Spring in Incheon
Ads could wait. Advertising was something you did when you had time to actually rest.
They agreed to shoot the official commercials later, and Noh In-seong, dutiful about his real job, pored over the schedule instead.
"So, Busan, Suwon, and Changwon are all behind us..."
The Busan series had been unexpectedly hard-fought, but Suwon and Changwon were nothing of the sort.
Suwon went two wins to one. Changwon was swept out of hand, three straight.
That put the Doubles at 8–2, already a game clear and sitting alone at the top of the table.
The Suwon series had gone smoothly — if you discounted Jin Joo-hyuk taking his first career loss in a big-league start.
"...You call that smooth?"
"Hey, let's be honest here. Was that my fault? If you're that bitter, you should've gone out and shut down the ninth inning yourself."
Jin Joo-hyuk protested, brimming with grievance, but Noh In-seong was utterly unrepentant.
"...And now that I think about it, in the last game they didn't even pitch to you, sir?"
They'd challenged him only for his first at-bat. Every plate appearance after that was an intentional ball.
And with strikes coming in hot and desperate behind him, cleanup hitter Song Jin-wook had obligingly manufactured a double play. It was the textbook anatomy of a losing team's ballgame.
"...Hmm. The deeper we go into the season, the less these kids seem to want to face me."
The Changwon series was the same story, really — he'd simply sat out three games of it.
Considering how sour the opposing dugout's faces had looked when he torched them for three home runs and seven RBIs across two games...
"If I'd played all three, they probably would've drilled me."
It was barely April, and already the league had filed Noh In-seong under powder keg.
'Lighting a cigarette in front of a keg that goes BOOM at the slightest knock is outright madness.'
'What's that? Cowardly? Gutless? Oh, do go on. I'm a little busy winning here.'
'Fuck, my command is already shot. If I try to paint corners against that body...'
That last one was just a man terrified of fists, admittedly.
Either way, the opposing teams had reached total unanimity: not pitching to him was, without question, the optimal strategy.
Noh In-seong being a monster in the early season was nothing new — it had been exactly the same last year.
A few teams in particular still carried memories of beatings so thorough they'd been preserved in the record books like taxidermy.
"...Haah..."
Incheon's case was special: for them, there was nothing but those memories of getting beaten.
"No second baseman, no catcher, and fuck me — now not even a pitcher."
So the coup had succeeded. Wonderful. What remained ahead was a long, grinding rebuild.
Jin Woo-jeong, the brand-new manager, sighed up at the sky.
Be grateful they only banished the lunatic who shredded your own brother's shoulder.
"I never should have taken this manager job..."
Jin Sa-rang wouldn't be back until the second half at the earliest. Could the team even survive that long?
"And that damned banner is still hanging up there."
BRING BACK MANAGER JUNG YONG-JUN! WE CONDEMN THE ASTRO FRONT OFFICE!
FIRED OVER BAD RESULTS?! THEN YOU'D FIRE YOURSELVES TOO, WOULDN'T YOU?!
"Damn it all. That man turned the roster into a scorched field, and I'm supposed to produce results out of this?"
And with that cursed bastard still loitering around Korean baseball besides, how exactly was anyone supposed to win?
Incheon — a team that collapsed into ruins every time it crossed paths with that one man — came marching into Jamsil to face the Doubles.
April the first. Carrying the PTSD of a team that had sunk like a lie, all because of one April Fool of a human being.
"The Incheon bastards have no manners. Do you people not even plan on facing me?"
It was a Jin Noh-ryeok start, so he'd at least assumed they'd fight him for the first at-bat.
"Yeah, yeah, can't hear you. Enjoy the stroll."
Brushing off the backup catcher's heckling with one ear, Noh In-seong flung his bat aside and walked.
Being handed first base via intentional ball from the very first plate appearance left a foul taste in his mouth.
It was already his fourth intentional pass of the season.
At forty-eight career intentional walks when you stacked this year on top of last, Noh In-seong grumbled his way down the first-base line.
"That puts him in a tie for 30th all-time already. Two more and he leaps all the way into a tie for 25th!"
"Hard to say how many he'll draw over a full season this year, but..."
