Masaaki Ikenaga

Masaaki Ikenaga was born in August 1946 in Hohoku, Yamaguchi Prefecture, came out of Shimonoseki Commercial High School, and pitched right-handed for the Nishitetsu Lions. By his early twenties he was among the best pitchers in Nippon Professional Baseball. Then, at twenty-three, he was caught up in the gambling scandal that swept Japanese baseball around 1970, and his career simply stopped. What stays with me is the arithmetic of that. A pitcher at his peak does not get a slow decline and a farewell season; he gets a line in the record book that ends mid-sentence, and then decades of life on the other side of the game. His ban was eventually lifted years later, which was widely reported in Japan and mattered enormously to people who had followed his case. He died on September 25, 2022. Counterfactuals in sport are usually idle fun, but here the question of what those missing seasons would have held is not entertainment. It is the actual shape of the story.

Name (English)

Masaaki Ikenaga

Name (Japanese)

池永正明

Reading

いけなが まさあき

Born

August 18, 1946 – September 25, 2022

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Dog

Origin

Hōhoku, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan

Height

175 cm

Occupation

baseball player

High school

Shimonoseki Commercial High School

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaaki%20Ikenaga
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%A0%E6%B0%B8%E6%AD%A3%E6%98%8E
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11135743

Tags

• Yamaguchi 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.