Baseball, in the Baseball Manga? Absurd!

Do you want somebody to say that?

After going a long time thinking I'd never find a copy of the 7th volume of Cross Game at a reasonable price (meaning, not $70 or more), I stumbled across someone selling a copy on Amazon for about $15 this January (as of last week's manga review, we moved on from stuff I bought last year.)

In a sharp, and welcome, departure from the all-consuming teen melodrama offering that was volume 6, volume 7 actually spends a lot of its pages on baseball. It's the beginning of the last tournament to reach Koshien this group of players will have, so it's now or never for Ko and Akaishi to make Wakaba's dream a reality.

Adachi doesn't only focus on the Seishu Gakuen squad, as their old foe Coach Daimon's team would face them in the second round. If he makes it that far, because in his path is a team led by Azuma's old teammate Miki, the one who left even before Daimon got fired because he wanted to play on a team where everyone loved playing baseball.

Adachi takes a different route with each game Seishu plays. The first one is such a dominant win the game is called after 5 innings (mercy rule), and is primarily used for a joke about how half the guys on the team asked Aoba if she'd go on a date with them if they reached certain achievements - one using two stolen bases as the benchmark for example - and none of them hitting the mark. Ko promised he'd get double-digit strikeouts if it meant they wouldn't go on a date, and pulled it off, though he apparently didn't realize it until Aoba mentioned it. But was Aoba disappointed? Oh no, the internal conflict!

The second game is a tense pitcher's duel against Miki's team. Miki's the ace pitcher now instead of the centerfielder, and while he's not on Ko's level of dominance, he gets results. Adachi wisely focuses on how Seishu keeps getting guys on base, but Miki always bears down and keeps them from scoring. Only late in the game does Aoba note that the opposing team hasn't gotten a single hit off Ko, leaning into the notion of how good a pitcher he is.

The third game is really just used to set-up a gag for the fourth game, as Ko tries to figure out why he was throwing harder than normal (in the process helping his team finish the game before a rain delay could begin.) When he asks Aoba for her perspective - because his motion is based on hers - if there was anything different with his mechanics, her observation leads to him walking a bunch of guys in the next game, though they still win easily.

The fifth game is likewise breezed through in a couple of pages, as the story shifts focus to Akane, who is in the hospital for another round of treatment for an unspecified condition. Aoba spends a lot of time with her, while Ko seems determined to just push through and keep playing, reasoning there's nothing he can do but hope things turn out well. And he knows how little good that does. The main issue is Akaishi, who's thrown by the whole thing and who struggles in the 5th game. This as the ace pitcher and elite slugger of Ryuou Gakuin, the presumptive favorites and team that knocked Seishu out of the tournament last time, remark that Seishu's catcher (Akaishi) is the one big advantage Seishu has over them.

So Akaishi's got to get his shit together, because standing between them and Ryuou is a team that seems blessed. Every win's been by a single run, and in close games, things can turn on one little thing. Adachi shows the Nishikura team score their first run in a series of isolated panels on one page. A grounder taking a funny hop over Senda's head. A bunt, and the runner advancing to second. Then a pop fly that lands just inside the foul line. Little things that added up to cancel out a lead-off home run from Senda. The panels contrast Nishikura's coach looking on confidently from behind his glasses, all the while Ko is mowing down batter after batter.

The volume ends on Ko visiting Akane, then he and Aoba visiting Wakaba's grave. It's a signpost of their shared history, that Ko agrees to tell Aoba about Akane's surgery (while hiding it from Akaishi) and how far they've come from when they were kids. There's a flashback showing the two of them getting in trouble for throwing mudballs at each other in the cemetery when they were little.

With all that out of the way, it's time for the big showdown, which we looked at when I reviewed volume 8.

A Perfect Monster

Is this the start of some terrifying, and adorable, new Planet of the Penguins? In this blogger's opinion, yes!

Volume 3 of JH's The Boxer sees Yu challenged by another up-and-coming lightweight, Qasim Al-Hajad. It's briefly set up to seem like contrasting rivals, as Qasim loudly boxes for the fun of it and uses unorthodox attacks he probably saw in video games, while Yu shows no emotion and just knocks people swiftly into oblivion with textbook form.

Just as quickly, Qasim is exposed as a bully who turns tail the moment he can't overwhelm his opponent with sheer athleticism, and as such, a disgrace to boxing. Calling back to volume 1, when Injae's father told him that, as a boxer, you can't ever stay down, no matter how outclassed you are, or it's over. The poser dispatched with ease, JH moves to the real show, Yu's bout against the undefeated lightweight champion, Jean Pierre Manuel.

Unlike in volume 2, when JH waited until the fight's began to dive into John Taker's backstory and "rookie killer" persona, we see Jean as he prepares for a bout against what might be his dream, and learn what boxing means to him. He seeks perfection through it, absolute perfect control of every part of his body. In Yu, from the first punch he threw at John Taker, Jean has seen his goal brought to life.

Then we see the extent he's willing to push himself to, in the hopes of attaining that same level. JH might overplay his hand here, as Jean not only begins roaming back alleys at night, fighting gangs that will kill him if they can. No, he goes so far as to steal some of their blood and use it to paint some vision of how he perceives Yu. Given how the fight plays out, though that isn't until volume 4, it pushes things too far.

JH draws Jean with an intense look from the start, but the further along the story goes, the thicker and rougher the lines that define Jean's face become, and the color of his pupils begins to spill over the lines into the whites of his eyes. It gives an air of someone unhinged, or maybe so tightly wound he's almost vibrating. There are also, during Jean's "training," narrow panels of blood cells rushing through arteries, or nerves firing, showing how Jean's body is reacting to the stress of the situation as he slowly attains the control he's sought. By the time of the fight, JH is stretching, almost smearing, their faces as they dodge punches. Partially to illustrate the quickness of their movements, but also to make them look less human, as they reveal the kinds of "monsters" they are.

And volume 3 ends with that looking like it still wasn't enough to keep up with Yu.

Nasty Cutter - Tim O'Mara

A notable lawyer turns up dead in the bathroom at a dinner to honor his charity work. By the next day, someone's broken into his law office, though it's unclear what, if anything, was stolen.

Ray Donne's a former cop-turned-schoolteacher whose father was the partner of recently deceased. Which puts him on the periphery of both cases, along with his reporter girlfriend Allison, and his friend (and tech guy) Edgar.

Credit to O'Mara, he really tries to jam a lot into this book. Besides the mysteries around both those incidents, there's Ray working with a couple of different kids have issues at school, Ray and Allison butting heads over how she goes about getting a story, Ray's sister hassling him to move his relationship with Allison along, Ray checking in on a student that got a job helping an elderly man through the dead lawyer's charity. There's two brothers, one who had a brief major league baseball career (the title being a reference to his best pitch, a cut fastball), the other who spent ten years in prison for assaulting a girl when they were in high school.

The truth about that, which ties into one of the two incidents that start the book, was easy to spot a mile off. The solution to the other incident felt like it came out of left field. Maybe because Ray is barely involved in that investigation after the opening scene. He's not doing any snooping for it; he just stumbles into the answer at the end without having any clue he was so close. I had to sit there a moment and ponder if that was really how O'Mara was having the mystery solved.

That speaks to the book's larger; little tension or suspense. There's no ticking clock of needing to clear an innocent person or Ray trying to avoid being killed himself. He's not driven to find the killer of his father's old partner, he's really not even looking. Ray's uncle is police commissioner, but he's not seeking Ray out to talk about the case. It hardly feels like it matters to anything that's happening. 

A few people get angry with Allison for digging up things they want buried, but it's never to a point anyone feels like they're in danger. The closest thing to suspense is whether Ray's going to put his foot in his mouth with Allison one time too many, and that only because, since we only get Ray's thoughts, I have no clue how close to the line he is with her.

'With my back to the stairs, Buzzer Guy looked over my shoulder and said, "Hey, you're in luck. It's the girlfriend."

I turned and looked into the face of Robert Donne's girlfriend.

She did not look nearly as happy to see me as she had that morning.'

The Tao of the Backup Catcher - Tim Brown with Eric Kratz

Brown's book is about what it is to be a backup catcher, both in terms of what sort of jobs you're expected to fill, how one finds themselves in the role of backup catcher, what sort of life tends to result from that designation, and the mindset one can develop if they embrace the job.

His primary window into the world is Erik Kratz, who played for 9 major league teams over 11 seasons. It's kind of crazy to me that over the course of his career, I only attended 9 baseball games, and he was the starting catcher in 2 of them. I saw 8 of his 951 career plate appearances (he went 0-for-8.) Kratz played for a lot more than 9 minor league teams, and between being sent up, down, released, traded, waived, and so on, switched teams more than 3 dozen times before he retired at the end of the 2020 season.

But that's part of the life of the backup catcher. Teams like to have you around for all the little things you do, until they decide someone who can do the big things is more important to have. Then you're looking for another job. Kratz tends to remain pretty upbeat, but doesn't sugarcoat the times he questioned what he was doing, hanging on in the minors, or when he got frustrated that what looked like a chance to stick somewhere evaporated again.

Brown tends to focus on a certain aspect of the job or process in a given chapter, speaking with Kratz or any number of other backup catchers, past and present. For example, what it means to become a starter's "personal" catcher, as Eddie Perez was for Greg Maddux for a time. Or even just what your job is a catcher with regards to your pitcher. Sometimes you have to be almost like a parent, other times you have to challenge him. Brown relates a story where Yankees' catcher John Flaherty went out to the mound to tell Randy Johnson not to ever show him up by yelling at him about where he set his stance, during a game. Or the work backups put in helping pitchers warm-up before games or in the bullpen. How exhausting that can be, but you do it because someone has to, so why not you?

Other times, it's focused more off the field. The grind for Kratz and his wife Sarah, as they have to constantly move. Find new apartments, set up electric and phone service, break current leases, scramble to cover rent (minor leaguers get paid basically dick.) The jobs they work in the off-season, the way Kratz carves out any time he can after a full day of construction work to take some practice swings.

Despite that, the tone of the book is light. The guys Brown talks to all made peace with the roles they ended up with. All of them would have loved to be the starting catcher, but whether due to talent deficit, lack of opportunity, or just bad luck, it didn't happen. But they found something they could do, and they tried to do it the best they could and most of them found a sort of peace with that, in the good days. Brown details all the little things the backup does to help the team, the unglamorous stuff, but in a way that makes the backup catcher seem like the man behind the curtain, rather than the unappreciated janitor.

'What comes of this is a league - a culture, even - of backup catchers reasonably sure they could be No. 1 catchers, but who are rigorously invested in the day in front of them. Most would defend their jobs, their teammates, and the final score with the thick end of a fungo bat. As soon as they go get it. It's in the blue bag up in the dugout tunnel. Which they know because they put it there after batting practice. When they helped clean up the field. Just to be helpful. It wasn't gonna pick itself up.'

Loaded Bases

That girl's about 5 seconds away from learning Giantopia definitely isn't inside her locker.

Gemma Hopper, the lead character in Brie Spangler's Fox Point's Own Gemma Hopper, is a 13-year old who feels like she's being crushed by the weight of too many things, unnoticed by anyone. Her mother is absent, the specifics only hinted at, and her dad seems to always be working. Which leaves care of her twin younger brothers, and the house in general, entirely to Gemma.

You might think her older brother Teddy could help, but he's busy being the hotshot baseball star, everyone's darling. Gemma's reduced to being the pitching machine for his hitting exhibitions. She's tall for her age, and awkward about it. Spangler draws Gemma looking twice the height of her best friend Bailey, and at least as tall as her brother or dad. School is an endless string of things, trying to get in with the popular crowd is a struggle, it's just a lot.

Some things Spangler shows us, like a three-page sequence of laundry day. A panel of Gemma moving through the rooms, gathering clothes, lugging them to the laundromat, washing, folding, and coming home to her little brothers still scarfing chips in front of the TV like they were when they left. 

Sometimes, Spangler leaves it to the imagination. When Gemma's letting her brother show off, she does it by throwing at least a half-dozen different pitches to the exact locations he tells her to. It's not commented on, since Teddy is swatting them all over the park, but that's pretty impressive for a 13-year, both in the number of pitches and the command of them she must have. So when she gets fed up playing the comic sidekick for Teddy's ego boost, it's sort of a natural outcome of what we've already seen.

Spangler avoids making the story just an airing of grievances of Gemma, by having her make her own missteps. Gemma has a few heart-to-hearts with Teddy that help her see his perspective on his own fame, even if Teddy's attempts to help feel at least a little self-serving. When taking Bailey's advice on a school project goes awry, Gemma throws Bailey under the bus in a moment of frustration. She tries to just ignore everyone for a day or two (Spangler illustrates this in a simplified style of Gemma navigating some dotted line trail like one of those Family Circus cartoon strips where the kid takes the ludicrously roundabout course to cross the street), and that gets her chewed out by Bailey when the girl finally corners her. Gemma's so wrapped up in what's weighing her down and thinking she's on her own, she missed the people who were actually trying to help her.

I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. Gemma gets her moment to shine and be seen, which is good. More importantly, while nervous, she doesn't run from it. Spangler has Gemma trying to pitch while being mocked by a spectral version of herself (with wavier hair), which Spangler outlines in red, rather than the blue that dominates the book otherwise.

But it still feels as though her father only notices the amount of stuff he just sort of dumped on her to deal with because he's been told she's really good at baseball, which he's crazy about*. In much the same way that baseball was just something fun he did with Gemma and Teddy, until he saw Teddy's talent. Then it was serious business for Teddy, and Gemma was left behind to handle all the things Mr. Baseball was too busy for.

* The twins are named "Pedro" and "Carl", and I assume that's for Carl Yastrzemski, but my mind first went to Carl Everett, who played on the Red Sox with Pedro Martinez and all I could think was, "You named your kid after the guy who said he didn't believe in dinosaurs because he'd never seen one?"

Intent Signed in Blood

That is not the face of a man that should be allowed within 500 feet of children. Or teenagers. Or, anyone really. Just shove him in a steel box and sink it.

But, like it or not, Yu's got to hospital bills that need paying. Bakesan's maybe, though I wonder if he it's Injae's bill. Doubt K cares either way. He's got his prize, so it's off to America to get him ready.

JH immediately sets in on showing hints of what Yu's capable of, as he's challenged by another young fighter who wants K to train him. Josh is a gifted amateur, has worked very hard, while Yu knows nothing about boxing beyond that time K showed him a one-two combo.

It doesn't make a difference. JH stays in Josh's mind for most of the fight, focusing on how his jealousy and confidence gradually shift to awe, terror and resignation. But we catch glimpses of Yu's thoughts, or how he perceives things. How slow everything moves for him. But even that serves only to play into Josh's mindset, as he grows increasingly disheartened, realizing what he's up against.

