Nobody Can Just Leave Noh In-seong Alone
Whether or not Noh In-seong's rage pierced the heavens, the opposing teams had stopped giving themselves any excuse to pick a fight with him.
No — strictly speaking, it was less a choice and more that the atmosphere simply wouldn't allow it anymore.
Among players, the ones who had to deal with a man like In-seong fell broadly into three categories.
First: those who intended to beat him with pure skill. The type who refused to react and simply ground out the battle in silence.
If their own team was getting beaten half to death in a bench clearing, sure, they'd jog out there and pull bodies apart — but that was as far as it went.
These types had confidence in their own ability, and cheap provocation didn't move them an inch.
For the most part, they were either arrogant bastards in their own right, or guys riding a once-in-a-generation career all the way up the ladder.
The Grizzlies' Jeong Han-sol fit the mold, as did Jong Min-soo, who had temporarily relocated from Daegu to Busan.
Daejeon's You Hong-jin, strictly speaking, just barely squeaked into this category too.
These were men who would be living side by side on the national team the moment the season ended anyway. Making a scene would only end badly for everyone, so most of them preferred to defuse things quietly and move on.
Second: the type who had actually handed In-seong a pretext for a feud — through age, or through dirty play.
Every last one of them was dead.
"...I can't even argue with that. I really did kill them all."
"Stop describing me like a serial killer, you lunatic."
Of course, nobody had actually died — what had died was, in most cases, a career.
One man had very nearly died, but that was thanks to drugs nobody knew about at the time.
"Look, I'll admit I pissed people off... wait, no. Does angering someone just cause a brain hemorrhage that easily?"
In-seong hadn't poured the poison himself, but the public had firmly decided that his verbal brutality was what pulled the trigger.
A former manager. A coach on his own team. A national team shortstop (doping). A mercenary import. A big-name rookie pitcher. A catcher...
There was no need to even sort them out — how many people, right this moment, were still lying in a hospital bed because of this one man?
And the worst part? Not only did he never once visit any of them to apologize.
No, after the Changwon series, on his one precious day off, he dragged his gaming channel crew out on a so-called "famous restaurant tour," and posted this:
He had deliberately gone to a restaurant sitting right in front of the hospital where his victim lay, ordered food that named the man's injured body part, and teabagged the entire fandom.
From the Incheon fans' perspective, it was enough to make their eyes spin in their sockets.
In fairness, they had already flooded his channel blaming him for their team's collapsing record — but couldn't they agree this went a step past even desecrating the corpse?
"I never forgive anyone who picks a fight with me... something like that, I suppose?"
"...God, you know me too well. Jeong Byung-wook...!! You deserve to die!"
Watching the channel owner and the channel manager spew complete nonsense at each other, Joo Han-chul sighed and wondered how on earth he was supposed to edit these two lunatics into a daily vlog.
"...Eh, riling up the Incheon fans should pull in some great view count, though?"
...Though honestly, this bastard was just as obsessed with view counts as the other one, so they were birds of a feather.
Which brings us to the third category — the ones who now made up nearly everyone.
To summarize this type in a single line:
"Hey. What are you feeding me today? Gonna dodge me again?"
"......"
"...Hm? Not even a peep out of you, huh?"
Thorough, absolute ignoring.
Overwhelming, industrial-grade indifference toward Noh In-seong.
Don't look at him, don't respond to him—the perfect extermination protocol for a passive lunatic who only activates when someone makes eye contact. The perfect countermeasure against a passive maniac who can't function unless someone reacts to him.
In-seong had been driven to the point where, outside of live plays, he couldn't get so much as a single reply out of anyone.
The opponent right after Changwon — where the manager had at least thrown him a few words — was Suwon. And Suwon had united as one body and one mind in ignoring him.
From the manager on down to the catcher, and even the first baseman whenever In-seong reached first.
Everyone, with a single heart and a single will, deliberately returned nothing but silence to avoid friction with him.
