Kazumi Saito
Japanese baseball player
Kazumi Saito (斉藤 和巳, Saitō Kazumi; born November 30, 1977) is a Japanese former professional baseball starting pitcher, and current fourth squad manager for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). He was a two-time winner of the Eiji Sawamura Award (2003, 2006), but did not pitch in a regular season game after October 2007 due to various shoulder injuries.
Professional career
Saito was marked as a top prospect by NPB scouts from his days at South Kyoto High School. He along with the current Hiroshima Toyo Carp pitcher Masayuki Hasegawa and Saitama Seibu Lions pitcher Tomoki Hoshino were dubbed the "Big Three" of their particular age group. The Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (currently the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks) selected Saito with their first-round pick in the 1995 NPB amateur draft.
Early years: 1996 to 2002
While Saito made his first appearance at the ichigun (Japanese equivalent of "major league") level in 1997, just his second year in the pros, his development was often hindered by his proneness to injury. In particular, Saito was plagued by a chronically loose shoulder joint, a condition so troubling for pitchers that coaches even suggested switching positions and becoming a hitter (as evidence of this, he was once called upon to pinch-hit in a nigun ("minor league" or "farm team") game, playing left field in the next inning). However, Saito refused and insisted upon remaining a pitcher.
After undergoing surgery on his right shoulder and missing the entire 1998 season due to rehab, Saito finally posted his first win with the ichigun in 2000. He went on to win five games that season, four of which were after the All-Star break in the thick of the pennant race, but was not called upon to start in the Japan Series when the Hawks eventually won the league title.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Kazumi Saito” is japanese baseball player. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kazumi, Saito and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6381581. VIAF identifies the subject as 238156317449302350005. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 2003, 2006 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kazumi Saito” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.