That done, the story skips ahead two years, to Yu's debut fight against a fighter dubbed "The Rookie Killer." Again, JH focuses primarily on this new fighter, who seems to delight in his rep as a dirty fighter who crushes the dreams of highly-touted prodigies. JH takes the time to reveal some of John Taker's backstory, how he got into boxing, why he loves it but is still willing to be this dirty fighter reviled by the crowds.

Of course, things don't go well for him here, as K gives Yu a specific plan on how to excite the crowd and make them holler for more. Even before the first punch is thrown, Taker's frightened by what he feels coming off Yu.

JH likes metaphorical imagery. Bakesan pictured himself as a giant atop a mountain, peering down at indistinct shadows. Josh sees Yu as an immense, endless wall. Taker is unnerved by what he feels staring at Yu. Having Taker visualize it as staring down the barrel of an immense gun feels ridiculous, but if you want to sell Yu as something almost inhuman, you go big. And JH pays these things off, referring back to them. The first punch Yu throws, which essentially tells how the match will go, the sound effect is "BANG", rather than, I don't know, "whoosh" or something.

In what will also become a recurring approach, JH starts with the fight, then flashes back to K's declaration of the goal - his goal - for the fight. It's pretty obvious K is after more than just training one more fighter, but what, I'm not sure. It may have something to do with his previous fighter, who's still active and the current heavyweight champion, but mostly, JH makes K seem like some kind of sadist. Again, letting the man anywhere near any kid, let alone one who seems to give no fucks and will do whatever's asked of him, is a terrible idea.

The second volume ends with Yu having caught the eye of both the current lightweight champion and another prospective challenger for the belt, who appears to be a physical marvel himself. And we see where both Injae and Bakesan ended up in the after they left the hospital.

He Carries a Reminder. . .

. . .of every blow, that laid him low, or cut him, 'til he cried out, "I am bleeding, I am bleeding!" but the paramedics stayed away, la la la lah la la la.

Volume 1 of JH's The Boxer starts with the "legendary trainer of five world champions", K, looking for his final project. Initially, it seems like it's going to be Bakesan Ryu, a prodigy with the reflexes, agility and flexibility to embarrass a trained fighter 4 weight classes above him. He even has the flashy and impractical moves that a crowd will love, not to mention the unusual hair color and style that marks your typical manga protagonist.

And then K notices a kid just letting bullies pummel him in an alley. JH doesn't explain what K saw until the very end of the volume, but K extends the offer to Yu to train him into a champion. Yu doesn't seem all that interested, however, so it would seem K's wasting a month waiting for him to show up at the gym.

After that, the story shifts to the local high school, where we see Bakesan uses his skills to bully and intimidate weaker students, particularly Injae, a meek kid with glasses. Injae seems to want to be friends with Yu, while Yu doesn't discourage it, he doesn't exactly encourage it, either. Although with him, actually speaking might qualify as encouragement.

About the time Yu saves Injae from being hit by a soccer ball kicked by Bakesan, JH switches focus to Injae. Injae's father was a boxer (career record: 13 wins, 12 losses, 2 draws), and Injae wants to be like him. Which he decides means he can't keep taking the bullying any longer, he has to stand up and fight.

(His father, when asked about fighting someone you know is stronger, makes a point that courage in a boxer and courage in someone who isn't are entirely different and equally admirable things, so it's not him imposing some toxic notion on his kid. He outright says it's OK to run.)

Unfortunately, Yu's interference has made him Bakesan's target now. Everything comes to a head in a series of fights as Injae stands up to Bakesan despite the difference in natural talent. In turn, this determination seems to spark some interest within Yu, and he gets involved. Which is when we get a glimpse of what caught K's eye.

JH has a relatively simple, clean style. Thin lines and basic character designs that distinguish the important players from each other, but also allow him to exaggerate for effect. The way he draws the face of one of Bakesan's hangers-on when Injae hits him with a jab, versus when Yu does the same thing, is entirely different. Injae's causes the guy's head to rock back slightly. Yu's reduces it to a blank square with force lines shooting off it like an explosion. When Yu hits Bakesan with a jab, JH draws it like someone took a hole punch to Bakesan's head, as a representation of what the punch felt like.

The book's an odd mix, because JH will add panels discussing or diagramming principles of boxing, like why you don't switch which punch you're going to throw in the middle of a punch. But then there's also a lot of figurative imagery. Bakesan's got a big head about his talent, so we see him as a giant seated atop a mountain. The "chosen one", while the tiny blurry outlines of lesser fighters reach futilely towards him from below. JH uses that a few times early on, then brings it back to different effect during his fight with Yu.

Yu's an interesting choice for a lead character, simply because he's so passive. We get a couple of glimpses of his past and current living situation, but not much, and he's not forthcoming, beyond the fact he doesn't recall ever really wanting to be anything or do anything. The later volumes (at least the 2 I've read so far), reveal how JH plans to use a character like that, though.

Losing for Future Losses

It's not been a good year for the St. Louis Cardinals. Hard to complain too much about their first losing season since 2007, but it has been a generally miserable experience watching them find ways to lose. 

Early on, it was the starting pitching - minus the since-traded Jordan Montgomery - being mostly garbage. When that started to round into form, the bullpen started blowing every lead it was handed. Didn't matter which reliever they used, he'd fuck it up somehow. The offense would alternate explosion of eight or more runs with weeks where they couldn't score more than three. The defense, which had been a strong point the previous two seasons (and is vital for a pitching staff that still doesn't strike anybody out), degraded through a combination of injuries, poor personnel choices, and just inexplicable play from normally good defenders.

Nolan Arenado's won a lot of Gold Gloves, but one could have expected some age-related decline as he continued into his early 30s. I didn't expect him to look like his talent was stolen by the Monstars in a baseball-themed remake of Space Jam.

Anyway, the season's done in any real sense beyond seeing if any of the younger players can show progress, or waiting for a few of the veterans to reach personal milestones. Adam Wainwright's quest for 200 wins has been difficult to watch. He pitched so well the first 5 months of last year, I really figured his struggles in September were related to the ground ball he took off the knee. If so, the issue has lingered for over 11 months now.

Situation being what it is, there's at least some portion of the fanbase rooting for the team to be as bad as possible. To tank, in pursuit of a higher draft pick next summer. I guess they figure the team is going to lose anyway, they might as well look for the silver lining.

I can't quite get to that perspective, never have been able to get into tanking as something to support. It seems contrary to the idea of competitive sports. You're supposed to be trying to win. Plus, thanks to all those years watching the Arizona Cardinals, I've seen too much losing due to incompetence rather than design to be enamored with, "We're losing, but it's on purpose!"

Besides, tanking's not a one-year strategy. Certainly not in baseball where it usually takes multiple seasons before a draft pick makes it to the major leagues. It ended up working out for the Astros and (to an extent) the Cubs, but the Astros had 162 wins and 324 losses over a 3-year span, then lost 92 games the next year before finally reaching the playoffs. Took another two years, plus trash can aided cheating - to win a World Series. The Cubs weren't quite that bad - 198 wins to 288 losses over 3 years, then an 89 loss-season before making the playoffs - but their run also ended much faster.

