4. Skipping Over Noh In-seong...
Noh In-seong stood in front of the full-length mirror, spinning his entire body around in slow circles as he ran through the adjustments he'd be making to his routine going forward.
"Behold the muscles that have been locked in hibernation for half a year!... Sigh, what am I saying. It hasn't even been half a month."
In truth, the Phoenix Tournament and draft day were barely two weeks apart — so these muscles were the pure, unadulterated fruit of past labor.
Months of grinding agony spent first building the muscle itself, then layering on cardio and the endless variety of hitting-related muscles, one group at a time.
And so there he stood before the mirror, admiring a physique that practically demanded the words "Now THIS is muscle. This is what a pro athlete looks like."
"...You absolute bastard of an older brother. It's genuinely disgusting. What is this, a garbage exhibition first thing in the morning?"
My little sister, Siyeon, had been about to step into the bathroom when she froze mid-motion, her face scrunching into a scowl at the sight of yours truly.
Because his name half-overlapped with some celebrity from back in the day — nothing to do with me, of course — he'd suffered through elementary school for it. Who knew puberty could hit an elementary schooler this early?
"It's a good morning, isn't it? Dear little sister..."
Ah. So THIS is how dangerous a world overflowing with environmental hormones really is. The poor, pitiful creature...
"...Get OUT of there right now!"
Anyway, separate matter entirely. A man was simply showering and admiring the temple of his own body — since when does the bottom feeder of the household caste system get a vote?
I believe men and women should be treated as equals, and I decided to put that belief into practice.
SLAP—!
By smacking her on the butt and shooing her out. What a satisfying sound.
"MOOOOM! Oppa hit me again...!!"
Ratta-tat-tat...!!
Oh dear, child. Have you never learned the ancient proverb about answering when your name is called? Truly pitiable.
And so, watching Siyeon sprint full-tilt for the kitchen, Noh In-seong muttered to himself in lament over his little sister's sluggish education — and thus began the morning of Draft Day.
CLANG—!!
"Why on EARTH are you smacking your sister's rear first thing in the morning?!"
"AAAGH—!!"
Aside from his mother cracking him across the skull with the ladle she'd been stirring soup with, the draft-day morning was perfectly peaceful.
And the breakfast menu was spectacular. Sausage stir-fried with vegetables, cucumber and chili salad — no wait, is that mackerel? Is today a holiday or what?
"...Hm? No, it's seaweed soup."
But hold on. Something was deeply wrong with that soup. What is this? Are they trying to make me slide down the draft board?
"Mom, seriously, what is this? Are you hoping I drop in the rankings?"
"Dropping would be a good thing. Haven't you said it every single day? That you'd rather kill yourself than go to Busan?"
Ahh. A true wise mother and good wife. Mother has thought of everything.
Gulp...
"But can a draft really go the way I want it to, though?"
Still, would Busan even let me go? Every position is a gaping hole, the starting rotation is running on geriatric legs.
Is their scouting department even earning their paychecks? They'll almost certainly pick me.
Starting pitcher / every infield position (catchers excluded) — and he can even patrol center field.
Honestly, the alarm bells in his brain were screaming: Are you insane? You want to torpedo your own career?
He didn't want to go. But the thought did cross his mind.
How many of the old guard would still be there?
And is the front office still receiving death threats? How bad would the traffic around the team bus get?
...Come to think of it, it might actually be fun. For about the first two months of the season.
Should he add a clause saying if they didn't back him up after he caused a scene, he'd demand his release? Nah. Wouldn't work, would it?
Gulp...
Noh In-seong — not quite choking down a rice cake with that seaweed soup — drained his bowl.
Unaware that the Busan Marines were beginning to have second thoughts about handing him the rice cake at all.
The graduate students of Korean baseball, the Busan Marines, who had once again earned an A grade this year.
"Heheh. You're REALLY going to let me defend my thesis this year, right?"
"Hm. Well, let's see the results first..."
When a grad student earns an A, you might let them defend their thesis — even if it's just to keep the hope alive.
But when a baseball franchise earns an A and calls it a season's results, the stadium bus catches physically on fire.
And this was barely a week after being blindsided by a single, grades-obsessed high school student.
"Ugh... THIS is... a team record...? It reeks of the alphabet..."
Still, with results like these, they'd snagged the first overall pick of the draft yet again.
This year? The Tragic Number was all but filled out. At the pace things were going, it would hit zero by mid-September. Another year, down the drain.
"Ah, so THAT'S why I told the second-years to come watch too."
With the season already dead and buried, the GM was cracking the whip on his scouting staff — might as well at least scout hard for the future.
The eve of the all-important draft, the one chance to nudge this wrecked reality even a millimeter in a new direction, and the conference room was packed.
The reason was simple. An emergency meeting had been convened over tomorrow's first-round, first pick.
