17. SNS Is a Waste of a Life
[Wow, the Doubles. They really are strong.]
[This year's Doubles are the very picture of a team hitting its stride — firing on all cylinders from the very first game of the season.]
The save had been recorded by the pitcher they'd traded for to plug the hole in the bullpen. The dim-witted rookie catcher had proven that, whatever else you said about him, he was good enough as a backup to shoulder the starting catcher's workload. And that troublemaker had booted the dim-witted catcher clear off the field the moment the game ended.
[Nobody in the baseball world doubted Noh In-seong would play well, did they?]
[Exactly — they all quietly talked themselves into other picks, purely because nobody knew what kind of trouble he'd blow up next...]
Like some basketball franchise that had drafted itself a king worthy of its dynasty within a single year — this was the franchise that had spent an entire season teetering between "maybe fall baseball, maybe not" amid injuries and a thinned roster, only to finish dead eighth.
[The sprout that bloomed in that sad autumn has now produced a six-game winning streak to open the Doubles' season!]
On the other side of the ledger, there was also a player in very real danger of being stabbed to death by a bamboo shoot so lush it stretched thirty centimeters taller every single day.
A man whose hitting was, to put it kindly, hopeless. The thinnest reed among the born slap hitters — shortstop Kim Jun-soo.
He'd drawn the start at third base again today, and while he was relieved simply to be in the lineup every day, the past few games had taught him something new about himself. Third base is offense first. It exists on a completely different plane from shortstop. One measly single. Going 1-for-4 was nowhere near enough offense for the position. And if the front office swung another trade, he'd be shoved aside and demoted to backup shortstop, just like that.
"Should I just overhaul my swing entirely?"
Back in spring he'd gone to the hitting coach and declared that while he had no dreams of becoming a slugger, he wanted to at least become a hitter who could ring up doubles! The answer he'd gotten back was merciless. His body wasn't built to add weight easily — he could put on muscle, sure, but his production in April and his production in September would look like two different players. His bat speed was simply too slow. He had the contact skills, no question, but scraping together just enough contact to put the ball in play and squaring up a pitch with intent to drive it were entirely different skills. In the end, he'd need to bank real experience — accepting a slower bat and learning to hit with authority, studying pitchers, grinding through the analysis... Nothing that could be papered over in the middle of a season. Rip the bandage off before the season ended, or even mid-season? That was something you did in a video game, not a risk a man whose livelihood depended on his own two hands could afford to choose. So he'd had no choice but to nod along when the coach said: keep things as they are this year, rebuild the swing properly in the offseason.
"Song Jin-wook here! Pleasure to be working with you all!"
And his gloomy premonition had come true, word for word.
The third baseman from the minors — the first-round pick from two years ago who'd been sent down because his defense was less a glove and more a hole — second-year man Song Jin-wook had been called up. His minor-league numbers: .414 with 21 home runs. He'd been pulled late in plenty of games over defensive concerns, but he'd still logged a healthy number of starts.
A second-year player, younger than him, with better hitting tools, had suddenly materialized as the obstacle standing between Kim Jun-soo and his everyday job.
"Hey, you're pretty famous, you know."
The man working the room with introductions, Song Jin-wook, had singled him out with a grin — so apparently he was famous down in the minors.
"Me? Famous for what, exactly?"
He asked purely out of curiosity, but Jin-wook just twisted his mouth into a wry smile, muttered nah, you're just... famous, and let it hang there.
Honestly, In-seong couldn't have cared less. Right now he was busy answering, in kind, a certain opposing mercenary who'd gotten cheeky with him on social media.
Hector Berlin, the Superstars' mercenary slugger. Consider that the man plays left field — can't you just smell the archetypal right-handed, big-bat whiff machine radiating off the screen? The kind of hitter whose entire mechanic is trusting God-given raw power, hauling the bat around in one violent rotation, and fishing for extra bases.
A physique packed to the gills with muscle and fat alike, and a temper to match. Although — that part was actually kind of curious. It's rare for a mercenary to throw up a shield for his own teammates this hard. Weird duck, this one.
Anyway. Not that it mattered. Noh In-seong was not about to bow his head to the mouth-garbage spewing out of this free-swinging slugger.
When a war of words this vicious breaks out off the field, the teams and the fanbases naturally cluster up and start stoking their mutual hatred. Gallery boards, real life, news sites, social media, video platforms... Every channel hummed to life, gorging itself on raw, unfiltered, pure verbal warfare the likes of which had never existed before.
— Let's Examine the Character of Noh In-seong: Everything He Said on Draft Day, Compiled
— From Sprout to "Noh": His High School Baseball Days
— The Most Shocking Thing About This Player? He's Never Actually Committed a Crime
From that very morning until first pitch of the afternoon game, everything from short clips to full articles came flooding out. And In-seong, for his part, answered every single hater with a double middle-finger emoji.
And the comment that so eloquently displayed its author's own intelligence quotient got screenshotted, framed, and permanently taxidermied for posterity.
Before Game 2 against the Superstars, Noh In-seong had personally doused the headlines in gasoline and struck the match.
- Wooooooo...!!
- You trash bastard! I came here to watch you die!
- Twist that ankle! Roll around on the ground screaming!
It honestly moved him. These were the same people who, just yesterday, couldn't fill their own home seats, let alone the outfield. Today the bleachers were shoulder to shoulder all the way back. Only problem was, the uniforms were an even mix of Daejeon, Busan, and Superstars.
Oh, would you look at that — Grizzlies jerseys over there too. Splendid. The entire Allied Nations has turned out.
Today's starter was Andy — the man who, in Game 2 against Phoenix, had single-handedly gone the full nine innings and allowed just one run. Though truthfully, In-seong suspected that had less to do with Andy and more to do with the fact that every defender happened to be having a good day.
Which made sense, because...
Crack—!
Because the man stationed at third base today had defense so bad, relative to his bat, it bordered on offensive. 190 centimeters, 114 kilograms. Obviously sluggish afield, a second-year rookie whose hitting might — might — be enough to push the mercenary out of the lineup.
Unlike Kim Jun-soo, whose range was so absurdly wide it overlapped with In-seong's — which had been its own problem — this guy's defense was essentially cemented to the third-base bag. Sung Hyun-tak's work at second was average defense, for better or worse, and because his range was average, he'd until now been free to shade toward second base to help out... but no longer.
Which meant: with that human boulder glued to third base, they couldn't even shift the infield. Standard positioning, all nine innings, no exceptions.
Whack—!
Wow. This is genuinely exhausting.
"In-seong, you're supposed to field those for me, buddy."
"...That was the second baseman's coverage zone. Up until today, I was the one covering it for you. Hyung."
Watching Sung Hyun-tak shuffle over all sheepish and spout that garbage somehow made the whole thing twice as exhausting.
After that, a sacrifice fly moved the runners to the corners, then another base hit refilled first and second. One out, and the game still sat at 1–0.
"Hey, you mouthy little punk."
"What? You senile old fossil."
The two men who'd been slugging it out on social media finally stood face to face, trading words — and not a single one of them friendly. Pure aggression, both barrels.