November 25, 1981 - Yomiuri Takes a College-Bound Captain in the Third Round
At the 17th NPB draft, held at the Hotel Grand Palace on November 25, 1981, Yomiuri selected Tadaaki Yoshimura of PL Gakuen High School in the third round. That spring Yoshimura had captained PL Gakuen, playing first base, to the school's first national title at the 53rd Spring Koshien, yet when his name was called he intended to go on to Hosei University. None of the six players Yomiuri took at this draft required a lottery.
| Round | Player | From |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Hiromi Makihara | Obu High School (pitcher) |
| 2nd | Koji Yamamoto | Nagoya Denki High School (catcher) |
| 3rd | Tadaaki Yoshimura | PL Gakuen High School (infielder) |
| 4th | Keiji Hashimoto | Fuji Heavy Industries (pitcher) |
| 5th | Shinichi Murata | Takigawa High School (catcher) |
| 6th | Kaoru Nimura | Waseda University (pitcher) |
Yoshimura was the first PL Gakuen player Yomiuri ever drafted. Since the baseball club was founded in 1955, 23 of its alumni had turned pro: five with Hankyu, four with Yakult, three with Yokohama Taiyo, two each with Chunichi, Hiroshima, Lotte and Nippon-Ham, and one each with Hanshin, Kintetsu and Nankai. Only Yomiuri and Seibu had never signed one. When Yomiuri finally reached for a PL player, it chose a captain who had said publicly that he was going to college.
At the same draft, according to Masashi Hosoda's series "1985: Eiyutachi no Draft" (Gendai Business), Tsunemi Tsuda of Kyowa Hakko had said he would not go to Yomiuri even if drafted; Hiroshima took him alone in the first round.
"I Think I Will Probably Go to College" - Yoshimura and PL Gakuen After the Draft
According to the Hochi Shimbun of November 26, 1981, Yoshimura said the pick came as a surprise. He liked Yomiuri and admired Sadaharu Oh, so he was happy, but he confessed, "I don't have the confidence to play as a pro," and after talking it over he said, "But I think I will probably go to college." In the same paper on December 2 he explained that after the spring title he had briefly thought about turning pro, but his hitting in the summer qualifier left him unsatisfied: "I decided I could never make it as a pro like this, so I chose to go to Hosei."
Hosei was a well-worn path for PL Gakuen players. Counting Shinji Nishida, Katsuhiko Kido and Takehiko Kobayakawa, 18 of the club's alumni had gone to Hosei by the time the club closed in 2014, more than went to any other Tokyo Big6 university. Of the 11 players in Yoshimura's class who made the bench, six went on to university, and three of them, including ace Yoshiaki Nishikawa, went to Hosei.
Toshihide Imoto, a PL Gakuen alumnus and former head of the baseball club, told the same series that because Yoshimura's plan to attend Hosei was known, no team came to pay its respects before the draft, and as he recalls, neither did Yomiuri scout Kikuo Ito.
Why Yomiuri Picked Him - The Testimony of Scout Kikuo Ito
The pick was driven by Kikuo Ito, the Yomiuri scout for the Kansai region known as "Ito-Kiku." Interviewed by nonfiction writer Minoru Sase for the December 1987 issue of the magazine Hoseki, Ito said his background checks had shown that Yoshimura had been a Yomiuri fan since childhood. He then urged manager Motoshi Fujita: "I think he will go beyond Kenji Awaguchi. There is no reason to pass. Why don't we draft him and try to win him over?"
In the same interview Ito rejected the idea that money had been decisive, and the suggestion of a secret deal in which Yoshimura was told to tell other teams he would not turn pro. Young players think about their future more than the size of a signing bonus, he said, and there was no guarantee that other teams would hold off. Asked what had decided it, he pointed to the tradition of Yomiuri as a team, and to the player's own feeling that if he was going to play pro baseball, it should be for Yomiuri.
At the December 8 meeting Ito told Yoshimura, "Because the college option was so strong, we had to take you in the third round" (Hochi Shimbun, December 9, 1981). He said the club needed Yoshimura's speed, arm and power, and called him, along with the right-handed Yoshiaki Kanemura of Hotoku Gakuen, the best high school hitter of that year. The club also had a need: its outfield relied on the foreign players Thomasson and White, and it was short of young outfielders. Taken at his word, Ito's account means Yomiuri knew Yoshimura had announced his college plans, lowered only the round, and made the pick counting on his fondness for the team.
