The Beginning of the End
Was it because he'd trampled all over Jang In-ho's feelings? Or had some internal problem, long since left to fester and rot, finally burst open at the seams?
Either way, the day after the game, the Busan clubhouse was in absolute chaos. The Marines had rolled out the intentional HBP strategy against Noh In-seong one more time — and this time, unlike yesterday, the results came back wretched and mutilated. That hadn't helped.
CRACK--!!
No visions of a future full of suffering, no dire premonitions — Song Jin-wook, who'd been running errands for a wife whose belly was quietly rounding out, moved at exactly the breakneck speed of his own life's tempo and blew the entire strategy to pieces with a monster blast that cleared not just the Sajik fence but the whole stadium.
"Damn it, In-seong. You should've told me that's what 'I will repay with baseball' was supposed to mean!"
"Hey, I never thought you'd actually do it. It was the most recycled joke in the entire book."
Before the game, Song Jin-wook — either genuinely remorseful or just sick of the reporters swarming him — had come begging Noh In-seong for help. And as payment for blurting out, word for word, the answer Noh In-seong had jokingly recommended—
"Haha, look at that one. Apparently he drank too much blood instead of booze."
"Argh, if Su-jeong sees this, she's going to flay my back raw..."
With one more shameful footnote added to the pile he'd carry to his grave, Song Jin-wook pulled a face like a man about to weep.
And if Song Jin-wook was pulling crying faces, Noh In-seong was making his opponents actually cry.
"Wow, there's basically no quick move to speak of. Heading now. Tell him he's a dumb bastard for me."
"Hey! Why aren't you glued to first like yesterday! Where do you think you're going!"
Whereas yesterday Noh In-seong had obediently planted himself on first base, today he gleefully demolished the opposing pitcher's soul.
CRACK--!!
Every time Song Jin-wook legged out a steal and then slapped a base hit, Noh In-seong would round third at insane speed and charge for home.
The catcher, more than a little terror-stricken, thrust his glove out front and went for the tag — and at that exact moment—
"...Huh?!"
Instead of a tag, the catcher high-fived nothing but open air, and a shadow fell across his mask.
Soaring clean over that glove, the airborne Flying Noh In-seong touched home plate, conjuring the small miracle of turning the backup catcher Jin Dong-ha — starting behind the dish today — into a slack-jawed statue, and tacking another run onto the board.
After a superplay like that turned yesterday's humiliation at Busan's hands into a hard-earned victory—
"...Pull all the kids. I'm losing my mind here. One game and the entire mood just detonated."
Busan's manager, Park Tae-jung, declared GG.
"It's over. We're finished. We're two games back now...!!"
And so, with the Doubles having nailed Busan's already distant legs firmly to the floor, the next opponent to arrive was—
"...Sigh. At least let me leave this life without pain, you wretched bastard."
"...Aww, still in love with your old team, are we? You're supposed to be loyal to your current club, you know."
"You wretched bastard, one brawl with you and the whole team nearly shattered to pieces...!!"
Jong Min-soo's old franchise. Daegu had come up to Jamsil to play out the final series of the season.
Daegu was, at this moment, cornered to within an inch of its life. In baseball terms: lose even one of the three remaining games, and depending on how the other results fell, their autumn was over on the spot.
"Gwangju's even with us in the win column... and the Superstars and the Grizzlies both have one more..."
Worse, Gwangju had drawn a series against second-place Daejeon, a team barreling down the win-streak highway — a serious problem. The Superstars were half in despair already, staring down a fisticuffs engagement with third-place Busan.
And in the fight for fourth place, the team holding the best hand was, ironically, the Grizzlies — playing Incheon.
"Please... please let Gwangju and the Superstars lose badly..."
And then, upon the Lions desperately offering up their prayers, more devastating news arrived. They needed to seize this last chance no matter what their opponents did — whether those opponents got complacent or not.
"Well then, everyone's had a good long rest? You all understand this is the last chance to keep the game-sharp edges polished."
