Shota Ohno

Shoto Ohno, longtime catcher for the Fighters and Dragons, announced his retirement last September.  Ohno was a star as an amateur player.  He hit 29 home runs as a high schooler in Gifu and won a Tohto League MVP and multiple Best 9 awards during his collegiate days at Toyo University.  He also played on the Japanese Collegiate National Team in both 2007 and 2008 (his junior and senior years).

The Fighters took him in the first round of the 2008 draft and he made his NPB debut with the top team in April of the following year.  He basically shared catching duties with Shinya Tsuruoka for the first five years of his career although he was considered the backup catcher when Tsuruoka was healthy.  He became the number one catcher in 2014 after Tsuruoka departed for Fukuoka as a free agent and he made the All Star team for the only time in his career that season.  He also hit a career high six home runs although his batting average was a paltry .174.  He had an elbow injury to start the 2015 season and was the third string for a while behind Kensuke Kondoh(!) and Ryo Ishikawa but was back to being the top catcher again by the end of the season (and Kondoh only caught one more game at the ichi-gun level after that season).  He and Shohei Ohtani won the "Best Battery Award" that season despite the time he had missed.  Healthy again in 2016, he played in a career high 109 games, won a Golden Glove Award and, of course, contributed to the Fighters winning the Nippon Series.  He was selected for the Samurai Japan team for the 2017 World Baseball Classic but only played in the first round game against China.  Following an injury-marred 2017 season, he filed for free agency and left the Fighters for the Chunichi Dragons.

He never really got on track with the Dragons.  He'd had elbow surgery in the 2017-18 off season and his recovery dragged into his first year in Nagoya, limiting him to only 50 games.  He re-injured the elbow in 2019 and only played in 34 games (although one of them was Yudai Ohno's no-hitter, making it the "Ohon-Ohno No-No").  That was pretty much it for him as a top team catcher.  He spent the entire 2020 season with the farm team and only played in 8 games with the top team in each of the 2021 and 2022 seasons.  When the Dragons decided against promoting him last summer when starting catcher Takuya Kinoshita got injured, he saw the writing on the wall.  His only appearance with the top team in 2023 was his retirement game on October 3rd, the last day of the season.  He'll be the catching coach on the Dragons' farm team this season.

Ohno's first baseball cards were collegiate cards in both the US and Japan.  His inclusion on the 2007 Japanese Collegiate National Team was commemorated by memorabilia cards in the 2008 Upper Deck USA Baseball set and his 2008 squad was memorialized in a BBM box set.  His first NPB card was from BBM's 2009 Rookie Edition set (#012) and he had other rookie cards in the 1st Version (#102), Fighters (#F36), Rookie Edition Premium (#RP07) and Nippon Series (#S43) sets from BBM as well as Konami's Baseball Heroes White set (#B09W039).  His first Calbee card was #150 from the 2010 Series Two set.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

2008 Upper Deck USA Baseball #JN-15

2008 BBM Japan College Baseball National Team #CN10

2008 BBM Japan College Baseball National Team #CN32

2009 BBM Rookie Edition #012

2009 BBM 1st Version #102

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #66

2011 Fighters Victory Card #019

2012 BBM Nippon Series #S49

2014 Calbee #205

2016 BBM Opening #16

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-21

2018 BBM 1st Version #281

2023 BBM Dragons #D32