Shigeru Takada

Shigeru Takada was born in Osaka in 1945, came out of Meiji University, and won the Central League Rookie of the Year award in 1968 as an outfielder for the Yomiuri Giants. What makes his record worth pausing on is everything after that: manager of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, manager of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, and later general manager of the Yokohama DeNA BayStars. Those are three genuinely different jobs. Playing is about your own body. Managing is about persuading twenty-five other people to act as one on a given afternoon. Running a front office is about the club as an institution, on a timescale where this season may be something you deliberately sacrifice. Plenty of great players never make the first jump, and very few former managers are trusted with the second. Doing all three is not a matter of longevity or of being handed things politely; each step required someone to believe he could think in a new register. That, more than the rookie award, is the career.

Name (English)

Shigeru Takada

Name (Japanese)

高田繁

Reading

たかだ しげる

Born

July 24, 1945 (age 81)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Rooster

Origin

Osaka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Height

173 cm

Occupation

baseball player

University

Meiji University

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru%20Takada
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%AB%98%E7%94%B0%E7%B9%81
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q844912

Tags

• Osaka 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.