"We will now begin the meeting on why we should NOT draft Noh In-seong."
In plain terms: Should we change our pick?
The scouting team looked like they'd seen a ghost. What is this? What did they snort? Rotisserie chicken up the nostrils?
Noh In-seong. Openly a starting-pitcher prospect. Openly an infield prospect. Openly a hitter prospect.
Wide defensive range, position versatility — the ONLY solution to this hopeless franchise riddled with infield holes.
And now they wanted to add 'another team's prospect' to that list?
"Are you people INSANE?!"
Completely justified. The scouts had only ever argued among themselves about where to play him first — never about not drafting him.
It was the reaction of a sane man watching a lunatic insist that a guaranteed winning lottery ticket is a conspiracy by the tax office.
PTOO—!
The scouting staff spat openly on the floor in the direction of the operations director.
"We understand everyone's feelings here. However..."
"However my ass! We held draft meetings until we were blue in the face, and you're telling me you're overturning the result the night before? WHAT kind of horseshit is that?"
BANG! The scouting director slammed the binder down on the table like he was throwing it — and honestly, you couldn't blame him.
A sophomore hurler, a junior slugger — Noh In-seong had already shown the world both halves of his talent. Every team in the country wanted him.
He wasn't even raw ore. He was a perfectly cut natural ruby, freshly unearthed.
A little polishing — no, hell, even if this brain-dead franchise beat the crap out of him, rubies are big. He could flounder for years and the team still couldn't lose on the deal.
"Are we seriously about to repeat the draft we already flushed down the toilet once?!"
They said the first pick of the first round was a once-in-a-lifetime golden ticket — and this moron franchise wouldn't even grab it.
Not that they had a choice... no. Other teams simply refused to help them.
There was that one draft where they'd passed on a pitcher who grew into a major-league-level arm — dragging their scout all the way there for nothing.
So of course the scouting team, desperate to bury that painful memory, pushed back.
"Please hear me out until the end. I am not trying to diminish this player's talent in any way."
The analytics director, who had been barely holding the line, took over.
- There's no guarantee he'll actually stick as a starting pitcher.
Maybe the position change in his junior year wasn't by design — maybe it was because his cumulative pitch count through sophomore year was already maxed out.
- Yes, he clearly has the potential to cover the entire infield. But we can't fill our holes with one man.
If we were committed to tanking for a few solid years, sure, draft him. The problem is this clown car looks ready to stretch that into ten.
- If we don't compete NEXT year, every last one of us is getting fired. We need a pitching prospect now and can fill the bats from college later...
Plausible-sounding arguments kept coming. But they were hollow words, every one of them.
One superhuman can't do everything, can he? True enough.
But had they forgotten the first rule of every draft in history — take the biggest chunk of talent FIRST, and worry about the rest after?
"Then... just draft him and TRADE him after, like people always do..."
Talent decides everything. Selling only after you've fully grasped the size of that talent is the rational play.
Just as the scouting director was wondering whether he should leak this entire circus to a reporter and go drown his sorrows in free booze instead —
"Besides, even assuming we make the pick — can anyone GUARANTEE that player would actually join our team?"
As if all of it had merely been buildup for this one revelation, the most fatal point of all finally tumbled out of the operations department's mouth.
"...I'm sorry. WHAT did you just say?"
Negative reactions erupted first. Naturally. Who turns down a pick—
"!!!"
Whoturns downa pick.
Why does the most obvious statement in the world suddenly sound so bone-chilling?
"...You mean... he could REFUSE our pick... and go somewhere else?"
The subject. The situation. The act.
All of it was terrifying. What scared them most was that, coming from THAT lunatic, it was entirely plausible.
"Have you forgotten what he said about us in his interviews?"
The man who bulldozed an entire franchise before he'd even set foot in professional baseball.
The titles already hanging around Noh In-seong's neck lent their fears perfect, airtight credibility.
"...Ugh, damn it. It's supposed to be a draft pick we can feast on... so why does it feel like a pick that'll kill us if we swallow it?"
What flashed through the scouting director's mind at that moment was a patch of bright, blazing fire clinging to bare skin.
No matter how beautiful a flame may be, if it's white phosphorus burning into your own flesh, there is nothing beautiful about it.
Before they'd even picked the player, their eyes were already stinging and strange hallucinations were creeping in. Who the hell would WANT to pick that up?
And of course, that wasn't even the half of it.
"Actually, even before all that — he got into a flaming public argument with our own fans on social media..."
A star who'd already traded mutual profanities with the fanbase before even signing was its own problem.
"And if we pick him — do you honestly believe he'd apologize if we asked?"
"He'd sooner say 'apologize? Sure — how about I pretty up that sorry face of yours with my fist instead.'"
Smooth out the differences? Bow his head? Would THAT kid actually do any of it? That was a real-world problem too.
