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A siren wails over Koshien Stadium, and a summer game begins. Forty-nine high schools, one from each of the 47 prefectures plus a second each from Hokkaido and Tokyo, play a single-elimination tournament there every August, over roughly two and a half weeks, in Nishinomiya just outside Osaka. The siren sounds again when each game ends, and the players who lose scoop infield dirt into bags to take home. For the seniors (third-years in the Japanese system) on those teams, that is usually the end of serious baseball. For Japanese baseball fiction, it is the finish line nearly every story is running toward.
Ask a Japanese fan for the best baseball anime and the answer starts with Mitsuru Adachi’s Touch, then H2 and Cross Game, then Major, Big Windup! and One Outs. As of October 2026, none of those six is on a US subscription service. So this is a different list: ten you can actually stream in America. Two of them are sequels to classics you cannot get, Mix to Touch and Major 2nd to Major, which turns out to be the best way in.
Of the shows in this piece, the ones I have watched are Touch, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Clannad. The last two are not baseball anime at all, which is why they close the list.
The 10 Picks at a Glance
| Title | Format | Length | MBTI | What is at stake |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ace of the Diamond | Anime series | 178 episodes through Act II, plus the 2026 season | ESFP | Fighting a fireballer for the number 1 |
| Mix: Meisei Story | Anime series | 48 episodes (2 seasons) | ISTP | Touch’s sequel, at the same school |
| Major 2nd | Anime series | 50 episodes (2 seasons) | ISFJ | A famous pitcher’s son who quit once |
| Battery | Anime series | 11 episodes | INTJ | Too gifted, too proud for a team |
| Princess Nine | Anime series | 26 episodes | ISTJ | Nine girls aiming at the boys’ tournament |
| Gurazeni: Money Pitch | Anime series | 24 episodes (2 seasons) | ISTJ | A reliever who sizes up hitters by salary |
| TAMAYOMI: The Baseball Girls | Anime series | 12 episodes | INFP | A pitch nobody could catch, until now |
| Cinderella Nine | Anime series | 12 episodes | ENFP | One girl starts a club from nothing |
| The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya | Anime series | 28 episodes | ENTP | Baseball as a cosmic emergency |
| Clannad: After Story | Anime series | 24 episodes | ISTP | A neighborhood game, then adult life |
The first eight are about baseball from the first episode to the last, from a junior high club to the pros. The last two each have one game worth the detour. Each title links to its entry.
1. Ace of the Diamond
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Drama, Comedy | 178 episodes through Act II, plus the 2026 season | Hype, Gritty |
Eijun Sawamura is a brash left-handed pitcher from a small country middle school, with a fastball that moves in ways even he cannot predict. Seido High, a baseball powerhouse in Tokyo, recruits him, and he leaves home to live in the team dormitory and compete for the mound with players far better trained than he is.
Adapted from Yuji Terajima’s manga. Madhouse and Production I.G produced the first 126 episodes starting in 2013, Act II added 52 more, and a new season began airing in April 2026.
The Number on His Back
One jersey on every Japanese high school team carries the number 1, and it belongs to the ace. Sawamura spends years of episodes trying to earn it while sharing a bullpen with Satoru Furuya, a quiet freshman who throws harder than he does. That rivalry runs through the whole series.
The club around them runs the way real Japanese school teams do. The players live together, the coach decides everything, and the seniors retire the day their last summer ends. In Japan, every summer game is treated as if it were a final, because for the seniors on the losing side it is.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On Crunchyroll in the US, including the 2026 season.
2. Mix: Meisei Story
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Romance, Drama | 48 episodes (2 seasons) | Nostalgic, Warm |
Meisei Academy once won the national championship at Koshien, thanks to a pitcher named Tatsuya Uesugi. Decades later, the team has faded into nothing. Two stepbrothers, Souichirou and Touma Tachibana, a catcher and a pitcher, set out to bring it back.
From Mitsuru Adachi’s manga, produced by OLM. Two seasons of twenty-four episodes each, in 2019 and 2023.
Touch, One Generation Later
School brass bands still play the theme from Touch in the stands at Koshien, more than forty years after the anime first aired. Mix is set at the same school a generation later, and the old legend hangs over the whole team.
I have watched Touch, and Mix reuses its setup on purpose: two brothers on the same team, a school living off one famous summer, and Adachi’s habit of leaving the most important feelings unsaid. The manga is still running, so the story is not finished.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On Crunchyroll in the US.
3. Major 2nd
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Drama | 50 episodes (2 seasons) | Underdog, Earnest |
Daigo Shigeno’s father, Goro, played in the Major Leagues. Daigo tried youth baseball, could not live up to the name and quit within a year. In sixth grade a transfer student arrives: Hikaru Sato, whose father was Goro’s closest friend and also played in the Majors. The two boys end up back on a field together.
