Rain and Tears (Part 2)
Before the Doubles even played their third series against Daegu, all hell had already broken loose.
Scrambling to book lodging at the last minute had seemed like a good idea at the time.
"...Is this for real?"
The situation was so absurd that the bench coach actually asked Jung Im-taek that question.
"...Don't take it out on me. I'm confused enough as it is."
Staring at the hotel in front of him, Jung Im-taek wore an expression of sheer disbelief at a sight he hadn't witnessed in ages.
Forget the facilities — the place was absolutely crawling with teenagers.
The Doubles had checked in at Gyeongju, the Mecca of school field trips.
Even if a typhoon had torn through the region, some cities were bound to have lucked out and skirted its path. This time, Gyeongju happened to be one of the prime beneficiaries.
It helped that it was late May, edging into early June.
"Hing, why Gyeongju of all places? Can't we go overseas too?"
"Excuse me, Teacher, does money grow rotting in your bank account? If we've got spare cash to kick back, domestic's the better play, no?"
It was still a viable field trip destination within Korea, even if it wasn't quite the boom town it once was.
"Hey! It's the Doubles players! Wanna take a picture?"
"Over here, please! Over here!"
Click-!Clickclickclickclick--!!
The hotel was swarming with snot-nosed kids on school trips.
"Hey! No photos! Why does this ALWAYS happen the one time I try to have a quiet drink?!"
"My beautiful dream of a nice, light drink before bed...!!"
The Doubles players, accustomed to having hotels entirely to themselves, saw their stress levels spike through the roof.
Instead of their usual routines, they spent the evening holed up in their rooms, hiding from the children.
"Ahh, I slept great. What's everybody's excuse for face-planting like that?"
"...How is this bastard's nerve so goddamn thick?"
While everyone else had been busy sleeping, one man had required his teammates to physically carry him to bed.
So Noh In-seong got up and implemented a master plan to fix everything at once.
"KYAAAAAH---!!"
"Oh dear... what did you do without reading the sign? The hallway is a living, breathing slip-and-slide right now."
Noh In-seong watched from the corridor as a student sprinted past, went into a long, glorious skid, and rocketed all the way to the far end of the hall.
They had at least piled up soft cushioning against the walls as a barricade, to keep the kids from getting hurt.
But the laws of impact were not something your ancestors could pray away.
When kids go shrieking and sprinting around making a racket, the obvious solution is to simply make it physically impossible.
Someone had sprayed detergent all over the hallway so the children would slip... no, wait, had *accidentally* spilled it.
"If you set up one little warning sign afterward, it stops being anyone's responsibility~ That's the beauty of it."
The cleaning staff wasn't stationed there around the clock, so it would just be filed away as an 'unfortunate accident.'
After all, someone might have been making ramyeon, needed more detergent for the room, and tipped over the entire container on the way to fetch it.
Granted, he'd make an honest effort to clean up most of it in the process.
"But if someone steps in the bit I missed and slips... well, that's on them, wouldn't you say?"
"In-seong, are you actually a demon spawn or what?"
Lim Jae-min, watching a third student already go skidding into a sprawl at the end of the hallway, quietly began strategizing how on earth to rein in this lunatic.
An hour later, when Noh In-seong had scrubbed every last trace of detergent off the floor with a mop he'd sourced from somewhere, the area in front of the Doubles' lodging was impossibly silent.
More than ten victims in under an hour. Any brain with a survival instinct intact would think twice before running down that corridor.
"There, now rest easy. I'm the starter tomorrow, so I need my sleep too."
And so the problem child Noh In-seong discovered that subduing a horde of students was really quite simple.
The next day, the typhoon had moved on, but Daegu was still suffering under a blanket of dark clouds.
Rain came and went, the weather stuck in an indecisive middle ground. The umpires gathered and reached an agreement — 'if visibility drops, we call it or cancel, no questions asked' — and the game began.
And that agreement, in the end:
...did not smile on Noh In-seong.
2-1. A one-run margin. If the game had gone the distance, who knew how it might have turned out?
But the rain, pouring as if the sky had been punctured, refused to grant them another minute.
Shaaaaaaa...
Top of the sixth. The Doubles walked off losers and headed back to their lodging in Gyeongju, while Noh In-seong went straight up to Seoul on his own.
"Ugh, this week has been total garbage."
He rejoined the team in Suwon after the off day. Right up until Jong Min-soo took him deep, he'd genuinely believed they could win.
And what he came back to instead was Nature itself declaring: You shall be rejected!
"So that wasn't just grumbling after all, huh. I feel personally robbed by this godforsaken weather."
The late, lamented former commissioner who never stopped preaching about infrastructure — and his deep, abiding love of domed stadiums.
Muttering complaints about that profound devotion, Noh In-seong boarded the hyper-loop.
