Hisashi Yamada

A submarine pitcher becoming one of the dominant arms of his era is the kind of thing that should not keep working, and yet Hisashi Yamada made it work for twenty years. Born in 1948 in Noshiro, Akita Prefecture, he spent his entire Nippon Professional Baseball career with the Hankyu Braves, from 1969 to 1988, throwing from that low, rising, unmistakable angle. He won the Pacific League MVP three years running, 1976 through 1978, a streak matched only by Ichiro Suzuki in 1994 to 1996. He is in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. What draws me to careers like his is that they are built on deception and geometry rather than raw velocity. Hitters see a few thousand overhand fastballs a season and then face a ball arriving from near the dirt. Two decades of that requires not just an unusual delivery but the durability to repeat it. I suspect a modern analytics department would love him.

Name (English)

Hisashi Yamada

Name (Japanese)

山田久志

Reading

やまだ ひさし

Born

July 29, 1948 (age 78)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Rat

Origin

Noshiro, Akita Prefecture, Japan

Height

176 cm

Occupation

baseball player

Awards & achievements

• Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hisashi%20Yamada
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E7%94%B0%E4%B9%85%E5%BF%97
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q846807

Tags

• Akita Prefecture
• baseball player

Last updated

2026-08-07

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.