9. Spring Camp (4) — I Don't Listen to Anyone Weaker Than Me
Professional baseball fans in Daejeon were, on the whole, a gentle breed.
Which was, of course, thanks to a history of getting crushed season after season far more often than they ever got to celebrate.
These days, hardly anything anyone said could rattle them anymore. They'd been tempered by suffering. Most insults just rolled right off.
"AAAGH! You absolute lunatic...!!"
The fans of a team that only sniffed the postseason once a decade, when an entire generation of players turned over at once, were intimately familiar with defeat...
Ah — though admittedly, that only applied when they couldn't find anyone to scream at in a normal interview. Anyway.
Right now, the Seoul Doubles' official fan forum, which had been perfectly healthy until yesterday, was crawling with an army of terrorists determined to recreate the club's signature fireworks display.
"UWAAAAH! No, not this!"
Server overloads, spam floods, reflux-inducing posts, memes of every conceivable deviancy — it all came crashing down on the board's servers like Asgard's IP address had personally declared war.
The youngest staffer managing the board had to pull overtime, again, to clean up the carnage.
This was already the second major incident in as many seasons, on top of last year's disaster.
"ARGH! Noh In-seong, that goddamn rookie piece of—!!"
Ever since Noh In-seong had stood in front of the Grizzlies and called them a gout-ridden, alcoholic sorry excuse for a team that can't even make the fall classic, some poor junior employee once again collected his sad overtime pay and wept.
Ordinarily, since the Daejeon Phoenix were classed as a weak team anyway, most of their fans didn't get particularly worked up when someone pointed out the obvious.
But every so often, a team like that produces a mutant — an ace — and those few players are raised on an outsized portion of the fans' love.
You Hong-jin. Third-year pro. A 2.98 ERA last season — second in the league, fourth in strikeouts. The super-ace of a losing ballclub was the textbook case.
As his miserable 6-14 record made plain, he'd racked up loss after loss while performing brilliantly, an ace who suffered enormously for it.
If something smells like the early 2010s, it probably is.
"Big frame, big name. Poor bastard, honestly."
Well, a Ryu was a Ryu no matter how you threw it — maybe fate had a sense of humor? Noh In-seong scratched his ear.
His opposing team's ace, insulted to his face by some rookie he'd never even heard of — well, okay, the rookie was famous, but still.
"A full THREE YEARS since You Hong-jin's debut... and all the hardships we've endured in that time...!!"
The Daejeon fans began gritting their teeth and preserving the insolence of Noh In-seong for posterity across the internet, freeze-drying his choicest quotes like museum specimens.
Obviously he had never actually said it in those words — but compared to the respect-dripping responses other players gave, it was the difference between heaven and earth.
It's human nature to mount a defensive response whenever someone pokes at the things you love.
Whether or not the social media hate flooded in, the milk was already spilled.
As Noh In-seong's public assessment rapidly congealed into an arrogant little punk who wouldn't know a senior if one bit him, the fabricated quote above made its rounds online, smearing his image even among the polite, mild-mannered fans.
Club staff came knocking on his hotel room door to ask what on earth he was thinking.
They waffled over whether to rage about what possible mindset produces an interview like that, then left in a huff without deciding.
Bombarded with questions from every direction while trying to prepare for the next game, Noh In-seong absorbed a fair amount of stress.
"Why the hell would I care what some other team's fans think? That's just nonsense floating around in empty air."
--I didn't even lie, and I didn't even swear. What's everyone's problem? Way overkill, guys.
While mentally carving another entry into his ledger of grudges — next time I run into the Daejeon bunch, this won't end here — he kept grumbling.
"Weirdly busy day today. What is it with everyone, so desperate to eat me alive?... Huh?"
It was then that Noh In-seong noticed his roommate staring at him with the eyes of a man observing a lunatic.
"You are genuinely insane."
Don't look at me with those eyes, Lim Jae-min. I only spoke the truth.
"What did I even do? Hmm, shall I do my very best to relieve some stress right now?"
Crrrick... pop pop pop...
Cracking his knuckles one by one, Noh In-seong slowly rose up on the bed toward Jae-min and clenched his fist.
"...No! That's not — you're supposed to wrap it up nicer! Soften it! Make it pretty, you maniac!"
Terrified that the stray sparks from that fist might land on him, Lim Jae-min scrambled into desperate self-defense.
"Oh, so you want me to paper over it with a lie instead? Then why give the interview at all?"