So an enraged In-seong had bolted for second on the very first pitch, planted himself on the bag, and opened fire on the one man he'd have to face again — not this year, but next year.
"Being on the national team together doesn't make you safe, you know?"
"...Ugh, hey! The manager ordered the whole team to ignore you — why are you coming at me specifically?!"
The national team second baseman. A hitter whose average, on-base, and slugging stacked up in a pristine .300-.400-.500, each number just barely spilling over the line.
Excellent defense too — but a man who, at precisely the moment his team had slid into a rebuild, was compiling losses instead of wins.
Kim Jin-il stared at In-seong with dead, exhausted eyes.
Even if his own team forced the order on him, a team's superstar could get away with bending it to a degree. And besides, this maniac might do anything, so better to at least talk to him.
"Then either keep me entertained, or go graze on the infield grass. Your pick."
"...How does a personality like that become the face of an entire nation? I swear I'm losing my mind."
His keystone partner, and that is what he turned out to be. Kim Jin-il quietly concluded that the future of Korean baseball was a dark place.
After that, In-seong attempted a steal of third as well, sliding in before the catcher could even get a throw off. And when he lay there on the bag and looked up — who else should be standing over him but another familiar face.
"Stomp to the face, or a friendly chat. Ten. Nine. Eight..."
The moment he started counting down, nice and slow —
"Oh, for god's sake, you little shit..."
words began pouring out of the opponent's mouth automatically.
Song Hak-joo was, after all, the ill-fated player who had taken a beating from In-seong and been traded away the very next day. And a man who's been hit once is not a man you can easily forget.
In-seong was busily hunting out the one crack in every opposing roster where somebody would still talk to him — and having a grand old time with it.
Meanwhile — ignore In-seong all you like; the train called the Doubles keeps rolling.
The proverb says the dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on. Except In-seong was something scarier than a rabid dog, one you'd hesitate to walk past even at full quarantine distance —
and the train called the Doubles wasn't on old rails anyway. It had strapped itself to a hyperloop and left the era's timetable behind.
"What the hell IS this mad dog?! How long is it going to chase us?!"
BARKBARKBARKBARK---!!
Flee the frothing, furious lunatic, and what waited at the end of the chase was a railway line. And a train with its brakes already smashed doesn't stop at stations — it simply mows down everyone standing on the platform.
"GWAAAARGH--!!"
And after the defeat, the aftereffects were equally spectacular. A full week of it, minimum.
The lineup was strong enough to boil any opponent's bullpen into a frantic, overworked frenzy on its own — opposing pitcher workload was the standard included option. Unless your rotation was genuinely elite, you absorbed the beating, then had to burn your chase crew just to stay in it.
Then just walk the key hitter, obviously. You think that's easy?
The moment you put In-seong on base for free, he was ready to run at any instant — so you couldn't even afford to walk him. One team had tried it exactly once, burned through the sanity of several catchers in the process, and after that everyone gave up.
Then, sad to say — just slug your way through their pitchers and force a shootout. Surely that works?
"Damn it, what is WITH this pitching staff...!! Our guys can't buy a hit!"
Tragically, the batters were getting roughed up every bit as badly as the pitchers.
After a date with the Doubles rotation — the same staff proudly credited with shortening the average length of a ballgame — batting averages simply evaporated. Slugging percentage, gone. Some hitters slid all the way into the opening chapter of a full-blown slump.
"No, seriously, what the hell?! How hard do they throw, and how big is that stuff--!!"
The gap was wide enough that entire opposing dugouts were screaming in fury — and it was then, anew, that everyone felt what it meant to be the league's runaway first-place team.
Throw the one-two punch at the opponent's fifth and sixth starters to bank the wins? Amazingly, the runs allowed still came out dead even.
This side had hitters capable of beating their pitchers bloody.
And this side's pitchers were no longer suckers.
