Take Aim! The Pirate Baseball King

This animated featurette runs about five and a half minutes and was paired with the theatrical release of The Cursed Holy Sword. Rather than a story, it stages a single absurd baseball contest between the Straw Hats and a fish-men squad, with Buggy and Mr. 2 Bon Kurei narrating the action from the booth and Gan Fall officiating behind home plate. The whole thing is voiced by just two actors, Kazuki Yao and Shigeru Chiba, with Yao delivering every Straw Hat line in his Bon Kurei voice.

The match swaps real baseballs for tiny spiked iron orbs, and the gags pile up from the first pitch. Luffy, distracted by a scuffle with Chew, takes a pitch to the backside and is sent to first. Zoro tries to bat three balls at once with his Three Sword Style and only smashes them, fanning himself out, while Luffy fails a steal and earns a glare from coach Nami. Usopp panics, sprints the bases on a wild pitch, then plants his long nose in the dirt just short of home. Sanji wastes two strikes mooning over Nami before booting the third ball clean out of the park, only to walk off without circling the bases.

By the final frame the fish-men lead three to nothing. With two outs and runners aboard, Luffy comes up against Arlong, his bat shatters, so he swings bare-handed and launches a Gomu Gomu no Home Run. The ball clobbers Momoo and then nails a furious Buggy square in the face just as he storms off the broadcast. The Straw Hats are crowned the Pirate Baseball Kings over the closing credits.

The short doubles as a tie-in for the game One Piece: Going Baseball, even slipping a password for it onto the on-screen scoreboard and reusing the same player uniforms. The unusual single-day novelty of having Yao and Chiba cover the entire cast, rather than the regular voice actors, is one of its quirks, and the hidden cameo character Pandaman turns up somewhere in the crowd as a recurring Oda gag.