Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes times. Bryant also struck out countless times, and holds the top four spots on the single-season strikeout records in Nippon Professional Baseball. Pitcher Hideo Nomo starred for the Buffaloes from 1990–1994 before he exercised a loophole in his contract and "retired," allowing him to sign with MLB's Los Angeles Dodgers. The subsequent wave of players moving to Major League Baseball has become a fixture of Japanese professional baseball. Tuffy Rhodes played for the Buffaoes for eight seasons from 1996–2003, hitting 288 home runs over that span. In the season, he hit his 55th homer to tie Sadaharu Oh's Japanese League
Robert Whiting extensively on current issues impacting both Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, including a four-part series, which was published in the "Japan Times", followed by an in-depth series on Sadaharu Oh, Trey Hillman, Bobby Valentine and Hideo Nomo for the same paper. In October 2011, he wrote a three-part series for "The Japan Times" on the talented, but troubled, Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu, who had died in California two months earlier of an apparent suicide. In a shifting era of globalization, Whiting is one of the few sports experts to explore the transnational flows of athletics. In his works