The Sacrifice (Part 1)
The shock of watching the ace they'd sent out with such confidence get knocked flat was a heavy one indeed.
Hear the Daejeon Phoenix out, and from their point of view, they'd actually had a reasonable chance of winning.
For starters, they'd sent out the pitcher with the second-worst ERA in their entire rotation.
The fact that the team had failed to score a single run in the opener—strategy plays aside—had weighed heavily on the decision, too.
Their proudly well-constructed lineup, they reasoned, would scrape together at least the minimum runs required for a victory.
That was the thinking, anyway.
"...So what you're saying is, you scored a whole pile of runs off our ace and won on Opening Day?"
"......"
Being a little out of sync at the plate early in the season was something every team dealt with equally. Back then they'd still lost to a single sacrifice bunt and a stolen base—but the Noh In-seong of this moment was not the Noh In-seong of that one.
The rookie who had once scorched the high school leagues had become—
First Game of the Second Half... Rookie Noh In-seong Declares Another Scorched-Earth Campaign Across the League
Running Out of Pitchers Who Can Even Face Him? Who Has Actually Had Success Against Noh In-seong?
Phoenix to Face Noh In-seong in Four Straight Games Without a Single Day of Rest...
—Korean baseball was being laid to waste by him, in one sense of the word and in the purely statistical sense alike.
And a slugfest? Setting one man aside as beyond discussion, the other was burning so hot he was a lock for season MVP.
A human being on fire because he had vowed to get married next year, or the year after at the latest.
That would be Song Jin-wook.
Game one, his only hit off You Hong-jin had been a bloop that dropped in, and his pride had taken the hit for it. But in game two, regarding the intentional walks and pitchouts Noh In-seong had been fed all game long—
"After watching that filthy changeup yesterday? Feels way more hittable to me."
"...What?"
CRACK---!!
As if to exact payment for putting a runner on base in front of him, Song Jin-wook succeeded in deporting the baseball clear out of the ballpark.
"...I'm the one who hit the homer, so why are you the one doing the ceremony, huh? In-seong, you In-seong..."
"Then go dig up some dirt on me, Song. This is going up on my channel—the view count's about to copy itself."
Granted, there was a little collateral opportunism mixed in, but that was business as usual.
The Phoenix's mercenary pitcher had committed the sin of recycling yesterday's recipe—fastball and changeup—exactly as written.
Jimmy's face crumpled like a crumpled-up tissue after one too many nose-blows.
'Fuck... should've just thrown the slider like always...'
His four-seamer was a little faster, sure, but in every other respect—vertical, horizontal movement—it was a worse stick. The gap in his changeup was the kind you'd measure between Triple-A and the big leagues.
A slider-dependent pitcher suddenly busting out fastballs and changeups as a surprise strategy?
A surprise strategy is, by definition, something that stops working the moment you've used it once. The truly weird part was that it had worked three times.
The strategic goal of pitching around Noh In-seong was executed flawlessly—but then a batter whose oWAR was creeping past 3 put a stop to it, and the Phoenix had no choice but to hand over a limp second loss as well.
The losing streak that hit them the instant baseball resumed was a sorrowful thing for Phoenix fans.
On top of that, one interview Noh In-seong gave after winning two straight games flipped the Phoenix's entire wardrobe inside out.
"It's the Daejeon 'Phoenix,' isn't it. Now I finally get why they went with a phoenix as the motif."
"...Why is that?"
"Word is, a phoenix has to burn down to ashes before it can rise again, right?"
—He could tell because he was currently watching the fans' hopes being reduced to ashes in real time.
It was far too painful a remark to be dismissed as a sour jab from a guy sore about getting zero good swings all game.
But that was from the standpoint of the man getting hit. The man swinging had no feeling for other people's pain.
Suddenly back in 7th place. While taking two straight beatings from first place, they'd been stomping everyone below them into the dirt—
"GRAAAAGH...!!"
"I'm only in 5th because the Doubles have been beating on me for a while—before that, I was 3rd! You looking down on me, punk?!"
—or else flaunting the kind of madness that amounted to spraying pure capsaicin into the eyes of the teams above them.
"Heheh, our season's already a write-off, but don't you go feeling safe either."
"GAAAH...!! What is this red pepper powder, Incheon?! I can't see fall baseball anymore...!!"
A situation where everyone was thrashing and clawing to climb over the Phoenix's heads.
Emergency bells were ringing nonstop in the heads of the Phoenix players and their manager.
And then there was one more.
"...Is this real life. Me. Me, at Jamsil...!!"
A man with emergency bells blaring in his skull existed on the Doubles' side as well.
Same as any other day, he'd gotten cocky on the strength of his wide strike zone, and—
CRACK---!!
A man betrayed, fatally, by his own signature sinker—the pitch that was supposed to bite down on his fingers and paint the corners for him.
For the number-three starter, Jeong In-woo, an exceptionally painful birthday had arrived.
Three innings. Eight runs allowed.
No matter what the commentators said, it was far too brutal a performance to laugh off as birthday bread.
"No, I just don't understand it. How do you sit there waiting like that, out in the open?"
A loss was a loss, and a birthday was a birthday. Jeong In-woo, who had lunch of seaweed soup with his family, settled for chicken delivery for dinner.
"...I mean, there are just days you can't hit the middle of the zone, right?"
That was Jeong In-young, who would get flattened by the facts anyway and, per standard sibling protocol, have it written off as business as usual.
"No! Normally when I aim for the middle, it goes in like a shotgun blast, scattered all over the strike zone—"
The outburst his little brother's comment provoked was, if anything, twice as pathetic as his first excuse.
Though, to be fair, the kid had a point. Command, even at the professional level, was always a war of hitting your spots or not. There were pitchers out there who couldn't even put the ball properly in the zone, and this guy could at least get it in there somewhere.