It was a wild hypothetical, but suppose Noh In-seong drew more than 107 intentional walks this season alone.
"The all-time record took eighteen seasons to set... Noh In-seong would need two."
"Haha, if he actually did that, the rulebook would change first... it would, right? Right?"
While the commentators explained things with visible reluctance, something close to a riot was breaking out on the internet.
Like a hedgehog people couldn't help but find adorable despite the crazy things it did — with absolutely no soft underside.
Pricking themselves on the spines all the while, the fans defended Noh In-seong to the death.
From where the Incheon fans sat, it was gut-churning nonsense.
A loser who'd lost his autumn baseball, his brawl, and his players, all in one go, naturally had no voice left.
All he could do was eat curses about being gutless.
And as if determined to stomp on those already-churning Incheon stomachs one more time—
"HE'S OFF! The catcher isn't even thinking about throwing! Noh In-seong's fourth stolen base of the season!"
"Perhaps he's decided to get his steals in early this year. That's 6 home runs and 4 stolen bases now."
Noh In-seong had started running at every opportunity.
Dum-dum-dum-dum...
Do you know the feeling of some enormous animal — a bear, maybe, or a tiger — crashing down on you from dead ahead?
The feeling of something, built on a completely different scale than your own body, charging straight at you at full sprint.
That was the impression Seong Hyun-jae, the rookie manning third base for the Astro, was currently having.
'Hii... hiiiiek....!!'
Normally, a player attempting to steal third is built sleek and light. That's the rule.
So even if a collision happened, you could console yourself: my body can take it.
But the human-bear barreling toward him right now looked like it would launch him clean into the outfield if they so much as touched.
This was the man who had already flattened their veterans countless times. He was profoundly, existentially dangerous.
And so, dazed, he caught the ball and thrust his glove out in front of the oncoming Noh In-seong—
"Safe! Safe!"
"How in the world is that SAFE?! Are your eyes broken?! Challenge it! CHALLENGE!"
The umpire and his own team's coach were screaming at each other, but not a word of it reached his ears.
'I survived. Fuck...'
Those eyes that looked ready to kill, the mouth split into a one-sided grin that said I'm going to end you, the sprinter's crouch bearing down on him.
Had Noh In-seong known his inner thoughts, he'd have said, 'You little shit, I just got the feeling the steal was gonna work and smiled...'
But Seong Hyun-jae was a rookie. Holding down his own quivering legs was struggle enough.
"Steal stands! Still safe!"
"Ah! Damn it!"
"The ruling is that Seong Hyun-jae failed to apply the tag properly! Video review upholds the call on the field—!"
"Honestly, from our broadcast cameras you can't see the tag at all. We have no access to the stadium's internal feed, you see..."
Layered on top of everything else was the fact that he'd just been charged with an error.
The face of a rookie in his very first season went whiter still.
And a vicious veteran(?) of Noh In-seong's caliber was hardly going to let that slide.
"...Heh heh. Works out nicely."
Come the fourth inning, he was back at second base, lining up another steal.
The reason Noh In-seong ran this viciously was simple.
"I have to make them understand: pitch around me, and you're probably just handing me third base anyway."
Legendary batting champions and home run kings generally avoided stealing — risk of injury — or were simply, catastrophically slow by nature(...) and skipped it on principle.
Noh In-seong, even with the muscle packed on, was not slow. Not even slightly.
If you pressed the point, long-distance running was a touch taxing these days — but over short bursts he'd actually gotten faster.
'It's not like I've added every ounce of muscle my frame can hold...'
The truth was he'd simply been abnormally light for an athlete built around explosive, momentary bursts of power.
Now that his weight had more or less normalized, he was in prime running condition.
And on top of that, the fact that the opponent happened to be Incheon was doing heavy lifting.
"You remember, Noh In-seong had a collision at second base on a steal attempt a while back."
"Ah, yes. I do. And every time, second baseman Song Jeong-woo ended up carted off, didn't he."
"Which may explain... ever since earlier, every time Noh In-seong steals, there's a missed tag. Every single time?"
Touch that cursed man and you will get hurt — a full-blown paranoid delusion, physically grounded or not.
