Ryoji Kuribayashi

Ryoji Kuribayashi, born in Aisai, Aichi in 1996, pitches for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp in Nippon Professional Baseball. I have always thought relief pitching demands a strange kind of temperament. You are handed only the moments that are already tense — late innings, narrow margins, the situations where a single mistake erases everything the team spent three hours building. Success is invisible and failure is remembered. Doing that repeatedly, in front of a Hiroshima crowd whose intensity is famous even by Japanese baseball standards, is a job I would not want. That energy is a gift on the good nights and a weight on the bad ones. He came in as the Carp's first-round pick in the 2020 draft after Meijo University and Toyota Motor, saved his debut game, was named the 2021 Rookie of the Year, and won Olympic gold with Japan in Tokyo that summer. That is a lot to carry into a bullpen in a first season.

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Name (English)

Ryoji Kuribayashi

Name (Japanese)

栗林良吏

Reading

くりばやし りょうじ

Born

July 9, 1996 (age 30)

Origin

Aisai, Aichi Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

baseball player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Rat

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/ryoji2038/
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryoji%20Kuribayashi
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A0%97%E6%9E%97%E8%89%AF%E5%90%8F
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q102246767

Tags

• Aichi Prefecture
• baseball player

Last updated

September 25, 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.