SoftBank’s Kenta Imamiya, who sacrificed 400 runs, found his professional path in hitting for the connection.

Overcoming setbacks and finding a way to live as a pro

Bunting is a battle against fear. The basic rule is to position yourself so that the pitcher’s pitch, bat, and eyes are in a straight line. If you are afraid to move your hands away from your face, you are more likely to fail. In other words, you have to make sure that you roll the ball as it flies toward your face.

Kenta Imamiya (34) of Softbank, who reached 400 sacrifice hits in August of this year, continues.

A hitter is considered excellent if he hits .300, but a bunt hitter is expected to hit almost 100 percent of the time. You also have to fight against the pressure. When you fail, the sighs of tens of thousands of people in the stadium are quite piercing. In my heart, I think, ‘It’s not that easy!

Only three players are ahead of Imamiya in the all-time sacrifice hits list: Masahiro Kawaso (ex-Giant), who holds the world record with 533 total, Ken Hirano (ex-Seibu), and Shinya Miyamoto (ex-Yakult). However, Imamiya sometimes wows fans with his powerful swing. This season, he achieved “100 home runs and 400 sacrifice hits. This is an accomplishment not only in the history of Japanese baseball, but also not seen anywhere else in the world.

As a young man, Imamiya had a promising future as a slugger. Despite his small stature (172 cm in height), he was a star of the Koshien Stadium as a player at Meiho High School (Oita), where he hit a total of 62 home runs and threw at a maximum speed of 154 km/h. He was also known as the “Little Giant.

When I entered the pro ranks as the No. 1 pick in the draft, I made a big talk at first, saying that my goal was to hit 3,000 home runs. Because of my physique, I didn’t say anything about home runs, but I had a desire for them. I was hoping to become a hitter who could hit about 20 a year.

However, it did not take long for him to realize that he had been naive.

I played in a game for the second team and my heart was broken. When I was in high school, I played against Yusei Kikuchi (Angels) and Daichi Oseira (Hiroshima), who later became top-notch pitchers in the same year. In the pros, however, he was also a second-team pitcher. I felt like an idiot when I said I was going to hit 3,000 runs.

How do you overcome your first setback? How he overcame his first setback would be a major deciding factor in whether or not he would succeed in professional baseball, where genius ballplayers gather.

I was lucky that Yusuke Torigoe (current Seibu head coach) was the manager of the second team. He taught me everything about baseball and how to be a professional baseball player. He always scolded me so harshly that I hated going to the ballpark, but looking back, I know that I did nothing wrong, and I have learned a lot of things that I have used in my life since then. That was good for someone like me, the type who gets on a roll.

In the midst of all this, he says that manager Torigoe clearly told him, “For a type like you, the only way to make a living in professional baseball is to master defense and hitting that connects the ball. He was naturally proud of his career as a star player up to high school.

Looking at the reality in front of me, it was obvious that I would not be able to make a living as a pro unless I accepted that style as my job. So it was easy for me to come to terms with it.

Determined to live as an iron fist, Imamiya spent a lot of time practicing his defense and sacrifice hits, and his 100 homers and 400 sacrifice hits are great records because he has found a way to live as a professional.

In the October 23 issue of “FRIDAY November 7” and the paid version of “FRIDAY GOLD”,
Even though Imamiya recorded double-digit homeruns, they introduced such meaty comments as, “I tried to think of it as a fluke. The magazine also carries a number of original photos of Imamiya’s goals, including his own handwritten goals.

From the November 7, 2025 issue of FRIDAY