Kazuhisa Inao

Kazuhisa Inao belongs to a category of pitcher that modern baseball has deliberately made extinct. Born in Beppu, Ōita in 1937, he spent his entire professional career with the Nishitetsu Lions, and in the 1956 Japan Series he won all three of his starts to hand the club its first championship. Read that again with a contemporary pitch-count mindset and it sounds less like a record than a medical event. Japanese fans coined a phrase for him that translates roughly as "God, Buddha, and Inao" — placing a pitcher in the same breath as deities, which tells you how the era regarded him. I hold two thoughts at once about careers like his. The workload was almost certainly unsustainable, and today's protective rules exist for good reasons. But the sport also lost something when the ace who simply refused to leave the mound became impossible. Inao is in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, and he died in 2007. What survives him is less a statistical line than a standard nobody is allowed to attempt anymore.

Name (English)

Kazuhisa Inao

Name (Japanese)

稲尾和久

Reading

いなお かずひさ

Born

June 10, 1937 – November 13, 2007

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Gemini / Ox

Origin

Beppu, Ōita Prefecture, Japan

Height

180 cm

Occupation

baseball player

Awards & achievements

• Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazuhisa%20Inao
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A8%B2%E5%B0%BE%E5%92%8C%E4%B9%85
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q847414

Tags

• Ōita 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.