One Look at the Grip and You Knew? It's a Slider
After everyone had gaped in awe at Song Jin-wook's masterful execution of the play and given him a raucous round of 'congratulations' at home plate, Jeong In-woo — who had coasted through eight innings while the rest of us did the heavy lifting — was the chosen one among us, sent off to do the postgame interview.
It made sense. In-woo had the seniority, he was the type who drove his own car to work anyway, and he'd surely clock out on his own after the interview was done.
The rest of us showered up, gathered around for a hearty serving of the manager's pep talk, then shuffled out of the stadium, debating whose car we could hitch a ride in.
"Noh In-seong! Just one word, please!"
Seriously? I need to get home fast.
I'm a damn pedestrian. When midnight hits, I'm stuck paying surge rates on a taxi.
In any case, the reporters who came looking for us after the game were, for the most part, ones on friendly terms with the club.
Frankly, if they weren't, they'd be risking a lifetime supply of curses from a bunch of exhausted players just to scrape together a story. Nobody wanted that bill.
Naturally, nobody asked me anything unfavorable. They all knew I had a reputation for hurling insults without a shred of hesitation — I was prime material to get torn apart for it.
"Kim Seong-ju said you had no manners after the game and that a player like you needs to be disciplined! What's your response to that?"
A reporter asked what I thought of the opposing team's hysterical reaction to today's loss.
Well, it's not exactly wrong. I am short on manners. But you see, that's not something that should be coming out of your mouth?
"Discipline? Tell me something — by that logic, does every unsportsmanlike play in league history get retroactively punished? Please go ask him that for me."
And honestly, the biggest stain on this league's competitive integrity is doping, of all things, and this bastard of all people—
"He says you excessively provoked the pitcher. How do you respond to that?"
The reporter fired off a follow-up. Eh, this much I could work with.
Hmm... I pitch too, so I really don't have a leg to stand on. But nothing says I have to respond the way he wants me to, does it?
"Sure, I provoked him. So what exactly are you going to do about it?"
Judging by the way the reporter grinned and hammered away at his keyboard, I'd given him exactly the answer he was hoping for.
Enjoy writing that article. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a taxi to catch.
But it was already too late — the surge meter on the taxi had a gift for me: a 40% surcharge.
Goddammit. Next time, maybe I'll just ask around for a cheap motel nearby instead of going home.
"Our opponents kept playing dirty. All we did was respond to it."
It was the hour drifting past morning, edging toward noon, after a night's sleep.
I'd been lounging in bed, phone screen zoomed in, rotting away in front of the news. It was getting to be about time to head to work, and I knew I should shower soon. Ugh. So much effort.
Scrolling through the fallout from yesterday's bench clearing and the interviews that followed, one thing struck me all over again:
Kim Seong-ju. I genuinely could not fathom what kind of gall it took for this guy to give interviews like this.
"The bench clearing was the same story. He kept provoking the pitcher — so what, that made it justified?"
Q. But didn't you throw at Dustin Noh In-seong, not Noh In-seong himself?
A. ...Hmm...
And that's why his mouth kept jamming shut. Because it was obvious.
Dustin had done nothing wrong and simply got swept into it — but if you pin it on me, then the pitcher who threw at a guy who wasn't even the party involved just becomes a lunatic.
This guy's got no skill and can't even talk properly either.
"In-seong! Food's on the table, get out here!"
Ah, Mom. Do I look like an idiot to you?
I knew that when I walked out, there'd be no rice served, no soup out yet, just a couple of side dishes slapped on the table — that's exactly why she was calling me.
"From the very start, that guy never showed me an ounce of respect — he was too busy criticizing me. I am convinced he should never be selected for the national team."
Ha, right. You used to be a national team player yourself, didn't you.
A bastard who got popped for doping and will never board that plane again... Honestly, the world really is ending if trash like this got to wear the national jersey.
I was still brooding over that when my furious mother came at my skull with a pair of frying chopsticks.
"Hey, quit attacking people with cooking utensils!"
Her cowardly fact-check — eat and get to work already — landed, and I silently shoveled home cooking into my mouth.
To be fair, Kim Seong-ju's doping bust and his national team days were separated by a bit of a gap.
He'd never tested positive as a student, and his first national team call-up came when he was brought along as a backup for one promising 'rookie.'
The shortstop position was aging out, so the plan was: bring up a young prospect, let him soak up some experience! He was carried as a backup to the backup, and his entire contribution was one game of defensive duty in the outfield.
Once the national team roster dissolved, he turned pro. His rookie season numbers were garbage, so around the end of the year he started doping — and got busted the following season.
Long story short: a washed-up fool who couldn't let go of a career already in the gutter was picking a fight with me for no reason.
He was clinging to the memory of a guy who'd once made the national team after a doping suspension, dreaming of his own recall. Pathetic, really.
"While I'm around? He's not getting selected. Not a chance."
Anybody worth calling up as my backup has to put defense first, obviously. Who's going to pick you?
That was the new image of the guy who'd dropped two balls yesterday. Apparently the most upvoted post on the Korean baseball community that day.
Before the game yesterday, I'd spotted Choon-sik while I was jogging around the stadium to loosen up.
He was suspended for five games anyway, so I figured he'd come to pick up his training schedule or something.
"In-seong! Thank you for grabbing that bastard's arm for me!"
"Wow, you actually noticed? Most guys either miss it completely or only catch it on the replay."
Of course he did — I'd picked up on it the moment the brawl started. This guy must have gotten into more than a few scraps back before Alice was even born.
