Pat Allen dug his cleats into the batter’s box, twisting them into the dirt like desperate roots in dry soil. The pitcher, a hulking figure from Toyama with a fastball that seemed to blur the edges of the world, stared him down. The count was 0-2. The crowd hummed like cicadas in the summer heat, waiting for the rookie to fail.

Pat squared his stance, gripping the bat as though it were the only steady thing in his life. His mind whispered like a voice carried on the wind. “You don’t strike out. You don’t ever strike out.” This wasn’t pride talking. It was fact. In the 10 games since his debut with the Niihama-shi Ghosts, Pat Allen had struck out only twice. He wasn’t fast, he wasn’t strong, but he could put bat to ball with a consistency that bordered on compulsive. “You’re a machine. Machines don’t miss.”

The pitcher wound up. Pat saw the ball leave his hand, a white streak slicing through the air. His father’s voice rang in his head, booming and sharp, like it always has: “Do it again, Pat. Again and again and again. Most athletes learn how to succeed and think they’re done. Not us. We keep going until we forget how to fail.”

Pat swung, a smooth arc honed over a childhood’s worth of repetitions. The bat connected, a soft liner slicing toward shallow right field. The ball stopped abruptly in the second baseman’s glove. Pat jogged to the dugout, his expression blank, but inside he was chewing on the result like a piece of gristle. “Contact,” he thought bitterly. “King contact. The hell’s it worth if it doesn’t find grass?”

Pat sat alone on the bench, watching his teammates. His mind wandered, as it often did during these quiet moments, to his father. Ray Allen had been a man obsessed with perfection. Every morning of Pat’s childhood began with the sound of a basketball bouncing on the driveway. Not one bounce, not two, but hundreds. Thousands. It was a rhythm, a pulse that ran through their house like a heartbeat. “Repetition makes the man,” Ray would say, handing Pat a bat when he was six years old. It wasn’t a suggestion; it was a commandment.

Pat loved baseball as a fish loves water: organically, instinctively, wholly. But under Ray’s watch, that love hardened into something else. The cage became… a crucible. Hours blurred into days, weeks into birthdays, swinging at pitches until his hands bled and his shoulders ached. His father never let him stop. “You chose this,” Ray would say. “Now make it count.” The memory lingered like the ache in his hands, long after the skin had healed. The piece that haunted him wasn’t the blood – it was the memory, absent and alien, of choice.

Later that night, Pat stood at the plate in the bottom of the ninth. The Ghosts were down by one, runners on second and third, two outs. The pitcher was a veteran, clever and cruel, who thrived on young players’ nerves. Pat tapped the bat against his cleats. His mind buzzed. “Don’t think. Just hit.” The first pitch came—a curve just off the edge of the plate. Pat watched it spin into the catcher’s mitt. The umpire called it a strike. “That’s fine. You’re fine. You don’t strike out.” The next pitch was a high fastball. Pat swung and fouled it straight back. “0-2 again. Perfect. Your favorite spot.”

The crowd roared, a low hum of noise. Pat stepped out of the box and tightened his gloves. His chest felt heavy, his breaths shallow. He thought of his father, somewhere across the ocean in Texas, watching this moment on a glowing screen. Ray would be leaning forward, hands clasped, his jaw tight. “Are you happy, Dad?” The thought blazed across Allen’s cortex like a shooting star before he fouled it off into the stands.

The pitcher set, and time slowed. The ball hurtled toward the plate, a blur of red and white. Pat swung, feeling pain in his hands as the bat met the ball. It shot toward the right-field line, a lazy, looping arc. The crowd held its breath. The right fielder sprinted, diving at the last second. The ball landed just inside the line and rolled to the wall. The tying run scored. The winning run rounded third.

Pat stood at second base, breathing hard. His teammates roared from the dugout, spilling onto the field as the runner slid home. The crowd roared like a distant volcano, the eruption a lingering curiosity that Pat watched from afar. Before the moment passed entirely, though, Pat deigned to allow himself a small, quiet smile.

In the locker room, a reporter asked him how it felt to deliver the game-winning hit. Pat shrugged. “I put the bat on the ball.”

Later, as the team bus hummed through the neon streets of Niihama, Pat stared out the window. His phone buzzed. It was a message from his father. “Nice hit. Keep it up.” Pat stared through the text before returning the phone to his pocket and resuming his glassy observation of the world outside his window. The city lights flickered on his face as the bus carried him forward.