The first cour of Mix S2 ends with a pretty “quiet week in Lake Woebegon” sort of episode.  Saturdays around here have been a day for the quiet ones this spring – neither Mix nor Tonikaku Cawaii draws much of an English following.  Like Tonikawa this show is much more popular locally, and in point of fact Mix even more so.  It regularly ranks among the top animated series in the weekly TV ratings, and the manga charts with every new volume.  Considering Touch (among the most successful Japanese franchises in any medium) has never even been licensed in English that’s not much of a surprise.

It is finally time for Koushien (the big one, not the Spring invitational through which Meisei got a two-round bye for Summer), so you’d think things would be action-packed.  But because of their seeded status Meisei has the first week off.  Ooyama can’t help but brag on that but he’s right, it does have minor drawbacks as well as positives.  Most of the time rust is not a big enough factor to nullify the usual talent gap, but there are exceptions to that.

When Nishimura-san prays to “save the drama for the games”, it’s pretty clear what he’s talking about.  And the fact that Mix hasn’t yet had a tragedy (apart from a couple of sad passings years before it began) is a sort if elephant in the room.  No rule that Adachi has to have one, but they’ve been a pretty consistent element of his baseball work.  If one were conspiracy-prone they might see Nishimura’s comment as foreshadowing, but my radar isn’t signalling in that direction – I don’t think we’re going to get that element with Mix.  If nothing else when it happens, it’s generally a lot earlier in the series.

Harada’s frustrating odyssey continues.  He has Tachibana-san’s scrapbook chronicling the Meisei Koushien run – for which he had a front row seat – but it doesn’t seem to have triggered anything apart from a few stray bits of intuition.  One of those is that Hakubi, Meisei’s eventual first opponent, is a potential trip-wire.  Even Touma is an admirer – always positive, the coach always smiling, fighting to the end, active in the community.  Who wouldn’t root for a team like that?

It’s very Adachi to build up a potential drama like that and then totally defuse it.  But there’s no way Meisei can lose to a team like Hakubi – if they do Adachi has no story.  The most important thing here is that Meisei gets the game called after six innings (the ten-run rule), which means that much less work for Touma.  I don’t know whether Ooyama plans to use Natsuno or even Souichirou as a pitcher in the tournament, but if not Meisei’s greatest vulnerability is Touma getting worn down, so every little bit helps.