Hideaki Wakui

Wakui is the kind of pitcher I have come to value more the older I get, because his defining stat is longevity rather than velocity. He went from Yokohama High School straight into the Seibu rotation and then kept finding a place in one — with the Saitama Seibu Lions, the Chiba Lotte Marines, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles and the Chunichi Dragons. Changing organizations that many times and still being handed the ball every fifth day says something about craft that a radar gun never will. He also pitched for Japan at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2009 World Baseball Classic, which is a fair measure of how much his country trusted his arm at his peak. Durability like that, out of Matsudo in Chiba, is its own kind of talent.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Hideaki Wakui

Name (Japanese)

涌井秀章

Reading

わくい ひであき

Born

June 21, 1986 (age 40)

Origin

Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, Japan

Height

185 cm

Occupation

baseball player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Gemini / Tiger

High school

Yokohama High School

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/wakui_hideaki/
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideaki%20Wakui
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B6%8C%E4%BA%95%E7%A7%80%E7%AB%A0
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q580592

Tags

• Chiba Prefecture
• baseball player

Last updated

September 18, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.