Mother Derby
The Daejeon Phoenix had lived up to their name, rising from the ashes with surprising speed.
For one thing, after that first day, the intentional walks all but vanished.
"Heh heh... heh heh..."
"...What the hell is wrong with this kid's eyes."
It was thanks to the rookie catcher who had transformed so drastically within a single day that even Noh In-seong was horrified. Hadn't they said Marie Antoinette's hair turned white overnight under the terror of the guillotine? The damage Noh In-seong had inflicted had remodeled a grown man's head in exactly one day.
The man behind the catcher's mask whose eyes never seemed to focus. No matter what his pitchers babbled at him, Myeong Jeong-ho called the game exactly as he pleased.
What the hell? Why is he ignoring the bench signs?
I think he's half out of his mind, sir.
What made it truly magnificent was that his game-calling ignored not just the opposing battery, but his own dugout as well.
You punk, this is curveball timing right now!
Heh heh, fastball's good. Throw the fastball till your arm falls off, I don't care.
...Then how about you at least call for an intentional walk?
Heh heh, fastball's good. Throw the fastball till your arm falls off, I don't care.
"Son of a—"
No matter how the man raged or offered suggestions, all that came back was the PitchCom blaring fastball! fastball!
Before receiving Noh In-seong's baptism, the kid's evaluation had been something like 'like throwing against a wall.' The wall was the same wall as ever — except now it wasn't stubbornness but literal non-communication, and that was what made it feel like a wall.
Whatever pitch the pitcher wanted to throw was flatly ignored, never so much as reaching the catcher's glove.
Tack!
The result went into the books as a base hit — and somehow, that too was the pitcher's fault.
The catcher serenely began flashing his next sign.
— Commentator: Yes, and the shortstop can't come up with it. As it gets through, Noh In-seong reaches first base safely.
— Analyst: Haah... when you take your swings and it still ends like this, it just leaves you hollow. So, will he run again?
The broadcast crew assumed that with no home run materializing, a stolen base would come next.
"Hey, look at that gut. Put on weight again? At that rate, shouldn't some of it turn into muscle by now? You pig."
"Why does this punk pick a fight every single time he sees me? Is it because 'In-seong' is in his name or something?"
"Honestly? At this point it just feels like a routine."
Standing practically on top of first base, they were trading curses back and forth with the opposing first baseman.
"Huh?"
"What, so he doesn't steal unless it's off an intentional walk?"
He would run with two outs and two strikes, or late in a close game, of course — but that was 'stealing within the bounds of common sense.'
It was nothing like the old behavior — advance rights, everyone! Kill them all and loot the bases!
A single in his first at-bat, a double in his second — both had turned into runs, and yet—
— Commentator: Yes, no stolen bases today. A quiet Noh In-seong. Could stamina be becoming an issue?
— Analyst: Hardly — his speed on the basepaths looks exactly the same. He just doesn't seem to be running.
— Commentator: Haha... indeed. Noh In-seong's stolen base total remains frozen at twenty-six.
The commentators knew, of course. They knew perfectly well why this result was unfolding.
A commentator's job is neutrality — but the truth is you see everything and are obligated to speak in vague half-measures.
Tch. Stop handing out intentional walks and he just won't run. His motives are crystal clear.
Is he agonizing over how to pace himself against the home run record or something?
If anyone could actually read Noh In-seong's mind, they would realize it was nothing of the sort.
Well, bait this size should be enough to make a few catchers rise up against their own managers, no?
You can send a submarine down into deep water, but you can never truly plumb the depths of a human heart.
Stolen bases not for his own record, but to sow discord inside the opposing clubhouse.
And today's declaration of a 'no-stealing day.'
'For the stats you want and a stress-free day, the team has to deal with me instead.'
The moment a team chose to face Noh In-seong, it had to absorb the run production of last year's monster, grown even sharper.
Singles became doubles; doubles became triples he could leg out in a flash; and every now and then, when he got pitched tight or simply caught fire, the ball would vanish over the fence.
'It's hell for the team, but you fans get to smile. Isn't that all that matters?'
A long 'team game' league obsessed with 'individual stats.'
Noh In-seong had struck at the blind spot of that mismatched contradiction.
Who knows? There might even come a day when they hold me to an oh-for-four. I can't be in peak form every day, and luck won't follow me around forever.
