Baseball, in the Baseball Manga? Absurd!

Do you want somebody to say that?

After going a long time thinking I'd never find a copy of the 7th volume of Cross Game at a reasonable price (meaning, not $70 or more), I stumbled across someone selling a copy on Amazon for about $15 this January (as of last week's manga review, we moved on from stuff I bought last year.)

In a sharp, and welcome, departure from the all-consuming teen melodrama offering that was volume 6, volume 7 actually spends a lot of its pages on baseball. It's the beginning of the last tournament to reach Koshien this group of players will have, so it's now or never for Ko and Akaishi to make Wakaba's dream a reality.

Adachi doesn't only focus on the Seishu Gakuen squad, as their old foe Coach Daimon's team would face them in the second round. If he makes it that far, because in his path is a team led by Azuma's old teammate Miki, the one who left even before Daimon got fired because he wanted to play on a team where everyone loved playing baseball.

Adachi takes a different route with each game Seishu plays. The first one is such a dominant win the game is called after 5 innings (mercy rule), and is primarily used for a joke about how half the guys on the team asked Aoba if she'd go on a date with them if they reached certain achievements - one using two stolen bases as the benchmark for example - and none of them hitting the mark. Ko promised he'd get double-digit strikeouts if it meant they wouldn't go on a date, and pulled it off, though he apparently didn't realize it until Aoba mentioned it. But was Aoba disappointed? Oh no, the internal conflict!

The second game is a tense pitcher's duel against Miki's team. Miki's the ace pitcher now instead of the centerfielder, and while he's not on Ko's level of dominance, he gets results. Adachi wisely focuses on how Seishu keeps getting guys on base, but Miki always bears down and keeps them from scoring. Only late in the game does Aoba note that the opposing team hasn't gotten a single hit off Ko, leaning into the notion of how good a pitcher he is.

The third game is really just used to set-up a gag for the fourth game, as Ko tries to figure out why he was throwing harder than normal (in the process helping his team finish the game before a rain delay could begin.) When he asks Aoba for her perspective - because his motion is based on hers - if there was anything different with his mechanics, her observation leads to him walking a bunch of guys in the next game, though they still win easily.

The fifth game is likewise breezed through in a couple of pages, as the story shifts focus to Akane, who is in the hospital for another round of treatment for an unspecified condition. Aoba spends a lot of time with her, while Ko seems determined to just push through and keep playing, reasoning there's nothing he can do but hope things turn out well. And he knows how little good that does. The main issue is Akaishi, who's thrown by the whole thing and who struggles in the 5th game. This as the ace pitcher and elite slugger of Ryuou Gakuin, the presumptive favorites and team that knocked Seishu out of the tournament last time, remark that Seishu's catcher (Akaishi) is the one big advantage Seishu has over them.

So Akaishi's got to get his shit together, because standing between them and Ryuou is a team that seems blessed. Every win's been by a single run, and in close games, things can turn on one little thing. Adachi shows the Nishikura team score their first run in a series of isolated panels on one page. A grounder taking a funny hop over Senda's head. A bunt, and the runner advancing to second. Then a pop fly that lands just inside the foul line. Little things that added up to cancel out a lead-off home run from Senda. The panels contrast Nishikura's coach looking on confidently from behind his glasses, all the while Ko is mowing down batter after batter.

The volume ends on Ko visiting Akane, then he and Aoba visiting Wakaba's grave. It's a signpost of their shared history, that Ko agrees to tell Aoba about Akane's surgery (while hiding it from Akaishi) and how far they've come from when they were kids. There's a flashback showing the two of them getting in trouble for throwing mudballs at each other in the cemetery when they were little.

With all that out of the way, it's time for the big showdown, which we looked at when I reviewed volume 8.