Don’t call it “moneyball” just yet, folks.
Earlier today, the official Gurazeni anime website updated with a new trailer, as well as a key visual and several cast members.
We break the details down below.
Trailer
The minute-long promo introduces the new cast members, as well as the show’s April première. Opening theme song Merigo feat. SKY-HI by Cypress Ueno to Robert Yoshino plays as a background track.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6e96yp
Key Visual
The visual features the major cast members, each with a price tag attahed. They’re posing in front of the Earth, which is adorned with baseball stitching.
Cast
The series will star the following:
- Natsunosuke Bonda: Fukushi Ochiai
- Yuki: M.A.O
- Tanabe: Issei Futamata
- Sakota: Kenji Nomura
- Kozato: Ryuuzou Ishino
- Tokunaga: Daisuke Namikawa
- Shibuya: Takanori Hoshino
- Announcer Matsumoto: Hideo Matsutomo
Hideo Matsumoto is a freelance baseball announcer. Ochiai’s role as Bonda was originally announced in October.
Gurazeni will hit SKY PerfecTV!’s SkyPer channel in April. The network will air the first episode “during the opening of the 2018 professional baseball season”, which kicks off in March.
Ayumu Watanabe (If Her Flag Breaks, Space Brothers) was tapped to direct Gurazeni at Studio DEEN, with Kenichi Ohnuki (Garzey’s Wing, Mobile Suit Gundam Seed) providing character designs. Hideo Takayashiki (Maison Ikkoku, Rideback) is in charge of series composition and writing the scripts.
Yūji Moritaka and illustrator Keiji Adachi’s Gurazeni manga kicked off in the pages of Kodansha’s Morning magazine in December 2010. The series ran through August 2014, and saw seventeen compiled volumes hit retailers.
An ongoing sequel series, titled Gurazeni: Tokyo Dome-hen (Gurazeni: Tokyo Dome Chapter) began in September 2014.
Manga resource Baka-Updates describes the series as:
Money Is Buried in the Ground!
Natsunosuke Bonda is a relief pitcher in Tokyo Spiders. In his eighth pro season, he makes 18 million yen at age 26. But he is always troubled by how little he makes, given that he is surrounded by high income earning baseball players.
This is a relief pitcher’s story in Nippon Pro Baseball, his envies, worries, sweat and tears.
Sources: Comic Natalie, Ota-suke
