The Attention-Seeker's Little Ball (5)
With baseball fully replaced by virtual reality, the daily schedule of a virtual-reality pro baseball team differed somewhat from that of a traditional club.
They still loosened up at nine in the morning with stretching and running—the same as always. But the point was less baseball itself than building the base physical fitness needed to keep training inside the virtual world.
Once the warm-up ended, from ten o'clock they logged into the virtual reality for position-specific drills.
A pro team's virtual-reality center was far more luxurious than anything found in an ordinary home. Gone were the days of simply slapping on goggle-like Connectors and flopping down wherever to play.
"Wow!"
Here, players reclined into massive capsule-style sofas fitted with genuine player-grade connection gear designed to minimize physical strain while they were logged in. The vast training center held more than seventy virtual-reality capsules—more than the roster itself—so that no one would ever be left out for lack of equipment. To Pi Anta's eyes the whole place was an utterly fascinating sight.
"I was super surprised the first time I came here too," Jiyun whispered, sidling up beside her.
"Training efficiency has to be really good this way."
Having lived the pro life herself, those advantages jumped out at Pi Anta at once.
Even a professional club normally works with only one field. When the infield is taking grounders, the outfield cannot run tag-up drills; when batting practice is underway, defensive work has to stop completely. But virtual reality let them log in together and simply set up separate small groups. In the same time slot the infield unit, the outfield unit, and the hitting group could all train at once. The time savings were enormous.
Watching such an efficient system, another question floated up in Pi Anta's mind.
With conditions this good, why are the results such a mess?
It was a perfectly reasonable suspicion, yet now that she was wearing the orange uniform, that kind of speculation was nothing more than spitting in her own face. She decided to drop the thought right there.
A short while later Pi Anta joined Jiyun for infield defensive work.
"All right, infield group—let's keep the energy high today!"
The coach bellowed a spirited shout, and the players answered in kind with a fiery cheer.
"Rai-rai cha-cha-cha!!"
"Rai-rai cha-cha-cha!!"
The chant, thick with something like battlefield camaraderie, left Pi Anta with the dizzying impression that they might be hunting ghosts rather than baseballs.
"Anta, are you practicing shortstop too?"
"Ack!! Regarding whether I may even entertain the question of whether it would be permissible to inquire whether the Marine might first take the defensive position—shortstop being always a joy—!"
"…Wh-what are you talking about?"
For Jiyun, who could not parse the swaggering, over-formal style of the question, Pi Anta translated it back into civilian language and asked again.
"Can you take defense first?"
"Ah, y-yeah."
Jiyun nodded while fidgeting with her glove, looking a little shy. In her eyes Pi Anta was a complete rookie who had only just joined the pros, so the pressure to set a proper example had her wound tight.
"I'm not that great either, but don't get nervous—just take it slow like me!"
With that she settled into a low stance at the shortstop spot, and the coach cracked a grounder from home plate.
Crack!
"Coming!"
The ball headed toward second. Close enough to first that a calm approach and a clean glove would have made it an easy play. Yet the burden of needing to show something as a senior seemed to get to her.
"Whoa?!"
She misread the bounce and let the ball skip right past her.
"Ha Jiyun, get your head in the game!"
"S-sorry!"
At the coach's bark Jiyun scrambled back to the shortstop position and set up again. The coach smacked another grounder—same general course, but slower this time and easier to handle.
"Ugh…!"
She chased it down quickly and this time snagged it cleanly. After finishing the smooth defensive motion she finally let out a breath. Then, catching Pi Anta watching her, she scratched the back of her neck with an awkward smile.
"S-so, how was that, Anta? If you mess up like that you just go back to the start and do it again. I did it on purpose to show you—yeah. On purpose! Heheh."
"Mm. Thanks."
Pi Anta nodded with an ambiguous smile. Once she confirmed Jiyun was heading to the back of the shortstop line, she muttered quietly to herself.
"With her center of gravity that high, no way the defense is going to be clean."
Compared with outfielders who mainly camp under fly balls, infielders have to stop grounders that come in like bullets. Judging the direction instantly and chasing is only the baseline. If you get so locked on the chase that you stick the glove in the wrong place at the last second, the ball slips past by a hair more often than not.
Jiyun was definitely Challenger tier—her reaction speed to the ball was solid, and her acceleration while chasing was actually better than Pi Anta's. The details, though, were lacking. She was so busy running with those fast feet that the precision when she finally extended the glove dropped off sharply.
Watch closely. This is top-tier shortstop defense.
Pi Anta dropped into a stance so low she was practically sitting in midair and lifted her eyes toward the plate. The instant the crack sounded—
"Hup!"
