Day 5 - Game 2 - Iwakuni Koukou vs. Seiko Gakuin

Initially I was going to report that nothing much happened in this game, since the scoreboard had read like this through 8:

Team             1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Iwakuni Koukou   2 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
Seiko Gakuin     1 2 2 2 0 2 1 1

Iwakuni, after taking the initial lead, suddenly lost focus. The manager disputed a balk in the first inning, SS Ueda-kun had 5 errors and an errant bounce hit him in the face. From the team's stats on the Asahi website, their ace pitcher was their only pitcher and was therefore out there for 7 innings before finally being pulled. In the end everyone but poor #11 Nakagawa was used.

But it was the last inning that made me change my story:

Team            9   R
Iwakuni Koukou  5   7
Seiko Gakuin    X  11

Yes, they still lost. No, I didn't think they were going to come back. But that's not the point. The point was that Iwakuni kept on fighting. After the game ended I looked back on Iwakuni's game. And they could've easily thrown in the towel and just hacked away at the plate, becoming one of those teams that just got blown away. But they didn't. They took their walks, they tried to score, they continued to fight.

And for that I will remember them.