Even after Noh In-seong left, declaring it was his day off anyway, the rain kept hammering Daegu like it had lost its mind.
The third game got drenched too — the field soaked through so thoroughly that even the drainage system seemed to give up.
"...That's a postponement for sure, right?"
"Yeah. Hey, everyone head back to the hotel and start packing. Forget the game — the grounds crew's got their work cut out just fixing the field."
"They sucked up this much water; they'll want to check the drainage pipes before anything else."
With the final two games of the series pushed to the end of the regular season, the Doubles headed home.
Naturally, a typhoon's reach doesn't stop at one ballpark.
Gwangju, for starters, achieved the rare feat of three consecutive mercy-rule games.
"Damn it, the problem is that we LOST all three of those mercy-rule games."
"...So this is where our paper-thin starting rotation gets exposed, huh..."
Fail to sign proper foreign players, and you're left without a single reliable starter. Even Oh Yeon-seok had spent the last three years piling up mileage until his arm simply gave out — and their collapse down the standings had plenty of reasons behind it.
Meanwhile, some teams were left gasping for breath after playing every single inning.
"God DAMN it, home AND away series, and every single one of them in a dome...!!"
Incheon gave up a series win to a bottom-feeder, the Grizzlys beat them senseless, and now —
a classic pitching-strong team whose record swung up and down with the vagaries of their hitters' form. The Superstars had barely climbed over two mountains.
"Oh for f—... we haven't even finished our trades yet, and we have to face THESE bastards next?"
Their next opponent: the Doubles, who — just like the Grizzlys — played in a dome. Riding the off day, the Superstars, now alone in fifth place after Daegu's postponement shuffled the standings, were grinding their teeth.
"Daegu has no obligation to sell those bastards any players. If they're selling, they'd be better off selling to Busan."
They were still seething over Noh In-seong's sabotage of the Jong Min-soo trade.
"Think about it. Those bastards already have their rookie slots locked up — everything left on that roster is dregs."
A remark that trampled over human beings like doormats, player rights be damned.
"Look at Busan! You all know they can't develop talent, but they're LOADED with raw gems, right?"
Granted, it was still far easier to say than the things that had utterly demolished the dignity of the coaching staff.
"When they were the ones selling, it was cash on the barrelhead. But now that they're the buyers, suddenly they have to pay full price for players."
Noh In-seong grinned.
"Honestly, I love this kind of dilemma. Watching them suffer over a roster that won't get reinforced, and then flaming out of the postseason hunt — that's the good stuff."
No, the current front office that bought the club hadn't been the ones flipping players for rice money.
But Noh In-seong still held firmly to one principle: the sins had to be paid for by whoever now wore the crest.
The Marines were a clown show, but at least they were burning their long-term future to the ground screaming *we're making the playoffs this year*. The Phoenix were idiots too, but idiots addicted to the taste of October baseball they'd gotten last year, scooping up every free agent in sight because they wanted to win.
But THESE bastards? New owner shows up, so hey, let's just buy some players and waltz into the postseason?
"Oh my, how utterly shameless."
For friends like that... the trade market simply must be closed to them, no?
People would ask why he had to go this far.
"You think the bastards who violated my laws to my face get to dodge the debts of the body just because the head changed?"
Coming from a man who would do absolutely anything, every single time, to win — those were the bastards he despised most.
Just look at the other teams that would do whatever it took if it meant beating their opponents.
"Bribing reporters, tormenting the other team's players, media wars, slander, profanity, grinding people down with seniority..."
All of it garbage, every last bit — but at least they were *trying to win*, and so Noh In-seong simply gave back in kind.
He was a do-anything-to-win man himself, so between his kind it was merely a contest of who could be more ruthless.
But the Superstars? With those bastards, he loathed everything they did, from the very first act to the last.
Maybe they'd walked straight out of some comic book where swapping out your bowl-cut protagonist restores your stamina gauge.
The sin of selling players for grocery money belonged to the previous owners, and now they themselves were to be held innocent?
"Ha! Then go found a brand-new franchise."
It is a law of nations: the sins of the predecessor are inherited by the present.
If the club had preferred selling off its players to actually winning games,
then for at least as long as they did it, they should have been pariahs in trades and free agency, bleeding talent and paying down the tab.
"Your body's debt is yours to repay. That's not a Qing dynasty bond — that's a Superstars bond."
And so Noh In-seong began his campaign of intimidation, shoving the toxic debt directly into their faces.
The long-missed air of home — the smell of air conditioning, the cool crisp air.
And that signature dry, humidity-free feel of this land... Perfect.
"Agh, it's not that I hate traveling outside Seoul when it's not monsoon season... but that typhoon was brutal."
"Normally the things slam straight into Japan and we get maybe a drizzle. What the hell is going on this year?"