Over the course of a season, an acquired, industrially injected PTSD had been branded into every last member of the Incheon organization.
'When Noh In-seong steals — when Noh In-seong does anything — think of the injury first.'
And for professional athletes, whose bodies are their wages, injury means one thing.
It means starving to death.
"...Uuuaaagh!"
"Safe! Safe!"
"Ah — look at that, even now Seong Hyun-jae's tag is late, isn't it? If you watch the feet before tagging, you'll always be late."
"Manager Jin Woo-jeong looks absolutely livid right now... yes, that's a substitution, isn't it?"
"Seong Hyun-jae is being pulled in a disciplinary swap. He's young — best to forget a day like this quickly..."
For a rookie still so young, still with so much growing left to do, it must have felt something like a drought.
Such was the damage done to a young sapling by Noh In-seong — a black rain saturated with radiation.
In the end, even after the third intentional ball, Incheon surrendered two more stolen bases.
If we let him run again next at-bat, this can't go on...
Jin Woo-jeong could see it: a seven-steal humiliation, a brand burned into Korean baseball history alongside the great stolen-base stamps of infamy.
So for the sake of his team's morale, he declared an all-out, face-to-face showdown.
"...Wait. Weren't you the only arm in your bullpen that could handle me? 'Manager'?"
"...Ah."
The single greatest blunder of a rookie star-manager, delivered as a direct hit: No, wait. Why can't I do that?
CRACK—!!!
A moonshot that split the dome's sky in half and detonated squarely against the videoboard panel.
Trailing 5–2, it was the decisive solo shot that blew the game wide open.
His first head-to-head with the bastard he'd wanted to kill since becoming a manager had ended in catastrophic failure.
Wooooo—!!!
On the day of his defeat, the one chant he least wanted to hear rolled through the stadium.
And the winning team's entire roster stood along the railing, cup after cup of mockery in hand, chanting right along with the crowd.
With the salt ground deep into every wound, Incheon Astro slunk out of Jamsil.
Naturally, news this delicious could not possibly fail to reach the greatest trash-talk generator in the sport's history.
To the very first question — 'What did you think of manager Jin Woo-jeong?' — Noh In-seong delivered his formal answer.
"My official position is that I'm better than that damned human garbage incinerator. He does give off massive old-fart energy, though."
And with that filterless delivery, everyone's jaws hit the floor.
"...Er, what's a 'garbage incinerator'? And an old-fart?"
"A man who feeds other people's arms into the fire for his own stats is human garbage. That's an incinerator."
— Meaning, in other words: a class of human being who deserves to be drawn and quartered, fine or no fine.
He had also better not entertain any thoughts of crawling onto some TV show to farm popularity for himself again.
"If I catch wind of it, I will personally infiltrate that opposing team's stadium in disguise and blow the entire broadcast off the air."
— One well-placed dead ball and one bench clearing, and that would work out just perfectly, wouldn't it.
For a man speaking so leisurely, it was an absurd, city-flattening nuclear statement.
"...And the 'old-fart' part?"
"Ah-ah. A dog-tier old-fart. Kindly do not forget the intensifier I placed in front of it."
"...Moving on, then."
There was also this — a petty, thoroughly In-seong-flavored anecdote.
"And who does he think he is, daring to interfere with this elder's run to second base?"
A very old story, from back when he was still a bullpen arm.
The first time they'd ever faced each other, he'd snapped at him, watch the footing in Busan — and the man had thrown it right back in his face.
"...You still remember that? Quite a lot more happened between you two than just that, surely?"
"Victims remember everything. That's just how it works. The next time anyone so much as breathes on my baserunning—"
— Manager or not, the next bench-clearing brawler would be you, sir.
Noh In-seong clenched his fist and flamboyantly stomped on the bag, again and again.
Beep—
"...Do you really think that lunatic would start a bench clearing over me?"
"...I'd say so, sir? Forgive me for saying it, but he genuinely does seem insane."
When Jin Woo-jeong asked after switching off the interview footage, his coach answered obediently.
It was the feeling of a massacre — the kind where players linking arms from the mound to the dugout wouldn't be enough to stop it.
