Pro Baseball Dog Meat
The sports news wound down on screen with a story about a home spectator at a Superstars game who, blinded by rage, hurled a player's helmet onto the field — only to be brutally subdued by an anti-riot electric shock drone. Meanwhile, two men at a restaurant were spinning their spoons nonstop.
"Already June, huh. Feels like most teams are finally starting to take shape."
Sluuurp—!!
"Mmph-ummph-mmm?"
"...You little bastard. At the very least, don't answer me with your mouth stuffed full of food..."
Team captain Jo In-soo, freshly returned to the roster, had called Noh In-seong out for a meal.
Noh In-seong was a man for whom rest after a starting pitching assignment was simply a matter of course. Even though he'd tagged along on the Suwon road trip, while everyone else sweated their way to a single win—
"On my day off~ I wonder what I should eat in Suwon~"
—replenishing expended energy was his one and only priority.
Jo In-soo had his own reasons for being busy too. Sure, he was back, but he needed to rebuild his condition, restore his stamina, get back into playing shape.
"You... you'll have to ease back in as a pinch hitter first, then work your way back into the starting lineup."
Manager Jung Im-taek had already pointed out that a fair chunk of his muscle had wasted away, leaving him slimmer than before.
"Yeah, that's fair. I honestly don't know if my batting form's even intact."
He'd spent so long lying face-down in a hospital bed that he had no idea how much of his form had survived.
With free agency on the horizon too, the last thing he could afford was to become a total bust. He still had years of playing left ahead of him — better to make a proper, solid comeback.
As for Noh In-seong, well. He didn't exactly have many opportunities to score a free meal on the team's dime. Obviously — his salary was already near the top of the payroll, and all the heavily paid veterans had up and vanished somewhere. A team this young meant that unless you were someone who'd cashed in on free agency, you weren't getting a free lunch.
"Ah, nothing beats the captain's wallet."
Of course, the punk pulling in a straight billion won in just his second year would, by total career earnings, technically be freeloading off Jo In-soo too.
With their interests perfectly aligned, the two men headed for a well-known Suwon restaurant that Jo In-soo trusted.
The menu: mild, unseasoned chicken gomtang.
One bite of anything spicy with chili in it, and all that treatment could go straight down the drain — right back to the hospital ward with him.
"You're telling me they don't even put pepper in chicken gomtang? Is this real life?"
"Hey, this is the kind of hospital diet that foreign folks call too spicy. This is what the doctors ordered."
Noh In-seong found himself wondering whether they should have just gone to a porridge joint instead — but surprisingly, the broth was rich, the meat was piled high, and one bowl was nowhere near enough. A genuinely great place.
He was still in a state where he had to watch what he ate, but at least he could now sit cross-legged without pain. The man was on the mend.
Jo In-soo, fully caught up by now, listened to the full report of every incident and accident that had gone down in his absence. When it was over...
"...So yeah, you really should've seen their faces when I was absolutely wrecking those bastards."
Jo In-soo's head suddenly spun, and a miracle occurred: he wanted to be readmitted to the hospital immediately.
Damn it. Maybe I should've gone to a different team, even if it meant a smaller FA paycheck.
The lunatic had, all while smiling, driven a colossal rift into an already fractured relationship between teams.
"...Suddenly I've completely lost my appetite?"
"And after that, they stopped even asking me whether those bastards were going to apologize to me or not... right, In-soo hyung?"
Watching the guy proudly show off his rap sheet — and by rap sheet, who knew whether he meant his battle record or his criminal record — with the innocence of a child, Jo In-soo felt his stomach twist.
This punk isn't sorry at all! The second I'm back, he's definitely going to pull this on me!
"Hey! The only veterans left on this team are me and that old utility infielder... *koff koff*!"
Mid-rant, a drop of broth caught in his windpipe, and Jo In-soo's voice cracked into a wheeze. Noh In-seong stared at him with utter contempt.
"Wow. And here I thought you'd only wrecked your exhaust pipe. Turns out the fuel intake is busted too."
"*Koff—koff!* You little—!"
Gulping down water in a hurry, Jo In-soo struggled to calm his churning stomach. Because of this punk, he had no idea how he was supposed to look the other national team players in the eye. But right now, at this moment, all he wanted was to smack this guy upside the head.
His first day back, and the captain's duty of counseling his teammate had tasted exactly like chicken broth.
A year and a half had now passed since Noh In-seong's debut in Korean pro baseball — and slowly but surely, the public perception of the sport was shifting.
And honestly, how could it not?
"When something insane happens every single day — when you've got punks who eat manners for breakfast running around... well, what do you expect."