The December Talks - A Hard Negotiation That Ended in a Contract
On December 1, six days after the draft, Ito visited PL Gakuen in Tondabayashi to pay his respects. Vice principal Masaru Hashiguchi, who also headed the baseball club, and manager Junji Nakamura told him he could negotiate with the player directly, and a first meeting was set for December 4 at the Kenshi dormitory on the grounds of the religious organization that runs the school.
The second meeting, on December 8, proved harder than expected. Hashiguchi, who sat in, said: "Our graduates who turned pro after university or the industrial leagues have done quite well, but the ones who went straight in have struggled to develop" (Hochi Shimbun, December 9, 1981). Yoshimura, for his part, voiced his doubts: his worries about the pros were easing, but having decided on college, he still wanted to go to university with his teammates and play at Jingu.
In the end Yoshimura signed with Yomiuri and began his pro career in 1982. He was named to the Best Nine in 1986 and 1987, tore three ligaments in his left knee in a collision while fielding on July 6, 1988, and returned on September 2, 1989. He retired in 1998 with a career batting average of .296, then served as a coach and as manager of the farm team before becoming head of baseball operations in 2022.
When Yoshimura decided to sign, who persuaded him and how, and how large his signing bonus was could not be confirmed in the sources this article relies on.
Masumi Kuwata Four Years Later - The Same Kind of Pick
At the 21st draft on November 20, 1985, six teams named Kazuhiro Kiyohara as their first choice, and Seibu won the lottery. Masumi Kuwata had announced that he would go to Waseda University and was due to sit its special admission exam four days later. Yomiuri alone took him in the first round, and he withdrew from the exam and signed. The full story is in our article on the KK draft.
| Aspect | Tadaaki Yoshimura | Masumi Kuwata |
|---|---|---|
| School | PL Gakuen High School | PL Gakuen High School |
| Stated plan | Hosei University | Waseda University |
| Other teams | Did not pick him | Did not pick him |
| The player's stance | A Yomiuri fan since childhood (the scout's background check) | Said at his press conference he had planned to sign if Yomiuri took him first |
| After the pick | Signed after direct talks | Withdrew from the exam and signed |
| Round | 3rd | 1st |
The same scout was involved, too: in 1985 Kikuo Ito also handled the pre-draft interviews with Kiyohara and Kuwata. The pick Yomiuri had pushed through in the third round four years earlier, it can be read, was repeated in the first round.
Drafting high school players who had declared other plans was not a Yomiuri-only tactic, however. At the same 1981 draft Seibu took Kimiyasu Kudo of Nagoya Denki High School, who had said he would not turn pro, in the sixth round and signed him, and before picking Tsutomu Ito alone in the first round it had him transfer to a school in Saitama and kept him close as a club employee.
What the Pro Declaration Form Shut Down
Until the 2003 school year, a high school senior who wanted to negotiate with a pro team had to submit a notice of withdrawal from his club to a regional branch of the Japan High School Baseball Federation, but even a player who had announced college plans could still be drafted.
The disputes most often cited from before the pro declaration form became a system are four: Hankyu and Suguru Egawa in 1973 (he refused to sign), Seibu and Kimiyasu Kudo in 1981, Yomiuri and Masumi Kuwata in 1985, and Daiei and Kenji Johjima in 1994. Yoshimura is not among them, but his pick followed the same pattern as Kuwata's. How Egawa later joined Yomiuri is covered in our article on the Egawa affair.
In the 2004 school year the pro declaration form for high school players became a formal system. A player who has not filed it with the Japan High School Baseball Federation is treated as seeking to continue his education or take a job, and cannot be drafted. Filing opens after the summer national tournament ends and closes two weeks before the draft. University players were required to file from the 2007 school year (a step decided in the same process as the abolition of the preferred-entry slots).
Because a player who does not file cannot be drafted at all, the pattern used with Yoshimura and Kuwata, drafting a high school player who had announced college plans and then talking him round, has not been possible since the 2004 school year. What remains is a player who files the form and then refuses to be drafted by any team but one, and that lies outside the system.