Yutaro Imai

Yutaro Imai is exactly the kind of pitcher who never got the marquee treatment but absolutely earned his place in the history of Japanese professional baseball. A Nagaoka kid from snow-country Niigata, he spent 21 seasons grinding through Nippon Pro Baseball, racking up 130 wins and four All-Star nods — the definition of a quiet workhorse. What gets me is the late bloom: he really hit his stride in his late twenties and then again at 35, leading the Pacific League in wins and ERA in 1984 at an age when a lot of guys are already thinking retirement. No flash, no shortcut, just a tall right-hander from the mountains doing his job through four different decades. The fact that he became a commentator after retiring tells you he genuinely loved the game, not just the paycheck. A 130-win career doesn't write itself, and I have a lot of respect for the players who built that kind of record one unglamorous start at a time.

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.

Yutaro Imai is a Japanese former professional baseball pitcher born on August 4, 1949, in Nagaoka, Niigata Prefecture. He stands 177 cm tall. He pitched for the Hankyu (later Orix) Braves from 1971 to 1990 and the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in 1991, and on August 31, 1978, threw the last perfect game of the Showa era, the first under the designated hitter rule.

Name (English)

Yutaro Imai

Name (Japanese)

今井雄太郎

Reading

いまい ゆうたろう

Born

August 4, 1949 (age 77)

Origin

Nagaoka, Niigata, Japan

Height

177cm

Occupation

Baseball player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Ox

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BB%8A%E4%BA%95%E9%9B%84%E5%A4%AA%E9%83%8E
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q10883950

Tags

• From Niigata
• Baseball player

Last updated

November 2, 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.