Point being, if the Cards do tank the way some of these folks are rooting, it won't stop with this season. While getting to pick earlier in the draft improves the chances of getting a difference maker, high draft picks crap out all the time in baseball. Pitchers get injured, or can't learn a changeup. Position players turn out to be unable to hit better pitching. It takes a lot of good players to make a good baseball team, not just one or two (ask the Los Angeles Angels.) And it takes time for those players to make it through the minor leagues before they can help. Tanking this year might improve the team in 2026, but it isn't going to do shit for 2024.

It's probably moot, since the Cardinals seem to like being competitive every year. Have a good chance to make the playoffs, then hope things break right their way so they can win it all. Plus, they rely a bit more on attendance for revenue than some of the other franchises. Losing teams don't put butts in the stands with or convince people to buy $12 beers (at least, not at the ballpark), so hopefully this isn't the start of a long trough.

The Battery (2012)

A pitcher-catcher duo (Mickey and Benny, respectively), try to navigate a zombie apocalypse together. At the time the movie begins, they've already been at it for some unmentioned amount of time, although we learn they spent 3 months trapped inside Mickey's house with his mother and sister at one point. Now they roam, on foot at first, later in some Subaru Benny finds with its undead driver still inside.

It's mostly the arc of their lives, day-to-day, and how they interact. Benny does most of the work. He leads, he does all the zombie killing (and apparently keeps a tally in a notebook), fishes, maybe cooks. tries to keep Mickey engaged by encouraging him to pitch to Benny or play catch with him. Sometimes it works - there's a scene of the two of them goofing off in an orchard, using apples for batting practice - and sometimes it doesn't.

Mickey retreats behind his headphones, a lot, in response to the realities of their lives. That's where the conflict lies. Mickey is tired of the nomad lifestyle, while Benny sees it as the only option. Mickey is hung up on old connections, but Benny never speaks of his past beyond things he and Mickey experienced since this started. Neither of them seems to have anyone else - the fate of Mickey's mother and sister is left unsaid - but they don't feel the same way about it.

A large chunk of the movie is the two of them trapped in a stalled car surrounded by zombies. The moans of the zombies and rocking of the car are a constant background noise, only going away when Mickey and Benny find some way to block it out. Mickey manages it at one point with the headphones, later the both of them get drunk and play rock-paper-scissors. It's an effective sequence, but it goes a little too long, especially the part where it's just one of them in the car.

The Cardinals Way - Howard Megdal

Poor timing on my dad's part. During a season where the Cardinals are sitting at the bottom of the National League, he decides to buy a book written 7 years ago about smart and well-run the Cardinals are.

Megdal starts with a few chapters on the team's drafting and player development system up to the early 2000s, started by Branch Rickey (the guy who signed Jackei Robinson to play for the Dodgers, and carried forward by a man named George Kissell and his various understudies for the next several decades. From there, Megdal moves into Bill DeWitt Jr., the owner of the team, bringing in Jeff Lunhow to improve those systems by incorporating newer statistical measures.

There is the expected pushback from the old-school types who don't trust guys who make decisions based on numbers in  spreadsheet, though Lunhow and John Mozeliak and any number of other people Megdal interviewed take pains to point out how the numbers were used in conjunction with the eyes-on scouting. The idea being to have the most data possible, to make the best assessment of whether a given player will turn into a major leaguer, and what the team should do to help it happen.

The thing is, I follow the Cardinals, so a lot of this is old hat to me. I've known since the late 2000s there was a conflict in the front office that lead to GM Walt Jocketty's being let go. I've known the Cardinals at one point seemed to have an assembly line, just churning out useful players and pitchers while fans of over teams wondered where the fuck these guys came from. I knew there was an eventual talent drain, as those guys started getting offered higher-level, higher paying jobs for other teams. The biographies of the people the Cardinals hired in that time are new to me, but how much do I really care about that?

It's like that movie Air with Affleck and Damon. Why do we care about some guys that figured out how to use the most popular basketball player in the world to market shoes? I watch sports for what the players do, not guys in offices with suits and ties, discussing how to get the best return on investment with their pool of draft money.

It is funny to read Megdal have to account for the 2015 scandal of the Cards' then-director of scouting, Chris Correa, getting busted by the FBI for hacking into the Houston Astros' (where Lunhow was GM) databases. Which was apparently really easy, because Lunhow used the same passwords he used when he worked for the Cardinals. *sad trombone* So Megdal has to try and square the circle that the Cardinals had a guy do that, which he does by Correa being a lone actor. Which, to the extent I remember the results of the FBI investigation, accurate.

It still leaves Megdal, having spent 250+ pages talking about how the Cardinals had done such a good job incorporating all this different information and creating this steady pipeline of players, having to wonder if the Cardinals are going to be able to continue to be a premiere franchise going forward. As they've won exactly one playoff series since the book was published, and are in the midst of a season where the current winning percentage would be the worst for a Cardinals team since 1919, signs point to "No."

Granted, I can't tell if this season is bad luck or there are serious flaws in the team-building philosophies. All of their relief pitchers deciding to suck simultaneously is probably luck, unless it's a flaw in their pitching strategy or game calling (their new catcher had some well-known issues with that before he arrived, but the team apparently thought they could fix them.) Not being willing to splurge on front-line, free agent starting pitching (and also apparently unable to develop such pitchers) hadn't kept them from at least making the playoffs recently. But it tends to leave a team dependent on their defense to help their pitchers and the Cardinals are also drafting a lot of guys based on their hitting, few of whom are any good at playing defense. But some of the defensive miscues have been from guys - Nolan Arenado, Tommy Edman - who are normally very good at defense. Bad luck, or failure of organizational philosophy? Probably a little from Column A, a little from Column B.

The fact I diverged into discussing the current team conveys that I was not invested in this book. But in the interest of ending on a somewhat higher note, it's funny to see Lunhow discussing the hacking scandal, knowing the Astros would get busted for cheating by using technology to stealing pitching signs in a few years, and Lunhow would get fired as a sacrificial lamb.

'If the tradition-bound members of the Cardinals' front office thought Jeff Lunhow had an atypical background, the brain trust he ultimately formed didn't change anybody's mind. The McKinsey executive hired a guy from MASA and Lockheed Martin, a guy from Brown and Lehman Brothers, and a cartoonist.'

The Catcher was a Spy - Nicholas Dawidoff

I first heard of Moe Berg, the only known person to play major league baseball and work for the OSS, through Mightygodking's "Reasons I Should Write Dr. Strange" series. So finding a biography of the man, even years later, was an immediate buy. 

Dawidoff starts with Berg's father, who left the Ukraine to come to the United States, partially in search of prosperity, but also apparently to escape a place that was entirely governed by Judaism. Then Berg's childhood, where Moe demanded to attend school like his sister and brother when he was only three, and college. Which is where some of the peculiarities emerge, as Berg attended New York University for a year before getting into Princeton, but from then on, never mentioned that year. Much as he never mentioned it took him an extra year to complete his law degree at Columbia University in the late '20s (albeit, a course of study conducted around his playing baseball.)

Berg didn't actually play much, despite being in the majors for 15 seasons, so much of those years are devoted to what he did the rest of the time. Reading newspapers, reading books about languages, traveling in the off-season to Paris or Japan. From there, it's into Berg's wartime service, including meeting and speaking with Italian physicists to try and get a line on how far along the Nazis might be in building an atomic bomb. That culminates in Berg attending a physics lecture in Zurich by Heisenberg, where Berg was to kill the scientist if it sounded like Germany was close to a breakthrough.