Choon-sik had decided not to appeal. The front office had talked him out of it, saying a foreign player's odds of getting nailed with guilt-by-association were far too high.
"This country's got plenty of multicultural families now — why are they still so unforgiving toward foreigners?"
"...Those are Koreans, you dimwitted American."
They actually have citizenship, dummy. If it bothers you that much, go get naturalized.
"Ohh, I heard in the fucking Korean Army they grind your knees off starting from day one. No thank you."
...Where the hell did this guy pick that up? Do you happen to have family in Seoul or something?
After parting ways with Choon-sik, the manager called the players together before the game — said he had something to tell us.
"So... Sung Hyun-tak is probably out for a couple of days."
No broken bones, apparently — just one punch to the face and his muscles had gone into shock. What a marvel of a man. He gets hit and somehow that injures him.
As I sat there shamelessly thinking like a starting pitcher, I spotted a few faces I hadn't seen since the end of spring camp.
Anyway, we had a hole in the infield, and with our left fielder/first baseman suspended, they'd evidently pulled a few guys up from the minors as a stopgap.
"In any case, Hyun-tak is off getting treatment to loosen those muscles up, and we've got new guys here — so everyone, introduce yourselves."
"Oh? Dong-goo!"
That was Lim Jae-min, beaming at one of the three call-ups — the pitcher.
Yeom Dong-goo. The third rookie of the '51 draft class, selected by the Doubles right after me and Jae-min, had just been registered to the first team.
"That kid really needs to pan out..."
"What's with the tone? You're talking like a professor watching over his grad student, hyung."
And astonishingly, the happiest of all was Kim Jin-hong, our bullpen ace. Just how much had this man been suffering?
"Good afternoon, everyone — welcome to Game 2 of the season series between the Grizzlies and the Doubles!"
"Yesterday these two rivals went at it so hard it ended in a full bench clearing — and in the end, the Doubles took it, didn't they?"
"That's right. And they lost on a walk-off in the middle of all that, so I imagine the mood over there isn't great."
The aftershocks of yesterday's bench clearing still rippled through the stadium, churning the surface tension of the atmosphere beneath them.
And of course, anyone who stirred up further trouble now would be looking at additional suspensions on top of everything else.
"No drama today. I am begging you — let's just play a clean, quiet ballgame."
"Be a lot easier if one particular bastard just kept his mouth shut."
Kim Seong-ju. Was it because he'd been on the outside of yesterday's brawl looking in? The guy was still running his mouth.
"You'll be sitting quietly soon enough anyway — why don't you head to the locker room early?"
Doping bastard. You're getting stuffed and mounted today. Should've done it yesterday, honestly.
Thanks to that drug-fiend, I had to take the pitcher's mound with my mood already soured before the first pitch — but it didn't touch my stuff.
Maybe it was because I'd slept soundly in my own bed, eaten a proper home-cooked meal, or maybe it was just the magic of being home. Who knows.
"Swing, strike three! Batter out!"
[Ball four— no, the batter swings! A limp wave at the falling slider! Noh In-seong retires the side in order in the top of the first!]
[Not the fastball today — it's the slider knifing in sharp to bring the strikeouts.]
Today, exactly one of my pitches was sharp. Days like this are rare, but they roll around now and then.
The four-seamer was slower than usual, the two-seamer biting less, the curveball dropping sooner than it should —
"Swing! Strike three! Batter out!"
[Wow, that's five sliders in a row! Dropping and cutting, slickly dodging the bats!]
[He's throwing his short, tighter-breaking slider almost like a four-seamer today — a slider with late, quick movement.]
But in exchange, the most beloved breaking ball in the entire league had decided to whisper its love to me today, and me alone.
"Easy pickings, coming right up."
And in the other corner, the man this breaking ball despised more than anyone else in the league stepped into the batter's box.
[Here's Kim Seong-ju. The slider's been filthy today, and from Kim Seong-ju's standpoint... well, that's not a great look.]
[He's elite against hard stuff like four-seamers and two-seamers, decent against curves and forks too... but, well. The slider is...]
Kim Seong-ju's hitting value against fastball-tier velocity ranked among the top three in the league.
Meaning: a pitch that generated hard contact nearly 40% of the time — the kind of pitch where, if he could put bat on it, the odds of a good outcome shot way up.
And on the other side? The most frequently thrown pitch in the league, the one anyone and everyone could command. The slider?
"Son of a—!"
[Whiff, Kim Seong-ju. Quite the gap, isn't it?]
[He's treated it as a persistent problem for years — apparently he's tried rebuilding his swing, overhauling his stance, everything, every single offseason.]
As of last season, sliders were the pitch he faced most often (39% of the time), yet his hitting value on them was threatening double digits in the negative, with hard contact under 20%.
In other words: forget the slider's intrinsic pitch value, sure — small sample sizes and all that. But against me, a certified top-tier slider in this league?
"Swing, strike three! You're out!"
Just a sucker. Not an ordinary sucker, either — this was a man who'd signed away the rights to his own organs.
[Oh, that's just helpless! All three pitches were sliders, and he can't even foul one off—]
The batter vented his fury by snapping his bat over his knee, and I figured the least I could do was put on a little show in return.
[What is Noh In-seong doing right now? He's holding up three fingers and showing the ball to the crowd?]
[Oh... he's showing his grip? Is that... the slider grip?]
Tipping my pitch. If you can't hit it even knowing it's coming, hang up your cleats and call yourself a batter a day.
Noh In-seong smiled brightly at the strikeout artist who had just signed his own waiver surrendering any claim to hitting.