Worried that Lin Guanglai's mentality might be affected, SoftBank's catcher called for a temporary pause before facing Seibu's foreign hitter in the fourth and fifth positions, and then walked straight up to the pitcher's mound.
The catcher partnering with Lin Guanglai today is not Yamashita Fumizuki from the second team, but the current starting catcher of the SoftBank First Team, the well-known veteran Hosokawa Kei—he previously played for the Seibu Lions and was Seibu's legendary catcher Ito Kei's handpicked successor. Throughout his career, he caught for many famous pitchers, including Matsuzaka Daisuke, Yu Darvish, Maeda Kenta, and Kikuchi Yuusei, until he was replaced by the younger Ginjiro Tanaka due to age, and transferred to SoftBank in 2010.
