Yuki Saitoh

Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters pitcher Yuki Saitoh announced his retirement back around the end of September/beginning of October.  Saitoh is a textbook example of how a baseball player can capture Japan's attention at the National High School Baseball Championship (aka the Summer Koshien Tournament) and have that fame both follow and overshadow his professional career.  Because of that, this retirement post is going to be longer than normal.

Saitoh was born and raised in Gunma Prefecture but attended high school at Waseda Jitsugyo in Tokyo.  As the name suggests, this school is affiliated with Waseda University.  It's a school with a strong baseball tradition - among its alumni are Sadaharu Oh and Daisuke Araki (another pitcher whose Koshien performance overshadowed his professional career).  He spent his first year mostly on the bench but started playing regularly in his second year.

Waseda Jitsugyo played in the 2006 National High School Invitational Tournament (aka "Spring Koshien").  Although they ultimately lost in the semi-finals to the eventual tournament champion Yokohama, their second round game against Kansai High School deserves some attention.  The game ended after 15 innings in a 7-7 tie.  Both Saitoh and Kansai starting pitcher Masataka Nakamura pitched the entire 15 innings.  The game was replayed the next day - Nakamura again pitched a complete game while Saitoh relieved Kohei Tsukada in the third inning and pitched the rest of the game.  Saitoh also contributed a solo home run in a game that Waseda won 4-3.  If Saitoh's high school career was a novel, my high school English teacher Ms. Tremallo would refer to this as foreshadowing.

I've written about Saitoh's exploits in the 2006 Summer Koshien Tournament previously but it's always been concentrated on what happened in the finals.  Until I started researching this post, I didn't realize just how amazing Saitoh's performance in the tournament actually was.  Let's recap it:

Waseda's first game in the tournament was on August 6th against Tsurusaki Technical High School.  Saitoh started and pitched complete game with Waseda winning 13-1.  Six days later on August 12th Waseda upset powerhouse Osaka Toin (and Saitoh's future teammate Sho Nakata) 11-2 with Saitoh again pitching a complete game.  Four days later on the 16th he again threw a complete game victory (and hit a home run) as Waseda defeated Fukui Commercial High School 7-1.

Are you detecting a trend here?

On the 18th he again started and pitched a complete game in the quarterfinals, beating Nihon University Yamagata 5-2.  The next day he again threw a complete game, shutting out Kagoshima Technical High School 5-0 to put Waseda into the finals for the first time since 1980 (when Araki pitched for them).

That final game on August 20th against Komazawa University Tomakomai High School has been somewhat misleadingly reported (including by me) as a duel between Saitoh and Masahiro Tanaka.  What this leaves out is that Tanaka didn't start the game - Shota Kikuchi did.  Tanaka relieved Kikuchi in the third inning and pitched the remainder of the game.  By the end of the game, however, no one remembered that Kikuchi had started.  The game was scoreless until the eighth inning when each team pushed across a single run.  Neither team scored again for the remainder of the game which ended as a 1-1 tie after 15 innings.  Saitoh pitched the entire 15 innings, throwing 178 pitches while striking out 16 batters.  Tanaka pitched 12 2/3 innings, throwing 165 pitches and striking out 10.  It was first time that the championship game had ended in a tie since 1969.  

The replay of the championship game was the next day, August 21st.  Saitoh again started for Waseda (his fourth start in as many days) with Kikuchi again starting for Komazawa.  Kikuchi didn't last long, however, as he gave up a run on two hits and two walks before being relieved by Tanaka with two outs in the bottom of the first.  Waseda added another run in the bottom of the second to take a 2-0 lead.  Meanwhile Saitoh kept Komazawa off the board until Tadao Mitani hit a solo home run in the top of the sixth to make it 2-1.  Waseda added single runs in the sixth and seventh innings and the game entered the top of the ninth with Waseda up 4-1.  Komazawa wasn't done yet, though, as their first batter, Yuya Miki, singled and then Tatsuya Nakamura followed that with a two run home run to reduce Waseda's lead to only one run.  But Saitoh bore down and retired the next three Komazawa batters, striking out Tanaka to end the 4-3 victory.  Saitoh threw 118 pitches, struck out 13 batters and didn't issue a single walk.

