Detroit, MI (Sports Network) – Seattle Mariners principal owner Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away Thursday in his native Japan, the team has announced. He was 85 years old.<\/p>\n
Yamauchi, the retired chairman of video-game giant Nintendo who purchased the team from Jeff Smulyan in 1992 to help keep the club in the Pacific Northwest, had been suffering from pneumonia.<\/p>\n
“The Seattle Mariners organization is deeply saddened by the passing today of Mr. Hiroshi Yamauchi,” the club said in a statement. “His leadership of Nintendo is legendary worldwide. His decision in 1992 to purchase the Mariners franchise and keep Major League Baseball in Seattle as a ‘gesture of goodwill to the citizens of the Pacific Northwest’ is legendary in this region.”<\/p>\n
Yamauchi’s presence was instrumental in the Mariners’ ability to lure several top Japanese players to the major leagues, most notably 10-time All-Star and 2001 AL MVP Ichiro Suzuki. Current pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma, former All-Star closer Kazuhiro Sasaki, catcher Kenji Johjima and reliever Shigetoshi Hasegawa also had varying degrees of success during their tenures in Seattle.<\/p>\n
“Mr. Yamauchi will be remembered for his role in moving forward the opportunity for Japanese baseball players to play in the United States,” the statement continued. “He will forever be a significant figure in Mariners Baseball history.”<\/p>\n
Seattle became the first major league team to be owned by a non-North American entity under Yamauchi, who relinquished daily operations of the Mariners to Nintendo of America in 2004.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Detroit, MI (Sports Network) – Seattle Mariners principal owner Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away Thursday in his native Japan, the team has announced. He was 85 years old. Yamauchi, the retired chairman of video-game giant Nintendo who purchased the team from Jeff Smulyan in 1992 to help keep the club in the Pacific Northwest, had been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[213,131,212],"class_list":["post-5243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb","tag-mariners","tag-seattle","tag-seattle-mariners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}