The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Catch Me at the Ballpark!

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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.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

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, 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.