CHAPTER 345: CHAPTER 195: CAN’T SAY GOODBYE

Tuesday, October 9, 2012.

As autumn arrived, the scorching temperatures of the summer of 2012 gradually faded, and it had been almost two months since Waseda Jitsugyo successfully defended their Summer Koshien championship.

The impact of winning the championship for the seventh consecutive time in history was enormous. This victory made Lin Guanglai a household name across Japan, a Koshien star everyone knew. In just over a month, countless media outlets had treated him like a hot commodity, with interviews and documentaries bombarding him, which was overwhelming even for someone like Lin Guanglai, who was already accustomed to such attention.

After finishing Koshien in August, Lin Guanglai didn’t have much time to rest before quickly joining the U18 representative team under the guidance of coach Ogura Quanyou, heading to Korea to participate in the U18 World Cup.

For this U18 national team, known as the Golden Generation, the Japanese audience had high hopes, wishing they could secure their first-ever victory for the baseball nation; but when the players arrived in Korea, they discovered that this journey wasn’t as simple as they had imagined.

Continuous heavy rain seriously disrupted the original schedule, affecting many teams, including the Japan National Team, in very negative ways. The event organizers were unable to provide a satisfactory solution, which disrupted Ogura Quanyou’s original pitching rotation plan entirely and further reduced the players’ rest time. Throughout the tournament, the Japanese team’s players had almost no time to rest, forced to endure an incredible "nine-game streak."

If the continuous games were a regular occurrence for these Japanese players, the rough style of baseball exhibited by the American players during the matches made them quite uncomfortable, even leading to significant conflict.

In the second round of the preliminaries, as two of the tournament’s championship favorites, the Japan Team and Team USA faced off in a climactic showdown—the winner would advance to the finals, while the loser would only play in the 5-6 placement match.

In this match, Lin Guanglai started on the field. Even against American batters, he showed no fear, steadily holding the opposition back until he exhausted the maximum allowed 85 pitches in international competition.

His teammates provided solid support for the pitcher, as Tamura Ryuhiro’s sacrifice fly and Ohtani Shohei’s double helped the Japan Team extend their lead to 5-3 by the end of the seventh inning. In the next inning, they brought in Fujinami Jintaro, who had performed well in the tournament, for relief.

The unexpected happened at that moment: facing a 2-run deficit, Team USA adopted extremely rough tactics, including but not limited to ramming into bases during sprints, and delivering elbow strikes at home plate to Mori Yuuya, attempting to make a tag. These actions ultimately resulted in Mori Yuuya suffering a concussion and withdrawing, but the umpire showed no response to these actions.

The cost of the conflict was enormous for the Japan National Team: they not only lost their starting catcher but also conceded 4 points, allowing Team USA to take the lead.

With a teammate injured and forced to leave, coupled with the demanding schedule leading to consecutive games, the exhausted Japan Team ultimately couldn’t produce a miracle, losing to Team USA 5-10. Even though they defeated the Korea Team the next day to secure fifth place, Lin Guanglai, Fujinami Jintaro, and Mori Yuuya were named to the tournament’s best lineup, but this was far from satisfying for players who came with dreams of winning the championship on this land.

For Lin Guanglai, this was his first participation in an international tournament, and this experience of failure made him realize the fundamentally different attitudes toward baseball in Asia and the Americas:

Fair play, etiquette, and speeding up the game’s pace are the fundamental tenets of Japanese high school baseball, and Koshien, where national representative schools gather, serves as a big stage requiring "exemplary performances."

For these players who have been raised with Japanese "yakyu" education since childhood, the behavior exhibited in American "Baseball" is completely unacceptable and absolutely not allowed—if a player dared to perform such level of home plate collision in a Koshien match, they would surely face condemnation and criticism from within the team, Takano Ren, and the entire Japanese society.

This loss on the international stage also sounded a warning bell for all Japanese baseball professionals: in terms of pure strength, these Japanese players are definitely among the best in the world; however, Japanese youth baseball has been disconnected from the world for too long, and professionals lack an understanding of international competition styles, while players struggle to adapt to the tempo of international competitions. These are pressing issues that need to be addressed.

After returning from Korea and resting for most of the half-month, in late September, Lin Guanglai and the third-year teammates headed to Gifu to participate in the 2012 Qingliu National Sports Conference—an annual fixed event where only the top eight teams in the Summer Koshien, or those contributing outstanding performances among the top sixteen, can qualify to compete.

As the final stage for these third-year players, Waseda Jitsugyo’s players cherished this opportunity—after all, once the National Sports Conference ends, their three-year high school baseball career will conclude, and many may find it hard to meet again soon.