Kenjirō Kawasaki

Kenjiro Kawasaki, born in Saiki, Oita in 1971, pitched in Nippon Professional Baseball and then moved into coaching and commentary. Written out flat like that, it's the most ordinary career arc in Japanese baseball. What interests me is the era he threw in. Pitchers of his generation worked under a very different set of assumptions about workload than today's arms do. Pitch counts were something you noticed afterward, not something that governed the decision to leave a man in. A career built under those rules costs the body in ways the box score never records. That, to me, is what makes former pitchers of his vintage worth listening to when they coach or commentate. They have direct physical knowledge of what a long outing does to a shoulder, and they watched the sport rewrite its own rules around exactly that problem. I'd rather hear one careful sentence from someone who lived through the transition than an hour of confident noise from someone who only read about it.

Name (English)

Kenjirō Kawasaki

Name (Japanese)

川崎憲次郎

Reading

かわさき けんじろう

Born

January 8, 1971 (age 55)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Capricorn / Boar

Origin

Saiki, Ōita Prefecture, Japan

Height

180 cm

Occupation

baseball player / baseball coach / baseball commentator

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/kenjirohkawasaki/
• Xhttps://x.com/kenjiroh17
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenjiro%20Kawasaki
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B7%9D%E5%B4%8E%E6%86%B2%E6%AC%A1%E9%83%8E
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5366714

Tags

• Ōita Prefecture
• baseball player
• baseball coach
• baseball commentator

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.