Takuya Mitsuda’s sequel to his own long-running manga Major. NHK aired fifty episodes over two seasons, in 2018 and 2020.
The Weight of a Famous Name
Do you need to have seen Major first? It helps, and this is the hardest entry here to recommend without that caveat. The original followed Goro from preschool to the Major Leagues over six seasons on NHK, and the adults in the sequel are that original cast, grown up. The show does not stop to introduce them.
The sequel flips the premise. Instead of a prodigy, it follows a kid with average talent and a heavy surname, and makes him a catcher, the position that wins by reading other people. By the second season he is captaining a middle school club where most of the players are girls.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
As of October 2026, it is listed only through the Crunchyroll channel inside Prime Video, a paid add-on on top of Prime.
4. Battery
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Drama, Coming-of-Age | 11 episodes | Tense, Quiet |
Takumi Harada is a pitcher who knows exactly how good he is. Just as he starts junior high, his family moves to a small town in the mountains, where he meets Go Nagakura, a new classmate and a catcher who can actually hold on to his fastball. The two of them join the school team.
Based on Atsuko Asano’s novels, which won the Noma Prize for Juvenile Literature and have sold more than ten million copies in Japan. Zero-G made eleven episodes for Fuji TV’s late-night noitamina block in 2016.
One Catcher Is Enough
A new town, a new school, and one boy who can catch the ball. Takumi does not want teammates. He wants one catcher who can take everything he throws, and the story is about whether a boy that sure of himself can let anyone else matter. The novels spend more pages on the two boys talking than on the games.
It feels literary because it started as literature. Asano wrote the books for young readers, and the anime keeps their subject: what it costs a proud boy to need somebody else.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Free with ads on RetroCrush (a Cineverse service), and RetroCrush is also sold as a paid channel inside Prime Video.
5. Princess Nine
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Drama | 26 episodes | Rousing, Retro |
Keiko Himuro, chairwoman of the Kisaragi Girls’ School, puts together an all-girls baseball team to prove that girls can play on equal terms with boys. Their target is Koshien itself. The ace is Ryo Hayakawa, daughter of a star pitcher who was banned from Japanese pro baseball.
An original series from 1998 that aired on NHK, twenty-six episodes.
A Tournament They Could Not Enter
Why would nine girls aim at a tournament they are not allowed to play in? The summer tournament at Koshien is for boys, and girls still cannot play in it. When Princess Nine aired, a girls’ team even reaching the stadium was pure fantasy.
Real life caught up partway. Since 2021, the final of the national girls’ high school championship has been played at Koshien Stadium, on the same field as the boys. Seen from 2026, the premise reads less as a fairy tale and more as an early draft of something that later happened.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On Crunchyroll in the US. It is also free with ads on RetroCrush.
6. Gurazeni: Money Pitch
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Comedy, Drama | 24 episodes (2 seasons) | Dry, Witty |
Natsunosuke Bonda is a 26-year-old left-handed relief pitcher for the Jingu Spiders, a fictional team in Japan’s pro league. He was a mid-round draft pick, he has survived eight seasons, and he knows the annual salary of every hitter he faces.
Adapted from the manga by Yuji Moritaka and Keiji Adachi. Studio Deen made two twelve-episode seasons in 2018.
Life After Koshien
This is the only entry with no school in it, and that is why it belongs. Japanese baseball fiction is mostly about the summer you turn seventeen. Gurazeni is about one of the few who made it to the pros, and what that usually means: a middle reliever’s modest salary and no guarantee of next year.
The title is short for a baseball saying credited to the old Nankai Hawks manager Kazuto Tsuruoka: there is money lying on the ground, meaning the field. Anyone who has seen Moneyball will recognize the math. The difference is that the pitcher is the one running the numbers, on the mound, about the hitter in front of him.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On Crunchyroll in the US.
7. TAMAYOMI: The Baseball Girls
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Comedy | 12 episodes | Cheerful, Earnest |
In junior high, Yomi Takeda had a signature breaking ball that her catcher could not handle, so she could never use it and her team went nowhere. She enrolls at Shin-Koshigaya High planning to give up the game, and runs into Tamaki Yamazaki, the childhood friend she used to play catch with, who has since become a catcher.
Adapted from Mountain Pukuichi’s manga in Houbunsha’s Manga Time Kirara Forward. Studio A-CAT made twelve episodes in 2020.
Pitcher and Catcher, Reunited
What is a pitch worth if nobody can catch it? That is the question the series is built on. Yomi’s breaking ball was wasted in junior high, and Tamaki is the first catcher who can handle it.