Saitoh ended up throwing 948 pitches in 69 innings over seven games in the tournament, all of which (pitches, innings and games) were new records.  He also had 78 strikeouts, second only to Eiji Bando's 83 in the 1958 tournament.  His performance was a sensation, as was his use of a blue handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his face while pitching.  He was dubbed "The Handkerchief Prince" by the media, a phrase that made publisher Jiyu Kokuminsha's annual list of top ten "new words/buzz words" for 2006.  Despite his earlier assertions that he intended to go to college, the sports media endlessly speculated on which NPB teams would draft him that fall.  He finally held a press conference on September 11th in which he announced he would be enrolling at Waseda University with the intent of getting a degree in sociology - the press conference drew over 150 reporters.

Of course Saitoh didn't go to Waseda just to get a sociology degree.  Waseda is one of the premier baseball powers in Japan's oldest collegiate baseball league - the Tokyo Big Six.  They were the defending league champions when Saitoh joined them and they would go on to win three of the four league titles in his first two years with them (Japanese collegiate leagues play two "seasons" every year - a spring one and an autumn one).  Saitoh pitched quite well for them those two years, winning three Best 9 awards and leading the league in wins three times and ERA once.  His numbers appear to have declined some in his last two years in college, with his ERAs climbing above 2 and he had a losing record his senior year despite Waseda again winning the championship that fall.  

Saitoh remained insanely popular during his college career and the already popular Waseda games became even more crowded.  Nippon TV secured the broadcasting rights to the league and their games were on terrestrial TV.  I don't know this for sure, but I've always suspected that Saitoh's popularity was the reason that BBM made a deal with the league to produce baseball cards for the Tokyo Big Six.  

There had been baseball cards made for the Tokyo Big Six league in the distant past but BBM's "Spring Version" set, released in April of 2008, was the first set for the league in over 50 years.  There's just one thing about the set though - Saitoh's not in it.  The set featured 54 player cards which worked out to nine players per team.  All nine Waseda players were fourth year players - I assume that either the league or the teams dictated to BBM who would be in the set and they decided to not include second year player Saitoh.  Saitoh's first BBM card was therefore in their "Autumn Version" set which was released in September that year.  The decision to not include Saitoh in the "Spring Version" set allowed someone other than BBM to surprise everyone with Saitoh's first ever baseball card.  And that someone wasn't even a Japanese company.

During the summer of 2007, Saitoh was on the Japanese collegiate national team that played in the USA-Japan Collegiate Baseball Championship in North Carolina in July.  Upper Deck released a USA Baseball box set the following year that included all the players on the US collegiate national team in its base set.  Additionally each box set contained a number of autograph and memorabilia cards not just for the US team but for the Japanese team as well, including Saitoh.  Saitoh has five different cards available - a jersey card (not serially numbered), an autographed card (serially numbered to 50), a patch card (serially numbered to 20), a "letter" card (serially numbered to 6) and a "flag" card (one-of-one).  Upper Deck released the set on May 12th, 2008, four months before BBM put out the "Autumn Version" set.

2008 Upper Deck USA Baseball #JN-16

Saitoh was included in every one of BBM's Tokyo Big Six sets that were published during the remainder of his college career - the afore-mentioned 2008 "Autumn Version" set and both the "Spring Version" and "Autumn Version" sets in both 2009 and 2010.  In addition, BBM published a box set for the Collegiate National Team in October of 2008.  This was for the 2008 version of the team that played in the World University Baseball Championship held in Brno in the Czech Republic in July of 2008 and, of course, featured Saitoh.  Each player had two cards in the set which means Saitoh had a total of seven collegiate cards from BBM.  That ties him with Yusuke Nomura for the most BBM collegiate cards.  Here's all seven cards:

2008 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #08 

2008 BBM College National Team #CN02

2008 BBM College National Team #CN24

2009 BBM Tokyo Big Six Spring Version #06

2009 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #08

2010 BBM Tokyo Big Six Spring Version #20

2010 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #08

Saitoh played on the Collegiate National Team in the summer of 2009 and 2010 as well but neither BBM nor Topps (which had taken over the licensing for Team USA's baseball cards by 2010) issued any cards for the team.  While most observers expected BBM to stop doing the Tokyo Big Six sets after Saitoh graduated they continued for three more years although they only issued one set a year for the last two years.  In total, BBM issued eleven collegiate sets between 2008 and 2013, six of which contained Saitoh.  They have not put out any other collegiate sets since 2013*.

