Runaway Locomotive (Part 1)
The second half of the season had begun.
There was exactly one phrase the Doubles faithful had been waiting for.
"Fuck, the full roster is finally back. Everyone else is dead."
"I'd better have gotten something out of riding all the way down to Busan. Ugh, I don't care how fast they've made the high-speed rail these days..."
For the die-hards who traveled to a ballpark every single day, the reason this phrase felt so welcome was simple.
First, with Noh In-seong and Song Jin-wook both out, the fans had taken an absolute beating, game after game.
They'd had to endure the entire stretch of In-seong's 11-game suspension — a period practically engineered to resurrect that old, familiar PTSD from years past.
"Ugh... it's reminding me of the old dark ages..."
"Don't you dare. You do not get to say that over a brief dip in the win rate!"
For the older baseball fans in particular, it was enough to bring back the seasons when the team had given up on October ball entirely and gone into full rebuild mode.
In other words, everyone's eyes were still glued to the garbage results of the final stretch of the first half.
For Doubles fans who had been piling up wins at an overwhelming clip until then, this humiliation was beyond imagination.
Having caught a small breather with In-seong's return, they finally started doing the math.
It stood to reason. Lose forty percent of the team's strength, then another twenty, and of course the remaining forty percent loses.
And so, in the Suwon game that marked In-seong's return, he had single-handedly detonated two wins in a row.
The Doubles had won thanks to the final burning streak In-seong tore off to close the first half, so everyone accepted the arithmetic.
But even these fans thought about the future.
Naturally, this whole spectacle drew a chorus of enjoy it while it lasts, you bastards... from the fans of countless other teams.
They were fans celebrating the victories in front of them — but deep down, a quiet unease was beginning to creep upward.
Meanwhile, the gentleman who accounted for that forty percent was once again being showered with praise by the experts.
As things stood, Noh In-seong was being told he could end the season right now and it would still be enough.
As a pitcher: 104 innings, 13 earned runs. A 1.13 ERA, 119 strikeouts, an 11-2 record, and a 3.28 fWAR — generous enough on its own.
Perhaps thanks to a body that had packed on muscle since last year and grown positively monstrous?
The batting numbers, coming more often and in greater volume, were somehow even more horrifying.
263 plate appearances, 231 at-bats, 98 hits. A .424 average / .492 on-base / 1.113 slugging.
40 home runs, 40 stolen bases, 92 RBI. An oWAR of 10.87.
Pitcher and hitter combined, he had already sailed comfortably past 14 WAR.
And Song Jin-wook, chasing right behind him, sat at barely a hair over 6 oWAR — which said everything about just how singular an anomaly In-seong was in this league.
His hit count had actually dropped, oddly enough, but the doubles and home runs had multiplied in proportion. Get hit by him, and the ball left the park.
Given that even an ordinary championship team's ace pitcher and ace hitter combined couldn't reach those numbers, opposing teams had to be wondering: why do these guys alone get to play on a tilted baseball field?
"...If the season ended like this, he'd still have outperformed last year, proportionally."
"That's fair. The steals are whatever — he racked those up in a heap early on, which is how we got here..."
Amid a parade of experts declaring, let the praising of Noh In-seong now commence, one expert's face kept shifting through a lively palette of colors.
"...So you're telling me we have to watch this lunatic for three straight games?"
"...Yes, and I offer my sincere condolences to your team's departed souls. Let's get swept, nice and clean!"
"Goddammit, have these crazy chicken bastards lost their minds?!"
The expert rooting for second-place Busan was currently locked in a collar-grabbing scuffle with the expert from third-place Daejeon.
No matter how good your own team's momentum was, this was not a situation anyone could laugh through.
It was no accident that the pundits were calling this a trial sent from heaven upon Busan.
The collision of first place and second place was about to begin.
Back in mid-July, when Busan had summoned the Doubles to their home turf.
They had been clinging to second place with a three-game cushion over Daejeon — a position that was, in a certain sense, stable.
"Wow, I honestly can't tell anymore — did we actually become a good team, or did we just buy the right players?"
"Is this real? Are we seriously going to October baseball now?"
The Busan fans who had watched this standings race unfold were in a daze.
Forget October baseball — the last time they'd finished the first half in second place was way back in 2012.
The news said it had taken a full forty years to reclaim this great achievement.
But forty years, they said. In that span, a person gets born, learns to walk, passes through kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, university —
then lands a job and finally gets around to buying their first real home, at which point they're pushing forty.
Meaning only the Busan fans now in their fifties had actually witnessed that glorious season from forty years ago.
"Goddammit...!! And after that we missed October ball every single year except twice...!! Is the universe mocking us or what...!!"
Naturally, this was the kind of topic where, if a kid asked about it, they'd get the Busan bread currently in hand hurled at their head.
Nobody ever asked a Busan fan, weren't you guys good back in the day?
Crowds came flooding and buzzing into Sajik Baseball Stadium.
And before the blazing sun had even finished setting, the first game of the second half began in earnest.
"Good evening, viewers, and welcome. We are live at Sajik! Greetings to you all from the first game of the second half!"
"Yes, we've well and truly rounded the turn now. Normally, we'd be wrapping things up once September passes."
At the highest point on the field stood Jang In-ho, the man already being anointed the nation's homegrown ace.
"...Goddammit. How is this bastard even scarier than the last time I saw him?"
Across from him stood Noh In-seong — not fully rested, but rested enough, and looking sharp.
Not that running away would have helped; the outcome would be stolen bases either way.
A bastard that fast wasn't going to stand still, so there was nothing to do but fight it out.
Jang In-ho, who had deliberately hidden that grip all this time and now gripped the ball for a curveball, intending never to show it until the moment it mattered.
"Whew. This is gonna be a long-ass day."
And he began toying with his fingers.
"Strike!"
"Ooh, beautiful first-pitch strike! Breaking hard and wide laterally... yes, that looks like a slurve! We haven't seen that in a long, long time."
"A bit different from the gyro slider he usually throws, wouldn't you say? Much more sweep, much more drop."
"Well, look at that. Now he's bringing out all kinds of tricks. Playing with his fingers must be so much fun."
The slider had, in the 2020s, undergone a second great wave of refinement at the hands of countless pitchers.
Hitters had long since stopped fearing the slider and moved on to attacking it head-on.
Fine, that was a Major League story, not a Korean baseball one — if you wanted to nitpick, go ahead.
But the calculus changed entirely the moment every pitcher could throw a slider better than a changeup.
And naturally, Korean baseball had begun actively hunting the slider down to devour it.
There had been an era when any slider drifting into the strike zone became prey for every hitter in the lineup.
From then on, the slider either fled the zone entirely or was forced to evolve for survival.
Drop it more, break it harder — or mash it together with something else entirely.
"I can throw my slider on a designated line too, you know."
Throw it with a horizontal emphasis, and it became a Sweeper.
The dropping, "ordinary" slider was his Gyro.
And then there was the pitch that kid had just thrown — an unholy mashup of curveball and slider.
"Last I checked, barely anyone still throws that thing, and you went and learned it too? Impressive. Who taught you?"
"...Nertube, you son of a bitch."
Kim Su-ho took the second slurve clean off his body.
The pitch had still clipped the zone, apparently, because the Machine God ABS called it a strike.
Two strikes. For the first time all season, Noh In-seong stood at the plate staring blankly at two called pitches.
Perhaps the broadcast crew hadn't expected this scenario either.
"My goodness — he breaks out the slurve and pockets a favorable count with two quick strikes! Outstanding."
"It's been a while since we've seen Noh In-seong just... stare at pitches like that. He's usually a hitter who swings at anything in his zip code..."
They could hardly stop singing the praises of Jang In-ho's new weapon.
For a man whose walks were mostly intentional, whose average and on-base percentage sat within a hair of each other, this was restraint no one had ever seen from him before.
Jang In-ho's spirits lifted.
He would thread in a four-seamer as a look-away pitch, then plan to close with the slurve again — punching at the PitchCom all the while.
This is a first. Me — the one who's always been hunted — chasing them for once...
Unable to contain his joy at his own development, the young pitcher let the ball fly.
His third pitch of the day. A 149 km/h fastball, shown for the very first time —
Tik!
"Oh no! Noh In-seong lays down the bunt---!! The catcher is charging, the pitcher still hasn't recovered his balance!"
"By the time he gets there and fields it, it's already too late! Safe! An infield hit!"
The ball rolled along the ground off In-seong's casually squared-around bunt.
"Figures it's you guys. If the pitch is working that well, you throw the third one, the fourth one, whatever it takes, you idiot."
With In-seong now standing on first, the next batter was Song Jin-wook.
Sure, Kim Su-ho's defense was solid — but having failed to catch that second slurve and blocked it with his body instead, the read was obvious.
"So his command isn't perfect yet. A breaking ball he just learned — of course that's how it is."
Which meant: the moment a runner as fast as In-seong reached base, that pitch effectively ceased to exist.
"Sounds like you'll have to throw it and pray it doesn't get away, huh? So what are you getting Song Jin-wook out with?"
Jin Dong-ha, standing at first base, was breaking out in a cold sweat.
He was plenty bitter about having been posted at first only because he couldn't handle that slurve at all —
but with the weakness now laid bare in just two pitches, anyone crouching behind the plate today was toast. No way around it.
In-seong's words had landed with surgical precision.
Two fastballs came in succession to the next batter, Song Jin-wook.
He spat on one of them, and on the one that crept in toward his body, he answered with a thunderous extra-base swing.
And while the batter-runner chugged toward second, Noh In-seong cruised home without breaking stride.
"Must be nice. At least from the three-hole on down, you can go back to throwing that thing."
Having needled Kim Su-ho on his way in, In-seong leaned over and whispered to Sung Hyun-tak, who was loosening up his swing in the on-deck circle.
"You think that'll work?"
"It'll work. Trust me on this one."
Once he'd talked Sung Hyun-tak around, it was the manager's turn.
Arriving at the dugout, In-seong laid bare every last weakness of that breaking ball, cooked up a scheme —
"Huh. There's something to that. Run it!"
— and even won over Jung Im-taek, a man who managed by the guiding philosophy that small-ball tactics were one hundred percent minus.
The Doubles' vicious brand of baseball was now one step from pouncing on Jang In-ho and devouring him whole.