Is Yusei Kikuchi Japanese?

Is Yusei Kikuchi Japanese?

Yusei Kikuchi, a Japanese professional baseball pitcher who now competes for the Toronto Blue Jays in Major League Baseball, was born in 1992 in Morioka, a city located on the island of Honshu in Japan.

Kikuchi is currently a member of the Blue Jays organization.

In the past, he has played for both the Seattle Mariners of Major League Baseball and the Saitama Seibu Lions of Nippon Professional Baseball. Currently, he is retired from professional baseball (NPB).

He throws with his left hand and is 6 feet tall (1.8 meters), has a weight of 200 pounds (91 kg), and his arm angle is three-quarters. He had a top speed of 99 miles per hour on his fastball.

2009 marked Kikuchi’s first year competing at the professional level, and the following year, he was selected to take part in the NPB All-Star game. He is the only player in the history of Major League Baseball to make his debut in Japan and to have been born in Japan.

Kikuchi’s first season with the Mariners was not a successful one; he finished the season with a record of 6–11 and a 5.46 earned run average in 32 starts.

In 2020, he had a strikeout ratio of 24 per cent, an increase from the 16.1 per cent he had in the previous year. His earned-run average was 5.17.

Kikuchi and the Toronto Blue Jays reached an agreement in 2021 for a contract that was worth a combined $36 million over the course of three years.