Baseball isn't the sport here, survival is. Harumaki is eight years deep into relief pitching, throwing weird angles that work just well enough to keep him employed, and every season is a negotiation with his own irrelevance. The show treats his salary like his life depends on it, because in a way it does. You watch a man fight not for glory but for the right to keep playing, to keep feeding himself, to not become the guy the team forgets about. It finds comedy in desperation and dignity in showing up to a job nobody celebrates.

Natsunosuke is a relief pitcher with the Tokyo Spiders, now in his eighth professional season in Nippon Pro Baseball. He relies on an unusual left-handed sidearm delivery. On his club, standing is sharply tiered, and how well a player performs sets how much he earns each year. At 26 he takes home 18 million yen, yet surrounded by far richer teammates and rivals, he constantly frets over how little that seems. He sizes up other players by their pay and keeps looking for ones to measure himself against. Adapted from a seinen manga, the comedy drama follows his envy, anxieties and hard work as he tries to hold his place in a system that rewards only results.