Transfer student Yamaguchi Tsutomu has just joined the baseball team. Yamaguchi is overweight and can’t run very fast, so the coach places him on the “D” team. Unlike the “A” team which is has nothing but aces, the “D” team is filled with baseball misfits who don’t expect to see any playing time. Despite this setback, Yamaguchi is determined not to give up his dream of someday becoming a pro second baseman!
The story behind Bench itself is… boring. I like baseball well enough, and I like stories about underdogs doing their best. That’s the story behind 90% of shounen manga anyway, so I might as well like it. But this story isn’t funny or interesting and it doesn’t go anywhere. The D-team does really suck, the A team bullies them for sucking, the main character shouts them down with garbage about Effort and Love of Baseball! But in typical Kishimoto fashion, the D-team suckers are also (ex-)elites, which makes them the same as the A-team and defeats the whole point of the “effort and love” story they have going on there. Why am I not surprised?
Anyway, the two D-team elites end up having a challenge against the A-team, but since they’re both elites it doesn’t matter who wins either way. It’s good this was a one-shot, because there’s no room for continuation. Two guys who were good and suffered temporary setbacks find a way of working around those setbacks. It sounds really heartwarming when you put it that way, and it might have stayed that way if Kishimoto hadn’t insisted on making the A-team A-holes and bringing up his [elite]-vs-[normal]=(elite wins and normal might as well not bother) theory again. In the end defeat = friendship, but the same goes for 99% of all other shounen manga so no surprises there.
Well, it was worth a read at least. I regret reading the online version though. It doesn’t read very well, and they got the Oh/Hanshin reference wrong right off the bat. The reason it’s a problem that Oh (the character) is a Hanshin fan is because he has the same name as the most famous Yomiuri Giants player of all time (Sadaharu Oh), and the Giants and Hanshin are bitter rivals. It’s like someone named George Best being a Manchester City fan, or someone named Babe Ruth being a Red Sox fan. Or something like that. I’m not too good at sports history.
Now, a minor mixup like that doesn’t affect the manga as a whole, but it doesn’t inspire faith in the translation either, especially when it’s so literal. “Anti-athlete’s body.” “Overly-serious tub of lard.” “As the ex-A team ace with a crushed shoulder.” “4th-seater.” (shouldn’t that be “cleanup?”) There should be smoother ways to put it than that.
Disclaimer: Translation is hard work, the translators are doing this for free and in a very short amount of time because they’re rushing to beat other releases (the fools), I make mistakes in my own writing and translation all the time. I’m just saying, that’s why I like to read manga in the original Japanese where possible. I was too lazy to hunt down a raw today, but stuff like this shows me that it’s worth the extra effort.
