Who Threatened Me With a Knife for Saying I've Made Enemies?
The moment Noh In-seong returned to team training, every single article of fabricated news evaporated.
Granted, even before that, nothing had ever definitively confirmed that In-seong was injured.
"I mean, when someone suddenly leaves the country for Tokyo mid-season, they're usually clutching an elbow or..."
"Or what, getting some mysterious bone-setting treatment from a folk healer, right? That kind of thing."
Flying abroad out of nowhere in the middle of the season, eating all day, quietly resting, then hitting the arcade. Complaining at 4 a.m. that the ramen broth was too salty, getting banned from the store with a shouted "Then get out!", and strolling back the next day as if nothing had happened — that was not a common species of ballplayer.
The Doubles' front office was left utterly dumbfounded.
"Wait, so what on earth did you go to Japan for?"
"Reporters camped out around my apartment and it was annoying, so I figured I'd drag them overseas. That's about it."
They had known he was a lunatic of unprecedented proportions, but they'd never imagined he was this species of lunatic.
It was an incident from the height of summer, in late July.
Aside from Noh In-seong's emergency vacation, the Doubles' front office, manager, and coaching staff were all quietly coming around to the same idea: it was about time they gave their pitchers a breather.
A rookie who had already thrown 114.1 innings was entering exactly the territory where overuse debates would have been entirely fair. It was like applying a poultice made of mustard, wasabi, and pepper paste to a crying child's eyes, but still. The flood of articles from the press only hardened their resolve.
With roughly fifty-odd games left in the regular season, starting now wasn't too late.
'Time to ease off the workload and give the innings to Kim Jeong-mook, the sixth starter we brought up.'
'Or at the very least, if we're giving him breaks mid-rotation, they need to be longer ones...'
'The most important thing is the fall baseball anyway. He has to be able to throw at full strength in October.'
Had the Doubles not had the luxury they did, this would have been nothing more than a fantasy — the kind of thing that simply could never happen. But in the current situation, where the magic number countdown was quietly beginning?
They had room to extend a slightly hypocritical kindness to their promising rookie.
"So — we'd simply like you to consider, just consider, throwing a little less often from here on out."
The Doubles' general manager made the proposal with studied leisure, watching Noh In-seong's face.
From In-seong's perspective, it wasn't a bad offer at all.
Even granting that he needed to fill 144 innings and 446 plate appearances, the pitching side of the ledger posed surprisingly little trouble. Thirty innings was hardly a crisis — if he came up a little short, he could just trot out of the bullpen to make up the difference.
The problem was the plate appearances. He had nearly 170 left to burn through, and the season was running out. Even at four trips to the plate in every single game, he'd need to appear in 43 more of them. Factor in the fact that he needed a full day off after every start to get his condition anywhere near recovered, and the offer was actually reasonable.
"Hmm... I'd still like to fill out 150 innings, though."
"That much is fine. Anything beyond that, well... I'd have to say no."
A deal with guaranteed benefits for both sides.
Noh In-seong, who intended to claim every end-of-season award as his own, and a general manager who wanted to hoist the final trophy in the fall.
On solid evidence, Noh In-seong and the general manager shook hands.
"Oh, and please don't do any interviews about this arrangement. There's something I'd like to say first."
"...Whatever it is, I'm begging you, just keep the interviews gentle..."
Of course, the fine details of what In-seong wanted nagged at the back of the GM's mind.
If his sin was letting his guard down — surely he wouldn't pull anything strange over something like this — then he had only himself to blame.
Before long, this inning limit would transform into an idea of truly extravagant absurdity.
The Superstars had, for all practical purposes, already folded this season.
Truthfully, the league structure itself had gotten a bit like that.
One team reigned as an absolute powerhouse while two teams lay cratered at the very bottom. And of those two, the one blown to bits in the greatest number of ways was the Superstars.
If it helps: this was the only season in league history where the Tragic Number was introduced to the public before the Magic Number was.
Their Game 1 win? That only happened because the team's ace / cleanup hitter / central figure was presumed ailing — and because the team's collective sanity had wandered off in an entirely wrong direction.
[He did it again! Noh In-seong drives in a run with an RBI single! That's a multi-hit day! The runner on second holds at third!]
[The swing itself is so compact — locked in tight like the Tyrant, rotating purely through the core... he hits it so effortlessly.]
[They got through two outs cleanly, but couldn't clear that final mountain.]
And when the man wearing all three of those crowns went on a rampage at the top of the lineup, the whole calculus changed.
The pitchers' fault? Are you saying that after watching him whip himself through the body on breaking balls buried deep inside?
"Ugh, they're pulling out every stop to suppress extra-base hits. The starter's a lefty, the bullpen's all right-handed sidearmers..."
"...You're saying that after hitting all of them anyway?"
Sung Hyun-tak — who had stranded two more runners today, steadily increasing his stake in the community hate boards — jumped at the sound of In-seong's grumbling.
"Does that look like hitting? I was just wrenching it out there by force."
Because he was folding his arms in and muscling the ball around with his core instead of his natural swing, the extra-base power had vanished. Fixing it would require the muscle to actually hold up. It didn't. Or the pitchers would need to throw harder, giving him more rebound to work with.
"They roll out a command-first soft-tosser sitting at 136 km/h. Where does this team keep digging up players..."
"...? What are you talking about. That's your draft classmate."
"You think I memorize that stuff? I was busy thinking about which team to embarrass in my postgame comments."
Soo Byung-jin. The Seoul Superstars' second-round pick in this year's rookie draft. A pitcher with a distinctive identity — right-handed sidearm, finesse arm — was being lit up for single after single by Noh In-seong.
"Ah, he blocked my path even back in high school, and here he is standing in my road again today."
