Japanese Baseball Cards: Kohei Miyadai

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Kohei Miyadai

Like Yuta Shirahama, Kohei Miyadai might seem like an odd player to devote a retirement post to. He only spent five years as a professional baseball player and only made three appearances at the ichi-gun level during that time. But Miyadai belongs to a very small club - a professional baseball player from the University Of Tokyo, the perennial doormat of the Tokyo Big Six league. He was just the sixth one ever.

Miyadai had a record of 6-13 with an ERA of 4.26 and 123 strikeouts in 38 games for Todai. If that win-loss record doesn't look impressive, keep in mind that Tokyo went 9-79 over the four years that he was there, including three seasons in which the team went 0-10 (Spring & Fall 2014 and Spring 2017). He was taken in the seventh round of the 2017 draft by the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

He made his ichi-gun debut on August 23, 2018 when the Fighters had him make a start against the Hawks. It was the first time a Todai graduate had started an NPB game since Takashi Ide started a game for the Dragons in 1967. He went 4 2/3 innings, giving up two earned runs on four hits and four walks with three strikeouts. He hurt his hip during the game (which the Fighters ultimately lost 6-2) and spent the rest of the season back on the farm team where he finished the season with a 3-1 record and a 4.97 ERA. He spent both 2019 and 2020 exclusively in ni-gun, going 4-3 with a 4.60 ERA in 2019 and 0-4 with a 7.71 ERA in 2020. The Fighters asked him to become a development player after 2020 but he declined so they released him.

He attended the 12 team tryout in the fall of 2020 and was signed by the Swallows. He had mostly been a starting pitcher with Nippon-Ham but Yakult moved him into middle relief. He put up pretty good numbers on the farm in both 2021 (1-1 with a 2.13 ERA) and 2022 (2-1 with a 2.68 ERA) but his two ichi-gun appearances in 2022 didn't go so well as he posted a 19.29 ERA in 2 1/3 innings. The Swallows wanted to bring him back this year but he decided to retire. He's pursuing a career in law after studying it at Tokyo.

Like Shirahama, most of Miyadai's baseball cards are from team sets from either BBM or Epoch. Teh exceptions are his cards from his rookie season of 2018 when he appeared in the BBM Rookie Edition (#048) and 1st Version (#135) sets and Epoch NPB (#180) and Pacific League Rookies (#33) sets. Here's all the cards I have for him: