The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Catch Me at the Ballpark!

Murata, an office worker, meets Ruriko, a vendor selling beer who looks like a gyaru. He becomes her first regular customer. Ruriko acts cold toward Murata, but she has an innocent personality that comes out when he is out of sight.

Catch Me at the Ballpark! is based on a manga by Tatsurō Suga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

EMT Squared, you've done it again: just when I thought your series could get more mid, you manage to unimpress me with the next one! Two in one day this time, even! Except this time, it's a series I wouldn't have wanted to watch in the first place. Okay, maybe that's not actually different from before…

I have a soft spot for Japanese baseball; while I don't follow it, the only baseball game I've ever been to was in Japan. It was even the Chiba Lotte Marines, the team the one in Catch Me at the Ballpark! is obviously based on. If you ever have the opportunity, I recommend sitting in the cheering section because everyone there gets wasted, and every player has their own song that you can probably learn by the end. Props are involved. The trumpets in the episode were not an exaggeration of what goes on back there.

However, this show is not about baseball in any way, which I realized just a few minutes in when Ruriko plopped down next to Murata, the personality-free working stiff who somehow managed to get a seat in an otherwise empty section. Ruriko is supposedly a gal, marked only by her slangy speech patterns and long blonde hair, because the meaning of gal has been diluted to mean “girl with blonde hair and big tits who you, the viewer, want to imagine flirting with you.” When she tells him that beer vendor girls rely on their regulars, I had an epiphany: this isn't about baseball. This is about hostesses who will give you alcohol and listen to your woes while you pretend to yourself that their smiles are genuine.

It felt demeaning – there's no genuine connection between Ruriko and Murata, who would have been more interesting if he were replaced with a medium-sized chunk of granite. But the show desperately wanted me to believe that she actually liked spending time with him instead of angling for tips. I also don't think stadium beer vendors rely on regulars at all because how many people have season tickets versus going to one or two games a year? I could be wrong here because, like I said, I've been to one game ever, but it just reinforced the impression that she belonged behind a bar nodding sympathetically instead of walking up and down stairs with a keg on her back.

Stadiums—regardless of the sport they are designed for—are fascinating buildings. They are built solely to show off a central area and cater to the needs of the people watching what's going on there. This means that not only are there giant corridors filled with food, shops, and bathrooms, but there is also an unseen labyrinth beneath that caters not only to the players of the sport but also to the staff needed to keep thousands of people happy. To put it another way, each is a fully-functional micro-city—one that's only operational for a few hours each week.

In general concept, this anime is about all those people who work behind the scenes at a baseball stadium. This episode introduces us to our first two jobs, a mobile beer vendor and a security guard. The former, Ruriko, works on commission, getting a cut of each beer or snack sold. Thus, we see her roam the crowd and flirt with a regular to the park, hoping that he will actively seek her out night after night when he wants a refill. It's a cool look into a cutthroat, customer-facing job—especially once it's revealed that Ruriko is far from the flirting machine she appears to be when off the clock.

As for the latter, we get Iga. He's a man who has been working as a security guard for the park his whole life, and he takes pride in this job. While he just stands by a door all day, saluting those who walk past, everyone—from the players to the vendors—knows his name and greets him warmly. But now that he's getting older, he's attempting to pass on his knowledge to the next generation—even if they got the job only because they wanted to see baseball games for free. Through the simple act of watching him deal with a lost child, we see how and why this supposedly menial job has given his life meaning. He has made a lasting impact on many, even if he spends most of his days standing alone in the hot sun.

All in all, I found this episode more interesting than I expected. I don't know if I'll stick around for the full season, but I am interested to see what other backstage jobs we will be introduced to and how the ever-increasing cast interacts as things go on.

The best thing that Catch Me at the Ballpark! has going for it is its novelty. We've seen plenty of “Baggy-eyed introvert gets teased by a cute girl with a snaggletooth” anime, but the baseball stadium setting and the focus on Riruko's job as a “beer girl” gives this show a unique enough flavor to stand out from the crowd. This, ironically, is probably exactly the opposite case of the ballpark beer that our guy Murata spends so much time guzzling. Unless, that is, peddling cheap-tasting and overpriced beer-swill is a tradition unique to American stadiums.

The point being, I was charmed enough by Catch Me at the Ballpark!'s premise that all it really needed to do was avoid bungling the execution. Thankfully, that is exactly what the anime does, though I can't say it accomplishes much more than delivering exactly the product it advertises. Murata is your typical Joe Average that most any straight male viewer could relate to enough to make the rom-com elements of the series work, and Riruko strikes a good balance of being a flirty tease without coming across as artificially cutesified. My favorite part of the premiere, in fact, is the bit where we learn that Riruko is actually just as shy and awkward as Murata; she simply has to put on an extroverted face to fulfill the professional obligations of an objectified concessions saleswoman.

That said, I hope you don't go into this anime expecting much more than “Diet Nagatoro-san, except it is about adults and takes place in a baseball stadium.” On the one hand, those qualities are exactly what makes this an appealing prospect for me. On the other hand, it turns out that when you mostly end up ignoring the actual baseball part of the equation, a baseball stadium isn't a particularly interesting setting for a TV show. There's just an awful lot of blue plastic chairs and concrete walls to look at, you know? Also, while I like the idea of using the stadium's security staff as a supporting cast, these guys might be a little *too* normal and low-key.

A good rom-com focused on adult characters is a relatively rare thing in this industry, so I'm willing to forgive Catch Me at the Ballpark!'s shortcomings if it can maintain a baseline level of functional cuteness. I doubt it will ever make for appointment viewing, but every season watchlist needs that one show that is perfect for folding laundry to. I think Catch Me at the Ballpark! will perform that duty quite nicely.

Everyone needs a place away from home where they can feel like they're escaping. I may not care about ballparks, baseball, or beer, but I can absolutely get behind what Catch Me at the Ballpark! is saying – for worn-out salaryman Murata, it's a place where he can unwind, and for security guard Igarashi, it's a place where he can do good. We don't know what beer vendor Ruriko gets out of it yet, and she herself thinks she's still an outsider at the stadium, but I have no doubt that we'll learn. This is slice-of-life with a focus on place as much as people, and I appreciate that.

Unfortunately, I don't love the format or the look of it. (The art for the ending theme, on the other hand, is adorable, and I kind of wish the whole show used that style.) This episode, and likely the next if the title is anything to go by, is divided into three short segments, although the first two may as well be one and the same. This gives the episode a choppy feel that seems at odds with its cozy vibe, because no sooner do we settle in with a plotline, than we're moving on to the next. Part of the issue may be that those first two segments do feel like they overlap, albeit not in a natural way. These two focus on Murata and his initial interactions with Ruriko as she sells him beer and chitchats with him, something that, we later learn, is out of her comfort zone, although you'd never know it. It's cute but not quite cute enough to really work, and it's also hampered by the translation of “bento” as “meal pack,” which just doesn't work for me; it makes Murata's lunchbox sound like a freeze-dried space supper.

The third segment, which shifts the focus to long-time security guard Igarashi and the comfort he takes from daily life at the ballpark, is the strongest. I almost wish they'd led with this one, because it not only establishes the venue as a character in its own right, it also creates a sense of timelessness. Igarashi helping Ruriko tend to a lost child leads into a flashback when the new security guard realizes that Igarashi did the same thing for him when he was five, and that gives the place and pastime a layer of history that, upon reflection, we can tell is what Murata is feeling there.

Still, if you like slice of life or have a fondness not just for baseball, but the act of watching it in a stadium, I think you'll find things to like here. It's not visually striking and the pacing is a bit off, but it still hits some good notes.