Director: Masuhara Mitsuyuki (Kobato, Shirokuma Café)
Writer: Konuta Kenji (Toshokan Sensou,
Blood Lad)
Main Cast:
Ohsaka Ryouta as Sawamura Eijun
Sakurai Takahiro as Miyuki Kazuya
Character Design: Ueda Minoru
Music: Frying Pan
Fall is a wonderful time for baseball fans. As I write this, I'm eagerly awaiting the first game of this year's World Series, where I'm hoping my Boston Red Sox can secure another title. With that in mind, I watched Daiya no Ace, the latest baseball anime from a country that is crazy about the sport. This title is the most common of baseball shows, in that it is about a high school team that is trying to make the national championships annually held at Koushien Stadium. Despite being a sports show, and therefore a show that I should like as a baseball fan, it still has some work to do. Namely, it needs to make me care.
The best way to make me care about the team's goals is to have interesting characters that are easy to root for. And the two main characters, Eijun, a pitcher, and Kazuya, a catcher, are passable from this standpoint. Eijun is hot-headed, emotional, and more than a bit of an idiot. He has a passion for baseball that gets him into trouble when he visits the elite baseball school Seidou on a recruiting trip. It is here where he meets Kazuya, who carries himself with and has a lot of confidence in himself and his abilities as a catcher. He works with Eijun on their first meeting to strike out a lumbering oaf of a power hitter who was verbally abusing some of his teammates, something Eijun had a major problem with. Overall, I like them both, and I wanted to meet more of the teammates.
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| No, I'm not making a sweaty ball joke. You can't make me. |
Unfortunately, that wasn't in the cards for the first three episodes. Instead of spending time getting to know the team, the first two episodes are spent on an arc with precisely zero dramatic tension aside from the scene described above. The arc is about whether Eijun will join the elite Seidou team or stay at home and play baseball with his much less talented middle school teammates. Seeing as the OP has Eijun wearing Seidou's uniform, we see Kazuya and other Seidou players playing baseball, and his middle school teammates are nowhere to be seen, this arc is a complete waste of time. Even the scene at the end of episode two, where Eijun's middle school teammates are crying over him leaving for Tokyo to go to Seidou, left me cold. I was ready for the show to move on to the main story and this is poor decision making by the people in charge.
As for the third episode, which was really the deciding factor for me with this show, things did not get much better. Part of this comes from meeting teammates who had little personality outside of being jerks who wouldn't wake up their roommate for morning practice. A bigger part of this comes from the show relying on screaming and reaction shots for its comedy, which quickly became tiresome. And the climatic moment of the episode, where Eijun's inability to hit the outfield fence from home plate because he accidentally throws a curveball, flies in the face of everything I know of as a sports fan. Maybe it's different in Japan, but there isn't a coach alive who would see Eijun's raw talent and not start developing it to help him win games. The Japanese way of handling pitchers involves having them throw until their arms fall off, not benching them for no good reason.
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| Oh, hi best character. How are you doing? |
So, it comes as no surprise that Daiya no Ace fails. I'm not saying there is zero chance it can be a good show, but I have no faith in the writer or director to make good decisions going forward. The best sports shows convince the viewer to root for the team because they like the players and want them to succeed. And this show only let me know a couple characters who seemed to be surrounded by a bunch of dicks. I know that's realistic when we're talking about high school boys, but that's not going to get me to root for the team.
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