Tag: baseball

Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu

In English Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu would be mean something like “The Macmillan High School Girls’ Hardball Baseball Club.” A 2-volume 4-koma gag manga about girl’s hardball baseball, which is apparently a real thing in Japan, even though there are only 16 teams at the high-school level, in this manga at least.

One would think that premise would be interesting enough, but the author went further. Male sports teams in manga tend to have female managers, so the author gave the Macmillan team a male manager instead.

Since Masakiyo is a rare breed of high school boy (even in this ‘politically correct’ age) who loves cooking, sewing and laundry and has relatively no interest in or knowledge about sports or girls, it would seem he’s not much different from your female regular team manager. And indeed, possibly because the manga is so short that there was no time to explore complex concepts, remarkably little fuss is made about his presence on the team. His classmates tease him only a little, with one exception the girls get used to having him around quickly and don’t really treat him as a ‘boy’ and he himself doesn’t spend any time thinking about gender roles, he just gets on with the washing and mending.

Macmillan Yakyuubu is short, but it does manage to cover the ‘essentials’ of baseball manga – training, rivals, team bonding and, of course, Koshien. Everything is handled lightly but not necessarily comically. This is one of the least gag-heavy 4-koma I’ve ever read. It’s very laid-back slice-of-lifeish, though the last few chapters have quite a bit of sports action and some rather predictable drama.

I wish I could say the characters are all likeable, but the pitcher really lets the side down. Apart from her, all the other team members are hardworking, friendly, fun-loving and cheerful. The pitcher is just your typical high-maintenance tsundere who often ruins the mood for everyone concerned, the reader included. She’s also the one who just can’t get over the fact that Masakiyo is a guy, and keeps making things awkward all the time. Still, she gets better quickly, and in any case there’s no time for that kind of drama once the Koshien Tournament rolls around.

All in all, Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu is a pretty good read. I liked that the author didn’t try to shoehorn laughs in where they didn’t belong (Mr. Fullswing, are you listening?!), the sports action was well-drawn and easy to follow, the series is short enough that it ends before it get tiresome, and apart from the first chapter it has very little fanservice. Most of all, I really appreciate the existence of at least one manga about a guy surrounded by girls that doesn’t devolve into a harem manga. Most of the characters keep their heads on and their eyes on the prize the whole time, even when they’re having fun. Good stuff!

Bench – one-shot by Masashi Kishimoto

A one-shot manga by Masashi Kishimoto, author of Naruto. I haven’t read any Naruto in roughly 8 years, but I liked it in the early days so the author is okay in my books. The blurb on mangaupdates is as follows:

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.

Last Inning manga review (spoilers)

Last Inning is a baseball manga about a con bailed out of prison with the condition that he help lead his former high school baseball team to the National Baseball Championships (Koshien). I read from vol 1 up to vol 15 and didn’t like it for several reasons.

1. No likeable characters. Or rather no likeable ones on the protagonist’s team. There were a few interesting chaps on rival teams, but the main team was made up of either slavish do-gooders or whiny crybabies. This includes the management as well.

2. Main character Hatogaya is a self-confessed crook that gets away with massive fraud and scamming innocent people. And is not even sorry for it. I can’t support someone like that. He should be in jail or at least working his butt off to pay people back.

3. Too repetitive. Train, complain, train, play practice game, win, train, complain, train. The kind of training changes, the specific complaints change, but it’s the same old cycle in the end.

4. They try to paint the main team as the underdogs, but they haven’t been an underdog team since they almost went toe-to-toe with Virgin Mary Academy in volume 5-ish. Makes it hard to root for them when they’re so good they can’t find opponents on their level.

5. Apart from the pitcher, the catcher, the cleanup and the captain, everyone else is completely forgettable. This is usually the case in baseball manga, but it’s extra bad here because it makes the matches completely forgettable. Speaking of which,

6. Apart from the Virgin Mary game, all the other games they’ve played have been routine and boring with 0 (zero) suspense.

7. I am disillusioned by the fact that conditions mean nothing in the series – things work out anyway. The VMA game was based on a bet: beat VMA or you don’t go to Okinawa. But they lost. Yet they went to Okinawa anyway. That means the main condition of the series – go to Koshien or the team is disbanded – means nothing. The team won’t be disbanded anyway.

Besides, I skipped and read the blurb of the latest Last Inning volume out in Japan and they not only made it to Koshien but are in the third round against a Tokyo school (don’t blame me, I did say “spoilers” in the topic title). So, yeah. I’m done here.

Update: I hear the Last Inning series is now over at 44 volumes. I wonder how it ended? Time to find out!

Mr. Fullswing manga review

I stopped reading manga and watching anime for a while back there, but I’m slowly picking up one or two series here and there.

I like baseball and I’d heard Mr. Fullswing was really funny so I thought “Why not?”

Story: Saruno, our main character, falls in love with a girl who happens to be the manager of the school baseball team. To impress her, he joins the team and pretends to be a good player, but he’s actually a complete beginner. He does however have a legendarily powerful swing that just might bring luck to the down-and-out Juunishi baseball team…

My verdict: It’s not that funny, and it’s not really about baseball either. Firstly the team has yet to play a real baseball game. They’ve been doing bullshit shonen-style training like catching three balls at once and throwing balls at moving targets. Their “baseball” games have also come with ridiculous conditions like stripping and adding weights. On top of that are all the bogus magical moves like razor balls and super speed, stuff that the series can do without because when it gets serious and normal it’s actually pretty good.

I read up to chapter 54 and it was hard going. There’s a gag on every page, usually a forced and unfunny one. It slows down the progression of the story, and it’s hard to laugh at jokes you know are coming. You know every time you turn a page that Saruno is going to do something “wacky and unexpected” so very quickly you stop finding him amusing and just want him to get on with it. It’s especially bad when it breaks the mood when something important is happening… which is all the time, come to think of it.

As I said, Mr. Fullswing is pretty good when it tones down the LOL RANDUM stuff and sticks to the story it’s trying to tell. That makes the occasional gags more amusing and easier to take. I think the author has realized it, which is why the more recent chapters are slightly more bearable. I don’t I care enough about the outcome of the Year 2-3 vs. Year 1 game to read the rest though.

I dread what will happen when they get to the Summer Tournament and Koshien anyway. If the older team members of the Juunishi team with their Time-stopping Fielding and Razor Curveballs couldn’t crack Koshien then the opposing teams must have some unimaginably (stupid and) powerful techniques that will only make Mr. Fullswing more of a slog than it already it. Maybe it’s best if I quit while I’m ahead.

Ookiku Furikabutte animation error

From Season 2 (Natsu no taikai-hen) episode 1. When Tajima, Mihashi, Hamada and Izumi are having lunch in the classroom, we first see Tajima holding his chopsticks in his left hand.

This is, of course, because he injured his right fingers in the last inning of the Tosei game. A few seconds later he gets up to talk to Shinooka, then gets back to eating. But this time his chopsticks have shifted to his right hand:
Either someone on the animation team wasn’t paying attention to the story continuity or the mistake come from the manga. …It wouldn’t take long to check… Nope, it’s not from the manga. Just an animator that didn’t pay attention to story continuity, happens all the time.