Professional Baseball Career
Before entering professional wrestling he had been a professional baseball pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants, and was signed at the age of 17. Baba, who was issued jersey number 59, was a member of the organization for at least five years. It appears however, he spent most of his time in the minor leagues. He appeared in only three games with the Giants, and recorded a record of 0-1.
It was around this time when national wrestling hero and owner of the Japanese Wrestling Association Mitsuhiro Momota - better known as RikidÅzan - began to feel the time was right for him to start grooming a successor in order to keep business strong.
Read more about this topic: Shohei Baba
Famous quotes containing the words professional, baseball and/or career:
“... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)