Eri Yoshida Eri Yoshida Yoshida was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan where, she taught herself how to throw the knuckleball at the age of 14 after watching Major League Baseball pitcher Tim Wakefield on television. She stands tall, and her pitches have been clocked at , while her knuckleball pitch velocity measures around 50 mph. As a high-school sophomore at Kawasaki-kita Senior High School in Kawasaki, she threw the pitch well enough to earn a place on the school's baseball team. Her success caused a sensation in the national media, who dubbed her the "Knuckle Princess". In 2008, she signed a contract
Hidehiko Yoshida The fight was even closer than its first iteration, as Yoshida won the first round to the judges and kept himself mostly out of danger until the third round, but he lost again by decision. Yoshida recovered from the defeat submitting Tank Abbott at the next event with the judo technique known as kata-ha-jime. At the end of the same year, Yoshida faced fellow Japanese judoka Naoya Ogawa by an armbar in a highly anticipated MMA bout at PRIDE Shockwave 2005 with each fighter receiving a payment of US$2 million, which remains one of the most expensive fights in MMA