The Legend of the "Final" Makyu Manga: Team Astro, 50 Years After Its Final Chapter

In many ways, the modern shonen action "battle manga" that's usually seen as the most popular type of manga around the world is essentially an off-shoot of the good ol' sports story. The drive for the main character to become the "best", encountering various rivals that push them to be better/stronger than before, said rivals possibly becoming allies later on, & the idea where, with the help of things like "friendship" & "effort", something akin to "victory" could be achieved are really the same things seen in sports stories as they are in action-heavy titles, even if the finer points can most-definitely vary wildly between them. By that same token, though there were obviously other influences to them, the idea of named special moves can also be traced all the way back, in some ways, to the simple curveball. Widely credited to Candy Cummings, who pitched the first one in a professional baseball game on October 7, 1867, the curveball is the quintessential type of specialty pitch that to a newbie might initially look like "magic"... and that's exactly what it was called in Japan when Hiroshi Hiraoka, "The Father of Japanese Baseball", brought the pitch back home with him after studying abroad in America: The "Makyu", or "Magic Ball".

The Houston Astros posted their first winning record in 1972.
Coincidence? Yeah, definitely.

Over time the term "makyu" would slowly go out of fashion, especially when other such "breaking balls" would be invented, and by the 1950s the term "henkakyu/changing ball" would instead be used for such pitches. However, right around that same time manga truly started to blow up & change from the rental-only market it initially was known as to more readily available serializations by way of proper manga magazines. Alongside that was a shift in focus in baseball manga from starring a batter to instead focusing on the pitcher, and this shift allowed the idea of the makyu to truly flourish. Throughout the 60s & 70s there were numerous baseball manga that would see their main characters throw wild & fantastical pitches, usually (but not always) with some sort of logic behind their execution but often portrayed in ways that were simply impossible in real life. Rintaro Tsubaki from 1963's Kuroi Himitsu Heiki was a literal descendant of the Iga ninja clan, utilizing his ninja skills to help pitch makyu for the Yomiuri Giants. Hyuma Hoshi from 1966's Star of the Giants had the Dai League Ball, which was iterated on numerous times as the opposition found ways to beat prior versions of it. Ban Banba from 1971's Samurai Giants was drafted to the Yomiuri Giants as a teenager because his makyu pitching prowess was so absurdly strong... so much so that Ban literally died on the mound in the final chapter, due to the strain pitching continual makyu put on his body. Rintaro & Hyuma were both also physically hurt by their continual makyu pitching, resulting in each of them eventually leaving the sport, so it's clear to see that gradual escalation was most certainly a thing when it came to makyu-focused baseball manga of the era. However, one manga took the makyu to its ultimate escalatory limit... and then continued to escalate things even further, in turn laying the initial foundation for what would become the modern "battle manga".

Issue #39 of Weekly Shonen Jump back in 1972 saw the debut of a brand new baseball manga titled Astro Kyudan/Astro Baseball Team, i.e. Team Astro, which came from the duo of writer Shiro Tozaki, a former freelance editor-turned-writer at Jump (the story of which is wild enough on its own), & artist Norihiro Nakajima, a relative newbie who only had two very short series under his name by that point. The manga was about a group of nine baseball players who were all born at the same exact time (9:09:09 on September 9, 1954, a.k.a. Showa 29/9/9) & had a baseball-shaped mark somewhere on their bodies. This was predicted by Eiji Sawamura, a legendary young pitching prodigy who once struck out Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx in succession during a Japan/US exhibition game in 1934 at just the age of 17; this is actual, real-life history. Sawamura told this prophecy he had to a young boy named J. Shuro he met while stationed in the Philippines during World War II before dying in battle during the war; this is actual, real-life BS. Shuro, now a pearl magnate, has made it his goal to gather all nine of these prophesized players, the "Astro Supermen", so that he can help achieve the dream Sawamura had, one where Japan & the US fought each other not on the battlefield, but on the baseball field.

To put it simply... Team Astro is pure & unadulterated mad insanity of a manga, featuring characters (both fictional & real life, but mostly fictional) performing baseball-related feats that literally break every law of physics & common sense possible, all executed in a fashion that makes you continually wonder if what you're reading (or watching, if you were to see the sole TV adaptation of it) should even be taken seriously as a baseball story in the first place. The Astro Supermen's motto is "Isshiai Kanzen Nenshou/One Game, Full Throttle", i.e. play every game like it's the last damn thing you'll ever do in your life, & the end result is a manga where literally everything is treated as though it's life or death... and, for some characters, it actually is just that; there may not be any crying in baseball, but there is indeed dying in this manga! Team Astro would take the concept of the makyu in a direction where, quite simply, nothing could possibly follow it up, and after its 183rd chapter appeared in Issue #26 of 1976 it all came to an end, currently making it the 81st longest manga in Jump history, slotting in right between Black Cat & The Promised Neverland; it's also Jump's fifth longest baseball manga of all time. Now, roughly 50 years after that final chapter was first serialized, it's time we honor & pay our respects to the series that may have killed the makyu manga entirely (not really... but kind of, sort of) but, in doing so, opened the field for so much more.

WARNING!! This goes into spoilers regarding various part of the story of Team Astro... but, to be fair, the chances of this manga ever getting translated, official or otherwise, are the same as a professional baseball game ever surpassing 33 innings, i.e. nil. PLAY BALL!!!