Arrogance and talent. People with big mouths and no skills to back it up are usually the first to be on the receiving end of humiliating crushing defeat, or possibly even a sideswipe from a teammate if they really can't stop talking. Contrast this to the gracious victors, the supremely talented who will never take any credit. Generally these are the protagonists, because directors know we want to project onto the absolute best human being available, but clever shows like Hyouka can help us understand where this paradigm breaks down in the real world. The rest are either talentless nothings or the self-aggrandizing who actually have the talent to show for it, a position Ping Pong narrowly avoided in favor of a more overarching parable of humanity, but with Battery we certainly get our fill of this particular monster. And the answer, if we hadn't already guessed, is that they put everyone in a difficult position, even themselves.
Of course they may not know that they are in a difficult position, even less than they know anyone else is. Battery's Harada Takumi is a key example, the type of person who was always so talented at pitching that he never learned what crushing jealousy and frustration feel like. He is insensitive to the point of sociopathy, someone who doesn't necessarily lack respect for the people around him, but who can't understand that they have their own pride to maintain. The reason Harada feels he should be on the mound is simply because it's optimal, and he feels that it's optimal because...well, he's never met anyone to challenge that assertion. Battery makes it clear through the battles he chooses to fight with his upperclassmen and coach that he genuinely has little if anything in the way of ulterior motives, which is little consolation when he's taken to a shed and beaten naked by the team captains for his blatant disregard of the pecking order.
Interestingly the show found a way to force this kind of lone wolf to work with others, and it's in one of the lesser-explored relationships on the diamond: a pitcher and their catcher. Nagakura Gou is the best catcher around, and becomes inspired by Harada's superfast pitches, but in reality we see that Gou is not actually talented enough to always catch them. This isn't a story of Gou training himself to take the catch every time, or working long hours with Harada to improve their coordination and understanding of one another. In a tragic sequence near the middle of the show, Gou drops one of Harada's pitches during a game, which itself has no consequences on the state of play, but causes them to fall apart. And in an amazing inversion of expectations, the one who falls apart isn't the less competent Gou, but the superman Harada, who lowers his skills to match his catcher in a moment of supreme arrogance and loses them the game. The rest of the story is atypical for a sports show: it is them mending their own minds, and having their relationship hopefully mend itself on the way.
It is downright bizarre to see a show so willing to tear down its protagonist, bit by bit. Harada is genuinely unlikable, not to the point where I ever wanted to drop the show but simply to the point where I had to stop making excuses for him in my mind. There are no trite feelings of him being simply misunderstood, nor is there a grand reveal or speech that absolves him of his actions. Every game won or lost, every relationship broken or repaired; they all have consequences that reverberate through the rest of the show, no take-backs. Harada and Gou's relationship is always tenuous, but while Gou is clearly the forgive and forget type, he never lets go of anything between them that affects his perception of himself. Harada, even when he seems to gain the understanding that his actions have consequences, never changes the core of who he is, not for us, not for the team.
The conflict is mostly internally driven, between Harada the newcomer from the big city and his teammates, but a recurring set of antagonists emerge with Kadowaki and Mizugaki, two skilled players from a local school known for being a baseball powerhouse. Kadowaki is enraptured with Harada's pitching, and as a batting ace he stakes his pride on getting a hit off of Harada. But the real star of this plot is Mizugaki, who is both Kadowaki's steadfast teammate and friend as well as an acquaintance of Harada's team captain Kaionji. He is sarcastic and genuinely spiteful, opening the initial rift between Harada and Gou, but we see all of his spite coming from his relationship with Kadowaki, whom he admires to the point of jealous hatred. The insecurity that comes out of Mizugaki when Kaionji questions his friendship with Kadowaki, to the point where he storms out in a clearly confused rage, is a perfect match to the shots of his face as he reveals his mixed feelings to Kadowaki himself, in a set of scenes that can only be describes as torturous. Melodrama and filled with middle school angst that it was, every line out of Mizugaki's mouth carried the weight, realism, and absolute chaotic terror of fighting with my best friend. I had to stop many of the episodes and cool down, because the words that Mizugaki said hurt, and I couldn't tell who I felt more hurt for.
Even beyond the dialogue, everything in the show is designed to pull us into this place, to make us feel nostalgic even if we've never been there ourselves. The watercolor style of the opening and ending match with the bright whimsical palate, making the town feel like the countryside we left behind as we grew up. The heavy dialect and the way which everyone knows one another must be particularly nostalgic for the Japanese audience, but all of us can see this tiny, closed-off world and be reminded of somewhere. For as much as I loved the opening and ending themes, I was happy that the show itself had little in the way of background music; the silence is enough to lay their flaws bare, and the lack of overwrought symphonic tracks during conflict made me felt less distracted and more like I was there and viscerally upset, watching these kids trying to find ways to communicate to one another through all their personal biases and flaws.
One of the discoveries Harada has to make along the way is that baseball can be fun, and here we learn something about how the show chooses to portray success. Harada plays baseball not for fun, but because he's good at it; he's grown up in a world where you are your skill, not your passion, and so it's no surprise that he blindly stays with the game, as it stays an objectively correct and immutable decision to him. While the Kadowaki-Mizugaki dynamic brought this ubiquitous societal issue more to the forefront of my mind, it was Harada and his inability to distinguish pleasure from success that made me painfully aware of this problem, one that we acknowledge and face every day and yet ignore all but a dozen times in a lifetime.
It is worth noting that Battery alienates many viewers, and while this is inevitable it is also an inherent flaw by the same token. There are no female characters, which helps avoid romantic subplots but also gives the show a very testosterone-driven vibe. Everyone watching will have a different tolerance for Harada as a person, and judging by the general reception to Battery I'd say he passes most people's thresholds by a good margin. It is also less accesible to Western audiences; the way in which it goes about addressing success and failure—and in the same vein, friendships and rivalries—is very Japanese, and not simply in the way we've grown adjusted to with classic stories of teamwork (nakama) and youth (seishun). The side characters are so well-characterized and given so much life that for some the main relationship between Harada and Gou may seem weak, an unfortunate accessory to an otherwise normal baseball story, one that also ends much too fast to satisfy in the team's victories.
These are issues people may have, but they certainly didn't bother me. Battery gives just enough of every character, of every circumstance and every barrier to pass over, and truly lets us fill in the blanks from our own experiences. If Harada and Gou have an unfulfilling relationship to us, then it's because they have an unfulfilling relationship with each other, one that fluctuates between motivating and destructive. The show is a tight, well-written package, and it forces a rethinking of the archetypal sports show protagonist, who skates by in their cooperation with their team as long as the increasing pace of their skill level matches their increasing understanding of teamwork. Here the skill bar is too high to be raised, but everything else has suffered in its wake, from maturity to teamwork and beyond. The show, while visually relaxing, is hard to watch. That's not an accident. That's Battery's statement.