Kirara is the magazine label behind a long line of gentle comedies about girls’ clubs, and the art follows that style. Shin-Koshigaya is in Saitama, just north of Tokyo, and the team has to be rebuilt from a handful of players before anything else can happen.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On Crunchyroll in the US.
8. Cinderella Nine
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sports, Slice of Life | 12 episodes | Sunny, Light |
Tsubasa Arihara finds out that her new high school has no baseball club, so she announces at the entrance ceremony that she is starting one. The girls who join include total beginners, girls who quit the game years ago, and a few who will not say why they came.
Based on a mobile game by Akatsuki that ran in Japan from 2017 until it ended service in 2024. TMS Entertainment made twelve episodes in 2019.
The Speech Nobody Gives
A first-year stands up in the middle of the entrance ceremony and asks for players. Nobody does that in Japan. High school starts in April with this ceremony, a formal assembly where new students sit in rows and listen to speeches, and the show opens by breaking it.
Most of the girls who answer are beginners or players who once quit, so the first job is simply getting nine people onto the same field. A team starting from nothing in April, in a country where August belongs to Koshien.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On Crunchyroll in the US.
9. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sci-Fi, Comedy, Mystery | 28 episodes | Chaotic, Clever |
Kyon starts high school assuming that aliens and time travelers are for children. Then Haruhi Suzumiya, the girl who sits behind him, announces that she is only interested in aliens, time travelers and espers, and drags him into a club she invents. The other members turn out to be exactly what she was looking for, and none of them can tell her.
Made by Kyoto Animation. The series first aired in 2006 and was rebroadcast in 2009 with new episodes added, which is the twenty-eight-episode version. The baseball episode is titled The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya.
A Sci-Fi Comedy at the Ballpark
In The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya, Haruhi enters her club in a local baseball tournament, fills out the roster with whoever she can drag in, including Kyon’s little sister, and discovers that her team cannot play. The trouble is that a bored Haruhi is a danger to the universe, so a lost game becomes a cosmic emergency.
This is the episode I would hand to anyone who wants a twenty-minute sample of the whole series. It takes the most ordinary weekend event in Japanese school life, the neighborhood tournament, and treats it with the seriousness of a world-ending threat.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On Crunchyroll in the US.
10. Clannad: After Story
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Drama, Romance, Family | 24 episodes | Tearjerker, Warm |
This is the second half of Clannad, so start with the first series. Tomoya Okazaki is a drifting high school student who meets Nagisa Furukawa, a fragile girl repeating a year, and slowly becomes part of her family, who run a bakery. After Story follows the two of them out of school and into adult life.
Kyoto Animation, from Key’s visual novel. Clannad has twenty-three broadcast episodes, and After Story, which aired from 2008 into 2009, adds twenty-four more.
The Game That Opens It
After Story is the half I would argue for, and it begins with baseball. Nagisa’s father, Akio, asks Tomoya to pull together a team for a game against the neighboring shopping street, and Tomoya fills it with everyone he knows. Japanese people call this kind of game kusa yakyu, grass baseball: neighbors and shop owners on a local field on a weekend. It is the last time the whole cast is together and carefree.
A bat comes back later in the season at the moment that decides Tomoya’s future. By then the series has become a family drama, and a ball game turns out to be the way two men talk to each other.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
On HIDIVE in the US, along with the first Clannad series. HIDIVE is also sold as a paid channel inside Prime Video.
US Streaming Comparison at a Glance
| Title | Crunchyroll | Netflix | Hulu | Amazon Prime Video | HBO Max | Disney+ | Apple TV+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ace of the Diamond | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Mix: Meisei Story | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Major 2nd | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Battery | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Princess Nine | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Gurazeni: Money Pitch | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| TAMAYOMI: The Baseball Girls | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Cinderella Nine | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Clannad: After Story | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
Checked in the US region on October 5, 2026. ◎ means included with the base subscription, △ means available only through a paid add-on channel, and ✕ means that service does not carry it. Seven of the ten titles are on Crunchyroll, which makes it the one subscription that covers most of this list.
Where to Start
Start with Ace of the Diamond if you want a full Koshien season in anime form. It is long, and it follows one school’s team through the dormitory, the bench and the seniors’ last summer.
Never watched anime, but follow baseball contracts closely? Gurazeni is the one for you. There are no magic pitches and no school uniforms, and the jokes are about salaries.
Start with Mix if the Japanese classics are what brought you here. It is the nearest thing to Touch that a US subscription will get you, played on the same field by the next generation of the same school.
Streaming information was verified in the US region on October 5, 2026 and can change without notice.