In place of complacency, Jeong Im-taek had filled his starting lineup to the brim with first-team regulars.
He even went and gift-wrapped the exact scenario Daegu wanted to see least of all.
"...Ah, damn it."
"Your rock-paper-scissors is absolute garbage. Want me to take it?"
"Sigh... fine. Game three, though... if I think of it as a season-ending start, it's not the worst deal."
Noh In-seong had won the rock-paper-scissors war for the final three starts of the season.
Game one's starter: Noh In-seong, shoulders farm-fresh from resting entirely too damn much.
"Sigh... we're not winning this, are we?"
As fans in Daegu uniforms made the pilgrimage to Jamsil to confirm the last flicker of hope their team had left—
"Hey! You haven't even started mixing the bibimbap and you're already whining about the seasoning!"
The other one exploded at his defeated friend, bellowing Don't give up! Fight back! at the top of his lungs — but the angry Daegu fan knew the truth too.
Noh In-seong. The only sub-1.00 ERA starter in Korean baseball.
Which meant scraping even an average of two runs off this bastard in a single game was a pipe dream.
Things had gotten so dire that the eight home runs extracted from him this season had been retroactively elevated to moments of national glory.
At best, fans could hope he'd eat just enough innings to scrape through the qualifying threshold.
"Damn it... 152 innings..."
Thanks to any number of grotesque detail stats, the fans felt their arteries clogging in real time.
And then they stepped into the stadium.
Pinstriped uniforms blanketing the field from foul line to foul line,
and legions of fans in the outfield stands screaming their lungs out, gloves raised skyward—
"Haah..."
"Truly a town from hell. A town from hell."
They knew, bone-deep and instinctive, that today would not be kind to Daegu.
FWOOSH--!!
"Strike!"
The batter, Jin Min-ho, loaded up with a mighty swing. Since there was no telling whether the bat would actually find the ball anyway, the thinking was obviously to muscle through it.
But too bad for you, pal. Today I couldn't find the zone with a search party.
Normally I'd pound the zone corner after corner and blow it past you — today it's pure roulette. And you can't tell a strike from a ball to save your life.
"Swing — strike two!"
Trying to mask his embarrassment, Jin Min-ho flipped his bat end-over-end, caught it, and flipped it back — a full batting routine on display.
An effort to look composed, no doubt. Completely pointless, but an effort.
Truth be told, Noh In-seong was a pitcher who attacked the strike zone with nearly everything he threw. But today, on one of those strange days when his condition flickered like a faulty bulb—
his third pitch, a four-seamer, missed wildly; and the two-seamer he threw purely for show broke in with aFantastically vicious bite.
"Strike three! Batter out!"
"ARGH! That's garbage!"
Struck out looking, the batter's spirit snapped clean in two.
An unhinged situation — completely unexpected pitches boring in for strikes, completely unintended ones sailing out for balls — but the next hitter went down swinging too, and the one after that as well.
In sports, the results speak for everything, and the results coldly announced that Noh In-seong had just delivered the finest pitching of his career.
It was only one inning, but three strikeouts in it carried real weight.
The opposing manager, Song Jun-ho, felt his face twist with the certainty that this game would be anything but easy. The Daegu hitters, one and all, wore panic behind frantic attempts at composure.
Though honestly — can you really conjure composure on command that fast? A poker face is closer to a birthright than a skill.
The faces of the Daegu players were rotting in real time.
"Hey, you see those bastards? They went solid ice just watching your warm-up pitches! Condition must be good today, huh?"
"What are you talking about. Right now my condition's swinging between 90 and minus 70. The amplitude's insane."
Their own catcher was no better — forget expression management, Jo In-soo was performing live facial acrobatics. Half of his face smiled, half of it winced, and Noh In-seong watched the display in genuine awe.
"...Ah! I know this one! It's the Asura trick, isn't it? That thing!"
"...I have no idea what that is, and either way — NO, you deranged lunatic!"
