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The story
Remarks from Hanamaki Higashi High School coach Hiroshi Sasaki about pitcher Tatsuya Takahashi, whom he once sent to the Hiroshima Carp, became a hot topic on 5ch. Takahashi was picked in the third round of the 2015 draft but was released after only seven years due to a left elbow injury, and Coach Sasaki has been reflecting on his own conviction that players should go pro straight out of high school. The thread was split, with some saying “seven years is plenty” and others countering that “you can get hurt going through college too” — debating whether going straight to the pros or via college is really better for players.
Coach Sasaki recalls that in his younger days, chasing the number of pro players he’d produced, there was a period when he pushed players to go straight from high school into the pros.
“Tatsuya Takahashi, who joined Hiroshima in the third round back in 2015, was let go after just seven years because of a left elbow injury. That really shook me. Instead of rushing him into the pros to chase results right away, I keep wondering — if he’d gone through college and focused on building up his body first, maybe he’d have had a longer career in baseball. It made me reflect on my own ego, on how fixated I’d been on the number of players I sent to the pros.”
Source: news-postseven.com / Read the original article here
What people said
If anything, college is notorious for overworking pitchers
Like how people always say Yuki Saito wouldn't have broken down if he'd gone pro straight out of high school, right?
Saito's a special case — Waseda's baseball environment back then wasn't great, and
they worked him insanely hard because he could win them a Big Six title.
That kind of overuse basically never happens normally — at a different school someone would've pulled the plug before he got seriously hurt.
Was Saito's hip injury actually from overuse though?
Even high-school-to-pro guys get cut after 3-4 years in this world
I'd still rather go the college route than straight out of high school
Well, building a track record of getting kids into famous universities makes the school happy too
I mean, the vast majority of players never make it to the pros. For those guys, having connections to famous universities and corporate teams is way more valuable
Apparently without the know-how, training them like pros gets them injured, and even cutting back the training load doesn't help since the gap with other players pushes them to overdo it and get hurt anyway
If a guy lacks basic physical conditioning, college is the better route
On the flip side, a pitcher who'd already be a main starter in college baseball from year one should just go pro right away, to spare his shoulder and elbow the wear and tear
Wait, who went pro straight out of middle school?
Even his son made it to the majors
Wait, is that Rintaro's dad?
But realistically, getting cut after 3 years as a college grad makes it way easier to restart your life — that part's just true
Like anyone on nanJ (5ch's rowdy sports/entertainment board) has reading comprehension
Lots of people say high schoolers aiming straight for MLB should go through NPB first, but they're forgetting that most of those guys just get chewed up and broken along the way in NPB
But if they'd get broken in NPB anyway, wouldn't that mean they'd never even make it up to the majors going straight?
That's a decent stretch of time, and there's no telling if he'd have made it without the injury, or developed more by going through college
And when exactly is YOUR life gonna 'develop,' huh
You sure you've got time to worry about somebody else?
Your parents are crying right now, you know
What I'm saying is, when you DO go back to normal life, having a college degree helps
No arguments accepted on this one
Isn't that only true for top-of-the-draft talent though?
Schools that still force buzz cuts on players are apparently seen as stuck in the past these days, and players are avoiding them — they're having trouble recruiting
At the high school baseball tournament two years ago
4 of the 8 quarterfinal teams had long-haired players
Times have really changed
Falling short in college ball and just landing a regular job as a college grad afterward is probably the happier life, honestly
He's actually on staff with the Rakuten Eagles now
Nobody retires from pro baseball with their body fully intact
No way that's true
His stats completely cratered because of it
Background and Key Points
Hanamaki Higashi is the Iwate prefecture school that produced both Yusei Kikuchi and Shohei Ohtani, and Hiroshi Sasaki is the coach credited with developing both — which is why his self-criticism carries weight in Japan. In NPB, a high schooler can be drafted straight into the pros or take the longer route through a four-year university or corporate (“industrial league”) team first; going pro directly is prestigious but throws an 18-year-old body straight into a professional training and game load years before it would face that in college ball. Tatsuya Takahashi was a third-round pick in 2015, played seven seasons for Hiroshima, and was released in 2022 after a career-ending left elbow injury — a fairly typical NPB outcome, since most non-first-round draftees are cut within three to five years regardless of route.
The thread’s actual disagreement wasn’t over whether Takahashi’s injury was preventable, but over whether college ball is genuinely safer than the pros. Several posters pointed to Yuki Saito (“Handkerchief Prince”), the Waseda ace whose college workload is often blamed for derailing his pro career, arguing that amateur pitchers get overused just as badly, if not worse, since no team is managing their long-term health.
What outside readers will likely miss is that Takahashi didn’t vanish after his release — a later post notes he’s now on staff with the Rakuten Eagles, which cuts against the “failed prospect” framing the headline invites. The thread also never engaged with the structural point one poster raised: for a coach, producing college-bound alumni is often more valuable to the school’s reputation and recruiting than producing pros, since so few players ever reach NPB at all.
*This article was compiled and summarized from a 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyou G) thread titled “Hanamaki Higashi’s coach: “I was shocked that a player I sent pro got cast aside due to injury after just 7 years”.”
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