70 Years of Baseball and Manga

　After baseball manga, another type of sports manga that gained immense popularity was judo manga. And the invention of the "makyū" is what made it possible to incorporate the one-on-one match pattern of judo manga, in which the protagonist and his rival apply their special techniques on each other, into baseball manga. This invention made it possible to condense baseball into a one-on-one match between a pitcher who threw magic pitches on the one hand and a batter armed with a special batting style on the other. Portraying the interaction between wacky magic pitches and special batting styles was a way to temporarily avoid the challenge of depicting a nine-on-nine match on a wide playing field.

　In "Kyojin no Hoshi", the coexistence between the impact of the magic pitch and reality of the story in baseball terms reached its limit. As Mitsuru Hanagata—the rival of Hyūma Hoshi—spends four pages passionately describing the principles behind his rival’s disappearing magic pitch, his fervor ends up demonstrating the limits inherent in attempts to logically explain magic pitches.

　"Kyojin no Hoshi" also fundamentally questions the nature of a protagonist who puts everything he has into matches hinging on magic pitches. The inner world of Hyūma Hoshi is vividly depicted as he ponders the futility of potentially ruining both his elbow and shoulder in an effort to develop a new magic pitch every single time he discards one that is hit by his rival, even as he forgets that he is a professional baseball player engaged in a nine-on-nine team-based game.　After the serialization of "Kyojin no Hoshi" was finished, Shinji Mizushima’s "Yakyū-kyō no Uta [Poetry of Baseball Enthusiasts]", was started in the same publication, "Weekly Shōnen Magazine". In that story, the female pitcher Yūki Mizuhara’s magic pitch—the Dream Ball—is a breaking ball that is actually possible, and information warfare concerning whether the pitch actually exists upsets the batters she faces. In "Dokaben", which was started during the same year, Mizushima successfully depicted nine-on-nine play on the pages of a magazine, ushering in a new era of baseball manga.

　In Asa Higuchi’s "Ōkiku Furikabutte [Big Windup!]", the unique fastball thrown by the pitcher Ren Mihashi—who has passion and dedication to pitching but struggles with the problem of low self-esteem—functions as a sort of magic pitch due to the leadership of the catcher Takaya Abe. This work, which meticulously depicts practice that incorporates the latest sports-science know-how, matches in which complex tactics unfold, and the communication between teammates and changing nature of their relationships, represents baseball manga in its current form.