I Can Still Play Baseball Because I Have No Real Skills or Achievements

I started playing baseball “just for fun.

I’m not a very good player.

The man who has pitched in 388 games in the majors has often said, “I’m not that good of a player. He is not being modest. He really believes this.

Junichi Tazawa, 38. He joined the Red Sox in 2008, despite being a draft candidate, without having played professional baseball in Japan. He was mainly a reliever and contributed to the ’13 World Series championship. This summer, he took the mound for the first time in 16 years for his old team, ENEOS, but as he says, he is by no means an elite player.

A native of Yokohama, Tazawa began playing baseball when he was in the third grade of elementary school. He pitched on the junior high school baseball team as well, “just for fun. His coach happened to watch a game in which he pitched well, and he was invited to join Yokohama Commerce University High School. There, he experienced adversity for the first time.

The coach was very strict. If you made a mistake, the coach would yell at you, and sometimes his hand would come out. Practice hours were also very long. Every day I was thinking about how I could avoid being yelled at, rather than how I could get good at it.

In the summer of his sophomore year, the team made an appearance at Koshien, but Tazawa was a reserve pitcher and did not pitch. In the summer of his junior year, when he became the ace of the tournament, he faced off against Yokohama High School’s Hideaki Wakui (now Chunichi) in the semifinals of the Kanagawa Prefectural Tournament, but lost 3 to 16.

After the summer tournament, the manager would ask me if I had submitted a letter of intent to become a professional baseball player. When I asked him if I did, he kicked me out, saying, ‘Of course not! He kicked me to the curb.

If he didn’t get an offer from a professional, he thought he would become a salaryman. The only company that invited Tazawa to join was Nippon Oil Corporation (now ENEOS).

Until the middle of my second year, I was a pitcher with no success,” Tazawa said. My straight ball was reasonably fast, but I couldn’t get strikes with my breaking ball.

I’m going to fire you.”

There were two points of growth. The first was the food he was forced to eat.

He was so thin that his coach told him, ‘If you don’t eat, you won’t be allowed to practice,’ so he ate a big bowl of rice at every meal. I weighed 81 kg, up from 67 kg in high school. Thanks to that, my control of the ball has improved.

Second, Hideaki Okubo, the coach, was strict but loving in his encouragement.

In my second year, I was still not getting good results, so he told me, ‘I’m going to fire you from the baseball team after the fall season. If I was going to be fired, I wanted to do it without regrets, so I started practicing harder. I was not satisfied with just throwing fastballs. Think about how you can control the hitters.’ That made me think about how I should pitch.

He probably had plenty of talent to begin with. Under Okubo’s guidance, Tazawa improved rapidly, and in his fourth year he led his team to victory in the SpoNICHI Tournament in March and the Inter-City Tournament in September, winning the MVP award. He became a right-handed pitcher that caught the attention of the pros.

I played against pros at ENEOS, but I was getting hit pretty hard. If you go from an adult to a pro, they will expect you to be an immediate starter. I didn’t have the confidence that I could play an active role right away.

It was then that Okubo told me that he was also interested in the majors.

I didn’t have any aspirations to play in the majors,” he said. But the Major League teams showed me their development programs. The Red Sox were especially specific. Even though I started out in the minors, I had a clear picture of my future and what kind of training would get me promoted to the majors. I chose the majors because it seemed like a place where I could develop myself rather than entering professional baseball as a quick starter.

As mentioned earlier, Tazawa’s development plan was successful, and he made it to the majors in his fourth year, and in his fifth year (2001), he helped the team win the World Series. However, he was often demoted to the minors due to injuries that forced him to travel long distances by bus.

One time, I met Tsuyoshi Nishioka, who was in the minors with the Twins at the time, in the middle of the night at a drive-through on a road trip. Nishioka-san said to me, ‘I’m surprised you’re here. But I didn’t have a hard time living in the minors. He said, ‘I’m not that good a player, even in the working world, I was almost fired. So it doesn’t bother me. If I had been a professional baseball player, I would have been dissatisfied. I don’t have any great achievements, so I think I can play baseball without regret because I feel that everything is an experience.

Tazawa also played in Taiwan and Mexico. He decided to return to ENEOS after receiving a fervent love call from his former coach, Okubo.

He said, “It doesn’t matter if you are in the minors or in the workforce. I just have to play where I am needed and cherish each and every play. I have wounds all over my body, but I want to continue to play as long as I am needed.

In the future, he would like to pass on his wealth of overseas experience to younger players.

From the October 11, 2024 issue of FRIDAY