Beat the Senior, Teach the Rookies
Even as Noh In-seong and the Doubles players were being run into the ground, the reporters were burning with curiosity.
"...No, look, Song Jin-wook's salary I get, but how much is this bastard making this year?"
It was the salary Noh In-seong had agreed upon with the Doubles front office, to be announced later when the timing was right for a media play. Not a single soul in the press knew the figure or the reasoning behind it — not even by the time spring camp rolled around in January.
Go ask the front office, and all you got was, "The player has requested to announce it himself."
And since the player gave interviews entirely on his own terms, there was no opportunity for contact in the first place.
Beg him in person, flying all the way to America?
"Sure, I'll accept your plea. You sure work hard at wasting time. Get out."
He was the kind of man you counted yourself lucky just for not hearing that from.
"He's definitely making far more than Song Jin-wook, but I wonder exactly how much."
Ten billion won or more was a given — anything beyond that was a mystery. They needed at least a rough number before opening day if they wanted to pump out comparison pieces.
Yet even as the reporters stewed in frustration, Noh In-seong stayed silent.
The reason was simple.
"Ugh, I'm dying. What interviews? Look at that lunatic's defensive range."
The man collapsed from exhaustion after every single fielding drill. Where exactly was he supposed to find the energy for press obligations?
Yesterday center field, today right field, tomorrow first base and third base practice...
"What? Well, if I were catchi— oh, wait, no. Never mind. If I were wearing the catcher's mask, that would mean the team was already in shambles."
If he of all people had to strap on catcher's gear, it would mean his own draft classmate was already in the hospital.
Noh In-seong hated suffering, but he had no desire to torpedo the season, so he spat out a mouthful of sand-flavored saliva.
"Ptui, ptui, ptui. Cancel that."
The unwritten rule of superstitious ballplayers terrified that words might become seeds. It was a contract-cancellation gesture.
***
"The reporters are mad at us, and we're the ones getting chewed out when we didn't do anything, sir?"
Even when the front office called him, Noh In-seong was utterly unbothered.
"It's not even February yet. There's plenty of time to announce it. I've got a lot on my plate."
If you blocked my training just to write your articles, that'd be putting the cart before the horse, wouldn't it?
He already had to level up as a pitcher, and the growing list of defensive positions kept him busier than ever.
The one small mercy was that he didn't need to install any new breaking balls.
"I mean, I can already adjust a four-seam, a two-seam, a changeup, a curve, and a slider."
Six pitch types at his command already. At this point, deepening his mastery of what he had was the smarter play.
Balancing his pitching workload was the slightly more pressing issue.
But all the pitching coach had to offer was, "How about we just work on your flexibility?" — so what could you do?
"Ugh. This kind of grunt work is not my hobby..."
All he could do was run the drills one by one while staring at the physical load charts the holograms drew up.
But Noh In-seong was a two-way player with defense on top. His hitting needed serious adjustment too.
"Your whole body got bigger! Obviously the swing has to rotate in sync with that new body or you won't hit a thing!"
His frame had changed, so the batting form had to be rebuilt slowly, checking its range of motion piece by piece.
"No, no! It's dropping a little! Your takeback is spraying open, I'm telling you!"
"...Hold on. Why am I the one getting drilled here when I'm the senior?"
"Why do you think? Because I fixed my swing ages ago. Get to work, new recruit."
Of course, the slight wrinkle was that the swing being referenced wasn't his own.
Noh In-seong had enlisted as an assistant, and he was remodeling Sung Hyun-tak.
"In-seong, make sure he doesn't do that. His swing's spraying open the old way again."
"Yes, sir."
THWACK--!!
"AAAAGH!! You hit me in the exact same spot as before!"
The professor: the hitting coach. The teaching assistant: Noh In-seong.
And so began Sung Hyun-tak's hellish thesis defense on the subject of "batting form."
***
This was where months of disciplined winter training, free of any fooling around, paid off in full.
His own corrections were already complete — which meant he now had front-row seats to watch someone else suffer.
THWACK--!!
"OW!!"
"There it goes again, the swing spraying open! If that's how you're gonna hit, then lose the weight and go back to second base!!"
The only difference, from a spectator's standpoint, was that the show was in 4D and uncomfortably vivid. But what could you do?
