The most telling moment of Chapter 451 of Jaja’s serialized novel “Out-of-Spec Amateur’s Pro Baseball Life,” published on Kakuyomu, comes not on the field but in the parking area outside an arena, where the protagonist waits for a dinner date and misreads a group of students’ request for a photo. He assumed they wanted a picture with him. They wanted a group shot with the arena behind them, Kakuyomu’s chapter recounts, and afterward one of them looked at his height and asked whether he played volleyball.
That mix-up — a moment of private embarrassment the protagonist later recounts to his teammate Taiga, who laughs at him — anchors the chapter. It sits alongside two other threads: the volleyball match he attended the day before, and the start of fall camp, where the pitcher is putting in roughly 1.5 to 2 times the training menu of other players.
The Photo Misunderstanding Outside the Arena
The embarrassing incident came after the match. The protagonist had promised to take Yumi out to dinner, so he was waiting near the arena when a sizable group — probably students, he thought — asked him to take their photo. With time before Yumi arrived, he agreed with a smile. Then several phones were handed to him and the students lined up in front of the arena backdrop. That is when he realized, according to the chapter, that they had not arranged a photo with him; they wanted a group commemorative shot. None of them appeared to know who he was, and after the photos were taken, one asked, looking at his height, whether he played volleyball too.
Before the realization hit, he had been thinking the attention was simply part of being a public figure. Afterward, he could barely remember whether he had managed to smile and talk normally, the chapter says.
170 km/h, a No-Hitter and a Save Record That Stood
The protagonist uses the moment to take stock of his own standing. This year he played in the WBC and reached 170 km/h on the radar gun. He did not break the saves record, but as a starter he threw a no-hit, no-run game. His name recognition has risen, he writes, and in Osaka he now gets called out on the street more often. Because of his conspicuous height, he admits he had started to assume that in Osaka hardly anyone did not know him — and that assumption, Taiga tells him, was pure conceit.
He had indeed been greeted several times at the arena before the match started, but the student group’s ignorance showed him his recognition was still lacking. His resolve, as the chapter puts it, is to keep performing until not just the baseball world but the entire Japanese public knows who he is. The unexpected off-day humiliation, he writes, gave him new motivation for next season.
Fall Camp Means Building the Body, Running Extra
The chapter then shifts to fall camp. The pitcher is smashing pitches from the batting-practice mound, but he is not skipping his pitching work — fall camp simply does not emphasize throwing volume. The focus is physical conditioning: running and strength training at high intensity, which is easier to do without games. He has been completing about 1.5 to 2 times the menu of other players and remains energetic enough that the coaching staff has been taken aback.
One Home Run All Season, and Taiga’s Advice on Waiting
With permission, he has also been joining the position players’ practice. He got legitimate at-bats this season but managed only one home run, and he was completely overmatched by veteran slugger Dōjima. His conclusion: he simply needs more at-bats, and the only way to get them is to keep swinging. Fall camp’s batting practice, even against a BP pitcher, is a rare chance to actually square up pitches, and he does not intend to waste it.
Taiga’s counter is that a good hitter is not defined by hitting difficult pitches but by crushing the pitch he is looking for, especially mistakes — and he points to the protagonist’s home run, where even a late swing sent a bad pitch to the deepest part of the park because of his swing speed and power. The chapter closes with the protagonist resolving to find his timing by repetition during fall camp and lock in the feel before the season ends.
