Katsunori Nomura

Katsunori Nomura was drafted in 1995 by the Yakult Swallows, a team then managed by his father, Katsuya Nomura, one of the greatest catchers in Japanese baseball history. And he played catcher. It is difficult to imagine a harder set of starting conditions: succeed and it is credited to the name, struggle and the comparison writes itself. From 1996 to 2006 he played mostly as a second or third-string catcher, which on a stat sheet looks unremarkable. I read it differently. Staying in professional baseball for eleven years while being permanently measured against the most famous man at your position, who is also sitting in your dugout, requires a kind of endurance that box scores do not record. He is now a coach with the Hanshin Tigers. Coaching is where a catcher's real value has always lived anyway, in reading hitters and managing pitchers, and it feels less like a consolation than like the job he was always being trained for.

Name (English)

Katsunori Nomura

Name (Japanese)

野村克則

Reading

のむら かつのり

Born

July 23, 1973 (age 53)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Ox

Origin

Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Height

178 cm

Occupation

baseball player / baseball coach

High school

Horikoshi High School

University

Meiji University

• Xhttps://x.com/KatsunoriNomura
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsunori%20Nomura
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%8E%E6%9D%91%E5%85%8B%E5%89%87
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27350

Tags

• Osaka Prefecture
• baseball player
• baseball coach

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.