He could say less, perhaps. But no one was going to censor how he expressed himself.
Noh In-seong, who fully intended to live this life without ever reading the room again, flopped comfortably back onto the bed, preparations for battle complete.
'Haah, goddammit. What am I even supposed to say to him...' Lim Jae-min heaved the laundry basket up onto his hip and shuffled out of the room.
Watching him head off to the coin laundry, something occurred to Noh In-seong.
"Hey! Wash mine too! I'll pay you!"
He leapt up in a panicked attempt to dump his chores on someone else —
"Yeah, no. Get lost. You smell."
His draft classmate would've been happy to run it all in one convenient load, but no — he'd hit the pause button with zero intention of folding anyone else's clothes. He was raising the barrier, not lowering it.
"Agh, this guy. No interest in bonding with his own draft class, but overflowing with motivation to keep himself squeaky clean!"
Deeply, tragically moved by this display, Noh In-seong lay back down on the bed and sank into a sorrowful sleep.
Painful but rewarding training carried on, day after day. Time flew by.
Apart from the organization handling him like an unexploded bomb, he seemed to have carved out a reasonable little niche for himself on the team.
As he should. If anyone felt wronged, all they had to do was throw scoreless innings and launch home runs every time they took the field — and swear at a few people while they were at it.
"...Since when were Koreans such a combative people?"
"...No, it's just that one guy. Only him."
Ever since the Great Manners-Training Incident, Dustin had occasionally grabbed meals with him and Lim Jae-min.
As it turned out, despite his looks and his monstrous frame, this man harbored a hobby of almost painful adorableness.
"...There we go. This is Seattle. This is Texas. And this one here — what is it? South America?"
He ran his own personal website, traveling the world in search of great bakeries, eating his way through them and posting ratings.
Huh. Was I profiling him? Honestly, though —
For a 190-centimeter, 120-plus-kilogram slab of muscle who looked like he should be eating meat for all three meals —
this guy was also, surprisingly, a perfect match for the team's starting catcher, Jo In-soo.
There were even rumors that on last year's road trip to Daejeon, the two of them had visited the famous bakery and burned through twenty dollars' worth of goods in a single sitting.
"...It was three hundred dollars."
Absolute bread goblins. They definitely demolished all of it on the spot.
Noh In-seong shook his head slowly.
And so it was that the two catchers, Dustin, and one more man besides —
a young pitcher among the foreign players — joined Dustin's grand Okinawa bakery pilgrimage.
"Ooh, hi. Rin-seong."
...Setting aside the butchering of his name, this one seemed like a genuinely nice guy.
"...In. It's IN-seong."
Andrew "Andy" Cage. Twenty-seven years old this year.
"Put the what where... ah. The pronunciation?"
Fourth-generation Irish immigrant vibes radiated off him in spades. A man who'd come over from Triple-A for a brief stint to earn a living.
The team's de facto second starter had shown up to eat bread, purely out of a desire to bond with Noh In-seong.
All manner of stories wove themselves between the bread, the coffee, and the Irish coffee.
"...Hold on. Are we allowed to drink during camp?"
"Haha, it's one shot. Settle down."
A rare moment of genuine warmth blossomed among the five of them.
"My bonus is pretty much gone at this point. Can't keep up the lifestyle back home anymore."
"Hmm, I burned through mine around then too. They actually feed you decently over here these days, so groceries weren't the issue, surprisingly."
Look at these two, swapping insider stories. The tear-soaked white bread of the minor leagues — a delicacy I've never tasted... wait. Huh?
"...Triple-A pay is pretty decent though, isn't it? It's not the nineties. It's not even Double-A."
Now that he thought about it, something was off. Didn't that league pay well? It wasn't like Double-A, where all they gave you was peanut butter mixed with grape jelly.
"Some guys down there end up out-earning us, don't they? What's different?"
--Oh. Right. That was when I was living as Jung In-seong. Did everything just get stingier across the board somehow?
At Noh In-seong's question, both Americans smiled bitterly.
"Have you ever read an article about American health insurance, In-seong?"
It was a single question from Andy, crystal clear as day, that summarized the entire situation better than any speech could have.
"Ah, of course. America's seven deadly sins are so famous people drop dead on the sidewalk."
After two more died on that very street, someone finally deployed a Security Drone overhead to guard the survivors. Or something like that.
"My mother is sick. And the cost... well, on a Triple-A salary alone, it doesn't cover it."
