On his first day at Divine Eagle Academy, Tetsu felt at home. This was a school for winners. The weight rooms stank with effort at the end of each day. Olympic hopefuls circled the tracks. Professional scouts bought parking passes in the principal’s office.
Tetsu liked to watch the afternoon buses roll in, full of doomed athletes from other schools. Some looked at the gleaming entrance and visibly swallowed. Others kept their eyes to the ground. Hours later, they’d limp away, tears making tiny marks on the sidewalk.
As a first-year shortstop, Tetsu had no hope of starting, but he was happy enough watching his seniors mercy-rule their opponents. He knew he’d get his chance. His training was scientific — broad jumps, power cleans, reaction drills, ice baths. He wasn’t first to arrive or last to leave, but that’s only because every one of his teammates was equally dedicated. They’d won the Koshien five years running, and #6 was guaranteed.
47,000 fans screamed as Matsuda hit the grand slam that would seal the final game.
Then the center fielder from Muddy River High ran up the wall and caught it. Four meters off the ground. Three outs.
But he didn’t stick the landing. He left the field on a stretcher, surrounded by his teammates. There were only ten.
Tetsu counted them again. That’s… three pitchers and no backup fielders? How did they get to the finals?
No matter. It was still 4-1 in the bottom of the ninth. Their ace reliever, Suzuki, was fresh. The Divine Eagle Band played his fight song as he took the mound. Tetsu imagined sprinting out of the dugout, joining his comrades to wave the navy pennant.
Suzuki struck out the first batter with a splitter, the second with a sinker.
The third, a beanpole whose glasses glinted in the stadium lights, fouled off eight pitches before walking.
The fourth, one of the scrawniest high-schoolers Tetsu had ever seen, laid down a desperate bunt and beat the throw.
The fifth batter, Tetsu recognized. It was Izaya, who was expelled from Divine Eagle last year after a brawl with Suzuki over some girl. The pitcher stared him down, then brushed him back with an inside fastball. Izaya yelled something, Suzuki yelled back. Tetsu couldn’t make it out over the fight songs and cheer squads.
Izaya hammered Suzuki’s next pitch right back at him. It hit him in the nuts — ow! — but Suzuki somehow controlled it, stopping anyone from reaching home. Then he hobbled off the field with his arm around Coach Takashi’s shoulders.
Takashi handed Suzuki off to his assistants. He looked to the dugout. Ushida, who’d pitched a shutout the night before, rose to his feet.
“He’s mine.”
“Are you sure, Ushida? How’s the arm?”
“He already struck out twice tonight. He can’t touch me in his condition.”
After a long look, Takashi nodded. Ushida trotted out to the mound. Tetsu felt the impact as 94,000 hands began to applaud.
But they weren’t applauding Ushida. That center fielder was back — hobbling to the plate. The scoreboard announced him as Mizuno Ryota.
What is happening? He can’t even walk!
As he took his stance, both schools’ bands inexplicably fell silent. The cheer squad captains lowered their megaphones. Tetsu could hear the players clearly.
“You already failed twice!” Ushida cried out. “And now you’ll be the final out! Why so stubborn?”
Do they know each other?
“Baseball is like life!” replied Mizuno. “Everyone gets out sometimes! But even if you fail twice, one for three still makes a great player! I’m not done yet!”
“You’re pathetic!”
“No!” Mizuno lifted his bat, swaying slightly with the pain. He pointed to the left-field wall — a called shot. The crowd gasped. “I’m going to be a great ballplayer! I am… the Boy with the Golden Bat!”
Tetsu’s teammates were cackling, but he didn’t join in. He was getting a funny feeling about this whole situation.
Mizuno settled into a stiff crouch. Ushida hurled a fastball straight past him, then another. The bat never left his shoulder.
“This is the last one, Ryota Mizuno! I’m ending your career today!”
“Bring it on!”
Ushida released the pitch. Mizuno whipped around with a cry of pain, practically flinging his bat in front of it. Tetsu’s mouth fell open at the sound — the purest crack! he’d ever heard. The ball flew over the left field fence.
Ushida punched the ground. Tetsu’s tears made tiny marks in the dirt.
“I still can’t believe what happened,” said Tetsu. It was the first lunch period after summer break. He sat with three friends, desks pushed together into a square.
“One of the craziest games I’ve ever seen,” said Kenji.
“One?”
“I still think our final was worse. We were up by 20 with six minutes to go, and this punk with bleached hair hit seven threes in a row. I wanted to give up on basketball forever.”
