Chapter 137

Short Summary
Tokuchi reveals to Kojima his strategy to beat the Mariners and explains why the other teams have been losing so badly to them.

Long Summary
The team are shocked by Tokuchi’s suggested strategy. He tells them there’s more value in an intentional loss than a win by chance. Since this is a league and not a tournament, they’re allowed to lose sometimes. He announces the pitchers for tomorrow and sets a rule: they cannot throw a ball that goes outside the strike zone. If they pitch a 'ball', they have to pay a million yen penalty. For every ball thrown in the strike zone Tokuchi will pay them 500,000 regardless of whether it’s hit. He asks every one to write down their prediction for how many points they’ll lose by. Anyone who gets it exactly right gets the ‘prize money’.

After the meeting Kojima asks him to explain. Tokuchi says they’re already thinking they’ll lose before the game’s started. Most of the predictions fall between 24 and 40 points. Kojima says he thinks those numbers aren’t unrealistic, but Tokuchi doesn’t agree. The Mariners’ average batting percentage is .33, which means 67% of the time they fail to get a hit; If 2/3rds of their hits are poor, the chances of holding them scoreless in an inning allowing for one runner on base is 60%.

Kojima says that’s not how things are working out in reality because they get points almost every inning and dominate every game. Tokuchi says it’s because in reality it’s not their batting percentage that’s terrifying, it’s their on-base one. The Mariners’ batting percentage is .330 but their on-base percentage is .513. The reason the latter is so high is because of the ‘horrible’ amount of 4 balls they get. A common pitching strategy is to intentionally walk a strong batter in the hopes of fighting it out with the next weaker batter instead, but this has allowed the Mariners to score highly every game.

Tokuchi says he’s noticed the count significantly affects their batting ability too. Takami’s batting percentage is .560 when the count is 0-2, but when it’s 2-0 it’s only .244 (meaning he gets a hit 56% of the time when the pitcher’s made two faults, but only 24.4% of the time when he has two strikes against him). Brooklyn hasn’t had a single hit this season with the count at 2-0. Tokuchi gave the pitchers a penalty so they wouldn’t throw balls to the Mariners. If the Lycaons pitchers don’t walk them, the Mariners on-base percentage should go down to 0.33, which incidentally is equivalent to the Lycaons on-base percentage.

Kojima asks why Tokuchi didn’t tell all this to team, but he replies it’s no good understanding it in their heads if they don’t ‘feel it with their skin.’ They need to feel how they’re defeating the Mariners themselves. Though he told them to lose the game, Tokuchi says he doesn’t really intend on that happening.

Characters

 * Tokuchi Toua
 * Kojima
 * Kurimizawa
 * Ideguchi
 * Sugadaira