And God knows what that man would do if he ever started lecturing anyone about seniority.
A bomb that, given your advanced age, might just gift you a fist to the face along with a warm invitation to climb into your coffin early.
So Jin Woo-jeong quietly amended team policy: from now on, every stolen-base attempt would include a jump-step, tag or no tag.
...It was absolutely, positively not because he was scared. It was a purely efficiency-driven upgrade.
And so, over the two remaining games of what had become the World Stealing Championship, situations unfolded that defied all reason.
Six rundowns. Combined. Between the two teams.
The Doubles got caught once in the first game; Incheon, incredibly, got caught twice.
At the end of the idiot Olympics it stood 5–2, the win neatly salted away as the fireman came in — and Cho Hyo-jin sat back and enjoyed the show of Incheon fans weeping tears of blood.
The problem was the next day, when the Doubles fans settled in to savor the Incheon fans' tears of blood for themselves—
and a certain someone from their own farm system brought fresh tears of blood to the eyes of the Doubles faithful.
"AH! HE'S CAUGHT—!! At second base, Song Jin-wook is run down! It's a rundown! That's two outs!"
"What on earth... honestly. He looks so intelligent at the plate, and then he steps onto the basepaths and I simply cannot tell you what happens."
Where the other players had been aggressively shuffling, pushing the envelope, and gotten picked off into rundowns, this one idiot had wandered into a rundown by pure stupidity.
That idiot scratched the back of his head all the way back to the dugout.
"Agh... argh! ARGH! My blood pressure. Fuck!"
"Manager, here you go... your medication, sir."
While the poor Jung Im-taek scrambled to swallow his antihypertensives against a violently spiking pulse—
"You crazy bastard! Why were you even RUNNING?! One out, man on first!!"
"The sign! I misread the sign! I thought it was run and hit!"
"That was a plain swing-away sign, you blockhead! You still haven't memorized the signs?!"
THWACK—!!
"KYAAAAGH...!!! What IS this pain...!!!"
A deeply satisfying crack of palm on butt echoed out of Song Jin-wook's backside, and with it, his baserunning tool grade — long rated a 30 — was slashed to a 25.
Perhaps riding the momentum of this lunacy, Incheon clawed out a win in the final game, bleeding the whole way.
"...Though we did burn through the entire bullpen..."
"...Still, a win's a win, isn't it?"
They had to travel straight into the next series, and the club was a smoldering wreck.
Thanks to the Doubles holding onto first place, the fans of a certain disgraced manager would be staying quiet for a while.
Less clutter in my head, honestly — maybe this is for the best, thought rookie manager Jin Woo-jeong as he boarded the team bus.
Meanwhile, the Grizzlies — the Doubles' next opponents — were in no better mood.
"Damn it. We don't have our cleanup hitter anymore, or our number one starter..."
They'd at least managed to sign mercenary replacements, small mercies — but Kim Seong-ju, post–brain surgery, was never coming back.
A hole blown clean through the heart of the batting order. And in any ordinary year, that spot would have belonged to a top-of-the-league hitter.
"...I'm losing my mind. And we have to face those lunatics over there in this state."
Sung Ji-chang was still green, and Jang Ji-seong had shown a spark as a pinch hitter but remained a half-finished hitter.
Sure, the pill-popper was gone — but with the one bat that had actually produced now missing, the lineup had become a platoon of peashooters.
A baseball player even more vicious than the doping bastard, and they had to face him for the whole rivalry series.
"Haah... I'm losing my mind."
Reading the transcript of that bastard's latest interview made it so much worse.
The reporter had presumably assumed Noh In-seong wouldn't say anything cruel about a hospitalized player.
"Stay in that bed. Soon enough, I'll be sending the team you left behind straight in your direction."
Provoked by the very question, Noh In-seong stuffed a declaration of war into his video message.
"I'll show you exactly what it looks like — the day you finally drag yourself out of that bed, check the standings, and find your team glued to the basement in tenth."
The mad bull who had already taken down one doper (two-time offender) from behind now squared up and stared a bear dead in the eye.
A bull to whom the entire world looked red.