Bear with me if this is a bit short, but a wifi issue has me relying on public wifi and a place to use it at the moment. And in Japan, that’s still comfortably less than ideal.

Mix has been nothing if not consistent in giving us classic Adachi in all its forms, and that includes the strategic timeskip. It was pretty clear the storyline with Nikidou was pretty well playing itself out, but all Adachi baseball series have a prologue, and it usually involves an injustice of some sort. And nothing that happened in this episode makes me disinclined to use that word.

As everyone in the audience must surely have guessed by now whether they’d read the manga or not, Nikaidou was indeed ill – a heart condition, as it turned out. While that makes the actions of the manager – his father’s best friend – explainable, that doesn’t make them any less wrong in my view. Resigning is the least he could do if you ask me, because a rich man’s son being sick is not a justification for crushing the baseball dreams of a bunch of middle schoolers. And as Minami told us, a bunch of kids never bothered to come back to the team after the coach quit.

Well – I suspect we’re supposed to feel a bit more sympathy for the Nikaidou clan than I do, but Adachi at least didn’t make Touma apologize for simply stating what was true. In any event, that ugliness is behind us and Touma finally has the #1 jersey – though for one game he’s forced to wear the number from the phony ace’s uniform. As for a coach, the temporary dude (probably a random math or social studies teacher) isn’t good for much except giving Adachi more free publicity as he educates himself on the rules of baseball by reading Cross Game (he could do worse).

The first months of Touma’s tenure go by in a veritable on-screen flash. Sou never calling for fastballs in the practice games so that the fielders can get actual practice (they need it), perhaps a bit of sandbagging for the sake of Nikaidou’s reputation (though I hope not), a deep run in the Tokyo tournament before Touma slams his fingers in a door and puts a stop to that. But things slow down a bit when a new face appears for the first time – Haruka (Hanazawa Kana, another dodgy casting decision). She’s moving into the neighborhood, and an alert viewer may have started to put some pieces together…

Ooyama-san, the old captain, now a deadbeat – and the manager at Meisei High School. It would be a good situation for Touma if he needed nepotism to get the ace treatment, but of course he won’t. Indeed, his only real competition for the ace number was his brother – and however that was resolved between them, it was indeed resolved. There’s still junior high school to think about, but with Adachi the “K” word is always the elephant in the room, and high school isn’t far away.

Finally, we get another flashback with Tou and Otomi – and even in the manga, these were just about my favorite scenes. Frankly the way Souichirou treats her I wouldn’t blame Otomi if she liked Touma better just because, but things are clearly complicated on that score. I loved the story of how she thought he “shined” when he pitched, and how he smilingly carried her all the way home in the snow with a boot full of blood. If anything ever exemplified an Adachi hero better than that, it’s a short list.