*I'm not including the two sets they did in 2011 - one for former Tohto League players and one for former Tokyo Big Six players - since none of the players featured in the set were current college players.  And before you ask, yes, of course, the Tokyo Big Six set included Saitoh.

The 2010 NPB draft was held in late October, just as Saitoh's final Tokyo Big Six season was coming to an end.  Saitoh was taken by four teams in the first round of the draft - the Swallows, the Fighters, the Marines and the Swallows.  Somewhat surprisingly he was not the player chosen by the most teams - his Waseda teammate Tatsuya Ohishi was chosen by six teams.  The Fighters won the lottery for the rights to Saitoh and the other three teams had to pick again (the Swallows eventually had to "settle" for Tetsuto Yamada).  By early December he and the Fighters agreed on a deal and Saitoh finally became a professional.  They held a press conference before a packed house of fans at Sapporo Dome on December 9th to announce the deal.

He made his first start for the Fighters on April 17th of 2011 against the Marines in Sapporo.  Lotte got to him for a couple of runs in the first and two more in the fifth but only one of those runs was earned.  He left the game with a 6-4 lead and Nippon-Ham added two more runs later in the game to help secure his first victory.  He suffered an oblique injury in his start against the Hawks on May 8th and was sent to the farm team to recover.  He didn't return to the ichi-gun team until June 29th when he suffered the first loss of his career - a 4-1 defeat at the hands of the Marines.  While he was recovering though he ended up making the Pacific League All Star team - he was voted in as the last man on the roster in the fan's "+1" online ballot.  He moved back into the Fighters' rotation after the All Star break and remained there for the rest of the season.

All eyes were on Sendai on September 10th as Saitoh and Tanaka opposed each other for the first time since the Koshien finals in 2006.  This time Tanaka's team the Eagles were victorious.  Both pitchers threw complete games although they didn't need to go over nine innings this time (and in fact Saitoh only went eight).

Saitoh's numbers for 2011 were decent.  He went 6-6 with a 2.69 ERA in 107 innings in 19 starts with the ichi-gun team.  Where Saitoh really stood out that season was in baseball cards.  Now that he was a professional player, it wasn't just BBM who could do cards for him.  BBM was the first company to put out a card of him in a Fighters uniform, however, as he was included in the 2011 edition of their Rookie Edition set (actually the very first Fighters card of him was a promo version of his Rookie Edition card in the March 2011 edition of Sports Card Magazine which hit the newsstands at the end of January).  BBM also published two new sets that March that featured Saitoh.  The first of these was called "Platinum Age - Born In 1988" and was entirely made up of players who, like Saitoh, were born in 1988.  It was a 27 card set that included 21 individual player cards plus six multi-player cards.  Besides his "regular" player card, Saitoh appears on two of the multi-player cards - one with his Waseda teammates Ohishi and Yuya Fukui and one with Hirokazu Sawamura.  This set eventually evolved into BBM's annual Icons set in 2013.

The other set was called "Future Icon".  It's never been quite clear to me if this set was supposed to be a giveaway at the Fighters' farm team ballpark in Kamagaya or if it was just going to be exclusively sold there but either way the day it was supposed to be available was March 16th, five days after the Tohoku earthquake so I'm pretty sure no games were played there then.  The set contains 18 cards.  16 of those cards are essentially reprints of the cards of the Fighters 2010 draft class from the Rookie Edition and 1st Version* sets plus reprints of Saitoh and Mitsuo Yoshikawa's regular and insert cards from the "Platinum Age" set.  The other two cards are another one of Saitoh (his fifth card in the set) and one for Cubby, the Fighters' farm team mascot.  I don't believe that BBM has ever done another "Future Icon" set.

*Is it really a reprint if the reprint is published BEFORE the original card?  The Future Icon set was supposed to have been published in mid-March, about a month before the 1st Version set.

Saitoh of course appeared in BBM's other 2011 offerings.  He had two cards in the 1st Version set - his "regular" card and a "Recommended Hope 2011" subset card - and three cards in the 2nd Version set - the "regular" card and cards in the "Young Guns" and "Impressive Scene" subsets.  He also appeared in the Fighters team set, the Rookie Edition Premium set and the Touch The Game set.  Since he made the All Star team, he appears in BBM's All Star set.  BBM issued a small boxed set for the Fighters called "Mega Energy" which included him as well.  There were two additional one-off sets that year that included him.  One was the "Legend Of Tokyo Big Six" set I mentioned above and the other was an oddball set given away to new subscribers gift of BBM's "Pro Yakyu Data File" magazine that included the first round picks from the 2010 draft.

The other card companies made arrangements to include extra cards of Saitoh too.  Calbee included a "draft pick" subset in their Series One set that year which included all 12 2010 first round picks - while they have had similar subsets in subsequent years, this was the first time they had included one.  Saitoh also had a "regular" card in their Series Two set.  Konami's "Baseball Heroes Opening Version White" set had an insert set that once again featured all the draft picks from the 2010 draft.  As with Calbee, Konami also included a "regular" card of Saitoh.  The only one of the main four card makers in 2011 who doesn't appear to have done anything new or special to include Saitoh was Bandai - he just had a "regular" player card (albeit a short printed "Infinity" card) in their Owners League 02 set.  Here's a handful of his 2011 cards:

2011 BBM Rookie Edition #027

2011 BBM Future Icon #09 (reprint of insert card from "Platinum Age - Born in 1988")

2011 BBM 1st Version #103

2011 Bandai Owners League 02 #038

2011 Calbee #098

2011 BBM Mega Energy #YY2

2011 BBM All Stars #A35

2011 BBM 2nd Version #698

With Yu Darvish departing for MLB in the offseason, Nippon-Ham and new manager Hideki Kuriyama were hoping that Saitoh could step up and become the ace of the staff in 2012.  He got the Opening Day start against the Lions and pitched a complete game for the victory.  That may have been the highlight of his season, if not his career.  He didn't pitch particularly well after that and by the All Star break his record was 5-7.  Despite this, he again was voted onto the All Star team - this time as the starting pitcher via the fan ballot.  He started and lost Game One, giving up three runs in three innings of work (including a long home run from Norihiro Nakamura).  The Fighters banished him to the farm team after the break but his performance didn't improve there - he went 1-3 with an ERA of 4.34 in five starts.  He came back up to the ichi-gun squad late in the season and made one more start in the Fighters' next to last game of the regular season which he took the loss in.  His numbers for the year were 5-8 with an ERA of 3.98.  The league hit .300 against him.  The Fighters went to the Nippon Series that year against the Giants, losing in six games.  Saitoh's only appearance in the Series was a mop up role in Game Five - he came on in the eighth inning with the Giants leading 8-2 and went two innings, giving up two more runs.

2013 did not go well for him.  He had apparently been suffering from a labrum injury in his right shoulder the previous year and he missed a lot of the season rehabbing it.  He went 1-3 with an 8.61 ERA in seven games on the farm and only made one appearance with the top team - a disastrous start on October 7th against Orix.  In four plus innings he gave up six runs on five hits, five walks and a hit batsman.  Shohei Ohtani's arrival that year probably took some attention away from him - which I'm sure was a positive for him - but it also underscored that he was no longer the Fighters' top prospect.

He only made six starts at the ichi-gun level in 2014, going 2-1 but with an ERA of 4.85.  This turned out to be the only season that he had a winning record with the top team.  Over the next five seasons he would pretty much split his time between Sapporo and Kamagaya, never playing more than 12 games with the ichi-gun team.  I think he was on the roster for the Fighters in the 2016 Nippon Series but he didn't pitch in it.  He spent all of 2020 on the farm and suffered an elbow injury towards the end of the year that kept him out of the first half of the 2021 season.  His retirement game on October 17th against Orix was the first time he made an appearance with the top team in two years - he walked the only batter he faced (Shuhei Fukuda).  He ended his career with a 15-26 record and a 4.34 ERA in 364 2/3 innings in 89 games over eleven years.

His appearances in baseball card sets pretty much mirrored the last ten years of his career.  He had a lot of cards in the 2012 sets.  BBM had him in their 1st and 2nd Version sets, the high end Genesis set, the "Strongest Generation" set (the 2012 edition of BBM's annual "Historic Collection" series), the All Star and Nippon Series box sets and the non-draft pick part of the Rookie Edition set.  He had a whopping 12 cards in the Fighters team set - his "regular" card, a card from the "So Hot & Cool Guys" subset, a card with former Waseda teammate (and 2012 rookie) Takumi Ohshima and a nine card puzzle subset completely devoted to him.  He had one card in each of Calbee's three sets that year - a regular card in Series One, an "Opening Day Pitcher" subset card in Series Two and an "All Star" subset card in Series Three.  He also had a "Star" insert card in Series One.  On the collectible card game front, Bandai and Konami each only issued one card for him.

After 2012 though, he started to be included in fewer sets.  In 2013 he appeared in BBM's 1st Version set, their Fighters team set (only one card this time), the "Young Fighters" box set, the "Great Numbers" set (the 2013 "Historic Collection" set) and he had two cards in the set commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the Fighters moving to Hokkaido.  He only had one Calbee card (in Series One) and one Bandai card (I think Konami had stopped doing cards after 2012 until 2018).  2014 saw his last Calbee card (in Series Two), his last BBM flagship card (in the 2nd Version set) and his last Bandai card.  For the remainder of his career, he pretty much just showed up in BBM's Fighters team sets - either the pack based "comprehensive" sets or their smaller team boxed sets.  The main exception to this is Epoch's NPB set - he appeared in all four editions of this set between 2018 and 2021.  Here's a bunch of his cards from 2012 to 2021:

2012 Calbee #OP-02

2012 BBM Nippon Series #S36

2013 BBM Young Fighters #YF03

2014 BBM 2nd Version #424

2014 Calbee #123

2015 BBM 25th Anniversary #170

2016 BBM 1st Version #326

2017 BBM Fighters #F02

2018 BBM Fighters #F02

2019 Epoch NPB #074

2020 BBM Fighters #F02

2021 Epoch NPB #146

That 2016 1st Version card shows him pitching at the Fighters spring camp in Peoria, Arizona that February.  While it is a flagship card showing him, it doesn't actually identify him so I still say his last flagship BBM card was in 2014.

I think the amazing thing about Saitoh is that even after his professional career sputtered after a few seasons, he was still extraordinarily popular.  I remember Deanna Rubin writing one time about going to see the Fighters farm team at Kamagaya and being surprised at the size of the crowd that had traveled somewhat out into the boonies to see Saitoh (Kamagaya's not terribly difficult to get to but it does take some time).  And I saw in person his popularity at the Fighters' spring camps in Arizona in both 2016 and 2018 - especially in 2018 when he was the only member of the Fighters signing autographs after the exhibition game against the KT Wiz that he started:

Saitoh's not the first guy to fail as a professional after starring at Koshien and he won't be the last.  While he didn't inspire mothers to name their children after him like Daisuke Araki did and he didn't give his name to his generation like Daisuke Matsuzaka did (at least I don't think either of those things happened) it could be argued that he was a bigger deal coming out of high school than either of them.  His performance at the Koshien tournament 15 years ago is what kept him a member of the Fighters for 11 seasons, despite numbers that would have gotten a less well known player his release in half that time.  You might not think that that's a good thing but I think it's pretty clear that it's a Japanese baseball thing.