At last, Yomi’s team finally get a taste of how a real baseball game is like. However, the team they are facing, Yanaukawagoe competed in nationals. Yep, this is going to be a hard game to win, but they are determined.
From last time, the advisor finally arranged a practice game for the baseball club. They are facing against Yanaukawagoe, a team that played in nationals. Apparently, their best pitcher, Aasukara is not there. She is the ace of the team. Without her, Oono did all the pitching and well, while her stats are impressive, she is not the ace. It becomes apparent when Yomi’s team managed to have three batters manage to hit home base and scored three points. Oono is obviously not happy about how badly the first round went.
Thanks to Yomi’s pitch, the opposing team wasn’t able to score for a couple of innings. Eventually, Yomi eventually manages to screw up a few pitches, which causes some runners on base while one of them hit home base. Thankfully, the team called a time out. It’s obvious that Tama realizes that Yomi is not enjoying baseball. This reminds her of that promise that they made in the previous episode. Tama pledges that she got her back and the team managed to prevent Yanaukawagoe from scoring any more points. However, the next inning was worse with them scoring three points over Yomi’s team. Now, Yanaukawagoe has the lead.
Sadly, it seems that Aasukara finally made it after Ooono had trouble with the pitches. This makes the situation for Yomi and her friends harder. Aasukara’s fast balls are hard to hit that none of the runners can make it to base. Nobody scored in that inning. This leaves the 7th and last one for Yomi to have a chance to catch up. Ibuki managed to have a successful play by batting using her left arm. That is all thanks to the opposing team messing up.
Will Yomi and her friends be lucky this time? Sadly, no. Nozomi managed to hit Aasukara’s fast ball, but sadly, Oono caught it. In other words, Yanaukawagoe won the game.
Yes, Yomi and her friends are disappointed that they couldn’t win, but they didn’t do that badly. After all, Tsubasa’s team with their first game only managed to score one point while the other team curbed stomped them. At least Yomi’s team have skilled team members. Aasukara notices when she compliments Yomi’s pitching skills and her team. In other words, the first game is very helpful. From this, Yomi and her friends can learn from the mistakes made and work on areas they need to improve.
Aside from that, there is one area of the episode besides the plot that is very concerning. Yes, the animation did a hit, at least with the stream version. The broadcast version from my understanding isn’t as bad compared to Funimation’s streamed version. You probably won’t notice from the screenshots in this post since we use the broadcast version for screenshots for sites other than Crunchyroll. This kind of makes Märchen Mädchen not look as bad in comparison.
My guess is that they needed to have the episode pushed out to them and they simply sent the draft copy instead of the competed version due to scheduling issues. Is it related to the news we have been hearing about the impact of COVID19? We can only speculate for now.
Pretty good first game. Sucks our heroines lost but unlike Western sports anime Japanese ones have a tendency of making the leads suffer a losing streak or at least not win their first game.
Weird Funi didn’t double check the version of the episode they got before uploading it. Then again this IS Funi so it may not be that surprising.
It’s not too surprising, but it’s definitely not as brutal, but still a loss by one point. Still, I definitely seen worse.
I guess the the poor animation is just a one off thing. It got me worried a bit.