First Impressions: TAMAYOMI: The Baseball Girls

AW SHIT, IT’S BASEBALL! FUCK YEAH!

And not only is it baseball, but (even though you can’t see it the way the featured image is formatted) Tall Girl’s thighs have actual muscle definition. 10/10 Anime of the Year.

I really wanted to compliment the character designs in this show. The faces are generic, but no one really looks like they could be swapped out for someone from any other moe show without anyone noticing, and I still dig that they don’t have sick figure legs. The above caption is only about 30% serious, but my dad played softball when I was a kid, so their legs should look more or less like his.

However, one of the earlier scenes has one character commenting on how ‘hard’ the main character’s throwing hand is, even though that, at least, could be swapped out with any other anime girl’s hand without anyone noticing.

Plus, the players need to put their hair all the way up when they’re playing. Baseball’s not like football where other players can and will grab you by a trailing ponytail or braids, but even so. That’s gotta get hot and sticky and be just no fun at all. Plus, having your hair down causes drag that could slow you down. Not by so much that it would be noticible in a casual pick up game, of course, but it can make or break a game against athletes who have devoted a great deal of time and energy to reducing every potential disadvantage as much as humanly possible.

Way back when Viz first started releasing their Shonen Jump magazine (back when it actually was a magazine) they spent a few months highlighting the various subgenres of shonen manga to try and gauge interest in what they might be able to bring over, and during their sports manga month, they, of course, had a feature of famous baseball manga. It’s been over 15 years since then and I couldn’t tell you which series they picked to talk about, but very time there’s a new baseball manga or anime I remember a joke the editor who wrote that column made.

I don’t remember it verbatim, but it was something along the lines of “The Japanese aren’t particularly interested in baseball, unless you classify ‘religious obsession’ as ‘interest’.” It was a funny joke then and it still merits a light chuckle now.

I complain often and loudly about sports anime being boring and samey when you’re not interested in the sport, and I am interested in this sport. I don’t watch it much because I don’t have cable and don’t like any sport enough to shell out for yet another subscription, but baseball is fun. Baseball anime on the other hand, usually fail to hold my attention for longer than one or two episodes.

I think the problem largely stems from them typically drawing from the same pool of Stock Sports Anime Characters & Plots, which are rarely engaging enough to make me want to watch them and their generic shenanigans when I really just want to watch them play baseball. It’s like “yeah yeah koshien and team spirit ei ei oh! whatever. Shut up and throw balls fast enough to explode some birds already.”

If “generically moe generic sports anime” sounds like your bag, check this one out. The actual baseball we got was nicely animated and satisfyingly baseball-y, so I might give this series three episodes if we don’t get a better baseball anime (which, given that it’s spring, we very well might), but for most of y’all it’s a pretty easy skip.

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