NPB History | Ohashi Stadium Site — The Monster Who Could Not Do It Twice

In the summer of 1976, in the third round of the Nagasaki prefectural qualifiers, a seventeen-year-old from Kaisei High School struck out the first sixteen batters he faced. Leadoff hitter of the first inning through one out in the sixth, sixteen consecutive, while throwing a no-hitter at the same time. He was called Sasshī — a play on Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, because monster was the only available word.

Sakai Keiichi came from Iki, the island out in the strait. Across the Nagasaki and West Kyushu qualifying that year he threw seven games, struck out seventy, gave up one run and threw two no-hitters. He took Kaisei to the national semi-finals at Koshien, the first time a Nagasaki school had reached the last four in twenty-four years, and lost it 2–3 to PL Gakuen. People compared him to Egawa Suguru. Yakult took him first overall in the draft that autumn.

Nine months after the sixteen strikeouts, on 28 May 1977, he came back to the same ballpark as a professional.

It was his fifth start. Yakult were playing Chunichi, and Ōhashi was full — eleven thousand. His parents had come over from Iki. His old high-school coach, Iguchi Kazuhiko, sat behind the net. The Kaisei supporters' association had made a banner reading *go on, Sakai Keiichi*, and it was moving in the early-summer wind.

He gave up a run in the first, helped along by an error behind him. In the second Kanayama Senkichi hit a home run off him, then Tanizawa Kenichi and Davis got hits, and he was taken out after forty-six pitches and an inning and two-thirds. He said the dirt on the mound felt exactly as it had in high school. Nothing else did.

He came back to this mound once more, on 17 May 1981 against Hiroshima, and gave up two home runs in two innings. In a fourteen-year professional career that was his last appearance at Ōhashi. The monster of the 1976 qualifiers never once did it again in front of the people who had seen it.

There is a coda that is better than the story. After he retired, Sakai became a scout — and the player he was responsible for was Ohtani Shohei.

Ōhashi Municipal Stadium had opened in 1952. In 1997 the prefecture spent ¥7.2 billion rebuilding it on the same ground as Nagasaki Prefectural Baseball Stadium, known as Big N — an unusual reversal, a city ballpark replaced by a prefectural one. It hosted the third All-Star game of 2000, the last of the twentieth century. The Nagasaki final of the summer high-school championship is played here every year, which means that every July somebody stands on this mound in front of the whole prefecture, as Sakai did.

It is a minute from the Ōhashi tram stop, in the sports cluster across the railway from the Peace Park, with the old Nagasaki Commercial ground a few hundred metres away.

Coordinates 32.776760, 129.861239 — Nagasaki Prefectural Baseball Stadium, on the Ōhashi site; ±60 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check.

Cover: Nagasaki Big N Stadium seen from above, photographed 13 June 2012 by Marine-Blue, CC BY-SA 3.0. Second image: the stadium in December 2010, photographed by ぱちょぴ, CC BY-SA 3.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons, and both show the 1997 rebuild rather than the ballpark Sakai pitched in.