Reporting Live on Your Blazing Earned Runs
Even if some lunatic is thrusting his hips around wildly on top of third base, a normal player stops when told to stop.
Which raises the question: what if the man in question isn't just an ordinary lunatic? No matter how furiously the opposing manager raged in front of him, he didn't change his dance in front of that manager — he simply never stopped dancing at all.
"Hey! Are you gonna knock that off right now or what?!"
"HOO-ah! HOO-ahh!"
The stands had already descended into chaos. Daegu, of all places, was one of those peculiar ballparks where the third-base side doubled as the home cheering section.
And no matter how thoroughly Noh In-seong had seeded the crowd with loyal fans through his long behind-the-scenes efforts, the area near the home cheering section was a different beast entirely.
WOOOOOOOOW—!!
You shameless hack, that thieving son of a—
Show some respect, you bas—
A torrent of every curse word imaginable rained down on Noh In-seong's manager-humiliating celebration.
And then, a fresh avalanche of garbage came raining down toward third base.
After the mess was cleared away, play still couldn't possibly resume, and only after Noh In-seong had been issued a warning was the pitcher finally allowed to throw the ball.
Rolling his shoulders in circles, desperate to hold on to even a sliver of the heat he'd built up, the pitcher Oh Yeon-seok was about to learn that his nightmare of a day had only just begun.
"Skipper, I can go through with it, right?"
"...You are, without question, the craziest bastard of the year. And the part I hate most is that I honestly think it might actually work on this guy..."
That had been the consensus after Noh In-seong and a handful of players huddled around the manager and bench coach inside the dugout, finishing their little conspiracy.
Everyone sported a splitting headache over the inscrutable brilliance of a strategy that had been officially certified as Freak of the Year.
Manager Jeong Im-taek agonized for a moment, face buried in his hands, before relaying his instructions to the designated signal-caller — Lim Jae-min, in today's case.
Whatever moral objections anyone might raise about the play's pedigree, it was a valid tactic. If it could catch the enemy off guard, it was worth trying.
The real problem, as it turned out, arose from an entirely different quarter.
"...Wait, you actually memorized all the signs?"
"...I know all the motions, at least..."
God, can we trust this guy? The baserunners have to move on this idiot's signals — that's the most absurd part of all.
"Okay, so this gesture means the situation call, and this one means the play goes into effect on pitch number—"
"...Hold on. THAT was that signal? Wasn't the finger-to-the-chest thing it?"
...God damn it, Song Jin-wook, you absolute lunatic. What exactly did this idiot learn in the minors...
Having discarded Dustin and acquired a brand-new synergy — the Dumbass Duo (when these two combine, collective intelligence decreases) — Noh In-seong patiently re-taught them the signs.
Are we seriously safe betting on these guys? Maybe I should just cancel the whole thing and go for it on the very first pitch?
Now, even after getting knocked around today, Oh Yeon-seok was by no means a bad pitcher.
After all, a domestic starter who could eat five straight outings at an average of six innings apiece always had the makings of an ace.
Over thirty-plus innings pitched, he'd allowed just seven runs. On paper, outstanding. The fewest runs allowed of any starter who had cleared the minimum innings requirement this season.
But what if the overwhelming majority of those runs came from collapses in one specific situation?
ABS had moved past the 1.0 era of machine umpires — when verdicts differed from team to team, region to region — and into the 2.0 generation, where every situation was funneled into a central server for comprehensive analysis and judgment.
Naturally, if a curve didn't land in the strike zone, that just meant the pitcher's curve broke earlier than he intended. Nothing more.
Oh Yeon-seok lived and died by a pure up-and-down repertoire — four-seam fastball, curveball, changeup — with the fastball-plus-curve combination accounting for over eighty percent of his pitches.
When a pitcher with no slider whatsoever loses feel for his downward-breaking stuff, what do you get? A walk machine.
Pile up the walks, and the pitch count climbs. As fatigue mounts, and since the curve is a pitch that taxes the fingers heavily anyway, the four-seamer's bite gradually erodes too. The vicious cycle spins on and on.
All seven of those runs had come in situations where the curveball failed to so much as graze the strike zone, and the pitcher unraveled from there.
And today, all that accumulated karma detonated at once. Seven runs surrendered in just 4⅓ innings — the man had doubled his entire season's earned run total in a single afternoon.
Then, in the bottom of the fifth with one out, he issued yet another ball four, and the bases were loaded.
"Ah, for fuck's sake!"
Burying his face in his glove, utterly unable to contain himself after the walk, Oh Yeon-seok came face to face with Noh In-seong for the third time.
And Noh In-seong, absolutely giddy at the prospect of handing him an even bigger gift.
His usual pre-at-bat routine was a light wave of the bat toward the pitcher, then pulling it back toward his shoulder as he settled in.
Today, though, he planned on a slightly different routine.
Aim the bat at the outfield beyond the third-base home cheering section. Then swing it around to point it straight at the pitcher's head.
"Oh, come on. Umpire. Are you really going to allow this? You keep refusing to regulate this stuff and the kid's losing his mind—"
"Oh, so Babe Ruth was a godless thug who never learned a single one of the five cardinal virtues? Fine, then. Never celebrate your home runs again, buddy."
How dare you dirty up a pitcher's day with your home runs and bat-flipping, you uncivilized, mannerless little brat. Tsk...
Noh In-seong swatted away the catcher's whining like a fly, and the catcher's face flushed crimson — and, in true soulmate-battery fashion, the opposing pitcher's face reddened right along with it.
Both of you are really worked up, huh? Haha. Enough to see red, are we?