'Go ahead. Roll your dice as hard as you like.'
Tack—!!
— Commentator: Noh In-seong today — three hits in three at-bats! Yes, another base hit, and he settles in at first base once again.
— Analyst: Strange... it almost seems like his results have actually improved since he stopped running... good grief.
"Hey there, Mr. Lard."
"Oh, damn it all. Umpire, this punk keeps getting under my skin."
Jeong In-woong bristled at Noh In-seong's constant verbal abuse —
"What, weren't we national team teammates? Look forward to it — when I see you there, I'll snap that arm of yours too."
Confronted with the prospect of 'Always WWE' turning into the UFC or WW2, the big man answered with an awkward grin.
"...Haha! No, no, sir. We're just close enough to joke around like that."
In an excellent mood, Noh In-seong magnanimously decided to let Jeong In-woong off the hook.
Against all odds, Daejeon had taken two straight games.
In fairness, the second game had come down to an offensive battle that fell exactly one run short at the very end.
"Wow, you're tough as nails, you know that? Fine. Take the domestic ace crown or don't, see if I care."
"Adrian! Adrian!!"
The third game, their man had absorbed two home runs off Noh In-seong's bat and shut down everything else — because You Hong-jin had put on a complete-game, nine-inning, three-run show.
Hit me all you want — there is not one other player on this team who can do the hitting for me! That was the kind of tenacious man he was.
The big problem with pitchers like that is that their mentality doesn't break easily.
In the most literal sense, a stubborn young man.
The Daejeon of old would have bitten them even harder in the field and stabbed them in the back — but at least the infield had been rebuilt to some degree, and outfielders Cho Gyu-cheol and Song Mu-jin had their fundamentals down.
Granted, unlike the legitimate hitter Cho Gyu-cheol, Song Mu-jin was nothing but a slappy little ttogi whose sole specialty was bunting — and losing fingers doing it.
"Hey, that's nothing. Back in the day, we were a pack of morons who couldn't even track the ball — just a crowd of idiots reaching for the sky."
"Aw, come on. No baseball player that bad exists, Dad."
Unlike his father, who had survived hell itself, the elementary school son who had tasted fall baseball just last year took it all with a 'no way, really?'
It was a generational gap in Phoenix baseball — nothing like the survivors of that era; these were children of a comparatively 'peaceful and prosperous' age of Daejeon baseball.
In any case, after dropping two straight, as the team packed up to head down for the second road series against Busan—
the first stepping stone of the team's recovery arrived.
"Surprise."
"Wow. You said two weeks, and you come back after nearly three. I want to kill you."
"Cough... khh...!! Ack! Let go! I'm going to re-injure myself because of this...!! In... Seong...!!"
The man responsible for Noh In-seong having to be conscripted into the rotation's top slot for so long. The man who'd lost a fingernail.
Andy, the mercenary ace, had finally returned to the team.
"Ah... so he's finally coming off the roster..."
Song Soo-ho, the team's temporary sixth starter, began to make a heartbroken face.
Jin Joo-hyuk didn't look particularly pleased either, but at least he wasn't scowling quite as hard as Song Soo-ho.
Unlike Jin Joo-hyuk, who still had the fallback of a bullpen job, Song Soo-ho had no possible way to stay on the first-team roster.
A rookie pitcher whose only advantage over Andy was a few ticks of extra velocity.
Naturally, he would go down to the second team, spend a long, long while polishing his signature pitch, and claw his way back up in the second half of the season.
Just as Song Soo-ho was starting to wonder if he should begin packing, the pitching coach handed him one final parting gift.
"Before you go down to the second team tomorrow — show us one last thing worth watching."
His final first-team appearance. Song Soo-ho boarded the bus to Busan burning with resolve.
The opposing Busan starter, remarkably, was Jang In-ho.
By strict rotation order, the opening-day starter meeting the sixth starter would have taken a while longer — but Jang In-ho was, after all, the team's fourth starter.
Naturally, with the two mercenary starters having claimed the top two spots and So Dong-jin eating the third, a rotation reshuffle had produced this matchup.
"So you've decided you're never throwing an intentional walk. Ever."
"Doesn't it feel like running away, sir? I hate it more than death itself."
In a situation where any obvious beanball would send In-seong scampering, a pitcher with the guts to go at him head-on.
