Moshidora 3-5: Half-way

So far I have been quite happy with Moshidora so far, it hasn’t blown my socks off yet as I had hoped for during the season preview but its been building up steadily for the past few episodes and I hope it will build up to something good. Then it dawned on me… I never checked how many eps the show had been scheduled for. Quick google later and my world came crushing down! Only 10 episodes, that is not enough time to do anything in the show especially at the rate thy have been going. Either it will just end having not actually gone anywhere or the next 5 episoeds are going to be one great big rush job. Neither are good alternatives.

Secondly, how many people want to go out and read Management by Peter Drucker now? Fair bit of publicity its getting, is that a cha ching I hear Production I.G.?

So Minami is still working through her textbook, so much so that it kind of slips her mind that she has exams. In addition to this minor mishap, a few other things start not going her way. After exams the team shows a distinct lack of interest in training and Yunosuke decides to leave the team. Minami then makes a very good point, she points out that the actual games are much more fun than a normal practice. Makes perfect sense as I recall back in high school not many of us were too keen about practice but when matchday came around we were all hyped and ready to play.

So Minami’s goes about trying to improve the practice sessions. After a brain storming session with Yuki, they get Ayano (who might have let slip that she has some strong feelings towards Yuki) too work the coach to devise new training methods. A boy were they productive.

The result is a competitive training methodology where everybody is divided into teams and has their performance recorded. Seems  abit much for high school, but then again I guess baseball is serious business. The new method is a success and even gets Yunosuke to come back after a motivating talk from his friend Hana and Minami. Minami then asks Hana to join the management team and she accepts. I’m not sure why she joined though as before she was doing karaoke with her friends every afternoon and now it looks as if she just collects the balls. On a sidenote, has anybody else found it wierd that the tune to A Whole New World plays in the background at times?

News of Minami’s success seems to have spread through school as many of the clubs come and ask her to be their managers too. Being as ambitious as she is, obviously she accepts even though she hasn’t really hasn’t really been doing much of the work up until now.

The next big event to happen is that Nikai decides that he really isn’t cut out for baseball and he too joins the management team. So that makes the management team 4 strong now, 5 if you include Yuki. He announces his retirement from the team at practice and everybody applauds his decision, this could be interpretted as them acknowledging his bravery or as I see it, them all agreeing with him that yeah, he sucks at baseball.

Minami’s ambition eventually catches up with her duties with the other clubs start pressuring her. To cope with everything she enlists to the baseball team to help, they end up participating in the other clubs activities as well. How she convinced them to agree to this is beyond me as they must have next to no free time left now.

The next step in the plan according to Drucker is to implement some sort of innovation in the way they do things. The coach helps with this as he just happened to he a revolutionary new gameplay strategy just laying around and so the No-Ball-No-Bunt gameplan is born.

So finally after effectively 4 episodes of laying the foundations their plans are finally put the test in a friendly against a college team. Before the game coach stresses that the No-Ball-No-Bunt system will not work immediately and that if they just keep at it they will get better at it… duh, you just told them about it last practice, half of them probably still don’t know what its about.
And as predicted things don’t go well at the beginning as the team leak runs like a burst balloon in the first few innings but as the game carries on Minami notices a distinct improvement in their play (Yunosuke actually stops a ball!) until the game is ended under the mercy rule. Has this always been around? I mean theoretically they could still have comeback and won the game in those last two innings. So yeah, they lost but owing to their improvement in performance, they kind of won.

So far episode 5 has been the best as we actually got some gameplay and once explained the strategy was actually pretty clever. No doubt there is more stuff still to be implemented from Druckers book but how much more can they squeeze in 5 more episodes? I doubt we’ll get to see any of the nationals.