He was also into swimming and could have been on the Olympic team according to his baseball coach. He learned to play ... the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) after they drafted him in the ...

“I think there’s still an immense amount of pressure from the high school baseball coaches to stay,” noted ... (The frustration) is more from the NPB teams’ perspective and the older ...

“I love how Japanese baseball is so much more fundamentally pure,” said Shimizu, who spent many years as a youth baseball coach ... ambitions — the 12-team NPB is not moving with nearly ...