RE-SPECT (Meaning: Go Get Another CT Scan)
"If you thought that would work, you're crazy. And if you thought it wouldn't work, well — you were already crazy to begin with."
That was straight from the manager's mouth. He also ignored my perfectly reasonable question about who'd been making the expensive boxed chocolate stocked in his office disappear, which I chose to let slide.
Yeah, to be fair, it probably wasn't going to work. A guy suspended for six games files an appeal and then plunks somebody in the head the very next day? Ten games, easy. No contest.
I was nibbling on the manager's premium chocolate, smuggled out in my pocket, when I stepped through the front doors — and got collared by the front office this time.
"Come on, In-seong, I'm begging you. Image matters in a trade, you understand? Our club's image—"
The scout team boss, who'd tagged along like a bonus feature, and the general manager — first time I'd seen the man since draft day — were both pleading their case. Apparently if we pulled a stunt like this, no team would ever sell them a player again.
"...? They'd sell, though? They're money-crazed bastards, the lot of them."
"Then we'd have two teams with funeral wreaths laid at their doors. Things are ugly enough as it is."
Damn it. That... actually held water. In the end, I accepted the suspension without a fight.
That said, if a fight starts on social media, it ought to end on social media. A fractured nasal bone normally means a CT scan, so all things considered, that counts as a pretty classy finishing blow.
I felt fantastic.
Hector, James, they both got their teeth kicked in, but of the two, Hector — the one who ate the counter — was in considerably worse shape. Four weeks out, fractured nose. Cheap for a guy who went down cold off a single punch, but cheap doesn't mean painless. Double the two weeks James got for his concussion, by Chinese math — not that James didn't earn every day of his, dropping like a sack of rice after that short hook to the jaw.
Tack on the other players who'd eaten indiscriminate haymakers inside a pile of flailing human bodies, and the casualty list ran long and short alike. Two men on the disabled list — an unprecedented catastrophe in Superstars franchise history — and six more shipped down to the farm team.
In other words, Game 3 against the Superstars, the first game after my ejection, had gone off without a hitch. A scorching eight-game winning streak to open the season, with the franchise-record ten straight looking well within reach. The best possible start.
The problem was everything that came after.
"Augh... son of a— that batshit lunatic just had to be disgustingly good at baseball...!!"
In the manager's office, Jeong Im-taek was clutching at a head of hair whose white strands had visibly multiplied under the stress, wailing to the ceiling.
Six games. Twenty plate appearances, seventeen at-bats, eight hits — three home runs, a double, five singles — two walks, one sacrifice fly. A slash line of .470/.500/1.058/1.558. Twenty-two total bases, two stolen bases. All of it error-free while rotating between shortstop and third.
And then, because he was apparently also a starting pitcher — one start, seven scoreless innings, nine strikeouts, two hits allowed, zero walks — this human being up and vanished for six games.
Worse, he'd originally been slated to start Game 3 against the Superstars, so his sudden absence meant a bullpen day tacked on top, already scheduled and unavoidable.
It wasn't for nothing that the manager coddled this walking time bomb, tiptoeing around him at every turn. He coddled him because the numbers were obliteration-grade.
"There's no replacing him...! Damn it, we can't run another bullpen day his next turn through the rotation either...!!"
The initial idea was to call up a wagonload of minor-league arms — evaluate the raw stock while plugging the hole — but who were we kidding. It wasn't September. It was the first week of fresh, green April, which meant five whole months of madness stood between now and expanded rosters.
What followed was an endless coaches' summit, with the scouting department dragged in to count how many arms down in Double-A could actually eat innings, spiraling into data analysis and shouting matches — down there he's an ace, up here he can't find the strike zone with both hands, this one's a home run factory foreman — until the whole circus finally concluded with: fine, bring up anyone who can give us three decent innings... *sigh*.
Daegu and Gwangju. The remaining six-game road swing ended three and three. The nine-game streak against Daegu died, and Gwangju — squatting in prospect-development mode under the polite fiction of "retooling" — took two straight off us. We cut the trip in half, but the lesson landed anyway: this pitching staff needed reinforcement, urgently.
[Song Jin-wook! Ah — off the glove and it trickles away!]
[That one's getting scored an error, for sure. Defensive range that narrow, no matter how you slice it... isn't that a problem?]
"Shiiiit! SONG! What the hell kind of defense is that? A homeless guy could play it better!"
It was also the road trip where everyone learned the hard rule: never put a defensive liability on the field during Caleb's starts. An injury report that reads cause: teammate fire is nobody's idea of an upgrade.
The manager's white hair gained another strand.
"Hey, Siyeon. Look at your big brother — draws a salary and lies on the couch doing absolutely nothing, while you have to go to school."
Oh, the tragedy! Look at her, trudging off to class. At least us working stiffs bring home a paycheck. Chest swelling with false grandeur, I was in the middle of showing off my special "vacation" from work (unpaid, mind you) to the unfortunate child.
"Mom! Oppa's teasing me again!"
Would a kid just past the midpoint of elementary school even know what a day off was? April doesn't have a single holiday to its name.
Clang!
"Son. Stop tormenting your sister and come eat."
Felt like draft day, honestly. Was that just my imagination? I come home for the first time in ages and take a ladle — reeking of kimchi stew — upside the head? Am I actually this family's son?
