Finished One Outs last night and damnit I never expected myself to cry at a baseball/gambling manga, but I did anyway. What an amazing read.
Anyone know another good baseball or gambling manga?
Yeah I really loved One Outs as well, I watched the anime three times before finishing the manga. STILL really bummed that the second half never got an adaptation. My biggest complaint with the series is that I felt the ending was kinda underwhelming, and that the artist overuses the "Shocked Face, with mouth fully agape" FAR FAR FAR too often; I'm pretty sure at some point there were characters whose mouths were never closed, they were just in a perpetual state of jaw-dropped. Characters mouths were so wide open you'd think they were preparing to swallow their freshly killed prey whole. It felt ridiculous, just yappy mouths, yappy mouths everywhere.
You can always check out Liar Game by the same author.
I highly recommend Legend of Koizumi and Gamble Fish, which I still maintain are the two mangas that deserve full, lavish anime adaptations more than any other manga in existence.
Akagi is very much in the same vein as One Outs, in the sense that it is about an aloof genius effortlessly outmindgaming and outstrategizing everyone. There's also its cousin anime, Kaiji, though it is about gambling, the main character isn't a towering genius of gambling, and actually fails quite a lot, but that makes him a lot more likable in my opinion.
If it's just baseball you want, there's Diamond No Ace, which I liked a lot. characters in that one are just bursting with spiral energy.
And by sheer coincidence, while not a manga, I finished reading The Natural by Bernard Malamud, about an up and coming baseball genius who is gunned down (nonfatally) in his prime, and has to start fresh way after his prime is over and gone. I quite liked it a lot, even if the suspension of disbelief occasionally comes apart from the characters acting silly and unrealistic at times.