Hideo Nomo Hideo Nomo Hideo Nomo (野茂 英雄/Nomo Hideo, born August 31, 1968 in Minato-ku, Osaka, Japan) is a retired Japanese baseball pitcher in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) and Major League Baseball (MLB). He achieved early success in his native country, where he played with the Kintetsu Buffaloes from to . He then exploited a loophole to free himself from his contract, and became the first Japanese major leaguer to permanently relocate to Major League Baseball in the United States, debuting with the Los Angeles Dodgers in . Although he was not the first Japanese person to play baseball professionally in the
Hideo Nomo (while finishing second in walks) and was second with a 2.54 ERA. He struck out 11.101 batters per 9 innings to break Sandy Koufax's single-season franchise record of 10.546 in . He also started that year's All-Star Game, striking out three of the six batters he faced. But he only barely won NL Rookie of the Year honors that year over future MVP Chipper Jones, as many voters felt that his Japanese success made him anything but a rookie, although he qualified by Major League rules. Nomo had another fine season in which was capped by a no-hitter thrown on