"Ugh, Mom! I've got aftereffects from the fight!"
"You beat the tar out of them one-sidedly. What aftereffects?"
I failed to recoup even my initial investment, eating hit after hit from the moment spoons hit the table through the last grain of rice, every dish airborne on its way up. Oof. My gut.
I was technically due back with the team today, but the club told me to stand by in Seoul rather than fly out with the squad to Gwangju. One extra game of rest, in exchange for a near-complete-game workload in Game 2 against Changwon. Fine by me. Nobody hands out medals for attendance in this line of work — performance first, perfect attendance a distant second.
[...And so the Doubles, with the eighth-place Gwangju Tigers snapping at their necks, taste their first losing streak of the season...]
[...The Doubles return to Jamsil to host Changwon in a new three-game series starting Tuesday. Meanwhile, regarding his suspension, Noh In-seong...]
"Oppa, oppa, you're on TV!"
"Kyah. So fucking charismatic."
For having no filter whatsoever in front of a child, I took one more blow to the head. Ah, this is making me dumber, I swear. At least she graduated to a spoon this time.
Nine straight road games. Seoul's Superstars are fine — same neighborhood, one bus ride away — but Daegu and Gwangju are no stroll. Two-and-one against Daegu, one-and-two against Gwangju, and we limped home in tatters, took one day off, then clocked back in.
"Hey, Chun-sik. Look at your eyes. Dead as a corpse."
Dustin returned my greeting with a face visibly run through the wringer. The man used to lounge at first base sipping honey — not anymore, not even close. Song Jin-wook, the humanoid error-machine parked at third, had put on a one-inning showcase of double-play roulette and detonated the collective sanity of every Doubles fan watching. After that, the manager finally grasped that Jin-wook's defense wasn't meaningfully better than the previous third-base troglodyte — army service and all — and started rotating him between first base and designated hitter. Which, naturally, meant Chun-sik had to go grind it out in left field like a dog.
"...In-seong. Fuck, man, it was brutal. So much happened. So much."
Was that a thank-you for going easy on him in intrasquad scrimmages? You're welcome. I'm actually pretty tender toward my own allies, you know.
"Aw, fuck. In-seong, I was fucking exhausted too. I am never praying to a monkey's paw about my position again."
But what the hell did this bastard Kim Jun-soo even do to be tired?
"What did you do to be tired, hyung?"
Zero errors committed, and his bat was the same old same old, wasn't it?
"If I move to third, third springs a hole! If I move to first, Hyun-tak hyung's drifting toward first base the entire game!"
...Shit. That does sound exhausting. I stand corrected.
We lost the first game against the returning Changwon. Not because I played badly — I did my part. Three-for-four, two doubles mixed in, proof the bat hadn't cooled off one degree. The lineup had raked, too. Song Jin-wook, the manager's blood-pressure switch, had even come out as the designated hitter and swatted a home run.
The problem was the bullpen day in my absence — a bullpen that hadn't rested once across the entire six-game Daegu-Gwangju swing and was running on fumes. Up seven runs through five innings, then the relievers started detonating from the sixth onward, and we lost.
Which is to say, Andy's face had gone a mottled green and purple. One color left, and the man evolves into a full RGB human.
"Shiit. My three-million-won win bonus just decomposed in midair, In-seong."
"...You get three hundred?"
His verbal assault fizzled out pathetically, and honestly I wasn't even that angry while packing up my gear — right up until the reporters materialized in front of me.
[Noh In-seong! How much of a share do you feel you bear for tonight's loss?]
Watching this son of a bitch dangle bait in my face, the anger came flooding right back.
"Oh ho. So the reporters are the ones running aggro on the players now, is that it..."
[...I'm sorry, what did you just say?]
"I don't know about my share of the loss, but I would like to tell a moron who doesn't know his own place to get lost."
Stay away from the ballpark for a week or so and look what happens — people lose their damn minds. Right, it had been quiet for about a week. But it was quiet because I was physically barred from the premises.
"Of course. You've got articles to file, so why would the guy keep his mouth shut, right? Half of you are mosquitoes that survive on page views."
[Are you aware that Hector is facing a long-term injury?]
"That bastard? Ah, how many weeks was it — four? Yeah, four, right?"
The news definitely said four weeks, so he should be back around early summer. Wonderful for him!
[...You feel no guilt whatsoever?]
"A man throws a baseball into another man's body, and he's the one who needs protecting while I'm the fist-swinger? What exactly should I feel guilty about — landing one punch on his face?"
This one's a real comedian. Superstars beat, is he?
"Somebody send Hector a video message. Background music should be — what's it called — Con te partirò. Really let the sentiment breathe."
Famous song, that. Better known in the States as "Time to Say Goodbye."
"He should thank his stars I finished it in one punch. One more swing and he'd have been on a flight back home."
Ah, right — and that pitcher bastard's due back from suspension soon, isn't he.
"James Carlon. Go ahead, throw at me again. Except next time it doesn't end with a hook. I'll be serving a heel hook instead."
"I'll make him regret being alive. I'm ready whenever. If he's planning the second act of his life, by all means — throw with your body again."
Aftercare has to be thorough. That's how you make sure there's a pretext waiting for you next time. If you intend to keep running your mouth and spewing trash in peace, you'd better be prepared for war.
Noh In-seong had never once forgotten the old adage.