time marches on. For those who couldn't rest properly, who couldn't finish preparing—
"Ahh, no games meant I actually got to sleep in. Life is good."
—or for those with no conscience at all, the hands of the clock spun along just fine.
The thing everyone had been waiting for. One day before the Korean Series, Media Day arrived.
"Our starter will be Noh In-seong."
The opposing manager's face, watching Jeong Im-taek say it so brazenly with naked envy, was a sight to behold.
His own club, with its pitchers worn to the bone, was in the position of scraping together the healthiest body they could find.
'They're just throwing their trump card on the table the moment it starts.'
Thanks to his history with the PED suspension, J-Lo was the one whose muscle loss was least severe, so he got the nod.
'...Can we actually win this?'
The Grizzlies' manager could do nothing but pray that In-seong would simply have an off day tomorrow.
"Noh In-seong. Feeling confident? Think the opposition looks a bit too worn out?"
"...I feel like the real scandal here is asking two questions in a single breath. Yes."
First the jab, then the answer. What a lunatic.
"I'm confident, and the fact that they're dead tired is wonderful news. I'll make sure they're even more tired when they go home."
Glaring at his opponents with bloodshot eyes, practically begging someone, anyone, to let him tear just one of them apart.
And so Noh In-seong stood before the bears for the first time in history on a full three weeks of rest.
The most he'd ever managed before was a single week.
If stamina were a visible gauge, his alone would have shown up in a completely different color.
"Look forward to it, you two pill-heads."
"...What is he planning this time."
Jeong Im-taek, the man tasked with keeping this madman on a leash, shuddered with dread.
It was one day before the Korean Series opened at Jamsil.