Must be the Off-Season

Yeah, I imagine it's annoying, too. What idiot's idea was this?

Volume 6 of Cross Game was almost the breaking point for me. There is zero actual baseball in this volume, as Adachi focuses almost entirely on the love triangle stuff. I had to go look up the Wikipedia entry to see if there was actually going to be any more baseball in this thing over the remaining two volumes.

It's more like a love polygon at this point. You have Aoba and Ko, who continue to snipe and bicker, but know each other very well. But there's also Ko and Akane, the girl who looks like a teenage version of Aoba's deceased sister, Wakaba. But the catcher Akaishi had a crush on Wakaba, so he's awkward around Akane, while trying to push her and Ko together. It's really creepy, since he describes it as wanting to see Wakaba smile, and she was happiest around Ko, sooooo. . . Even when Ko and Akaishi discuss after the date that hey, Akane knows all sorts of people and places they don't because she's a unique being and not just Aged-Up Wakaba, it still feels as though she's treated as interchangeable with a girl that's been dead for 10 years.

There's also still Aoba's cousin who has a crush on her. Miyuka, or Miyuki, or whatever (Mizuki). It really doesn't matter, as he's been so largely shoved into the background I wonder why the hell Adachi even bothered to add him to the series. He doesn't bring anything to the table as a character. He doesn't care about baseball at all, but that's such an obvious deal-breaker with Aoba, and his interest in mountain climbing rarely comes up, so what's the point? If the scene needs an argumentative character or an idiot, use Nakanashi or Senda, respectively.

On top of all that mess, now the star slugger Azuma lets slip that if he was going to date any girl, it would be Aoba. *slams head against desk* The tiny bit of baseball is Aoba pitching batting practice to Azuma and getting injured when he hits a line drive. Of course, then Azuma can't hit because he's so sad about what he did and he visits her in the hospital a lot and yeesh. Adachi at least draws the parallel between this and what happened to Azuma's brother, which is what made Azuma such a humorless dick when the series began.

Adachi can want to write the teen romance stuff if they want, but that's not the part I'm invested in. The team trying to improve, trying to break through, Ko, Aoba, and Akaishi trying to make Wakaba's dream come true and reach Koshien, that's what I'm invested in, and it basically stalls out for 500 pages. There's some humor, although the parts I laugh at are mostly Coach Maeno's lines. The back-and-forth between Ko and Aoba doesn't really feel funny to me.