
by Adam_9316
Ethan Bennett has the kind of nickname that sticks because everyone thinks it is true. At Mill Creek High, they call him Bunt. No power. No arm. No future. The kid who cannot hit, cannot throw, and should never be trusted with a place on the varsity baseball team. He only tries out because his pride gets ahead of his brain. Then Ethan finds an old glove in the abandoned equipment shed behind the town’s dying ballfield. It belonged to Caleb Hart, Mill Creek’s forgotten baseball prodigy, a seventeen-year-old who died in 1945 before he could play the championship game that was supposed to make him a legend. Somehow, Cal is back. Old-fashioned, impossible, and terrifyingly good at baseball. Cal can pitch like a ghost story. Ethan can barely catch without flinching. But when Mill Creek’s broken team starts chasing a season no one believes they deserve, Ethan discovers that being useless in the spotlight is not the same as being useless forever. Behind the plate, bruised, scared, and stubborn enough to make better players furious, he begins to learn the one thing nobody expected from him. How to hold the line. Because sometimes the smallest play changes the whole game.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 23 Oct 2026, 11:48 UTC
Entry forecast updated 23 Oct 2026, 11:48 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Not enough recent follower history to estimate a shadow rank yet.
beats 3% of similar stories
not enough data yet
needs about a week of observations
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 50–149 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.