And so the reasons NOT to draft him kept piling onto one side of the scale, heavier and heavier.
Watching this unfold, the scouting director sank into his chair, drowning in a fog of swirling thoughts.
No, but still, we have to draft hi... ugh, I mean, it's not like I don't UNDERSTAND where they're coming from... but God, of ALL teams on earth, why did he have to fall into THIS one...
And then he thought to himself:
...Son of a bitch. Go ahead. Let them pull this crap and then try giving ME a bad scout evaluation. Just try it.
No — his innermost thought escaped out loud before he could stop it.
"I'm sorry? What was that?"
Trying to play it off as nothing happened! simply wasn't an option. Too loud.
His own crime — the sin of having taken a job at a franchise this rotten — was simply too great.
The draft hall was in an uproar.
Every team scrambling, phones ringing off the hook, the rustle of flipping pages, the clatter of tablets.
- Everyone, what's the call?! What is this?! Who's next?!
- No, forget that — get the article written NOW!
Every conceivable noise collided into one roaring marketplace of chaos.
"The Busan Marines will now announce their first-round pick. Pitcher Jang In-ho of Gyeongnam High School."
A single team's choice had just sent shockwaves through every other team in the hall, dominoes toppling in a chain.
The announcer who had been waiting, naturally, to call out Noh In-seong's name — the MC too — froze solid.
Draft officials and club delegations everywhere were crying, 'What happens to OUR picks now?!' — scratching names off holographic displays, frantically recalculating their boards.
"...Heh. Damn it all. What is even happening right now."
Jang In-ho, the gloriously frozen first pick of the first round, stood there half-petrified, thinking exactly that.
Rustle, rustle...
Beside him, Noh In-seong — lazily rummaging through a bucket of caramel popcorn — was thinking something too.
"...Hahaha. You absolute sons of bitches."
No, he actually said it out loud.
Well. Would a kid who cared about appearances really be sprawled there with his legs crossed, munching popcorn through the entire draft?
Afterward, teams that had stubbornly stuck to their original picks were skipped over — and thanks to a league so starved of catchers it was practically criminal —
the club holding the second pick called the top catching prospect in the nation.
Then, a full TWO slots of free fall. The club with the third pick of the first round — the Seoul Doubles — pulled the cap down over Noh In-seong's head.
"...Yes. That's me. Noh In-seong."
In that suffocatingly awkward atmosphere, Noh In-seong, black cap perched on his head, took the mic and began his greeting...
"Hm... You know, thinking about it now, I'm actually pissed off?"
No — correction. It wasn't a greeting. It was a declaration of war.
"From this day forward, every time I come to Busan, I promise to be the kind of player who brings the stadium back to the good old romantic days — when Molotov cocktails rained across the diamond."
And he punctuated it with a hammering punch to his own gut, as if deliberately forcing them to relive the PTSD of their saddest era.
"I can't speak to the team's standings — but if I can carve enough letters of the alphabet into Busan's record, I'll consider my KBO career a success."
One man, personally and formally issuing a public proclamation of 'we are going to DESTROY you' to an entire franchise, purely out of spite.
"Oh, right — and thank you for picking me. You guys are pretty good, I guess."
Somehow, in the middle of all that, he still managed a thank-you — the logic being, well, they DID pick him, after all.
Head bowed at a perfectly courteous forty-five degrees, he delivered his very first professional greeting to the Doubles.
"...Normally people open with 'Thank you for selecting me'... don't they?"
"Eh, what do you know. They only picked me because they couldn't resist. That's plenty."
Nobody in the hall could bring themselves to call that a polite greeting.
Naturally, in all the long, storied history of baseball, no draftee had EVER opened his career with a greeting like that.
Noh In-seong plastered his face across the front page of the sports section, topping the lead story on every portal site in the country.
Thanks to the ongoing saga of sports athletes having their comment sections blanket-disabled, the hate comments were, for once, scarce —
but with the angry-to-agree ratio hitting a cool 1:9, it was clear everyone was either furious or riding an uncut dopamine high.
And obviously, the site where people wore their humanity on the thinnest of threads — some of them uploading photos with the skin peeled entirely off — crashed under the load.
"THIS SON OF A— 'Regional preference' AGAIN?! Seriously?!"
Especially for the fans still flat on their backs, groggy from taking the cursed 'regional preference' PTSD square in the jaw every draft —
a rookie who'd flipped the table AND his outfit in his first interview was practically coronated ruler of the dark galleries by default.
The first radiation victim, the Busan Marines gallery — and naturally, that wasn't all.
From the first fallout zone to the second — the Seoul Doubles gallery, who'd gotten their pick and then been made to bow and grovel for it —
every gallery combined, this was the moment Noh In-seong was officially crowned overlord of them both.