Moshidora

[zherok]

That's another Adachi Mitsuru series. I personally liked Cross Game more, but again, they're all pretty good. H2 is his other big baseball manga (though he's done more.) All three have an anime series, too.

[jaybug]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Windup!

That was my favorite about baseball. I watched Central Anime's version.

[Bob2004]

I guess the funny thing is I don't really care for sports in general. Baseball has a compelling narrative though, in a way that other sports often don't. I think it's the way roles work. It avoids some of the "superstar steals the show" emphasis that dominate a lot of other sports. You can have an amazing pitcher, but someone still needs to hit the balls. And even the least important character is gonna appear in both the lineup and on the field, while something like basketball ends up with a couple players controlling the narrative and the bench hardly sees play at all. Slam Dunk had it's starting five do that, and had a bench only three people deep (IIRC.) And I believe the author's followup to Slam Dunk had no bench at all.

Anyway, the conceit was neat for Moshidora. I think the emphasis on a non-player made it a bit distant (none of the players seemed particularly important beyond hitting the right plot points.) But for ten episodes it did well.

Out of curiosity, are there any baseball shows either of you (or anyone) liked more? I think Cross game is probably my favorite at the moment (and Adachi is awesome all around), though One Outs was really fun too. Shame it only had one season though.

I kind of feel that Moshidora isn't really a baseball anime though, so I can forgive it a lot of that. I mean, it's about a baseball team, but not so much about the actual game itself. The emphasis is very much on the management of the team (at least, apart from those last couple of annoying episodes).

I definitely agree it could have done with being longer though. I'm sure there's plenty more in Management that they could have incorporated with more time.

I also agree that baseball tends to make for a more interesting narrative. The more complex interactions between players and the importance of each role within the team definitely make it a lot more involving, compared to relatively simplistic games like basketball or football.

[jaybug]

Basically it was a Business Management class for the masses. I think the American equivalent would be School House Rock, and we haven't done even that much since.

[zherok]

Could compare it to Moneyball, though that was more statistics than pure business strategy.

[jaybug]

Could compare it to Moneyball, though that was more statistics than pure business strategy.

Okay, I'll bite; and disagree. Moneyball is moving people around to improve things. Moshidora is doing things to improve what those people do. No one got traded in Moshidora. lol Baseball is the analogy at play in the anime, whereas statistics is the analogy in Moneyball. Both are demonstrations of business practices, and the two would have been closer had Billy Beane not been able to trade anyone from his lineup. He would have had to find ways to improve the talent he already had, instead of acquiring it elsewhere.

Or argue it as science versus art. Moneyball is using science, whereas getting people to do better is an art.

[zherok]

I wasn't arguing they were identical, they're both fairly esoteric topics. Not likely there's all that many baseball anime that get any closer to something like Moneyball than Moshidora.

[jaybug]

Baseball, no. But maybe "C" might come closer to the theory behind Moneyball.

[Bob2004]

OK, yeah, anyone who's thinking about watching the live action version - don't waste your time. They've butchered most of it, and Maeda Atsuko's acting is atrocious. To make things worse, the subtitles in the only English release I could find are so incredibly dire, you'll have trouble understanding a lot of things if you don't speak at least a bit of Japanese. And if you do speak Japanese, you'll still find them incredibly distracting because of the quality.

Stick with the anime is my advice. It's far superior in almost every way.