Maybe the most interesting part is what comes after the war, which is to say, largely nothing. Berg continues to travel and read, but without any sort of central pillar for any of it to revolve around. There's no baseball season taking him around the country, no spy missions taking him to Europe or other countries (minus a couple of exceptions in the '50s). It's a life a drift, and Dawidoff takes a different approach. Rather than going chronologically, he breaks the 100-page chapter into sections by cities, then details what Berg got up to there. Or more accurately, who he temporarily moved in with as Berg travels almost constantly, moving in with one person or the other for sometimes weeks.

Dawidoff apparently had access to a lot of Berg's personal papers, in addition to many interviews with other people (because sportswriters loved to talk to and write about Berg, so no shortage of copy there). The picture he paints is of a guy who liked to be the center of attention, but on his terms, so he played mysterious. He would see an old acquaintance on the street, and if they asked what was happening, he would put a finger to his lips. Berg might not have anything going on, but he wanted people to think he did. He would arrive in town, call someone and expect to be treated to dinner and possibly allowed to live with them. Then he might just up and vanish, not heard from for years or ever.Moe wanted to be noticed, but not imposed upon. Depending on who's interviewed, Berg was either excellent at listening and learning about others, or only interested in talking about himself (again, only in very particular ways.)

It's hard to tell from that if Berg was happy, however one might define that. Some of the notes he kept would suggest no, but that he wasn't able or willing to change. Certainly in the '50s he didn't want to work because he kept thinking the CIA would call. At least one agent points out Berg's tendency to draw attention to himself by acting mysterious was exactly the wrong one for a spy. You're supposed to blend in and move unnoticed, which Berg was capable of when he chose, he just didn't always choose it. 

Also, Alan Dulles didn't really get along with Berg when they met in Bern during WWII, which hurts the odds he'd tap him for a job. Count that as a point in favor of Berg's character. Dawidoff is far too kind to that Nazi-shielding shitbag Dulles.

The family situation Dawidoff paints is likewise a bit sad. Berg and his father never seem to have seen eye-to-eye, his dad contemptuous of Berg being a "sports" rather than some respectable position. His brother resented Berg being the favorite anyway, and Berg's brother and sister apparently hated each others' guts, although no answer is available as to why. None of them marry, none of them have kids, there's no reconciliation before their deaths.

'What to make of this lawyer who wasn't working on Wall Street, this linguist who wasn't teaching at Princeton, this ballplayer who didn't seem interested in playing ball? With Berg, potential was a red herring.'

Walk-Off Home Run

Is Senda right (for once)? We'll check back in later.

Volume 8 of Cross Game is the final volume of the series. After the romantic melodrama-swamped mess that was volume 6, this book is blessedly focused on the rematch between Seishu Gakuen (the school Ko pitches for), and Ryuou Gakuin, who defeated them the year before (seen in volume 5). At stake is the chance to reach the Koshien high school championship. Since this is their last year, it's the last chance for Ko and Akaishi to make Wakaba's dream of them playing in that championship come true.

But Ryuou Gakuin have their own ace pitcher and star slugger, superior to the ones that headlined the team last tie, so it's not going to be easy. Adachi cuts between the action on the field and Aoba and Junpei watching in the stands (also at stake: Aoba's big sister agreed to marry Junpei if the team makes Koshien). Ko promised Aoba he'd throw a 100 mph fastball, and so Adachi throws in a lot of close-up panels of the radar gun readings on the scoreboard.

This is the frustrating thing about this series for me. Adachi is really damn good at making the games tense. Lots of small panels that jump from one the ball taking a funny hop, to the reaction in the dugout, to a close-up of a foot touching home plate. Then sometimes Adachi will switch to an establishing shot, the bleachers for example, then back to a small panel of a ball bouncing off the steps. He may not draw the ball making contact with the bat, but you the see the leave the pitcher's hand, and you see where it ends up. 

Aoba's cousin, Mizuki, doesn't attend the game, but Adachi uses that to good effect, as Mizuki finds himself drawn into watching the game on TV, and when there's a big hit, he can hear to crowd's roar all the way from the house. (Mizuki also ends up stumbling across Aoba's journals, which help him make peace with the fact she likes Ko, and he goes on walkabout. Still feels like Adachi introduced Mizuki, then had little to do with him.)

Adachi also has some fun with the announce team, at times having one of them make a comment, then switch to the dugout in the next panel and have the manager point back at the previous panel to ask his players if the comment was correct, or vice versa. Late in the game, he switches out the announcer who pretends to be knowledgeable with one who responds to his partner's rhetorical questions as though they were literal. It help with the rise and fall of the tension.

Point being, the presentation of the game is expertly done, and I would have gladly taken a lot more of that. We also get to see Azuma let himself really enjoy playing baseball, even though he's sad on some level that he'll never get to face Ko - this version of Ko, a true ace pitcher - one-on-one.

Adachi also throws in a funny at-bat where the opposing pitcher, a little annoyed at all the oohing and aahing over Ko's velocity, decides to strike out Ko on three straight fastballs. He only hits 93 mph, but Ko's surprised at how fast that is. As Akaishi notes, it's because Ko never gets to see how fast his own pitches are from the batter's box.

Overall, it's very enjoyable conclusion to the book, even if I'm never clear on why these baseball manga are always about getting to the championship at Koshien, but never actually show any of the games played there. It's like having a baseball movie, but cutting off when the team earns the right to go to the World Series. Just odd.

Huh, look at that. Broken clock and all that.

What I Bought 2/3/2023

I love that Kyrie Irving demanded a trade. The Nets spent 3.5 seasons covering for and excusing all his dumbassery. Whether it's throwing his teammates under the bus as not being good enough to help he and Durant, or refusing to get vaccinated, or promoting movies that claim Jews made up the Holocaust, the Nets always make excuses and empty promises that Kyrie's gonna do better, and nothing changed. 

And now the Mavericks traded the only guy on their team who plays defense, plus draft picks for Kyrie Irving, whose teams never show any real drop-off in performance after he leaves, and who can't be counted on not to get hurt or say or do something stupid or hateful that gets him suspended. And he's a free agent at the end of this season! They gave up actual useful players and draft picks for the basketball equivalent of a 5-month migraine! Just spectacular.

One book last week, one book this week (that the local store won't have). Maybe three books next week. Why is everything waiting until the last week of the month to ship? Like February isn't depressing enough already.

Moon Knight #20, by Jed MacKay and Danny Lore (writers), Alessandro Cappuccio and Ray-Anthony height (artists), Le Beau Underwood and Scott Hanna (inkers), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Moon Knight can sense a fashion disaster somewhere nearby, but he just can't find them.

In a much earlier volume, Moon Knight had a group of agents and informants. Someone is now killing them, including a poor guy who looks like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Ruh-roh. Marc's rushing to the home of his buddy Plesko, the guy who talked with Zodiac last issue, but the place blows up. Which is strange when the other victims are being killed in more hands-on ways. Totally not suspicious!

They've managed to save a couple of people so far, which gives Reese the idea to have Jake figure out what route the killers are taking. Nice panel of Marc stepping aside for Jake by pulling the mask off while the burning building puts their face in shadow. Jake figures the route, Moonie finds them, i.d.'s them with some help from 8-Ball, and beats them up while they make cryptic statements about a 'ghost in the telephone.'

