Takehiro Ishikawa

The final retirement post (for now anyway) is for a player who wasn't officially retired until after I finally started doing the post-2020 retirement posts two months ago.  Longtime Baystars infielder Takehiro Ishikawa was released by DeNA last fall but was hoping to catch on with another team.  After not getting any offers all winter he finally announced his retirement on March 21st.

Ishikawa attended Yokohama High School and was taken by the hometown team in the sixth round of the 2004 draft.  He spent most of his first three seasons on the farm team but by 2009 he had established himself as the team's starting shortstop, a role he kept for about three seasons.  He had what was probably his best season in 2010, hitting .294 with 36 steals (second in the Central League) in 131 games.  He became the DeNA Baystars first team captain in 2012 and moved over to second base.

Ishikawa never hit much and his lack of offense started cutting into his playing time with the top team after 2014.  He relinquished his captaincy to Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh in 2015.  He spent all of 2020 with the farm team before he and the team parted ways at the end of the year.  He's now a commentator on Baystars games on TV.

Like almost every other NPB player I've done one of these posts for, his first BBM cards are from the Rookie Edition and 1st Version sets from the year after he was drafted.  In Ishikawa's case those were the 2005 Rookie Edition (#77) and 1st Version (#491) sets.  His first Calbee card was #300 from the 2009 Series Three set.  Here's an assortment of his cards:

2005 BBM Rookie Edition #77

2005 BBM 1st Version #491

2010 BBM 1st Version #200

2011 BBM 2nd Version #663

2012 Calbee #071

2013 Front Runner Baystars Season Summary #17

2015 BBM 1st Version #285

2016 Baystars Team Set #7

2020 Epoch NPB #274