I agree that ep4 was once again very enjoyable. An episode made only of a baseball match... but with feelings added? I might start to understand why some people have been telling me Oofuri is more of a seinen than a shonen. So many characters went through nice development in so little time.
Spoiler for ep4:
Really, it was nice to see Ren gaining self-confidence by actually surprising his old team. We shouldn't see him being so desperate about his own abilities anymore, or at least not before a while (I suppose we might happen to see him trying harder to play with both great speed and control, which he won't be able to achieve easily - but there's a hand-holding scene awaiting us in this case, isn't there?).
Abe's reactions play a good part in the overall enjoyment IMO. I am a total baseball newbie so I don't know how much a catcher is supposed to analyze the players, but his way of thinking is truly great. Even in the previous episodes, not on a baseball field, he showed interesting reactions towards Ren.
Basically, Tajima is a player with overall (too) good abilities, but doesn't have the fitting body to actually hit homeruns? Feel free to correct me, very limited understanding skills here. If that is indeed the case, I'm glad to see how he's not made to be able to do anything and always be relied on.
I thought Hanai and Kanou were nicely treated today too, but their part has already been nicely described.
Oh, and one silly thing about this episode: a player from the Mihoshi team is voiced by Jun Fukuyama (he voices a Nishiura player, too) - except this time he uses a voice that sounds totally like Lelouch from CG (with kansai ben added
). It didn't help that I watched the ep on a certain streaming video website, so I got to see a ton of scrolling messages which were like "Lulu wwwwwwww". The resemblance was really that shocking, I just had to smile. Has any CG watcher not thought of it?