With no way out, the fastest route to getting his mother treated was to leave the country.
"To get proper insurance, I either had to reach the majors for even a single day, or come to Korea as a foreign player and lean on the medical support here."
Somewhere along the way, the Doubles — the club that promised the biggest financial package — won his signature.
"So I've got to pitch well, and hold on at least until the surgery's done and her recovery is finished, and I can take her home."
--The second shot at the majors comes after that.
Andy's face turned grave. He swore he would see that goal through and clenched his fist —
SPLAT!
"Oh, shit..."
Cream went flying in every direction as the crème brûlée donut detonated into fragments.
Aww, what a waste. That thing cost 240 yen.
"Me... it wasn't insurance in my case. I came because I've got a family to support."
Andy frowned; Dustin smiled wryly. Well, fair enough — if Dustin had been bouncing up and down from the majors, he'd have coverage.
"My kid's growing up. School's coming soon... and college prep takes a serious pile of cash, one way or another."
The play was obvious: dominate here, then angle for a direct call-up back to the majors.
"I'm going to throw my heart out so this team can win it all this year — and then leave for the majors in style."
Dustin lifted the corners of his mouth so high it was hard to watch, and managed something approximating a smile.
Both of them would be fine. Men with that kind of desperation behind their eyes always found a way.
'...Hmm. If those two alone hold up, we might actually make the postseason for real this year.'
Noh In-seong smiled at the feeling radiating off his teammates.
That same feeling his past self had chased so desperately, failing again and again until he could bear to look at it no longer.
Desperation.
While the players lounged around a famous bakery in northern Okinawa, idly chatting over bread and coffee, the coaching staff's heads were throbbing.
"Agh. First time in my life I've seen a roster Swiss-cheesed like this."
First, the starting rotation: five men, roughly mirroring last year.
Caleb James — the left-handed foreign ace who'd anchored last year's rotation with steady innings — slotted in as the number one starter.
Behind him, the number two: Andy.
And following the man who lived on a steady diet of modified fastballs came —
a chameleon who could throw everything: slider, curve, changeup, sinker, even a splinker.
"Up to here, it's... actually great."
Beyond that? Nothing was settled.
The Doubles were in the grip of an unprecedented pitching shortage.
If even one more pitcher had left the roster last year, they'd have been resorting to bullpen days jammed into the four-man rotation by spring. That was how close it had been.
What if the two brothers — Jeong In-woo and Jeong In-young — hadn't developed? ...Purely hypothetical, but the thought still blacked out manager Jung Im-taek's vision.
Jeong In-woo had logged experience as the fourth starter last year, so a simple rotation shuffle would do.
Jeong In-young had worked as a swingman, but his ability to eat innings carried a giant question mark; he was destined for spot starts or a permanent home in the five-hole.
Which was precisely when it hurt most to remember the pitchers who were gone.
Not through free agency — one veteran starter had simply gotten too old and retired last year.
Another had hugged his ruined, bent arm and called it quits, declaring he couldn't throw a baseball anymore.
"...Wasn't there one more starting candidate left, though?"
"In the minors. There was, yes..."
That final prized pitching prospect was, as of now, being diligently consumed by Sangmu — the military baseball team.
"...They say even dog crap's useful for medicine, but apparently not when the army's got it."
Well, nothing to be done. Better than sending him straight into active duty. The future had to come first.
"...So you're saying we need to slot Noh In-seong in as the fourth starter?"
That was where the idea surfaced: deploying the rookie who had gone unscored upon all spring, surrendering exactly one hit across the entire exhibition slate.
"We have no choice. Jeong In-young is a question mark. No matter how well he pitches, five innings is his ceiling."
Which meant that, unlike the other starters, there would inevitably be days when the rookie had to double up — a bare-faced one-plus-one outing.
Jeong In-woo was a pitcher who leaned shamelessly on the vast, vast expanse of the Jamsil Dome, burying hitters with groundball after sinkerball.
"Of course, in smaller parks, his flies do turn into home runs fairly often, but..."
Even on his worst implosion days, he ate respectable innings and came off the mound, easing the burden on the bullpen — a model employee.
Jeong In-young belonged to a different species entirely. A strikeout pitcher whose K totals outnumbered his balls in play.
Everything the pitching coach said was, theoretically, beyond reproach.
And so manager Jung Im-taek's head began to throb, gently, insistently.
"I see. So we rest Noh In-seong in the fifth-starter games — the ones we're likely to concede anyway."