Noh In-seong's antique trivia had vaguely described the situation; Jo In-soo instantly lost his temper.
And if it wasn't, then it wasn't — why was the man getting so angry about it?
Face utterly shameless, Noh In-seong strolled off the mound.
After shutting them down, of course, came time to swing the bat.
Daegu had, naturally, rolled out their absolute best lineup today.
But even accounting for that, Song Jun-ho couldn't shake the strong feeling that it was woefully thin.
"Damn it... our starter's so mediocre..."
He despised the reality that left him no choice but to throw Jo Il-yeong at Noh In-seong. But what could he do? Of the remaining arms, this was the strongest card.
Worse, Jo Il-yeong had nowhere to run.
That insane number — his stolen base total hanging tantalizingly at fifty-nine — had left Daegu paralyzed with hesitation.
...If we face him head-on, he won't stoop to cowardly base-stealing... right?
But in exchange, they might hand over the home run record instead. Everything hinged on the pitcher's own discretion.
Unsurprisingly, Jo Il-yeong, trapped in this dilemma and torn between the Asian home run record and the world's first 60-60, pressed the button marked none of the above.
"AH!"
If you're going to throw at him, throw; if you're going to avoid him, avoid — but no pitcher alive makes this game look that easy. At best, a peak-condition, elite MLB finesse artist could approximate it.
As a direct consequence of Jo Il-yeong's choice, Noh In-seong was off for second base on pitch three, and a mere four seconds later, he seized the bag with both hands and hoisted it high toward the heavens.
THUD!
"This is the record YOU chose! Now endure it through hell and high water! Let's GOOO!"
"......AAAH!! I hate this so much!!"
Jo Il-yeong's humiliation, sealed inside the base, was raised ceremoniously toward the sky.
"Naju---plains! Bow-wow-wow, chihuahua...!!"
"That's not the song, you lunatic! And it's dangerous — quit singing!"
It was a rare moment indeed: the drone camera director losing his temper.
What followed was the portrait of Daegu losing, sketched with the breezy confidence of an artist who'd drawn it a thousand times.
Whether he died on second base as a bodhisattva or not, Song Jin-wook succeeded in driving Noh In-seong home — because Noh In-seong had just etched two separate records against Jo Il-yeong in a single day.
CRACKAAAAACK----!!
Bottom of the fifth, Noh In-seong's third plate appearance — and the scoreboard lit up like a welding torch.
"Heh heh, hell. That scoreboard's going to be scorched black."
The facilities manager staring at it in a daze, mentally drafting tomorrow's repair crew requisition; the club's marketing director clamoring to put the shattered scoreboard fragments on museum display; the baseball association, the team owner, the teammates — every last one of them rejoicing over a act of vandalism for the ages.
And Noh In-seong hurled the great bat that had forged the record high into the sky, then took a lap around the dome.
"With a record like this, I could go completely insane as many times as I wanted, and they'd forgive me every time — so long as it isn't criminal, right?"
Well — it was the kind of achievement that forgave everything except betraying the team or pulling some Real World-grade atrocity.
Not that he had any intention of it. He wouldn't do that to the fans who loved him.
But shattering the souls of rival teams' fans? Madness like that was always on the menu.
And look there — weren't those two figures in Daegu uniforms clutching their heads on the verge of tears?
"Damn it, you absolute idiots — if you didn't want THIS, you should've just walked him every single at-bat!"
"Argh, they steal the old record AND hand him a brand-new one...!!"
The most hated man alive, to the rival fans turned sacrificial lambs. Noh In-seong moonwalked slowly toward the next base, right in front of the visiting cheering section.
And for the Daegu fans who had watched this entire season unfold, the most maddening truth of all was this: it still wasn't over.
As the sage of the card game once pronounced:
"Why do they never understand? Beneath the floor, there is yet a deeper floor."
Beneath the basement, behind a heavier iron door, a sub-basement chamber waited with its jaws stretched wide open.
