Ever since the stadium was outfitted with the Re:FAN System—a product of a global partnership with one of the world’s dominant tech conglomerates—this space has been stripped of all unpredictability. No fluctuations in humidity. No stray particles of dust. Just perfectly optimized temperature and sterile, tasteless oxygen, wrapping the players in a mechanical stillness as they prepare to take the mound.
Baseball, once a sport of drama and chaos, had stood at the brink of extinction. Sabermetrics and scientific training had advanced to such extremes that every play became a solved equation. Batters swung only at statistically correct pitches. Pitchers threw the same spin-rate fastballs, over and over. The game lost its surprises. And the audience, weary of its length and predictability, quietly drifted away.
Then came salvation—from the very tech giants that now govern the world’s computational domains. Their answer: the Re:FAN System. A black box solution, marketed as the ultimate revival tool for professional baseball. No one truly understood how it worked—not the players, not the fans, not even the front offices. But somehow, it brought the crowds back. Now, the stadium roars with a fervor that makes the dark days feel like a distant dream.
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On the adjacent mound, a young setup man fires a 169 km/h fastball with surgical precision. He’s become little more than a “maximum output device,” his body a vessel for velocity. Shhh. The hiss of mechanical breath. His form is stripped of all waste, a perfect replica of statistical correctness. His pitches, just shy of the 170 km/h human limit, are processed by the system as “predictable data”—the peak of human output, reduced to numbers.
And then there’s me.
A full-time knuckleballer, barely scraping 120 km/h. A relic of a bygone era. My warm-up is quiet, unremarkable. I gently touch the tips of my fingers—index, middle, ring. The dull sting of nails pressing into flesh. The roughness of a hangnail. These tiny, unpleasant sensations are my sanctuary— The last domain the system deems “inefficient noise,” The one thing it cannot compute. The last proof that I am still human.
“You’re up.”
The voice crackles through the sterile intercom. They always call me in during the middle innings—when the crowd’s attention peaks. Our team is buried in the standings, with nothing left to fight for. And that’s when they send me to the mound. From beyond the bullpen walls, a tidal wave of uniform applause crashes down.
I focus once more on the sting in my fingertips. Soon, I’ll step onto the mound and hurl a pitch that defies physics— An uncertainty factor the system can’t quite resolve. I don’t know how it processes this noise. No one does. But this numbness in my fingers… It’s the only proof I have that I’m still alive.
And so, cutting through the dead air, I step out of the bullpen.