Baseball Anime 'One Outs' Is More Mind Games Than Baseball - and Is All the Better for It

One Outs is an anime about baseball.  However, the narrative portrayal of its featured sport per se was not the selling point for me.  It was the main character’s unique, cerebral style of playing the game.

This aforementioned main character is Toa Tukuchi, whose appearance served as the first thing that struck me about him.  He really looks like Eyeshield 21’s Yoichi Hiruma.  But, more than the appearance, he’s also like Hiruma in how he dominates his sport by being a master of strategy, manipulation, psychological warfare, and gambling rather than being a remarkably gifted athlete.

Toa started out as a legend in “One Outs”, a game where the pitcher and batter go one-on-one against each other with money on the line.  Despite his unexceptional pitching abilities, he’s strangely undefeated by every batter he goes against.  One day, Hiromichi Kojima – the cleanup batter of the professional baseball team Saitama Lycaons – decides to challenge him, as he feels that Toa is being sacrilegious to the sport.  Toa beats Kojima in their first meeting.  But some time later, the latter challenges the former for a rematch, but with much higher stakes: if Toa wins again, Kojima will retire; but if Kojima wins, he will “take” Toa’s right arm as prize, so that he won’t ever get to gamble on baseball again.  This time around, Toa is defeated, and he calmly offers his arm to Kojima.  However, instead of breaking it, Kojima conscripts Toa into the Saitama Lycaons, that he may help the team win the championship.

But before he can play professional baseball, he first has to agree on a contract with the Lycaons’ sleazy owner, Tsuneo Saikawa, who is more concerned with making money than seeing his team win.  Thus, he’s reluctant to pay Toa a fair salary.  However, Toa appeals to Saikawa’s greediness by proposing a bizarre “One Outs” contract for himself.  For every out he pitches, he’s to be paid ¥5 million.  But for every run he loses, he has to pay Saikawa ¥50 million.  Seeing that the deal is advantageous to himself, the owner agrees.

However, it soon becomes apparent to Saikawa that Toa is no ordinary pitcher, and to his horror, he keeps on racking up outs without giving up any runs.  The owner quickly tries to recover by revising the contract, adding four more conditions:

1. Always follow instructions from the dugout.
2. Definition of a 'run' is any run lost during a pitching appearance, not just 'earned runs.'
3. Contract rate can be adjusted depending on the importance of the game.
4. Existence of the contract can only be known to the 4 people present.

Moreover, if the first clause is broken, there’s going to be a fine of ¥500 million, and if the fourth clause is broken, there’s also a fine of ¥500 million – plus, any salary up to that point will be invalidated.  To the delight of the owner, Toa agrees to the new contract despite the fact that it’s heavily disadvantageous to him.

Game after game, Saikawa makes different attempts to get the better of Toa by exploiting the contract’s stipulations as well as employing underhanded methods.  However, time and time again, Toa comes out on top – his salary continually increasing.

And this is simply what makes One Outs a lot of fun – Toa always winning and getting what he wants at the end of the day.  Now, invincible characters tend to get boring.  But this isn’t the case with Toa.  Sure, he’s always the smartest man in the room – or the diamond, for that matter – and in the face of the most difficult of conundrums, it can be expected that he’ll never get ruffled, and in the end, either he’ll soon figure out a solution while thinking on his feet or it’ll be revealed that he’s been five steps ahead of everyone all along.  Nevertheless, the journey toward it remains thrilling.  It’s because the odds are really being stacked against him by his enemies, making the process of learning how he’ll manage to overcome them legitimately intriguing – which, in turn, makes the whole unfolding of the story absorbing.

On the other hand, however, One Outs is a one-man show.  It’s just focused on letting Toa be completely awesome.  No other Lycaons player comes off as special.  Even Kojima, who is supposedly the team’s ace player prior to Toa’s arrival, never does anything “ace player”-worthy.  Saikawa, in the context of the story, has a satisfactory presence as a villain, but mostly because it’s very gratifying to see him go ballistic in frustration whenever Toa outwits him.  However, he’s never really a villain that can be treated as serious foil for Toa.

In the end, I extremely enjoyed One Outs – definitely one of the best sports anime series I’ve ever seen.  I’ve never been a huge fan of baseball – I can’t remember if I’ve ever even finished watching an MLB game.  But by having a dominant “mind games” aspect, this show, in my opinion, has delivered the sport’s most exciting depiction in pop culture.

It was way back 2009 when the 25-episode first season ended.  Unfortunately, a new season has neither been released nor announced since then.  I really hope the rest of the manga is adapted someday.  I’ve never read it yet, but I did read some synopsis, and – oh, boy – there are plot developments that I would love to see in anime form.