One Outs - Plot

Plot

The Lycaons is the weakest team in the "Paradice" league. Hiromichi Kojima, the Lycaons' star batter, heads to a training camp in Okinawa to bring himself out of a slump and try for his last attempt at a championship. While looking for a practice pitcher for Kojima, a few players get themselves into trouble by participating in the "One Outs" game, where a pitcher duels with a batter with money on the line. The next day, Kojima arrives to avenge his teammates and meets Toua Tokuchi, who defeats Kojima easily and causes him to enter seclusion to re-evaluate himself as a professional player. Later, Tokuchi accepts a rematch because Kojima raised the stakes by betting his professional career to prevent Tokuchi from gambling with baseball again by taking his dominant right arm. This time, Tokuchi experiences his very first loss and offers Kojima his right arm to have it broken with a bat. Instead, Kojima tells him he never intended to break it, and asks Tokuchi to join the Lycaons and use his unique pitching ability to take the Lycaons to the championships. Soon, Tokuchi meets Saikawa, the greedy owner of the Lycaons who only cares about the team making a profit. When Saikawa easily gets the upper hand in the salary negotiation, Tokuchi offers an unusual proposal. He proposes the 'One Outs contract', an illegal performance-based pay where he gets 5,000,000 yen for every out he pitches, but loses 50,000,000 yen for every run he gives up.

Later on in the baseball season, it is revealed that even the "One Outs contract" was done for the benefit of the team as Saikawa had no plans to keep the Lycaons and setup a deal to sell the team to the Tronpos company. Knowing this, Tokuchi formed an alliance with Tronpos and provided financial intel on Saikawa in exchange for financial backing. With this intel, Tronpos is able to make sure they are able to purchase the Lycaons as cheaply as possible by spreading rumors to dissuade other corporations from bidding. Unfortunately for the Lycaons, Tronpos also has no plans on proceeding with the current lineup and will replace all players after purchasing them. The Tronpos chairman made a mistake by believing Tokuchi to be his supporter and told Tokuchi his intended bid, to which Tokuchi responded with a last minute counter-offer.

For triple the bid, Tokuchi becomes the new owner of the Lycaons. Though there is heavy dissent in the team due to his dubious nature, Tokuchi starts to implement a wide variety of changes, most notably the L-Ticket. It is the old admission ticket with a new 1.5x admission fee, but with the promise of a full refund if the Lycaons loses the game. Additionally, the spectators can make up to 5 votes for the MVP on the ticket, which will directly influence the new player salaries by paying 200 yen per vote. Though the Lycaons are in chaos with the new changes, the team slowly realizes that these changes are what the team needs in order to become strong enough to win the championship.