Ace of the Diamond, now in manga form!
Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Yuji Terajima
Translation: Abby Lehrke
Lettering: Allen Berry
Editing: Alexandra Swanson
What They Say:
Eijun Sawamura had his heart set on the middle-school national baseball championships. But his team is eliminated thanks to a wild pitch thrown by Eijun himself. He’s planning to go to high school with his teammates and try again next year when he’s scouted by the famous Seido High School Baseball team. When he goes for a campus visit, he finds himself on the receiving end of a baptism by fire! His experience forming a battery with up-and-coming catcher Miyuki rekindles his passion for baseball!!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
For those that don’t know, I wrote 120 reviews on the Ace of the Diamond anime as it was running on Crunchyroll (there are more episodes than that, but sometimes I forgot or had life happen, and had to combine a few episodes into one). I was hype for it before it started because I had recently come off of watching Touch, the anime adaptation of the Mitsuru Adachi manga, and I just wanted more baseball anime in my life. Then, when I was at one of those weeby Japanese bookstores in LA, I stumbled across Ace of the Diamond manga in Japanese and picked up a few, just to have them on my shelf. I never expected it to get a state side release for its manga version, but here Kodansha is, the great savior they are with Ace of the Diamond on the Comixology docket. I cried a little the day I read the announcement.
Ace of the Diamond, for those unfamiliar, is a 53+ volume manga, and 131 episode anime adaptation, surrounded around the life and growth of Eijun Sawamura. He’s from a dinky town in the country, but moved to Tokyo after a scout found him by accident while scouting another team’s player. (I hear this is actually what happens A LOT in major league scouting; a team’s scout will go to check out this awesome player for one high school, and find someone else who was completely off the radar. I imagine it doesn’t happen as much in the college level, since those guys have a little more national attention than high school baseballers—at least in the states—but it’s neat to know that’s based in reality!)
He is, as the title suggests, yearning after the ace number, that’s the number 1 in Japanese high school baseball, but he’s an unrefined kid with only a fastball to speak of and barely aware of any mechanics. Plus, Sawamura still has growing to do; he could turn out to be a 6’ 6” behemoth for all we know (I doubt it, but that’d be kind of funny, to see a second to third year growth spurt from Sawamura). He’s got a long way to go though…No matter what Adachi thinks about Uegusi Tatsuya, Sawamura isn’t getting through high school with only a fastball.
In Summary:
This is a sports manga through and through. Sawamura is in the same kind of mold of boisterous, low talent, high potential main characters that always pervade shonen manga. And it becomes some really exciting, tense baseball in the later going of the series.
Volume one isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s also very good. It sets up everything Sawamura needed for a first volume, and he doesn’t really stray from those goals as of the end of the anime. He also grows a tremendous amount throughout its duration, which is just wonderful to go back and experience now.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Kodansha USA
Release Date: March 7, 2017
MSRP: $10.99
