Yakyuukyou no Uta

Holy guacamole, it gets better in the ep5, seems like the opposite thing of muzu's usual deal: lackluster at first, becomes imaginative, inventive, sensitive and cute as the time passes.
Can relate to the wolf of the north guy, he looks spent, crass, and burnt out, though at least he is handsome, while I'm just lazy, unstable and scrawny instead.
11 eps in and it really is shocking, charming and sensuous, but damnit it was a single movie's worth of material, not 10 45-minutes episodes. Ep12 is aight, too, I guess. Tetsu carrying the game with tricks until complete exhaustion is actually hilarious, but still ... a mid show and not "one outs" or such.
Ep13 starts to look like some real soulless 60s shit: like when the moment is not important (not some match or dramatic pivot), it is actually uglier than Ashita no Joe tv-1 or such. Very poor for late 70s, in other words.
13 also has a badass death scene, but still, I'm not that much attached to the character, and it was still not worth 13 45-minutes episodes. All in all, I'm not impressed.
Also, Hiura's reaction is so edgy and contrived, it had me burst into laughter despite the dramatic moment. But at least the (second? additional?)OP/ED song for those eps are catchy and great.
While the ep14 has this cool idea and pretty brutal imagery, the story is still stupid and feels fake and contrived, it took too much a coincidence to pull all that shit out: no one figuring out they have similar scars, then them never meeting each other before, then mom recovering from it and also coming in at a right place and time, then them both going into baseball - all in all, looks utterly stupid and feigned.
In the latter half, the show resorts increasingly more to a "lazy scriptwriter's magic wand" which is the untimely death of a player's father. Well, at least they bother to write in the premises and explanations, not just the usual and convenient "spitting blood for no reason" anime disease.
Alright, in the end of the day, the show really lives up to its name: it's an ode to the small people with baseball as a bee in their bonnet.
But that's it! It could have been quite good, had it been a documentary about players/people pertained and everything that can go wrong in the baseball industry, but as it is now, it's pretty much any other baseball anime of the era, but cheaper. Excluding Mitsuru Adachi's titles, naturally, because those play in a complete dumpster league of their own. This is by far not GOAT, but still on the opposite side of the spectrum from Adachi.
The other issue is Mizuhara cutie, the one tagged as "leading character" and the one on the poster, completely disappearing somewhere before the Wolf of the North chapter. I was sure she'll be back one of those episodes, but no. She's just a clickbait.