If he was sore about it, he should have prepared in advance for all the weight he'd gained.
Sung Hyun-tak was absorbing the full aftershock of the bulk-up disaster he had summoned upon himself.
In Sung Hyun-tak's not-so-long life,
he had been through an athletic program's brutal curriculum more than once or twice.
But never, not once, had he run into a persist... no, a human being as relentless as this one.
"The power transfer's breaking down! In-seong! Lock that man's swing in place and make him move!"
"Argh, you insane bastard. You went back to that dinky slap-hitter swing again! Get your elbow inside?!"
THWACK-!
Get hit, or do it right. Sung Hyun-tak had to endure the pain of this insane either-or.
"OW!! Come on, a batting form doesn't get fixed in a day or two!"
Sung Hyun-tak's protest, perfectly reasonable by any normal standard of common sense,
was invariably answered with: "It'll fix itself if I hit you! So fix it! Whap!"
The old 45-degree-angle TV-corner repair technique, applied to a human being.
Wait... when that bastard was born, TVs hadn't been repaired that way in ages...?
He was a man of the bezel-free television era, raised on holograms.
And yet here was Sung Hyun-tak, taking the CRT-era repair maneuver square on the body.
"Swing, rotate compactly. Whap!"
"OW!!"
Where on earth had he learned these appliance-repair methods,
and why was he applying them to him? Sung Hyun-tak simply could not comprehend it.
***
The Marine-Corps-style batting correction program: fix it by force, by any means necessary.
Astonishingly — whether thanks to the terror of the bat, or simply because he hated being smacked around by a junior with less service time —
"Oh! It's getting a little better?!"
"Ugh, would you quit with the... you bastard... it feels like smoke's coming off my butt..."
Sung Hyun-tak's swing had narrowly, barely, settled back within normal parameters.
I must NEVER let this lunatic near the rookies...
As his backside swelled to roughly 1.15 times its original size, Sung Hyun-tak was thinking the most obvious thought in the world.
But later, after watching Noh In-seong's lectures for the two rookies with uneasy eyes,
he saw the treatment they received was heaven and earth apart from his own, and filed a protest of his own.
"Hey! You beat me, so why not the kids?!"
"You, Hyung, only understand things once you've been hit. These kids watched me beat you."
They figured, on their own, that if they didn't behave, the madman would come for them too.
"And on top of that — it's fine when a senior gets smacked around by a junior, but if it's the other way..."
--Noh In-seong assaults juniors?! If that happened, it'd be all over the news, wouldn't it?
When a junior thoroughly outclasses a senior, it gets buried. But if a senior lays a hand on a junior, that's abuse of power.
Sung Hyun-tak grew a little wistful, wiping from his eyes the moisture welling up from his heart.
It was the desert, after all. Dust must have gotten in his eye.
***
While Noh In-seong was grinding away at his pitching balance in the indoor bullpen,
he caught the two rookies sighing as they agonized over how to find their own strengths.
What good was listening to a brilliant lecture from the pitching coach,
when the look on their faces clearly said, I understood absolutely nothing! Speak Korean, you bastard!
Noh In-seong beckoned the two trembling newbies over with a flick of his finger.
"Rookies. Over here. Come here, I said."
"...Yes, sir!"
"Yes!"
The second-year man — a former team MVP who had once administered his own eye-level education to Sung Hyun-tak — summoned the first-year recruits.
And once summoned, one naturally concluded it was best to answer promptly and politely.
They could feel it in their bones that fooling around with a senior whose rumors were this strange would leave them without even the soup from the pot.
Whoa... his sheer size is on a completely different level from back then...
Even back then, his shots cleared the stadium walls. If he homered off himself now, how far would it fly?
Back when they were sophomores, they'd even been on the receiving end of home runs off junior-year Noh In-seong.
In other words, they were the generation that had experienced Noh In-seong-phobia more intensely than anyone.
Whether it was Song Soo-ho or Jin Seong-min, both had been elite even within the cramped world of high school baseball.
But no elite was a match for a legendary senior who had spent all three years of high school baseball gripping the sport by the throat and crushing it.
"...Right. So it seems my words aren't getting through."
""It's like listening to an alien!""
The pitching coach's masterful lectures came back at them as a deep, gut-level sense of betrayal.
