Baseball: A Two-Way Player-Chapter 423 - 65: The Joyful Main Event

After getting ready, Lin Guanglai in the left batting area nodded towards Chika Huangda not far away, signaling that he could start pitching.

After watching three pitches in a row, Lin Guanglai still didn’t swing the bat. Not only did he need to find the most comfortable batting position, Chika Huangda also needed some time to find the pitching rhythm. After all, in a home run competition, success rate is the most important.

On the fourth pitch, the baseball was thrown from the pitcher’s mound by Chika Huangda, the position and speed of the pitch was quite comfortable. Lin Guanglai slightly lifted his front leg, then swung the bat forward, channeling all his power into the baseball.

"Crack——!!!"

Amidst the audience’s screams of "Oh oh oh oh oh," the baseball spiraled upwards, and a few seconds later, it flew straight onto the front of the stands, caught by a young player sitting there.

Seeing the baseball successfully fly out of the field, Lin Guanglai immediately dropped the bat and raised his hands high, shouting "Yeah" out loud;

On the other side, Abe Shinjiro also smiled and shook his head, then patted Lin Guanglai’s shoulder as he came forward to express gratitude, the two opponents shared a brief hug.

The second matchup unfolded between foreign players Andrew Jones and Tony Blanco: although his time in the Major League was not as bright as the other, Blanco, who is three years younger than Jones, fully showcased what it means by "the youth fears the powerful," as white balls flew all over Pancheng Green Stadium.

After a fierce battle, Blanco defeated Jones, who hit 2 home runs, with a score of 4 home runs, advancing to the finals for the third consecutive home run competition— in the previous two matches, he had defeated the Ham Team’s Sho Nakata and Yakult’s Valentien.

After a brief rest, the battle reignited, with Lin Guanglai, who had rested longer in the first round, taking the lead in batting— facing Blanco, who had already hit 25 home runs this season, leading the leaderboard, he didn’t dare hold back at all, eventually sending 2 balls out of the park, putting all the pressure on the following Blanco.

As expected, after a fierce contest with Jones in the first round, Blanco, known for his power and dominating in recent matches, finally couldn’t withstand the huge physical toll:

By the finals, the physical exhaustion led to an inevitable drop in swing speed and power, and he couldn’t send any balls onto the stands.

Relying on his own ability and a fair amount of luck, Lin Guanglai was crowned the home run king of the third All-Star game amidst the cheers of Pancheng’s audience, providing the audience with a rather nice appetizer.

And soon, the real feast would begin!

After returning to the player area for a short rest, and waiting for the on-site staff to rearrange the field, Lin Guanglai once again walked onto the pitcher’s mound of Pancheng Green Stadium, with his pitcher glove under the watchful eyes of tens of thousands of spectators — this stadium, located in a region where baseball isn’t well-developed, naturally isn’t as good as the home fields of professional baseball teams, but it gave Lin Guanglai a familiar feeling unique to high school baseball that he hadn’t felt in a long time.

The soil on the pitcher’s mound was very soft, even too soft, which forced Lin Guanglai to step back and forth with his cleats around the pitcher mound to compact the soil before starting his warm-up pitches.

Lin Guanglai’s catching partner today was the Ham Team’s main catcher, Takeshima Shinya. Having been Yu Darvish’s designated catcher during his Nihon Professional Baseball days, his pitching strategy, which involved arranging pitches based on the pitcher’s personal characteristics and respecting the pitcher’s personal ideas, made Lin Guanglai feel comfortable, and they worked well together.

As Hosokawa Kei ages and younger catchers like Yamashita Taisho haven’t matured yet, Lin Guanglai has also heard from SoftBank staff that the team intends to pursue experienced and vigorous catchers like Takeshima Shinya during the off-season to supplement their strength — in Lin Guanglai’s view, if Takeshima Shinya could indeed transfer to SoftBank, it would undoubtedly be a win-win deal for both his personal development and SoftBank as a whole.

After the warm-up, the Central League hitters are ready: regarding the lineup arrangement, Central League’s manager Hara Tatsunori sent his own team’s main shortstop, Sakamoto Yuuto, as the hitting lead-off.

Speaking of Sakamoto Yuuto, one can’t skip the origin of his nickname "Night King": in the professional baseball world, many strong individual players are undisputed "carnivores," indulging in drinks in Ginza, staying all night in clubs is routine for them, and Sakamoto Yuuto is a prime example of this kind of player, having been featured in Bunshun magazine’s reports multiple times, yet never really changing his ways.

To maintain his status as one of Japan’s strongest shortstops for many years under such circumstances, one can only say his talent is extraordinarily high indeed...

Compared with official matches that require undivided attention, the All-Star game is more about serving the fans present, offering them more entertaining matches and scenes that are not normally seen.

As the game just started, Lin Guanglai pitched quite relaxedly. As the game just began and his body wasn’t fully warmed up, he intended to leave the phase of maximizing his pitching speed for later;