Spring Camp (1) – Always WWE
Noh In-seong had heard that the Doubles would be holding this year's spring camp in Okinawa.
All of February, and roughly the first week of March besides.
"A world of difference from the winter of this godforsaken peninsula, where the cold is comparatively filthy."
Temperatures normally somewhere between twenty degrees at the high end and sixteen at the low — the kind of mild, slightly crisp weather you could survive with a single long-sleeve shirt and a pair of track pants.
Nothing like back home, where winter arrived drenched in the earth's pure malice, as if the planet were praying for every last human to freeze to death.
Ziiiip—!!
He'd packed his gym bag, set an alarm for the arrival time the club had messaged him the day before, and gathered every last item on the list.
He was, after all, drawing on Jung In-seong's memories of the years he'd crawled around Guam and Okinawa back in his Busan days.
"As expected, the more money you have, the lighter your luggage gets."
Pack light, carry plenty of cash, and buy your daily necessities on-site — that was always the easiest way.
"Fwurrrp... ha. Now go behave yourself. Focus on hitting the ball, not the players, you hear?"
"...Hold on. Wait. That's really the advice you're giving your son on the eve of his very first pro training camp?"
The man had only just gotten back from a brutal winter business trip rush, and this was the fatherly wisdom he dispensed the moment the whole family sat down to eat together.
"Hehe, this galbi-jjim is delicious."
Siyeon was so preoccupied with her braised short ribs that she didn't spare a single thought for her heavenly older brother vanishing for about a month.
And Mother... hmm. Well, to be fair, unlike Father, she'd seen plenty of me lately, so maybe she had nothing to say.
"Honey. Let it go."
Oh. So that's how it is. She just didn't think it was time to cut me loose yet.
On the day before spring camp, Noh In-seong was thoroughly humiliated by his own family.
'Ugh, whatever. Souvenirs, schmouvenirs. I'm just going to buy myself some bread.'
"What did you say? This little—?!"
WHACK—!!
"GWAAAAGH—!!"
Body and soul alike, he ached — including the still-tender scar of his promotion.
"Yeesh, there's a filthy number of people in here... Where is it? The lounge."
The airport was crawling with humanity.
With nobody in the Doubles organization he actually knew, he'd ridden the airport train all the way to the international terminal alone.
"Nobody around here I know, huh?"
If you really stretched the definition, there was his draft classmate — but given the sheer volume of incidents and accidents In-seong had racked up, striking up conversation felt ill-advised.
By now, typing his name into FirewoodWiki pulled up an "Incidents & Controversies" section right alongside his profile.
"So unfair. This is so unfair. When exactly did I cause this much trouble?"
He was zoning out, solemnly resolving to one day rehabilitate that section of his page, when a familiar face drifted over.
"Gah. Holy hell, so you're actually one of those show-up-early types?"
What was his name again? The guy had spent his entire high school career eating In-seong's abuse, so his name had slipped away while the curses themselves remained crystal clear.
"...? What? I was always diligent, though?"
"Diligent, my ass. Diligently cursing out other players, mocking them, and knocking them around. Already trying to launder your high school reputation, huh?"
And yet this guy had already accumulated one count of sheer rudeness. Confucius himself said: do not unto others what you would not have done to you!
"...Hey. What was your name again?"
Tsk.
His draft-class catcher clicked his tongue, his face broadcasting a single message: 'What the hell is this bastard, can't even remember his own classmate's name?'
Sensing a misunderstanding brewing, In-seong laid his heart completely bare.
"I mean, think about it. Almost every conversation you and I ever had was me cursing you out."
'This bastard, that bastard' — the guy had been too busy being insulted for names to come up. Since when had In-seong ever addressed him by anything but profanity?
"...Right, that's... no, you insane bastard! Don't say that like you're proud of it!"
This was the Doubles' second-round pick — a selection made because, looking ahead at the catcher depth chart, the team had needed an infusion of young blood to replace its retired veteran backup catchers.
Lim Jae-min felt his blood pressure spike at the sight of Noh In-seong.
Utterly disregarding Lim Jae-min's silent plea to be spared from ever interacting with him, Noh In-seong sat down in the seat right beside his.
Presumably the club's way of saying: players your age should get to know each other.
'I'm a pitcher, that bastard's a catcher. Then again, if the two of us hate each other, we're basically guaranteed to end up in a headlock situation sooner or later.'
Having resolved to at least refrain from picking fights inside the plane, Noh In-seong glanced over at Jae-min, who was huddled into himself.
Rattle-rattle-rattle...
He could feel the vibration of the kid's leg — a cocktail of nerves, anxiety about the future, and a dash of excitement.
Shaved head, ramrod-straight back, eyes darting nervously around the room — a pint-sized catcher with rookie written all over him.
'He's genuinely, one hundred percent a rookie. Brings back the old days.'
Being a secondhand rookie himself, In-seong obviously felt no jitters of his own — but the nostalgia got to him, and he struck up a conversation.
"Hey. Look to your right. Your right. Hey!"
"......"
