It’s Hard to Score on One Out
One Outs is the sports/gambling manga-turned-anime about some kid swindling money from people who look down on him and one-upping said folks for profit and excitement. It starts out with hobos and joes but it turns into pro. It’s a good recipe. The tags would be baseball, bishie, and JUST AS PLANNED.
The problem I have with it is that I’m just outside of its target demographic. I understand enough about gambling to do it, and I understand enough about baseball to watch and to play. I’m indifferent to bishies. But that’s where it ends.
Shows like Kaiji have that trademark style that came from older works of fiction where two embattled rivals mete out reciprical punishment, one-upping against each other, only to be described and explained by some observer who also understands the art–from swordplay to cooking to love to, like One Outs, baseball. However sports or the kitchen or whatever is just a context where such contests happen. Naturally competitive sports make a very comfortable and familiar fantasy world for most of us, so there’s an entire genre of manga/anime for sports due to its popularity.
For people like him, that’s one of the major things they look for in a serial narrative. That’s relatively common; in fact, that’s the Shounen Jump formula in a nutshell. But I think you will have to tie me to a chair and tape my eyelids open, or pay me a lot of money, to swallow episodes of One Outs after the second episode. (That said I will probably watch it since the setup is amusing and they do that in the 3rd ep.)
For the most part, I can enjoy this kind of show just fine as long as it gives me a way to “check my brain at the door.” Basically, I can’t be more imaginative, more creative, and better at the game of whatever those people in the anime is doing, in order to really enjoy it. However, I like sports, I understand basic theories about statistics, and I understand enough about baseball to find most of the stuff explained in One Outs to be totally lame. Fukumoto’s Kaiji, in contrast, paints a totally unreal setting that actually had to be explained and figured out by the main character and viewer. I might figure out the game Kaiji was playing faster than Kaiji, but that isn’t offensive as some pro baseball player not having the most basic understanding of the psychological game involved in baseball.
It’s almost like street magicians. It’s one thing if they’re doing tricks you’ve never seen before, tricks you have never seen explained in books you can buy in a bookstore. One Outs is really the stuff you can find in a bookstore. It paints an interesting fantasy but it’s one good example of a very unimaginative fantasy. A scrub’s world, you might say (if you played fighting games).
To its merit, One Outs is meant for those people who don’t really understand the basic psychological game involved in baseball. It might even be a good gateway to introduce people to that side of the sport. But when the basic level of presumption it makes about pitching is the typical sports manga, magical fastball stuff, it makes me wonder if people in Japan actually watch baseball or just some fantastic variety of it.
I don’t really see One Outs principally as a baseball show - which sounds moronic I know, but the emphasis seems to be on the psychology as opposed to the mechanics of the game. I guess it is similar to Kaiji in that regard, although the latter does I think go to greater lengths to get the technical jargon right.
I don’t have any interest in baseball or sport in general by the way, but I still got hooked on the first episode. I suppose my experience there supports your theory that if you’re blind to the inaccuracies you are able to enjoy it more?
Psychology is a part of the game in baseball. It’s something people who don’t really know the sport probably doesn’t know, so One Outs introduces them to it.
In fact, the battle between a pitcher and a batter is a huge psychological game. If a pitcher gets ahead by 2 strikes, you will start wondering where the ball will be pitched. Should you place it slightly outside the zone to let the batter chase it or go in for a kill. One outs manages to put it in a palpable form.
Its the same reason why we hate football (ie soccer) anime. We know too much about it to enjoy it without the special powers.
I don’t think special powers are necessary. It helps but when the show elevates itself to be an actual sports-oriented thing, like Oofuri, then it works.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to handle this one. It’s fun at first, but the tedious and ultimately useless narration becomes even more grating and absurd with every passing moment. It’s why I dropped Kaiji. I don’t need anyone to explain to me, in detail, rock, paper, scissors. I get it. At the same time, I ended up loving Akagi for the opposite reason. I knew nothing about Mahjong, so it was a learning experience.
This series would be ten times better without Big Mama.
What is up with you and fat people.
The series has been pretty interesting so far (episode 12), and they’re actually doing stuff other than magical fastballs which I thought the series was gonna be about (Toua’s actually a crappy pitcher in terms of skill). It’s mostly a show about mind games as you say.
Probably not as interesting for people very knowledgeable about baseball since they’d probably yell DUH at some of the things they explain in depth.
Thank you for the affirmation.
It’s something I ought to research about, but the baseball fanatics on this side of the pond study it like geeks study rocket science. Not sure what Japanese baseball fanatics do.