First Alyssa Milano announces that she no longer will be dating baseball players–we’re dating now instead–and now this, Hideo Nomo has announced his retirement. It’s like baseball is losing all the great ones.
For Nomo, this technically marks his second retirement, as in order to become the first Japanese pitcher in the US, he had to “retire” from Japanese baseball, thus using a loophole to leave his contract in Japan and come play for the Dodgers. In his first year in the bigs, Nomo won the Rookie of the Year award, led the league in strikeouts and started the All Star game, striking out 3 of the 6 batters he faced. His second season featured his first of two no-hitters, in pre-humidor Colorado no less!
Nomo was released in April by the Royals and had struggled to find anyone willing to pick him up. Over his career with the Dodgers (twice), Mets, Brewers, Tigers, Red Sox (2nd no-hitter), then-Devil Rays, and the Royals he amassed a 123-109 record, along with another 78 wins in Japan. His career ERA was 4.24 and he finished with 1918 strikeouts in the major leagues.
Known for his tornado-like delivery which often baffled hitters, Nomo sparked off Nomo-Mania in Los Angeles when he arrived and his success directly led to other Japanese players coming over to MLB. Without his accomplishments in the majors, it is possible players like Ichiro (and the AL’s All Star success,) Hideki Matsui (and his porn collection,) or Hideki Irabu (fat toad,) would never have come to the big leagues.
The 39 year old announced his retirement on his website with the terse statement, “Retiring. July 17, 2008. I announced my retirement from my playing career.”
He spoke with the Kyodo News later and told them, “I want to continue, but I don’t think I can deliver a professional-level performance anymore. I believe many clubs think the same way. I knew I had to make some kind of decision. I knew I had to let my fans know.”
Seeing as how he threw the first Red Sox no-hitter I had ever seen, he will long be remembered by me. Au revoir et bon chance monsieur Nomo, bon chance.
The Slanch Report 
See, Nomo has CLASS. All that’s left is his performance of seppuku in front of Dodger stadium.
Meanwhile, Brett Favre is whining his way back to the NFL. And seppuku is completely out of question with him. Too bad.
We share quite different memories of Hideo Nomo, as I remember him as the terrible Mets pitcher who went 4-5 after the mets traded fan favorite Dave Mlicki for him in ’98 (Mlicki, who shut out the yanks in the first in-season subway series game, and who wound up pitching better the rest of the way in ’98).
The other thing I hated about nomo and his mets tenure, was whenever he got a K, they played this awful, AWFUL soundclip at Shea that just repeated “NO-MO! *drum* *drum* *drum* NO-MO!”
I, for one, am certainly glad Nomo is No-Mo (though yes, it’s good that he probably helped bring along the ichiro’s and fukudome’s in baseball today)…