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
South Africa national baseball team 17th November 1945, a South African exhibition team made up of players from the Transvaal, Natal, Eastern and Western Province provinces took on a US Navy team from the USS Tennessee and USS California battleships. 'Nearly 20,000 cheering fans witnessed the principal game, which the ships company was hard pressed to win by two tallies (six to four)'. In Johannesburg, on 19th March 1950, the Australian cricket team ended their tour with a baseball match against a combined South African baseball team, in front of a reported record crowd of 12,000. During a visit to Battle Creek in Michigan, USA