4: November, 2019

 The new GM made very few changes when he came to Naha. Mike Freund, the assistant GM, was one of the new hires. Freund comes from Iowa, one of those landlocked states with unspeakable cuisine nobody outside of America has ever heard of. Around the office, Freund is known as “Mister No”. It often falls to him to tell other Shisa executives what they don’t want to hear. As you might imagine, he’s not widely popular. I find him to be a nice enough guy saddled with a tough job. After the series, he called me into his office.

 “Kusonoki, I’ve got something for you,” he said, pulling a fat accordion file folder out of the safe behind his desk. I hadn’t seen this folder before, but I recognized it immediately.

 Freund handed me a small manilla folder that he pulled out of the larger file. Inside it was a list of names. “We’ve got some prospects we want you to run through that development algorithm of yours.”

 I glanced at the list of players. “It’s not finished yet, the algorithm. Besides, you should have full projections on all of these players already.”

 “This comes from Seattle, Kusonoki. I’m going to need fresh projections on all of those players. We all know the development model is a long-term project of yours, a work in progress, but we’ll take it as it is for now. This,” he said, pointing to the list in my hand, “takes precedence over anything else you’re working on. You’ve got two weeks.”

  Around the office, ‘This comes from Seattle,’ is code for ‘It’s out of my hands, and there’s no use in fighting it’.

 “Two weeks is possible,” I said, “but the data entry on these alone will take me days.”

 Freund sighed and cast his eyes towards the ceiling. “And now you’re going to ask for that intern position again.”

 “Well, yes. This is exactly the sort of thing I could use an intern for.”

 Freund stretched out his arms, as if he was just waking up from a nap, and got up out of his chair. A preliminary to escorting a visitor to the door. Intern positions are a little difficult to create in this office. The GM doesn’t believe anyone should work for free and our internships are all paid. Room must be found in the player development budget if I am ever to get an intern to help me in my work. “You know my answer is going to be the same as Kasai’s [my boss], but I tell you what, Kusonoki, if we get the development budget the GM’s going to be asking for, you can have two interns.”

  The assistant GM isn’t known for sudden bouts of sincere generosity. “We’re not getting any budget increase, are we?” I asked.

 “Doubtful,” he replied. “More likely just the opposite, in fact. The GM’s shooting for the moon in the budget proposal he sent over to Seattle, but I’m guessing funds will be hard to find in 2020. Another post-season series loss isn’t going to give him much leverage when we have that video conference. Anyway. Two weeks, Kusonoki. We’re behind on this thing, and ownership’s not going to be happy if we can’t show some progress.”

 Seigyoki makes much of his money in high-tech, but for matters he deems to be important, he’s purely analog. He doesn’t trust electronic communications for sensitive material, hence, a large accordion file delivered by courier.

 We refer to the contents of that file folder as Project ‘O’ (I think it was Kyoko Tsuda who came up with that name), but few of us know what the aims and goals of the project are. In fact, maybe only Seigyoki himself knows. The list in my hands, made up of players already in our minor league system, some not really considered prospects, shed no light on the subject. For all the secrecy, the folder is nevertheless famous around here, as the occasional, random, small project for various executives has come from it. And now it was my turn. The connection between these tasks isn’t entirely clear, and some of them, like my updating of minor league player development projections that we already have, look suspiciously like make-work.

 Naturally, I resented the intrusion on what I deemed to be my more important efforts, but I couldn’t really blame Freund, to be fair. There was no sense in sulking; “it came from Seattle”. I got to work. The sooner begun, the sooner finished, the sooner I could get back to my more important duties.