—she exhaled short and exploded toward third.
Grounders near third are usually fast, and because you have to chase opposite the direction of first, even a clean field requires slamming on the brakes and throwing accurately—a genuinely tough course. Pi Anta locked onto the ball and sprinted like a shot. Her first step was excellent and her speed solid enough that a slide would have stopped it with room to spare, yet she forced herself to take one or two extra strides and fielded the ball between her legs instead of backhand. Then she threw cleanly to first and completed the play.
It was a defensive effort that left everyone watching with a strange feeling.
Why does that look so easy…?
Anyone who had ever played shortstop knew the truth: that last ball had been a really difficult course. Normally you would slide, snag it backhand, then fire with everything you had and still barely beat the runner at first. Instead she simply ran over, caught it leisurely, and threw with time to spare. And the timing was not late—not even close.
It was too hard. Yet it looked too easy. That was the irony.
Did she just stroll off to buy ramen or something?
It was rare to see shortstop defense look that relaxed, as if she were merely popping down to the neighborhood convenience store. After that, Pi Anta repeated her so-called "ramen defense" no matter the course—and she did not miss a single ball.
By the time the roughly one-hour shortstop session wound down, a whole crowd of players had already flocked around her, chattering and turning the area into a noisy hubbub.
"Hey, rookie! You're pretty good! How the hell do you make defense look that easy?"
"I seriously thought you were out for a walk."
"Pi Anta, was it? If you're at shortstop you definitely won't live up to the nickname—no hits getting through! Haha!"
"Teach us the secret. Let us defend easy too!"
Hearing all that attention, the attention-seeking urge to show off everything she knew began wriggling and boiling up inside Pi Anta's chest.
You're curious about the secret to making shortstop defense easy, huh. To explain that secret I'd have to go back to my high-school days. Back then I switched to shortstop with nothing but guts and made a ton of errors, and my teacher told me this: "Hey, back when I was a player, you know. When was that, uh…."
…There were endless branches of talk that could have unspooled from there, but—
It's the first day. Acting up for no reason wouldn't look good.
Veterans were rivals, so a little needling was fine; needling the coaching staff, however, was bad for team atmosphere. No matter how good she was, emphasizing that she still stood a step below the coaches would help the team's cohesion more. So Pi Anta swallowed dozens of sentences and answered with concise words instead.
"Based on the coach's teachings—thorough preparation and review. That's the secret."
Jiyun and the rest of the shortstops kept clamoring, but Pi Anta pretended not to hear.
"Anta. You're really not gonna teach me?"
"I already taught you earlier. Based on the coach's teachings…"
"Come on, don't lie!"
"Are you disrespecting the coach right now? No matter how much I fly and crawl, huh? The leftover scraps of experience Coach has eaten are more than all the baseball rice I've ever eaten, you punk."
"What kind of old-fogey talk is that?!"
Pi Anta had to work hard all through lunch just to shake off Jiyun, who kept pestering her. Yet even with the continued refusals, the way the girl clung so tenaciously to learning the know-how could be read as pure passion, so Pi Anta did not really mind.
Maybe I should take advantage of being roommates a little?
She decided she would give Jiyun special private lessons later, when no one else was watching.
Contenders League games—the second-team circuit—were mostly day games unless something special came up. To match the one-o'clock start they ate lunch early, at eleven. Of course today was Monday, so there were no league games. But today another important contest was scheduled.
A little after the meal, at twelve-thirty, the manager and coaching staff stepped in front of the lined-up players again. Two documents glowed on the tablet in the manager's hand.
"All right, let's have fun with the blue-white scrimmage today too~"
Through the scrimmage they would check the players' real-game skills and, on that basis, decide the lineup for the Contenders League games that would run the coming week. Because Contenders' main goal was development, player changes were frequent, yet it was still an important stage that decided who received more opportunities and who received fewer. The players therefore took the scrimmage fairly seriously.
Pi Anta was left out of today's starting lineup. The shortstops who had watched her defense that morning found it quite strange, but being left off the start did not mean she would not play at all, and proper seniors still stood ahead of her, so the decision was perhaps only natural.
"Manager."
One man raised his hand and objected to the starting lineup.
"Could I request a lineup change?"
"Oh, Kang Dongsik. Something not to your liking?"
The giant of a man called Kang Dongsik—the same one who had been kind to Jiyun earlier—was a longtime fixture of the team, a local boss. Regardless of pure skill, his words always carried weight.
"Put the new recruit who came today in as catcher on the team opposite me."
The oldest player on the second team, and a catcher, had suddenly issued a challenge to Pi Anta.