Not exactly the words of a man who'd just sworn off antagonizing people — but the bastard was blocking his water, after all.
"Pass it over. You can see it next to you, can't you? Hand it over quick, I'm thirsty."
Staring blankly at In-seong's finger, then glancing sideways, Jae-min finally spotted the paper cup and lunged for it in a panic.
"Ah— ah! S-sorry!"
"Oh my, no worries at all."
It wasn't like the kid had a game to play right this second. Why was he shaking like a leaf?
No matter how high a catcher got drafted, unlike any other position player, he couldn't just walk in and seize a starting job.
Memorizing every pitcher's repertoire, confirming his grasp of the team's sign system, and depending on the Doubles' philosophy, possibly even managing the pitching staff itself.
And if the team ran shifts aggressively, then directing them was the least of it — down to the final duty of checking whether every defender was actually standing where he belonged.
'Just memorizing all of that takes the better part of a year, doesn't it?'
Memorize it all and you might survive — but if you were dumb on top of that, you'd never claw your way up from the minors.
Jae-min, occupying roughly the third-string catcher slot, wouldn't be seeing aggressive playing time.
Most likely he'd be planted in the minors farming experience, then crawl up to the first team if the starting catcher went down.
Best-case scenario: appearing in the big leagues purely as a backup, getting his legs managed and his body kept fresh until the starter recovered.
If he had hitting potential, pinch-hitting duty might be worth considering — but In-seong didn't remember this guy hitting anything special in high school.
Most of his appearances would come in the eighth or ninth inning, paired with some fastball-only reliever.
Far more often than not, he'd be sitting as the team's third catcher — and the fact that anyone was seeing him regularly at all was itself a sign the team was groaning at the seams.
Seeing as little of him as possible meant, at minimum, that the team was having a good year.
"Hey. Snap out of it. This spring camp, your entire job is basically bulking up and studying, you know that?"
"Uh... uh-huh."
Oh boy. This kid can't even process a sentence. Is he going to be okay?
Since they were flying out together, the assumption was they'd share a room too — assuming the old-school initiation rituals were dead and buried, that is.
"At this rate, I honestly don't know if he'll manage to find the hotel dining room..."
The kid had frozen solid into a complete idiot who couldn't string two words together.
Like a plane climbing too steeply into the sky, an anxiety flickered through Noh In-seong's mind — the feeling of something that would crash before the team ever got off the ground.
Noh In-seong's assessment had been perfectly sound.
No team in its right mind uses a rookie catcher as its backup.
"...Damn it. Except in this particular case, things are quite a bit different."
That is, unless the starting catcher hadn't suffered a single injury in the last two years, the backup catcher was quietly fuming with grievances, and a golden opportunity had appeared to shore up a bullpen that was falling apart.
"So what I'm saying is, we can acquire the opposing team's bullpen ace in exchange for our backup catcher—"
"Then who exactly are we supposed to use as our backup catcher right now?"
The decibel level in the conference room climbed, with the general manager at the center of the storm.
One side preached stability; the other touted the sweet returns of a trade.
SLAM!
"All right, then. Let's get this straight."
In the end, it fell to the final decision-maker of this trade to bring order.
The GM who'd shotgunned the room began working his tablet — the era of summarizing things on paper, it seemed, was long gone.
"The catcher we're giving up is our backup, Jin Dong-ha."
By last year's numbers, a catcher hovering around .250 with no standout virtue at the plate.
His OBP was nothing special relative to his average, sitting roughly at league norms.
His wRC+ bobbed up and down around 100. Truly, magnificently ordinary hitting.
His defense was average; his caught-stealing rate ranked tenth among all catchers, a touch over thirty percent.
But the granular numbers — particularly his passed balls and wild pitches at around 0.4 per nine innings by the Passed/9 measure — marked him as a defensively solid, dependable backup catcher.
"He's not going to get much use on our roster anyway... and it seems our counterpart is in quite the hurry."
Indeed, the Marines on the other side were in a situation where aging and injuries had piled up on their catchers, and they needed one immediately.
Even if they'd drafted a college catcher, the best he could offer was backup duty.
"Might as well strip-mine them for all they're worth. At this level, anyway."
It had to be assumed the trade was proposed with the rip-off fully factored in from the start.
"The pitcher we can acquire is Kim Jin-hong. Of course, we'll have to throw in a few second-team players, or our third-string center fielder."
What the Marines had resigned themselves to paying through the nose for was the departure of the de facto bullpen ace — the pitcher who, among all those who'd thrown fifty innings for the team last year, had allowed the fewest inherited runners to score.
"A fair price to pay."
A proposal befitting a team whose bullpen depth was genuinely luxurious while literally everything else lay in ruins.
There had been players traded just before spring camp before — but players traded in the middle of spring camp, this was probably a first.
"Whatever. The camps are right next door anyway."
Caring nothing for the feelings of players being shipped to a destination less than five minutes away by car — that was simply baseline conduct for a front office.
Baseball, these days, was a cold and colder business.
On the first day of spring camp, the trade was announced.
