Hiromi Makihara

Nineteen years, one club. That fact does most of the talking for Hiromi Makihara. He came out of Handa in Aichi Prefecture, stood 187 centimeters, and spent his entire professional career pitching for the Yomiuri Giants - the most watched and least forgiving job in Japanese baseball. Rookie of the Year, six-time Central League All-Star, and, once, a perfect game. That last item deserves a pause for readers outside Japan. Nippon Professional Baseball has been running since the 1930s, and a perfect game there is as rare as it is anywhere: twenty-seven batters, twenty-seven outs, nothing in between. After Makihara did it in 1994, no NPB pitcher managed it again for twenty-eight years, until Roki Sasaki in 2022. You do not get there on stuff alone. You need a defense that does not blink, a strike zone that stays where it was in the first inning, and two or three line drives that find gloves instead of grass. What interests me more than the box score is the shape of the career around it. Nineteen seasons in the same uniform means a great many ordinary Tuesdays, a great many nights when the fastball simply was not there, and a great many walks to the interview area afterward in a city that reads three sports papers before breakfast. Makihara stayed. By the end he was the kind of pitcher whose name gets spoken with affection rather than awe, which is harder to earn than dominance. That, I suspect, is why he has been so durable in his second life talking about the game. People trust a man who has been beaten in public and never went looking for excuses.

Name (English)

Hiromi Makihara

Name (Japanese)

槙原寛己

Born

August 11, 1963 (age 62)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Rabbit

Origin

Handa, Aichi Prefecture, Japan

Height

187 cm

Occupation

baseball player

Motto

Private

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/makihara17/
• Xhttps://x.com/makiharachannel
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A7%99%E5%8E%9F%E5%AF%9B%E5%B7%B1

Tags

• Aichi Prefecture
• baseball player

Last updated

2026-07-27

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.