Paralysis and Fury
"If the Superstars keep going like this, their season might as well already be over."
"...Already? The All-Star break hasn't even come around yet?"
Even in this era, flooded as it is with online channels that treat baseball like a casual afterthought, there will always be half-experts — and outright lunatics who love the game so much they've sucked it down to the marrow. And naturally, the fastest way for such people to make money is the internet platform. Two such men ran one of the more forward-thinking channels out there, Yagurix, and today, as always, they were at each other's throats.
"No, forget the cash flow and the front-office mess. Just look at the standings. They're dead last right now."
It was a pride-driven brawl between two idiots, Yoo Jin-woo and Mook Jeong-ho.
"Come on, half the league plays in domes now, right? Both Jamsil teams, plus Incheon."
Granted, that count included a certain moronic team that briefly lost its dome after botching a drone show — and milking that disaster for a whole episode arguing over whether the fully sealed design was cured, or whether ventilation was the real priority.
"Heh heh. For teams whining that the dome feels stuffy, they've switched to a material that opens and shuts like a window."
"Yeah... that episode pulled in sweet, sweet numbers... anyway, that's not the point."
Before domed stadiums existed, baseball simply stopped dead whenever it rained. It was the miracle monsoon season: fans whose team was winning prayed desperately for rain in the fifth inning, and fans whose team was losing prayed desperately for rain before it. Teams with shaky rotations resorted to the one-two punch and held rain dances, begging the heavens for three straight days of downpour. Things got so bad that somewhere around 1950, someone actually wrote a poem pleading, 'After my number one and number two starters, kindly rain for two days straight.'
But then the era of 'well, it rains, so let's just put a lid on the ballpark' arrived.
"And ever since then, whenever a certain man who's gone completely dome-crazy does commentary, he just has to shout 'DOME STADIUM'..."
"Hey, quiet. That guy made it all the way to league commissioner, remember."
As the pair's nonsense echoed through the studio, Yoo Jin-woo finally got to what he'd actually wanted to say.
"Anyway — four teams call a dome home? So rain delays and makeups land on the provincial teams' schedules. Almost all of them."
"And the Superstars have already played more games than anyone, which means fewer ways left to climb the standings?"
"Exactly. And if they hate that, well — with the season's halfway mark creeping up, they should've been winning by now."
The first game of next weekend's series would be Game 72. The exact halfway point of 144. A grasshopper can afford to die when winter comes, but a baseball team is all ants. A team that failed to store away the grain called victory cannot find the means to save itself.
"Honestly, in the old days everyone would've given them a year to figure it out. Not anymore."
If they wanted to calm public opinion down to the point where fans would tolerate what came next, they needed three things, minimum.
"The obvious one — win enough to play baseball in October."
"Stop the player drain entirely — better yet, raid the second draft or the aging-veteran pool and rebuild the roster's whole constitution."
"And the last one is..."
"...Did those bastards eat something bad today? Why are they so vicious?"
Ever since the third game in Incheon, he'd come out as a pinch hitter over the shutout dispute, then fallen sick and watched his condition collapse. But he'd felt fine the very next day — recovery complete, or so he'd thought. Apparently not?
"What are you staring blankly at? Everyone has days like that."
Jo In-soo wandered over and offered the words.
"What do you mean, 'days like that'? What kind of day is it when the entire lineup charges like they've all swallowed something wrong and runs for its life?"
Eyes blazing, fouling off pitches by any means necessary, sprinting down the line for their lives on any contact. And that opposing catcher over there — the one who ran as if he were carrying a pole instead of legs — had apparently decided today was his day.
"You're going to bury another curveball, aren't you? Painfully obvious."
When Noh In-seong needled him as usual, angling for even the smallest hitting hint, the man flinched — but then—
"Form is not other than emptiness... emptiness is not other than form... form is precisely emptiness..."
"...Wow, this is genuinely driving me insane. Thanks to these bastards, I'm about to ascend to nirvana myself."
Eyes screwed shut, chanting sutras, refusing to surrender a single hint to Noh In-seong. Was stupidity contagious? Or did it simply take a madman to handle a madman?
The sudden burst of insanity was, frankly, bewildering to Noh In-seong. He ended up grounding out to second base and trudging back to the dugout, shoulders slumped.
As he stood there fuming, preparing to head back out to the mound, Jo In-soo handed him a dose of reality.
"How many straight games you think they've lost to us?"
"Uh... three in a row the first series, three in a row after that, and they lost yesterday, so... seven?"
Counting off the losses on his fingers, Noh In-seong finally grasped the gravity of the situation.
"Hold on. So from their perspective..."
"We're the kill-on-sight devils of the century."
Noh In-seong had been marked by an entire franchise's first-team roster.
Of course, Noh In-seong was never the sort of man to be frightened by hearing that.
"Swing — strikeout!"
"AAAAGH!! FUCK!!"
The batter who smashed his own bat to splinters in rage proved it for him.
The next batter battled through seven pitches before being put down on a four-seamer that caught the heart of the plate at 164 km/h. Through five innings, Noh In-seong had kept the shutout intact, declaring loud and clear: So what if you all marked me — what are you going to do about it?
"...Fine, the goose egg looks great. But take a look at your own condition."
Manager Jung Im-taek attempted communication via the universal male language of 'you doing okay?'
"...Agh, please don't make me talk. This is exhausting as hell."
Today's starting pitcher had no spare stamina left for interpreting pleasantries. Noh In-seong draped a towel soaked in cold water over his head and flopped across the bench to recover — because the cost of deleting five innings had turned out to be steep.
