Really odd story last week -
Chiba Lotte Marines infielder Shota Ohmine announced he was retiring at age 26 due to financial issues. He reportedly owes a lot of money - although none of it for doing anything illegal - and wants a "change of pace". Ohmine was drafted out of high school in Okinawa in the third round of the 2009 draft by the Marines. His brother Yuta had been drafted by the Marines in the first round of the 2006 high school draft. Ohmine's registered name in NPB was just "Shota" until 2014 when he changed it to "Shota Ohmine". He only played on the farm team his first four years but he made his
ichi-gun debut in 2014. He never spent a lot of time with the top team - he only got into 196 games over five seasons and almost half of that was the 91 games he got into last season. His career batting average is .210.
He's got a somewhat odd collection of baseball cards. I was surprised to see that he didn't have a card in the 2010 BBM Rookie Edition set. I first thought I had messed up somewhere and was missing a card but when I looked at
his Japanese wikipedia page I saw that he had been arrested for underage drinking about a month after the 2009 draft and his official signing with the Marines ended up being delayed until mid-January which was apparently after the Rookie Edition set went to press. (This isn't the only time something like this has happened - Lions pitcher Makoto Aiuchi was arrested for speeding and driving without a license shortly after being a second round pick in the 2012 draft and didn't officially sign with Seibu until March so he missed both the Rookie Edition and 1st Version sets in 2013.) Ohmine's first card was in the 1st Version set in 2010 and he also had a card in the 2nd Version set that year which is kind of strange considering he only played with the farm team that year. These were the only BBM flagship cards he has had. I'm pretty sure his only other BBM cards are from their annual Marines team sets. He's never had a Calbee card but he showed up in Epoch's flagship NPB set this year.
 |
| 2010 BBM 1st Version #395 |
 |
| 2010 BBM 2nd Version #710 |
 |
| 2013 BBM Marines #M51 |
 |
| 2015 BBM Marines #M53 |
 |
| 2016 BBM Marines #M51 |
 |
| 2017 BBM Marines #M54 |
 |
| 2018 Epoch NPB #205 |
I swear I'll be doing a post on the new NPB set soon - probably Friday.
4 comments:
Something about his retirement makes no sense at all. He owes money to people and therefore he is retiring from an extraordinarily well paid job in order to somehow take care of that? Outside of baseball he's basically just an unskilled high school grad qualified for 900 Yen per hour retail jobs.
There must be more to the story, possibly this has been forced upon him by the team who don't want to be tarnished by any scandal that might emerge (he might not have done anything illegal but possibly the people he owes money to may have). Especially since a guy in debt to potentially shady characters is an obvious risk in terms of throwing games for money, etc.
Yeah, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I wonder if we'll ever learn more about what's actually going on.
Very odd indeed. What's his current salary?
If I'm reading the Google translate version of this article correctly, he was making 10 million yen this season which is roughly $90,000. As Sean said it really doesn't make any sense that he'd quit this extremely well paying job because he owes a lot of money.
Post a Comment