Jun Hagiwara

The Dragons' recent experimentation with using Akira Neo as a pitcher got me curious if this had happened before in recent-ish (say the last 50 years of so) NPB history.  I could think of a number of examples of players who started out as pitchers switching to being position players - Kazuya Fukuura, Yoshio Itoi, Yuhei Takai, Ryuji Miyade and Fumikazu Kimura are all examples from the last 30 years - but I could not come up with anyone who'd gone the other way.  I reached out to John E. Gibson and Jim Allen of the Japan Baseball Weekly podcast and asked them if they could think of anyone.  They answered my question on the podcast two weeks ago but the only name they could think of was Jun Hagiwara.

Hagiwara drew a lot of attention by hitting 25 home runs as an infielder with Kofu High School.  He was the second round pick of the Orix BlueWave back in 1991 - the same draft that Orix took So Taguchi (1st round) and Ichiro Suzuki (4th round).  I'll quote the Google translation of his Japanese Wikipedia page - "When he was a newcomer, he was expected to be the same as So Taguchi and Ichiro, but his talent did not bloom."  I don't know what his farm team statistics were but between 1992 and 2000 he only had seven plate appearances in seven ichi-gun games and had just one hit.  In the middle of the 2000 season, Orix manager Akira Ohgi suggested that he try pitching.

He made his top team debut as a pitcher in 2001, appear in just one game but really came into his own in 2002 - appearing in 48 games out of the bullpen and posting a 2.64 ERA with 10 saves.  That was probably the best season of his career as his ERA jumped to 7-ish in each of the next two seasons.  He had another decent year in 2005, going 3-2 with a 3.89 ERA in 49 games split between the bullpen and the starting rotation.  He was traded to the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters with Tatsuo Katoh in the middle of the 2007 season for Akio Shimizu and Kuniyuki Kimoto.  He got into 25 games with the Fighters, posting a 5.63 ERA and was released after the season, despite pitching three scoreless innings against the Dragons in the Nippon Series.  He attended the 12 team tryout that winter and ended up signing with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.  He spent three seasons with Yakult although he was demoted to the farm team due to shoulder pain late in 2009 and was never brought back up the following season.  He retired at the end of the 2010 season and has been coaching for a variety of independent teams ever since.

Here's a handful of his baseball cards.  These first two are the only cards I know of showing him as a position player - although I would guess that there are some team issued cards of him from the 90's depicting him as an infielder as well:

1992 BBM #446

1997 BBM #278

His first cards as a pitcher don't appear to be until 2003.  He has 20+ cards between 2003 and 2010.  The only card showing him as a member of the Fighters is from the 2007 BBM Nippon Series set.  

2003 BBM 1st Version #351

2006 BBM Buffaloes #Bs23

2007 BBM Nippon Series #S32

2010 BBM 1st Version #082

One thing I discovered while researching Hagiwara is that he was actually the third player that Ohgi had converted to pitching in the late 90's!  He had also moved Toshihiro Kase (who I'd written about before but forgotten) and Fumiaki Imamura to the mound.  Hagiwara was by far the most successful pitcher of this trio which was kind of odd as he's the only one of the trio who was not a pitcher in high school.  Of course that also means his arm wasn't abused by his high school coach either.