"Ninth Inning, Two Outs, Bases loaded..."- A Rookies Review

Originalname:	ルーキーズ | Rukizu
Also known as:	-
Release Date:	19. April - 28. July 2008
Director:	Yuichiro Hirakawa, Takeyoshi Yamamoto, Jun Muto
Writer:	Yoshihiro Izumi, Masanori Morita (manga)
Cast:	Ryuta Sato, Hayato Ichihara, Keisuke Koide, Yuu Shirota, Akiyoshi Nakao, Sousuke Takaoka, Kenta Kiritani, Takeru Sato, Kazuyuki Asano, Shunji Igarashi, Yosuke Kawamura, Hiroyuki Onoue, Eri Murakawa

 Plot

A baseball match. That’s how it all begins. The baseball team is aiming for Koushien Championship. But as their batter angrily hits the catcher with his bat, their dreams were shattered as well.

We cut to some months later we see the same team, that was so eager to go to Koushien, became a group full of violent delinquents. They would’ve been thrown out of school already but since that would mean a loss of reputation, they are still there.

But the principal has a plan. He hires a teacher, who was known for hitting his student and resigned afterwards. He should repeat his mistakes and the delinquents should have a fight with the teacher, so that all of them could be thrown out.

Without knowing the teacher arrives at the school. It’s our main character Kawato.

Mikoshiba is a nice student, who has only one dream since the incident happened: To play baseball with friends once again. But since his dream is so hopeless, he decides that he just should drop out of school. But Kawato steps in and tells him to wait until he knows, what Kawato can do. With that Kawato decided to become the baseball coach.

Since Mikoshiba begins to trust Kawato, he gives him the keys to the clubroom, much to the dislike of the clubmembers. They want Sekikawa, the fastest, to steal it back, but while he was trying to do so, he gets to know why Kawato was hired. He begins to think differently of Kawato.

As Shinjo finds out that they cleared out their ‘paradise’, he gets really angry. And he tracks down Sekikawa and beats him unconscious. The rest of the group arrives and tells him to stop, because this is not the way you treat your friends. Shinjo says that he’ll not tolerate any kind of betrayal. As Mikoshiba speaks up, he gets dragged to the roof. The others want to stop him, but drag Sekikawa into the nursery first.

Sekikawa tells them what he heard when he was getting the keys and they run to the roof and Sekikawa stops Kawato from hitting Shinjo. Instead he lets himself get hit by Shinjo and covers up for him afterwards.

Kawato finds Wakana, Okada, Yufune and Hiyama smoking on the roof one day. Okada, Yufune and Hiyama quickly hide their cigarettes but Wakana states that he couldn’t throw them out since it would mean he didn’t have enough members. Kawato takes his cigarette, puts it out and then hides it in his pocket. Wakana, who is pissed off, lies to him by telling that they would rather play football. Kawato believes him and tries everything possible to get them into the football club. This and watching him weeding the ground at impossible hours finally gets Wakana to feel bad and he confesses that he lied to him. (A hilarious chasing scene later) Wakana decides to join the team with Okada, Yufune and Hiyama to follow soon after him.

The baseball club has to face more hardships as someone wrote mean things on the walls of their clubroom. This gets the club members angry and they go to defend their pride. As they arrive they find Aniya and Shuji already fighting.

Things work out fine for them and they don’t get suspended.

On the next day Aniya arrives at the newly painted room while the club is dressing up. After a good laugh they go out and Aniya is left alone in the room, gazing at the “Aim for Koushien” poster which Kawato made for them. Kawato gets in and Aniya yells that he shouldn’t be that stupid since he’s only amateur, rips the poster apart and storms out. This gets to Kawato and he tries his best to be a real coach.

Aniya however also still hasn’t forgotten about baseball since he teaches the kids how to do it.

There is a pitcher vs. batter duel between Kawato and Aniya (with epic rain, epic slowmotion and epic mud) which Kawato loses and, according to his agreement with Aniya, has to give up on the baseball club.

On the next day he wants to tell his boys that he has to stop being their coach, but Aniya comes in his training cloths, tells that Kawato has to learn the rules to not be an amateur anymore. So he joins after all.

And that is good because their first game is waiting. With Aniya they have the minimum requested players. Most of the pressure lays on Aniya since he’s the best player. To win this match he has to run, to throw the ball very fast and to hit very strong. No wonder he gets exhausted. Kawato sees that and risks an inning to lose that Aniya can rest. But there is another problem. Wakana, the catcher, can’t close his hand because he had to catch the fast balls from Aniya. His hand is red.
In the mean time we see that Shinjo is in the dressing room and looking at the changes. Then he sees a locker with his name on it and in this locker are his clothes. This plucks his heart since he believed after all those things he did, they wouldn’t want him back.
In the moment, it’s the 9^th inning bases are loaded, Wakana has to bat, but he can’t grab the batter perfectly. To hide his injuries he tells a joke: he will hit with one hand. In this moment, Shinjo appears in whole uniform. He knows that Wakana is injured and replaces him. He hits the ball and it’s a homerun. The Rookies win this game.