He was keeping one careful eye on any pitch creeping inside when Lim Jae-min raised his hand from the dugout. The runners touched the brims of their helmets in acknowledgment.
Huh, he's a rookie, but a catcher's a catcher, I suppose. And he memorized them that fast. It really is a position where only the sharp survive.
"Hey! Who do you think you—"
For the life of him, Noh In-seong couldn't figure out why opposing catchers, then and now, always chose the exact moment of a hitter's swing timing to try to needle him out of it.
Problem is, I wasn't planning to swing at all. That trick only works if you're distracted by thoughts of swinging.
Tok—!
The man whose job it was to field it first — the pitcher — stood frozen, failing to fully register what was even happening.
The third baseman, the first one to come to his senses, sprinted in and snatched up the ball, but—
"SAFE—!"
Every runner had already taken his ninety feet. One safety squeeze bunt, one more run on the board.
And so Oh Yeon-seok renewed his career-worst meltdown with eight earned runs in a single game, and was pulled for good.
Crack—!
And Dustin — Chun-sik, in peak form as always — did not forget the old maxim: hammer the new pitcher's very first pitch.
With the inherited-runners scoring bonus thrown in, the ledger got rewritten yet again. Eight earned runs became eleven.
One morning-to-nightfall collapse, and his ERA ballooned to 4.63. A calamity for the ages.
It takes a long, miserable career for a pitcher to wreck his mind and his stat line alike, but all it took to explode a water cooler in the corridor was one bottom of the fifth.
The opposing players shrieked themselves hoarse in outrage, but Noh In-seong had no intention whatsoever of listening.
When the opposing first baseman demanded, "How can you be so shameless? Aren't you scared of what the fans will think?", the only reply was a shimmy of his hips.
The man was shameless to his very core, and besides, to someone busy celebrating a successful bunt with a twerking exhibition at first base, criticism was just white noise.
And most importantly of all, something entirely new was unfolding in the hitherto peaceful world of Korean baseball bench-clearings.
Throw a beanball at the man who had declared, 'Trivial pleasantries and restaurant recommendations are hereby banned! From this day forward, I alone shall govern the bench-clearing!'?
Internet ghouls had dug up an old meme and christened the situation: with the era of the Do Death dawning, who in their right mind would throw at that guy?
Nobody fancied getting facial reconstruction surgery in early April and telling the doctor, "See you in four weeks."
So the retaliation came, merely, from a slightly different direction — petty and small-minded, as all the best vengeance is.
"...Ball four! Runner takes first!"
WOOOOOOOW—!!
Noh In-seong couldn't have cared less, but the other fans watching that game were never going to sit still.
Sure, everything the man did was villainous, but if he'd gotten that double today, it would have been a history-making, youngest-ever record.
This was a series that had drawn plenty of neutral fans too, and so the booing drowned out even the amplifiers — the one true advantage of playing at home — from first pitch to last.
The visiting fans cranked their speakers even louder, sang the most deranged chants imaginable, and even the home fans turned on the spectacle. There was no taste of victory left in that ballpark for anyone.
Home fans, away fans, and the third-party spectators who'd come purely to curse both sides into the dirt.
Amid all of it — the curses and condemnation sloshing together in the madhouse that was Gwangju's home stadium — Gwangju dropped Game 3 in the most listless, most miserable fashion imaginable.
We won it 14-2. Well, what can you do when your starter detonates from the first inning?
The bullpen that followed coughed up three more, but our relief corps came with a peculiar quirk: perennial control problems paired with an uncanny ability to eat innings.
The team's beloved workhorse — hailed as So Dong-yeop, compared to a handsome old-school celebrity when he pitched well, and demoted to "Rampage-Yeop" and "Big Ox" when he didn't.
He handled four full innings all by himself and made bullpen day look effortless.
No walks today. Sure, he gave up a home run, but that just meant everything else was getting pounded into the strike zone.
"Man, Dong-yeop's command was dialed in today."
"Right? I kept yelling 'Get in the zone!' at the ball, and it actually LISTENED to me for once!"
...No, you idiot. Since when is "the ball obeyed me" something a pitcher should celebrate...
Surveying the tissue-paper-thin depth of the team's bullpen, Noh In-seong felt the world go dark before his eyes.
If everything had gone according to the original plan, he probably would have been today's starter.
"It's basic common sense to pair a sinkerballer with a shortstop who can pick it, obviously~"
It was all so that he and Jeong In-woo could take the mound together — a bullpen day slotted in to bump Jeong In-woo back to the third slot in the rotation.
Using the off day plus one bullpen day, they'd realigned Jeong In-woo's turn so that it landed on Game 1 against the Grizzlies.
And mercifully, thanks to that shuffle, Noh In-seong would get the start in Game 2 of the Grizzlies series.
"Wait, then what about MY run support..."
Jeong In-young looked ready to grumble, but in a world where the default response is "if that bothers you, go post better numbers yourself?", he never stood a chance.
Produce results. Results. At this rate, isn't the bullpen coming for you too?
After the game, a swarm of reporters descended on Noh In-seong, all wearing their most disapproving smiles.
"Don't you think provoking the opposing team cost you a chance to set a record?"
"Deceiving the opposition with a called shot, then laying down a bunt — isn't that underhanded? It borders on outright deception."
Deception and underhandedness. My, what splendid vocabulary we have today.
"In a game where stealing from the opposition is perfectly legal — if you get fooled right in front of your eyes and stand there like an idiot, isn't that just begging to be deceived?"
I mean... honestly, who's to say. If you got fooled, isn't that on you for being a fool?
Noh In-seong's face was the very picture of genuine, uncomprehending bafflement.