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Major is a baseball series which revolves around Honda Goro as he grows up and pursues his dream of following his father to becoming a professional baseball player.  There are many seasons which focus on different parts of Goro’s life – the first season starts off with a brief introduction to Goro and his past as a five-year-old, and then leaps forward three years.  The rest of the season is spent focusing on Goro forming a little league team and participating in his first tournament.

I’ve had sort of an awakening in the past few months towards baseball series.  I used to dismiss them (along with most sports series) as either not worth watching or just not suitable for me, but after watching three series in particular (Cross Game, Touch, and Ookiku Furikabutte!), I realize that competitive sports, particularly with younger characters, is a perfectly good tool for character development, as well as exploring themes of friendship, ambition, and so on.  With that string of exceptional baseball series close behind me, I went into Major on a relatively optimistic note.  So how does it compare?

I think bringing up Ookiku Furikabutte for comparison makes sense because Major is, in many ways, the antithesis of that show.  Oofuri was hailed for avoiding cliches and common devices in the sports genre, and I can’t help but feel like Major may have been the show that people thought about when making those criticisms of other sports shows.  There really are quite a bit of shounen tropes, particularly the main character.  Goro is a Naruto-esque lead character – ambitious, loud, persistent, ultimately good-hearted, and somewhat arrogant.  A lot of people will be turned away by some of the stock shounen characteristics that he exhibits at times, so if you have a low tolerance for that, you have been warned.  The side characters, particularly the other characters on the team, are not really very unique either.  Now, keep in mind that none of this means they are unlikable kids – Goro and his friends are perfectly likable and you do end up rooting them on, but they aren’t the type that will stick in your mind as memorable characters.  They are, for lack of a better phrase, rather “cartoony”.

And that’s a good way of describing many other parts of this series as well.  The gist of the anime is that Goro gets together a bunch of kids, some who have had no experience in baseball ever before, and turns them into one of the best teams in one summer with hard work and friendship.  The more cynical viewers may roll their eyes at this, but most, if not all, of their success is due to Goro.  Goro himself follows the tried and true anime trope of being extremely talented, almost limitlessly so, as well as inspiring everyone around him.  He manages to hit a home run with only one arm against one of the most skilled Little League pitchers in the country.  During a long game, he collapses from exhaustion but through sheer willpower is able to get up and not only resume pitching, but pitch faster than he ever did before in that game.  There are plenty of shows where the main character possesses talent (Touch being one of them) but Major really puts it on a different level.

So on one hand, I can completely see why many people might not like the series, particularly if they are very repelled by common shounen-style devices and characters.  On the other hand, there is a fair bit to like here.  I already mentioned that the characters, while not being particularly unique, are likable and sympathetic.  The plot itself – an underdog team working hard to get to the top – is also not entirely unique but perfectly enjoyable on its own merit.  Perhaps this is a good way of describing the series as a whole – not exactly mindbogglingly memorable, but enjoyable for what it is.

What I liked most from the series was the beginning.  The first six episodes of this first season actually focus less on baseball and more on interactions between Goro, his widowed father, and his nursery school teacher.  There are some really nice, down-to-earth moments in these early episodes that contrast fairly heavily with some of the brasher scenes of competition later on.  I think anyone who enjoys slice-of-life shows would probably enjoy that first batch of episodes as well.  Although they serve as a prologue to the rest of the show, there are moments throughout the rest of the show that return to these kind of interactions, and they remained enjoyable.

I suppose my final verdict here is that this probably isn’t a show that will stick in my mind for a long time.  Yes, that’s partly because it’s a fairly light series for most of its run – but so was Ookiku Furikabutte! I don’t think that Major is a series that will convince people to start watching sports anime, but if you have already acquired a taste for baseball series, you will probably find something to like here, and I must admit that the first few episodes were a great hook – I just wish the rest of it was on the same level.