Baseball: A Two-Way Player-Chapter 612 - 154: I Want It All!

As a major competitor within the same league, the Ham Team has faced Lin Guanglai and his Softbank Team countless times over the past three years, and naturally understands their prowess.

The upper management spares no expense, making them invincible in the free agent market. Rarely do players who have obtained FA rights and are seeking lucrative contracts turn down Softbank's offers.

In addition to causing a stir in the transfer market, a large amount of money also fertilized the player development system—now within the Softbank Team, including Lin Guanglai, Yanagida Yuuki, Imamiya Kenta, and Chika Huangda, are all stars cultivated by Softbank's own system.

With the current strength demonstrated by this team, unless their opponent drops the ball themselves, medium and small clubs with inferior financial resources and development capabilities find it very difficult to compete with such a giant—because of this, as the supervisor of the Ham Team, Kuriyama Hideki knows that this year is their best chance to win the glory!

And to achieve this goal, the current match is one they must win; only by defeating the opponent at Softbank's home ground today, can the Ham Team retain the last shred of hope for victory and bring the suspense back to their home ground.

To achieve this goal, Kuriyama Hideki also sent out the strongest lineup he could muster: With the chief umpire's order, the focus battle that attracted the attention of all Japan officially began.

The Ham Team's leadoff hitter in this match is their left fielder, Nishikawa Haruki. With his swift feet and skillful hitting, he has stolen over 35 bases for three consecutive seasons, and this season his on-base percentage even reached an astonishing over 40%, and he still holds the record for the most triples in the Pacific League, making him a quintessential leadoff hitter.

Allowing a batter of this type on base almost means letting the opponent advance to the scoring position, and even stealing third base is not impossible. Even routinely destined ground balls might be turned into hits by him—thus, facing Nishikawa Haruki, Lin Guanglai and Takeshima Shinya are determined to pursue strikeouts as much as possible.

Although Nishikawa Haruki has also been selected with over 60 walks for four consecutive years, Lin Guanglai is fully confident in his abilities and has no fear whatsoever.

Against a frontline hitter who poses a great threat on base and relies more on skillful hitting, Lin Guanglai still combines his advantageous features and chooses the most brutal and simple method—to overwhelm!

The first ball thrown is a heavy, high-pressure fastball with a speed exceeding 160 km/h, aiming directly at the batter's inner corner.

Skillful hitters indeed make good use of technique to hit balls, but that is based on their ability to touch the ball and apply the technique; facing Lin Guanglai's fastball with rapid speed, intense spin, and tightly sticking to his inner corner, Nishikawa Haruki cannot even perform a smooth swing and can only choose to let the ball pass.

This is also Lin Guanglai's customary strategy of seizing a good ball count in Nippon Professional Baseball. After all, NPB itself presents a clear phenomenon of high pitching and low batting, and the game balls are more inclined to pitchers; very few hitters can withstand his inner-corner high-pressure fastball count-seizing strategy.

And judging from the performance of this past season, if Lin Guanglai takes the lead in the ballcount at the start of a bat, the final result of that bat is basically—

"Good ball! Swing and miss for a strikeout!"

Accompanied by the chief umpire's bow-drawing motion behind home plate, Nishikawa Haruki is struck out by Lin Guanglai, even consuming only four pitches.

Nishikawa Haruki returned to the player zone with a gloomy expression, greeted by Kuriyama Hideki's supervisor's consolation—he had foreseen the difficulty of this match before the game started, and he considered the loss of the first bat to be normal; he even mentally prepared for a round of batting without hitting any hits.

If his thoughts were known by others, someone might think that Kuriyama Hideki admitted defeat before fighting, losing before the battle even started; however, precisely because he clearly understands Lin Guanglai's strength and grasped the most firsthand information, he would make similar preparations.

Simply put, taking Lin Guanglai's arsenal of pitches, just his fast forkball and fork slider alone are enough to challenge the hitters of all Japan:

Same delivery motion, same speed, same initial ball path, yet they make completely different ball-path changes before reaching home plate—hitters making judgments in less than 0.5 seconds is impossible, let alone hitting the balls as hits.

According to the latest data statistics from Ham Team's data team, in this past season, Lin Guanglai's unique fork slider usage rate reached 28%, second only to his four-seam fastball usage rate; the hitters from 12 Nippon Professional Baseball clubs when facing this ball produced a batting average of less than 10% and a swing-and-miss rate of over 38%—it is no exaggeration to say even if Lin Guanglai had only these two types of pitches, he would be enough to become the world's top closer, be it in Japan or globally.

Soon, the second batter of the Ham Team also walked into the hitting zone; coincidentally, the newcomer happened to be an old acquaintance of Lin Guanglai—a graduate from Kanagawa Prefecture Yokohama High School, selected as the fourth position by Nippon-Ham Fighters in 2011, Kondo Kensuke.