Diamond No Ace: The Strongest Hitter Has Arrived

No outs. Bases loaded. Zhang Han at the plate.

In the stands, the Seido supporters who had spent most of the afternoon watching their team's two most dangerous bats get systematically avoided were experiencing something between vindication and anticipation.

The bases-loaded strategy had finally consumed its own escape routes. Sensen had loaded the bases before the dangerous part of the order arrived, which meant Yuuki had been walked with the bases occupied and Zhang Han was now standing at the plate with nowhere left to put him.

The feeling of watching an opponent's plan exhaust itself was satisfying in a specific way that a direct home run couldn't quite replicate. The cleverness that Ugai had applied throughout the game had turned back on itself, and the confrontation that had been avoided twice was now unavoidable.

What the Seido supporters did not know, sitting in those stands, was that the Sensen dugout was not experiencing the corresponding despair.

Ugai had been thinking past this moment since before the first pitch of the game.

The bases-loaded situation was not a scenario he had failed to anticipate. It was a scenario he had considered one of the more likely outcomes of the strategy, prepared for it accordingly, and built a specific response into the gameplan.

Walking two batters across an afternoon inevitably created conditions where the third confrontation could not be delayed, and Ugai was a coach who did not build strategies on the assumption that everything would work perfectly. He built them on the assumption that unexpected situations would arise and then prepared for those situations in advance.

The specific preparation for this moment was built on data and on one deliberate structural choice embedded in the afternoon's approach.

The data said: Zhang Han hit fastballs at a success rate that was, for a high school player, essentially beyond discussion. The number was simply too high to pitch around reliably. The data also said: his success rate against breaking balls was lower. Not low in any absolute sense, not a genuine weakness in the traditional meaning of the word, but lower relative to the fastball rate. In a matchup that offered no comfortable options, lower relative success was the closest thing to an advantage available.

The structural choice was the two intentional walks. Both of them had kept Zhang Han out of the box against Maki's actual pitching. Zhang Han had watched from first base twice while the game continued around him, which meant he was standing in the box now without a single at-bat's worth of direct experience against Maki's curveball from the hitting position.

The curveball worked on descending angle. Batters who had not faced it needed at least one at-bat to calibrate the drop, to build the internal model of where the ball was going to be when it arrived. Zhang Han was going into this confrontation without that calibration.

It was not a guarantee. Ugai did not deal in guarantees. It was a probability adjustment, shifting the odds in Sensen's favor by a meaningful degree in a situation where every degree mattered.

In the dugout, a cold, measured clarity sat behind Ugai's eyes that had nothing to do with the chubby, approachable exterior he carried through public interactions.

He who does not think far ahead will have worries close at hand.

On the mound, Maki had spent several innings accumulating the fatigue that long pitch counts produced, and had felt it in his command during the Kominato at-bat and the innings that followed. Something happened to that fatigue when Zhang Han stepped to the plate.

The competitive drive that had brought him to this game, the specific desire to stand across from the player who represented what Seido had chosen instead of him, refilled something that the inning had been emptying. He set himself, found his grip, and delivered with everything he had remaining.

In the Seido dugout, Coach Kataoka watched with his arms folded and his expression unchanged.

He had read Ugai's strategy the moment the decision to face Zhang Han was made, and he understood the logic behind it. The breaking ball approach was not wrong as a concept. Zhang Han's fastball numbers were high enough that it was the rational choice. Ugai had done his homework and arrived at the correct conclusion based on the available information.

The available information had a gap in it.

Two months had passed since Koshien. More than a month since the team's return and the beginning of the autumn preparation period. Coach Kataoka had been tracking Zhang Han's extra work during that time, not through formal observation but through the natural visibility that came from running a program where the facilities were shared and the schedule was known. He had encountered Zhang Han in the batting cage late on an evening not long before this game.

The conversation had been brief, and Zhang Han had not been performing for an audience. He had explained simply and directly what he was working on and why. The swing speed was being developed specifically to address the breaking ball problem, not by learning to read breaks earlier in flight but by compressing the decision window to the final moment before the pitch arrived, waiting until the break was nearly complete before committing, then generating enough bat speed to still make contact with authority on what was essentially a stationary target.

The approach required exceptional bat speed. Zhang Han had it and was developing it further. What had looked to the outside world like a player with a relative weakness against breaking balls was, from Coach Kataoka's vantage point, a player who had identified the limitation and was systematically eliminating it through a method that would make him more dangerous against breaking balls than most pitchers wanted to consider.

Ugai's information was accurate for a version of Zhang Han that no longer fully existed.

At the plate, Zhang Han watched the pitch leave Maki's hand from the elevated release point and tracked it across the distance between them.

The ball was not a fastball. He read it clearly from the beginning, identified the curveball trajectory before the break began, and made the decision that the work in the batting cage had prepared him to make: wait, let it break, let the momentum exhaust itself, and swing when the break was complete rather than when the pitch was halfway there.

The bat arrived at the ball in the final moment of the pitch's useful movement. The contact was flush and centered, the barrel finding the ball at exactly the point where the approach was designed to find it.

The ball left the bat with the sound that full contact produced.

The Sensen catcher registered the white ball in his field of vision and then registered that it was no longer there. The gap between those two moments was too small to do anything useful with.

Two or three seconds passed before the commentator's voice reached the field.

"Soaring! As expected of Koshien's super rookie, Zhang Han has hit a grand slam with the bases loaded."

The scoreboard moved four times.

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