Manager Ota, who was generally relaxed about most things, held his position on this one with unusual firmness.

The players were at the age where they should be pouring everything into their development, and instead they were spending significant portions of their time and attention on their phones. It wasn’t a matter of any individual player being undisciplined. It was a structural problem, a constant ambient drain on focus and energy that accumulated across a roster and showed up in practice quality in ways that were difficult to measure directly but impossible to miss entirely.

Social progress and technological development were not uncomplicated gifts. The players of previous generations had been simpler in this regard, their attention less fragmented, their mental space less crowded with incoming information. The current generation was not worse as people, but they operated in an environment that made sustained, undivided focus genuinely harder to maintain.

Several other powerhouse programs had already responded to this with clear policy: phones collected during school and training hours, returned on rest days and holidays. The logic was straightforward and the implementation was consistent.

Seido’s policy, by comparison, was considerably more relaxed. Coach Kataoka’s threshold was that phones stayed away during active training. Beyond that, players managed themselves. Back in the dormitory at night, they were on their own time.

Manager Ota had accumulated opinions about this arrangement over some time.

Coach Kataoka listened to the full argument and then responded with the kind of unhurried clarity that came from having thought about the same problem from a different direction.

“You can’t whip a champion into existence. The players who come to this school, especially those who’ve traveled from other regions to be here, already have high levels of self-awareness. The string in their minds is already pulled tight. Add more pressure on top of that and you risk snapping it rather than tightening it further. As long as they’re focused during training and during games, that’s what matters. The rest of the time is theirs.” He paused. “As for the media reports, they need to learn to live with them. If they can’t handle this now, what happens when we’re at Koshien? We can’t cover their ears there.”

Manager Ota sat with this for a moment and then conceded the point.

The logic was sound. A player who worked hard because they had internalized the reasons for it was a different thing from a player who worked hard because external pressure left them no alternative. The former was sustainable. The latter produced compliance without commitment, and compliance without commitment had a way of failing exactly when the situation became most demanding.

A forced melon isn’t sweet. The phrase applied here as well as anywhere.

With the coaching staff maintaining its position, the wave of media coverage moved through the team unfiltered.

The question of who had emerged as the story of the second game became a genuine debate among the players as they sorted through the coverage. The first game had centered on Yuuki and Zhang Han, with the added novelty of Zhang Han’s left-handed pitching debut. The second game had removed Zhang Han and Miyuki from the starting lineup entirely, which had created a different kind of visibility problem for the coverage.

When the sorting was done, Miyuki Kazuya had generated more than fifty individual articles of recognition.

The number surprised some people, and on reflection it probably shouldn’t have. During the period when the third-year seniors were still on the roster, Miyuki’s contributions had been real but partially obscured by the larger personalities around him. His position as catcher placed him in a role whose difficulty was invisible to most spectators and whose influence on the game’s outcome didn’t translate into the kinds of counting statistics that drove headlines. Zhang Han’s fame had outpaced his partly because of position, partly because of the moments the tournament had provided to each of them.

With the seniors gone and the core hitters sitting, Miyuki had stepped into the foreground in a way that finally gave observers the angle they needed to assess him directly. What they found was a first-year catcher who was functionally running the game from behind the plate, managing a strong-willed pitcher through a complete game, making real-time adjustments based on batter tendencies, and doing all of it without drawing attention to the process. The difficulty of that role, now that people were looking at it properly, was considerable.

Tanba received his own share of attention, with more than twenty articles dedicating space to his performance. The high-breaking curveball had made an impression that was difficult to write around.

The praise from media and classmates alike settled over the team as the days moved toward the third game.

Their opponent had been determined: Sensen High School, a West Tokyo program. Not a powerhouse by the standard that Inashiro or Ichidai San represented, but a team with genuine competitive strength that had been making consistent progress in recent seasons. The bracket had finally brought Seido face to face with a fellow West Tokyo school after two consecutive East Tokyo opponents.

Sensen had not had a quiet moment since the matchup was announced. Their coaching staff and players had moved into preparation immediately, treating the upcoming game with the full weight of focus it deserved.

The Seido players, for their part, found that weight difficult to locate.

It wasn’t carelessness exactly. When practice came around, they did the work. The mechanics of preparation were present. But underneath the execution, the tension that usually drove competitive preparation simply refused to engage at the appropriate level.

The reason was embarrassingly straightforward: Seido had never lost to Sensen. Not once, across every meeting the two programs had shared. The outcome of this game felt, in some quiet corner of each player’s mind, like something that had already been decided before the first pitch was thrown.

The feeling was intellectually recognized as dangerous by every player who noticed it in themselves.

Recognizing it and correcting it were different operations.

Coach Kataoka saw it clearly and found himself without a clean solution.

The decision to let the team absorb the media environment rather than insulate them from it had been the right call for their long-term development. But right calls produced their own complications. Players who had been working their way up through the second and third teams, who had never experienced the public attention that came with being a nationally recognized program, had moved in the span of two games from anonymity to something close to celebrity.

The adjustment that kind of shift required was not instantaneous, and the symptoms of incomplete adjustment were visible in how the team was approaching a game against an opponent it had decided, without quite deciding, it had already beaten.

Their eyes had moved past Sensen entirely. Seihou and Osaka Kiryuu occupied the far horizon of their ambitions. Closer in, Inashiro and Ichidai San represented the genuine tests they were building toward. Sensen sat between them and those tests, and the mind had an inconvenient tendency to look past obstacles it considered resolved.

The problem was that Sensen had spent recent seasons becoming something more than their historical record against top programs suggested. They had never beaten a powerhouse in West Tokyo, not Seido, not Inashiro, not Ichidai San. That record was accurate.

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