Midsummer Dog Days
"Rain outside, coming down hard! Rain outside, coming down hard!"
Noh In-seong, dressed in his pajamas, was dancing in the lobby, singing at the top of his lungs.
In truth, it wasn't just In-seong who was fired up. The entire Doubles roster was buzzing with excitement.
"Hell yes! What is this rain! The game's getting postponed!"
"This is awesome! Day off today! The rainfall's about the same as it was in Daejeon!"
Everyone had come back yesterday completely wrung out, their energy sapped by the brutal heat.
Half-dead from exhaustion, they'd showered again, downed plenty of fluids, and gone straight to sleep without doing a single thing.
The usual routine of ballplayers—eating a proper meal before bed—went right out the window. Sleep was all anyone had time for.
And no matter how many tools they had—cooling fans, ice packs—those were dugout luxuries.
The ground, radiating reflected geothermal heat and baking under a sky like an oven, was genuinely brutal.
When they woke up in the morning and checked the forecast promising clear skies, the whole team sank into despair.
It was going to be hot anyway, so they all lounged around in bed muttering that they'd prepare as late as humanly possible.
Shaaaaaa...!! Krrrmmm...!!
But at that blessed sound drifting in from the window, everyone scrambled up and sprinted over to pull back the curtains.
Maybe someone up in the heavens had accidentally fired a nail gun into the cloud-water reservoir—who knew.
What they saw was no ordinary drizzle but a proper downpour, with thunder rumbling overhead, and the players immediately went insane.
"It's raining! Lifegiving water is falling from the sky!"
"Rain dance forever! We prayed for this yesterday, we literally prayed!"
The madness at the team hotel finally wound down once the players hit the "so what do we do now?" stage and headed out to eat.
"I've got something to take care of. Enjoy your lunch, everyone."
"You're eating here? The rest of us were going out for spicy braised ribs."
Noh In-seong stayed behind, along with the foreign mercenary who hated spicy food and a few players who were simply too tired to move.
In-seong pressed the broadcast button on his phone.
Viewers had already been piling in for the past thirty minutes of standby. There was no need to wait for an audience.
"It really has been a while since I've turned this on. Good day to you all."
This was In-seong's personal stream, something he turned on when he had something to say or just wanted to mess around.
It was a day off anyway—time for a rare survival report—and he had things he wanted to say. Two birds, one stone.
Granted, the things he wanted to say were entirely useless things.
"I'd really appreciate it if you people would stop voting me into the All-Star Game, dear viewers."
The All-Star break was right around the corner. Two weeks out.
And like a kid who just wanted to lie around and do nothing over the holidays, he was being issued a mandatory participation ticket.
In-seong currently sat second in the fan vote. With 70% of the fan ballot already tallied, he was practically locked in as a starter.
He was certain he'd get almost nothing from the players' vote, so that hadn't worried him—but this was unexpected.
Noh In-seong had done his absolute best to be left out 'fairly and squarely.'
"An All-Star? Me? A violent, self-absorbed, fist-happy player with zero manners? Yikes."
Denial, seasoned with self-deprecation.
"I'm going out there and doing whatever I want! Are you people insane?! You absolute lunatics!"
An 'I play baseball' declaration laced with rage.
"Fine, let's negotiate. Negotiate. I'll show up, but I want to go as a reserve."
He'd even attempted to negotiate himself down to a bench slot.
"...Aargh, why did I even bother turning this on for you bastards. Everybody out!"
Skipping grief and acceptance entirely, he flipped right back to anger and killed the stream.
To be fair, this was a man with absolutely no connection to being on the receiving end of death. He was usually on the delivering side.
"Fine. Time to show them what a real clown looks like."
Having gotten a visceral sense of his own popularity, In-seong frantically began researching something.
After holing up in the hotel and getting properly rested, the Doubles squad came back the next day ready to die all over again.
Daegu's sky, which had poured rain all day, was now blindingly clear as if the whole thing had been a lie.
In other words, the alchemy had begun—the process by which puddles turned into humidity, and humidity into pure irritation.
"GAAAH...!! Daegu, what the hell is this humidity...!!"
"Ugh, it's clammy. Ugh, I don't want to walk. Ugh, I want the bus back..."
