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The story
On 5ch’s “Morning Musume.” board (the Hello! Project board), a post went up imagining members of the idol group Juice=Juice as baseball players and assembling a batting order for them. The original proposal opened with Kawashima Mifuu batting leadoff at first base, Arisawa Ichika second at catcher, and Inoue Reon third as pitcher — and the thread quickly filled with debate over whether those fielding assignments made sense, plus comparisons to real NPB players like Yoshio Itoi and Kotaro Kiyomiya. Eventually multiple users started pitching their own lineup versions, and the thread turned into a running game of guessing positions from the members’ builds and personalities, on the assumption that nobody involved knew much about baseball to begin with.
What people said
2. Arisawa Ichika (C)
3. Inoue Reon (P)
2 Arisawa Ichika (C)
3 Inoue Reon (P) ← makes sense
4 Danbara Ruru (CF) ← makes sense
5 Ebata Hisaki (2B) ← makes sense
6 Kudo Yua (3B) ← makes sense
7 Endo Sakari (SS)
8 Hayashi Nia (LF) ← makes sense
9 Irie Risa (RF)
Setup man: Ishiyama Sakura
Closer: Matsunaga Ria ← makes sense
Straight out of a Takuya Mitsuda manga — an elite, super-high-school-level team.
What an Ebata!
Yeah, the Yoshio Itoi type
This is starting to smell a lot like the Chunichi Dragons
If we're doing that bit, it'd have to be 'Iriebata-ya' (a pun mashing up Irie and Ebata's names, playing off the octopus joke)
More like an Itoi, a Yo Dai-kang, or an Ota Taishi type
That build shows up a lot on the Nippon-Ham Fighters
← ①⑤② ⑦⑥ ⑨③ ④ ⑧
Guess it's Kansai faction vs. Hokkaido faction
That was clearly the only thing OP actually wanted to say
Maybe wearing uniform No. 2 or something
But she's the first one out of the dugout the second a brawl breaks out
Does Juice=Juice not have a single lefty?
2 Ebata (SS)
3 Inoue (CF)
4 Danbara (C)
5 Matsunaga (2B)
6 Arisawa (3B)
7 Endo (1B)
8 Kudo (RF)
9 Kawashima (P)
Ishiyama (P)
Hayashi (P)
Something like that
2 Kudo (2B)
3 Inoue (C)
4 Danbara (3B)
5 Arisawa (1B)
6 Ishiyama (RF)
7 Endo (CF)
8 Irie (LF)
9 Kawashima (P)
Ebata (P)
Hayashi (P)
Something like that
2 Ebata, SS
3 Hayashi, 1B
4 Arisawa, C
5 Ishiyama, LF
6 Kawashima, CF
7 Irie, 2B
8 Matsunaga, 3B
9 Kudo, RF
Danbara: starter
Endo: reliever
Catcher: Kudo
1B: Arisawa
2B: Ebata
3B: Endo
SS: Kawashima
LF: Hayashi
CF: Irie
RF: Ishiyama
Background and Talking Points
This kind of “cast idols as baseball players” thread is a running gag on the Hello! Project board — pure speculation about fielding positions and hitting styles based on members’ physiques and personalities, nothing more. In this thread, the original poster appeared to have limited knowledge of actual baseball positioning, and most of the pushback centered on the choice to bat a first baseman leadoff — a spot usually reserved for fast, smaller players. The comparisons to real NPB players like Yoshio Itoi and Kotaro Kiyomiya are also a standard feature of these threads and may read as random references to anyone unfamiliar with Japanese pro baseball. The lineup gets reworked repeatedly throughout the thread simply because there’s no single “correct” answer being sought — it’s a free-for-all where each poster remixes the order to their own taste, not a debate with a winner or an official conclusion, something that isn’t obvious from the posts alone.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “We tried building a baseball team out of Juice=Juice members (with batting order).”
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