Kazutaka Shindo

Shindo cuts a large, athletic figure with tanned skin and an athlete's build. His black hair is short and spiky, and his eyes are dark and sharp, giving him the bearing of a seasoned team captain.

Like many students of the main school, Shindo carries plenty of pride born from his success. Unlike the more arrogant of his peers, though, he can offer sincere respect to skilled players regardless of which class they belong to, as he does toward Sugino. That decency runs deep: even under the chairman's hypnotic push to crush others for the sake of winning, he cannot bring himself to injure Karma Akabane and Yuma Isogai. He also has a theatrical, faintly eccentric streak, delighting in dramatic phone briefings about the Big Five.

Shindo first appears at practice, warmly hailing his old teammate Sugino as he passes by. The mood cools once Sugino's status as a Class E student surfaces, and Shindo voices his belief that only those able to juggle everything deserve to advance, challenging Sugino to disprove it in the coming tournament. When the exhibition match pits his squad against the Class E team, he is blindsided in the early innings as three E batters bunt his pitches for three unanswered runs. Chairman Gakuho Asano intervenes to fire him up, ordering him to repeat that he is strong, the best, and must trample others to get ahead. Chanting it, Shindo turns overwhelming by the final innings, until Karma and Isogai plant themselves at point-blank range against his swing and his refusal to hurt them makes him forget the chairman's mantra, costing his team the game.

Afterward Sugino admits he did not treat the win as proof of his own strength as a player, only of his strategizing, prompting Shindo to ask why victory mattered so much. Sugino answers that he simply wanted to boast about his Class E friends, and Shindo smiles, vowing a high-school rematch as he takes his hand. Before the first end-of-term exams he phones Sugino to dramatically brief Class 3-E on the Big Five led by top student Gakushu Asano, and he later resurfaces as a narrator promoting the school festival. A gifted pitcher and the star of his team, Shindo throws almost nothing but fastballs and curveballs, favoring fastballs, with a top speed clocked at 140.5 kph.