Hideo Iijima

Here's a guy who was already making noise as a sprinter and then someone apparently looked at those legs and said, "get this man on a baseball diamond too" — and he just went with it. Waseda University, 176 cm, fast enough to build a whole career on pure speed. What gets me is the crossover — sprinting and baseball aren't exactly the same skill set, but elite foot speed is elite foot speed, and you can feel the logic of someone saying, yeah, we want whatever he's got on our team. He broke a 29-year-old national 100 m record, ran at two Olympics, and then went pro in baseball — and that outline reads like something out of a sports manga, and I mean that as full praise.

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.

Hideo Iijima is a retired Japanese sprinter and former professional baseball player born on January 1, 1943, in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture. He attended Meguro Gakuin Junior and Senior High School before going on to study at Waseda University. In 1964 he broke the Japanese 100 m record for the first time in 29 years, and he competed at the 1964 and 1968 Olympics before turning to professional baseball in 1969. He stands 176 cm tall.

Name (English)

Hideo Iijima

Name (Japanese)

飯島秀雄

Reading

いいじま ひでお

Born

January 1, 1943 (age 83)

Origin

Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan

Height

176cm

Occupation

Baseball player / Track and field athlete / Sprinter

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Capricorn / Goat

High school

Meguro Gakuin Junior and Senior High School

University

Waseda University

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A3%AF%E5%B3%B6%E7%A7%80%E9%9B%84
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5752586

Tags

• From Ibaraki Prefecture
• Baseball player
• Track and field athlete
• Sprinter

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.