Ballpark de Tsukamaete! (The Catcher in the Ballpark!) – 07

Ballpark de Tsukamaete! continues to be a really fun 22 minutes for a baseball fan like me. Not every chapter is a hit but the overall batting average is pretty darn good. I think it’s one of those series where the whole is more than the sum of the parts (though the parts are pretty good). It has an overall charm that exceeds what you’d expect without any one element that’s truly exceptional.

First off we have Ruriko glomming on to the words of Masudo-san, the manager. Manager interviews are always a desperate hunt for any memorable statements among the platitudes – or at least a good platitude. That’s what Masudo-san gives here, describing why he starts a catcher who always backs up first base on routing grounders – he likes guys who hustle the “pointless 99 times”.

Ruriko doesn’t know jack about baseball, but this resonates. Every day the beer girls do “vocal exercises” where they practice phrases they’re likely to use. Including “have a nice day” – in English – which they rarely get the chance to break out (thus, 99% pointless). Even the two gaijin fans are bi-lingual. But when a smartass oji-san asks if she has habushu, Ruriko realizes that “Habu nai su ne” gets her darn close. Engrish puns are always a path to my favor, so I heartily approve.

Next the sad tale of Ichinomiya-san, the 25 year-old backup second baseman worn down by being in golden boy Shishio’s shadow. He gets a pep talk – and a tray of ankake karaage – from the kindly server in the players’ dining room. She says he’s “like her old dog that died” – a hell of a left-handed compliment, that – and that she’s in his corner. Nothing too memorable here, but pleasant enough.

Finally, Ruriko scores a photo shoot in “Weekly Baseball’s” feature on ballpark food. And the great pains she takes to make sure Koutarou is aware of it reveals just how far she’s fallen for him at this point. So has Yamada-san of course – and when he stares at her for mostly unrelated reasons while buying his karaage bento, she assumes it’s because he read the featurette on her, too. He hasn’t, and that’s for the best given that they spelled her name wrong, as “Kawada” (how do you even do that with Kanji?). But because Yamada is one of those people whose toast always lands butter-side down, she doesn’t know that. She just can’t catch a break.

Uchuujin MuuMuu (Me and the Alien MuMu) – 06

I can’t think of another case where an ED can have so little to do with the anime using it, yet still be this perfectly suited. Uchuujin MuuMuu is such a weird show, objectively flawed in some ways. Yet I kind of love it somehow. This series is a mood (muud?), as they say. Kuricorder Quartet is a mood too, of course, which is why the two go so well together.

This time around it’s all about rice, and rice cookers. Make no mistake, cosplaying alien or not, MuuMuu is a cat. And a cat will find a warm place with unerring radar – if it fits, they sits. That would include a rice cooker of course. Normally you’d solve that by closing the lid but when your cat is an alien with opposable thumbs, that’s a problem. After the land mine incident, Sakurako takes her rice cooker (and her alien, as always) to the HRRG, where the Prez gives us a lecture on the difference between IH and microcomputer rice cookers (which I never knew), and why the former is so much more dangerous for curious alien cats.

Another reversion to form for MuuMuu is hairballs – except his hairballs are overloads of information, which could certainly be a problem around Tenkubashi (who seems to know almost literally everything). This ep also gives us our longest focus on Decimaru, who Akihiro is still trying desperately to ingratiate himself to. Decimaru’s hilariously wrong (but also kind of right, which is the joke) observations about Japanese society (the human trafficking one had me on the floor) are the running soundtrack (along with Kuricorder) for the week. He makes quite an impact on social media during his journeys, which is fortunate as that leads Akihiro to come rescue him after he’s nabbed by the subway police.

In the end, Decimaru displays his gratitude to Akihiro by begrudgingly giving one of his dozens of cat toys a bap (again – they’re cats, all right). And MuuMuu gives Sakurako an ever better reason to get a lock for the rice cooker (and no, don’t feed rice to your cats, kids). I don’t know if any of this gets us any closer to this show getting wherever it is the plot is going, but it’s definitely one where the pleasure is in the journey.