I had thought, based on how Sabbatini and Rosenberg illustrated them in the glimpse we got at the end of last issue, that they were robots. Actually, I thought they looked like the droid goon lackey for Pizza the Hutt in Spaceballs!, but they're actually some guys called the Harlequin Hit Men. The masks are supposed to look stitched together from different pieces of fabric, I guess. Whatever, someone did a number on them mentally, and while Marc lets Dr. Sternman take them in, now he's in a mood.

The second story, by Danny Lore and Ray-Anthony Height, is set in the 1970s and involves Blade teaming up with a Moon Knight of that time to deal with some yuppie vampires that are abducting people to feed on and buying up the abandoned buildings at a discount. Ah the old double-jump snatchy-snatchy, seen it a million times. 

Moon Knight and Blade take care of the vampires, but when Moonie decides to try and kill him, too, Blade points out he'll owe her a favor in the future. Or, it'll be owed to another of Khonshu's fists. Which is why, in the present, Blade agrees to help Reese learn about being a vampire as soon as Marc asks.

It's a nice twist. I was expecting a fight or some sort of confrontation between Marc and Blade about Moon Knight dusting all those vampires that came to New York for the sales pitch, but Lore used the fact Blade's been around for a while, and there have been a lot of Moon Knights. Height's art is very different from Cappuccio's, less sharp and minimalist. His 1970s Fist of Khonshu is a much more elaborate look, and while she does rock a big cape, it doesn't swallow up her movements. Rosenberg does away with the high-contrast, deep shadows approach she uses for the main story.

It's a Long Road Back

I'm so happy these guys won another title.

I've always gravitated towards the teams that shoot a lot of 3s and/or run a lot, so a roster with the greatest shooter in NBA history (Steph Curry), plus one of the other greatest shooters (Klay Thompson) was always going to be my jam. They seemed like a team that had so much fun. When they'd get some stops and turn them into fast break dunks or open 3s for Curry or Thompson, and that would start the avalanche.

Suddenly, one of those two couldn't miss and everyone on the team was encouraging them to just keep shooting and going nuts as the shots kept going in. The Warriors would pull away in seemingly an instant. Their opponent would panic, start trying to hit their own big shots to come back, and it would only get worse. I remember watching them in the playoffs against a solid-if-unspectacular Utah team and midway through the second quarter, the Warriors hit another level and suddenly made the Jazz look completely outmatched. Like Golden State was playing a JV high school team rather than a roster of actual NBA players.

That's an oversimplification of their team, though. The Warriors' success is as much about their defense as the offense over the years. The original "Death Lineup" - Andre Iguodala/Draymond Green/Harrison Barnes/Curry/Thompson - got that name because it consisted of four excellent defenders (plus Curry, who has worked to get better over his career, but is still an easier target), who could guard almost anyone, without requiring a big center who fouled up the spacing on offense. All with Draymond, who seems to understand defense, anticipation, positioning to a remarkable degree, running the show.

It helped that both Iguodala and Green, poor shooters, were smart passers and active without the ball. That's one of the things the Warriors being good for several years did, give me a better appreciation for how basketball works. Or maybe how it can work. Their offense is based on movement. Everybody screens, everybody cuts, everybody gets to touch the ball and be part of the offense. The polar opposite of the crap the Houston Rockets ran when they had James Harden, where he dribbles the ball for 20 seconds while the other four guys stand in the corners and wait to see if he'll pass to them or just jump into his defender to draw a bullshit foul.

(I understood people being tired of the Warriors at a certain point, but the notion of rooting for the Rockets to beat them? Just, no. Actually, NO. Absolutely not.)

The motion requires space. Namely, the amount of space Curry's shooting creates. The moment he reaches half-court, he has to be guarded. Because he's in range already. Dragging one, or even two if they decide to double-team or trap him, defenders out that far opens up so much room for everyone else on the team.

One of my favorite stretches was in the 2019 playoffs. Kevin Durant got hurt, and for the remainder of their series with Houston and the entire series with Portland, there would be times where it was Curry and 4 guys who can't shoot (usually Draymond, Iguodala, Shaun Livingston and Kevon Looney). It didn't matter. Guarding Curry properly created room to move, and all those guys were smart passers, so the Rockets and Blazers were scrambling all over the court, trying to keep up.

It fell apart against the Raptors in the Finals. Partially because Durant came back and then got really hurt, then Klay got really hurt, but also because the Raptors were a much better defensive team than the Blazers or Rockets. They could keep up with the passing and the movement. The Raptors won the title. Kevin Durant joined the Brooklyn Nets. Shaun Livingston retired. The Warriors traded Iguodala to cut the luxury tax payment. 

I was actually excited. I didn't mind Durant deciding he wanted to play with the Warriors, and while I didn't understand not wanting to stay, I was curious to see what would happen. He was gone, but Curry, Green and Thompson won a title without him. I expected they would want to prove they could do it again. Except, Klay Thompson missed all of the next season. Curry injured his hand five games into that season and missed the rest of it. Draymond looked out of shape and disinterested. The Warriors had the worst record in the league.

They were so bad, when the NBA resumed the COVID-interrupted season in "the bubble" down at Disneyland, the Warriors were one of the teams they didn't even invite. The garbage-ass Washington Wizards, who haven't been to a conference finals in over 40 years, were good enough to be invited to see if they could squeak into the playoffs, but the Warriors were relegated to the same category as the NBA's longest-running joke, the Sacramento Kings.

OK, maybe next year. Curry's hand would be fine. Thompson would be recovered from the ACL tear. Draymond would give a shit once those guys were back and they were contending. Then Thompson blew out his Achilles tendon in training camp. Missed another year. The Warriors scrambled to fill the spot with Kelly Oubre, who has never been a satisfactory answer to any problem a NBA team has faced. They managed a winning record anyway, on the strength of a strong finish to the season where they paired Curry with whoever on the roster could play the way the Warriors liked to, but still missed the playoffs.

Consistent title contenders usually have a core group of guys throughout a run, but there comes a point where they drop off. Age-related decline, injuries, retirement, guys leave in free agency, whatever. Once they do, the team doesn't come back until there's an entirely new core in place. The Celtics made it to at least the conference finals (meaning they were one of the last 4 teams standing) 7 of 8 years from 1980-1988. They won 3 titles, made the Finals 2 other times. After that, they didn't make the conference finals again until 2003. From 1980 through 1991, the Lakers made it to at least the conference finals 10 of 12 years. Won 5 titles, lost in the Finals 4 other times. After '91, took them until '98 (and having Shaq and Kobe) to get back to the conference finals. The Bulls in the 1990s made the Finals 6 of 8 years, won every time. They've made the conference finals once since 1998. It took them 7 years to even get back to the playoffs at all. 

The Cavaliers and Heat both dropped off after Lebron left. The Spurs did the same once Kawhi decided he didn't want to be in San Antonio any longer. The Lakers had a solid shitty decade after the Kobe/Pau Gasol/Lamar Odom group fell apart, and needed Lebron James to pull them from that tailspin. Considering they've only escaped the first round 1 of the 4 seasons he's been there, it's fair to question if he really succeeded.

So I wondered if injuries and time got the Warriors, and they wouldn't be able to make it back. But I hoped to be wrong, and they started the season well, 18-2. Neck-and-neck with the Suns for best record, and Klay was supposed to be progressing nicely, scrimmaging and everything. But they never could get everybody on the court together during the regular season. Klay came back, and Draymond almost immediately was out with a back injury. He came back, Curry's foot got rolled over and he missed the last two weeks of the season. They just held onto the #3 seed ahead of the Mavericks.

