Former Tigers, Lions and Carp pitcher Kenji Furusawa passed away earlier this week from cancer. He was 75. Furusawa dropped out of Niihama Higashi High School at age 16 to sign with Hanshin in 1964 and made his ichi-gun debut in July of that year. At 16 years and 117 days, he was the youngest player to debut in NPB since the war ended. It would be almost a year before he got his first victory, a complete game shutout of the Taiyo Whales in June of 1965. He spent the rest of his teens and the 60's mostly on the farm although generally getting into a handful of games with the top team, usually working out of the bullpen. He spent all of 1969 and 1970 on the ni-gun team but emerged in 1971 as one of the Tiger's top pitchers, going 12-9 with a 2.05 ERA. He followed that with a down couple of seasons but was a mainstay in the Tigers' rotation for four years from 1974 to 1977. He tied with Hiromu Matsuoka and Yoshiro Sotokoba for the Central League lead in shutouts with four in 1974 and tied for the lead again (this time with Senichi Hoshino, Shigeru Kobayashi and Takenori Emoto) in 1977 with three.
After a down year in 1978, Furusawa was dealt to the Seibu Lions as part of the blockbuster trade that sent future Hall Of Famer Koichi Tabuchi to the Lions in exchange for Akinobu Mayumi, Masashi Takenouchi, Masafumi Takeda, and Yoshiharu Wakana. He posted ERAs over five for his first two years in Tokorozawa, getting moved out of the starting rotation into the bullpen or the farm team. He bounced back somewhat in 1981, posting a 2.01 ERA in 32 games, mostly as a middle innings reliever. He began 1982 on the farm team and in June he was traded along with Tetsuya Ohara to the Carp for Naoki Takahashi. He spent the remainder of the season working out of the Carp bullpen, a role he'd continue for the next two seasons. After spending the entirety of the 1985 season on the Carp's farm team he decided to retire as a player. He was a two time All Star (1974 and 1977). Despite having played for pennant winners in both his first and last seasons at the ichi-gun level (1964 & 1984), he never pitched in the Nippon Series. He was a TV commentator for a few years after he retired before coaching for both the Carp, the Tigers and the Guangdong Leopards of the China Baseball League.
The bulk of Furusawa's baseball cards that came out when he was an active player are from Calbee and Takara. He's appeared somewhat frequently in OB sets over the past 20 years, popping up in several OB team sets for the Tigers, Lions and Carp along with a couple more general sets. Here's a handful of his cards:
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| 1975/76/77 Calbee #522 |
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| 1982 Takara Lions #51 |
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| 1984 Takara Carp #16 |
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| 2005 BBM Tigers 70th Anniversary #32 |
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| 2013 BBM The Trade Stories #25 |
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| 2020 BBM Time Travel 1985 #74 |
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