Ayatsugu Yamashita

The Hawks' 2010 NPB draft was probably one of their best ever.  They took a generational talent, Yuki Yanagita, with their second round pick and hit the jackpot in the development player portion of the draft, taking Kodai Senga, Taisei Makihara and Takuya Kai.  Their first round pick from this draft was a catcher out of Narashino High School in Chiba named Ayatsugu Yamashita.

To be fair, Yamashita was not actually the Hawks' original first round pick.  Softbank was one of four teams that had initally selected Waseda University pitcher Yuki Saitoh.  When Nippon-Ham won the lottery for Saitoh's rights, the Hawks selected Yamashita.

Yamashita spent his entire first season on the Hawks' farm team, hitting .207 in 82 games.  Softbank shipped him off to Australia at the end of the season and he hit .340 in 16 games with the Brisbane Bandits.  He apparently overslept in training camp in 2012 and got banished to the farm team again for the season, hitting .206 in 93 games.  He again was sent overseas at the end of the season, playing eleven games in the Taiwan Winter League (although I don't know how well he played).

His batting average on the farm improved to .256 in 2013 and he finally made an appearance with the ichi-gun team, getting into 11 games total.  He missed some time with injuries the next two seasons but he opened the 2016 season as the Hawks starting catcher (and had changed his registered name to just "Ayatsugu").  He only played in 13 games on the top team though, hitting .231 before being sent back to the farm.  By 2017 Takuya Kai had taken over as the Hawks starting catcher and Yamashita spent almost the entire season on the ni-gun squad.  The Hawks traded him that off season to the Eagles for Tetsuro Nashida.

He went back to using his full name with the Eagles and got into a career high 43 games in 2018.  He followed that up with 31 games in 2019.  But his batting average fell to .198 in 2018 and .183 in 2019.  He only played in eight games with the top team in 2020 and the Eagles released him at the end of the year.

He signed a development player contract with the Dragons for 2021 but played well enough on their farm team that he was moved to the 70 man roster at the beginning of June and promoted to the ichi-gun team.  He didn't hit though, posting an average of .100 in 5 games and was sent back down to the farm for the rest of the season.  Last year was more of the same - he hit decently on the farm team but only hit .130 with the top team.  The Dragons released him at the end of the season and he announced his retirement.  He's currently running a bar he owns in the Nishiki area of Nagoya.

Yamashita's BBM rookie cards are from the 2011 Rookie Edition (#001), 1st Version (#023) and Hawks (#H39) sets.  He also had 2011 cards in the Bandai Owners League 02 (#OL06002), Calbee Series One (#D-01) and Konami Opening Version White (#B11RW004 and #B11DR001) sets.  He also had several cards in the two Brisbane Bandits team sets from 2011-12.  TCDB's list of his cards can be found here.  Here's some of his cards:

2011 BBM Rookie Edition #001

2011 BBM 1st Version #023

2011-12 Brisbane Bandits Series One #014

2014 Hawks Players Card #22

2017 BBM Hawks #H34

2019 Eagles Team Set #40

2020 Epoch NPB #087

2022 BBM Dragons #D34