Bread, the City of Bread (Part 1)
Inside the bus bound for Daejeon, the energetic voices of every player rang out in a lively din.
A team on a winning streak always carried a different kind of energy — but today, things were especially electric.
Strictly speaking, one of them was rampaging around like a lunatic, and it was a scene of collective bewilderment for everyone else.
"No, look at this photo, will you? Doesn't it look just like me?"
"You insane bastard. The whole thing's blurry — you can't even see anything, so what the hell is it supposed to look like..."
Noh In-seong held back a punch.
No matter how shameless he was, the kid would soon become his nephew, and his conscience pricked at him for throwing a fist at a photo of the little one.
It was the stage where Song Jin-wook had finally brought in a picture of the fetus and started bragging about how much it resembled him.
The child in the womb, first noticed around Children's Day, was now heading into mid-August.
The fetus had grown steadily, finally showing its face clearly on the ultrasound.
"Sure. I'd love it if your daughter grew up to look just like you. Ugh, you daughter-obsessed lunatic."
BANG--!!
Noh In-seong, with a photo of his future nephew shoved right into his face, flared up and booted Song Jin-wook across the bus —
"Hehehe! The current me doesn't feel pain at all!"
— yet the man didn't so much as yelp from the kick and just beamed with delight.
Human Song Jin-wook was an absolute lunatic, but Father Song Jin-wook was greatness incarnate, apparently.
"Seriously, I know I kicked him pretty hard. What on earth is going on inside that guy's brain?"
As everyone stared in disbelief, the bus pulled onto the interchange and delivered them to their destination.
"Everyone start getting ready. Especially you, Song Jin-wook — try not to show off too much. I'm genuinely scared of what you'll be capable of once that kid's born."
At Jung Im-taek's words, the players began to prepare to disembark, only to find themselves in the predicament of being completely jammed up right at the entrance.
"Damn it, how does the highway take one hour, but the exit ramp takes fifteen minutes?"
With Noh In-seong's grumbling, they arrived at their destination.
A hotel in the city center. The City of Bread. The Doubles players had arrived at their lodging in Daejeon.
Daejeon feared the Doubles.
Or more precisely, it wasn't so much the Doubles riding their winning streak that terrified them.
"Damn it, of course that lunatic goes berserk when he's playing against us."
It was the guy hiding within that winning-streak momentum, churning out insane numbers, who was the problem.
Setting aside the fact that Busan, sitting above them in the standings, had been thoroughly beaten down —
"Damn it, that crazy bastard hit five home runs in a single game..."
The real issue was that, by the record books, one of the great unbroken records — untouched for forty-nine years — was now within arm's reach.
Home runs hit by Noh In-seong so far: fifty-two.
He was one game away from tying the most home runs ever hit by a right-handed batter.
That mark alone already tied him for fifth all-time.
Two more homers would tie him for second all-time. Four would tie him for first.
And if he hit five?
"Damn it, we should be thankful his autograph won't be worth anything, but at the very least, that ball's going down in Korean history."
His name would be inscribed, pristine and immortal, above everyone else — and the name of the pitcher who served it up would be preserved just as beautifully.
The yielding pitcher, then the *hehe*-yielding pitcher, then the *hehehe*-yielding, the *he-four*-yielding...
Because it was the kind of record where the man who got hit suffered far more, the eyes of Daejeon's players went hollow —
but the even greater torment was that they couldn't simply refuse to pitch to him.
"Why does that son of a bitch have to be so damn fast on the bases too..."
With two more steals added in Changwon, he now had forty-two.
Just eight more — and giving them to this madman in a single series? That was handing him a free-pass ticket into a club no player in the entire world had ever entered even once.
"Then we just get called idiots on top of everything, and that's the end. The absolute end."
If they pitched around him, it helped him on his path to a fifty-fifty season. If they didn't, any pitch could become a hit with a 41.1% probability.
He had 120 hits — fifty-two of which were home runs.
"Damn it, so there's a 17.81% chance any given hit is a home run?!"
Ptooey—!
This game was unplayable. The Daejeon manager spat.
Naturally, whenever someone stood on the verge of history, the crowds came flooding in.
The reporters, first of all, had to show up even if it meant butting heads with Noh In-seong.
"Yeah~ we're shameless by nature~ try and stop us from getting our scoop~ I'd rather die~"
From the types who'd been addicted to view counts their entire careers, to the ones who believed that failing to land an interview meant death itself.
They shoved microphones in Noh In-seong's face, begging — please, just one word, that's all we ask.
"You and I are in a lawsuit relationship, and you're sticking a microphone in my face?!"
"Forget the settlement money — we've gotta get the views to pay it back! Just one juicy quote, come on!"
We'll get the quote to pay you back! — hearing that in the mid-twenty-first century, not the nineteenth.
One lunatic, fleeing in horror at the sight of an even greater lunatic.
The throng of rebuffed reporters chasing after him desperately.
But among the reporters, a few had maintained a good relationship with Noh In-seong all along.