Realistically, if he took something off, he could hit just about any spot he pleased. But then, would the professional hitters on the other side really fail to notice?
It was at that moment that the doomed bastard—who had been silently helping himself to everyone else's legs, quietly committing one petty evil a day—opened his mouth.
"Eh, everybody gets shelled now and then."
"Shut it, mister career-high four earned runs. I just gave up eight and got pulled in the third inning."
—Was that encouragement, or tee-balling?
On a start day and the day after, a starter was supposed to be careful with his intake down to carbonated drinks, let alone alcohol.
But hearing that, Jeong In-woo wanted nothing more than to knock back something vicious.
"...And you're one to talk, you little punk. What's this about a no-hit game?!"
Was it the aftertaste of yesterday's interview, or the lingering trauma of all those intentional walks?
Today, Noh In-seong went hitless: one walk, one sacrifice fly. That was the reason Jeong In-woo got shelled so smoothly, without even the benefit of the enormous run support he usually received.
Naturally, the internet was a festival grounds.
There was no way on earth Noh In-seong—hypersensitive as he was to internet comments and any article dragging him—could let this slide.
He swore to pay it all back, without fail, the very next day.
But first, there was one bastard who'd talked trash about him standing right in front of him.
"Well, first things first—gotta do what's gotta be done, right? Get that face over here."
SPLAAAT---!!
"KHGHH...!!"
For the eight runs he'd coughed up while the infield crawled around like dogs behind him, the man who had talked like a dog got a cake slammed into his mouth.
Noh In-seong, having bought the cake with his own money, succeeded in his fully legal—outlet for revenge.
"AAAGH, I'm allergic to strawberries!!"
"Wow, lucky I bought this one, huh. See? Fortune really does love me."
On top of everything else, he'd landed a bonus critical hit—talk about good luck.
The next day—whether because he'd successfully blown off steam, or simply because tormenting other people brought him such joy—
Noh In-seong woke up before the crisp, lovely ringtone of his phone could even fill the room.
"...I just... woke up? On my own?"
Normally it took Mom coming in once, and then Siyeon once more because it was a day off—
If Dad was home, Dad would try to wake him, give up because he was in the shower, and then Mom would have to wallop him awake. That was the standard procedure.
He could've written it off as one of those days when his condition was simply good. But today, even his luck was good.
"...No, seriously, what is—on my way to the bathroom... a fifty-thousand-won bill?"
A high-denomination note flew out of nowhere and slapped itself right onto his face.
WOOF WOOF--!!
"Aww, aren't you adorable."
Something like the dog that seemed destined to require a one-way ticket to Mars, rubbing its head against its owner mid-walk.
This overwhelming current of good luck on his way to work.
And decisively, he felt the true source of that energy up on the mound in the top of the first, during his warm-up throws.
"...No way. Everything I ask for today is just going to go exactly where I want it?"
When Noh In-seong, the team's number-four starter and today's man on the bump, tossed a few warm-up pitches from the mound—
he realized that today, he had transformed into a legend.
"In-seong looks to be in phenomenal shape today."
"So it would seem. Look at that—the ball's just popping out of his hand."
In the eyes of Jung Im-taek, a manager who had once been a living legend himself, there were occasionally players like this.
Players for whom the gap between an ordinary day and a day when their condition went completely berserk was enormous.
Even on his worst days, In-seong had the command to shove fastballs inside the zone and stuff nobody could square up. But today, he was displaying command that let him shove the ball anywhere inside the zone he damn well pleased.
"Strike!"
Two four-seamers planted, and on top of that, his out pitches today were the two-seamer, the changeup, the curve, and two varieties of slider.
Hitters were being forced into an absurd guessing game where even a blind guess only connected twenty percent of the time—
but the out pitch TrackMan revealed today showed the whole world exactly why Noh In-seong was not a man in his right mind.
"Strike three! Batter out!"
"...In-soo, are you messing with me right now. There's no way that sign came from him. You're just yanking my chain."
"I hate it too, man. Who on earth calls for a strikeout with this?"
Jeong In-woong stared back with the face of a man begging his draft classmate not to do this to him—
and the draft classmate's next pitch brought him an even greater despair.
A leisurely 104.2 km/h four-seamer slipped perfectly between the high strike and the low one.
Internet opinion instantly flooded over into blaming the hitters—
For the experts, a chill ran down their spines.
"......Can he really just crank his velocity up and down at will like that? His delivery looked identical both times."
"That speed, I believe, is the floor—throttled all the way down. He has thrown an eephus before, but that one came out of a different delivery, so..."
And for Daejeon, this was the worst possible scenario. The moment the emergency bell was upgraded to an air-raid siren.
In today's offensive half-innings, Noh In-seong was no help whatsoever.
Through the fifth, he'd gone down looking on called strikeouts every time. Naturally, the rhythm of the batting order was stuttering along without him.
If Song Jin-wook hadn't produced that one run with a single swing, the score would still be 0-0.
Even so, no one could lay this scoreline at Noh In-seong's feet.
If one man was single-handedly shredding seventy-five percent of the opposing lineup, someone else was going to have to handle the offense.
"Swing, strike three! Batter out!"
Yes, a pitcher's four-seamer comes out at a slightly different velocity every single throw.
But professionals, by and large, try to throw the ball as hard as they possibly can.
Of course they do—that's how you minimize your chances of giving up hits.
But that logic only holds when the hitter is physically capable of hitting the ball at all.
"Strikeout! Three outs, side retired!"
When a hitter can't touch even the slowest pitch, let alone the fastest one, hit prevention becomes a meaningless concept.
As Noh In-seong walked back to the dugout, dabbing the sweat from his brow, no one said a word. Everyone kept their silence.
The record, after all, was still in progress.