Golden Gloves 2003-2011

Nippon Professional Baseball’s Golden Glove announcements kicked off the offseason media-voted award cycle with few surprises. I am, however, interested in who receives votes, and who, over the years, have received the greatest share of the votes cast.

While the entire undertaking for all the votes since 1972 is a monumental undertaking, NPB has made it easier by publishing the vote totals since 2003, so I wrote a program to scrape those pages and got a record of every player to receive a vote since that year.

I decided to split the 19-year span into one segment of nine seasons (2003 to 2011) and one of 10 (2012-2021), and spill out the three players for each position, nine for the outfield, with the largest share of the votes during those spans.

I’ll put the first group here and the second in another post.

The player with the biggest share at a position in his league from 2003 to 2011, was Chunichi Dragons second baseman Masahiro Araki with 4.80 full shares and six Golden Gloves. Runner-up was his double-play partner, Hirokazu Kawabata with 4.66 and six awards at shortstop. Norichika Aoki, who didn’t start playing regularly until 2005, was third 4.64 and six awards.

Here’s the overall rundown:

PitcherCLPL
1Kenshin Kawakami1.61Daisuke Matsuzaka2.61
2Kenta Maeda1.00Yu Darvish1.50
3Hiroki Kuroda0.95Hideaki Wakui1.41
CatcherCLPL
1Motonobu Tanishige3.41Kenji Jojima2.86
2Akihiro Yano1.83Toru Hosokawa1.74
3Shinnosuke Abe1.45Tomoya Satozaki1.55
FirstCLPL
1Andy Sheets1.81Kazuya Fukuura2.97
2Kenta Kurihara1.58Hiroki Kokubo1.09
3George Arias0.89Nobuhiko Matsunaka0.72
SecondCLPL
1Masahiro Araki4.80Kensuke Tanaka3.10
2Hiroyasu Tanaka1.04Tadahito Iguchi1.74
3Keiichi Hirano0.87Yuichi Honda1.45
ThirdCLPL
1Shinya Miyamoto2.36Toshiaki Imae3.19
2Akinori Iwamura1.50Eiichi Koyano1.84
3Kazuyoshi Tatsunami1.04Michihiro Ogasawara0.92
ShortCLPL
1Hirokazu Ibata4.66Munenori Kawasaki2.63
2Takashi Toritani1.32Tsuyoshi Nishioka1.4
3Shinya Miyamoto1.11Makoto Kaneko1.3
OutfieldCLPL
1Norichika Aoki4.64Hichori Morimoto2.97
2Norihiro Akahoshi3.62Atsunori Inaba2.81
3Kosuke Fukudome3.13Tsuyoshi Shinjo2.60
4Tatsuhiko Kinjo1.82Tomotaka Sakaguchi2.34
5Yoshinobu Takahashi1.39Yoshio Itoi2.26
6Alex Ochoa1.36Naoyuki Omura1.69
7Hidenori Kuramoto1.13Arihito Muramatsu1.65
8Masato Akamatsu0.95Takumi Kuriyama1.32
9Tetsuya Matsumoto0.85Yoshitomo Tani1.07

What I loved about doing this was the reminder of how good some of these players and teams were. With catcher Motonobu Tanishige, Chunichi Dragons had three of the top players of the period, and the Nippon Ham Fighters four, with the outfield of Hichori Morimoto, Tsuyoshi Shinjo — who only played three seasons for them — and Atsunori Inaba, and second baseman Kensuke Tanaka.

First base and catcher are the only two spots the Fighters didn’t have at least one player, and they had Yoshio Itoi after Shinjo split.

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