The Saitama Lycaons are the weakest team in the Japanese league. Hiromichi Kojima, the Lycaons' star batter, forms a training camp in Okinawa to try for his last attempt at a championship after 21 years. When the minor league pitcher training with Kojima becomes injured, him and Kojima's trainer goes to look for a replacement, but run into trouble by participating in the "One Outs" game, where a pitcher and batter duel 1-on-1 with money on the line. The next day, Kojima arrives to avenge his teammates and meets Tōa Tokuchi, who appears to have no special pitching skills, but defeats Kojima easily and causes him to enter seclusion to re-evaluate himself as a professional player. Later, Tokuchi accepts a rematch after Kojima raised the stakes, proclaiming he will retire immediately if he loses, but he will "take" Tokuchi's right arm to make sure he will never gamble on baseball again if Tokuchi loses. This time, Tokuchi experiences his very first loss and offers Kojima his right arm to have it broken. 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 championship. Soon, Tokuchi meets Saikawa, the greedy owner of the Lycaons who only cares about the team making a profit. Saikawa is reluctant to give Tokuchi any sort of significant salary due to his inexperience as a professional, but Tokuchi offers an unusual proposal. He proposes the 'One Outs contract', a performance-based pay where he gets 5,000,000 yen for every out he pitches, but loses 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 set up 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 1.5× admission fee, but with the promise of a full refund if the Lycaons loses the game. Additionally, the spectators can make up to five 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.
Characters
Main
;Toa Tokuchi ;Hiromichi Kojima ;Satoshi Ideguchi ;Tsuneo Saikawa
Supporting
;Yuuzaburou Mihara ;Jun'ichi Kawanaka Dennis Johnson The Chiba Mariners ;Itsuki Takami
Media
Manga
One Outs is written and illustrated by Shinobu Kaitani. It was serialized in Shueisha's seinen manga magazine Business Jump from 1998 to 2006. Shueisha compiled the individual chapters into nineteen tankōbon volumes released from June 18, 1999 to October 19, 2006. A sequel titled One Outs: Miwaku no All-Star-Hen was serialized from 2008 to 2009 and compiled into a tankōbon volume released on February 19, 2009.
Volume list
Anime
An animated adaptation of the manga premiered in Japan on Nippon Television on October 7, 2008, and ran for 25 episodes until its conclusion on March 31, 2009. Produced by Nippon TV, D.N. Dream Partners, VAP and Madhouse, the series is directed by Yūzō Satō, with Hideo Takayashiki handling series composition, Takahiro Umehara designing the characters and Akihiko Matsumoto composing the music. Kunihiko Sakurai, Haruhito Takada and Masaki Hinata served as additional character designers. While the anime is generally faithful to the manga, there are a few differences, such as the Lycaons being changed from visitor to home team. The series' opening song is "Bury" by Pay Money to My Pain and the ending song is "Moment" by TRIBAL CHAIR.