Ninety pitches. Eight strikeouts. To an outside observer, a perfectly respectable start. But—
"He's facing a mountain of pitches every at-bat, he has to sprint on every foul ball, and the dead time between innings drags on forever."
Noh In-seong was a player who, as a starter, needed to pitch considerably more efficiently than this.
"Hey, In-seong. Time to head to the on-deck circle."
"Oh, goddammit...!"
He flung the wet towel onto the bench and hurriedly grabbed his helmet and bat.
"Ngh...!!"
No matter how hard he worked as a pitcher, if luck was against him he had to step straight into the batter's box. The rest intervals shrank to nothing. The two-way player's fatal flaws — combined with opponents who were unusually tenacious and carrying a full ledger of grudges — descended on Noh In-seong all at once.
Out of that grueling at-bat, Noh In-seong managed to punch out an RBI double. He'd perfectly fulfilled his personal conditions for a win — did my job again today — and in the very moment he was basking in it, those win conditions performed the miracle of flipping him the bird and vanishing into thin air.
First, burning eight pitches just to retire the leadoff hitter loomed large. Hector — the man whose nasal bone Noh In-seong had fractured in the bench-clearing brawl — had returned and dug in with infuriating stubbornness. From there, his gradually fading arm strength conspired to keep the ball from going where he intended.
A walk. Then a mistake pitch over the heart of the plate that turned into a single past a charging third baseman. He was truly fortunate to retire the next batter on an infield fly.
CRACK---!!
The finisher: Noh In-seong's 120th pitch of the night, a 160 km/h two-seamer that caught the middle of the plate — and the moment it met a wooden bat, the recoil sent it soaring out of the stadium.
The Superstars' new third baseman. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the very bench-clearing brawl Noh In-seong had ignited. And he had now succeeded in repaying the kindness of the man who'd dragged him from the minors to the first team — by returning it as a mortal enemy would.
"...In-seong. What's it going to be? Coming out?"
The catcher, the manager, and the coach had all converged on the mound, asking whether he intended to come down or not.
"Come out? We're finishing this. Those bastards are only batting eighth anyway."
Astonishingly, it wasn't his arm, or his shoulder — his command was failing purely because he was flat-out out of gas. He'd been certain his stamina had fully recovered. Apparently not even close.
"You think I'm going to let even that sutra-chanting lunatic get a hit off me?"
Noh In-seong waved everyone off the mound.
"Swing and a strike! Out!"
That sutra-chanting lunatic, Kim Soo-ho, shattering yet another bat today was, at the very least, a small consolation for Noh In-seong.
Six innings, three earned runs. The worst pitching line Noh In-seong had ever walked off the mound with since he'd begun pitching.
"Tch. My mouth tastes bitter. In-soo hyung — can I ask you one favor?"
"...Sure. What is it?"
Noh In-seong asked Jo In-soo for something, then slipped away to shower.
It was the first moment, since the day he was reborn, that he had ever come down off the mound in a losing position.
Their first win after a seven-game skid. A victory over the man who'd mocked them every single time.
And now, on top of a mountain of wounds salt-and-sugared in equal measure, that same monster had handed them the season's first loss dealt to him as a starter?
Naturally, the fans briefly set their rage aside and went back to cheering for their players. Whether it was the sight of a team clinging on tooth and nail, fighting with everything it had just to win — or simply the moderate fans who hadn't yet surrendered their hope — they roared their approval at seeing their club show a different face.
Just as Yoo Jin-woo had put it:
"And the last thing? They're fighting the team fans hate most in the league right now, aren't they? They have to beat them."
"And the opponent's hunger is written all over their faces. 'I can't stand watching you hotshots have it this good.'"
—Isn't that exactly what the fans want?
A certain motivation. A desperate situation. And a heaping gift of red pepper powder for the man they couldn't stand.
3–2. A razor-thin victory by a single run.
The Superstars. The cornered rats had succeeded in giving the cat's face a brutal working-over.
"Where'd that bastard Noh In-seong go?"
"He finally lost one. Bet he's sulking somewhere today."
"Let's find him and needle him just right — milk some material out of him."
The reporters came swarming into the stadium as the game wound down.
Say it with me: the winner takes everything, and the loser loses everything. It's a game — whether baseball or life, there's hardly any real difference.
Noh In-seong's first loss was the juiciest prey those reporters had ever been offered. How would the lawless mad dog — the shameless, do-as-he-pleased git who'd never once bowed to anyone — react to the first defeat of his professional career? Unbearable dopamine was already coursing through the press corps' brains.
"...Then why isn't he coming out?"
"Right? Aren't all the players out by now?"
While every other player slowly made his way to his own car or the waiting team bus, Noh In-seong was nowhere to be seen. Only after night had fully settled, past eight o'clock — only after his SNS post went up — did anyone realize he'd handed his bag to Jo In-soo and slipped out by subway.
Even in defeat, Noh In-seong never forgot to screw the press. A loser, too, has his own spoils to walk away with.
Despairing over the day's loss? Never. He'd screwed the reporters instead — and in doing so, kept his career winning percentage pinned at a neat 50%.
"ARGH! All that time wasted because of that son of a bitch..!!"
"Hello? Ah, yes, Editor-in-Chief. Yes. I got out to the scene first and... I'm sorry? What do you mean we couldn't find him?"
"...Agh. I'm exhausted..."
Noh In-seong had successfully converted the time of roughly thirty-some people into hours of utterly wasted waiting.