However the coach still wants revenge because Kawato hit him during the game. The principal resigns for Kawato. (But the new principal is still a hole, so his resignation was entirely pointless! Yay…)

One night Hiyama decides to train because he is the worst batter in the team. But Enatsu, who was that batter that hit the catcher with his bat, finds him and beats him up.

Through a phone call he reaches the others who of course want to help him. But Kawato comes and decides that they should have a match. And so the game against their shadows from their past begins.

Enatsu doesn’t take the game serious and plays on his own. His teammates don’t approve of this and they nearly start a fight on the field. But through Kawatos speech they start to play seriously and they nearly win the game. But our team manages to improve tooand ends up winning against them.

They feel better now. And qualification games lay ahead so Captain Mikoshiba and manager Yagi went to the lottery drawing of their next opponent. But as they come to school they find their baseball field covered in trash and completely demolished. The first years responsible for this appear. One of them, Uesaka, states that his biggest dream is to conquer Tokyo and to get to his dream he has to beat the violent baseball team first. But the team doesn’t want to fight since this would cost them Koushien. So they just pick up the trash.

Mikoshiba is having a hard time on his own since his team is known as the violent baseball team and nobody wants them to participate. He gets to feel all the hate of the other teams and begins to wonder if they’re allowed to participate. He talks with Kawato about it in the locker room while the other eavesdrop from outside.

After they won some games the journalists get interested in them and find out that Kawato had a violent past. The high school baseball confederation demand to talk to him. But they get interrupted by a teacher saying that the baseball club has been in a fight again, when they really didn’t fight back.

Kawato begs them to not expel them. And they agree on two conditions: Kawato isn’t allowed to come to the game and if their team doesn’t win the game they’ll get expelled.

So the game starts without Kawato and it couldn’t go worse since Wakana, Sekikawa and Aniya have major injuries from the fight.

Outside of the stadium we see Kawato listening to the game. After a while Uesaka finds him and tells him to go inside since his team needs him. He then decides despite of his agreement to be with his team. He gets caught by the security and escorted to the confederations chef. So they agree that Kawato would resign.

He comes to the game and it begins to look better for the team. Everyone gives his best and they win the game.

Since Kawato resigned they lost the rest of the matches and didn’t reach Koushien, but they still practised a lot during that time. Kawato ends up returning (He took his teacher exam during that time) and everyone is happy to see him.

Conclusion

After the rollercoaster ride that “My GF is a Gumiho” gave me, my poor heart couldn’t take anymore Romance. So I switched to the next best thing: BROMANCE!

“Rookies” is a nice drama about friendship and achieving your dream. (You know, the normal stuff…) So focus on the good and bad stuff. Firstly, the good stuff: The cast was good! They could play the funny moments as well as the serious ones. In my opinion, Koide Keisuke (Mikoshiba) was the best actor. You could really feel his devotion for baseball and his teammates. Also, I think his change was the most visible and comprehensible: From the shy boy to a remarkable Captain. The others were just good and that worked well for their roles, although Ichihara Hayato and Murakawa Eri could’ve had a little bit more chemistry. (Seriously, even Koide Keisuke and Murakawa Eri had more chemistry!)

All matches were EPIC! I mean, epic slides, epic running, epic hitting, epic speeches, epic rain and not to forget the most important: EPIC SLOWMOTION!

The music was great! The score and also the ending song KISEKI from Greeeen were very fitting and matched with the emotions. KISEKI represented for me the hope that dragged them through the story. Though, I had to get used to it first. I wasn’t used to hear such tunes from J-Rock. But it grew to me very quickly and found myself humming the tune very often.

Let’s go to the bad stuff: Only Mikoshiba had a character development. The others mostly remained the same. And that’s really a let-down for a story that is partly about changing.

What also was annoying, every time a new face appeared you knew, that he wanted to destroy the baseball team. The guys already had to fight with enough prejudice. They should’ve just let the story take that direction more towards the end.

And now a funny aspect: the half Crows Zero Cast was in this drama!

Let’s start with Takaoka Sousuke aka Wakana. His role wasn’t much different from Izaki, the role he played in Crows Zero. In both he was a fighter, except in Rookies he had more funny scenes.

Next, Tsutomu Takahashi, who played Takashi Makise, in Rookies he had the role  as a regular student who attacked Aniya.

Really?

And now for the person, who surprised us the most. We really didn’t recognize him. Kenta Kiritani, who played Tokio in Crows Zero, had the role of Hiratsuka in Rookies. I was shocked! Tokio was one of my favourite characters in Crows Zero and here he was just a comic relieve I didn’t really care about. Clap your hands everyone for a really unpredictable actor!  

There are more people who played in Crows Zero, because of that you especially look at the similarities, but Rookies really can’t be Crows Zero, since it goes into another direction than Crows Zero.

You should go check it out if you have time and need a rest from Romance.