But maybe these guys don't need any reps to mesh. They've been teammates so long, they already know what to do. They basically smoked the Nuggets in the first round, even with Curry coming off the bench for four games as he worked back from the injury. He still scored 34 points in less than 23 minutes in a Game 2, 20-point beatdown. But the Nuggets were minus anyone other than Jokic who could reliably do anything on offense, and they weren't much on defense, either. 

The Grizzlies were going to be another matter. Young, athletic, tough, full of confidence and not shy letting the opponent know about it. The Grizzlies won Game 2 behind 47 points from Ja Morant, and suddenly there were all these articles about how would the Warriors be able to stop him, and boy, they're in trouble. Seemed like an overreaction considering the series was tied, the Warriors had home court, and the Grizzlies only won by 5. If Morant scored 40, they would have lost. He scored 34 in Game 3, and Memphis lost by 30.

And he got hurt, which improved the Grizzlies' defense, but they had no one who could get them a bucket when they needed it. It turned into a slog for the Warriors, but they made it hard for Memphis to score - the Grizzlies didn't break 100 points in Game 4 or 6, both of which they lost - and Golden State was able to find the cracks in the defense at the end to score just enough. In Game 6, Memphis grabbed a 2 point lead, 89-87 with just under 7 minutes left. From there, the Warriors went on a 21-3 run in the next 5 minutes and put it away.

On to Dallas, who had just humiliated the Suns and made Chris Paul look like a chump (though they're hardly the first to do that in the playoffs.) The Mavericks tried to take away 3-pointers from the Warriors. So the Warriors attacked the rim constantly. Got their own misses and tried again. The Mavs had no big men who could discourage that or grab enough rebounds, and so the Warriors shot over 50% from the field in the series.

The Celtics were supposed to be the toughest test. They were being picked to win by many, although there was a weird contradiction in how the Celtics were discussed. They were treated as this great team, who only beat themselves because of their tendency to make dumb turnovers. Which they do, a lot. But if they were a great team, they wouldn't be beating themselves multiple times in every series. If they were really that much better than Milwaukee or Miami, they wouldn't have needed 7 games to win. More likely the Celtics were very good, and so were the Bucks and the Heat. The Warriors were better than Dallas or Denver, and they (mostly) played like it. They beat them each in 5 games, and the one game they lost in both series was after they were up 3 games to 0 and the series was effectively over.

The longer the Finals went, the more the Warriors seemed in control. Outside of the Celtics' big comeback in Game 1, the Warriors seemed to know how to slow them down. The Celtics did make several turnovers that were just inexplicably dumb passes, but the Warriors also knew how to cut them off, how to anticipate, how to funnel whoever had the ball to a place he didn't want to be. And when the Celtics turned the ball over, the Warriors ran with it.

The Celtics gummed up Golden State's offense frequently, taking the approach to not help when guarding Curry in an attempt to keep him from finding open teammates. It mostly worked. Nobody was getting easy shots. Except Curry, you know, the most dangerous guy on the team. After he torched the Celtics for 43 points to win Game 4, they finally lost their resolve and started double-teaming him. And it worked, Curry had a terrible shooting night! But the thing Boston had been worried about kicked in. The other Warriors got easy shots, the Celtics were out of position to fight for rebounds, so the Warriors killed them on second-chance points. Andrew Wiggins had a great night, Klay Thompson scored 21, they got points from Jordan Poole and Gary Payton II off the bench. The Celtics got nothing from their bench.

The Celtics came out desperate at the start of Game 6, but the Warriors took their best punch, and after the first three minutes of the game had them down 14-2, went on a 52-25 run over the next 21 minutes. The Celtics tried to make a few comebacks during the game, but every time they got within 8, the Warriors either got an open shot off an attempted double-team on Curry, or Curry hit a shot, or the Warriors' defense forced another turnover. They withstood every push the Celtics made. 

Maybe because the Celtics were tired from playing more games, or for not having a better bench to lessen the load. Even when the non-Curry Warriors weren't scoring, they were helping. Wiggins was making Jayson Tatum's life miserable. Kevon Looney was grabbing rebounds like crazy. Gary Payton II and Klay were active on defense and making just enough shots. Draymond was doing a little of everything in the last couple of games, which is his specialty. 

Or maybe it was because the Warriors have done this before. After facing Lebron James in 4 consecutive finals, Jayson Tatum and Marcus Smart probably don't seem too terrifying. It was weird, but even if I worried about if the Warriors would win individual games, I was never worried about them winning any of these series. It helps that, other than being down 1 game to 0 and then 2 games to 1 to Boston, they were never behind. But even when Boston was up, I still felt like Golden State could come back and win. And they did. So maybe I'm better at predicting sports than I am at predicting resolutions to comic book plots.

I don't know if they'll be able to do it again next year. It'd be cool if they could, but there's never any guarantees. The Bucks probably figured they were going back to the Finals this year, and then Khris Middleton hurt his knee in a first-round series against Chicago. The Bucks could beat the Bulls without him, they couldn't beat Boston. The Suns talked about this as their revenge tour for losing in the Finals last year, and then Dallas beat them like a drum in Round 2. The Warriors' last couple of seasons are maybe the best example. Nothing went the way they expected. But at least this season, they made it all the way back to the top this year.

A Ghost from Their Past

Cut to still image of Hayao Miyazaki saying, 'anime was a mistake.'

Owing once again to the peculiarities in when and how I find volumes of Cross Game, we're getting to volume 5 before volume 4. The first half revolves around a showdown between Seishu Gakuen, led by Ko and Azuma, and the powerhouse Ryuou Gakuin, who are the #1 seed in this qualifying tournament to reach Koshien, which I guess is a big national high school baseball tournament that takes place in Koshien Stadium. I just know every baseball manga or anime I've seen (all three of them) is fixated on getting to Koshien.

Seishu already won two games to get this far, but Ryuou's a whole other matter. They have their own ace and slugging first baseman, although as the game goes on it appears their back-ups, both second years like Ko and Azuma, are even better. The game ends up turning on an event that really doesn't make much sense to me. Ko catches a scorching line drive with his glove, which somehow makes his hand so numb he can't properly lift his arm? This is something that gets hinted during the game and even after. Basically, the game-winning hit gets past him because he doesn't get his glove up high enough to grab it, and Mitsuru keeps making it seem like it's due to some inability to lift his arm, rather than not being able to feel his hand.

Seems like horseshit to me, but I guess it's to make us wait until the very end of the series to see if they actually make it to Koshien. 

In the meantime, there's teen romance angst plotlines to focus on, and oh geez, does this stuff get silly. In volume 4, Mitsuru introduced Aoba's cousin Mizuki as a potential rival for her affections (which Ko would insist he doesn't have anyway.) This also involved multiple characters assuring us that yes, first cousins can get married and, look, I know different people have different opinions on things like this. I am on the Internet, I have seen the sorts of fanfiction people write. 

Hell, I knew a guy in high school that thought I was weird for being disturbed that in the movie The Devil's Advocate (with Keanu and Al Pacino), Keanu is encouraged to father a child with a woman with the same father as him (meaning, Al Pacino). Of course, Gregor was kind of an asshole on a good day, so I wouldn't use him as a baseline for what's OK in any circumstance. Point is, Adachi can have as many characters say it's cool as they want, I'm still going to look sideways at it.

