Kenta Kozono

Kenta Kozono was born in Kaizuka, Osaka, in 2003, and pitches for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars in Nippon Professional Baseball. He arrived as a highly rated high-school arm, which in Japan means the expectations were fully formed before he had thrown a single professional pitch. I have always thought that is a strange kind of burden to hand a teenager. Most people his age are still in their first years of training at an ordinary job, quietly bad at things, with nobody watching. A young pitcher gets none of that cover: every outing is public evidence, and every season without a breakout becomes a story about what he has not done yet. Nobody can actually say how long it takes to finish building a professional pitcher — the honest answer is that it varies wildly and often takes longer than the impatient allow. So with Kozono I would rather be on the patient side of that question.

Name (English)

Kenta Kozono

Name (Japanese)

小園健太

Reading

こぞの けんた

Born

April 9, 2003 (age 23)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aries / Goat

Origin

Kaizuka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

professional baseball player

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/kozoken___/
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenta%20Kozono
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E5%9C%92%E5%81%A5%E5%A4%AA
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q108776732

Tags

• Osaka Prefecture
• professional 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.