Story:
We open with our main protagonist, Sawamura Eijun, being recruited by Seidou, a school with a proud tradition of throwing balls and hitting them with sticks. He sets his sight on becoming the lead pitcher and getting the coveted "Ace number." From there, the anime follows Seidou's performance in a big tournament and the aftermath.
Let's start with the main problem that really makes this series kind of unbearable. The pacing is horrendously slow. The longer games take longer than the card games in Duel Monsters and at least those have holographic monsters attacking each other. In these, we have a lot of the same thing with the pitchers throwing balls and the plays that follow and long, drawn out stretches of the crowd reacting. So, we have slow games, slow crowd reactions & slow training sequences. This series is actually so goddamn tedious and boring that you either have to let your mind wander and think about other things or you'll enter a catatonic state. If this is accurate to watching Baseball, it's no wonder the game basically ceased to exist in the Star Trek universe and had to be radically altered to be more interesting in Futurama.
Here's another huge problem I have with this series. It's set up so that we, as the audience, are supposed to be rooting for Sawamura and we're supposed to see him as a pitcher with amazing potential. But he comes across as a rubbish player. He can't control where his pitches go for shit. He's constantly breaking down at crucial moments, screwing the team over and having to be coddled to regain his ability to pitch. Maybe it's just because I don't know much about Baseball, but to me those seem like really horrible qualities for a player. Like, this person would never actually make a competitive team unless they got their shit together.
On the positive side, at least this series doesn't go the usual sports media route of following a group of plucky underdogs. Instead, we have a highly skilled team plus Sawamura and the tension comes from there being a lot of other highly skilled teams that are on their level or a bit above.
Characters:
The big issue with the characters in this is that they're all kind of similar. In the sense that they're all obsessed with baseball. Aside from that, there's not that much to their characters. Sawamura is the energetic protagonist who tries hard but has to overcome his own inadequacy. The coach is the understanding but strict mentor figure. Chris is the calm and collected upperclassman. I'm going to stop with those three examples because this anime has thirty million characters.
The anime also has very weak character interactions and relationships. We see them play together and train together but we very rarely see them talk about anything besides baseball or spend time doing things unrelated to their training or playing the game. Which just contributes to the sense that these guys are all overly obsessed with this tedious game that doesn't matter. I mean, is it normal to cry like a baby when you lose a game?
Art:
The art looks fine. I couldn't tell you if the character movements or pitching forms are accurate to baseball but they move smoothly enough. If I were to bring up any issue, it would be that a lot of the character designs are kind of similar and they basically largely consist of generic looking guys. There's a point where Seidou's old opponents are watching them play a game and it took me multiple episodes to remember who they are and even then it was largely because I was wondering why they kept cutting to these random people.
Sound:
The acting is passable. Mayhaps a bit exaggerated at times but it largely sounds fine. The music is mostly fine. The biggest problem with it is that they constantly play the same music whenever there's a "pinch" or triumphant moment and, in an anime this long, it just feels stale after a while.
Ho-yay:
Maybe if the characters had stronger interactions we would see some that came across as a bit ho-yayriffic. But since the character relationships are generally weak and built around taking a game far too seriously, that doesn't happen.
Areas of Improvement:
1. It would help to show the characters in more diverse situations. Not only could the relationship dynamics be stronger but it could also help flesh them out as characters in general.
2. Speed things up. We don't need ten minutes of crowd reactions for every "big play" and we don't need long pauses between plays. There is a degree of that that can help increase the tension but this anime takes that degree and multiplies it tenfold.
3. Sawamura shouldn't be as rubbish as he is. I understand what Terajima is going for. He wants to follow Sawamura's journey and show him overcoming adversity. I'm sure in series twenty of this he'll actually be amazing. The problem is that he makes him too bad considering he's on Seidou's main team.
Final Thoughts:
If you're a huge baseball fan and you really want something to watch when there aren't any actual baseball games on, this might just be the anime for you. For everyone else, it's far too slow and dull for me to recommend it. And I'm giving it a 3/10 because it's that much of a slog.
