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 Major League Baseball history. He has, to date, thrown the only no-hitters at Coors Field and Oriole Park at Camden Yards. He won the 1996 ESPY Award for Breakthrough Athlete. Nomo was elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, only the third ever to be selected in his or her first year of eligibility. At the time, he was also the youngest player ever elected to that Hall of Fame, although his record was broken in 2018 by Hideki Matsui. A song about Nomo, "There's No One Like Nomo" performed by Jack Sheldon, written by Marvin Hamlisch