Bottom of the fifth, currently. Strikeouts so far: eleven. Pitches thrown: a mere fifty-two. Noh In-seong's arm was still fresh as morning.
"Good lord."
It was when Noh In-seong polished off the top of the eighth that Daegu finally noticed the sub-basement. Only three innings had passed since then, and the margin left to them was exactly zero.
Being dragged around at 2-0 was miserable enough.
Far more infuriating was the fact that every single one of their postseason rivals was currently winning.
Lose to Noh In-seong without sinking so much as a single tooth into him, and the season was, for all practical purposes, over today.
But what truly drove them to despair was this:
"Nineteen strikeouts...!!"
That Noh In-seong — whose command had ping-ponged unpredictably all day long — was taking the mound with the nastiest stuff of any start all season, for the sole purpose of writing one more record into the books.
Bunting to stop that record was, realistically, a sealed-off option. Noh In-seong was a shortstop — one of the disgustingly good bunt-fielders in the league.
The out was easy to make, the score gap was small — and they were supposed to burn an out for absolutely nothing?
Bottom of the eighth, the Doubles failed to add insurance runs.
The final inning of the regular season. Pitcher Noh In-seong's season finale had begun.
"Strike!"
First pitch is always a strike — and forcing the opponent to deal with that question can pressure them in a hundred ways. But modern hitters don't play along. Come at them over the plate and they'll bludgeon you for it.
"Damn bastard — of all the shitty spots, you HAVE to paint that one, don't you?"
"Hey, when you were catching me, you set up knee-high every single time and then whined about outer-corner fastballs."
And so the Always WWE between battery mates played itself out.
Noh In-seong's second slider looked destined for the hitter's skull, then grazed the very edge of the strike zone.
"Two strikes!"
"That's in the zone?! You've got to be kidding me — that did NOT look in!"
Song Ji-young, who had jerked his body back in genuine fear for his head, erupted.
"Yeah, it was. It went in. If you're so mad, you should've swung."
Ambiguous in 2D, barely legible in 3D — the cluster of impact points inside that line was drawn by a computer's cold arithmetic.
The hitter needed a moment to think. Noh In-seong granted him nothing. Eight seconds to get in the box, or an automatic called strikeout — that was the reality.
Song Ji-young scrambled into his stance — and the instant he did, Noh In-seong's pitch exploded toward the plate at the fastest velocity of the day.
The bat chased the fastest ball of the day with the fastest swing of the day, too. The ball had already blown past.
"Swing, strike three! Batter out!"
Seeing the ball clamped white-knuckled in Jo In-soo's numbed hand, Song Ji-young trudged back to the dugout wearing the hollow face of a man betrayed by the universe.
The monumental record reserved for when twenty of those twenty-seven are put down by the pitcher and catcher alone, without a single fielder's help.
Perhaps heaven itself had declared that wishing for more would simply be too shameless.
The next hitter grounded out, and the pinch-hitter who came up last popped harmlessly into the infield, spending the final out.
Ball still clutched in his hand, Noh In-seong stood atop the mound and celebrated the end of his workday.
"Man, this is GREAT! Finished every one of my regulation plate appearances, so I've got the next two games off!"
"...This lunatic doesn't spare a single thought for the monumental record he just set — he's over there celebrating clocking out!"
Hearing this, Jeong Im-taek clutched the back of his neck yet again.
But patient zero of the lunacy virus paid it no mind whatsoever, turning to leave for the showers—
"U-uh... hey! Noh In-seong! The interview! You have to do the interview...!"
"Goddamn it! Today, of all days, NO ONE can stop me! Interfere with my commute home and I'll take this straight to the broadcasting commission...!!"
"AAARGH, somebody gag him RIGHT NOW!!"
He thrashed around with a teammate's palm clamped over his mouth until he was dragged, still flailing, to the interview zone.
It had been exactly five minutes since he'd earned his madness coupon. One ticket had just gone up in flames.