"Hey, Phelps. What are you drinking? Is that a glass bottle of Gatorade?"

The teammate he gestured at shook his head. "No."

"Well, then what is it?"

He looked to his right, sneaking a sip of the bottle. "It's…beer."

Stark sat down next to him, forcing the bottle from his hand. "Damn rookies…what the hell are you doing drinking alcohol in the middle of a baseball game?"

Phelps shrugged. "It helps my numbers, Mr. Stark. A female journalist from Sports Illustrated interviewed me a couple of days ago, I'm gonna be in some little 'watch out' blurb. What if I can win Rookie of the Year? Until I go 0-for the night I'm downing a pint every bottom fifth."

His elder, frustrated with deciphering the Asian symbols across the label, handed the bottle back to Phelps. "Ridiculous."

"Nope. Smart."

The third baseman, Stevenson, walked down into the dugout, removing his helmet. From his posture, Stark could read that he was the second out, and not their much-needed second run. "Hey rookie, gimme some of your drink. It's crazy hot at the plate."

"You don't want any," Stark said, "Stupid kid's got beer."

He took a closer look, squinting to see the bottle. "He's been hitting well, so I wouldn't mind a sip…but I don't know what that is. It's definitely not Budweiser."

"Got it from someone I met at the gym during the offseason. I was in Japan, working with some friends there. I can't read the symbols, but he translated it…something wants me to say it was called 'knife-edge paradise', but that's whack. All I know is you drink, you produce. Simple as that."

Stevenson took a step back, putting his batting helmet in a cupboard. "It's gotta have steroids in it. Are you that stupid to take drinks from strangers in a foreign country? Asians, you know, they traffick a lot of…tricky stuff."

"No, uh...I asked him when he offered me some of his. He makes it himself, showed me the ingredients. And then he said, 'stuff's better than steroids, mate.' So it is."

The two elder players stared at Phelps long and hard, occasionally switching their gazes to the brown bottle in his hands. Behind them, players shuffled out to the field- the top of the sixth was about to start, and Stevenson, Stark, and Phelps were three-fourths of the infield.

"You have the number of this guy?" Stevenson asked. The rookie gave a nervous nod. "Then after the game, you're going to make a phone call."

POTENT BREW

Japanese bar owner makes fortune off of athletic alcohol

By Georgia Prince, ESPN Correspondent

"Sell alcohol that helps athletes train, perform, and condition more efficiently."-- the recipe for Chuu Sugiyama's success seems more like the makings of a worse disaster for athletic conditioning than steroids. But Sugiyama insists that he only sells his beer to those who know when to stop drinking- and never to underage athletes.

"I've been using it for years, and it's powerful stuff," he said in an interview in downtown Tokyo. "If you don't use it properly, it'll rip you apart like a hungry great white."

After he met rookie standout Darren Phelps last winter during MLB's offseason and sold him his home-made brew, Sugiyama received a flood of phone calls- the word of mouth the beer received rivaled that of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. He now has over a hundred clients in MLB, and several in the ATP, NFL, and even the PGA Tour. In Japan, Sugiyama Beer is the official sponsor of the nation's own professional baseball league, and he's now looking to sell it in supermarkets next to such giants as Budweiser and Miller.

But despite his whirlwind success, Sugiyama explained he never thought of selling his special beer. He made his first batch of the brew at age eighteen, and found he performed better in the gym after a round than while sober. He'd shared it with friends, but until he met Phelps, he'd made his living off the bar he co-operates with one of his roommates, fellow beer enthusiast Jin Yamamoto. At the bar, they sold other local brands, and made most of their money off of sake. Laughing, he said that he thought his do-it-yourself alcohol "only affected him" and that it was a "psychological sort of thing."

"I only asked Darren to use it as a fun little experiment on my day off," he said. "I didn't know he'd respond so well."

However, others have not. Some sportswriters have clamored for the outlawing of beer in MLB, saying that it will encourage more fighting and less initiative among players, who will be more inclined to sit on the bench with their teammates and, as Chicago writer Joseph Torricelli wrote, "drink their insides to ruin". Others find it only fitting in a world with stadiums named for alcoholic beverages and legends such as Babe Ruth who enjoyed a bottle or six. In the midst of this, Sugiyama has received sometimes ignorant criticism, with one sportswriter calling him a "gym-loitering drunkard", though he hadn't heard that particular barb until our interview.

"Drunk?" He said. "Oh no. Never drunk, not me. I can hold my alcohol like you wouldn't believe."

And, hopefully, so can his growing list of clients. With executives from all professional sports divided on the issue, any movement to ban Sugiyama brews from clubhouses nationwide will inevitably fall through. American sports are headed for a future where beer will replace Gatorade as the prime athletic drink- and Sugiyama, who will be watching the fray from Japan, doesn't know himself what the future holds.

"I've never gotten this big before. Obviously, you don't want anything bad to happen," he said, "but the manufacturer of the knife isn't to blame when his brand his found through someone's heart."

Author's note: Hello world. So I guess you guys are going to kill me? If I have any subscribers left…they get an e-mail saying I've done something…and it's a one-shot drabble about Chuu's entry into the athletic drink business.

I last wrote a serious fanfiction (as in, not writing badfic in the wee hours with my dorm mates) two years ago, after I started my sophomore year, and I left a story or two (or three, sorry guys) hanging. I thought of this idea when I was reading about the Olympics over lunch, and I'm a big sports nerd (and I was thinking about YYH earlier in the day), so the story really just wrote itself. So I feel really bad about all these people reviewing my stories and begging me to write more, but this isn't a comeback. I didn't realize it, but my internet life really collapsed after I switched schools (my new school is far more competitive). There's actually an unfinished fourteenth chapter of Beautiful Disaster sitting on my desktop (it's horrible, really, you don't want to read it) that I started before sophomore year. So I apologize for all of that. But I hope whoever's reading this likes it. It's the product of my blissful summer boredom- enjoy.