It doesn't matter too much in this story, because almost immediately we're shown Aoba barely notices Mizuki, despite his attempts to hang out or let her copy his English homework. Meanwhile, the similarities between she and Ko in everything (cleanliness, approach to fashion, sleeping habits, reactions to movies) are hammered at. So in this volume, we get a new complication: a new neighbor for Ko. A new neighbor who happens to look just like Aoba's deceased sister Wakaba would, if she hadn't died and continued to grow up.

So we get lots of people seeing her without realizing this is Akane, daughter of the owner of the new soba restaurant, and freaking out about Wakaba's ghost being out and walking around. I mostly feel bad for Akane, who has no idea any of this is going on until Senda comes barging into the restaurant and very bluntly says he's there to see the girl who looks like Aoba's dead sister.

Akaishi probably should have hit him harder, honestly.

Sigh. This is a frustrating development. I'm interested in the baseball stuff. Ko trying to see how good he can be, Akaishi wanting to make Wakaba's dream a reality, figuring out how Aoba's going to get to play in an official game. Hell, even Azuma gradually starting to enjoy baseball again, rather than doing it to make up for ending his brother's promising career. Secondary to that is at least some of the humor. At least Azuma's brother is being slightly less of a pervert now that he's actually dating Aoba's oldest sister, Ichiyo. This relationship drama stuff? No thanks, especially when we're getting into daytime soap opera-esque "she's a twin for my dead sister" hijinks.

Prequel to a Rematch

Inspirational leadership right there. The guy is a high school pitcher with four breaking balls, and you're busting his chops about his fastball? There are major league pitchers who barely have one! This fucking guy, I tell you.

Volume 3 of Cross Game was focused on the rematch between the Seishu Gakuen varsity team and the "portables" squad, led by Ko and Akaishi. Unsurprisingly then, volume 2 is mostly about the first game between the two teams. It ends in a loss, which sets up the portables' intense training in preparation for the rematch.

Adachi sets a few things in motion here. This is Ko's first time pitching in a real game, so it gives him a sense of what he's up against if he's going to bring Wakaba's dream to fruition. At the same time, Yuhei's perceptions of Ko change over the course of the game. Ko challenges Yuhei each time he comes to bat, rather than pitch around him, and gets burned the first three times. But as he tells Yuhei, each time he really didn't think Yuhei would be able to hit a home run off him.

Adachi's also working hard to show that, even if Yuhei's social skills are non-existent, he takes this seriously. He's one of the only members of his team who recognizes the portables have been scouting their weaknesses, or who understands that varsity is winning because Ko keeps challenging Yuhei, rather than just walking him and attacking the rest of the lineup. Coach Daimon continues to be an overconfident, smirking jerk, who insists the game wouldn't be close if he was actually doing any coaching. Which makes it sound like he's not doing his job, but his argument is this will help them realize how much they need to listen to him.

Yeah, but if you lose to the "small fry", then you just look like a jackass.

Beyond that, Adachi has Aoba watching in the stands with an old man who becomes plot-relevant in volume 3. It shows not only her knowledge of the varsity team, from the time Daimon made her pitch batting practice until she collapsed, but her (maybe unconscious) confidence in Ko. Which is strange, given her statement later on that she doesn't trust him at all, but she has a grasp on what he's thinking throughout the game. When he settles down after allowing some runs, she correctly notes he probably blew up in the dugout.

This is also when Adachi adds Senda, the comic relief character, to the cast, as he gets demoted from the varsity to the portables in the middle of the game. Daimon had him pitch so the defense could show off, but when he gave up some runs, he got the boot. So Coach Meneo, who seems where Senda's gifts actually lie, turns him into a shortstop.

And Adachi even manages a little character arc for some of the seniors on the portables. They spend most of the game hot-dogging and playing selfishly in the belief they can wow Coach Daimon and get back on the varsity squad. Over the course of the game, at least a couple of them change their perspective on this being their last chance, and try to make sacrifices to help the team win. Fortunate, or Robert DeNiro probably would have shown up to smash their heads in with a bat.

Adachi continues to do a good job of figuring out how to depict the action on the field. Showing the baseball as a indistinct white blur. Using a full-page splash of Yuhei finishing his swing, then following that with a smaller panel of the ball going over the fence, shown from a long distance (probably Ko's perspective on the mound.) When there's lots of action happening simultaneously, a ball in play and runners moving, Adachi will switch to a bunch of small triangular panels all at the same level on the page. Then he'll move back to larger panels as the different parts of the play converge, say when a runner gets thrown out at the plate.

Rematch Time

That's the spirit! I think. . .maybe.

As far as these tpb/manga reviews go, I hit them in the order I bought them, which is why we're skipping volume 2 of Cross Game and going to volume 3. The first half is largely focused on a rematch between Seishu Gakuen's front-line team, and the "portables", led by Ko and Akaishi, with their respective coaches' jobs on the line.

Adachi advances a few different threads here. One is the continued progress of Ko as a pitcher, as he utterly dominates Coach Daimon's lineup. Adachi uses a couple of different characters as the POV here. 

One is Aoba Tsukishima, who is added to the portable team as their starting centerfielder (even though she can't play in any official games because she's a girl.) Aoba still doesn't believe in Ko, but she also hasn't seen him pitch in a game other than the first one between these two teams. We see that in how immediately irritated she gets with him. When he walks one batter in the late innings, Adachi draws her glaring and muttering "Hey!" in the next panel. This is a chance for Ko to prove to his biggest doubter that he's actually taking this seriously and not just a goof-off.

The other is Yuhei Azuma, the star slugger, who Adachi begins to soften, or maybe flesh out is a better descriptor. We get to meet his older brother Junpei (who's a pervert, but otherwise an upbeat guy and supportive brother). Yuhei's recognized something in Ko already, demonstrated in volume 1 by the fact Yuhei bothers to remember his name, a courtesy he didn't extend to most of his teammates. He's the only one who doesn't dismiss the portables chances of winning the game. Though that may have as much to do with how aware he's become of Coach Daimon's limitations. The portables probably win because Yuhei lightly injures himself so he can't play, telling Daimon to prove this team is good enough to win without him.

He's still kind of a prick, or just has a very deadpan delivery on his jokes, but Adachi is working hard to show that Yuhei isn't simply condescending to the others. Rather, he holds them to the same standard holds himself. Because he believes it's the only way he'll achieve his goals.

Adachi really likes using the head-on perspective during the game action. The baseball coming directly towards us, slightly squashed looking. Or using seeing the catcher from the perspective or whoever is throwing, with the ball already in their mitt. Or showing Ko at the end of his delivery. It's probably the best approach, breaking up the action into small panels. A baseball field is so large, it would be hard to show all the action in one panel and convey any sense of action or tension. Better to save that for establishing shots, and zoom in on specific moments.

After that game, Adachi jumps ahead a little as a way to shake things up again. Yuhei's brother is trying to court Aoba's oldest sister, and Yuhei is no living at Ko's house, because all the players Daimon recruited left with him, so there's no one in the dorms. Which makes Yuhei sort of the outsider perspective on everything with Ko and Aoba. We see that there are tons of boys smitten with Aoba, none of whom she's interested in, and Akaishi is actively keeping all the girls away from Ko by saying he's Aoba's property. Aoba is unaware of this, which is probably good for Akaishi's health. Or maybe Ko's since she'd probably blame him somehow.

Aoba and Ko are still pretty antagonistic to each other, so I'm not really buying there's going to be some big romance between them eventually, but I know that's where it's going nonetheless, even with the late introduction of Aoba's cousin, Mizuki.