Yasuyuki Kataoka

Yasuyuki Kataoka is my favourite kind of baseball player: the one whose value never quite fits on the back of a card. He was a second baseman for the Seibu Lions and later the Yomiuri Giants, and his weapon was his legs. He won the Pacific League stolen base title multiple times, and he did it in an era when the sport was already drifting toward home runs and radar-gun readings. Watching him reach first base was genuinely stressful in the best way. The pitcher would stop caring about the batter. The catcher would start guessing. An entire defence would tilt because one man was standing ninety feet away refusing to be ignored. That kind of pressure never shows up cleanly in a box score, but it decides games, and he decided a lot of them. He was also part of championship teams in both leagues, which tells you managers wanted him in the middle of the infield when it mattered. There is one detail foreign fans always trip over: he changed his registered name more than once during his career, which is a permitted quirk in Japanese pro baseball and led to a slightly chaotic paper trail. He has since moved into coaching and broadcasting, which feels right. Speed is the first thing a player loses and the last thing he forgets how to teach. I suspect he is a better instructor for it, because base stealing was never really about raw pace. It is about reading a pitcher's shoulder, knowing which count invites a gamble, and being willing to look stupid in front of forty thousand people when the read is wrong. That is a teachable skill, and he spent a career proving it wins games.

Name (English)

Yasuyuki Kataoka

Name (Japanese)

片岡保幸

Born

February 17, 1983 (age 43)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aquarius / Boar

Origin

Hanamigawa-ku, Chiba Prefecture, Japan

Height

176 cm

Occupation

baseball player / baseball coach / baseball commentator

Motto

Private

• Xhttps://x.com/otancoyasu
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%87%E5%B2%A1%E4%BF%9D%E5%B9%B8

Tags

• Chiba Prefecture
• baseball player
• baseball coach
• baseball commentator

Last updated

2026-07-27

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.