Takahiro Norimoto

Eight consecutive starts with ten or more strikeouts. That is Takahiro Norimoto's entry in the record books, and it is a world record, not merely a Japanese one. Double-digit strikeouts is a good night for most pitchers. For two months he made it routine. He is not the sort of player Japanese baseball usually mints. He came out of Taga, a small town in Shiga Prefecture, by way of a commercial high school and then Mie Chukyo University, which is not a pipeline anybody scouts hard. Rakuten drafted him anyway, and he won fifteen games as a rookie in 2013, the season the Golden Eagles took their first Japan Series title. That year is usually told as Masahiro Tanaka's story, fairly enough, but a championship rotation needs a second arm that does not flinch, and at twenty-two Norimoto was it. Then the elbow went, which is what tends to happen to power pitchers who throw the way he throws: hard, from a short and violent arm action, with no interest in nibbling at corners. He lost time. He came back. He is with the Yomiuri Giants now, still competing in his mid-thirties, which is a longer career than the smart money would have given a right-hander built like that. I like pitchers who stay stubborn about their own identity. Norimoto never learned to be crafty, because he never needed an alternative to being difficult to hit. Watching him now, in different colors and with fewer miles left in the arm, is a reminder that conviction ages better than most people expect it to.

Name (English)

Takahiro Norimoto

Name (Japanese)

則本昂大

Born

December 17, 1990 (age 35)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Horse

Origin

Taga, Shiga Prefecture, Japan

Height

178 cm

Occupation

baseball player

University

Mie Chukyo University

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%89%87%E6%9C%AC%E6%98%82%E5%A4%A7

Tags

• Shiga Prefecture
• baseball player

Last updated

2026-07-26

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.