Facing two study-averse rookies, Noh In-seong attempted an eye-level education of his own.
***
The reason Noh In-seong treated the two rookies well was simple.
They're not anywhere near big enough to threaten my position.
Noh In-seong's position on the team was absolute.
Absolute?, you might ask, of a mere second-year player who'd only just shed his rookie label.
"Then go win a championship without me. I hear Daegu's really chomping at the bit."
"......"
One line, and every dissenting voice went quiet. That is what you call proof of absolute results.
Whatever position he wanted was his, and whenever he wanted to pitch, he could pitch. Simple as that.
Besides, the Doubles' own farm system had its limits.
One first-prize lottery ticket, and two runner-up tickets with the bonus numbers roughly matched — that's about where the streak ends.
That meant these two were the only rookies showing even a glimmer of promise at spring camp.
And just as the bespectacled ace of his past life had trusted him enough to pass down his signature pitch,
passing everything down to the juniors who came after was, after all, part of the soul of Korean baseball.
So Noh In-seong resolved to be somewhat warm to his underclassmen too.
"Right, well, if you've got questions, ask away."
""......""
What. Why are you both looking at me like that?
It was unfair enough that the two rookies gave him those looks — but why the catchers who'd caught his bullpens too?
Hey, you — the starting catcher and the two backup pitchers over there. Why the wide eyes?
"Look at how he acts normally. You think a guy who throws punches at his seniors is gonna go easy on rookies?"
"Hey! You punt me across the room every day, so why are they getting the royal treatment?!"
Another deeply unfair situation. And it was Jin Seong-min, the slightly crazier of the two rookies, who lit the fuse.
"You're not gonna pull that 'the professor's a genius, so it all just *whooshes* into his head' nonsense again, are you, Coach?"
"...And who exactly taught you to talk like that, you lunatic?"
"The bastard standing right next to you."
"...No, then what am I supposed to do about it? How else am I supposed to explain anything?"
Jin Seong-min, being his direct junior at least, had apparently been asking Song Soo-ho for breaking-ball grips and catching know-how he could trust —
but every answer Song Soo-ho gave was that exact brand of nonsense, and the stress had apparently been unbearable.
"Damn it. The scout report clearly says 'normal,' but these bastards are lunatics too."
The scouting department really does sloppy work, don't they. Should've written up a psychiatric evaluation while they were at it.
Noh In-seong pressed a hand to his forehead. The road ahead with these two bastards looked impossibly long.
***
Since early last season, the Doubles' incompetent pitching coach had been replaced by a competent newcomer —
but unless you were someone like Noh In-seong, or one of those scholarly old-guard types who actually went digging through theory papers, his evaluations were brutal.
"Damn it. I can't understand a single word."
Especially with these two rookie pitchers, the cascade of jargon had been pure poison.
"Breaking balls, simply put, work by modifying the existing Magnus effect — whether through spin rate, air resistance..."
"Coach. If you use difficult words, I can't understand you."
Was this Korean, or an alien language?
Jin Seong-min, no scholar, intercepted it head-on.
Since Song Soo-ho's raw intelligence was about the same, it was safe to assume neither of them understood a word.
"...Argh, I should just stop talking. Teaching assistant. You're up."
Boiling over with frustration, Noh In-seong stepped in to explain in the pitching coach's place.
"Basically, what the coach is saying is: whether you spin the hell out of it or toss it nice and easy, you're changing which direction the ball breaks."
Faced with vocabulary simple enough to slide straight into the brain, both students nodded like everything had clicked.
"...Is this a joke? They actually understood that?"
"Coach. Do you honestly think these two are going to study English and decode your terminology?"
If only you'd done this from the start, they'd have been singing, 'Oh, Coach, how magnificent you are! We understood nothing on our own!'
The pitching coach despaired for a moment — but with interpreter Noh In-seong on hand, the lecture carried on.
Unlike before, their eyes were sparkling. It seemed they finally understood something.
WHUMP-!
"There it is! Nice break on that!"
The slider's break had sharpened, if only by a hair, for both rookie pitchers — and they gained confidence.
"...Ha. Damn it. Maybe I should learn to talk like you."
"...You'd come across as absurdly intimidating, sir."
And so the pitching coach lost a sliver of his confidence. But what could he do? That was just the nature of the profession.
