That may have been the best walk in baseball anime history.

I don’t know, there’s just somehow about these sports anime about younger kids…  There are moments when I almost break down because I’m pulling so hard for them, and this episode (specifically Daigo’s at-bat against Maruyama Michiru) was one of them.  Empathy is an extraordinarily powerful thing both in life and fiction, and when a story can make you feel it the deal is a long way towards being closed.  Maybe no series has been better at it than Hourou Musuko for me, but that’s a different sort of emotion than you get with the likes of Major/Major 2nd and Ginga e Kickoff.  And having played youth sports myself, having felt the volcanic emotions involved, I can directly relate to these sorts of series all the more.

There’s more here, though, and that’s down to Daigo.  He may just be on my shortlist for best protagonist in a sports manga (and it’s a very short list) – one his dad is already on, but for reasons that literally could not be more opposite.  It’s such an ingenious move by Mitsuda-sensei – give us a story that explores what it’s like to be a normal son of a truly extraordinary father.  The thing about Goro is, most of the things that made him extraordinary are obvious – unmissable to anyone remotely attuned to baseball.  Daigo is an extraordinary little boy, but what makes him extraordinary takes patience (from him, too) to discover – it doesn’t jump out and grab you by the throat like Goro’s exquisite baseball genius.

This showdown between Mifune and Toutou Boys (and girl) is quite extraordinary in its own right.  It’s not going the way anyone expected – certainly not Inui-san, Toutou’s laconic but shrewd manager.  I mean, who would have expected the sight of Urabe being asked to squeeze (hell, even cleanup Wataru was asked – briefly – to bunt later on)?  It becomes a station-to-station scrap for survival, the kind of battle Inui never expected.  And after the Dolphins tie the game, Wataru finally goes to his coach and asks him to swap Komatsu and Michiru – something that arguably should have happened a little sooner.

For Mifune it’s certainly a moral victory to force the powerhouse Toutou to burn their ace, who they hoped to save for their “real” survival game.  But they’re not after moral victories now – and moral victories suck, anyway.  What fascinates me is the question of Maruyama Wataru.  Inui’s question “Then who’s going to pitch tomorrow?” implies that Wataru is not an option – why is that?  Why is the boy who was so dominant on the mound that he forced Urabe to flee the team completely off the radar as a pitcher?  Whatever the reason, he apparently is – and Inui is right in his calculus, if Toutou lose this game tomorrow doesn’t matter anyway.  I give the guy credit – he’s cocky, but not too much so to recognize that he’s in a dogfight he’s going to have to scrap to survive.

When Michiru takes the mound, she snuffs out the Dolphins’ rally with extreme prejudice – striking out Hikaru to finish it off, though he does manage a couple of hard fouls and make some impressive instinctual adjustments at the plate.  And Toutou summarily rallies for two runs themselves, leaving both Urabe and Andy shaken.  They add one more in the 6th and things are looking grim indeed, given that not a single Mifune hitter manages to put the ball in play before the 7th and Tashiro seems about ready to throw in the towel, promising Nagai-kun a ceremonial at-bat if (as he expects) Michiru mows down the first two batters.

But Daigo has other ideas.  Urabe attributes his resilience to his inexperience, but that’s Urabe’s own insecurity talking.  Daigo has simply suffered through so much baseball ignominy that he doesn’t know how to quit now.  To impact the game as much as he does in the ways he’s forced to do so is a testament to just how tough and savvy Daigo is.  When you’re down three runs in the last inning a walk is as good as a home run, and Daigo doggedly fouls off pitch after pitch until Michiru finally misses four times.  What a little hero he is, though there’s not much glory for him in the way he achieves it.

Both Urabe and Andy seem to have checked out at this point, but Daigo’s at-bat for the ages shames them back into combat mode – and that’s the power of a player like Daigo, who does so much with so little.  For Urabe and Andy this is their battle, their white whale – they shouldn’t need Daigo to motivate them, but you take it where you can get it.  This is all about extending the game until Hikaru’s at-bat, really – to give him a chance to be the tying run.  As it happens Urabe’s swinging bunt and Andy’s sharp single make Hikaru the go-ahead run – leaving the fate of the Dolphins in the hands of the boy who actually looks the part of the conventional baseball hero.  Baseball, they say, is an individual sport played on teams – and it’s individual battles like Michiru vs. Hikaru that make or break games, and seasons.  But it’s at-bats like Daigo’s that make them possible.