Reviews

I have to give this one high marks because I definitely sat down to binge & finish it, putting other shows by the wayside to finish. It reminds me a little of a gender-swapped Big Windup! insofar as it focuses on an insecure but talented pitcher who just needs a solid catcher who believes in them! They put together a defunct baseball club at their High School that had been disbanded the year before for reasons of an unspecified scandal...there are two second years (Juniors) who want to resume playing but are rather tight lipped about what transpired the year before. So mostly the team is full of first year girls, many of whom were high ranked Middle School players. While Yomi Takeda (武田 詠深) is obviously the main character, the show takes time to give each girl their due, their moment in the spotlight, including their fellow student coach who is a brilliant data analyst and gives Shin Koshigaya an edge in the games they play.

The anime is clearly an advertisement for the manga series, concluding in only 12 episodes. But it's a fun ride with lovable characters. While I'm only a casual baseball fan, I do attend local Minor League games every season and I was fairly enthralled by the baseball action in each episode, even if most games were basically a highlights reel to economize run time. The elephant in the room is the girl's baseball uniforms include shorts, which is ludicrous and only done for fan service reasons, to show off the girls bare legs and their flexing leg muscles. It's laugh out loud ridiculous, but if you can get past this little indulgence, the story is a good one. Also, this series uses what looks to me like a hybrid of 2D hand drawn animation while resorting to 3D CGI for the baseball action scenes. It's a little jarring, but if you're used to Idol shows like AKB 0048 or Love Live it's nothing you haven't seen before. If this show had been subtitled only I probably would've given it a pass but since it had an English dub, it made it binge worthy...and I'm enough of a leg man perv to enjoy the cheesy fanservice. PLAY BALL!