Time for another Dragon.
Kenichi Yazawa was a Waseda product who played OF-1B for Chunichi from 1970 to 1986. He joined the Meikyukai in 1985, returned for an encore in 86, and then hung them up, finishing with 2062 hits. Offensively, he looks to have been a strong player, posting a career batting line of 302/368/481. If you just look at his raw numbers it will look like he got better as he got older (something that you almost never see), but he didn’t really. The Central League became more offense-heavy as his career went on. I picked an early and late year from his career at random: in 1974 the league-wide slugging percentage in the Central League was 392, in 1984 it was 425. League OBP also went up (albeit by not quite as much). In baseball, a rising tide lifts most boats, and so it was with Yazawa. That said, he did age well; he lost some batting average towards the end, and missed a number of games, but he was still a productive player when he was on the field. He had started coaching part-time for the Dragons while he was still a player, and there are rumors that Senichi Hoshino, who took over as manager in 1987, was not happy with this arrangement and forced his retirement as a player.
In total, Yazawa was a rookie of the year winner, an 11-time all-star, and two-time batting champion. (He won in 1976 with a 355 mark, and 1980, when he hit 369.)
Post-retirement, Yazawa has kept busy. He was a radio commentator and batting coach for a number of years, and then in the late 1990s he earned a masters degree from Waseda in international business administration. He’s currently a visiting professor at Waseda, teaching “sports theory” (that’s how Google Translate translates it, don’t know what it actually is), and he works with the University’s baseball team. He also seems to be involved in professional baseball (his Japanese Wikipedia page says that he founded a team), although obviously not top-tier pro ball. Maybe there’s Indy ball in Japan?
Here’s (what I assume is)
his Instagram.
Allen has a nice
interview with Yazawa about sign-stealing in Japan. Apparently it’s a big thing. He dishes dirt on the Carp and cops to it himself.
Meikyukai:
Yes – Hall of Fame:
No
1978 Yamakatsu. These are nice cards. Like Calbees, there’s no boarder, but unlike Calbees there isn’t any text on the front. Just a full-bleed photo.