One Outs

[Don]

Just when you think you've seen every possible way a sports manga can suck, it turns out that the talent in Japan never fails to redefine what it means to suck. One Outs is a baseball manga drawn by the same guy who is currently drawing Liar Game, and I guess this the reason why nobody has heard of him prior to Liar Game.

Almost all sports manga I'm aware of, besides Slam Dunk, suspends reality in some way. If you see a guy pitch a 120 MPH fastball you know that can't be real so you change your expectations accordingly. If you see a pitched throw 4 shutouts in 4 conseutive days you know that probably can't actually happen so again your expectation is lowered. Indeed in some extreme cases you got Prince of Tennis where people can move at the speed of light, so nobody is going to be very concerned if people in POT do some superhuman things like killing your opponent with thought (it's a very reliable way to win, I might add).

The problem is that like Slam Dunk, One Outs does not suspend reality. And this means you got to know the game you're writing about really well, but Slam Dunk is written by a guy considered to be one of the best manga guy in Japan (and a huge fan of basketball). On the other hand the author of One Outs's understanding of baseball is probably comparable to how much the author of ES21 knows about America and American Football (President Obama is a white guy in ES21).

The basic premise is that there's this pitcher who can only throw a 75 mph fastball. He has no other pitches at all. The only kind of pitch he has is a 75 mph fastball. This guy is supposed to be super smart, so he can apparently anticipate what every batter he faces can do, so he went to some fictional Major League in Japan and led a team of scrubs to victory. He struck out something like 400 guys and had an ERA of 0.91 and won 37 games and 20 of them were probably perfect games, or something crazy like that.

The problem is that strategy and intelligence can't make up for the fact that 75 MPH fastball is not a very scary pitch. The manga goes through great lengths to explain how you can possibly strike out so many guys with one pitch but fails miserably. The only way it can be possible is if he was pitching for the Little Leagues. There's also one game where he was behind 16-0 (he gave up 16 runs on purpose) and then at the last inning he was basically like 'they have fallen into my trap hahaha' and then his team scored 17 runs in one inning, and it didn't even involve people transforming to Super Saiyans or anything. In fact the whole series of event was so ridiculous they didn't even bother drawing out the sequence, it was literally like 'due to his super genius his team scored 17 runs this inning'.

In the finale he gave up 36 runs in the first game (out of 5) and apparently it took some superhuman skill to give up 36 runs. I guess most of us must be superhuman pitchers because I'm sure most of us can give up 360 runs against a professional team if we're to pitch.

It's a shame too, because not all the strategy stuff in this manga is bogus. The baserunning/fielding/etc strategy looks plausible, but none of it matters since it rests on a completely implausible strategy starting a pitcher that essentially, cannot pitch. The story could make sense if this guy was the manager.

[Mental]

75MPH is indeed a pretty piddly fastball for a professional pitcher. It's not something to write about. You need to hit at least 85MPH to really impress anyone with a fastball in pro baseball, and some of the better pitchers have thrown 95-100.

I also agree that the notion of the pitcher being "super smart" enough to strike out everyone with a fastball basically fails at actually being about baseball. A pitcher mostly uses his intelligence and outguessing abilities to do two things: choose where the ball is going, and choose what kind of pitch will most successfully confuse the batter. If he can only throw one kind of pitch, he can never switch it up, and just about every good batter in any professional baseball league will start winging doubles, triples, home runs in every at-bat if you toss them the same 75MPH fastball over and over and over again.

So, yes, this sounds really awful. Write the guy a letter and tell him to stick to drawing pretty girls in dresses with big breasts. Just like the 75MPH fastball in question, that's the one thing every anime artist knows how to actually do convincingly.

[Kupek]

In MLB, I don't think 75 mph even counts as a fastball. A quick Google search yielded that even 85 mph was considered slow for a "fastball."

[Zeus]

In MLB, I don't think 75 mph even counts as a fastball. A quick Google search yielded that even 85 mph was considered slow for a "fastball."

As a baseball fanatic, I can concur with that statement. Fastballs need to be in the high 80s to 90 or so before they're considered "average"

[Don]

Well the author does repeatedly mention even a high school guy can throw a faster fastball than the hero of the story. I think in Japan they actually use the term 'straight ball' for fastball, which implies the ball just goes in a linear motion with no sudden changes in direction.

This fictional pitcher apparently has absolute control on where the ball goes, i.e. if he wants it to go to an upper right corner it will always go to exactly that spot. The story also mentions something about he can change the spin of the ball at will (make it spin a lot, or not at all). But even given my limited knowledge of baseball, it'd appear if you can never throw a ball faster than 75 MPH and it can only go in a straight line, then a pro can simply just watch that pitch and react to that because if they can't do that they'd never be able to hit anything in real life.

In the world of fiction it is easy to make a 75 MPH pitch scary if you just make it say, teleport through space and time, or move in a way that defies the law of physics. I saw someone made a point that sports manga are so crazy because writing about reality is really hard and actually takes a lot of skill. I sure would have no idea how to write about an awesome pitcher that pitches like a real person, but I can easily make up a pitcher who can defy the laws of physics and you can't even question the validity of that because it's magic. A common speed to pitch in a baseball manga is probably 120 MPH, and I think I read that a human cannot physically pitch a baseball that fast, but it sure makes it really easy to explain why someone would be dominant if you could pitch that fast.

The guy who wrote this has since moved on to something new. Liar Game is actually decent, and this is why people are scanning the stuff he did before Liar Game. Though it's pretty obvious he wasn't very good in the past! What's interesting is that most of the reader feedback seems to suggest that people actually believe what's described is actually plausible. I think it's sort of an Emperor's New Cloth syndrone since this manga is said to be as something only smart people will get, so obviously if you think it's dumb that just means you're not smart, because the manga said so! Actually, the Chinese subtitle for One Outs is: A Game Only For the Super Smart People. So clearly that means only smart people can appreciate it!

[Mental]

The story also mentions something about he can change the spin of the ball at will (make it spin a lot, or not at all).

That's not a fastball. That's a curveball, or a slider, or a screwball. If you put more than a tiny amount of spin on something, it's not a fastball anymore.

Actually, the Chinese subtitle for One Outs is: A Game Only For the Super Smart People. So clearly that means only smart people can appreciate it!

Why are you reading this when you can clearly tell what a pile of crap it is?

[Don]

I don't know baseball enough to tell you how the spin comes into but there are separate terms for a slider/curveball/etc and that was definitely not the pitch being used. I don't actually know what the distinction between a Japanese 'straight ball' relative to an American 'fastball', but I assume it's still supposed to encompass the same basic type of pitch since every other kind of pitch has an exact parallel.

As for why I'm reading this? Like I said this is the same guy who did Liar Game, which is pretty decent. One Out ended 3 years ago and nobody has even heard of it, but as Liar Game picks up in popularity people are starting to scanning his older works on the assumption that if Liar Game was pretty good it might be worth checking out the other stuff he did. Out of the 20 volumes I read the first 4 and the last 3 parts (~10 part in a volume) and the first two volumes were actually good until the guy started throwing consecutive perfect games. The non-pitching related stuff of this manga is actually decent, or at least plausibly believeable.

And as for the title, Chinese subtitles are notorious bad. For example on the same site you can find Street Fighter 4 subtitled as Street Fighter 5. Most people are trained to ignore the Chinese subtitles so the revealation didn't kick in for a while. Besides, there's a drought of good manga recently so it's not like there's much of a choice there.

[Zeus]

This fictional pitcher apparently has absolute control on where the ball goes, i.e. if he wants it to go to an upper right corner it will always go to exactly that spot. The story also mentions something about he can change the spin of the ball at will (make it spin a lot, or not at all). But even given my limited knowledge of baseball, it'd appear if you can never throw a ball faster than 75 MPH and it can only go in a straight line, then a pro can simply just watch that pitch and react to that because if they can't do that they'd never be able to hit anything in real life.

Fictional pitcher? This man exist and goes by the name of Roy "Doc" Halladay :-)

Spin is what causes a ball to not go straight. Not at all is what's referred to as a knuckleball.

And pros can hit a 100mph ball that doesn't move. They generally don't react to pitches, there's no time really. They take a guess at what's coming and try to hit that. If they don't get it and are protecting the plate, they tend to foul it off.

