Maybe Getting Duped Isn't So Bad
Sung Hyun-tak's face twisted into a knot as he watched Noh In-seong and Hector grinning at each other like a pair of rotten puppies.
...These absolute lunatics. They're actually going to fight...
His English was terrible, but even without catching an F-bomb, you could feel the tone of a threat. It wasn't hard.
Andy was already irritated that the inning was dragging on longer than usual, but now didn't seem like the time to worry about that.
Tap-tap—
"Hyun-tak hyung, shift over a little. Batter's a lefty."
Ah. Right. It's not the time for me to be babysitting these two either.
The infield coach's face was flushing red by the second — if Sung Hyun-tak kept standing there in a daze, he'd be sentenced to hours of fungo drills after the game for sure.
Sung Hyun-tak scurried over to his shifted position.
Runners on first and second with one out — a prime scoring chance. But Andy refused to let a single runner advance and racked up two outs.
When the ball popped up into the infield, sweat was pouring down Andy's forehead. So he had been nervous, huh.
The next batter was Kim Soo-ho. The guy who'd gotten verbally and skillfully dismantled by In-seong yesterday, and now hid behind his imported mercenary.
Watching him flash that smiling greeting at In-soo hyung — honestly, it made his blood boil.
"Hey, Hector. You actually managed to keep something like that hidden all this time?"
First-pitch strike. He called out to Hector, who had scurried back to second base. He'd thrown down the gauntlet, so he deserved a response.
"Don't you dare call our captain 'that,' you freshly-drafted rookie bastard."
"Oho, there it is. What's with all this devotion from a guy who'll be boarding a plane back home next year?"
Before the second pitch, Noh In-seong fired a pickoff throw to second — and deliberately smacked the tag down a little too hard.
"...Try a pickoff like that one more time, and you won't be finishing this game."
"Ooh~ so scary. Not like I'd ever tag your solar plexus softly or anything."
Classic hothead. Watching his face flush crimson on the spot gave Noh In-seong a wonderful idea.
As he threw the ball back to Andy, he flashed a hand signal — another pickoff after the third pitch — and winked.
Anyone who played baseball with their brain would get the gist. Oh, would you look at that. He's smiling. Guess he understood.
The second pitch was a theatrical ball bounced into the dirt. The third, a slider to even the count. Strike.
Just before the fourth pitch, Andy whipped around sharply. A pickoff.
Hector's feet were so slow that, in a live-ball situation, he was a prime target for a lead-force play at third — so he'd been taking an unusually long lead off the bag.
Safe!
Well, safe is safe. Shame about that.
"...Heh. Scaredy-cat bastard. Can't even tag like you did earlier. You flinched."
"Tch. I was trying to tag you fast, that's all. What the—"
Face slightly flustered, Hector waved his arm at Andy.
Andy turned away — and the moment this idiot lifted his foot off the base —
Tap.
"That's the last time I'll be nice about tagging you, genius."
"Hm?"
"Hm?" my ass. Get off the field, you moron. Do you even pay attention?
The entire stadium filled up with a coalition army united in fury against Noh In-seong. But at their core, they were fans of other teams — and when you lose to this kind of play, your true face always shows itself.
Home fans erupt in rage; everyone else either laughs or shakes their head in pity.
And the Doubles fans were far too busy laughing at the opposing side to care.
It didn't take long at all for that mockery to swell into full-throated laughter.
Third inning. A game that had been dragging along by the fingernails suddenly broke wide open, smooth as silk.
Amid all of it, though, there was exactly one Doubles player sitting slumped by himself, wearing the face of a man at a funeral.
"Ha... So as of today, I'm officially the backup."
The man whose starting position had been snatched by a first-year and whose utility position had been snatched by a second-year — both in one clean snip. Kim Jun-soo.
But was it actually unfair? Well, no. Not exactly.
The massive second-year with a defensive contribution hovering around negative-one-hundred-percent had gone one-for-one today. His first hit? A double.
His old starting position? Now held by a guy with better defense than him, who'd driven in four runs all by himself. That last one was probably the go-ahead homer, too.
It was the top of the sixth now. Once that third baseman wrapped up his final at-bat, Kim Jun-soo would trot out as a late-inning defensive replacement.
Pro ball runs on skill. Nothing to be done about it. And yet, his heart still ached.
'God, Buddha, Allah, or — screw it — blessed Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm not asking to start. Just... just let me get on the field a little more often. Please...'
"Pray with a sincere heart and it shall be granted!" — somebody had said that once, hadn't they?
"— ......t! Hey! Get out here!"
"— ......old him! Hey! Oof..."
...? Something was getting loud.
Kim Jun-soo stopped mid-prayer and looked up — and all hell had broken loose. Full-scale warfare.
"Hey! Everyone out! Hold them back!"
"Is that guy dead?!"
As the Doubles' first-ever bench clearing erupted, Kim Jun-soo's prayer was answered.
Granted, the deity in question wasn't one of the major gods — it was the one with the Monkey's Paw.
