The ninth inning arrived with a tension that felt like a physical weight. The opposing team was no longer laughing or whispering about our field. They were desperate. They had managed to scrape together a few runs earlier in the game because my teammates were still learning the fundamentals. While I had the talent of a pro the rest of my team was still a work in progress. Bunting was especially difficult for them and we had missed several opportunities to move runners over because the ball would pop up or roll foul.
We held a slim lead but the opposing team had a runner on third base with two outs. Their dugout was screaming and their batter was a tall kid who had been making snide remarks about Wakana since the first inning. He stepped into the box and glared toward shortstop.
"Just hit it toward the girl!" he yelled to his teammates. "That is an automatic hole in the defense!"
I didn't say a word. I just looked at Wakana. She didn't look back at him. She just lowered her center of gravity and rested her hands on her knees. Her focus was terrifying.
I delivered a fastball right on the outside corner. The batter swung hard and the ball screamed off the bat. It was a vicious line drive headed straight for the gap between second and short. It looked like a certain hit that would tie the game.
Then it happened. Wakana moved like a blur. Because we lived in the mountains and spent our days running up and down steep slopes our lower body strength and speed were on a different level. She crossed the dirt in a split second and launched herself into a full extension dive. Her glove snatched the ball out of the air inches from the grass.
She didn't stop there. She hit the ground and used her momentum to pop back up to her feet. With a lightning fast release she fired a bullet to first base. The ball beat the runner by three steps.
"Out! Game over!" the umpire shouted.
The batter stood frozen in the middle of the baseline. The teammates who had been mocking her were suddenly silent. Wakana just calmly tossed her glove toward our dugout and wiped a smudge of dirt from her cheek. She had shut them up without saying a single word.
As we gathered to bow I felt a strange mix of emotions. The final score was 4 to 3 in our favor. We had won but it was close.
The truth was I could have ended the game much sooner. If I had thrown at my full power I could have struck out every single batter they had. But I was careful. I was still young and I knew that overworking my arm now would only lead to a career-ending injury later. I also didn't want to completely break the spirit of a local team in a simple friendly match.
More importantly I was hiding my best pitches. My current catcher was a hard worker but his hands were too weak to handle my moving balls or my high velocity breaking pitches. Those were my secret aces. I was saving them for the future. In my heart I knew those pitches belonged to a specific catcher. I wanted to throw them to Miyuki Kazuya one day just like I did in the life I remembered.
"We did it Eijun!" Nobu shouted as he threw his arm around my shoulder. "We actually won a real game!"
"Yeah." I replied with a small smile. "We did."
Our speed from living in the mountains had saved us on defense but our lack of overall skill had kept the score close. We were fast and we were determined but we still had so much to learn. As we watched the other team board their bus in shamed silence and realized that we were no longer just a group of kids with rakes.