"You're the one who ate three bowls for breakfast, hyung. A guy who inhales gomtang like he's chugging water doesn't get to talk."
As they left the chicken gomtang restaurant, Jo In-soo nagged, and Noh In-seong counterattacked with a jab about his appetite. Not only was the backtalk irritating — it was shameless too, which made it twice as effective!
"Argh, who's talking about gomtang?! You cause some disaster practically every time you step on a field, you insane walking catastrophe!"
How many organizations were left, really, that Noh In-seong hadn't clashed with? All Jo In-soo had to do was pull out his phone and tap the 'Noh In-seong / Incidents & Accidents' tab, and the list poured out: opposing fans, opposing teams, opposing managers, the league association, reporters, parents, the gaming industry... wait. The gaming industry?
"What the hell did you do to the gaming industry to have its own entry on this list?"
"Oh, games? Some idiots made a total piece of garbage but built a genius monetization model, so I officially roasted them for it..."
To be fair, he'd already called a certain Changwon conglomerate a pachinko parlor long before this, so of course there was history. The problem was that the game he'd torched this time was that company's newest release.
The problem was Bloodline 52.
There they were — dancing balloons announcing "Our store is now OPEN!" and handouts of tissues flying everywhere — and what does this maniac do?
"Mmm, yes! An ultra-naNoMaChine dog meat molecular cuisine, made with a brand-new engine!"
While spouting that garbage, he sprayed liquid nitrogen at minus 150 degrees all over the storefront. That was the review he'd spat out after a mere thirty minutes on his own Nertube channel — so what did anyone expect?
Pile on the scathing takedowns from other Nertubers, the signature predatory monetization, the same tired story, the same siege wars, the same soul-crushing grind. Mix every bad ingredient together with the venom of the most popular influencer on the planet, and the result was miserable. About as miserable as the fighting game from the applause-card heyday, or the title that vanished leaving behind only one Great Hilarious Mountain character.
— Overwhelmingly Negative — was the label that slapped itself onto a game that had barely just shipped.
"ARGH! This absolute lunatic!"
Jo In-soo gaped in horror. No, seriously — was this guy picking fights with megacorporations now too? The man genuinely seemed to want to wage war against the entire world. What a complete maniac.
But Noh In-seong had his reasons.
"Where do these half-baked morons get off buying my likeness rights to make a baseball-dog-meat game?!"
His own likeness was on the verge of falling into the hands of those chuckleheads.
The truth was, Noh In-seong had hated virtually every gacha game on a cellular level since birth.
Money? It wasn't about the money.
"How dare money beat effort, you arrogant bastards!"
These were dark times for anything aspiring to be called a "game" in Noh In-seong's book. If you didn't grind your life away for thousands of hours and become capable of literally anything, it didn't count as a game in his ledger.
There was a reason mobile game ad deals never came his way. Because the guy who'd be endorsing them was the same guy who'd say, "Instead of dumping money into a garbage pay-to-win game like this, just go buy yourself some meat."
And in the middle of all this, the Changwon conglomerate declared it would revive an old baseball IP it had sitting in a vault.
On its own, he couldn't have cared less. The trouble started when it happened right as the biggest jackpot bait for card-pack ripping was being prepped.
Card packs could be bought with in-game currency — but that currency could only be earned in strictly limited daily amounts. On top of that, the league ran on a promotion-relegation system, so every new card release naturally sent the power balance into convulsions.
And naturally, the 2051 Doubles deck reigned at the very top of the league as the number-one power deck. A deck that won 100 games in a single season was not going to be weak.
The standard-issue Noh In-seong card was already strong as it was — and now there was a card designed to replace it.
"A Noh In-seong model will sell at a premium! As the flagship of the first card pack...!!"
The plan was to rake in cash with the release of the 2051 'Rookie of the Year' Noh In-seong card and the 2051 'MVP' Noh In-seong card.
That plan had to go through the shredder the very next day.
The moment word of the card production scheme reached the ears of Noh In-seong — who happened to be resting that day — he initiated an immediate, silent recall of his likeness rights.
"Flagship model?! THE flagship model?! These clowns are out of their minds!"
Slap his face onto a steaming pile of a management game and run a suuuuuper-amazing card racket off it? Fatten their wallets off his popularity? The sheer audacity — were these people insane?
The recall interviews followed as surely as night follows day, and through Reporter Jeong's microphone, the dis track broadcast itself to the entire world.
"Looking at how you're trying to farm people by just tweaking the card rarity tier, I guess the rebuilding's going great, huh."
He'd taken his next opponent's parent company's flagship product and beaten them over the head with it.
