Baseball Time

Sugino and Nagisa stage an early-morning strike, hurling a baseball loaded with anti-sensei pellets, but Korosensei darts to the sports shed, grabs a glove, and snags it in midair while praising the ploy's stealth. The whiff leaves Sugino humiliated and withdrawn for the rest of the day. Over lunch their teacher hands the ball back, then coils his tentacles around the boy to study his frame, concluding that Sugino keeps mimicking a New York Yankees pitcher whose shoulder power he simply does not have.

When Nagisa erupts, sure the octopus is belittling Class E again, Korosensei corrects him: the answer is to chase flexibility and build a personal throwing style rather than copy an idol. Cheered by the advice, Sugino soon works out a curveball all his own.

Pressed by Nagisa on why he goes to such lengths, Korosensei says only that he is keeping a promise. A later forest ambush turns slapstick when he plucks the students' blades away and replaces them with tulips, then recoils in horror on realizing he uprooted flowers the class had planted months before. He tries to make amends by letting them string him up and fire at him at reduced speed, until a branch he taunts from snaps under his showing off.

Meanwhile Karasuma settles his cover as the incoming physical education teacher, treating the role as an ideal perch for the assassination. Nagisa keeps a running log of Korosensei's quirks, filing each character flaw as an exploitable weak point.

The episode adapts Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of the manga. Chairman Gakuho Asano surfaces briefly for his first cameo, and the closing scene introduces Karma Akabane, a suspended troublemaker who is untroubled by the prospect of killing a teacher, human or not. Background classmates render in CGI, and several anime-only beats extend Nagisa's narration alongside the Kunudon mascot bit. It first aired in Japan on January 16, 2015.