Early Life and High School Career
Nakajima was born in Itami, a city in Hyogo, Japan. He was a pitcher during his days at Itami Municipal Sakuradai Elementary School, playing in a national tournament alongside batterymate Katsuki Yamazaki (who would become a catcher for the rival Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks a decade later). He played for Takarazuka Senior while attending Itami Municipal Tennōjigawa Junior High School, receiving offers to play for high school baseball powerhouses in other prefectures by coaches who came to see him play.
Nakajima opted to apply to the prestigious Hōtoku Gakuen High School within the prefecture but was rejected and ended up enrolling in Itami Kita Senior High School, a local school and a complete unknown in high school baseball. He worked his way into the starting lineup in his first year (the equivalent of tenth grade in the United States), playing right field that summer and becoming the team's leadoff hitter by his second.
Nakajima hit 43 home runs out of the leadoff spot in his high school career and took the mound as the team's ace pitcher in his last two years, but his team never came particularly close to making a national tournament, losing in the fourth round of the Hyogo Tournament in the last summer of Nakajima's high school career. However, despite such relative anonymity, Nakajima was picked by the Seibu Lions in the fifth round of the 2000 NPB amateur draft. He was the 57th overall pick (out of 86 players) in that year's draft.
Read more about this topic: Hiroyuki Nakajima
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, high, school and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
—Bible: Hebrew Exodus, 21:23-25.
“As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity.... The march of God in the world, that is what the State is.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)