From our other sites
The story
On September 29, 2026, DeNA announced it will not renew contracts for 10 players next season, including pitcher Kenta Kozono (2021 first-round pick), pitcher Shintaro Fujinami, pitcher Chihaya Sasaki, and outfielder Ayato Inoue. Kozono was one of the celebrated “High School BIG3” who joined the team amid huge hype out of Ichi-Wakayama High School, and the news that he was being let go after five years without a single top-team win sparked surprise. The thread turned to the broader struggles of the 2021 draft’s top picks, including classmates Daichi Moriki (Hanshin) and Kyuda Kazama (SoftBank), sparking a debate over the accuracy of pro scouting.
September 29, 2026, 2:04 PM
DeNA announced on the 29th that it will not renew contracts for the following players next season: outfielder Ayato Inoue (26), pitcher Kenta Kozono (23), pitcher Chihaya Sasaki (32), pitcher Hayato Horioka (28), pitcher Hayate Nakagawa (27), pitcher Shintaro Fujinami (32), development-roster infielder Kenji Nishimaki (27), pitcher Ryunosuke Matsumoto (24), infielder Ao Ogasawara (20), and catcher Taiga Kondo (21).
Inoue joined the team as a sixth-round pick in the 2023 draft. Expected to develop into a power hitter, he showed signs of a breakout last season with 2 home runs, but this season he appeared in only 3 games.
Source: nikkansports.com / Original article here
What people said
① Kenta Kozono — Ichi-Wakayama High
First-round pick, joined the Yokohama DeNA BayStars. Wears number 18.
Got his first top-team win and is fighting to take the next step up.
② Daichi Moriki — Kochi High
First-round pick, joined the Hanshin Tigers.
Struggled with control issues and injuries; now trying his luck in the U.S. (minor leagues, etc.).
③ Kyuda Kazama — Hokuoh Asia University Meio High
First-round pick, joined the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks.
After being dropped to the development roster and more, still hoping to break out as a pro.
That's the Fighters' sharp eye for you — ignored all three of these guys and went straight for Tatsu instead (Kota Tatsu, the Fighters' 2021 first-round pick).
——— the top-team win wall ———
Moriki (2 games)
——— the top-team appearance wall ———
Kazama
Scouting is tough after all — even pro scouts' eye for talent can end up producing this.
Will they hand it to one of their existing star pitchers?
Or use it as bait to reel in a rookie?
Still, Kozono being a first-round pick really was a huge bust…
Sounds like they'll get a second life there — just not the kind anyone hoped for.
Apparently they're at least offering him a development-roster deal.
Think of it like he went to college — four years on the development roster is fine, but by the year after that he needs to at least show some sign of breaking out. Five years sounds about right, and he's still young enough to switch career paths.
Unrelated, but I think they should've cut Kō Neo loose around this point too.
Sounds like his shoulder's the problem.
An elbow, you can operate on — but once you cut into a shoulder, that's basically it.
Imanaga's case turned out fine because apparently the important parts were clean and it was just a simple surgery to shave down a bone spur, but even Mahara's one-season comeback was rare.
Not a single team took Yoshinobu Yamamoto with their first pick back in the day, so pro "scouts" (lol) are clearly full of blind spots.
Short guys get filtered out, so that's just how it goes.
The Seibu Lions' own scouts actually begged the front office to draft Darvish, so the story goes — but they dug so deep into his background (not practicing, smoking, not gelling with teammates) that the team decided "this one can't be fixed here" and passed on him. So you can't just call scouts incompetent. As for Yamamoto, his elbow was already hurting back in high school.
Plenty of guys in the 170s (cm) have still gone in the first round.
Kazama, I could see some upside in — even though he got cut before Kozono did.
Kazama's conduct was just too bad.
Sure, there were injuries too, but if his behavior had been decent they'd probably have kept him around longer.
Agreed.
Kozono was well-balanced, but he always felt like a scaled-down, younger version of one of those college first-round pitchers you see every year — I never got that "imagine how good he could be if he breaks out" thrill from him.
Kazama's stuff had more power behind it, and I found him more exciting to watch (nobody outside the team really knows about the conduct stuff anyway).
As for Moriki, those draft pundits who always push high schoolers were hyping him up hard, but even back in his third year of high school I didn't think he was first-round caliber — so when he pitched well on the top team as a rookie, it beat my expectations in a good way. Shame about the injuries though.
No, there's always the coaching path — assuming they've got the people skills for it, anyway.
Even the ones no team picks back up usually built connections during their playing days, and end up doing sales or something somewhere.
Though more of them give up on it before it even gets that far.
Fujinami's pulled in something like 1 billion yen in career earnings all told, so he can just kick back and live easy doing YouTube or whatever from here on.
If you were a first-round pick ("doraichi"), the team will keep you on as a scout or in PR all the way to retirement age.
The Giants' scouting staff is full of former first-rounders.
Background and key points of this discussion
The “release notice” (senryokugai tsūkoku) is an annual system in which each NPB team publicly announces which players it won’t re-sign for the coming season. Being named doesn’t mean immediate retirement — players still have the option of trying out for other teams or signing development-roster deals, and the article itself notes that DeNA is reportedly offering Kozono a shot at a development contract. What split opinion in the thread was how to judge scouts’ “eye for talent.” The fact that all three members of the 2021 draft’s “High School BIG3” (Kozono, Daichi Moriki, and Kyuda Kazama) stalled out fueled skepticism about scouting itself, while others pushed back, citing the story of how Yu Darvish was passed over due to concerns raised by background checks into his conduct, arguing you “can’t just call scouts incompetent across the board.” One thing easy for readers to miss is that this release wasn’t limited to Kozono and Fujinami — it covered 10 players in total, including Ayato Inoue, Chihaya Sasaki, Hayate Nakagawa, and Hayato Horioka — meaning it’s really part of a broader roster overhaul for DeNA.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5channel (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Baseball] DeNA gives release notice to 10 players including 2021 first-round pick Kenta Kozono, Ayato Inoue, Chihaya Sasaki, Hayate Nakagawa, and Shintaro Fujinami [Ailuropoda melanoleuca★].”
Leave a Reply