Eri Yoshida to play for the of the Kansai Independent Baseball League. Yoshida made her professional baseball debut at the Osaka Dome in the opening game of the Kansai Independent Baseball League on March 26, 2009 in front of 11,592 fans. She faced two batters, walking the first and striking out the second in a 5–0 win over the . She appeared in 11 games for the Kobe 9 Cruise and moved on after the season to focus on advancing up the pro ranks. She appeared in a one-inning battle against the top hitters of the Hiroshima Carp on November 24, 2009.
Saori Yoshida regularly appears in their commercials. In December 2008, the wrestling singlet which Yoshida wore in the Olympic final bout earlier that year, was sold for 551,000 yen (ca. US$6,123) at an internet auction, and the money was donated to the Japanese Red Cross society. In 2013, when the International Olympic Committee named wrestling as a candidate for exclusion from the Games, she became an active part of the Japanese lobbying team that persuaded the IOC to retain wrestling at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In May 2014 Yoshida made a cameo appearance in the Japanese television drama "Tokyo Metropolitan Guard Center",