The Prodigal Son Repays His Debt
Game 2 in Changwon had its own talking points — the two-way starter's return to the rotation, the restoration of the Doubles' five-man starting staff — but somehow, the game ended up famous for something else entirely.
For their part, the clubs that had taken a joyous public beating quietly slipped 'contributions' to the press for articles like these, and even leaned on the league to draft brand-new provisions against on-field violence. None of it gained any traction whatsoever.
Because this was an age where information traveled at the speed of a tap, the era of successfully stirring up the mob was well and truly over. Crude as it sounds, you could feed any random AI a name and ask why Noh In-seong threw punches, and it would tell you everything. Who was going to fall for an op-ed?
In the end, the only thing that mattered was winning. The bastard who wins gets worshipped; the bastard who loses gets torn apart.
Countless eyes locked onto Noh In-seong's first start back in the rotation.
"Why the hell is everybody swinging like maniacs with their eyes rolled back in their heads?"
And, ironically — perhaps because he'd authored such an electrifying, spine-tingling comeback the day before — he cruised right past the early innings. Three frames on a mere nineteen pitches. It being his first outing in a while, the four-seamer flatly refused to obey him, so he'd thrown nothing but two-seamers instead. Whatever he was aiming at, nobody was watching: swing, swing, swing.
The faces in the away section were a sight to behold. Fifty percent I want to kill him, and fifty percent God help me, I still love him. The old saying that ninety percent of baseball fans live at the extreme poles of emotion? Verified fact.
It was as if a single line were written across all of their stricken, wronged faces: "You crazy bastards, watch the ball and HIT it!" Such sad, such aggrieved expressions. He loved it.
"Your four-seam ratio was pretty high right up through the last game, wasn't it?"
"It was. Forty percent four-seam, thirty percent slider, twenty percent two-seam."
And the remaining ten percent was whatever junk he felt like throwing that day — the eephus, or even an outright 130 km/h dung-ball.
"But you're throwing over eighty percent two-seamers today. I'm guessing they came in locked onto the four-seam."
"Oh, In-soo hyung, you're giving off surprisingly intelligent vibes today? Is that how you wooed your wife?"
"Yeah, actually, it is. See, when I first laid eyes on Jeong-im... hey, you little shit!"
Still trading trash talk on the way back to the dugout, he was suddenly summoned in a hurry.
"Noh In-seong! Noh In-seong! Get over here, quick! You too, In-soo!"
What now, all of a sudden? In his experience, whenever the man hollered like that, somebody was about to get screwed.
"How many innings do you think you can give me today? How many pitches did the front office clear you for before the season started?"
The innings question — who knew. Even with the hitters swinging as dim-witted as they had been, this was still a professional team; they'd catch on soon enough. That one remained an open variable.
The pitch limit, though... how many had it been, again? Before the season began, one of the front office guys had come by for a chat about it.
"Ninety... ninety-something, I think? Pretty sure it wasn't a hundred."
"Unbelievable. Jae-kyung's out — elbow pain during his warmups. Right now, the only reliever who hasn't pitched on back-to-back days is Dong-yeop. He's it."
So Dong-yeop. A reliever who ate innings from that awkward middle ground between the mop-up crew and the high-leverage arms.
His fatal flaw was command so wretched that he found himself one mistake away from surrendering runs every single inning. The man rolled the lottery inside the strike zone. If not for a cutter that differed barely at all in velocity, his control was minor-league grade — which is to say, not a man you entrusted anything to.
"It's true that the more you grind down a bullpen, the less you have left at the end of the season... hmm."
Tsk. Thanks to his one skipped start, even his stretchy, rubber-band conscience twinged at the thought of accusing the manager of abusing his arms.
"Ay, alrighty then — reckon I'll give 'er a whirl!"
"No, you lunatic. Even if this game were the Korean Series, if you say that, I'm the one who ends up looking like garbage."
Fine. He'd eat an inning properly today. With that, manager's-office-chocolate-thief Noh In-seong was hereby issued a formal indulgence.
He'd just have to squeeze out one more theft next time.
Contrary to popular prejudice, there was no secret technique to eating innings.
