Baseball: A Two-Way Player-Chapter 405 - 54: Reunion with Old Friends

"Walking from the Ikebukuro Station exit towards Rikkyo University, the store is called ’Next to St. Paul’s’... Ah! This should be it!"

Following the guidance of the smartphone navigation app all the way, Lin Guanglai looked at the signboard above his head; after confirming he was in the right place, he walked up the escalator and pushed open the store’s door.

"Excuse me——"

The store’s floor space wasn’t particularly large, so the front door was a bit small. For the nearly two-meter-tall Lin Guanglai, he had to bend down to enter.

It was meal time, and the store was already quite crowded. After all, this place was just a minute’s walk from Rikkyo University, so the crowd was understandable. Lin Guanglai raised his head to search among the crowd and quickly found his target.

"Ah—— everyone, long time no see!!!"

Seeing a large group of people at the innermost seats of the restaurant, Lin Guanglai’s face instantly lit up with a bright smile as he strode over to them.

"Yo yo, look who it is—— isn’t it our Waseda Jitsugyo Baseball Club’s star player, Lin Guanglai..." The one leading the group was Tsuchiya Ryota, who was once Lin Guanglai’s pitcher-catcher partner in the first year.

With his teasing of Lin Guanglai as a starting point, a large group of Lin Guanglai’s teammates from the Waseda Jitsugyo days gathered around to greet him. Among them were seniors like Suzuki Kensuke and Tsuchiya Ryota, as well as second-year students back then, like Shigetsugu Shinjiro and Kenshu Yasuda.

As for his same-year peers like Uesugi Yasuyuki, they couldn’t attend because Waseda University’s baseball team’s reserve had a practice match today.

Recently, not only is professional baseball in full swing, but the spring season of the Tokyo Big6 University Baseball League is also ongoing.

The reason they arranged to meet near Rikkyo University today was primarily because Lin Guanglai’s seniors in Waseda University’s baseball team had been losing quite a number of games, which made their supervisor, Ookamura Tatsuya, very upset. As a result, he specially brought the players here for a friendly match on their day off — and even the lunch meeting was only approved under the pretext of "meeting with a junior who is now a professional player."

After catching up with his seniors and juniors, Lin Guanglai finally had a chance to sit down; but just as he sat down, barely warming the seat, a sweet and weak voice sounded beside him:

"Excuse me, are you Lin from the SoftBank Team..."

Lin Guanglai looked down in the direction of the voice, and speaking was a petite girl.

"Yes, is there something I can help you with?" Lin Guanglai politely replied.

"Could you give me an autograph? I have been a fan of yours since your high school days in Takayama..."

Lin Guanglai readily agreed to the fan’s request, took the autograph board and pen from her, signed it quickly, and returned it to her, also fulfilling her request for a photo together.

Lin Guanglai was somewhat accustomed to such occurrences: ever since he gained fame during his high school days, he often encountered similar situations on the streets of Tokyo, and even more so after entering professional baseball.

Since entering professional baseball, Lin Guanglai had encountered such situations quite often, and by now he was more or less used to being the center of attention among the crowd — after all, with both outstanding skills and looks, he was hard not to be welcomed by baseball fans, especially the female fans, all the more so in a fan culture-rich country like Japan.

Once Lin Guanglai completed his interaction with the female fan and rejoined his group of old friends, he found that every single one of them was staring at him, as if he were a rare creature.

"Truly unexpected..." the usually reticent Suzuki Kensuke was the first to speak, "The Guanglai who used to cry on camera after losing a game three years ago is now the only professional player among us..."

His sentiment drew agreement from others around him.

Following this topic, the group began reminiscing about the days at Waseda Jitsugyo, especially the summer of 2010. Although a long time had passed, every moment of every game was deeply etched in everyone’s memory, and to this day, those memories remained just as vivid.

As the conversation continued chronologically forward to 2011, leading the charge, Suzuki Kensuke and Tsuchiya Ryota, who had retired from the team by then, all displayed envious expressions.

"That was the spring-summer consecutive championship... a feat only achieved by seven schools in over a century of Koshien history. I envy you guys so much—ah ah ah! How I wish I were one year younger, then my name could be written in the school’s history and placed in Koshien’s museum..."

When it came to the topic of the spring-summer consecutive championship, Tsuchiya Ryota was the most animated, leaning over the table and lamenting how he was born too early.

After discussing these, the seniors also brought up Lin Guanglai’s third-year battles against Osaka Tsubaki in the spring and summer Koshien tournaments, each giving him a thumbs-up, which made Lin Guanglai somewhat embarrassed, quickly attempting to steer the conversation to other topics.