Naturally, journalists were not the sort of people to pass up a ratings goldmine wrapped in a righteous cause.
Noh In-seong's 'Likeness Rights Dispute'... Just How Ugly Are Their 'Card Pull' Rates?
A Second Coming of Baseball, 'Bloodline'... How Did the Original Series Crash and Burn?
Server Costs From Hell, a League of Pure Agony... Why Dig a Dead Game Out of Its Grave?
He'd been burned by Noh In-seong once before, so Reporter Jeong couldn't write hit pieces on him for a while. But—
"Still, these guys clickbait great, don't they?"
"They really do!"
The conglomerate in question had always been a magnet for controversy, so the reporters happily lent a hand while grinning. And so, everyone began rolling out the red carpet — smiling all the while — to bury Changwon's Dinosaurs alive.
Having cleanly taken the winning series off Suwon, the Doubles set off for their road trip to Changwon — and found the home stadium surprisingly thin on fans, patchy with empty seats here and there.
Part of it was the club's official declaration of a rebuild. But there was more to it.
"The team's broke now, that's why. You've gotta at least be having fun to show up."
A steaming bowl of hard truth, served fresh by Noh In-seong.
"...You're genuinely cruel, you know that?"
Song Jin-wook — who'd been busy at the market looking after his wife, who'd lately traded the news for morning sickness — only now heard the full story and managed one remark.
As a rule, fans watch from outside when the team's winning, and from inside the stadium when it's losing. Granted, some teams still draw loyal crowds even through losing seasons — fans who genuinely enjoy it, or who show up religiously win or lose. But that's the story of teams with fully finished brainwashing, franchises so old that watching baseball has simply become culture. Or teams blessed with such enormous fanbases that they keep showing up out of sheer devotion, even when the standings are ugly.
With the results this mediocre, only the hardcore fans who came to watch the rebuild in progress had any reason to show up. No wonder the club hadn't tried to build its marketing around its own players — it had tried to build it around Noh In-seong.
True to a rebuilding team, Changwon was pinning everything on exactly three names: two mercenary pitchers, and two batters — Jeong Jin-woo and Tavarez.
Baseball may be the sport with win probabilities closest to a pure 50:50 coin flip, but a baby-faced roster built around rookies and second-years simply cannot beat a baby-faced roster that's also good.
And especially—
CRACK—!!
"Hey, you bastards! Tell your owner this! Put my name down as NOH IN-SEONG, and stop blurring my face into a black silhouette!"
Anyone else might have been forgivable — but an opposing franchise owner trying to sell his face for profit? That earned an earful.
The real problem was that lunatic who kept doing something every time he rounded the bases — a gesture so ceremonial it looked like he was hitting home runs purely as an excuse to perform it.
Across the three-game series in Changwon, Noh In-seong compiled a monstrous stat line: three games, nine home runs, and a hit in every single at-bat.
A squad that young, getting hammered like this? Would they come to their senses — or spiral into panic and self-destruct?
Only one sane man remained among them, and manager Kim Chang-soo wept tears of blood.
"Damn it... what did our baseball team ever do wrong..."
All the weak man could do was shed the tears of the powerless. If you really wanted to assign blame, it was the sin of being saddled with the wrong parent company.
What could he do? The sins of a sponsor who'd crossed Noh In-seong ran this deep.
In the end, Noh In-seong got his likeness rights back — and the player who was supposed to headline the flagship card pack was barred from release entirely. His face was gone, and his name changed with it.
And as a bonus, the player the company had been planning to power up next—
"Huh? In-seong says he's not doing this? Then I'm out too!"
Song Jin-wook pulled his likeness rights as well.
"...Uh, you really didn't have to do that."
Caught somewhere between gratitude and mild regret, Noh In-seong thanked Song Jin-wook in a slightly wavering voice. He wondered if some rote-education brainwashing had been involved — but no, this one came straight from Song Jin-wook's own brain. Or rather, from the brain of the woman behind it.
"Think about it. How's a moron baseball game that can't even release a Noh In-seong card supposed to survive?"
— It's getting shut down sooner or later anyway. And hey, staying out of it is good for your image too?
He'd simply taken his wise wife's advice to heart.
"Why should I dump money into garbage like this?! Shut it down NOW! There are plenty of real simulator games!"
"Aww~ There are plenty of baseball games without you too~ They could just do a conversion of an old classic~"
"Now that there's an international league, the Japanese baseball games will model you anyway~"
Jung Soo-jung's instincts were dead on.
It didn't even take a full month. Just two weeks later, with vague promises of "we'll be back," the Changwon conglomerate's passion project vanished into the dustbin of history.
The second ruin had come to pass.