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, 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)
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.”
—Constance Rourke (1885–1941)
“Why does not the kitten betray some of the attributes common to the adult puss? A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense. We never hear our friends say they love puppies, but cannot bear dogs. A kitten is a thing apart; and many people who lack the discriminating enthusiasm for cats, who regard these beautiful beasts with aversion and mistrust, are won over easily, and cajoled out of their prejudices, by the deceitful wiles of kittenhood.”
—Agnes Repplier (1858–1950)
“Obviously, it’s a great privilege and pleasure to be here at the Yale Law School Sesquicentennial Convocation. And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)