Hideki Samejima

Hideki Samejima — born in Osaka in the summer of 1973, a catcher who came up through one of Japan's most unforgiving sports cities and has spent his whole working life with the Yakult Swallows. Osaka crowds don't give you a pass; they've seen too much baseball to be impressed easily, which means anyone who carved out a career there had to earn it in a way that quieter cities might not demand. At 178 cm he's not the towering slugger type, so I imagine his game was built on the stuff that doesn't show up on a highlight reel — footwork, reading the pitch, showing up every day when nobody's watching. The kind of guy who just played ball.

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.

Hideki Samejima is a Japanese former professional baseball catcher born on July 22, 1973, in Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture. He stands 178 cm tall. Drafted by the Yakult Swallows in 1991, he played for them as a catcher and stayed with the club after retiring, working as a bullpen catcher, batting practice pitcher and scorer, and in 2026 as assistant manager of the team's dormitory in Toda.

Name (English)

Hideki Samejima

Name (Japanese)

鮫島秀旗

Reading

さめじま ひでき

Born

July 22, 1973 (age 53)

Origin

Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Height

178cm

Occupation

Baseball player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Ox

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%AE%AB%E5%B3%B6%E7%A7%80%E6%97%97
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11674190

Tags

• From Osaka Prefecture
• Baseball player

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.