For Kim Soo-ho — whose arm strength made throwing runners out a lost cause — Jang In-ho's bravado was infinitely preferable.
Damn it. I can't stand a bastard who keeps running.
Come to think of it, Jin Dong-ha had complaints of his own lately — word was that in every game except today's, he'd been calling for intentional walks.
'Might honestly be better if he just ran instead of me...?'
Little did the man who said it know that those words would become the seed of his own ruin.
"Today, I will beat the Doubles. I swear it."
The rematch with Busan — the man who had finally clawed his way back onto the mound this year.
"I'll show them something before I go down. I swear it."
And the man who could only climb back onto a first-team mound at the very tail end of this season.
The battle of two fiercely proud pitchers was underway.
Of course, not in a good way.
Tack—!!
— Commentator: High—!! Off the wall—!! It does not go over! Noh In-seong cruises into second base!
— Analyst: Haha, not this time. It clipped the very top of the wall and bounced back in.
"Doesn't look like he's in the form he had last time. Well, that day he was awfully good for a first game back, I suppose."
There was no chance that a man fresh off post-surgery rehab could openly trade blows with Noh In-seong and rack up strikeouts.
He still had recovery ahead of him — only after regaining the weight and muscle he'd lost and winning back every mile per hour of his velocity—
'Even then, I was confident I could beat him.'
It was probably right to call that day's condition a fluke.
Song Jin-wook followed with another base hit, and the Doubles lightly drew first blood.
The unmistakable air of a team on a roll seemed to flow between the Doubles players.
Yes — it felt like it was flowing. Precisely until five minutes had elapsed, that is.
The bottom of the first was where the trouble started — the problem being that whatever Song Soo-ho had promised to 'show them' turned out to be violence.
"I'm gonna winnnnn—!!"
Thwack—!
"GYAAAAAAGH...!!!"
— Commentator: Oh my — the very first pitch comes in hard and buried up and in. Kim Taek-gyu is crying out in pain.
— Analyst: Good grief... he did go right after the hitter, but that was far, far too much.
A first-pitch cutter at 142 km/h buried itself deep in the leadoff hitter's body.
Not the backside — the ball slammed into his side hard enough to rattle his ribs, and the tears sprang straight out of Kim Taek-gyu's eyes.
"I'm sorry!"
"...Sorry?! If an apology were enough to settle things, why would the world need fists and police—"
Just as the customary repertoire of 'where in the hell was this lunatic aiming?!' was about to begin—
"He said he's sorry. That settles it, doesn't it?"
"Ah. Right, sorry does settle it. Understood. Please, carry on with the ballgame."
Pure violence in human form, advancing slowly from the shortstop position, permitted the game to continue.
The two players took their licks from each other — each absorbing what was owed—
and yet the one decisive final pitch was never squared up.
— Commentator: Struck him out swinging! Song Soo-ho's short, sharp-breaking curveball succeeds in fooling the batter's eyes!
— Analyst: That curve is honestly nothing special on its own, but after the fastball? It's a thing of beauty.
— Commentator: And with that, the two-on, two-out chance evaporates into thin air! Bottom of the fourth — Busan's rally dies with two runners stranded!
He surrendered runs the cheap way, sure — a home run here, a pair of doubles there — but when the real chances came with two outs, Song Soo-ho shut every last one of them with his own two hands.
— Commentator: Base hit! The runner from third scores! It's 4-3 — the Doubles retake the lead!
— Analyst: The pitching coach and the manager are heading out to the mound now. Probably checking on the situation?
— Commentator: Well, if it comes to that... they could always make a change. It's still only the top of the fifth, after all.
"Hoo... hoo..."
"You holding up? Think you can keep battling?"
"I'll win. Trust me — leave it to me."
Pat.
"...Right. This is how you grow, after all."
Under Manager Park Tae-jung, who had steeled himself to pay his fines, and a catcher who had deferred the game-calling entirely to his pitcher—
and while the hitters were being let in at third base little by little, drop by drop—
Tack!
— Commentator: This one's straight at the third baseman! Jung Jin-gi fields it — to second! And back across to first! Double play!
— Analyst: Noh In-seong grounding into double plays now? Last year this man hit into only twelve all season.
"Wow, what a maniac. So in the end he just shoves it right at your body at the last second?"
Put a runner on first, and this pitcher would always — without exception — grind out a ground ball or an outfield fly. A man of singular obsession.