Mostly the sabermetrically-minded ones who wrote articles along the lines of "He really is good at baseball..."
Those reporters were granted private sit-downs with him and received their material straight from the source.
"It was a pleasure. Good luck with your articles, everyone... I've got somewhere to be."
"Thank you. We'll be rooting for the record to fall."
Since these were reporters he didn't usually clash with, they naturally reaped the views —
"...Haah. Is it really right for me to be feeding this lunatic information?"
"Hee hee! The view count is copying itself overrrr!!"
And of course, the one who secured the best information and the best spot amid it all was Reporter Jeong.
Reporter Jeong, parked in his camper van with a tarp stretched out in front of it, typing up articles worth printing.
And one little tyke who'd tagged along with him.
"Hi, Hyung!"
"...Wait, what? A butterfly net? Already? It is summer, sure, but still."
The kid had appeared with something slung over his shoulder — it was a butterfly net.
"...Are you planning to catch a home run ball with that?"
Considering the speed of a home run ball, he did wonder whether the thing could even snag one —
"This is just for my summer vacation homework... I can't catch any cicadas..."
"...Huh. Now that you mention it, butterfly nets are on the prohibited-items list, aren't they."
Apparently it was one of the self-directed assignments the school had handed out. Come to think of it, Siyeon had the same thing on her school notice.
He heard the kid was planning to tour the city with Reporter Jeong for a while.
"Hehe, Mom has to watch the stationery store, so she can't come. But I've got nothing else to do anyway."
Reporter Jeong, kid in tow and camper van rented, intended to shadow Noh In-seong for the foreseeable future.
"Works out great, right? I mean... even when school starts back up, I can just say it's a career-shadowing day at Dad's workplace."
For Reporter Jeong, it was a chance to keep his bored-at-home kid occupied every single day.
"Honestly though, I'm just gonna follow you around every day, catch a baseball, and sell it to the team for a fortune!"
—And it'll knock out my homework too, won't it? It's basically 'A Summer Memory'!
A golden opportunity to strike it rich and finish his summer homework in one fell swoop.
Winnnnng... no, hold on — what kind of summer homework involves stealing a home run ball? Noh In-seong's head throbbed.
"Unbelievable. It's not a gold rush, it's a home run ball rush. I'm losing my mind."
Himself, he couldn't care less — he had no attachment to a ball — but the team would surely want to put a historic ball on display.
Well, if the kid handed it back for a fair price, fine. If things went sideways, there wasn't much to be done.
"Worst case, I'll just declare the ball unofficial. That settles it, doesn't it?"
Sitting right there, threatening to disqualify the home run ball, the little tyke's face went pale —
"But... you're someone I know, so I'll cut you a deal. Peel off one camper van's worth. Something like that?"
— and Noh In-seong's offer made him light up all over again.
Well, after the reporters, the national custom was for acquaintances and friends to come swarming under the pretext of knowing him.
"If you pulled that kind of insane stunt with me, you'd probably spend the whole year trudging back and forth to court."
Hearing that over the phone, Noh In-seong truly felt that his pool of friends was a disaster.
"...You lunatic. Weren't we talking about putting up congratulatory ads? A friend serving me garbage first thing."
Noh In-seong had never had many close people to begin with, so that whole course was meaningless to him.
If he had to name one, Deok Jin-man was the friend who had benefited most from knowing him.
From the youth national team, he had somehow become the owner of a food company thriving in the industry.
Whenever an event like this happened, sales went up, and he reaped the rewards of choosing his friends well.
His high school coach and the Jung Yong-chan Baseball Academy he'd attended as a kid hung up banners and preened —
"We produced Noh In-seong! Hah, can you blame us?"
They had another chance to suck on the honeyed nipple of having birthed him —
"...Damn it. For us, that's nothing but a pipe dream."
His middle school, on the other hand — the one that had once dismissed him and cast him out —
could do nothing but weep and curse its own disastrous foresight all over again.
And then there were the rest — people who had come calling after a truly long absence.
"Congratulations on this month's MVP! It's been a while!"
An hour before the game against Daejeon, the sponsor came to find Noh In-seong once again.
Someone who presented the monthly MVP award and shook his hand before leaving — but this month, the sight was oddly welcome.
"Haha, no need. This was something you were owed to begin with..."
It was the moment Noh In-seong realized the preciousness of seeing the man after two months instead of one.
"Aargh, apart from the one time I ate a loss last month, there's just no beating him..."
Tasting that bitterness, last month's recipient stared at Noh In-seong with envious eyes.
The July Monthly MVP was awarded to Noh In-seong once more.
"I dedicate this award to the fireflies who thought they were stars. You guys shine so hard."
"Hey, you little—!!"
It was used to mock one certain godforsaken father who had spent the bus ride rubbing his nephew's ultrasound photo against his own face.
On to Daejeon.
Daejeon currently held second place, riding a stroke of luck one game ahead of Busan —
but they didn't fool themselves into thinking it was thanks to their own ability.
