The timelessness of a series like Major 2nd is profound for me in many ways.  It presents an unbroken link to a very different time both for anime as a medium and myself as a consumer of it, and those memories are very much positive ones.  And there’s not much about Major that feels trendy or periodic – this is an old-school sports series the way old-school sports series have always been written, even when they’re new school.  Mitsuda Takuya is one of the legends of the genre for damn good reason, and this series profoundly displays that.

More than anything else, I just love Major, plain and simple.  I love Daigo and I love Goro (though he makes it very hard sometimes), as different as they are.  I love the love it has for baseball, and I share it.  I love the authenticity it brings to the experience of being a kid playing the game.  And because I – and many others – can relate to that experience in a way we can’t to someone playing professionally or even at the high school level, this franchise seems to connect that little bit more when the focus is on the protagonists as kids playing a kids game.

Last Saturday was an interesting one in anime.  At 1730 JST we saw one boy who desperately needed a hug and compassion from the adults in his life and couldn’t buy either to save his life, and another (I’m looking at you, Kacchan) who needed a kick in the ass and got a big hug instead.  Since no one stepped up to buy All Might a ticket to Mifune (he can hug with the best of them) poor Daigo had to make do with his father – and heaven knows, when it comes to this sort of thing that’s a mighty heavy burden for a little kid to have to bear.

I won’t completely shut Goro out for credit this week.  He does make a genuine effort, which while the bare minimum basic decency required of a man is his position was still not a given.  And he does apologize to Kaoru for leaving her to deal with this crisis on her own (though he clearly doesn’t retain the lesson, based on the ending).  Not everyone can be a good father, which is a painful truth many fathers and children have learned the hard way.  If forgiveness is a theme of this episode, maybe forgiving Goro for being a pretty bad dad is part of that, too (though it isn’t easy).

While I applaud his effort, much of what Goro does here is try to distract Daigo with your basic “divorced dad has son for the weekend” stuff.  This is not an easy situation, in his defense.  Daigo shouldn’t have had to wait until he asked to know that Goro wasn’t disappointed in him, though at least Goro gave the right answer.  And Goro doesn’t try too hard to push his son back into baseball, though he can’t totally hide the fact that he’s gutted Daigo is ruling it out.  The fact is that Daigo obviously wants to play – he almost says it outright – and at some point even dense as dwarfstar alloy Goro figures out what it is that Daigo needs in order to move on.

Ironically, if I’m pissed at anybody here (and when I say “here”, I mean before the last three minutes of the episode happened) it’s Toshiya and Hikaru.  That’s mitigated somewhat by the fact that Hikaru is a 12 year-old boy and pretty dense and Toshiya is honoring his son’s wishes, but seriously – seriously!?  Toshi at least had to know how terribly Daigo was suffering, and even if it’s just believable that Hikaru assumed everyone knew the accident was his fault (which it was), Toshiya should have overruled him and told Daigo his son was recovering.  It would have spared Daigo so much pain – but I guess Toshiya was thinking more about the needs of his own son and not that of Goro’s.

In any event, it was pleasing to see Hikaru on the path to recovery – the younger they are the better they recover from traumatic injury, after all.  And of course Daigo’s recovery is very much tied into Hikaru’s, not just because they’re joined in the shounen string of fate but because knowing Hikaru is coming back allows Daigo to enjoy playing again with the burden of thinking he’s ended his best friend’s career before it started.  Like their fathers, it seems the boys are fated to play junior high ball at different schools – but their dream of being a battery in the future can certainly survive that.

OK, so – all good, then?  But that ending, oh boy…  Apparently satisfied that he’s fulfilled his duties as dad for his minimal role in playing fixer, Goro decides to wing down to Venezuela to play winter ball – and not even bother to say goodbye to his kids (or at least the one who needs him most).  Daigo arrives home from school all excited that he can finally share baseball with his pop in a meaningful way, and Pop is on his way to the station to desert him again.  I don’t hate Goro (I still love the rat bastard, too much history there) but damn, I hate him for doing this.  And I hate the episode for making light of it the way it does.  You yutz – just why do you think you’re a “rookie” as a dad?  It’s because you keep buggering off rather than face your kids, Idiot!  Being gone for more than half the year playing out the string in Taiwan isn’t enough – even a few months of parenting is too scary?

Oh, well – I would love to see Major 2nd take that on in a really meaningful way, but I know it isn’t that sort of series, and Mitsuda makes it clear enough to me that he’s acknowledging Goro has serious deficiencies.  All in all, this season did a wonderful job of introducing us to this new generation – especially Daigo, of course – and in doing so made it very clear that this is a very different sort of “Major” than what came before.  Daigo may not be “strong” like his dad, but he’s strong in a different way – that’s why he can admit it – and that makes him a fascinating and hugely likeable protagonist.

As I said, I find Major to be at its best when it focuses on this stage of its protagonists’ lives, where baseball is still very much a game.  That’s why I’d rank this as probably the second-best season in the franchise overall behind the Kasai Kenichi-directed first (still one of the best seasons of sports anime in history).  Major 2nd was everything I love about Major and about sports series, but then I knew that going in as someone who loves the manga.  This won’t be the last time I write about it this year, I can promise you that.

As for what the future holds, that’s hard to say.  When a season of the original Major ended, there was never really any doubt of a sequel – that series was always going to be fully adapted.  Now?  Who knows – Major 2nd is a very strong-selling manga indeed, but the anime industry has changed quite a lot.  As for material, this season used up maybe half of the existing chapters, or just a bit more, so if the will is there we’d likely see another season in summer or fall of 2019.  Will we?  Who knows – there’s always a place for Major in my heart, but whether that’s true for anime very much remains to be seen.