A Profanity Machine in a Human Suit
A man who had whipped internet debate boards into a feeding frenzy with one controversy after another — and with results that outshone even those controversies.
For Noh In-seong, resting on a day off meant keeping movement to a minimum and quietly focusing on physical recovery.
Honestly, the energy a single baseball game burns is on the low end compared to most sports. But baseball is a sport like life itself. To put it vulgarly: a sport you have to play the long fucking game with. The season is long, there's more baseball waiting in the fall, and exhibition games even before the season starts. No single game is all that punishing — it's the accumulated fatigue that kills you.
And on top of that, you're young, so you'll drink until dawn and cover the damage with talent? These days, anyone living like that gets easily overtaken by the kids who skip the booze, sleep early, and actually take care of their bodies. Unless your talent belongs to a different tax bracket entirely, that is — and if it does, you'd be off climbing a much higher mountain anyway.
This was bedrock common sense, handed down from the days when Noh In-seong was still Jung In-seong.
So on that Monday of rest — the official holiday of every baseball player — Noh In-seong was shuffling through his neighborhood, grumbling under his breath. He'd briefly considered going to watch Song Jin-wook get dragged out that morning, teary-eyed, to swing a bat. But having pulled off a "miracle morning" before lunch, he'd been saddled with an errand he hadn't run even back in his school days.
"Yep, sure. In-seong, run to the mart up the street and grab the stuff for soup."
"Ugh. Why am I the one buying this? Just order drone delivery..."
Noh In-seong cursed his mother for refusing the blessings of modern civilization — but from her side of the table, a son with free delivery beat a 3,000-won drone fee every time.
He trudged down the alley, and the moment the mart came into view, people began to cluster around him.
"...No, seriously, shit. Now what."
Right after the draft, only the neighbors who knew him could pick Noh In-seong out of a crowd. By the time this season started, he was reasonably recognizable — recognizable enough that even little kids three blocks over knew his face. And at some point, it crossed a line: he couldn't so much as walk around in a sweat-wicking tee, shorts, and slippers without hearing—
"Whoa! It's the guy from those Shorts!"
"It's the God of Rotten Personality! Sign it, please!"
"Did you seriously tear up your replica jersey? For real?"
"Can you really never go back on those debate shows? When I showed my mom, she said quit watching garbage like that!"
Crowds had begun to gather around the man who had become his neighborhood's biggest celebrity. Mostly people wanting autographs, gawking kids, and fans in full team jerseys.
"...Hahh. Fine. At least nobody showed up in that revolting uniform."
He let out a long sigh and began arranging the crowd into a line — the motions coming almost naturally now. This was the moment Noh In-seong truly grasped the scale of his own fame.
He ducked into a stationery shop, bought a marker, and signed away for the mob. Only once his shoulder had started to ache did he finally wrap up, grab the soup ingredients, and drag himself home.
"In-seong, who on earth takes forty-five minutes to run one simple errand? Where did you wander off to this time?"
His mother, discovering the soup pot had somehow become a stew pot, came marching over with a spoon in hand, fury written across her face.
THWACK—!
"Ow! This is a smear campaign! It wasn't even my fault!"
After desperately talking his mother down, Noh In-seong resigned himself to just ordering damn near everything by drone from then on.
"Taking a single day off is a colossal pain in the ass..."
Was there really no way to move somewhere quieter? It was, for a fleeting moment, the first stir of an independent streak in Noh In-seong.
Popularity isn't a metric that applies only to people. Franchises need it too. Of course, there are cases where a single player ends up more famous than several whole teams combined.
"All-Star? A kids' tea party. National team? Don't wanna. Run your mouth at me and I'll bury you."
Famous in the other direction, that is. Infamy is still fame — recognition has never cared to distinguish between fans and haters.
So when Noh In-seong got ambushed by the Tree Frogs over the All-Star vote, the party taking the single biggest hit wasn't actually Noh In-seong. Sure, a team being forced to field a guy who had zero intention of showing up was a critical blow. But the far more serious damage was this: the very real possibility of a team that couldn't produce a single "All-Star-caliber player" to save its life.
"Isn't this an unprecedented crisis?"
"A situation where other managers can't even bring themselves to recommend anyone... this is bad. Really bad."
One team, in particular, existed in a state of profound performance-related emergency.
Two foreign players who couldn't reach the regulation plate appearances or innings because of injury. Starters cycling down to the minors and back up again, missing five, eight, sometimes more games to the aftereffects of one injury after another. A team whose performance graph had been in an unbroken nosedive since that day — this was the story of the Superstars.
Even if managers picked a few players out of pity, there was nobody healthy and contributing to pick. If not for Noh In-seong, at least the foreign players would have tasted an All-Star game — but one of them was still in rehab. Managers would have to resort to sympathy picks, scooping up rookies with excuses like "he's young, you can see the potential." And everyone knew exactly what that translated to: well, we sold off every real player and our results are garbage, so I suppose the kids can have the spots.
For the despairing Superstars faithful, there was exactly one flicker of hope for an "All-Star on merit." One man. Drafted four years ago, a year in the minors, called up during expanded rosters before shipping off to Sangmu. Back in November of last year, spending the winter through early this season focused entirely on rebuilding his body. Kang Ji-hoon.
And the timing could not have been better. After Noh In-seong shredded a third of their first-team roster, Kang Ji-hoon had come up out of the bullpen. A 2.91 ERA across twenty games with nine holds — he finally seemed to be igniting the potential everyone had whispered about.
"So that means they want to sell him, right?"
"That'd be my read? They're basically telling us to sweeten the pot."
"Those bastards run every negotiation the exact same way, don't they. Hey, we should dig in harder."
