Time always flew by when people were relaxed. Before they knew it, the three-day Seaside Trip had come to an end, and once they returned, they began the Joint Practice before the Practice Match.
"Axia! (A random shout!)"
"Smack!"
"Nice ball, Ei-chan!"
"A Shin, practice twenty pitches with me!"
"Okay!"
"Very good. None of you have fallen behind on bunting or base running after coming back. Keep it up! The Practice Match is in three days!"
With the Practice Match approaching, Sendou split the team into several groups. Sawamura and Takeda, the pitcher-catcher pair, stayed in the Bullpen to build their coordination, while everyone else practiced bunting or Meditation-Style Base Running.
Meditation-Style Base Running meant imagining the pitcher's condition and running the bases accordingly. After all, they had practiced with the Wildcats Little League for a long time, so their minds held a huge number of impressions of their pitches. Every night, they watched videos from their previous and current practices—both to deepen those impressions of the Wildcats' pitchers' high-quality pitching and to identify mistakes in their own base running and bunting.
Because they had been consolidating their training over the past two days, they had even reduced their morning run to just three kilometers for warm-up.
"Alright, take a break first. It's hot again today, so make sure you drink plenty of water!"
"Yeah!!!"
"How are they doing with their training?" Fumino, who knew absolutely nothing about baseball, asked from beside him.
"They're doing okay. That idiot and A Shin have decent coordination, neither especially good nor bad. But with this Restrained Throwing Style, A Shin rarely misses catches now! A Shin's shoulder is weak, but he's done pretty well with the training methods I gave him. Still, his talent is limited. Reaching his current level is