Early Life and High School Career
Nishioka was born in Daitō, Osaka, and grew up in the city of Nara. He played in the national tournament as a member of Kōriyama Senior while attending Nara Prefectural Heijō East Junior High School, starting baseball as a right-handed hitter and switched to the left side during junior high.
Nishioka had longed to attend noted baseball powerhouse PL Gakuen High School in Tondabayashi, Osaka, but suffered much disappointment when he was told he would not be chosen as a recipient of an athletic scholarship. He made up his mind to attend Osaka Tōin Senior High School in his birth place of Daitō instead, vowing to defeat PL Gakuen when he played the school later on. In all of the games that Osaka Tōin played during the three years (the equivalent of tenth through twelfth grades in the United States) that Nishioka spent at the school, it never once lost to PL Gakuen.
Nishioka led Osaka Tōin to the 84th National High School Baseball Championship in his senior year of high school as the team captain and leadoff hitter, but the team lost in the first round to Tōhō High School, the Aichi champions. Despite his lack of success on the national stage, Nishioka hit 42 home runs in his high school career, mostly as a second baseman, and was considered one of the top high school prospects in the country by NPB scouts. He was selected in the first round of the 2002 NPB amateur draft held that fall by the Chiba Lotte Marines.
Read more about this topic: Tsuyoshi Nishioka
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, high, school and/or career:
“Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light-blue lane of early dawn,”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)