"Ah — we can't hand the Bears that guy too. Should we call them back?"
"I think you'll have to. We already got a second warning, so from the year after next..."
Of course, "his potential finally bloomed" is just another way of saying that potential had acquired cold, hard market value. While the salary caps of every championship contender burst at the seams, here was a team with half its books sitting empty. And so the Superstars were pushing through yet another trade.
Korean baseball selects its All-Stars through a scoring system combining the fan vote and a vote among the players themselves. Beyond that, each team's manager gets to pick. In other words, no matter how wretched a club is, no team ever shows up to the All-Star game with zero representatives. They simply get to hear things like: You picked THAT bastard? What about our guys? Is this a joke?
This year, for the first time, there was genuinely a team that either received no managerial picks at all, or got asked "why on earth did you pick him?" when they did.
So why not skip the merit-based managerial picks and go for a starting lineup slot instead? That was pure nonsense. Because that was a contest in a realm entirely separate from skill.
A team's "core" baseball fans are, to put it kindly, a group that is slightly — very — unwell. Take all baseball fans, distill down to a pinch, then distill that pinch down to another pinch, and there they are. They mostly manifest online; if someone is permanently camped on the baseball forums, odds are good they qualify. Because rather than spreading their attention across many things, these are people who pour their entire souls into one team.
To them, baseball is the most important thing in life after life itself — and simultaneously the most soul-crushing thing in it. Every day at 2, 5, or 6:30, a two-to-three-hour session of psychological torture begins. Staying sane is not easy. And yet the moment someone says, You love your team, don't you? Go cast your All-Star vote — where in God's name do they find that energy?
"Our team is the greatest! Nobody but ours deserves votes! FLOOD THE BALLOT BOX—!!"
"That bastard's character is rotten! That one's got no star quality! That bastard is... uh... wait, that's Noh In-seong?"
"Our team's slap hitter is worth more than their three-four-five! Your team's top bat is just a dinker!"
They rampage, shoving their team forward with everything they have — and this has been tradition for so long it's simply woven into daily life. In that spirit, All-Star voting season is the single most humiliating moment of the year for any club with a small roster and a small fanbase.
Changwon? Well, it's smaller than the next neighborhood over, but if the results hold up, the fans keep coming steadily. Gwangju? Just win, and that town votes like lunatics — they nearly pulled off a full ballot-stuffing campaign once, too. It's a town where the hardcore fans practically live in their own separate household, and there's even been a case of a certain someone misreading the room and catching a vicious backlash for it. Daejeon? The people there are even crazier than either of the above. It's less a city than holy ground, made of baseball and bread. The only mercy is that in their lean years they're comparatively quiet, so they take less abuse.
And then there's the Doubles — one of those big-market clubs that, whenever a rebuild clicks, occasionally devours nearly the entire All-Star selection. They've long sat on the opposite side of Seoul's divided fandom from the Bears, who command roughly half the capital's love, and the two camps have even occasionally joined hands to push each other's players.
So what about this year's Superstars — Seoul's designated losers, a club that sold off its entire roster to become bottom-feeders among bottom-feeders, with bottom-feeder results to match?
"Please, at least leave us Kang Ji-hoon... they've already stripped away every cornerstone. He's our last shred of pride...!!"
"You bastards, leave the team ONE All-Star pick... just one...!!"
"Front office scum, just TRY selling him...!!"
They were already dying of indignation over this season's wretched, gutter-crawling record. And now the club was selling off the one player who could actually be voted in on genuine merit?
Even the loyalists — the fans who had cheered in silence, holding out hope for someday — were declaring they couldn't take it anymore. The fury of the core fans, and of every fan watching the franchise's dark age unfold in real time, had finally detonated.
----Wooooooooo....!!!!
Seats that would normally sit at least partly empty had been filled to the rafters by fans brimming with rage. Before the game had even begun, the stadium was awash in boos, placards denouncing the front office, and protests thick with profanity and screaming. These people were wearing the home team's own jerseys — and cheering for them was the furthest thing from their minds.
"Let's go, Noh In-seong--!!"
"Throw a shutout today--!!"
The rage-filled crowd, funneling all its fury into power for that lunatic, bore down on the Superstars players like a physical weight. They were already hopelessly outmatched on talent — and now their spirits were cracking under the strain, too.
"Strike three! Batter out!"
Noh In-seong had dispatched the Superstars without breaking a sweat.
By the top of the eighth, the game had already blown wide open into something no one could realistically chase down. While every pitcher the Superstars sent to the mound got hammered into the dirt, the man at the center of the controversy finally finished loosening up and made his appearance.
Applauding their one and only remaining pride — that much, they granted him.
From that point on, for the rest of the game, the fans never once cheered for the Superstars.
Game one: the Superstars fell to the Doubles, 18–1.
The only pitcher who surrendered zero runs was Kang Ji-hoon.
Onto the Superstars — already scrambling just to stamp out public opinion, flaring up like a grease fire screaming hot, hot, HOT! — one player now began pouring a fresh can of gasoline.
"There's something fundamentally broken about the phrase 'the Superstars' Kang Ji-hoon.' The franchise is too small to be super. The kid hasn't shown enough to be a star. And tack an S on the front and it's meaningless anyway — they sold everyone else off, so he's all alone in there."
—Therefore, he should simply be called Kang Ji-hoon.
Just like that, Noh In-seong turned a player into a free agent.
"They're planning to sell you off anyway, right? So ditch the team name up front and just come out to the All-Star game as yourself."
—Wouldn't that be more fun?
Noh In-seong cackled, staring straight into the camera.
Where exactly are you planning to reinforce, huh? We can barely reinforce ourselves fast enough.
Though of course, buried somewhere in there, a separate agenda was quietly ticking along.