Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Giants Coach Takuya Kimura Died Today

Very sad. I'd mentioned in my previous post that he collapsed on the field during pre-game fielding practice in Hiroshima on Friday, essentially with a stroke, and had been in a coma for the past several days with "very little hope of recovering". This morning, he passed away. He leaves behind a wife and three kids, and a host of Giants and Carp fans.

This is pretty much the only decent photo I ever took of him (I rarely get close enough to Giants players; this was during batting practice before a game in May 2008):



The saddest thing, to me, is that he would have turned 38 next week. That's just too young for a recently-retired baseball player to be dying of a stroke.

Mainichi has a photo gallery of his career here.

Nikkan Sports has the progression of his condition here.

The Japanese baseball cards blog has a bunch of cards over his career here.

I vaguely wonder if Takuya Kimura of SMAP will make any comments. Haven't seen any yet, but there was a long ongoing joke about their sharing the same name, and the Giants player even used "Kimutaku" as a nickname just like the SMAP guy.

3 comments:

rilakkuma said...

How about this?

ttp://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20100405-00000033-sanspo-ent

I can't find any other article except this.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this. I had been trying to find out how he was and couldn't find any info. Such sad news. Way to young!!!

Knox said...

It's sad to hear such tragic news. Especially him, coz his active and still young :(