"Damn it, we've been playing against rebuilding teams, so we had it pretty easy."
The series against Gwangju — what real resistance could a team that had sold off everything worth selling possibly mount?
Watching the teams above them get hammered into the dirt in an instant had hit them hard.
This series — even if we have to throw away the second game, we absolutely have to take the first.
Kim Jeong-mook, or whatever his name was — the guy dropped his arm angle and kept plunking batters with dead balls, didn't he?
Which meant the pitches would be drifting in on hitters' bodies, no?
"Then just armor yourselves up like tanks, and if you get hit, get hit and take your base!"
"Are you serious?! This isn't turn-of-the-century baseball — we're talking a fifty-year anachronism here."
Naturally, the players pushed back. Easy for you to say — when's the last time you took a pitch in your playing days?
The veterans shot sideways glances at their former-pitcher manager, and the hitters were too busy jeering to listen —
"Hey! You think I actually want you to get hit?! I'm telling you to focus on tracking pitches on the inner half!"
It had been a while since Kim Jeong-mook's style had fully crystallized.
Three appearances on the mound — plenty of time for the analysis to be complete.
From Daejeon's perspective, Kim Jeong-mook actually offered far more ways to attack him.
By contrast, that Jung kid, the fifth starter, had no real tells, and the pitch he'd added was itself a variation.
The grips were nearly identical, so a hitter would have to read the wrist snap at the very last moment and adjust mid-swing...
"And what hitter on this roster can hit like that? He's the kind of pitcher who shouldn't exist in this world."
There was exactly one such hitter — but only people connected to the Doubles organization knew it.
Kim Jeong-mook, on the other hand, was simple.
"Since he dropped his arm to near sidearm, the majority of his sinkers run in on the hands — over seventy percent."
Because the pitch felt threatening, he threw it more often, and he'd feasted on the results.
But if the analysis was already this complete?
"Back off a little, wait for the pitch he'll be forced to throw eventually — even that gives hitters a huge edge."
They had more than enough batsmen on the roster to punish anything, hits or homers alike.
Keep Noh In-seong locked down against You Hong-jin as long as possible, pound Kim Jeong-mook, and win!
The strategy itself was sound. A plan that could absolutely work, they believed —
"Well, I am a former pitcher, you know. I figured you'd try something like that."
Jung Im-taek dumped a bucket of ice water over the whole idea.
"Our starting pitcher today is Jin Joo-hyuk."
"WHAT?!"
By sending up a bullpen arm instead of a starter, the curtain rose on Game One.
Kim Jeong-mook, slowly loosening up, stretching his muscles out at a leisurely pace.
"Damn it, these guys are so loaded with pitching depth they can afford to be this wasteful."
Watching the jumbotron, the Daejeon manager began to grasp what was happening.
Jin Joo-hyuk was a bullpen arm, yes, but one who knew how to eat up innings.
He was currently throwing as a swingman, but the plan to use him to paper over a struggling fifth starter had always been in the back of his mind.
A golden opportunity: give the kid his chance while simultaneously serving the opposition a heaping plate of garbage.
"Exactly three innings. Go out there and shut them down."
"I won't waste it, sir."
Jin Joo-hyuk was set as the Opener, with Kim Jeong-mook as the Bulk Guy.
Except — whereas a typical opener's purpose was to quickly get through one or two innings, this opener existed for one reason alone: to neutralize an entire trip through the lineup.
And as a bonus, by the time the opposing hitters came around for their second look, the strategy they'd prepared for Kim Jeong-mook would already be worthless.
They would have to battle the sidearm arm all over again, panicking and cheating inside.
WHUMP--!
"Swing, strike three!"
Daejeon's second batter, Myeong Jeong-ho, spat and worked to scrub the afterimage of the pitch from his mind.
Damn it — a slow curve, then a slow changeup. Next one's got to be the fastball.
The velocity and trajectory of the pitch he'd just seen had burned itself far too vividly into his brain.
The next pitch came in — upper 130s — and now what? The pitcher's data bank in his head spun.
Slider? It's a slider. A touch fast, but factoring in his condition today, that adds up.
He anticipated the breaking ball, angling his swing path to match —
WHUMP--!!
"Swing strike three, batter out!"
"No — damn it. He threw the exact same pitch and only changed the speed?!"
Watching an identical incoming trajectory, he'd been deceived by Jo In-soo all over again.
"What's the problem? If you had a pitcher who could do the same thing, you'd have done it too."
Truthfully, he would have — which left him nothing to say.
The next batter, Jung In-woong, lofted a decent ball, but it vanished straight into Noh In-seong's glove. Three up, three down.
The opener had been a resounding success.
And conversely —
Daejeon's method for dealing with Noh In-seong was in anything but ordinary form today.
"Damn it, what's with him today? Did he take something, or what?"
"You tortured him way too much last time. He's been biting down on this with everything he's got."
For days now, You Hong-jin had prepared his condition for this game alone.
Facing his greatest nemesis, he fought to earn an evaluation different from the last time.