Baseball: A Two-Way Player

"Aoba Green East Little League Team, hmm, this should be the place."

Izumi Minoru looked up, confirmed the address on the doorplate was correct, and then reached out to knock on the door.

As the door slowly opened, a weathered middle-aged face appeared before him; before Izumi Minoru could introduce himself, the middle-aged man inside beamed with a warm smile and said:

"Are you Mr. Izumi from Waseda Jitsugyo? Hello, hello, welcome to our Aoba Green East Little League Team for a visit!"

"I am the team's current supervisor, Nakamura Keiji—Waseda University, Showa 49 graduate, a few years older than you, please take care of me."

Faced with his senior, Izumi Minoru did not dare to slack off, quickly bowed in return: "No, no, I am the one intruding—just call me Izumi, please take care of me, senior."

After a bit of small talk, Nakamura Keiji glanced at his watch, seeing that training time was approaching, he invited Izumi Minoru: "Izumi, our players should be almost all here, I'm aware of the purpose of your visit, would you like to see the skills of our players?"

Having already intended to do so, Izumi Minoru naturally agreed enthusiastically, following Nakamura Keiji's footsteps all the way to the training grounds of Aoba Green East.

Aoba Green East Little League Team is a well-known hardball team in the Kantou Region—in general, out of safety considerations, there are few opportunities for junior high school players in Japan to engage in hardball in schools; most play with softballs;

However, Aoba Green East Little League Team is precisely a club that provides professional hardball training guidance for junior high school students, and team members have the opportunity to participate in national competitions of various scales, making it popular locally among players with talent who intend to continue developing in high school.

Given the current scarcity of pitchers at Waseda Jitsugyo, since coming to Kanagawa for training, how could one not take a look at the young prospects here—for this reason, Izumi Minoru, a Waseda University alumnus, used some of his connections, leading to today's opportunity to observe the training games here.

As the full authority supervisor of the baseball team, Izumi Minoru naturally holds special recruitment quotas for baseball talents—if he sees any gifted prospects today, he certainly wouldn't hesitate to seize the opportunity to recruit them.

The training at Aoba Green East started—it must be said, the club's scale is considerable, and the training content and process are rather formal:

According to the staff accompanying Izumi Minoru, the coaches here are all professionals with many years of formal hardball experience, most having played many years of semi-professional baseball with company teams; the two head coaches in charge even work as data analysts for the Yokohama BayStars during regular days.

As a club aiming to nurture talent and compete for victory, Aoba Green East naturally has a relatively strict selection mechanism: generally, they recruit only about 10 players per grade, with a total not exceeding 40, following a completely elite educational route, unlike clubs where anyone with money can play.

The players training on the field now are third-year junior high school students, and they were conducting pre-game warm-ups and field training with decent form, steadily catching fast rollers, strong hits, and high fly balls batted out by the coach, evidently of fine quality.

As the official match began, Izumi Minoru's gaze was instantly drawn to one of the players:

Standing on the pitcher's mound was a round-faced, slightly chubby boy, whose young, collagen-rich face accentuated his age.

The boy's appearance was not particularly handsome, at least according to Izumi Minoru it surely didn't match up to a certain monster in his own team; compared to looks, which are just icing on the cake, Izumi Minoru was more concerned about the player's performance on the field.

"To be the ace pitcher in such an elite-level little league club, this boy's skill must be outstanding."

"And he's a rare left-handed pitcher... if his actual performance is up to standard, it's entirely possible to recruit him directly!"

No matter which country or place in the world, left-handed pitchers are extremely scarce—a Japanese baseball publication once proposed this notion:

"In professional baseball drafts, the value of a fastball left-handed pitcher is calculated as if adding five kilometers per hour to the value of a fastball right-handed pitcher."

With many high schools having numerous left-handed hitters today, a good left-handed pitcher is all the more important to any team, whether as a starter or closer.

Though Izumi Minoru hadn't attended the entire week's training, he watched each inter-team match:

Yokohama High School's strength lies largely in having a strong catcher, as well as two ace pitchers—a right and a left, one with breaking balls and one with fastballs; after Yanagida Yuuya pitches through the 5th to 7th innings, the fully charged Souma and Maruwa come up to secure the win, an almost invincible approach.

"If such a system could be replicated at Waseda Jitsugyo..." Just thinking about it made Izumi Minoru almost afraid to hope further—what if this was all a dream?

As the game truly began and the young pitcher on the mound started pitching with full effort, Izumi Minoru was increasingly delighted in his heart: