Baseball: A Two-Way Player-Chapter 427 - 67: Death Match Across Day and Night

In the Sapporo Dome of Hokkaido, there are still four hours before the game between Fukuoka SoftBank and Hokkaido Ham begins, and the SoftBank team members are practicing on the field before the match.

Akiyama Koji stands on the sidelines, observing the condition of his players on the field, letting out an almost imperceptible sigh—it is evident that the players’ performance in today’s training does not satisfy him.

If this were the beginning of the season, Akiyama Koji would have undoubtedly blown the whistle to stop the training and hauled out those players with poor attitudes or who were slacking off, to teach them a lesson and serve as a warning to others. But now, in the final sprint phase of the season, he is genuinely reluctant to do so. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

For professional baseball players, the final sprint phase of the season is undoubtedly the toughest time:

On one hand, the organization’s demand for performance and better rankings is objectively present, forcing the players to give their all in every game;

Yet at the same time, the tighter schedule at the end of the season, the more intense competition, and the fact that the fitness accumulated during preseason training has reached its limit, make every game during this period a psychological and physical grind for the players.

Take the SoftBank players, for instance; they just finished a series against Orix at Osaka Kyocera Dome yesterday, and this morning they flew to Hokkaido. After just dropping off their luggage and having a meal, they have come to pre-game training, and in the evening, they have to play against the Ham Team—there hasn’t been a moment of free time from start to finish—and this has been their norm for the past month.

"Coach, why don’t we just let this game go tonight? After all, right after this, we’re heading to Chiba for a decisive battle with Rode, and you’ve seen the players’ current state. I’m afraid that if it continues like this, our players’ fitness and spirits won’t even last until the end of the season..."

Evidently, it wasn’t just Akiyama Koji who had noticed the players’ unusual state. A host of professionals, including the head coach Daijiro Oishi, the pitching coach Guo Taiyuan, and the batting coach Fujii Yasuo, also approached Akiyama Koji with similar suggestions—from the most rational perspective, by sacrificing a game against the Ham Team, which poses no significant threat to SoftBank’s ranking, for the recuperation of the main players’ fitness and form before the series against Rode, it is clearly a profitable trade.

Having already considered this plan, Akiyama Koji readily went with the flow and agreed to this approach—the starting pitcher for this match against the Ham Team, Akiyama Koji chose SoftBank’s 2008 first-round draft pick, Tsurugi Makoto, who had languished in the minors for years, unable to fulfill his potential; if it weren’t for the current shortage of starting pitchers in the SoftBank First Team, Akiyama Koji would never have brought him up to the first team.

At least before the game, baseball commentators and practitioners who received the starting lineup from both teams probably figured that SoftBank’s arrangement was aiming to let this match go, to focus on the battle against Rode in Chiba two days later.

At six o’clock local time in Sapporo, the game started on time:

Besides sending Tsurugi Makoto as the starting pitcher, SoftBank made some small adjustments in the field positions. All-rounder Kenshi Akashi replaced foreign player Lahai’er at first base, Yanagida Yuuki served as the designated hitter; as for Lin Guanglai, since he was already confirmed to start in the match against Rode two days later, he reserved his energy on the bench for this game.

As for the Ham Team, which is almost certain to finish at the bottom of the Pacific League this season and had no desires left, they simply sent their much-anticipated young genius Ohtani Shohei as the starting pitcher, with no other changes, largely sticking to their main squad for the season.

Judging from the pre-game strategies of the coaching teams on both sides, this match should be a no-brainer in terms of paper strength—the visiting SoftBank team ensured their main players a breather, while the home team Ham could achieve the purpose of honing their rookies.

But when the game truly began, many discovered that the progress of the match didn’t quite align with their expectations:

Normally, the average duration of a half-inning game is around 6-7 minutes, even with some stalemate, it shouldn’t exceed 10-15 minutes at most; however, the first half-inning of the match, with the Ham Team attacking, took nearly 20 minutes to finish.

Makoto Tsurugi, who hadn’t experienced the first-team intensity for a long time, faced Nishikawa Haruki and Yang Daigang, top-level professional batters, at the outset. Though presumed to be easily overwhelmed by opponents, he performed surprisingly well—despite using 7-8 or even more than 10 pitches per batter, and being toughly resisted, he surprisingly, and quite luckily, managed to pull off a 1-2-3 inning.

Soon after, in the bottom half of the inning, the SoftBank batters made a resurgence: against the genius young Ohtani Shohei, the SoftBank seniors showed no mercy; from the first batter, Nakamura Akira, to the third batter, Hasegawa Yu, the consecutive three hit singles or received walks, swiftly filling up all three bases in no time;