The cause was simple enough. "How dare a rookie punk?" and "He humiliated us with that trick play!" were the headline grievances.
When the top of the sixth rolled around and the rookie's turn at bat came up, the Superstars coaching staff had decided it was better to break the kid's spirit once, so future meetings would go smoother.
And surely — surely — a guy who ignored seniority might still not throw punches after getting plunked? There was no way he'd trample on league conventions too. Obviously.
The executor, the opposing starter — mercenary pitcher James — had likewise concluded that teaching this rookie some manners would make his own life easier.
Everyone's thoughts converged into one. And unlike the proverb "when three captains set sail, the ship sails to the mountains," the dead-ball consensus came fast.
They got as far as the conclusion that "hit him once in the body, and the ungrateful brat will walk to first grinning like he died and went to heaven!"
Which raised one small problem: what if the guy getting plunked happened to believe that socially agreed-upon pacts are not law?
"Agh!....."
A two-seamer came screaming in at 147 km/h and slammed into his back. Noh In-seong slowly peeled off his protective gear and strolled toward first base — all of which was going just fine.
Because he'd been lulled, you see, thinking: That's right! If this punk acts cocky again, just inject another dose of medicine into his backside!
The instant every last piece of gear that could count toward additional disciplinary charges hit the ground, Noh In-seong charged the mound.
"You broken-armed catapult piece of garbage!"
The moment a flustered James clumsily raised his guard, Noh In-seong burrowed inside it and drove a short hook into his jaw.
His chin spun, his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
Only then did the rest of the players grasp what was happening, and they came sprinting out of the dugouts. Bench clearing.
"You cursed little punk!"
Hector — the designated hitter that day — came rushing in swinging, but announced his punch like a TV commercial, "this one's for you" written all over it.
Noh In-seong hauled the incoming fist in with his left arm, collapsing the man's posture, and simultaneously drove his right fist straight into his face.
THUUUUD---!!
Not a sound a human face should ever make. An appallingly dull, meaty thump.
He yanked Hector's wild haymaker off course and countered him square in the face.
On top of where James lay, Hector now piled on as a bonus. A human game of Jenga.
After that, it got even uglier. When a bench clearing breaks out, you have to take your lumps — senior or not — and the man trying to enforce that logic had to be stopped.
There were so many people that they figured, swarm him and pin him down with numbers! — and they did execute it, and he really did stop moving.
Problem was, from inside that wall of bodies, he was landing short uppercuts into sides and ribs — and for the less fortunate, straight into the lower abdomen.
"Ugh! Ack! Hey! Hold him tighter! This bastard keeps punching!"
"Aagh! He hit my balls! Agh...!"
Runtime: ten minutes. Noh In-seong's Punch-o-Rama spectacular came to an end only when he was finally dragged off — he couldn't bring himself to swing at his own teammates, after all.
Noh In-seong, James, and Hector were ejected, and it was over.
"...Wait, what? Monkey's Paw?"
Kim Jun-soo, standing at shortstop with a face of pure bewilderment, playing defense like nothing had happened — and,
"Ugh... ohhhh..."
"Hey, I can't run anymore...!"
Leaving behind a Superstars roster totaling eight casualties — two seriously injured, six lightly — the most violent and educational bench clearing since the founding of Korean professional baseball finally drew its curtain.
For context: this was ever since the sport's founding era, when one mercenary batter decided to enlighten a Korean pitcher about a pitcher's sense of pride — the hard way.
Of course, none of the ejected men went around wailing, "Sob, I'm so sorry! It will never happen again!"
"Don't you feel any responsibility for showing an act of violence to so many fans?!"
"I'm truly sorry. I should've also beaten down their catcher and their manager and stacked them in a nice pile, but I couldn't manage it. I'm doing some real soul-searching."
Asked a perfectly reasonable, standard question, he answered with a theory of shared responsibility — that the blame should have been distributed among more targets and administered more thoroughly.
"Children grow up watching these games! What exactly are they supposed to learn from this?!"
"Kids these days watch UFC and say it's boring? Last I heard, they're busy playing Squid Game knockoffs."
Told to bear the responsibility of being a role model that children look up to, he shot back with a question of whether he was supposed to bring a machine gun to the next game of Red Light, Green Light.
"Do you have any intention of apologizing to the opposing team? You know, smiling, taking a photo together..."
"That pose? I'd probably snap their necks on pure reflex, so I'd better not."
He refused on the grounds that Korea's most storied baseball tradition — the heartwarming reconciliation photo after a bench clearing — could not, under any circumstances, be turned into a funeral portrait.
Noh In-seong had rejected every single one of the lukewarm, ceremonial resolutions that every bench clearing before his had run on.
The reaction was white-hot.
He was the lead story on the nine o'clock sports news — a chick barely one week into the first team.
Granted, the story got filed under combat sports rather than baseball. But hey, it made headlines either way. Drink up.
"God... that kid is f***ing charismatic."
"Oh, dear Lord... that absolute lunatic..."
It was the moment the poisoned polonium chalice — presented to Manager Jung Im-taek for the very first time — finally revealed its toxicity.