Irregulars

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Irregulars is pretty much your run-of-the-mill sports manga that employs the classic declining sports team trope where it struggles to get enough members and only dreams of returning to the former glory of its heyday era, but with a strong emphasis on the concept behind it being touted as "the team that was hated throughout Japan". The story kicks off with a rag-tag team of 3 misfits, short of the 9 people needed for a proper baseball team, and this restriction is the only one holding the MC Hibino back. He's an ambitious aspiring baseball player who wants to go to Koshien no matter what ... and he's determined to get there with the joint team with Meikyo. The first chapter itself finishes off with such a joint team partnership between two schools, of which Hibino has to play baseball with the delinquents who ganged up on him as well as the baseball prodigy that turned rough who saved him.

The other two misfits aren't as interesting of a character as Hibino so far, as Hibino himself has the quirkiest trait of being dead set on baseball itself. The story advances towards slowly getting the team members to play baseball together while making it seem near impossible, leaving each chapter super tense as Hibino's dumb idealism seems to pay off well in the end. It's so satisfying to see the characters go from aggressive cynicism to breaking into a smirk or sharing the same joy Hibino emanates from playing baseball. Seeing how Hibino decides to face the repercussions of his naïve idealism would be the highlight of this story at this point, which makes this story less about the game and more about the characters themselves, meaning to say that it's less a plot driven story but a character focused one.

Since at the point of reviewing only 5 chapters have been translated out of 32 (I'm also going to read ahead in Japanese), there isn't much to say but such a story has a lot of potential due to the whole concept behind it, which I'm expecting that each delinquent member of the team would eventually change for the better and bring Jōsei to Koshien (as shown in the first colour spread in the first chapter with everyone donning their uniforms at what I'm guessing would be Koshien).

Definitely do check this out to find out if it does live up to the prologue as a tale that drove the entirety of Japan into a frenzy!