Kazuyuki Shirai

Kazuyuki Shirai, born October 3, 1977 in Hyōgo Prefecture, is a professional baseball umpire in Japan. He joined the Pacific League umpiring staff in 1997 after Akashi High School, wears number 20, has passed 2,000 career games, and now works as a crew chief. Umpiring is the rare profession where anonymity is the performance review. A player is measured by moments people remember; an umpire is measured by games nobody discusses afterward. If a match ends and no one is talking about the officiating, the officiating was good. So two thousand games of that job is, in a strange way, a record of work done properly. It's also a reminder of how lopsided sports history is. The contest between pitcher and batter only exists because someone stands behind the plate, in gear, making split-second calls that must be defensible in real time and will be replayed in slow motion. Nobody grows up dreaming of that. It's worth keeping a page for the people who do it anyway.

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.

Name (English)

Kazuyuki Shirai

Name (Japanese)

白井一行

Reading

しらい かずゆき

Born

October 3, 1977 (age 49)

Origin

Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

baseball umpire

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Libra / Snake

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E4%BA%95%E4%B8%80%E8%A1%8C
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11579324

Tags

• Hyōgo Prefecture
• baseball umpire

Last updated

October 3, 2026

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.