Sen’ichi Hoshino

Sen'ichi Hoshino (Japanese星野 仙 一, Hoshino Sen'ichi; born January 22, 1947 in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture) is a Japanese baseball manager and former pitcher. For the 2008 Summer Olympics, he coached the Japanese baseball team. As a player, he won the Sawamura Award for best pitcher of the league in 1974.

Life

Playing career

Hoshino played in his high school years of Okayama Kurashiki Kenritsu Shōgyō Kōtō Gakko, with which it never succeeded him at the Koshien tournament to participate. While studying at Meiji University, he played from the beginning in the first team. In the League of Six universities of Tokyo, he brought it in 63 matches at an ERA of 1.91 at 23 wins and 25 defeats.

1986 Hoshino was gedrafted in the first round of the Chunichi Dragons, for which he regularly pitched in the very first season and soon became frequent, often used as a starter in the first years as a reliever. 1974, when the Dragons were able to break the nine-year dominance of the Giants and win the first place in the Central League, Hoshino led the league with 10 saves and also scored in a total of 49 games 15 wins to 9 Losses and an ERA of 2.87. For the performance of the season he won the Sawamura Award.

After the Dragons were able to repeat their success in 1982 and again were first, Hoshino ended his career. In a total of 500 games (including 177 starts) - all for Chunichi - he scored 146 wins and 34 saves. Six times he had participated in the All- Star Game.

Coaching career

After the End of career Hoshino worked as a television commentator for NHK. After the 1986 season, he broke Kazuhiro Yamauchi from as manager of the Chunichi Dragons, who had finished the previous two seasons on the fifth ( penultimate ) space. In 1988, he led the team to the league title, but lost then the Nippon Series against the Seibu Lions. After five years Hoshino resigned in 1991.

For the 1996 season, he was re-appointed as a manager. In 1999, he was able to repeat the success of 1988 with the team, but again lost the championship, this time against the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks. In 2001 he finally left definitively the Dragons and in 2002 took over the Hanshin Tigers. Although he was able to win the title in the Central League again in 2003, reports of his imminent resignation have been published during the Nippon Series. After he lost the championship back to the Hawks, he resigned for health reasons; he was sick more than once in the course of the season. He was awarded as deserved Manager with the Shoriki - Matsutaro price Yomiuri Shimbun of.

In January 2007, Hoshino took over in preparation for the Olympic Summer Games in Beijing, the Japanese baseball national team of Sadaharu Oh ( or as the Olympic team by Shigeo Nagashima ). Having won the Asian Championship in December 2007, his team failed to qualify directly for the Olympics.