“You should’ve seen the volleyball final,” said Naoki. “They had this kid — must’ve been 160 centimeters tops, but he could jump as high as Kuroba!”
“Soccer wasn’t even fair,” grumbled Daiki.
“You lost to a foreigner, right?”
“He’s half-Japanese, half-Brazilian. I looked him up. His grandfather was, er, Pelé.”
“What?”
“His Brazilian dad showed up at the match. They were hugging each other and crying. Apparently he spent the guy’s whole childhood in prison on false charges.”
“I mean, good for them, but it does suck for you.”
“Have you seen Twitter?” asked Kenji. “People are calling us Second Place Academy.”
“Because we went one season without a championship? That’s stupid.”
“Yeah. Next year will be different. No more freak accidents.”
Next year was not different.
Nishikawa, the school’s tennis ace, made the national finals but lost to some nobody who started two years ago — and was dating Nishikawa’s ex-girlfriend.
Mihara, Tetsu’s girlfriend, lost her most important kendo match to a full-blown gyaru who tripped over nothing and struck the winning blow by chance.
In the national meet, their relay team lost to a team of… horse girls? They all wore headbands with animal ears and impractical shoes and won by forty meters.
Second place, second place, second place.
Tetsu ran three miles every morning and lifted weights three times a week. He made the baseball starting nine, and they swept the regular season. But in the Koshien, they were shocked in the semifinals by some industrial school with no baseball pedigree. They were enormous — Tetsu knew about steroids, but could steroids also make you taller? They smashed five home runs and played ironclad defense; Divine Eagle never stood a chance.
As he endured a series of crushing handshakes from men shaped like refrigerators, Tetsu spotted Muddy River High’s team in the stands. Their glasses kid was scribbling notes. Mizuno — sorry, “Golden Bat” Mizuno — looked worried.
Tetsu skipped the finals, but couldn’t stop himself from watching the last innings on TV. Mizuno, who had acquired a black eye somewhere, came up with two outs in the ninth. His shallow fly caught a freak gust of wind and bounced off the left fielder’s swollen head for a home run.
After summer break, the atmosphere was terrible. It didn’t improve.
The Divine Eagle sumo captain got tossed out of the ring by an ex-judoka who, according to his own Twitter, took up the sport after becoming “addicted to pizza”. (Tetsu now spent his evenings on Twitter, defending his school’s honor in #SecondPlaceAcademy threads.)
The new American football team, a group of bitter refugees from second-place teams across the school, cruised through its matches with sheer athleticism — until a team of juvenile delinquents left them bleeding in the dust.
Tetsu’s new girlfriend — Mihara had left school to train her swordsmanship in the mountains — set a national record on the balance beam. This was immediately broken by a girl with violet hair who got the highest possible score, looking bored the whole time. Then some guy in a gi jumped out of the stands and proposed to her. She broke his nose with a kick and fled the gym as he stood there with his bouquet, blood gushing down, still smiling.
In his third year, Tetsu tore his ACL. No more baseball.
At first, he staggered out to practice on crutches. But he couldn’t stand the mournful glances from his teammates, or the thought of watching another second place.
He took to spending his time in the library, scrolling Twitter and watching scrappy outsiders beat objectively better teams. The contagion was spreading; no champion was safe.
One day in June, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see three students — a short boy with a binder, a tall boy with thick glasses, and a shockingly beautiful girl — crowded around his computer.
“You’re Hayashi Tetsu, right?” said the girl.
“Yeah. What’s it to you?”
“Looks like you’re a real sports fanatic,” said Binder.
“You could say that.”
“We’re starting a team,” said Glasses. “A fantasy sports team.”
“What are fantasy sports?”
“It’s a big-time thing in America,” he replied. “You pick teams of players from different schools, and score points if they do well.”
“This is its first year as an official sport in Japan,” said the girl. She had pink hair, and her uniform broke at least three rules. “All the best academic schools are favored; they have huge teams. Everyone here plays a sport, so we can’t even find a fourth member.”
“But then we saw you!” said Binder. “It looks like you have time — no offense — and we could use someone with real experience to give us a leg up. Someone with an eye for raw talent, who can see past the numbers and pick the right underdogs.”
“With your help,” said Glasses, “we could make this year a real… Allsports Fantasy!”
“A what? Why is your voice like that? Why are you putting emphasis at the beginning of those words?”
“All great questions, which we will gladly answer in the clubroom. Fair warning: It used to be a broom closet.”
“Are you in?” asked the girl.
Tetsu thought for a moment, then sighed.
“Guess I’ll give it a shot. I know a winner when I see one.”