Kosei Yoshida threw more pitches in six games during last summer's National High School Baseball Championship than NPB hurlers did in any one month last season.
Yoshida threw 881 pitches during Summer Koshien for Kanaashi Nogyo (Akita) High School, which made a Cinderella run to the final. Among NPB pitchers, the highest monthly total (per Deltagraphs) was 710 by the Hiroshima Carp's Daichi Osera — who actually hit that number from Sept. 1 to Oct. 7 — in six starts. The high in MLB was 662 by the Washington Nationals' Max Scherzer in May.
Yoshida didn't just throw more pitches, he did it with much less time to recover. He threw five complete games and five innings of another from Aug. 8-21.
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