Not so long ago, the back-end starters used to carry scouting write-ups like these:
Jeong In-young: 'A promising young starter with real guts and a signature weapon of his own.' — meaning a one-tool slider guy who threw everything belt-high and could detonate on any given day.
Kim Jeong-mook: 'Owns plenty of throw-able pitches; nothing fast, but grinds when the ball's working.' — meaning a scrub with no true out-pitch and velocity stuck in no-man's-land.
"One son of a bitch who just chucks two flavors of dogshit up there, and another bastard who apparently learned his manners from a dog."
And now? Look at how the opposition evaluated them — through gritted teeth and a mouthful of curses.
Starter profiles you could read at a glance, the kind where you knew exactly what the man did the second you heard him described. A feature, not a bug.
Their own back-end starters, absorbing every curse word in the dictionary from opposing clubs — and the Doubles fans' hearts swelled with pride.
Since Noh In-seong's shutout win to close the All-Star break, the Doubles were riding a sixteen-game winning streak.
When a winning-streak train builds up speed like this, a certain thought starts creeping through the clubhouse.
"...Huh? When did we actually lose last?"
"Good question. Feels like a month ago? We had the All-Star break in there too."
It was when Song Jin-wook, halfway through hoisting the barbell, voiced the idle thought that had drifted into his head. Jo In-soo answered like a man who genuinely couldn't pin down the date of the last loss.
But the truth was, both of them knew perfectly well. They'd just wanted to say it out loud.
Winning had congealed into an assumed 'concept.' Losing had become literally impossible to imagine. The muscles refused to register fatigue even after explosive exertion every single night — with dopamine pinging away daily on a winning high, of course nobody felt tired.
"Alright! We're going out there and winning again today! Everybody got that?!"
One, two, three — GO DOUBLES!
And the coaching staff, and the manager, all arrived at the same unconscious realization: ah, there's really nothing left to add here. Just keep up the conditioning work.
A veteran skipper would already be quietly stocking supplies for the day this streak ended — preparing, in advance, for the return of the losing era. But a manager who had only just peeled the "rookie" sticker off his nameplate with a single championship had never lived through that kind of situation.
Jung Im-taek certainly hadn't.
Even though the next opponent was Busan — the very team that had clawed back second place by a single game.
Not one player on the roster could genuinely picture themselves losing.
Call it a bad premonition come true.
Busan lost. Again.
Against a Doubles squad whose hitting cycle — and everything else — had peaked out entirely, they simply had nothing to counter with.
So Dong-jin and Jang In-ho could not beat Andy and Jackson. The lineup fought valiantly, with Jong Min-soo single-handedly crushing four home runs across the two games — but.
DAAAAANG---!!
[High and deep---!! This one clears the wall with room to spare! Noh In-seong's fifth home run of the series!]
[There's just no answer! The second that bat connects, the outfielder is sprinting to the warning track — and it still changes absolutely nothing!]
One monarch with a white-hot bat sitting in the opposing lineup — that was the single difference that blew the series wide open.
In-seong, finally handed a stretch where he could pour himself into nothing but 'baseball,' delivered the fundamental answer to a question everyone had been asking: why did all those problems keep happening until now?
"SEE what happens when you ignore me?!"
Jang In-ho had kept In-seong somewhat in check and risen as the league's shiny new hope. But isn't the new hope getting its arms severed by the old hope practically a genre requirement at this point?
Five at-bats. Five hits. Five home runs. Thirteen RBIs.
Busan's greatest nightmare carved a fresh wound into them yet again —
and succeeded in kicking Busan back down to third place, one more time.
An eighteen-game winning streak.
But the Daejeon team, basking in second place on pure fisherman's luck, found itself unable to crack a smile this time.
"...Son of a bitch. We're next."
Two guaranteed games — with In-seong's start included. The sacrificial lamb that had wandered onto the winning train's next stretch of track was them.