Japanese Baseball Cards: Kentaro Kuwahara

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Kentaro Kuwahara

And back to the retirement posts again...

Middle reliever Kentaro Kuwahara of the Tigers announced his retirement back in September. Kuwahara made a name for himself pitching for Nara Sangyo University, going 26-2 with a 1.38 ERA and 255 strikeouts. He won three Best 9 awards, an MVP and a Best Pitcher award and also threw a perfect game against Nara University. He was the third round pick of the Yokohama Baystars in the college/industrial league player portion of the 2007 draft.

For three seasons he bounced between starting and relieving with the Baystars and also between the top team and the farm team. He was traded along with Shingo Nonaka to the Orix Buffaloes for Ikki Shimamura after the 2010 season but while Orix used him exclusively in middle relief he still spent more time with the ni-gun team than with the ichi-gun squad. After four seasons in Osaka he was on the move again - this time to the Hanshin Tigers in a trade for Hirokazu Shiranita.

Things didn't improve for him initially with Hanshin. He stared 2015 with the top team but his poor pitching got him banished to the farm team by mid-May and he wouldn't make it back to the top team until 2017.

His year on the farm team in 2016 apparently gave him the opportunity to adjust his mechanics which led to him putting together the best year of his career in 2017. He got into 67 games sharing the setup duties with Marcus Mateo (for closer Rafael Dolis), going 4-2 with an ERA of 1.51. He led the Central League with 39 holds and tied with Mateo for the lead in hold points with 43 (hold points are wins plus holds). He followed that up in 2018 with another good season, going 5-3 with a 2.63 ERA and 32 holds in 62 games. An elbow injury cut into his playing time starting in 2019, limiting him to only 26 games with the ichi-gun Tigers over the last three seasons.

Kuwahara's first baseball cards are from 2008 - #22 in BBM's Rookie Edition set, #144 in the 1st Version set and #YB24 in their Baystars team set. He'd make another appearance in the 2009 BBM flagship set but then only appeared in BBM team sets for the Baystars, Buffaloes and Tigers (and a couple Bandai Owners League sets) for the next eight years. His next appearance in a BBM flagship set wouldn't be until the 2017 2nd Version set. His first Calbee card was #048 in the 2018 Series One set - it and #192 from Series Three set from the same year were his only Calbee cards. Here's a selection of his cards (I have to confess that I don't actually own of his cards with the Buffaloes so I swiped the image of the 2013 BBM Buffaloes card from Jambalaya):