Prologue - Then Why Don't You Try It?
I’d endured the pain of an injury that had stolen my dream of ever standing on the mound again by losing myself in baseball novels. Those stories were the only thing that let me breathe through the nights when the scar on my shoulder burned and the what-ifs threatened to choke me.
But the novel I’d clung to the hardest ended in the most gut-wrenching way imaginable. The protagonist, after letting his childhood friend—who had supported him through every grueling high-school game, every injury, every moment of doubt—carry him on her back for years, simply discarded her. He flew off to America, hooked up with the team manager, and that was that. The worst possible conclusion.
Maybe that was why, in a fit of pure rage at an ending that threw away the one person who had never given up on him, I hammered out a comment that stretched to a staggering fifty-seven thousand characters. The moment I hit post…
[Then why don't you try it?]
I was hurled straight into that world.