High School Career
After excelling at the Little League and junior high level, Daisuke Matsuzaka was admitted into Yokohama High School, a baseball powerhouse, in the spring of 1996. By his second of three years, he had developed into the school's ace pitcher. Despite his early success, he would experience a setback that summer when he allowed a go-ahead wild pitch in the semi-final game of the Kanagawa Prefecture preliminary round of the National High School Baseball Championship (Summer Koshien).
During that offseason, his fastballs first began to regularly sit around 87 miles per hour (140 km/h). After pitching his school to the championship of the National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament (Spring Koshien), Matsuzaka set his aim on the 1998 Summer Koshien and eventually led his school to the championship.
In the quarterfinal of the 1998 Summer Koshien, Matsuzaka threw 250 pitches in 17 innings in a win over PL Gakuen. (The previous day he had thrown a 148-pitch complete game shutout.) The next day, despite trailing 6–0 in the top of the eighth inning, the team miraculously won the game after scoring 7 runs in the final two innings (four in the eighth and three in the ninth). He started the game in left field, but came in as a reliever in the ninth inning to record the win in 15 pitches. In the final, he threw a no-hitter, the second ever in a final. This performance garnered him the attention of many scouts.
Read more about this topic: Daisuke Matsuzaka
Famous quotes containing the words high, school and/or career:
“No man rises so high as he knows not whither he goes.”
—Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658)
“He had first discovered a propensity for savagery in the acrid lavatories of a minor English public school where he used to press the heads of the new boys into the ceramic bowl and pull the flush upon them to drown their gurgling protests.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)