The faces of the Doubles players, stepping off the bus with their bags, were visibly crumpling in real time.
The humidity had been brutal in the last game already, but the day after rain? That was the final boss.
The temperature was lower than it had been two days ago, but the humidity was far higher, which meant the felt temperature was worse.
Everyone was at a full boil—a mood where a mere brush of shoulders could put the other man in the ground.
"Did you not know, son, that bunting against a shift is against the unwritten rules?"
Before the game, during a pregame interview, the opposing manager slapped Noh In-seong on the shoulder.
"Why the hell should I care about that? We don't even run infield shifts much."
--If it bothers you so much, maybe you should've drafted a shortstop with my range. Can't even scout properly.
And In-seong returned the favor with a response roughly equivalent to ripping the man's shoulder clean off.
Game three between the Doubles and the Lions had descended into Mount Displeasure before the first pitch was even thrown.
The thing was, what In-seong had said wasn't actually wrong.
Ever since the shift-ban rules came in, shifts had been steadily losing their place in the game.
It was similar to why infielders' defensive ability had come back into the spotlight.
"If the batter has no ability to hit to the opposite field, you can redeploy your fielders like casting a net."
In the old days, an extremely pull-heavy hitter faced with a shift lost an absurd amount of value unless he hit a home run.
It wasn't for nothing that the fly-ball revolution had happened.
Shifting against a slugger like In-seong was meant to shave even a sliver off his production.
[The shift is being deployed against Noh In-seong once again... Yes, that's right. He's squaring around to bunt.]
[The fielders are scrambling back from the shift to their original positions. And he pulls the bunt back!]
But against a menace like In-seong, it was a joy button—a way to put a stray dog through obedience training on a scorching day.
"Hahaha, you idiots! Keep running! Third base! Your feet are slow!"
"...Why you little—!"
Not once, not twice—he'd already done it four times in a single at-bat, carefully taking balls along the way.
On the double-sided frying pan of Daegu Baseball Stadium, 37 degrees actual, 41 degrees felt, cooking both sides evenly.
In-seong was savoring the exchange rate: his pain for the pain of nine opposing men.
"I suffer, but they suffer more! Hit me till I die!"
Finally, on the ninth pitch, In-seong grounded out weakly in front of the pitcher with the count at two and two.
"...Ah... that was genuinely exhausting..."
Whether pitcher or catcher or the infielders who'd been sprinting the whole time, everyone was now worse off, both mentally and physically.
"...What's wrong with these guys?"
Starting with Song Jin-wook, the next batter up, runs began pouring out one after another.
Craaaack---!!!
[High and deep---!! Off the wall! And it's GONE! A solo home run for Song Jin-wook--!!]
[Dustin with a double! The ball found the gap in the middle!]
[Jo In-soo takes a big cut---!!! Ah! The outfielder drops it!]
Errors, base hits, and even a home run. Not a single out recorded after In-seong—a full bat-around for the entire lineup.
"Wow. That cooling fan is seriously incredible. Feels way better already? Guess we're doing this again?"
And with the bases empty and one out, up came Noh In-seong.
The score had blown open to 8-0, but In-seong showed absolutely no mercy.
Once more the shift and the bunt traded places, and the stray-dog training show went on.
"GAAAAH...!! Just kill me instead...!!"
"Somebody throw a ball at that son of a bitch's head!"
Outfielders and infielders alike, everyone was reaching peak fury.
"I'm making you angry! I can control your emotions!"
The damned bastard found joy inside the misery, grinning even as sweat poured off him.
Noh In-seong curled the corners of his mouth upward.
"...Damn it!"
It began with Song Ji-young slamming his mitt down on the bench,
and from there, the furious Daegu players kept venting their rage one after another.
After In-seong had run his training regimen all the way to four balls in his second at-bat, the Daegu manager finally abandoned the shift.
In-seong went down on a fly ball afterward, but all that remained behind was wounded pride and spent legs.
"...I'm sorry. This is my fault. That man is not ordinarily insane."
He apologized in front of the whole team, so sincere about it that the players forgave their manager.
But their stamina was drained to the dregs and only venom remained, and that fury pointed itself at Noh In-seong.
