Rookies

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"The little bird cannot imagine what is in the big bird's mind. In other words, small-minded men cannot understand the ambitions of great men. The size of your ambition is a measure of how big a man you are, Do not mock people for having dreams!"

A manga by Masanori Morita, creator of 80's hit manga "Rokudenashi Blues" who also worked as an assistant for "Fist of the North Star". Since Minori-Sensei also started creating Manga quite early on in his life (High School) he was the ... inspiration for "Bakuman's" MC

What would you do if a Man came up to you, asked you about your dream, tried to find qualities in you and then believed in you from the bottom of his heart. A person who could make you realise and act on your dream?

simple, you'd try to find good
in yourself and reform

Enter Kawato Koichi, who previously took responsibility and willingly resigned himself from his position as teacher at his previous school after nearly killing a student (fell from 2nd floor, not Kawato's fault) .The rookie teacher is then employed by Futakotamagawa High School, a school famous for never having expelled any students. He gets assigned to class 1-B, the delinquent baseball team's class. In hopes that he would fight with them and get himself and the delinquents resigned.
The baseball team after an incident have fallen out and completely given up on Life, smoking, using the club-room as their own gang hideout. The worst of the worst, they're delinquents.

But once they realize their dream, going to the Koshien; the super prestigious national highschool baseball tournament. They lock in.

The dynamic of how despite each member's polarising differences from one another they still manage to work together under the team, "Nikogaku" is what's truly amazing. They don't have top-of-the-line facilities at their school, nor are they respected. Half the players start playing seriously at the start of the manga, meaning they don't have any talent either. What they do have plenty of however, is Heart, Spirit and Love for the game

The Main character of the story is without a doubt, Kawato. Who just like Onizuka from "GTO" is there for his students no matter what. His lack of fear, and "It will be okay" attitude has pulled himself and his team, "Nikogaku" out of many sticky-situations. Kawato's presence alone is able to provide the boy's with courage and vigour because they know, the other team-staff know that he's always there for every single one of them. Always fixated on the right thing and sometimes going beyond the sport, towards Humanity.

However, Kawato is also the type of guy who's very wise but rash and sometimes idiotic too, but you could call that part of his charm as well. Since nobody's perfect, so the best we all can do is help, trust and believe in those who need it and strive for our own dreams.

Overall, I love this show and I rate it highly because I wish I had someone like Kawatou in my life. But now it's my dream to be like Kawatou for other people! It's true that I haven't seen much Sports manga so my opinions may change with time but some will stay true, such as "Working hard and striving hard towards one's dreams is never a bad thing!."

PROS
Art: 10/10, Gorgeous (Better than most manga art today and on par with Vagabond's beauty.)
Plot: 9/10, Above all I really like shows that can express the need to change for a greater cause and the human indomitable spirit.
Story:8.5, I loved every last bit of it. Truly inspiring and encouraging. Made me try to become a better person.
Pacing 8/10, sometimes the matches may seem like they're going on for too long but bear with it. Every panel is for the sake of the build-up to the exciting bits and climaxes.

CONS
- There wasn't enough of the show. We need after story. IMMEDIATELY.
- I wish some characters were given more panels and limelight. Some people disappear and never show up again, I understand they aren't the focus of the story but I wish they had been given more focus.
- The balance between baseball matches and life outside it was a bit imbalanced.
- I wish we got to see more is One of my Biggest issues with the series, just more, about the School, about the players. I wish we had more that's all

Please check it out, I will re-read it in the future. This has officially entered my top 10. 99 because this hit very close to home.

English is not my first language


If you expect to find in rookies a manga focused exclusively on baseball as I expected, I'm sorry to inform you that you won't find what you want. But that's not a bad thing at all, because what you'll get is a mix of a sports manga and GTO (great teacher onizuka).

Rookies is as much about baseball as it is about its characters and their dramas and dreams, the critique of the education system and the professional conduct and duty of a teacher.

In a way, rookies reminded me a lot of American sports movies: It's not just about the sport, ... so much so that there isn't as much focus on the rules and the complex techniques that can be used (which are usually presented with more complex explanations in mangas), but how sports, be it baseball, football, football or basketball, is something important to the characters and how they really want to win; that's where much of the emotional weight comes from. And the final pages only reinforce this idea, since a distribution of credit is made at the end for the staff and the editorial board

Rookies is kind of a cheesy story. Kawato, the cornerstone of Futagotamaga High School says stuff like "Flutter into your dreams, glitter into tomorrow" to a bunch of high school kids. Even if they were well-disciplined ones, I don't think any of them wouldn't have thought that line was corny. However, I think that's one of the biggest charms that Rookies has to offer.

This series does something quite interesting. While the manga has a large focus on baseball, it has an equal amount of focus on character development. Before anything else, Rookies is a series that builds a great baseball team based on a strong ... cast of characters.

Yes, this manga is unrealistically romanticized. Kawato is the type of teacher that anyone would have wanted. He truly cares about students. He's not jaded, where he's desensitized to students' plights and puts himself above adolescent high school students. He'd risk anything, even his career to help his baseball club play games and win Koshien. He's emotional, empathetic, and wants nothing more than, well, for his students to "Flutter into [their] dreams." Would there be any teacher that goes that far to the extent of his students? An emotional bastion, a wholehearted and honest person that props his team up? Probably not.

Yet, this is exactly what's emotional about this manga. It's not half-assed. Kawato goes and has heart-to-heart conversations with delinquent kids that never got praised in their life, violence being the only language they ever spoke. It's not like the kids aspired to be Yakuza their entire life, and they, too, want to live their youth with purpose. But, they didn't have the opportunity, the courage, and the spine to take the first step towards playing baseball with hopes towards something bigger than their previous aspirations could have ever been.

Again, is this realistic? All the baseball club members that were delinquents, reformed towards being better players. While each player has their own redemption arc and motivations towards joining the baseball club, could the entire baseball team be reformed? Probably not. But, it happened. In this story, it did happen, and that raw emotion towards going and aspiring to go to Koshien shines through.

Each player makes an effort to become a better baseball player. They sweat, cry, and run with all their might towards the first base in hopes of not getting out. They will play with injuries and soldier through the pain. They will practice swings outside of practice times to the point of exhaustion. For each player, it's a "death sentence" if they lose, and this emotion truly expressed through the manga panels.

For that much talk about the baseball club members, you might be wondering why I haven't spoke of any in any particular depth, other than Kawato. Well, there's just too many characters to talk about. I don't think there's any weak character in the 10+ player cast of Futagotamaga High School, and it's a treat to watch these players grow not only as baseball players, but also grow mentally.

And another good plus, with a strong cast of characters that finally dove into becoming baseball players comes the actual baseball games. Unlike Cross Game, which forsakes any actual baseball games in favor of characters, Rookies manages to have good baseball games that build on the foundation of the characters. I will admit that the first 50 or chapters were the best ones, where the baseball club gets reformed and finds their motivations towards becoming baseball players, but the games are also good too. This series is very smart about the pacing of each game. This 200+ chapter run only covers around ~1 year of actual baseball, and it's neither too short or long. There's only two powerhouse schools in the region that get mentioned, and there's only around four extensively covered games that go over each play, two of them being practice games. Each game that gets covered play-by-play shows the extent of the progress of the maturity that each player goes through. You get to know each player's strength, the pitching strength of each rival school, and the buildup to all of the runs in the game. The series is thorough, and it definitely feels like a baseball manga that's actually focused on baseball. Because of the one year timeline and the lack of too many powerhouse schools, This manga can focus on just a small pool of rival characters and games that truly matter.

That being said, you can tell character development matters more than the actual game. The biggest game that Futagotamaga High School wins isn't covered too extensively when it comes to play-by-play, but rather on the players' depression at their coach not being at their bench, them being down runs after losing a scoring oppurtunity near the end of the game, and the subsequent turnaround victory that happens when Kawato returns to the dugout as a coach.

Like I said, I liked the earlier chapters the best since it was all about fostering character development, but the later arcs, while good, rely too much on dramatic turn of events. Kawato has to risk his job, or he's suspended from the dugout. Many key players get injuries that threaten them to pull out of the game. A lot of the tension is artificially driven by dramatic circumstances caused by these sorts of things, and the earlier chapters didn't need to rely on that in the beginning.