[Don]

I remember reading about how Andre Agassi can hit a fastball from one of those pitching machines while running up to it. Of course that doesn't mean he could hit the ball well, but it'd seem to me 75 MPH is slow enough for those with good hand-eye coordination to react to it, especially if you know the ball cannot go faster than 75 MPH. It also seems like if you know the ball is always that slow you can just keep on foul off the ball?

Another common thing is sometime he'd throw a 75 MPH straight down the middle on first pitch, and the argument here is that good hitters generally watch the first pitch. Now remember the setting is that this fictional guy can always outthink his opponent, so you'll never be able to anticipate when you get the easy pitch. But it seems to me even if you're not ready, it shouldn't be that hard to hit a 75 MPH ball straight down the middle.

Part of the reason I post here is because I actually don't know enough about baseball so I'm actually curious if anything in this remotely plausible.

[Mental]

http://hsbaseballweb.com/eve/forums/a/t ... 8116075893

This forum has a discussion on high school pitching, and apparently the better high schoolers can throw into their 80s by senior year. 75 seems to be about average for high school.

Bear in mind, you usually have to be somewhat decent to pitch for your high school's varsity team, but that still says a lot.

[Mental]

Apparently, the average fastball in MLB is (anecdotally) somewhere between 89-91. So I would have been off with my first statement of the thread. You need about a 95MPH fastball to actually *impress* anyone in the major leagues.

[Don]

Hmmm, that high school article is interesting, since it'd mean Mr. Fullswing is closer to reality than most baseball manga, seeing that the high school kids in there only throw around 140-150 KPH (87-94 MPH) despite being able to make a ball split into 64 equal halves and converge at the plate. The Japanese ace pitcher in that is supposed to going to MLB and he can throw a 100 MPH fastball, 100 MPH sinker, and a 100 MPH fastball that warps space and time. Now I'm pretty sure two out of those 3 pitches aren't possible especially the last one, but at least they got the speed right.

I really think people should at least be responsible enough to have some general knowledge about the sports they're attempting to write about. Mr. Fullswing is basically sci-fi stuff when you got a pitch that can stop in mid air and then move again, but nobody in that series was ever able to throw a ball harder than what a human could have in terms of speed.

[SineSwiper]

The anime sucks. Why are there 12 posts on the manner?

[Mental]

Hmmm, that high school article is interesting, since it'd mean Mr. Fullswing is closer to reality than most baseball manga, seeing that the high school kids in there only throw around 140-150 KPH (87-94 MPH) despite being able to make a ball split into 64 equal halves and converge at the plate.

I kind of agree with Sine. Once you have baseballs splitting into fractions and then magically reassembling themselves, you've kind of disestablished reality, and you have to more or less take everything at face value. So why are we still discussing this?

[Zeus]

I remember reading about how Andre Agassi can hit a fastball from one of those pitching machines while running up to it. Of course that doesn't mean he could hit the ball well, but it'd seem to me 75 MPH is slow enough for those with good hand-eye coordination to react to it, especially if you know the ball cannot go faster than 75 MPH. It also seems like if you know the ball is always that slow you can just keep on foul off the ball?

Another common thing is sometime he'd throw a 75 MPH straight down the middle on first pitch, and the argument here is that good hitters generally watch the first pitch. Now remember the setting is that this fictional guy can always outthink his opponent, so you'll never be able to anticipate when you get the easy pitch. But it seems to me even if you're not ready, it shouldn't be that hard to hit a 75 MPH ball straight down the middle.

Part of the reason I post here is because I actually don't know enough about baseball so I'm actually curious if anything in this remotely plausible.

Watching the first pitch is an old thing. It generally is only a high probability if you either have never seen the pitcher before or if you don't have success against him or if the pitcher has shown a tendency to be wild or waste the first pitch. If you watch the first pitch each time against a guy like Halladay, you could very well be wasting the only good pitch you see from him all at-bat (or even all night).

And that's part of the "outthinking" you were referring to. Are you able to guess what the pitcher or catcher is thinking? If you do, the game becomes easy. And it's highly dependent on what pitches the pitcher can get over for strikes. The more pitches you eliminate as possibilities, the less pitches you have to worry about.

With a few practice swings to get the timing down, I'm sure I could rather easily hit a 75 mph fastball that's going straight. That ain't particularly hard at all.

The stuff you're talking about is very basic baseball. It's just taken to an extreme which anime guys like to do :-)