Song Jin-wook and Sung Hyun-tak grumbled nonstop about how they hadn't gotten any real rest.
"Oh, would you two give it a rest. I threw five innings, gave up two runs, and took the loss — and you're throwing a tantrum in front of ME."
Noh In-seong was a man who had eaten losses to his performance-evaluated stats on top of everything else.
Unsurprisingly, fire came shooting out from under the butts of these men who hadn't contributed a single thing to the offense.
"KERCHAK!"
"...That's why I came prepared. Already wedged a sponge in there. Didn't see that one coming, did you?"
Perhaps because he'd been kicked so many times, Song Jin-wook had actually started developing countermeasures.
"Aww~ then I'll just kick harder~"
THWACK---!!
"GYAAAH...!! Why are you kicking my THIGH...!! I'm slow enough already...!!"
"It's not a fielding day today. Just grit your teeth and bear it."
To his elaborate countermeasure, the answer he got back was simply: hit him one more time.
'Hit him one more time.'
Who could have guessed that little motto would apply to everything today — the game itself, and Song Jin-wook's slump along with it?
In the second Daegu game, the Doubles' offense had managed a grand total of one run across five innings. Today was... rather different.
The Superstars were, at their core, a team built on a pitching staff good enough to reach October, and an offense of tiny, meticulous contact hitting that ran play after play.
About the only batter on their roster capable of real extra-base power was Seol Ho-jin.
Jimmy Sutton could technically hit for power too — except right now he couldn't hit anything at all.
Beep... beep... beep...
"Time for the patient's liquid diet, sir."
"Uhhurgh? Hhurghh!"
The man was laid up in a hospital, his body barely able to chew.
Gigi Paul had come back and was making a valiant redemption effort — but the moment Noh In-seong stepped into the batter's box:
"Goddammit, it's THAT bastard again."
—he scrambled to fire an intentional ball off the outside corner before any damage could start.
Against recent starters who'd been holding up well, there had simply been far too many losses from an offense that couldn't score.
And in the middle of all this, they'd gone and rented Jong Min-soo for half a season to fix the heart of their lineup —
just as the price had skyrocketed lately, thanks to one certain cursed individual.
"Damn it. There aren't just one or two holes to fill in this lineup, and now we have to choose between buying Jong Min-soo or plugging somewhere else."
Today, too, the game only truly opened up after Gigi Paul came off the mound — whether his team's blood had finally started flowing or what.
Leading 5-3, the Doubles went ahead and stole their own bullpen's chance to pitch.
DING--!!
It all started with the number eight hitter.
A rare base hit from Kim Jun-soo — the man whose at-bats summoned billboard advertisements more often than base hits.
Then Pi Jeong-doo followed with a hit of his own, and the runner was swapped out for pinch runner Jin Jung-seok.
"Ugh, would it kill them to sub me out a little faster? My knee's killing me."
"Rain's probably coming, then. Yours is the knee, huh? Mine's the elbow."
While the grizzled veterans traded their worn old jokes, Noh In-seong's turn at the plate came around.
Was it the pressure? Or was he simply a pitcher who'd never had much command to begin with?
Soo Byung-jin's curveball slammed into the dirt and went skittering gently toward the backstop.
With the ball escaped, the runners naturally advanced, and the Superstars' manager looked at the now-empty first base.
"...We'll walk him."
Issuing an intentional walk in this situation wasn't cheap gamesmanship at all. It was a perfectly good way to buy an out.
Noh In-seong knew it too, which was why he'd tossed his bat aside and was strolling unhurriedly down to first.
The problem was the man standing in that batter's box — a man who, since the end of the Daegu series, had heard a certain piece of news.
"...I'm... I'm going to be a dad."
Anywhere in the world, the weight of a father watching his own family grow is a heavy thing to carry.
And a father whose first child arrived the moment the honeymoon ended? That man can do anything.
CRACK----!!!
The man now facing a lifetime of formula prices — Song Jin-wook's eyes had completely rolled back.
'Hit, home runs, RBIs, incentives! Doesn't matter — I have to do it ALL!'
He was already making good money. But if he didn't keep it up, the numbers would come right back down.
With his eyes fully rolled back, Song Jin-wook went deep AGAIN in his very next at-bat —
and by the end of the game, he had succeeded in squeezing genuine tears out of the Superstars' pitching staff.
"Well, I mean. Can you blame them? Getting back-to-back grand slams off you by the same batter — how are tears NOT going to come out?"
Deeply moved by Song Jin-wook's sadistic brand of baseball, Noh In-seong gave him a standing ovation.
Soo Byung-jin — and with him, the entire Superstars organization — had just been forced into a record so rare you couldn't find it anywhere else in the world:
giving up two grand slams to a single batter in one game.
There was a distinct smell of tears coming off the mandu that day.