The anime begins with the minor league team the Saitama Lycaons on a trip to Okinawa for training, when a few of them stumble upon a group of people playing and betting on a baseball variant known as “one outs”. One outs is a 1-on-1 game where a pitcher and batter play (as the title implies) one out: if the batter can hit a ball to the outfield in three pitches they win, otherwise the pitcher wins. There they encounter Toua Tokuchi, who is undefeated as a pitcher in one outs. Tokuchi’s pitching technique isn’t particularly impressive (he can literally only pitch fastballs), but he can read the batter to always through the pitch they aren’t expecting. Through a series of hijinks Tokuchi ends up officially joining the Lycaons, whereupon the story begins proper.
Right off the bat (pun intended), One Outs is unique. While there are power fantasies, I’d say underdog stories are much more common, especially in gaming manga. While the protagonist will be the smartest person in the room, within the mechanics of the game they’re the same as everyone else, and it’s not uncommon for the opponent to have some sort of talent or ability that gives them an edge. Even if the protagonist starts off on even ground, there will be some crisis that puts them on the back foot. The fun is then in seeing how a normal person is able to turn the tables using nothing but intelligence and strategy.
But One Outs isn’t like that. The baseline for Tokuchi is that his pitches are unhittable. Obviously that puts Tokuchi and the Lycaons at an overwhelming advantage. Fortunately, the author was smart enough to know that watching Tokuchi breeze through a series of perfect game would be boring, and so every team has some player or strategy that is able to (initially) break through Tokuchi. It feels a bit contrived, but it’s entertaining and the point of the story, so it’s a bit of a necessary buy-in.
On top of that, Tokuchi enters a unique contract with the owner of the Lycaons, which they dub the one outs contract. (The contract doesn’t really have anything to do with one outs, but it provides at least a nominal tie to the title beyond the first two episodes.) Under the contract, Tokuchi doesn’t get a standard salary. Instead, he earns 5 million yen for each batter he strikes out, but must pay 50 million yen for each run he gives up.
When he signs the contract, the owner thinks Tokuchi is an arrogant idiot. Even if Tokuchi has an ERA (I learned what that means because of this anime!) equal to the best pitcher in the league, Tokuchi will only break even. However, Tokuchi soon proves himself the real deal and wracks up a huge bonus. As a result, the owner starts plotting and maneuvering to cause Tokuchi to give up runs. This means that issues Tokuchi faces don’t just come from the opposing team but sometimes from his own as well, and that every individual pitch and run is significant, not just the end results of the game.
That’s just the set-up. The execution is glorious. It’s a ton of fun seeing both the strategies the other teams bust how and how Tokuchi counters them. While it’s ridiculous and exaggerated, it’s also all logical and brilliantly plotted. There are plenty of amazing and gratifying moments where Tokuchi is able to trap the opponents with their own weapon. The show never hides where its narrative arc is pointed, and a fair number of maneuvers can be foreseen, but I think that just speaks to the strength of the logic upon which the series if written. There are a couple of developments that rely on baseball rules and physics, but most of the plot is fair play (and I am willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt that all the technical minutiae are true).
One Outs is based on a manga of the same name by Shinobu Kaitani, the author of Liar Game. I adore Liar Game, and wanted to read more by Kaitani, so I was pretty disappointed to see that his other main work was a baseball manga, since I assumed I wouldn’t be interested. But over the years I’d say One Outs mentioned and praised every so often, so I finally gave in and tried it, and Kaitani thankfully works the same magic he did in Liar Game here. Just concentrated in baseball.
One recurring sentiment I saw in the comments on One Outs over the years is that the characters are awesome, which in retrospect I find a bit puzzling because… they’re not. They’re not bad, they just aren’t the focus of the show whatsoever. Tokuchi isn’t really a character, he’s a plot vehicle. He always has an answer, always wins, and always gets his way, just because he’s Tokuchi, the same way a detective is always right in the end just because they’re the detective. It’s clear how Tokuchi ended up the prototype for Akiyama in Liar Game, but Akiyama has vulnerabilities and shortcomings that Tokuchi does not.
None of the other characters bring much to the table either. Liar Game is filled with nondescript players of average intelligence to serve as warm bodies in the games, and the teams in One Outs are similar. There are a few members of the Lycaons who get a bit more screen time, and any player with a special talent gets a name and some focus, but there’s no special or compelling development. The Lycaons’ manager is an easily manipulated fool, and the team owner is an arrogant jerk who is too arrogant to try to renegotiate with Tokuchi for a mutually beneficial arrangement rather than fruitlessly try to crush him.
In other words, the characters are there to support the plot, and don’t bring much on their own. But maybe people just like watching Tokuchi aura farm and confuse that with character writing.
The plot is phenomenal, and well worth watching for anyone who is a fan of mysteries (and adjacent genres), although that doesn’t mean I can’t come up with a few minor quibbles. As I mentioned, the teams are filled with “normal” people, which means that whenever one of the plot-drivers does something odd, they need to react that that person has gone crazy or given up or something along those lines, and you’d think that at some point the Lycaons would realize that whenever Tokuchi has a plan whenever he does something seemingly strange. But genre convention demands that they never learn.
The best game in the series is the second one, so in a sense the series peaks early but it’s hard to be too upset if it goes from a 9/10 to an 8/10. There is also one play near the very end that is fantastic. I don’t want to discuss specifics of what happens, but I do feel a bit conflicted about the final episode. It feels emblematic of Tokuchi winning just because he’s Tokuchi; many times the way Tokuchi figures out the enemy’s strategy or the method by which information is conveyed is a key plot point, but here both of those elements are hand-waved, which feels uncharacteristically sloppy. On the other hand, there’s a great narrative twist. And if this is the biggest substantive complaint I can must against One Outs, I think that shows just how great it is. Also, I love the Lycaons’ “triumph” at the end, which just reinforces how One Outs truly is not a sports anime.
If you like Liar Game and Kakegurui and other gambling shows (which, if you like mysteries, you probably do, since they scratch the same itch), don’t sleep on One Outs. It features baseball, but it’s absolutely about the strategies and countermeasures, and requires minimal prior baseball knowledge to enjoy (as I can personally attest).
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