Japanese Baseball Cards: Minoru Iwata

Saturday, February 19, 2022

Minoru Iwata

Hanshin Tigers pitcher Minoru Iwata retired at the end of last season. Iwata attended baseball powerhouse Osaka Toin for high school and was a teammate of Takeya Nakamura and Tsuyoshi Nishioka there. He was named the ace pitcher of his team by his junior year but missed opportunities to pitch much due to a back injury and the discovery that he suffered from Type 1 diabetes. He had hoped to go into professional baseball after graduating from high school but went undrafted in the fall 2001 NPB draft. He went to Kansai University and went 6-10 with a 2.11 ERA and 143 strikeouts in 23 games over four injury-plagued seasons. Former Hankyu Braves pitcher Takashi Yamaguchi who was a scout for the Tigers and an alum of Kansai University recommended that Hanshin draft him. The team actually acquired him via the "desired enrollment frame" part of the 2005 draft which basically allowed them to sign him to a deal without other teams getting a shot at drafting him - the process cost the Tigers their first and second round picks in the college/industrial league portion of the draft.

Iwata spent most of his first two seasons with the Tigers on their farm team, making only one appearance with the top team in 2006 and four in 2007. He made the ichi-gun starting rotation in 2008 and went 10-10 with a 3.28 ERA in 27 starts and finished third in Rookie Of The Year voting behind Tetsuya Yamaguchi and Hayato Sakamoto. He was a late addition to the 2009 Japanese World Baseball Classic team, replacing Hiroki Kuroda. He only made two appearances in the tournament, both against Korea, but hurt his shoulder and missed a couple months of the season. An elbow injury sidelined him for all of 2010 but he returned to the Tigers starting rotation in 2011 and remained there for the next five seasons, starting at least 20 games each season except for 2013 where ineffectiveness limited him to only nine games with the top team. He started Game Four of the 2014 Nippon Series and held the Hawks to just two runs in seven innings in a game ultimately won by Softbank on a three run walk off home run by Akira Nakamura in the bottom of the tenth. His playing time on the top team dropped off quite a bit after 2015, apparently due to poor performance. He announced his retirement after the team had let him know that he wasn't in their plans for 2022. He's now working for the team as a "community ambassador".

Iwata's first baseball cards were in the 2006 Rookie Edition (#55) and 1st Version (#248) sets from BBM. His first Calbee card was #116 in the 2008 Series Two set. He's also appeared in various sets from Konami, Bandai and Epoch. Here's some of his cards: