Hayato Terahara

I have to confess that I've gotten behind in the retirement posts I wanted to do at the end of the 2019 season.  The main reason for this is that the primary resource that I've used for the past...well, ever...is YakyuDB which unfortunately has not been updated much in the past year.  (And I hope that Gen, the guy who runs the site, is doing ok.)  I tried looking around a little on the Japanese version of Wikipedia but I didn't really get a chance to really research it before BBM's annual set for retired players came out last week.  It was a lot easier to look at those cards rather than try to decipher translated Wikipedia pages so I did that instead.  I came up with five guys that I wanted to do posts on and I'm starting with Hayato Terahara.

Hayato Terahara was a big deal coming out of high school.  He was the ace pitcher at Nichinan Gakuen High School and was clocked in the high 90's.  He gained nationwide recognition while pitching in the 2001 Summer Koshien tournament although his team lost in the quarterfinals.  Later that fall he was the first high school player to ever make the Japanese National Team when he was named to the squad for the 2001 Baseball World Cup.  That tournament ended the day before that year's NPB draft where he was taken by four teams in the first round - the Dragons, the Baystars, the Giants and the Hawks, who won the lottery for his rights. 

He had a promising first season in 2002 - he went 6-2 with a save and an ERA of 3.59 in 14 games including seven starts - but things started to go wrong in 2003.  Injuries and ineffectiveness limited him to only 42 games with the ichi-gun team between 2003 and 2006.

The Hawks traded him to the Baystars after the 2006 season for Hitoshi Tamura.  He spent 2007 in the starting rotation, making 27 starts and going 12-12 with a 3.80 ERA.  He was Yokohama's Opening Day starter in 2008 before being converted to the team's closer.  He ended up saving 22 games for a team that lost 94 games, posted an ERA of 3.30 and made the All Star team for the only time in his career.  He lost a lot of time due to injuries over the next two years, only appearing in 33 games with the top team in 2009 and 2010.

He was traded again after 2010, this time to the Orix Buffaloes along with Kazuya Takamiya for Shogo Yamamoto and Go Kida.  He had perhaps the best season of his career in 2011, going 12-10 with a 3.06 ERA in 25 starts but injuries once again cut into his playing time in 2012.

He became a free agent after the 2012 season and resigned with the Hawks.  He pitched ok for the Hawks but once again injuries cut into his playing time.  It also didn't help that unlike his time with Yokohama and Orix, the Hawks had younger, better pitchers to give playing time to so even when he was healthy he wasn't necessarily playing with the ichi-gun squad.  He did finally get into a Nippon Series game in 2017 (the fourth time the Hawks had made the Series while he was on the team).  He had a pretty good year in 2018, posting an ERA of 2.39 in 21 games out of the bullpen but the Hawks decided they didn't need a 35 year reliever and released him at the end of the season.

He spent 2019 with the Swallows but his numbers weren't good - he had an ERA of 6.19 in four appearances with the ichi-gun squad and an ERA of 6.42 in 14 games with the farm team.  He announced his retirement in mid-September.

Terahara's first card is actually a "pre-rookie" card from the 2002 BBM Japanese National Team set for the 2001 Baseball World Cup.  His first NPB card is #P80 from the 2002 BBM Preview set and he also had rookie cards in BBM's 1st and 2nd Version, Hawks and Touch The Game sets that year.  His first Calbee card was from the 2002 "New Face" subset and he also had a couple cards in the Konami Prime Nine set that year.  Here's some of his cards:

2002 BBM Japan National Team #5

2002 BBM Preview #P80

2002 BBM 1st Version #234

2003 BBM Hawks #009

2002 Calbee #N-13

2006 Konami Baseball Heroes 2 White Edition #B06W017

2008 BBM All Stars #A12

2011 Bandai Owners League 02 #056

2015 Calbee #171

2019 Epoch NPB #263