This was the secret winter maneuvering season, waged in the shadows for the sake of a championship.
The opening of the Stove League.
"Good to meet you all. Kim Jin-hong here."
Two players had suddenly unpacked their bags, packed them right back up, and walked out of camp — and now a man none of them had ever laid eyes on walked in.
"...A trade?"
In-seong had no idea how you bought and sold players mid-camp, but then again, in the minors they say you can get sold to the opposing team right after a game, so who was he to judge.
"I was playing for the Marines. Now I'll be playing with you fine gentlemen."
Both the one leaving and the one arriving wore beaming faces, entirely without regret, as they abandoned each other's nests.
Then again, one had been buried behind an immovable-object starting catcher with no opportunities in sight, while the other had never even glimpsed fall baseball and was now joining a playoff-caliber team — a win-win, right? Hm?
"Wait. Then we don't have a backup catcher? That bastard was our third catcher, wasn't he?"
Well, someone would come up from the minors... no, actually, that wouldn't work either, would it.
"...Don't tell me. Whoa. Damn it. This team is finished."
"Uh... u-uh... uhhh... uhhh..."
Oh for god's sake. This gibbering little brat is our backup catcher now. I'm losing my mind.
He'd have to walk back his earlier claim that a rookie catcher as the second-string backstop meant the team was wobbling.
The team was experiencing a full-blown earthquake. Ah, Father — I didn't cause the accident. The front office did.
The Busan Marines had truly, desperately needed a catcher.
Not out of some rosy "we simply want a catcher with league-average hitting numbers!" sentiment — the numbers told a grimmer story.
A passed-ball rate of 0.7, and blocking so bad that the two catchers currently rotating behind the plate were both objects of universal loathing.
"Damn it, get certified already! Stop practicing blocking pitches and start blocking the holes in your own lives!"
In this situation, could a starting pitcher even dream of throwing his breaking stuff with confidence?
The reason Busan's bullpen numbers outshone their rotation's was simple:
"...Sometimes the ball does get away, but, heh. They still catch it. Mostly."
Because a self-proclaimed catcher who couldn't hold onto a fastball had no business existing in professional baseball.
"...Yeah, we got played like fools, but how many teams out there actually had a catcher to spare?"
In the eyes of the experts, this trade — however steep the price — was a necessary one.
"What are you doing, you absolute lunatics?! You're giving up your future closer to receive a backup catcher and a backup center fielder?!"
The problem was that the fans' perception very often ran in a completely different direction from the satisfied front office.
Fans, by their nature, demand the club run at a loss and field a powerhouse every year, lose none of their own players, and steal everyone else's.
Naturally, the moment the trade broke, the comment section of the Marines' homepage was detonating.
"Sheesh, same circus, different day. Am I the general manager here, or a paid shill massaging the comment section?"
While the front office wrung its hands and deployed an army of sock puppets to fracture public opinion and rehabilitate the club's image, something far more horrifying than an exploding comment section was unfolding in the Marines' intrasquad game.
"Strike!"
"...Is this right? The ball feels incredibly slow."
Pitch one: 130 km/h, four-seam fastball, called a strike up and to the right — according to the Rapsodo data.
It was an intrasquad game, after all. Any problem could simply be corrected on the spot.
But the faces of the data-analysis team recording pitch types off the Rapsodo were rotting by the minute.
"...Hey. Something's wrong. Pull that kid and get him a medical workup."
Jang In-ho, their proud first-round pick this year — winter or no winter, his velocity wasn't just down. It was way down.
He was a true-blue rookie, so the plan had been to let him start the intrasquad game and throw an inning or two — but it got to the point where the staff genuinely wondered if that was wise.
After facing just one batter, he was swapped out, pulled quickly, and sent straight off for examination.
Naturally, the coaches and manager went to full alert.
Endless questioning from the coaching staff, plus X-rays taken at a nearby hospital.
And at last, the Marines learned the truth.
"It's dead arm."
A torn joint labrum. A SLAP lesion. It had occurred in Jang In-ho's body.
Jang In-ho, who had started every game through all of high school, whose bread and butter was a steady 150 km/h fastball.
The moment they realized that their first-round pick — the reliably durable starter they'd carried home after passing on the biggest fish in the draft — could never again recover his draft-day velocity without surgery,
"...It's over."
the Busan Marines carved their own names, once again, into the annals of all-time draft disasters.
And the colossal fish they had let slip — the man whose character was such that merely hearing the news would send him ordering a delivery of yukgaejang to devour on his personal broadcast on the spot — at that very exact moment,
"AAAGH! AAAAAGH!!"
Thwack! Thwack-thwack!
was demonstrating, in the Seoul Doubles' intrasquad game, precisely why the Busan Marines had passed on him in the draft.
"You dare, on this venerable elder's mound?"
"I TAPPED! I tapped out! TAP!!"
With a Scorpion Death Lock clamped onto a hired mercenary batter atop the mound,
Noh In-seong, having completely ignored his opponent's frantic tap-signals of surrender,
was single-handedly instigating a bench-clearing brawl — against his own teammates.