Ryoji Nakata

At 171 cm he's never going to be the towering presence scouts dream about, but baseball history is full of guys who made that exact height irrelevant through sheer craft and baseball IQ, and I'd bet my last dollar he's that type. He spent five seasons with the Chunichi Dragons, and honestly that kind of low-key dedication is its own statement — Yao isn't glamorous, it's a real working-class Osaka city, and someone who came up through that and made it to professional ball clearly wasn't relying on hype to carry him.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Ryoji Nakata is a Japanese former professional baseball infielder born on November 3, 1987, in Yao, Osaka Prefecture. He stands 171 cm tall and played first base for the Chunichi Dragons from 2010 to 2014.

Name (English)

Ryoji Nakata

Name (Japanese)

中田亮二

Reading

なかた りょうじ

Born

November 3, 1987 (age 38)

Origin

Yao, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Height

171cm

Occupation

Baseball player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Scorpio / Rabbit

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E7%94%B0%E4%BA%AE%E4%BA%8C
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7385294

Tags

• From Osaka Prefecture
• Baseball player

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.