Nippon Professional Baseball players like the Lee brothers, Leron Lee and Leon Lee, Greg "Boomer" Wells, Randy Bass, and Ralph Bryant playing key roles on their NPB teams. In 1995, star pitcher Hideo Nomo "retired" from the Kintetsu Buffaloes and signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Nomo pitched over the span of 14 seasons in the Major Leagues before retiring in 2008. He won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1995. He twice led the league in strikeouts, and also threw two no-hitters (the only Japanese pitcher to throw a no-hitter in Major League Baseball until Hisashi Iwakuma achieved the feat in
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