IN: Nomo was born into the working-class Osaka family of Shizuo, a fisherman and postal worker, and Kayoko, a part-time supermarket employee. As a youth, Nomo was shy and withdrawn, although passionate about baseball. He developed his corkscrew-style pitching motion in order to impress his father while playing catch. He believed that rotating from having his back turned to his target would help him add speed to his pitches.

The tornado delivery that baffled batters in Japan had the same effect on major league hitters, and he led the league in strikeouts in 1995 (while finishing second in walks) and was second with a 2.54 ERA. He struck out 11.101 batters per 9 innings to break Sandy Koufax's single-season franchise record of 10.546 in 1962. He also started that year's All-Star Game, striking out three of the six batters he faced. But he only barely won NL Rookie of the Year honors that year over future MVP Chipper Jones, as many voters felt that his Japanese success made him anything but a rookie, although he qualified by Major League rules. Nomo had another fine season in 1996 which was capped by a no-hitter thrown on September 17 in the unlikeliest of places, Denver's Coors Field, a park notoriously known as being a hitters' park because of its high elevation, semi-arid climate, and lack of foul territory. He was the last Dodger to throw a no-hitter until Josh Beckett completed one on May 25, 2014.  Nomo also found commercial success in America. Nomo had a signature sneaker, called the Air Max Nomo, produced by Nike in 1996. Also, he appeared on a Segata Sanshiro commercial for the Sega Saturn in 1997.  As batters caught on to his delivery, his effectiveness waned a bit in 1997, although he still went 14-12, joining Dwight Gooden as the only other pitcher to strike out at least 200 batters in each of his first three seasons.
QUESTION: who did he play for at this time?
IN: Fibber McGee and Molly was an American radio comedy series. A staple of the NBC Red Network for the show's entire run and one of the most popular and enduring radio series of its time, the prime time situation comedy ran as a standalone series from 1935 to 1956, then continued as a short-form series as part of the weekend Monitor from 1957 to 1959. The title characters were created and portrayed by Jim and Marian Jordan, a real-life husband and wife team that had been working in radio since the 1920s. Fibber McGee and Molly, which followed up the Jordans' previous radio sitcom Smackout, followed the adventures of a working-class couple, the habitual storyteller Fibber McGee and his sometimes terse but always loving wife

Fibber McGee and Molly spun two supporting characters off into their own shows. By far the most successful and popular was Harold Peary's Gildersleeve, spun into The Great Gildersleeve in 1941. This show introduced single parenthood of a sort to creative broadcasting: the pompous, previously married Gildersleeve now moved to Summerfield, became single (although the missing wife was never explained), and raised his orphaned, spirited niece and nephew, while dividing his time between running his manufacturing business and (eventually) becoming the town water commissioner. In one episode, the McGees arrived in Summerfield for a visit with their old neighbor with hilarious results: McGee inadvertently learns Gildersleeve is engaged, and he practically needs to be chloroformed to perpetuate the secret a little longer.  Peary returned the favor in a memorable 1944 Fibber McGee & Molly episode in which neither of the title characters appeared: Jim Jordan was recovering from a bout of pneumonia (this would be written into the show the following week, when the Jordans returned), and the story line involved Gildersleeve and nephew Leroy hoping to visit the McGees at home during a train layover in Wistful Vista, but finding Fibber and Molly not at home. At the end of the episode, Gildersleeve discovers the couple had left in a hurry that morning when they received Gildy's letter saying he would be stopping over in Wistful Vista.  Marlin Hurt's Beulah was also spun off, leading to both a radio and television show that would eventually star Hattie McDaniel and Ethel Waters.  Jim and Marian Jordan themselves occasionally appeared on other programs, away from their Fibber and Molly characters. One memorable episode of Suspense ("Backseat Driver", 02-03-1949) cast the Jordans as victims of a car-jacking; Jim Jordan's tense, interior monologues were especially dramatic.
QUESTION:
Why was this significant?