Induce grounders to raise the in-play rate? Was he out of his mind — he was the starting pitcher today, which meant no designated hitter slot in the lineup.
Just look at the state of third base. Throw a ball anywhere near that corner and it was irasshaimase, come right in — Song Jin-wook was playing the hot corner today.
It would be like trying to stop a six-man infield-hit massacre with the team medic pulled all the way back to the parking lot. A perfect recipe for a massacre.
Stick to the fundamentals. First order of business: cut down the wasted balls.
Ah, damn it all. Nothing to be done about that one. On to the second.
Throw them a pitch they had never seen. A single unexpected curveball expanded his pitching patterns by a factor of dozens.
He remembered what the analytics team used to say — that analysis was like washing a window. Wash it nearly spotless, then toss a single speck of filth onto the middle of the glass, and you had to start all over again from the beginning.
Shown one breaking ball, why not follow up with a fastball?
It was, of course, a bluff. Judging by the betrayed look on the batter's face, In-soo hyung must have tipped something in that split second.
He couldn't quite sympathize with the booing from the stands. Sure, watching from the seats and standing in the box were two different things — but it was also because he could throw that curve with less drop whenever he pleased. You might read it the instant it left his hand, but you'd never know where it was going to end up.
Back in the days when he had lived under the name Jung In-seong, Busan had an ace hailed as the heir to the bespectacled legend. And back when his ligaments were still intact, he had been a pitcher too — he'd climbed all the way to the setup man who followed that ace out of the bullpen.
How did a second-year man crack the high-leverage corps? By inheriting the curveball straight from the great man himself: a blazing hook that topped out at 137 km/h.
Truthfully, throwing it properly had been a long struggle. His rookie-year command was so nonexistent he was practically a pitching machine with a grudge, and his curve never rose above batting-practice fodder. The proficiency simply wasn't there.
The curveball is a haughty pitch. Offer it mediocre command, and it repays the insult by stripping away its own value entirely.
Three years in, just as the curve finally confessed its love to him, he turned his back on it — his injury saw to that. The 137 km/h curveball became an ambiguous 128 km/h pitch that dropped less and floated more; the 150 km/h fastball mutated into a worse 140 km/h pitch that dropped more.
And yet, to survive, this was how he'd thrown:
Drive the fastball in hard toward the batter's body —
"Strike!"
— then drop the curveball to the outside corner, right where the hitter had just been tracking the fastball. A trajectory utterly different from anything he'd laid eyes on before. The curve came sailing in and then plummeted, and the batter either swung through empty air or simply failed to react at all.
Unlike a backspinning fastball that resisted the drop, this curve dove viciously off a top-spin axis. Like two faces of a mirror drifting apart, the images kept growing more distant — he seemed to remember there being a term for it. Spin mirroring, something like that.
"Swing — strike three!"
And the final sign... good lord, this man has one hell of a personality too. How has he been holding that in all game?
In-soo hyung had called In-seong's last pitch of the day himself, straight through the PitchCom.
Fifty-six kilometers per hour. A curveball that floated brazenly up into the sky, not even pretending otherwise. A perfect slow curve, wholly deserving of the A that would be written onto a scorecard now reading eight scoreless innings.
As a bonus, today's jackpot batter — the man who had struck out on that pitch — was absolutely furious. Though judging by how he didn't come charging at him, his infamy must be spreading properly after all.
"That aside — holy hell, is this scoreline even right? Feels like I played this entire game by myself."
"...Hey, I got on base in front of you, didn't I?"
Changwon, Game 2. Final score: 3–1.
Winning pitcher: Noh In-seong (8 IP, 0 ER), 93 pitches. Decisive RBI: Noh In-seong (three-run homer, 7th inning).
The runaway son of the house — no, the son who had been briefly exiled from the house — had snapped the three-game losing streak with what amounted to a one-man martial arts exhibition.
At this rate, surely even his conscience could live with him pilfering a little chocolate, right?
"...So it was you?"
Ah, damn it all. Busted. The manager had been standing directly behind him.
He was let off on the condition that he buy two packs of the exact same brand of chocolate the next day. So unfair.