What followed was one-on-one time: interpreting a customized curriculum for each of them.
First up was Jin Seong-min, the bullpen arm all but guaranteed the most first-team appearances this year.
"You're a lefty, and basically you're coming out of the bullpen."
"Yes, sir!"
"Lefties have the edge against left-handed hitters, and the league's crawling with Fool Against Lefties types. You know that, right?"
"It was like that in high school too, so yes!"
Jwasangba — shorthand for "idiot against left-handed pitchers."
Our team's got one too. Over theeere~ among the guys in catcher's gear, the big one.
"Your own captain can't do a thing against lefties throwing over 150 km/h."
"Hey! There are things you don't say in front of the kids!"
For all his blustering, Jwasangba was a serious hitting affliction.
Strip away Jo In-soo's numbers against left-handers, and his .250-something average creeps up toward .300.
Against one particular man in Daejeon, it wasn't even a matchup — it was a straight-up type disadvantage, like a video game.
"Thank God opening day is in Busan. Last year we got plastered with insults the moment the season started."
"Ugh, where did the captain's authority go?"
And of course, the league had more than one hitter like that.
The hitters Jin Seong-min needed to target were exactly these kinds of bats.
They looked like they mashed fastballs just fine —
but the moment a heater climbed past a certain velocity, their averages fell off a cliff. The classic all-or-nothing power flop.
"So for you, step one: build up your body."
Breaking balls for now were just a palate cleanser.
If you could cook one main dish exquisitely, serving up hitters wasn't all that complicated.
If he could throw his four-seam fastball — already graded 60-plus — just a little harder, that would be the end of it.
Jin Seong-min's face lit up as the translation of the pitching coach's alien lecture sank in.
"...And me?"
"You? You probably won't see the first team until September at the earliest."
For Song Soo-ho, the rotation prospect, the odds were high he wouldn't even catch a glimpse of the first team in the first half.
Once a rookie entered the starter's curriculum, the futures-team manager wouldn't promote him until he hit a certain standard.
"This guy here is the bullpen's long man, so he might come up now and then during me and In-seong's shift games."
"...That's discrimination against starters! Ack!"
"Get out of here, you filthy genius-track bastard! If you're sore about it, drop down to the bullpen!"
Jin Seong-min, already anxious about his own future, punted Song Soo-ho — the star of the futures team, at least — clear across the room.
The alien-language explanations are infuriating enough, but this guy takes the cake!
What was learned quickly was, naturally, also violence.
It was the butterfly effect of Noh In-seong's pitcher school, where the lessons were good.
"...You're teaching them good things, In-seong."
"No, I didn't teach him that! He kicked him all on his own!"
"You can't even lose your temper in front of the young ones," Jo In-soo grumbled, shooting Noh In-seong a sour look.
***
Where the Doubles held their spring camp — the Cactus League — a few more Korean teams had arrived.
Busan had set up camp first, and then the Superstars.
After swallowing the humiliation of a third-place finish last year, you'd think they'd want to prove something. But—
Daegu, having signed not a single player, had also planted their own camp right near the Doubles'.
Daegu had, for all practical purposes, already given up on this year's market.
"We finished second in the regular season last year, so even without new signings, we just have to hold the line..."
Take one shot at it, and if it fails, simply maintain the roster until Noh In-seong leaves.
Even after Noh In-seong goes, there's that other monster over there — though presumably that one isn't going anywhere.
"He'll leave too, won't he? Japan, somewhere, wherever."
"No, he can't field."
"What does fielding have to do with anything, you lunatic? Baseball is a sport of offense."
And so Daegu shifted its stance: wait for those two biggest obstacles to walk out the door.
Protect the prospects, gather in more of them, develop them to the very end —
"Let's look forward to the after. To life after that man leaves. Our GM has plans, after all."
In the post-Noh In-seong era, they intended to run.
"...We just have to make it so he can't stay... that's all."
It was Plan B, discussed with the Superstars' general manager.
If the gap was still painfully wide next year, there would be no other way.
"If a piece comes along that would wreck the environment, you just drop it overseas, wholesale."
Our environment is the urgent one — what business is it of ours how things look abroad?
It was splendid Nimby-ism: perfectly acceptable anywhere except in one's own backyard.