...It should have, anyway. Then someone poked a hole in that rage-filled balloon.
"Everyone, stand down. If anything happens to that lunatic, our fall baseball goes up in smoke."
The team's veteran, third baseman Jong Min-soo, held them all back.
Ordinarily this was a man who manufactured conflicts with other teams more often than anyone.
But he evidently knew how to be serious when the moment demanded it, and he shut everyone down with firm resolve.
"I have a way."
Min-soo laid out for the team a method to, at the very least, ruin that damned Noh In-seong's mood.
"That guy is, at his core, an attention addict. Just like me."
Coming from a man famous for hitting home runs and then spinning the bat like a helicopter, and for all manner of other antics, the argument had real weight.
"Ignore him. For a guy like that, withholding attention is the fundamentally effective strategy."
"...Min-soo hyung, that's your life story, isn't it?"
"...Shut it, punk."
Having quietly confessed the very thing he hated most to endure, Min-soo won them over.
'...Besides, if things got any uglier and I got punched, my overseas posting next year goes straight out the window, so.'
Either way, the mood-ruining strategy wasn't a lie.
Feeling that the triangle of his conscience was still quite sharp, Jong Min-soo leaned back deep into his chair.
Hoping to recover even a fraction of the stamina he'd burned today, he let his whole body go slack.
If they wanted to reach fall baseball, they still had a long, long road ahead.
After that, In-seong kept chipping away at Daegu with steady, patient persistence.
Asking the catcher all manner of pleasantries, or legging out a stolen base right after reaching base for the first time on a walk.
[Ah, they're not even attempting a throw. That's defensive indifference, right?]
"...Is this real life? They're erasing me from the game entirely?"
The atmosphere had abruptly switched from a sports drama to a production starring an invisible man, and In-seong panicked.
He tried stealing third once more, but waiting there to greet him wasn't his fellow attention addict, Jong Min-soo.
"......"
"What's with this guy? Hey! Where's Jong Min-soo?!"
Instead, his draft classmate—the man he'd surely exchanged faces with at the draft—greeted him with silence.
Whether In-seong actually remembered that face was another matter entirely.
"...No way. Did they order you not to say a single word to me?"
In-seong, demanding a response, was met with silence—silence is golden, and for you it's also medicine.
It was a fine play by Min-soo, who'd assumed that if he were out there, he'd be joining in the trash talk himself.
If you're going to take poison, lick the plate clean too. As the proverb from the country next door goes.
"Don't... don't give him the attention."
Jong Min-soo's radical strategy worked on Noh In-seong.
Stacked on top of a game already out of reach, with the opposition pulling its key players to give rookies some experience,
In-seong went hitless in four at-bats.
He had proven, once again, just how colossal an effect one's mood has on hitting.
After the game, a thoroughly enraged Noh In-seong called a press interview.
Being ignored, it turned out, got under his skin far more than he'd expected.
But running straight to the reporters to whine about it?
That would be laying his whole hand on the table—amateur hour.
"The temperature in Daegu has exceeded acceptable limits, and the club is doing nothing about it."
In-seong found a different point of attack.
"Going forward, I believe teams with open-air stadiums should implement the 'Temperature Control Act.'"
A set of regulations governing game operations based on readings from stadium temperature-measuring equipment.
Temperature Control Regulations, for short. The On-Tong Act.
"When players' bodies break down from the heat, that ultimately becomes a loss for the entire league."
"...So this isn't just you throwing a tantrum because Daegu's stadium is hot?"
The reporter tossed the ball right back at him with a look that said, what kind of nonsense is this.
The fact landed square in his chest—but In-seong finished his statement with maximum shamelessness.
"I'm hardly the only one who'd benefit, am I? Players of the league! Pass the Temperature Control Act! We're counting on you!"
Demanding this only after he himself had suffered made it blatantly obvious he was gunning at rival clubs,
but the intentions were so noble, the players had no choice but to take it up.
For the Daegu Lions, who'd already licked the poison plate clean, a whole basin of poison came back for a refill.
"Now then. You'll pay attention to this, won't you?"
An attention addict dies without attention, but a lunatic begs for it until you cave and give it.
It was Jong Min-soo's defeat—a failure to grasp that crucial difference.