Has anyone translated the Major manga? It's like 72 volumes long! I was reading up on it on Wikipedia, and it sounds pretty cool. Starts with the Goro's dad getting dead-balled in a Japanese pro game, winning, but then dying due to internal bleeding, and then it switches to Goro as a little kid and follows him all the way up from little league, to high school ball, to the American minors, and then the majors. Crazy! He also goes up against
spoiler (click to show/hide)
the guy who dead-balled his dad and eventually beats him.
How far does the anime series go? The manga is still on-going.
The only sports series I ever got into was Harlem Beat, a basketball manga. I liked it because it focused on street ball instead of high school animu stuff, and enjoyed the story and characters. Basically, you have this everyday typical kid who always quits clubs/sports teams instead of trying to get better. He tries out for the basketball team, gets sent to buy some equipment, and runs into an old female classmate from elementary school. She takes him to a street hoop, run by an undefeated team. One of the members shows up and they play, and the kid is about to give up, but the girl essentially calls him a little bitch, and he bucks up, gives it a try, and ends up doing a high jump into air walk, scoring a basket off the member that no one else could beat. This series had two major problems: One, the publisher was Mixxzine/Tokyopop. They changed character names to more "Americanized" titles, then after 7-8 volumes, put the series on hiatus. That leads to the other problem, which is when they brought it back under the name "Rebound," but skipped ahead and didn't bother with several volumes, fucking up the continuity. I loved the first 5-6 volumes, which focused on street ball, and then shifted to the high school team, with several members using street smarts to win. But then it basically just became all high school-stuff, without the street ball, and I lost a lot of interest. I have no idea if Tokyopop ever finished translating it.
The author, Yuriko Nishiyama, then did another series that Tokyopop brought over, called "Dragon Voice." It was basically Harlem Beat with a boy band. I never thought a comic about pop music singers could be fun, but somehow it worked.