The Fukuoka native writes that the home run came in a Seinan League game while he was a bench player, and that the excitement from that moment means he has no regrets about playing baseball in college.

From park soccer to the diamond at age 10

Miyaguchi wrote that he spent every day after elementary school playing soccer with friends at a neighborhood park until curfew, and asked his parents to let him join a soccer program, but they refused. In the spring of fourth grade, a transfer student moved in nearby and, looking to make a fresh start, invited Miyaguchi to play baseball. Miyaguchi initially resisted — he was a soccer kid — but agreed to try, and wrote that he was hooked from that day on, playing from morning to night.

The next autumn, in fifth grade, he begged his parents to let him play baseball, and got an immediate yes.

He initially planned to continue with FIT Jr.’s junior high team, but his parents wanted him to join his school’s club team instead. At his elementary graduation, he tearfully declared in front of his teammates that he would keep playing, and his parents relented — but then learned that the friend whose invitation had started his baseball journey was joining the school club instead. Miyaguchi followed him there.

A captain’s middle school years, a high school heartbreak

In junior high, Miyaguchi was the team’s cleanup hitter, shortstop and captain, according to the blog. His class was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, which wiped out the national junior high tournament, and he wrote that younger teammates tease him about having been in elementary school during the pandemic.

Miyaguchi, who came up through a softball school club and entered as a general admission student, wrote that he seriously wavered over whether to keep playing. He had aimed for the more academically prestigious Fukuoka High School but failed its entrance exam.

That rejection, he wrote, fueled a defining moment: in the fifth round of the spring prefectural tournament against Fukuoka High, he was not a regular but was inserted into the starting lineup because his coach knew how much the matchup meant to him. With two outs and the bases loaded in the first inning, he lined a two-run single to left on a full count. His team won and went on to reach the prefectural semifinals.

The team’s ace was Junki Sonoda, now a pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants, and Miyaguchi wrote that everyone believed the summer invitational to Japan’s national high school tournament at Koshien was within reach. Instead, the team lost its opening summer game to Hakata Kogyo, which it had beaten by a five-run mercy rule in the new-team tournament. Miyaguchi wrote that he was stunned, and that what he felt most was not regret but apology to the supporters around him.

Two retake years, then a change of heart in college

After that loss, he turned to exam prep.

He entered university with no intention of playing baseball, he wrote — he had pictured joining a casual volleyball circle and enjoying typical college life. But while watching his high school senior sister's final tournament, he was struck by how compelling it was to be devoted to something, and decided that playing club baseball as a college student could be just as worthwhile.

Why he calls himself a late bloomer

Miyaguchi closes the post by writing that both his baseball and his studies only bore fruit after time and sustained effort, and that he plans to keep working steadily with that self-knowledge in mind.