The frustration was real, but it wasn't as though In-seong had ever spared a thought for anyone whose dreams he'd flattened. Soo Byung-jin quietly retired the remaining batters and steeled himself for the next inning.
A rookie emerging in late July — not as an expanded-roster call-up — carries two meanings.
The first: he's a giant puzzle piece capable of plugging that team's holes.
The second: the team has been driven to the point of testing whether such a player has any future at all.
Noh In-seong was the former — the man who, quite literally, single-handedly filled three holes in the Doubles' roster.
Soo Byung-jin was the latter, still in the process of eating innings and growing through the punishment.
CRAAACK—!!
[A sharp grounder straight at the shortstop — he flips to second! And on to first! DOUBLE PLAY!]
[His first scoreless outing in a long while — Yeom Dong-goo ROARS on the mound!]
"WAAAAAAAH—!!"
Yeom Dong-goo was closer to a strange exception — neither the first case nor the second.
He was no puzzle piece plugging three holes at once like Noh In-seong, and the team had held first place since barely a month into the season.
He'd been called up amid the bullpen's total collapse and raised out of sheer necessity. But was he worth raising, worth the payroll, worth the development? That much, at least, could be answered with certainty.
[He's been pounded all season long! But through these punishing hours, the rookie is growing!]
[The command problems seem to have largely worked themselves out. That curveball is genuinely lovely.]
What is a left-handed pitcher supposed to do when he lacks decisive stuff — raw power?
Yeom Dong-goo found a small answer in Noh In-seong's perfect game.
Naturally, he hadn't tried to copy it outright. At minimum, he had a grasp on his own abilities now. What he'd learned from watching In-seong line up three pitches on the outer edge, dead straight, wasn't command or power.
"He just kept throwing outside until he got two strikes. Every single time."
"What."
It was a meditation on what makes an opponent utterly miserable — in other words, pitching design.
Didn't they say that among any three people you walk with, there is always something to learn? A fellow human living a rather different life, sure — but Noh In-seong had left a positive mark.
"You're doing some genuinely deranged work out there. I hereby award you a praise sticker."
Noh In-seong was congratulating Yeom Dong-goo, who had somehow held the opposition scoreless from the sixth all the way through the eighth.
Kim Jeong-mook had gone five innings, one run. Closer Joo Hak-soo came in to seal it — the new faces finished the game themselves. Final score: 4-1. The Doubles took Game 2 by a slim margin.
"...Am I in third grade? What is this frozen-to-death praise sticker nonsense."
"This kid throws a fit even when you compliment him. Is it because I haven't hit him today?"
Yeom Dong-goo scurried off, his retreating figure vanishing into the locker room showers.
And a microphone was thrust toward Noh In-seong.
"Noh In-seong, congratulations on the win and on tonight's Player of the Game honors."
Two hits in four at-bats in his comeback game, plus a walk — the man had produced half of his team's runs all by himself. Naturally, he was Player of the Game material.
"Your arm..."
"Is absolutely fine. Truth is, those reporter bastards occupied the whole block around my house, so I..."
A flat declaration that he'd gone abroad specifically to spite them — and that there would be no more interviews for the press, ever. A remarkable piece of theater: openly flipping the bird to fellow members of the broadcast media, right in front of a broadcaster's camera.
--"Honestly, I don't think I'll be able to throw many more innings from here on out."
"Uh... are you saying you're injured?"
"No, the team has advised me not to throw any more, so..."--
Using Noh In-seong's interview as white noise, two men watched the scene on a wall-mounted screen.
One was the current general manager of the Superstars.
The other was a buyer who wanted to purchase the Superstars.
"Yesterday's loss stung a little, I'll admit. Some of our fans are still full of hope, in all sorts of ways."
"Well, it's not as though a playoff berth is mathematically gone."
The GM's goal was to keep the franchise's value from being hammered down by any means necessary. The buyer's goal was to buy it as cheaply as possible, by any means whatsoever.
They smiled at each other across the table — but neither of those smiles was a smile.
--"By my count, I have roughly 36 innings left."
"...Ah, right, of course. Since the cap is 150..."--
"But the last-place finish is all but locked in, isn't it? At this point, you'd be better off giving up."
"And what exactly could you people do? Force me to sell off my assets?"
"Come now — would I do something like that, in a free-market economy? Surely not."
It was rich, hearing this from the very man who had whipped the shareholder ouster movement into violence. But in the end, he had to be made to step down voluntarily — no one could force anything.
The two men stared each other down for a long, lingering moment, and at last turned their backs on each other.
One moved to defend the team's true worth.
The other moved to shake the team apart — a little more violently this time.
"Say that from now on, I throw roughly six innings per start. That's six starts, then."
"Correct. That's how the math works out..."
"And every team that's rubbed me the wrong way will have to show up and watch me, game after game, on exactly that six-start schedule."
A flawless Targeted Outing schedule in the making.
After all, once every team's series ran through Game 4, the rest of the slate was nothing but two-game sets — or rainouts waiting to be made up.
"Let's start by assigning two of them to Busan."
Having first allocated two appearances to the fan community's beloved anonymous idols —
"The remaining four, I'll take against whichever team annoys me most, or whoever's earned my grudge."
"...But showing up to pitch doesn't guarantee you'll win, does it?"
The reporter offered the voice of common sense.
"On the contrary — couldn't every outing carve a place in history, the way it did in Daejeon?"
"...!!"
"Fall baseball. I'd very much like to go."
At that malice of the highest grade glowing on the screen, every team in the league shuddered.
"Why, WHY are you dumping this garbage on us all the way to the end of the season?!"
And one team wept openly.
The team with a brutal, punishing rebuild already scheduled for the moment this season ended.
The Busan Marines shed tears over the treacherous fall schedule that had just descended upon them.