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.
