Former Major League Baseball players Hideo Nomo and Shigetoshi Hasegawa, pitchers who rose to prominence in Japan before making the switch to the USA, recently took part in bringing a Japanese youth baseball team to the USA for a tournament against some American players.
Group Shot
As MLB.com details, Nomo added his Junior All-Japan team, called the Nomo Project, with Hasegawa’s Southern California-based ROX Baseball Club, the Japan based International Baseball Exchange Committee (IBEC) team and the Urban Youth Academy team to make up the participants in the two-day event.
The two pitchers saw this opportunity as a great chance to emphasize the importance of Major League Baseball forging relationships between countries and cultures.
Darrell Miller, the VP of program and facility development for MLB, praised the opportunity: “The more we can do to develop relationships with baseball countries — countries that really get it, like we do in America and Japan, which is a great country to partner with,” said Miller. “The more we exchange culture, the more we exchange best practices — talking about the best ways to get our kids excited about baseball, keep them energized about baseball and take them to the next level — that’s why international competition is taking precedent over all the other ways to develop talent.”
Read more about the efforts of Hideo Nomo and Shigetoshi Hasegawa at MLB.com.
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