Seiichi Uchikawa

It's mid-February and training camps have opened in Japan so it's obviously time that I finally get started doing my posts about the players who retired at the end of last season.  As always I had intended to get started earlier but there always seemed to be something else I wanted to post about.

First up this year is former Baystar, Hawk and Swallow Seiichi Uchikawa.  You'd be forgiven if you'd thought he had already retired after the Swallows let him go at the end of the 2022 season but he had spent most of last season playing indy ball.

Uchikawa was born in Oita on the eastern side of Kyushu.  His father was the baseball coach at Oita Prefectural Kunisaki High School and one of his students was Toyohiko Yoshida who had signed with the Nankai Hawks in the mid-80's.  This apparently caused young Seiichi to become a fan of the Hawks at a young age, even though they were still playing in Osaka until he was six.  He attended high school at Oita Prefectural Technical High School and played for their baseball team,   He suffered some heel injuries during his high school career but still managed to hit 43 home runs and was the first pick of the Yokohama Baystars in the 2000 NPB draft.

He spent most of the 2001 season on the farm team, getting into just three games with the top team.  His playing time started to increase the following year, getting into 42 ichi-gun games mostly as a pinch hitter.  Over the next few years the Baystars tried him at shortstop, second base, first base and outfield.  He'd show some promise but would invariably lose his starting job due to injury, fielding difficulties or lack of hitting.  Finally in 2008 he put it all together, establishing himself as Yokohama's first baseman and leading the league in hits, doubles, batting average and on-base-percentage.  He hit over .300 in 2009 and 2010 as well although he was moved to the outfield to make room for foreign players (Dan Johnson and Brett Harper respectively) who couldn't play anywhere other than first.

He earned his domestic free agent rights during the 2010 season and left Yokohama that off-season to join the Hawks.  Jim Allen has said that he was the first Central League star to move to a Pacific League team as a free agent.  He led the league in batting that season with a .338 average, making him only the second batter in NPB history to win a batting crown in both leagues (following Shinichi Eto).  He helped lead the Hawks to their first Nippon Series victory since 2003 (and first under Softbank) and won the PL MVP award.  He followed that season with a number of solid seasons - he generally could be counted on to hit .300 with 10 to 20 home runs most years.  He was an integral part of the Hawks dynasty of the 2010's, helping Softbank ultimately win seven Nippon Series championships between 2011 and 2020.  Injuries had started to slow him down somewhat by the time he got his 2000th hit in 2018 however.  He hit .327 with the Hawks ni-gun team in 2020 but never appeared with the top team and he and Softbank parted ways after the season ended.

After ten years in Kyushi, he moved back to Kanto, signing with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows for the 2021 season.  He only hit .208 in 38 games with the ichi-gun squad although he got to make a couple pinch hitting appearances in the Nippon Series that year (making it five straight years that his team had won the Nippon Series).  He only got into seven games in 2022 and announced his retirement at the end of the season.

His retirement was short-lived, however, as in December, 2022, he announced that he was signing with the Oita B-Rings of the independent Kyushu Asia League, his hometown team.  I don't know his final stats for the season but he went 2-5 on Opening Day, hitting the game winning home run.  He announced his retirement for the second (and as far as I know final) time in October.  He was final active pre-DeNA Baystar.

Besides the times I've already mentioned that he led the league, he also led the PL in hits in 2012, becoming just the second batter (after Isao Harimoto) to lead both leagues in hits.  He won five Best 9 awards (2008-09, 2011-13) and one Golden Glove award (2019).  That Golden Glove award was a reflection of him making no errors in 1094 chances at first base that season, only the second time that a first baseman had had a perfect season (Jose Lopez of the Baystars was the first the previous season).  He made the All Star team six times (2008-09, 2011-13 and 2017) and was named MVP of an All Star game twice.  He was the MVP of the 2014 Nippon Series and the interleague MVP in 2011.  I believe he's the only player to ever be MVP of a full season, interleage, an All Star game and a Nippon Series.  There's six other players who were MVPs of a season, an All Star game and a Nippon Series - Tetsuharu Kawakami, Hiroshi Oshita, Yutaka Fukumoto, Tom O'Malley, Atsuya Furuta and Hideki Matsui - but only Furuta played when there was interleague play.  Uchikawa played for Japan in the World Baseball Classics - 2009, 2013 and 2017.

His first baseball card was in the draft pick subset of the 2001 BBM Preview set (#P30).  He had additional rookie cards in the 2001 BBM (#321), Upper Deck (#1) and Future Bee Baystars (#Yb-27) sets.  After 2003 he was pretty much in either or both of BBM's 1st or 2nd Version sets each year until 2021.  His first Calbee card was #150 in the 2004 Calbee Series Two set and until 2022 the only year he didn't appear in at least one of Calbee's sets was 2005.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

2001 BBM Preview #P30

2001 BBM #321

2001 Upper Deck #1

2004 BBM Baystars #YB44

2007 BBM 1st Version #422

2009 BBM All Stars #A60

2010 Georgia Coffee #018

2011 BBM Shukan Baseball Season Memorial #1/2

2013 BBM 2nd Version #605

2014 Calbee #C-6

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-30

2019 BBM Hawks Autograph

2020 Calbee #TR-9

2021 BBM 1st Version #311

2022 BBM Swallows #S46