It takes 16 chapters to assemble a full baseball team - that's with rushing at the end and just recruiting a few generics. I can imagine the axe was probably already set in stone by that point. Too bad 'cause things were just starting to get interesting. A specific villain was introduced, as well as a team with an interesting (?) gimmick that gives our heroes a challenge.
The story didn't have a bad premise, but I guess the startup is a bit slow - a flaw of the premise itself. How can you assemble a team of unique, quality players from scratch in a short time when baseball requires 9 players on a team? Compared to One Piece, for example, where Luffy's half-assed "pirate crew" can function in some capacity even with just 2 or 3 members. One Piece could take its time assembling the crew and write in new characters when it's interesting; this story, however, did not have that option. It might've been setup to fail from the start!
The final chapter is actually pretty high quality and wraps things up decently. I don't care about baseball and there's a lack of villains for the majority of the story, maybe that's why my score is low. It was an okay manga while it lasted and you probably won't feel too burned if you decide to read it (despite the axe).