"That's correct, sir."
He wanted to bury his face in his hands at the state of this deranged rotation — but for now, the priority was verifying every remaining possibility.
"...We've decided to test him as a position player in the remaining spring games, so let's proceed with the original plan for now."
Only by nailing down the evaluation now would they know where to cement him in the field once the season began and he started taking his at-bats.
"On that subject — he doesn't take coaching very well. Is that going to be all right?"
Pitching coach Ju Sung-jin seized the opening, angling to have his authority formally confirmed.
"I'm not trying to ruin the kid. But is it acceptable for a rookie to talk back to a coach this brazenly, Manager?"
Word was, when the coach had suggested adding one more breaking ball to the rookie's arsenal yesterday, Noh In-seong had flatly told him no — to his face, no varnish.
A door slammed in someone's face, and everyone's reaction was roughly, yeah, that tracks.
"Hmm... but if the boy says he doesn't want to..."
"Still, rules are rules. If we let this slide, what kind of precedent does that set for the rest of the rookies?"
"...Hahh... fine. Handle it however you like."
Ju Sung-jin had spent over a decade as a pitching coach, and lately the itch to become a manager himself had grown impossible to ignore.
But time after time, his junior by five years — Jung Im-taek — had beaten him to the punch, and all that remained in the man's heart was gall.
The team's oldest coach had, at last, extracted the tacit blessing he'd wanted.
"Heh heh. You doomed little bastard. There's no escaping me now."
Whether Noh In-seong would accept that so graciously was, of course, an entirely separate question.
"No. I said no, sir."
"It's not about whether you want it or not! The problem is a rookie who just walked in the door deciding he can simply REFUSE!"
No, this crazy old coot is actually losing his marbles.
I throw my slider with two distinct orientations. What on earth would a forkball add?
"You may not know this, fresh out of school, but when a coach speaks, you're supposed to fall in line!"
"Heh... so that's how you want to play it?"
Fine. I'm not the one who's going to stop a man determined to drink his own poison.
A poisoned chalice? I'll wrap it in polonium, stuff it with cesium and cadmium, and set it on the memorial altar myself.
"Very well, sir. Then the responsibility is yours."
"Haha, good! Excellent! I'll take full responsibility. Starting today, you will live and breathe with a finger-strengthener for forkballs — carry it everywhere!"
Noh In-seong squeezed the gripper pressed into his palm. Stiff as a bank vault.
"Max resistance, 100 kilograms? What is wrong with you. You think I'm training for the World's Strongest Man?"
He's finished. Genuinely, truly finished.
Ju Sung-jin's single greatest blunder was this: in his bid to tame the rookie and elevate his own standing, the "uncontrollable human being" he'd chosen to gaslight was Noh In-seong himself. That fact alone sealed everything.
Noh In-seong, who had built a personal streaming career on death-horror shows of himself losing at video games, decided to spend today's broadcast airing the whole affair in broad daylight.
"...And that, chat, is what happened. I mean, seriously. Coach is supposed to coach, fine — but is he going to live my life for me too?"
The very day the coach had let himself believe, for the first time, that he'd finally broken in his rookie —
the kid flipped on his personal stream and broadcast the coach's reputation, and the grim reality of his bargain-bin coaching, to the entire planet. A catastrophe of historic proportions.
"And get this — the guy hands me a gripper cranked up to 100 kilograms, then piles on a homework load straight out of a nightmare. Does that sound like coaching to you?"
--Hang on. If I do this for a month I'll be on an operating table with finger tendonitis, won't I? Is that right? Is that right?! My pro career just got murdered...
Revelation after revelation filled the stream's audio, delivering premium dopamine to sports fans and gaming fans alike — a masterpiece of programming.
"General Manager! Is it true a coach assigned Noh In-seong an actual training regimen like that?!"
"Director! Do you intend to keep that schedule going forward?! What disciplinary action will you take?!"
"AAGH! Everyone out! Get out of my office—!!"
The stream that reporters adored and front offices loathed was suspended for a month by the club's own disciplinary committee.
And naturally, Ju Sung-jin — under the white-hot fury of both the general manager and the team president — received his reassignment: the rehabilitation squad.
"Where did it go wrong...? It was a flawless operation...!!"
Where did it go wrong? You should've looked at who you were dealing with before pulling that stunt.
And so the career of one aging coach, unable to keep pace with the march of the times, came to its end.