Jang In-ho, too, was stubbornly, tenaciously surviving up there on the mound.
And the fans of both teams watching this game live were seized by a feeling they hadn't known in ages.
The old days came flooding back, and their PTSD was flaring up in real time.
"At this point, even the league officials can't bring themselves to say the derby's name — the one made from the first letters of the two teams."
"The Mother Derby?"
"Because, you know — the players' moms always end up disappearing during it. The rougher crowd is the ones who started calling it that."
"...Shouldn't that be about dads?"
"True. The fella who put it that way actually got fined for it, back in the day."
Busan's rabid fans, and the equally aggressive, attack-minded Doubles faithful alike, were clutching their chests and tipping back their bottles of alcohol one after another at this insane ballgame.
A derby where the spectators suffered more than the men playing it.
The Mother Derby had reclaimed its old glory at last.
No matter how grueling it was for the spectators — no matter how the pain transmitted itself through their entire bodies in real time—
nobody suffered physically the way the men actually throwing and catching did.
Mentally, watching could be agony. In this particular case, though, it was safe to say both body and mind were in agony.
In the top of the seventh, the opportunity arrived to grant the small wish Kim Soo-ho had aired in the locker room earlier that day.
Granted, there was the minor snag that the god granting the wish had monkey hands—
but when a god grants a wish, you can hardly call his little slip-ups errors, now can you?
The ball off the bat of the nine-hole hitter, Song Ju-in, skipped off the plate and slithered up between the catcher's groin protector—
For anyone who loved billiards, the most delicious scenario imaginable.
Right where two balls had come to rest, side by side.
Thwack—!
"GYAAAAAAGH—!!"
"...Ah. I'm so sorry."
A foreign billiard ball — white with red stripes, unlike any of the others — had collided with its kin.
With an ice pack wrapped around the most unfortunate region of a lower body swollen to the size of a baseball, Kim Soo-ho was rushed off to the urology clinic — 'Thank goodness. It's just swelling' — and while he lay in bed collecting the praise of countless netizens for truly earning his nickname today—
"Damn it. He switched up his style on me out of nowhere."
With Jin Dong-ha — a man who, unlike the catchers who let their pitchers throw whatever they pleased, preferred an iron-fisted, coercive game-calling — grabbing the reins,
the Busan battery began to fall apart.
"Agh, these bastards are dragging this out for-fucking-ever."
Noh In-seong's at-bat became the staging ground for open warfare between pitcher and catcher.
Unlike the pitcher, who — true to form — wanted to bludgeon the opponent with raw stuff,
'Just throw the breaking ball away.'
the catcher had chosen an option that was nothing like going head-on.
'I refuse. I told you — let me fight him.'
'Good grief, do you actually enjoy fighting this lunatic? What on earth is the manager thinking, refusing to walk him?'
They hammered away at their PitchComs, an endless cycle of protest and counter-protest, proposal and refusal—
"...Pitch clock violation!"
The home plate umpire, who had been watching the whole charade — throw the damn ball already, you miserable bastards — tacked a ball onto the count.
In the end, the young pitcher, outgunned in the seniority war, threw the pitch with a sour face.
Taaaaack—!!!
— Commentator: Far, far into the sky above Sajik Stadium! Noh In-seong's home run sails into the distance! He cranks it as if he'd been waiting for that exact pitch!
— Analyst: Looks that way — he swung under it like he knew for a fact that ball was arriving in that exact spot.
And with that ball soaring beyond the sky, the final hit of the day was entered into the record.
Jin Dong-ha, outsmarted by his own clever scheming, watched Noh In-seong round the bases straight toward him.
"Come on — if you're not walking me, you're throwing outside breaking balls a hundred percent of the time. That head of yours is exactly as predictable as it looks."
"...Just hurry up and get off my field."
"Like I always say — a backup is a backup. No wonder they had to go out and buy a catcher."
—Even if you'd been on our team, your ceiling would've been third option anyway.
Watching the back of the bastard who had gleefully raked open his heart's wounds before vanishing into the dugout, Jin Dong-ha shuddered with humiliation.
'You rotten son of a bitch...!'
Even on the same team, this was a man he never would have heard a kind word from.
But as the catcher of an enemy team, the son of a bitch who never failed to deliver a full payload of exhaustion and irritation felt somehow even more hateful today.