Taishou Yakyuu Musume - Episode 11

After their training camp last episode, it appears that all of the girls hard work has born fruit, with Ouka-kai thrashing their opponents in their final practice match before the day of their big showdown with Asaka secondary school.

Of course, it would be foolish of us to expect the run-up to this big game to go smoothly, and so after many months of keeping her activities hidden a visit from one of Asaka's players to her families restaurant blows the doors wide open on Koume's baseball playing proclivities.


However, despite the anger of her father (seemingly more about her lying to her parents rather than the baseball side of things itself) Koume is still allowed to go and join her team mates for the big game... Which is more than can be said for Akiko, who has been locked in her room by her mother after a big blow-up row about the match. With time running out before the referee forces the girls to forfeit the game for having too few players, it's up to Koume (with the help of the Ogasawa family's driver) to effectively break Akiko out so she can take her place in the game.

With this obstacle successfully traversed, we're treated to the first few innings of the match itself, and all is going swimmingly for Ouka-kai up to this point, thwarting Asaka's offensive opportunities perfectly while also putting away a few runs for themselves. But with Asaka's players getting wise to Akiko's "magical" balls, how much longer can their advantage last? That's for us to find out in the final episode.

After having been shorn of too much in the way of actual baseball of late, it's actually quite nice to finally get to the big game which has been the aim of this series throughout, and much as Saki managed to ramp up the tension when it came to the actual mahjong action when it mattered so it proves to be quite exciting to watch for the outcome of the game. While the first half of this episode was arguably just going through the motions in creating some drama, it was well worth sitting through to take us to the baseball game itself, and I'm actually pretty keen to see how it all pans out in the series finale.