Richard Sunagawa

Richard Makoto Sunagawa O'Brien is one of those players whose name alone makes overseas fans do a double take, but he is a Japanese professional through and through. Born on June 18, 1999, he is an infielder who came up with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and now plays for the Yomiuri Giants. The line on his record I keep coming back to is 2022, when he set the Western League single-season home run record. Some people wave that off as a minor league number. I don't. Sustaining that kind of raw power across a full season is not luck; it is a real, repeatable skill, and skills like that tend to translate eventually. What remains open is the harder part: turning that power into consistent top-level production against the best pitching Japan has. I like watching hitters who can change a game with one swing, because the whole ballpark leans forward when they come up. His story is clearly still being written, and I'd rather wait for the ending than guess at it.

Name (English)

Richard Sunagawa

Name (Japanese)

砂川リチャード

Reading

砂川りちゃーど

Born

June 18, 1999 (age 27)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Gemini / Rabbit

Occupation

baseball player

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/richard0618.127/
• Xhttps://x.com/Richard_52_0618
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard%20Sunagawa
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A0%82%E5%B7%9D%E3%83%AA%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60986339

Tags

• 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.