What They Say:
Baby Steps centers on a honor student named Eiichiro Maruo who becomes frustrated with his life and decides to join the tennis club. Despite lacking experience and physical strength, he utilizes his studious nature to develop a strategic approach to playing tennis. Taking notes of his opponents’ habits and tendencies, he is able to predict their next move before they even react. He also meets Natsu Takasaki, a beautiful girl with a passion for tennis. With her help, he aims to become a professional tennis player.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Baby Steps is certainly living up to its name by moving in small ways, but providing time between some of the steps so that we’re not actually crawling. Eiichiro has grown well in the first nine episodes so far and we’ve seen him really take to the game in a serious way. He’s got over twenty notebooks on his performance and on others as he watches everything and his analytical side is what helps him grow and understand the game. What seems to be lacking though, as much as I hate to say it, is a real passion for the game to drive him. He’s enjoying the challenge and he wants to win, but there’s no love of tennis itself here at this point. And that’s kind of unfortunate since it was initially about Natsu and then getting drawn into it for other reasons.
With his latest match in the tournament, he’s going up against a better player this time around again and he’s finding himself struggling lightly. But with the way he’s spent so much time analyzing things, he’s able to take the hits from Miyagawa while also pushing back on his own as well in order to score and keep it even at times. The match is fun to watch during the first half as we see how Eiichiro moves forward with it and holds his own and his reputation starts to spread a bit, particularly since he’s getting known as a note-taker. That’s not an insult, especially for a sport like this where we’ve seen so many shows that have analytical characters and that’s part of the overall mythology, so seeing Eiichiro really grow and become aggressive – in his own way – during the match is a lot of fun since it also provides some surprises for those watching as he does unexpected moves.
The match definitely takes up a large portion of the episode and it works well because as the matches go on, we see how Eiichiro is handling himself but also getting surprised along the way because he realizes that Miyagawa was spending some of the time trying to understand how Eiichiro plays and has grasped it. Eiichiro is smart enough to realize it though and that leaves him trying to find an out to work with so that he doesn’t get taken down. It’s a great bit of self awareness but also being very aware of your opponent in a way that’s truly hard to do. Changing up his own style of play is difficult to be sure, but he’s not wedded to any style since he’s only been playing for a year whereas most others have played their entire lives. AS it unfolds more, it’s really fun to see the way Eiichiro is able to adapt but Miyagawa is unable to and you get to see the strain of the whole situation.
In Summary:
Baby Steps has been the kind of fun and analytical sports show that I can get into since it doesn’t spend a huge amount of time on each match or game in full. While I love things like Slam Dunk and Kuroko’s Basketball, it can feel like forever in really making progress. With Baby Steps, we see Eiichiro grow and change and become a far better player by what he does. This episode brings a whole lot of that out as we see him really learning to take what he’s achieved so far, understand himself and his abilities but also to change as needed. He still doesn’t truly have his own style and that makes him a lot more adaptable, particularly since he can grasp what the other players are up to after awhile. A very good episode that establishes more and build his reputation nicely while offering a surprise or two.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
