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Photo/Xiao Luo
Taking advantage of the 100th Games, I started watching baseball Koshien in the summer of 2018. For me, watching a group of high school students across the sea running around is like making up for a missed youth.
2018, 2019, the two years before the epidemic, now seem a bit far away. Ami High School sophomore pitcher Yuki Hayashi stood on the pitcher's board in the Koshien Round of 8 in the summer of 17. In the second half of the 9 innings, the team led 2-1, 0 out full base, a big crisis.
The opposite team is called Jinzunong, an agricultural school from Akita Prefecture. Before Koshien opened, few people supported this "weed army", thinking that they could win one, and if they were lucky, they would win two, and that's it. But after this summer, they will become famous in Japan for beating many giants to reach the final, and the main player Keisei Yoshida was selected by the Hokkaido Ham Fighters as a Japanese professional baseball player in first place.
In the world of baseball, being ahead doesn't mean anything. From 2 to 1 to 2 to 3, all you need is one ball, one swing.
Omi High School is always one step away from the championship
Lin Youshu is not a talented player, he is only 170 cm, relatively short among shooters, and the ball speed is less than 140 km/h. 2018 and 2019 were big pitchers' years, with Keisei Yoshida, Kyoshinobu Okukawa and Ronki Sasaki in the same or later editions. Yoshida has a ball speed of 150km/h in his third year of high school, 154km/h for Okukawa, and 163km/h for Sasaki, making him a genius among talents.
As for Lin - in fact, there are not so many professional baseball stars who have come out of Koshien, which is more for ordinary high school students. As Hanamichi Sakuragi said to Coach Anzai, "Dad, what was your most glorious moment?" Is it the All Japan Era? And I am now. "This is the supreme stage for all Japanese high school baseball players, and many people's baseball careers end here, and after graduation, they will go to university, become members of society, and remember the sweat and tears they shed in the summer 20 years later.
If a person can get into professional sports, you can see it at once. Just like if you are in high school, there is a black brother in your classmates who is 205 centimeters tall, weighs 110 kilograms, flies away, and is the No. 1 high school basketball star in the United States, then you know at a glance that he is going to the NBA.
But you also know that your other classmate, 185 cm, 85 kg, is well-proportioned, plays in the small forward position, has a good shot - he may be the basketball star of your school, but he will not go to the NBA, his future belongs to college, play at most a few NCAA games, then work in a bank, wear a suit and tie, and recommend a 3.5% annualized financial product to you.
Lin Youshu is such a person.
Although he performed well in Koshien and made the Japan U-18 team, no team was willing to ask for this small pitcher from Omi High School in the 2019 Professional Baseball Draft. He eventually went to the Seino Transport Team of Social Man Baseball and became a member.
Social Man Baseball in Japan is an alternative to professional baseball, college baseball, and high school baseball. When high school baseball players graduate, if they still want to continue playing, there are several options: top players enter professional baseball, are willing (and can be admitted) to go to college, and then go to the company as a member, participate in the company's baseball team, generally half a day to work, half a day to train.
Hayashi Yushu during the Saino transportation period
Saino Transport's pitching coach Shoji Saeki discovered Yuki Hayashi , he knew that the young man was not convinced, he knew that he still wanted to go to professional baseball, so the two agreed that after the professional baseball draft time regulations (you can only participate in the draft after entering social baseball for 3 years), if you are unsuccessful in running again, you will continue your baseball career at Saino Transportation.
During the three-year journey of joining the company, Lin Youshu did not go smoothly, with a fatigue fracture of his elbow in May 2020, a comeback to pitch in February 2021, and another bone fracture in October. But in the past three years, he has been aiming for professional baseball every day, training harder than anyone else, just for that unattainable dream.
The draft rule of Nippon Professional Baseball is to select by round. In the first round, each team chooses what they want most; In the second round, choose the second you want. If several teams want to choose the same person, they are decided by lot, and they can usually be selected for more than a dozen rounds. The 2022 Professional Baseball Draft is almost the shortest ever, and the economic conditions of all teams are poor in the current environment, most teams have only been selected 5 to 6 times, and in the sixth nomination near the end of the conference, the Tohoku Lotte Golden Vultures selected 21-year-old left pitcher Yushu Lin from Seino Transportation.
In the conference room of Seino Transportation, a member wearing a blue overalls cried bitterly in front of the computer, and the colleagues around him filmed the scene with DV.
2022 Professional Baseball Draft
This is not a story of a hard-working high school genius dominating the professional game, but a story of how a man faces himself and breaks free from the mire of pain to reach his own promised land in the midst of long failures and unwillingness.
That could be our story too.