Japanese HOF Project [Archive] - Net54baseball.com Forums

nat

05-08-2018, 10:38 AM

I've decided to take my collection in a different direction. My new goal is to get one playing-days card of each Japanese hall of famer. It's been exciting so far, as it provides an opportunity to learn not just about new sets of baseball cards, but an entirely new world of baseball.

Anyhow, I'd like to document this project. We have pick-up threads, but this is different enough that I thought it might merit its own thread. The plan is to post a picture of each card and a little bit of history about the player pictured to give you, dear reader, an idea of who this guy is and his place in Japanese baseball. The tread is on this side of the board because professional Japanese baseball didn't start until 1936, and although there are pre-war Japanese cards (which I'll have to track down eventually) they are very rare.

We'll start with these two guys.

On the right is Kazuhisa Inao (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=inao--000kaz). He pitched from 1956 to 1969 for the Nishitetsu Lions. All Japanese teams are owned by corporations, and they are identified by the name of the company that owns them and then their nickname. Nishitetsu is the national Japanese railroad. The team plays in Fukuoka, down on the southern end of Japan. Inao had a relatively short career, but few were better than he was at his peak. He's sort of the Japanese Sandy Koufax. He won 42 games in 1961, pitching more than 400 innings. He surpassed 30 wins several other seasons. He set a record with a 1.06 ERA as a rookie and won 20 consecutive games in 1957.

On the left is Takehiko Bessho (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=bessho000tak). Bessho played from 1942 to 1960, taking a couple years out for the war. He spent most of his career with the Yomiuri Giants. It's hard to over-state how dominant the Giants were up until the 1980s. They were like the Yankees only more so. At one point they won the Japan series nine consecutive years, and have won the series 22 times in total. (It was first held in 1950.) He won 310 games, fifth all-time according to Baseball Guru (although parts of their website are out of date and this one may be as well). He wasn't quite as good as Inao, but he had a longer career and was one of the greatest pitchers in Japanese history.

The card itself is a menko card. Menko is a card-flipping game. The idea would be familiar to American kids, although menko has been around for centuries. You can find menko cards featuring all sorts of things, athletes, animals, cars, and many others. Menko cards tend to be colorful with lots of designs that are intended to appeal to kids. Early menko cards had these designs on the fronts of the cards, by the 1950s the designs were relegated to the back. The set is catalogued as JCM 28a and was issued in 1957 (so this is Inao's rookie card). There were hundreds of sets of menko cards made, but relatively few of each one (either that or they didn't survive at a very high rate). Gary Engel, who literally wrote the book on Japanese baseball cards, says that this set is relatively uncommon, with around 100 to 250 examples of each card known.

I'll post more cards later.

darkhorse9

05-08-2018, 11:54 AM

I love the casual note for Bessho where he took a couple years off for the war....TO TRY AND KILL US!!!!!!
:D

Rickyy

05-08-2018, 11:54 AM

Nice!!! I am starting to get interested in Japanese cards...and have a few I have acquired over the years. I grew up in Japan until I was 10 yrs old and it was during the glory days of Oh and Nagashima's Giants so I got to actually seem them play as a youngster. Didn't collect them though (except for some menko cards) until I came to the US and discovered MLB cards.

I don't know if you can get one of all HOF... I'm not up on all of the cards issued, but if you can find one of Eiji Sawamura of the Yomiuri Giants. that will be something. I don't believe there is one. He was killed in WW2, and at age 17 of course he gained fame when struck out Babe Ruth and Gehrig at an exhibition game. The Japanese Cy Young Award equivalent is named in his honor.

Ricky Y

nat

05-08-2018, 02:05 PM

Well, to be fair, Bessho was stationed in China, and then re-deployed to the home islands.

And yes, I realize that this goal is probably impossible. (Although if you get a lead on a Sawamura card let me know.)

But, eh. It's still an ideal to shoot for.

Anyway, next up is Noburo Akiyama (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=akiyam000nob). Akiyama was a good pitcher on a bad team with a short career. He pitched for the Taiyo Whales from 1956 to 1967. This card is from the same set as the last one, so this is also his rookie card. He was a workhorse early in his career, reportedly throwing 1000 pitch training sessions in college. He was certainly a good pitchers (career ERA 2.60, although I'm pretty sure in a lower run-scoring environment than we're used to), but only briefly a great one. And he managed just under 3000 IP for his career. Sort of a peculiar choice for the hall of fame - it would be sort of like electing Roy Oswalt - but the American hall of fame also has plenty of questionable inductees.

seanofjapan

05-08-2018, 06:54 PM

Awesome cards!

I live in Japan and collect Japanese vintage cards too (I'm more of a set builder, working on stuff from the 70s mostly these days). Its nice to see others are collecting them too!

Menko are amazing, its one of the vintage card collecting areas where Japan has something totally unique in comparison with the US.

If you need any help tracking stuff down let me know (not sure I can always help but might be able to!)

(Also a minor correction - Nishitetsu is not the national railroad, it is a private railroad that runs in Fukuoka. I lived in Fukuoka for four years and used to take their trains all the time!)

Rickyy

05-09-2018, 12:25 AM

Rickyy

05-09-2018, 12:27 AM

Jeff Alcorn

05-09-2018, 01:07 AM

Hi,

I have been collecting Japanese cards since the late 1970s, and it is very enjoyable to learn about their players, teams and history. Ricky- if you need help with Calbee checklists just let me know, I have them all. Sean- thanks for getting me that 1976 Calbee Matty Alou "Lions vs. Braves" card and sending it to our friend Jay Shelton.
Nat- your knowledge of Japanese cards and baseball sounds pretty good for someone just starting out.

If any of you need help or information, just let me know. I love to share my knowledge and learn from others.

Jeff

seanofjapan

05-09-2018, 01:32 AM

I checked out your link. Looks great! I am trying to slowly track down some cards...esp the early 70's Kalbee's of some of my favorite players. Is there check lists for those issues? I know some sets are huge.

Ricky Y

Hi,

Thanks!

If you register on Sports Card Forum (https://www.sportscardforum.com/private.php) some of the complete Calbee checklists from the 70s are available there, the guy who does Clyde's Stale cards did all the work on those a while ago (https://clydes-stalecards.blogspot.jp/)

And yeah, the sets from the mid-70s are huge. I'm working on the 1975-76 Calbee set right now and it has 1472 cards! And some series of it were only issued in single cities (two series in Hiroshima, one in Nagoya) so they are extremely hard to find, (kind of like if part of the 1972 Topps set was only sold in Cleveland and another only sold in Denver). Its got to be one of the most difficult sets in the world to put together (though fortunately prices don't reflect this for the most part).

seanofjapan

05-09-2018, 01:34 AM

nat

05-09-2018, 10:24 AM

Rickyy

05-09-2018, 01:15 PM

Hi,

Thanks!

If you register on Sports Card Forum (https://www.sportscardforum.com/private.php) some of the complete Calbee checklists from the 70s are available there, the guy who does Clyde's Stale cards did all the work on those a while ago (https://clydes-stalecards.blogspot.jp/)

And yeah, the sets from the mid-70s are huge. I'm working on the 1975-76 Calbee set right now and it has 1472 cards! And some series of it were only issued in single cities (two series in Hiroshima, one in Nagoya) so they are extremely hard to find, (kind of like if part of the 1972 Topps set was only sold in Cleveland and another only sold in Denver). Its got to be one of the most difficult sets in the world to put together (though fortunately prices don't reflect this for the most part).

domo arigato for the information Sean! I will check it out.

Ricky Y

Rickyy

05-09-2018, 01:16 PM

nat

05-09-2018, 06:55 PM

Moving on from menko cards for a while. This is a bromide. Bromides were sold as baseball cards, one at a time. It's printed on thin stock, and is, maddeningly, very slightly too large to fit into a binder page. The set is catalogued as JBR 16, and Engel says that it is fairly rare: only double digits of each card known to exist. The backs are blank, but mine has a stamp on it. Google translate tells me that the stamp says "one piece", which doesn't make any sense, so anyone with more insight is welcome to fill me in.

The player is Takao Kajimoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kajimo000tak), who has got to be unique in that he both (1) is a pitcher in the hall of fame and (2) has a losing record for his career. Just barely, I grant, but 254-255 is still a losing record. He played for the Hankyu Braves from 1954 to 1973. He did win the pennant at one point, but, as you might expect, the Braves were pretty bad for much of his career. He was a 12-time all star, and the first Japanese pitcher to clear 2000 strike outs.

nat

05-09-2018, 07:18 PM

And now, as Monty Python would say, for something completely different.

In 1991 Baseball Magazine decided to issue American-style baseball cards. Their sets would be of a design and composition familiar to Americans, and sold in packs, like American cards. They were (and are) a hit.

I'm not usually a fan of shiny modern cards - check out my avatar for my favorite era of American cards - but there's no way to get around it for modern players. Kids just don't play menko like they used to. This is a Masaki Saito (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=saitoh001mas) from the 1993 BBM set. Unlike the earlier cards that I've posted, these are very very very common. This one cost me $1. Saito was a first-round draft pick, pitching for the Giants from 1984 to 2001. He was inducted into the hall of fame in 2016. He began his career as a reliever/swing-man, but over time transitioned into one of the great pitchers of the 1990s. He won the Sawamura award three times, tying a record. (The Sawamura award is given to the best pitcher in the league, although they reserve the right to not award it in any given year if they think that no one is up to their standards that year - which has happened a couple times.) He was also, apparently, a very good fielder, winning several gold gloves. You wouldn't think that pitcher fielding matters a whole lot, but ask the 2006 Tigers about that.

Just looking at his career numbers, Saito looks like an odd hall of fame choice. 2300 innings isn't much. Roy Halladay, who will probably get elected but who is an interesting test-case for short-career pitchers in America, got up to 2700 innings. I suspect that I need to spend more time with Japanese record books to get a better feel for the context. Maybe in the modern Japanese game 2300 innings isn't so bad.

seanofjapan

05-09-2018, 07:26 PM

First, I'd like to start by recommending Sean's blog. It was one of the first things that I encountered when I started getting interested in Japanese cards.

Second, do you folks read kanji? I took Japanese in high school years and years ago, but (1) it's pretty rusty at this point, and (2) I never did learn to read kanji. One of the most challenging things about collecting these cards has been trying to figure out who is on them. (Sometimes sellers will tell you, sometimes not. Often they just provide the last name.) I've been doing it through a combination of drawing kanji in google translate, checking baseball-reference to see if the player that I'm looking for was on the team he's shown with on the card, and checking Engel's book (which sometimes only lists last names). It's slow going, especially the google translate bit.

Third, here's another card. Same set as the first two. Bessho is again on the left, next to him is Futoshi Nakanishi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nakani000fut). I get the feeling that after they took the picture of Bessho with Inao the photographer just grabbed Nakanishi for another shot. Nakanishi played 1952 to 1969 with the Lions. He was a third baseman who, when he was young, looked like he was going to be one of the best ever. A slugging percentage over .600 for a 20 year old is pretty impressive. He led the league in home runs for four straight years. When this card was issued he was at the top of his game, a hugely successful slugging third baseman, his team had just won the Japan series, and he had just gotten married - to his manager's daughter. But it wasn't to last. In 1959 he suffered the first of a string of injuries from which he never recovered. He never played a full season again, although he did take over managing his team when he was just 29.

Thanks!

I can read kanji, but I've lived here for almost 20 years and it took some work.

With player name recognition it is best to concentrate on the learning the kanji in last names since (with some exceptions) they tend to use more common ones (中、山、西 etc) while first names are way more idiosyncratic and use a lot of obscure ones with weird readings. I can definitely help with reading names if anyone has questions about them.

One potential shortcut which I have found helpful (sometimes I don't know how to read the kanji on a player's name since they have multiple readings) is to use the Japanese wikipedia page which has the list of players for each team. So if you get a card of a player from the Hawks for example (https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/福岡ソフトバンクホークスの選手一覧 ) , you can scroll through and look for the kanji (easiest way is to just look for the first kanji in the name), click on the player's name when you find it, then click over to the English Wikipedia page and you've found your guy!

seanofjapan

05-09-2018, 09:07 PM

I suspect that I need to spend more time with Japanese record books to get a better feel for the context. Maybe in the modern Japanese game 2300 innings isn't so bad.

One thing with career stats is that owing to the shorter season Japanese stars usually have lower totals in comparison with their American counterparts (which makes Sadaharu Oh's career home run total so insane). So 2,000 hits is the de facto standard for HOF consideration rather than 3,000, etc. Not sure if that was the case with Saito, he had a sort of Sandy Koufax like period of brief but exceptional dominance in the late 80s-early 90s.

Jayworld

05-10-2018, 07:30 AM

Nat:
As posted above, I'd definitely recommend Sean's blog site, as well as Dave's blog site here:
http://japanesebaseballcards.blogspot.com/

Both Sean and Jeff Alcorn can certainly translate for you. Jeff is a good friend who is one of the "pioneers" of Japanese baseball card collecting here in the U.S. His knowledge is vast and highly recommended.

Collecting Japanese baseball cards is a lot of fun, both in the hunt and history. Picking up Gary Engel's books are a definite must (although better used as a history guide and checklist instead of card valuation prices). Robert Klevens is also a great resource and owns Prestige Collectibles and is also a member here on the forum.

I started collecting Japanese baseball cards in 1980 when a mutual friend brought back some 1978 Yamakatsu cards for me from Japan (I have since finished the set).

nat

05-10-2018, 12:51 PM

Koji Akiyama (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=akiyam001koj) played outfield for the Lions and the Hawks over a 20 year career. He surpassed 2000 career hits as well as 400 home runs. He also spent one season, very early in his career, with the San Jose Bees, at the time an unaffiliated class A team. He was a flashy and dramatic player, doing, among other things, a backflip onto home plate after hitting a key home run in the Japan Series. He was also fast, turning in three 30-30 seasons. Superficially his statistics look like those of a young Jose Canseco, but this probably sells him short. For one thing, he was always better at getting on base than Canseco was.

The Lions were the dominant team of the late 80s and early 90s. The won the pennant many times. After an off year at age 31 (albeit one in which he still slugged >.500) he was traded to the Daiei Hawks.

Edited to add: I have Engel's book on vintage cards. It's really good as a guide and checklist, but you're right, the prices are... not helpful. I know about Prestige Collectables, but haven't bid in any of their auctions. I'll look into the next one.

seanofjapan

05-10-2018, 10:58 PM

Akiyama is great, he was also the best manager in NPB (IMO) for several years, though for some reason he retired quite young. I lived in Fukuoka when he was the Hawks manager (taking over after Sadaharu Oh retired) and watching his teams play was the most exciting time I've ever had as a baseball fan as they were constantly dominating the PL and won the Japan Series in his final season.

He also arguably had the best hair of any player to ever take the field.

I'm not a BBM collector but I have to admit to liking the colorful designs of that 1993 set.

nat

05-11-2018, 10:24 AM

It's great having people around who have actually seen these guys. To me they are names on a baseball card (or a list of stats), but I would certainly have liked to have seen them play.

One more BBM card and then we'll go back to vintage.

This is Tsutomu Ito (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=itoh--001tsu). He had a very long career, and so managed to accumulate some respectable career numbers, but he really wasn't much of a hitter. A career slash line of 247/319/363 does not strike fear into the heart of opposing pitchers. He was a great defensive catcher, however, and his defense got him sixteen all-star selections. I don't think that someone like this would make the American hall of fame. We do have hall of famers who are there primarily for their defense, but the only one who was consistently below-average as a hitter was Bill Mazeroski, and he (1) was the greatest defensive player ever at his position, (2) had a really famous home run, and (3) was such an embarrassing mistake that they reformed the veteran's committee afterwards to make sure that a mistake like this doesn't happen again.

Also, I don't have any idea what 'affluent nineteen' means.

seanofjapan

05-13-2018, 09:47 PM

Also, I don't have any idea what 'affluent nineteen' means.

That is a reference to the text on the back of the card, which is entirely about how much money he gets paid (I think this must have been part of a subset). The top text in the text box says 100 Million Yen Player and it goes on to say that he was the first catcher in NPB history to be paid 100 Million yen per year.

That is about 900,000 US$, so even by 1993 standards the players here weren't getting quite the insane MLB rates, but I think he can definitely be called affluent!

nat

05-15-2018, 08:58 AM

Sadarahu Oh

868 HRs. 9 MVPs. 13 consecutive HR titles.

His autobiography is dedicated to his hitting coach.

Originally I wrote a rather lengthy summary of Oh’s career, and made an attempt to explain, in so far as I understand it, what he means (and doesn’t mean) to Japanese culture. I mentioned how he is half Chinese and still holds a Taiwanese passport. I mentioned how he was a pitcher in high school, and how he hid a blistered pitching hand from his manager so that he could pitch a crucial game. And how, once he turned pro, he wasn’t any good, until he developed his famous “flamingo” batting stance. But I deleted it, because it is all, in a way, beside the point. There is one essential fact about needs to be conveyed, and it is this:

Sadaharu Oh was the greatest player in the history of Japanese baseball.

The card itself is from the enormous 1975/76 Calbee set that Sean is working on. (Sean, if you need this one I’ll trade it for another Oh card.) Menko/bromide production tailed off significantly in the late 1960s. Through the 1970s and 1980s Calbee was, basically, the only show in town. Calbee cards were inserted into envelopes and attached to the outside of bags of potato chips. Calbee also makes little toasted veggie snack things that my wife loves.

Exhibitman

05-15-2018, 01:32 PM

I'll play.

Here's a 1958 JCM29 Inao:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/miscellaneous3/Japanese%20JCM%2029%201958%20Inao.jpg

IMO one of the nicest looking Japanese sets, 1964 JG2 Nomura:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/miscellaneous3/Japanese%20JG%202%201964%20Morinaga%20Nomura.jpg

Nagashima:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/miscellaneous3/Japanese%20JG%202%201964%20Morinaga%20Nagashima.jp g

Oh:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/miscellaneous3/Japanese%20JG%202%201964%20Morinaga%20Oh.jpg

I've got nice cards of Kawakami (nickname "The God of Batting"), Harimoto (only 3,000 hits member), and Victor Starrfin somewhere.

here's a bromide of Lefty O'Doul from the 1949 SF Seals goodwill tour:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/frankleftyodoulcard/websize/1949%20Japanese%20OquDoul.jpg

and from the 1951 tour with Joe D:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/frankleftyodoulcard/1951%20Japanese%20tour%20card.JPG

This postcard depicting Lefty and Japanese HOF manager Shunichi Amachi has a commemorative postmark dated 11/7/51 from Narumi Stadium, where the Seals played that day:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/frankleftyodoulcard/1951%20OquDoul%20Japan%20Tour%20PC%201.JPG

and I have a really spiffy 1950 tour 8 x 10 bromide of Dom DiMaggio somewhere too.

nat

05-15-2018, 04:06 PM

Great cards Adam! The quality of the images on the JG2s is excellent, but I especially like the O'Doul/DiMaggio card.

Eventually I'll need to decide whether a Goudey O'Doul counts for this project, or whether I'll need to get a Japanese one. (With similar issues about Nomo, Matsui, etc.)

Exhibitman

05-15-2018, 05:49 PM

well, when in Rome, er, Tokyo. There are Japanese O'Doul cards so I think you have to go that route. That's free advice and it is worth every dime you pay for it.

seanofjapan

05-15-2018, 08:58 PM

seanofjapan

05-15-2018, 09:02 PM

Adam - those cards are beautiful!

About O'Doul, I only have one Japanese card of his which is from a menko set issued during the Seals 1949 tour of Japan. The art is pretty crudely drawn but as an uncut sheet the set as a whole is kind of visually appealing. They aren't too expensive either:

https://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.jp/2016/09/lefty-odoul-and-1949-san-francisco.html

JoeDfan

05-16-2018, 09:49 AM

Is that O'Doul/DiMaggio card supposed to have cut corners?

I have one, but I thought it was trimmed...

Thanks,
Sean

Big Six

05-16-2018, 10:02 AM

I don’t have much to add but seeing as I’m a big Lefty O’Doul fan, here ya go...

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20180516/c1efad5a55b454ea3fa8b6767072a6c1.jpg

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

nat

05-16-2018, 10:38 AM

Kinugasa is most famous for his consecutive games-played streak. He didn't miss a game for 17 years. He began his career (in 1965) at first base, and moved to third in 1975. (Moving up the defensive spectrum is quite unusual.) He spent his entire career with the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, retiring in 1987. Amazingly, when he retired his consecutive games-played streak was still intact. He surpassed Gehrig, although Ripken would later pass him. Kinugasa rarely led the league in anything, and didn't make any best-nines until late in his career (since he was usually blocked by Oh or Nagashima). He was, however, often among the league leaders in many offensive categories, and places in the top 10 or so in many career statistics. His style was aggressive; he was a big slugger (504 career home runs) famous for a max-effort style of swing.

Inevitably mentioned in (western) Kinugasa biographies (of which this is one, so here's the mention), Kinugasa's father was an African American service man. He left the family when the future ball-player was young, and he was raised by his mother.

Kinugasa's nickname was 'Ironman'. One would think that the reasoning behind it was obvious, but the ever-reliable Wikipedia claims that it was taken from a manga.

He died less than a month ago.

This is also a Calbee card, although somewhat newer than the Oh posted above. This one is from 1982. Calbee cards tend to be slightly smaller than American cards, but for a while in the 80s they made them very small. This one is Goudey-sized or smaller.

Exhibitman

05-16-2018, 11:31 AM

Is that O'Doul/DiMaggio card supposed to have cut corners?

I have one, but I thought it was trimmed...

Thanks,
Sean

I've only seen them with corners cut. I have no idea, though. Mine was pasted to notebook paper too.

Rickyy

05-17-2018, 12:19 PM

nat

05-17-2018, 02:00 PM

Let's continue with the Carp.

Ohno was Kinugasa's teammate for about ten years. He's another lifetime Carp, pitching for them from 1977 (when retired only one batter but gave up five ER) to 1998.

He's got an absurd winning percentage: .597. Just for some perspective, an American team with a .597 winning percentage would end up with a record of 96-66. Pretty good. He was a Sawamura award winner and 10-time all-star. I'm not sure why, but in 1991 the Carp decided that he should be a relief pitcher, and he started striking out everybody and their brother. His K/9 rate jumped from an already-respectable 8.5 to 11.3. In 1995, as a 39 year old, he returned to being a starting pitcher. His career, therefore, has something like the shape of John Smoltz'.

I just noticed, look at that grip. Did Ohno throw a knuckleball?

Also, let's talk about intellectual property for a minute here. I realize that Cincinnati and Hiroshima are a long distance apart, but surely the Reds have a lawyer filing lawsuits any time the Carp try to sell gear or licensed merch over here. Admittedly this doesn't happen much, but I had a Kintetsu Buffalos cap when I was a kid, so I imagine there are some Carp hats out there somewhere.

rgpete

05-17-2018, 02:35 PM

What about Wally Yonamine the First American / Japanese to be in the Japanese HOF The card is one of his 1951 rookie cards

seanofjapan

05-17-2018, 09:12 PM

Also, let's talk about intellectual property for a minute here. I realize that Cincinnati and Hiroshima are a long distance apart, but surely the Reds have a lawyer filing lawsuits any time the Carp try to sell gear or licensed merch over here. Admittedly this doesn't happen much, but I had a Kintetsu Buffalos cap when I was a kid, so I imagine there are some Carp hats out there somewhere.

They might. Trademarks are territorial so its not a problem for the Carp to use the same logo as the Reds in Japan, but if they sell that in the US they would run afoul of Cincinnati's TM. I'm guessing they might have some sort of arrangement worked out to avoid disputes (and also to sell Reds stuff in Japan, where it could be in breach of the Carp's trademark).

A lot of the older teams here have uniforms, etc obviously modelled off of MLB teams (Tigers, Giants, Dragons) but its only the Carp which has the same initial as their US counterpart!

nat

05-18-2018, 08:51 PM

Lou Gehrig:Babe Ruth || ? :Sadaharu Oh

They were teammates for years, and played for the most successful team in history during it's most successful period in history. Forever linked as a part of the ON-Cannon. Nagashima was a gold-glove third-baseman (and in that was different than Gehrig), who hit 444 home runs and collected close to 2500 hits. He is probably a top-5 player all-time in Japan. Jim Albright ranks him 3rd over all. He was a five-time MVP and a best nine player every season of his career. (So, in context, he was better than Gehrig.) The Giants of the 1960s were just beyond belief.

The place where the Gehrig analogy really breaks down is in their respective roles in the broader culture. Oh was the better player, but not the bigger star. It's worth noting that the #1 (and #2, and #3, and so on) cards in the inaugural Calbee set were all of Nagashima. He is Japan's most beloved baseball player. He played for the Giants from 1958 to 1974, and took over managing the team after his retirement.

The card is from the JCM 54 menko set. It's a 1958 issue, which should make this one of Nagashima's rookie cards. (I don't know if that designation carries any weight or interest in Japan. The Japanese baseball card hobby is much smaller than its American counterpart, and it may have evolved in different ways. Which may be commendable, caring more about a player's first card always seemed a bit odd to me.) I'm a big fan of menko cards, and I think that I like the ones with the solid color backgrounds best of all. They're a bit artistic, sort of like 1949 Leaf (my favorite set). Engel gives this set a rarity designation of R3, indicating that 10 to 99 copies of each card are known. I wonder how he knows that. The back of the card says:

Who am I?
Team: Giants
Position: third
Number: 3
pitch right hit right
Weight 73 kg
Height 1 meter 79
School Ritsudai

I had a friend read it for me, but at this point I've encountered it often enough to know what 巨人 means.

nat

05-22-2018, 11:58 AM

I'm more interested in the older cards, but Kudoh is also a hall of famer, so he gets his moment in the sun (I'm sure he's thrilled by the honor).

Kimiyasu Kudoh was a star pitcher for a bunch of teams from 1982 to 2010. That's right, 29 years. If I lived in Japan, I suspect that he'd be one of my favorite players. I love players who have strange careers, and a 29 year career counts. Kudoh appeared in the Japan Series 14 times, and although he won an MVP award he never won the Sawamura award. He first rose to prominence with the Seibu Lions, leaving in 1994 as a 31 year old. He would return in 2010 to pitch his final season (well, his final six innings) at age 47. I suspect that this was a sentimental, "retire as a Lion" sort of thing. Despite the exceptionally long career, he accumulated only about 3300 innings pitched (fewer than Smoltz pitched, even though Kudoh's career was eight years longer). In part this is due to the shorter Japanese season, and in part to the fact that he spent both the beginning and the end of his career as a reliever. He was a good fielder (and gold glove winner) but a hilariously inept batter. He was 22 for 272 for his career, a .081 batting average. 224-142 W/L record more than makes up for it though.

Rickyy

05-22-2018, 01:29 PM

nat

05-22-2018, 02:42 PM

Funny thing growing up as a kid in Japan, we flipped menko cards all the time with both Japanese kids and American kids (who lived in and around the US military base) and I don't recall Japanese bb players on them at all. Most if not all had cartoon characters on them. Both square and round ones.

Ricky Y

As near as I can tell they stopped making baseball menko cards in the 1960s. If you were growing up after that point there wouldn't have been any. Baseball menko cards were a late-40s to 1960s thing.

seanofjapan

05-23-2018, 08:31 PM

Kudoh - he is the second player you listed after Koji Akiyama who went on to be a great manager of the Hawks (he is their current manager and led them to the Japan Series in 2 out of his first 3 seasons).

About menko, that is cool that you have memories of playing with them as a kid Ricky. Most of them don't have baseball players on them, anime characters are much more common to find on them (hence your childhood recollection!)

I might buy some menko for my kids to see if I can get them into them. I have some vintage ones but have never played with them (well, I'm not going to give those to the kids, but you can still buy generic new ones pretty cheap at some shops).

Exhibitman

05-24-2018, 07:26 AM

There are menko like cards all across Asia. I have similar boxing cards from Malaysia and the Philippines (where they are called TEKS). Plus Bruce Lee cards from Thailand and China.

nat

05-25-2018, 08:28 PM

Three hall of famers in this post.

Starting in the upper left we have Hiroshi Oshita (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=oshita000hir). Oshita played for several teams from 1946 to 1959. The last half of his career he spent with the Nishitetsu Lions. Oshita grew up in Taiwan, but was recruited to play for Meiji University, one of the early powerhouses of Japanese baseball. During the war he attained the rank of second lieutenant, and, according to Wikipedia he trained as a kamikaze pilot. (I have not been able to confirm this report from any other sources, and Wikipedia is not, in general, to be trusted.) Anyway, Oshita quickly became one of Japan’s biggest sluggers. He famously used a bat that was painted blue, although he once went to bat with a stick of bamboo and was fined 100 Yen for it. His 20 home run season in 1946 set a record, although one that would not last long. (He himself nearly doubled that mark just three years later.) He also boasted strong on-base skills, hitting .383 in an abbreviated 1951 campaign. (My guess is that an injury was involved.) Rob Fitts reports that he was something of a bon vivant, with a taste for sake and women. Oshita tried his hand at pitching early in his career, but it didn’t go well. He tried his hand at managing late in his career, and it went worse. (The Flyers posted a 30-46 record before he was relieved of his duties.) His career .490 slugging percentage looks good-but-not-great to American eyes, but one must remember that context is everything. In 1949 he slugged .626 against a league average of .398. By comparison, the American League slugged .414 last year and, except for 2014, hasn’t had a league-wide slugging percentage below .400 since 1992. I would really really really like to find historical context-neutral statistics for Japanese baseball, even if it’s just OPS+ and ERA+. I’d even be happy to calculate them myself, but I haven’t been able to locate park factors, nor the home-vs-road splits that would be necessary to calculate park factors. You can compare a player’s OPS (or whatever stat you want) to the league average (which is available), but given the significance of park effects, this leaves out a lot of information and can be very deceiving. (For example, comparing Todd Helton’s OPS to league average doesn’t tell you much of anything at all.)

Next to Oshita you will see Henry “Bozo” Tadashi Wakabayashi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=wakaba000hen). He pitched from 1936 to 1953, missing 1945 and 1952. He pitched for Hanshin, Osaka, and Mainichi. He’s pitching for Hanshin on this card, as it helpfully has his team name given in English. I don’t think I’ve seen any other Japanese cards this old (or even close to this old) with English on them. The writing is almost always in Kanji. Wakabayashi had a career 1.99 ERA, which is certainly impressive, but, as noted above, context is important. If the league is slugging below .400 it’s easier to post a low ERA. Wakabayashi was born in Hawaii and was one of the first members of the Japanese baseball hall of fame. Okay, he was 16th, but that’s pretty good. Grover Cleveland Alexander was the 16th member of the American hall. In fact, if you’re looking for a fair comparison with an American player, Alexander wouldn’t be your worst choice. Both relatively early pitchers with long and successful careers, although overshadowed by some of their contemporaries. (Matty, in Alexander’s case, Starffin for Wakabayashi.) He was of Japanese descent, and was recruited to play college ball in Japan when one of his teams in Hawaii visited to play the local teams. Incredibly, video of him pitching still exists (http://fromdeeprightfield.com/history-of-baseball-the-man-from-hawaii/). He apparently threw sidearm and had a crazy windup.

The third hall of famer on this sheet is Noboru Aota (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=aota--000nob), on the lower left. Aota was an outfielder who played from 1942 to 1959. He hit .355 in an abbreviated debut as a 17 year old with Tokyo. After the war he spent a couple season with Hankyu before spending the bulk of his career with the Giants and the Whales. He was a slugger with a little bit of speed; basically the same kind of player at Oshita. Indeed, there were off-field similarities too. Like Oshita, Aota had a reputation for hard living. He missed time for the war, serving in the Japanese air force, but he did not see combat. At his retirement Aota held the all-time record for home runs (265), although it would be eclipsed just four years later.

The fourth player is Takeshi Doigaki (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=doigak000tak). He’s not in the hall of fame, but he was a standout catcher in the post-war period. When I was a kid I always like cards of catchers – with all their armor they looked like maybe they were part insect, or part baseball-playing robot. Anyway, lots of Doigaki cards show him in his full catcher gear, unfortunately this one has only got him with his glove. Offensively he was somewhat better than average, with a Yogi Berra-like ability to avoid striking out.

These cards are catalogued as JCM 75. They were issued in 1947. Engel calls them Menko cards, although I don’t really believe it. To begin with, they have neither a menko number, nor a rock-paper-scissor symbols. That may not be dispositive evidence, but it’s pretty good. On top of that, these cards are made of very thin stock. Almost a rough paper. It’s hard to imagine these flipping over once they were on the ground, and it’s even harder to imagine that anything would flip over if hit with one of these. I think it’s best to simply think of them as trading cards. The catalogue doesn’t mention the Tarzan back on the Wakabayashi card. I’ve seen two uncut sheets, however, and in both cases Wakabayashi has this back and not a “Base Ball” back, so I suspect that it’s not an unusual variation or anything. I’ve never encountered single cards from this set, only the uncut sheets, which is probably explained by the fact that the cards are very flimsy. Any that were distributed to kids would have been destroyed pretty quickly.

I like the immediately post-war cards. One of the nice things about baseball cards is that they provide a connection to world that can be very different than the one that we live in. For example, Goudey cards were issued during the depths of the great depression. There’s every possibility that the Jimmie Foxx that sits comfortably ensconced in your PSA holder was some kid’s prize possession in 1934; pennies were hard to come by back then. I’m not an historian, and can’t tell you how extensive the war damage was to Japanese industry, but it was pretty extensive. Cards like these might have been the first toys produced after the fighting stopped, and one of the first signs of life getting back to normal.

nat

05-28-2018, 10:03 AM

Makoto Kozuru (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=koduru000mak) was an OF/1B-type-player who played pro ball from 1942 to 1958. In the early part of his career he changed teams with some frequency. In 1953 he joined Hiroshima and spent the rest of his career there. (Baseball-reference’s bullpen section says that Carp fans took up a collection to raise money to sign him). Kozuru’s case for the hall of fame is obviously one based around peak performance. In 1950 he became the first Japanese player to hit 50 home runs in a season, and his marks in total bases (376), runs (143), and RBI (161) are still Japanese records. By contrast his career totals are rather mediocre (at least, for a hall of famer). Jim Albright ranks him as the 50th greatest player in Japanese history. He was a member of the all-star team that played against the Seals on their 1949 tour through Japan.

This is my first die-cut menko card. The shape is very common for a die-cut card, and I’d always assumed that it was intended to look something like a person. But, on the other hand, I’ve seen military menko with images of battleships and the like in the same shape, so who knows. The set is not catalogued, although it bears obvious similarities to a number of late 40s sets. Fortunately it is possible to date it quite precisely, as Kozuru is wearing a Stars uniform, and 1949 was the only season that he played for them.

rgpete

05-28-2018, 04:11 PM

Here are a few more some repeats Hiroshi Ohshita Kaoru Betto Wally Yonamine from the 1952 Yamaktasu and Tadashi Wakabayashi

nat

05-28-2018, 09:07 PM

Wow, those are great cards! I love the round glasses that seem to have been super popular in Japan in the 40s and 50s.

I still don't have a Yonamine card. He's really popular (at least by the standards of vintage Japanese players), although I'm not 100% sure why. He was certainly good, but it's not like he's noticeably (or even: any) better than Oshita, or a number of other contemporary players. Is it that he was also a pro football player? That he was American probably helps explain his popularity with Americans, but it's not like he was the first. Wakabayashi, for example, pre-dated him.

rgpete

05-29-2018, 04:55 PM

nat

05-31-2018, 09:38 PM

Hiromitsu Ohiai (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=ochiai001hir) was the best player of the 1980s. He was a fearsome slugger who clobbered 510 home runs on the way to putting up a 311/422/564 slash line. Over 20 years he played for Lotte, Chunichi, Yomiuri, and Nippon Ham. (An aside: I know 'Nippon Ham' is the company's name and 'Fighters' is the team nickname, but it's still my favorite team name.) Ochiai had some truly amazing seasons. In 1985, for instance, he slugged .763. For some perspective, that season would rank 9th all-time in America, sandwiched between Ruth’s 1923 and Hornsby’s 1925. The only Americans to have ever posted a higher slugging percentage are Ruth, Bonds, and Gehrig. (Although, as always, context is important.) He is 12th all-time in Japan in runs scored, and 5th in RBIs. Ochiai is an all-time great.

He was, however, a late bloomer. He dropped out of college and went to play in the industrial leagues, from which he was drafted by the Orions. He was not a regular until age 28, but he caught up after his late start. Ochiai was a 3-time triple crown winner (1982, 85 and 86). Here he is hitting an opposite-field home run (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-yFrQjmoUM).

Beyond his great performances, Ochiai was known for his rejection of traditional Japanese baseball culture. He would skip workouts (which are notoriously rigorous in Japan), refuse coaching help, show up late to warm ups, that sort of thing. This was, apparently, something of a scandal in Japan. I think that Americans would write it off; obnoxious, sure, but we almost expect a star to be a bit of a prima donna.

This card lists him as an “infielder” which is a bit generous. He started his career at second and quickly switched to third. But by 1991 he was a full-time first baseman, and would never again appear at another position. In total he played about 1500 games at 1B and 650 at third.

The card is from the inaugural BBM set, in 1991. By contemporary standards it looks pretty plain, but this set was the first Japanese set to be modeled on American baseball cards, and it kicked off a period of intense innovation (with all of the parallels, inserts, etc., that you find in American cards) in the Japanese card market. YMMV on the merits of these developments. Personally I like the old menko cards the best.

nat

06-01-2018, 04:16 PM

There are many people in the Japanese hall of fame. Most of them were not players. I didn't actually keep track, but a shockingly high percentage of the members of the Japanese hall of fame were executives. The Americans also induct executives, but not nearly to the same extent that the Japanese do. If you were vice president of the Giants for more than couple weeks, you are probably in the hall of fame.

Anyhoo, I went through the list of hall of famers and sorted out those who were not primarily players. Now, the Japanese hall of fame recognizes people for play as amateurs as well as professionals, so there are some members of the hall who were stars in college but who didn't play professionally. There are some early menko issues that feature amateur players, but not many. I've never seen one. There are plenty that feature amateur teams, but that's another matter. If I can get cards of the amateur hall of fame players, that's great, and I'll buy them if I see them (and if they exist), but I'm going to treat them as extra credit. So I sorted out these folks as well. That left 87 hall of famers who are in the hall primarily for their play as professionals. Almost all of these guys played post-war (although many began their careers before the war started). These guys are my targets.

Of those 87 I currently have 22 in hand (as well as several more in the mail from Japan, but I'm not going to count them until they're here). That's a little bit over 25%. I've been at this for a month and a half. Oldest cards are from 1947, and my newest are from 1993. It's nice that Japanese cards are so much less expensive than American ones. I mean, it's true that last month I went way over my regular baseball card budget, but I've still spent more on single American cards than I've spent on 1/4th of the Japanese hall of fame.

rgpete

06-03-2018, 05:39 AM

My understanding that there are two Japanese Hall of Fames the Meikyukai the Golden Players Club and the Yakyu Dendo the Japanese Hall of Fame

nat

06-03-2018, 08:56 AM

My understanding that there are two Japanese Hall of Fames the Meikyukai the Golden Players Club and the Yakyu Dendo the Japanese Hall of Fame

That's right. My focus is on the Yakyu Dendo. A complete list of its members is here (http://english.baseball-museum.or.jp/baseball_hallo/list/syllabary.html). The Meikyukai is only for players. (Here is the membership list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meikyukai).) Membership in the Meikyuaki is determined by whether or not a player has reached certain statistical milestones (ex 2000 hits), provided that they were born between 1926 and 1988. The Yakyu Dendo has its own problems (basically the same ones as the American hall of fame), but the hard in/out line on the basis of these particular milestones doesn't make sense to me. Ted Williams didn't get 3000 hits (the American version of this milestone), but he did have 2600 hits plus 2000 walks.

The exception to the hard in/out line is actually the last guy that I posted: Ochiai. He hit the necessary milestones, but decided that he didn't want to be inducted.

rgpete

06-03-2018, 01:05 PM

That's right. My focus is on the Yakyu Dendo. A complete list of its members is here (http://english.baseball-museum.or.jp/baseball_hallo/list/syllabary.html). The Meikyukai is only for players. (Here is the membership list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meikyukai).) Membership in the Meikyuaki is determined by whether or not a player has reached certain statistical milestones (ex 2000 hits), provided that they were born between 1926 and 1988. The Yakyu Dendo has its own problems (basically the same ones as the American hall of fame), but the hard in/out line on the basis of these particular milestones doesn't make sense to me. Ted Williams didn't get 3000 hits (the American version of this milestone), but he did have 2600 hits plus 2000 walks.

The exception to the hard in/out line is actually the last guy that I posted: Ochiai. He hit the necessary milestones, but decided that he didn't want to be inducted.

Thank You for explaining the differences between the two Hall of Fames

nat

06-03-2018, 09:15 PM

Tatsuro Hiroka (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=hirook000tat) played from 1954 to 1966 for the Giants, primarily at short stop. Frankly there's not much to say about this guy. He had a hell of a year as a rookie, but for his career he was offensively just sort of "meh". Given that he's in the hall of fame, I assume that he was a great defensive player, although defensive statistics for Japanese baseball in the 1950s either don't exist or I was unable to find them in a cursory internet search (or both). His one mark of real success for which documentation is available is as a manager. In 1976 Hiroka took over managing the Swallows and in two years they won the Japan Series. After leaving the Swallows he took over managing the Lions with whom he captured three pennants and two championships over four seasons. And then he was fired. Tough line of work. After leaving the Lions he moved into the front office, eventually becoming general manager of the Marines.

In some ways Hiroka reminds me of Dave Concepcion; they were both light-hitting shortstops for powerhouse teams. Of course there are ways in which the two are disanalogous too; Hiroka's career was quite short, and he missed he heart of the Giants' great runs. He won the Japan Series four times as a player (and lost it four other times), so obvious he played for a great team, but he retired just as the O-N Cannon was gearing up for its historic run in the late 60s and early 70s. Concepcion is not in the hall of fame. He has his supporters, but it's hard to imagine him even having an argument for the hall if he had played only 13 seasons. I suspect that Hiroka's induction was something of a life-time achievement award. He was a player on a successful team, he had a successful (if short) managing career, and then he became an executive. I'm not sure that I'd put someone in the hall of fame for that, but it sounds like a pretty good life in baseball.

nat

06-05-2018, 09:33 PM

Hisashi Yamada (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=yamada000his) spent 20 years pitching for the Hankyu Braves, 1969 to 1988. Despite Japan's abbreviated seasons, he recorded very respectable amounts of innings pitched (peaking at 270 in 1971) and a very nice 3865 for his career. Given the sheer volume of his workload, it's no surprise that he had a large number of decisions. In a league where 200 wins is a hall-of-fame-worthy accomplishment, Yamada managed 284 wins. He was not merely a complier, though, Yamada also performed at an incredible level at his peak. He won three consecutive MVP awards. (I wonder if Japan has the same bias against pitchers winning the MVP award as MLB does? If so, this is an even more astonishing accomplishment.) Perhaps his longevity is due, in part, to having an easy submarine motion. You can see him pitching here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RQbArVRKys). You should watch the video, it ends with a dramatic match-up between Yamada and Sadaharu Oh. It's hard to get the velocity expected of professional pitchers when throwing underhand, but if you can manage it it's a great way to relieve stress on your shoulder.

Incidentally, I've always had a soft spot for guys with a delivery like this. Years ago I was a big fan of Jeff Innis, and now I always like seeing Darren O'Day warming up.

The card is from the 1984 Calbee set. It's another one of the under-sized cards that Calbee produced in the 80s. Was there are reason that they made them so small? To package them with smaller bags of chips? Because it's cheaper? One interesting thing (to an American who doesn't know about these things) about this card is that it lists his last name (山田) before his first name (久志). This is, of course, common with Korean names, I didn't know that they do it this way in Japan as well.

nat

06-07-2018, 09:22 PM

Michinori Tsubouchi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=tsuboc000mic) began his career in 1936 - the first year of professional Japanese baseball - and he retired after the 1951 season. In the early years Japan had split seasons - spring and fall. During the split seasons Tsubouchi played for Dai Tokyo and the Tokyo Lions (with whom he remained after they switched to a single baseball seasons each year). He spent the early 1940s playing for Asai, and then played for the Stars and Dragons in the late 40s.

He was a contact hitter and a speedy leadoff-style batter. He struck out just 299 times in his career (in 6301 plate appearances), against 546 walks. While speed was his game, power was not. He had only a single season in which he made it into double-digits in home runs (barely: he hit 10) and hit an average of only two per year. On the surface his offensive statistics appear to be anemic, but early Japanese ball was a very low offense affair. In 1941 (to pick one season from his career at random) the league as a whole had a .201 batting average, a .299 on base percentage, and a .248 slugging percentage.* There were 26000 plate appearances that year, and yet the league managed only 549 doubles, 108 triples, and 100 home runs. In that context Tsubouchi's 237/343/294 line, with 10 doubles, a triple, and two home runs, looks pretty good. He made the first best nine in 1946.

As for this card: I have only a guess as to what it is, and I'm not even sure that it's Tsubouchi. The seller that I bought it from listed it as Tsubouchi, and I've bought plenty of things from him with no problems, so I'm inclined to take his word for it. But I really don't know how he knows who it is. There is no writing on the card at all (besides the number 4 stamped on the back). You can't tell which team the player is on, and his face is hard to make out. Basically all you can tell about him is that he's wearing the number 1. My best guess is that it's a JBR 37 card, from the 1949 "Marusei Home Run Batter" set. Engel says that these cards usually, but not always, have text specifying the team and player. Here's his description of the Tsubouchi card from this set: "RHB, knees up, #1". Not much to go on. I don't know what 'knees up' means, but he is a RHB wearing #1, and it's possible that this is one of the JBR 37 cards without text on it. That's my best guess. If anyone has any better ideas, please let me know. I also might message the seller and ask how he knows that this is Tsubouchi.

*An aside about on-base percentage and slugging percentage: it's very rare for someone to have a slugging percentage lower than their on-base percentage. Since any hit contributes to both, and any extra-base hit contributes a lot more to slugging than to on-base percentage, in order to pull this off you need to be a batter who takes lots of walks but who has no power at all. Brett Butler was the first guy that I thought of, and sure enough he pulled it off a few times, but it's pretty unusual. Tsubouchi's entire league did this. Curious to see if it's ever happened in MLB, I looked through the dead ball years, and found only one season. In 1918 the AL had an OBP of 324 and a SLG of 323. I'm pretty sure that's the only time an entire league in the US has done it. So the 1941 JPBL was like the dead ball era, except much more extreme.

drmondobueno

06-08-2018, 02:44 PM

Thought I’d share a lttle old school round Menko. A two for one HOFer card ! My “collection” is more of a type set, with an occasional complete set, usually of older die cut or round menko. Love the schoolboy drawing illustrations. Color works for me.

This particular disc is from 1948 and is part of the JRM 26 “Pinwheel” set. This disc is 3 1/2 inches in diameter, with all others in the set being 2 3/4. Like most other round menko, the disc is blank backed. The set is fairly common, with between 100 and 249 copies of each player disc assumed to be available.

The Engel Chcklist is invaluable for a guy like me. I am terrible at languages and I rely on the guide to identify a card and player.

P S... how can you have a slugging percentage lower than your on base percentage? Breaking my brain on that one!

seanofjapan

06-08-2018, 05:49 PM

The card is from the 1984 Calbee set. It's another one of the under-sized cards that Calbee produced in the 80s. Was there are reason that they made them so small? To package them with smaller bags of chips? Because it's cheaper? One interesting thing (to an American who doesn't know about these things) about this card is that it lists his last name (山田) before his first name (久志). This is, of course, common with Korean names, I didn't know that they do it this way in Japan as well.

My own theory is that there is a parallel to how Topps transitioned from its big size cards to the modern, smaller sized ones in 1957 when it no longer faced competition from Bowman.

In the 70s Calbee had some competition, mainly from Yamakatsu which also produced sets. In 1979 Yamakatsu started making small cards and in 1980 left the market, which freed Calbee from competition (and showed them that small sets were feasible) from 1980 on. It wasn’t until Lotte and BBM entered the market that they went back to bigger card sizes.

drmondobueno

06-09-2018, 12:20 AM

Chuck9788

06-09-2018, 08:05 PM

Wow! This is a spectacular collection interest.

Curious if there are any cards of Victor Starffin?

Starffin (1916-1957) was an ethnic Russian baseball player in Japan and the first professional pitcher in Japan to win three hundred games. With 83 career shutouts, he ranks number one all-time in Japanese professional baseball. In 1960, he became the first player elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame.

In 1940, as xenophobia increased in Japan, Starffin was forced to change his name to Suda Hiroshi. Later, during World War II, wartime paranoia resulted in Starffin being placed in a detention camp at Karuizawa with diplomats and other foreign residents.

1957, Starffin was killed in a traffic accident when the car he was driving was struck by a tram in Setagaya, Tokyo. The exact circumstances of the incident are debated to this day, with speculation ranging from a simple accident to suicide or drunk driving.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/61/cd/f2/61cdf257ab85a21453fd5025ba3080b6.jpg

nat

06-09-2018, 08:13 PM

Thanks Keith. I think the pinwheel menkos are really attractive cards. Some of them are really common, but I've never seen that particular one before. Perhaps the rarity varies within the set. I just bought my first Kawakami card, so I'll have a write-up about him once it arrives from Japan.

Regarding my "Tsubouchi" card. Turns out it is slightly too large to be JBR 37. It measures 2 and 1/8th by 2 and 3/8th inches. That's within the margin of error for JBR 74 (approximately 2 and 3/16ths by 2 and 5/16ths). JBR 75 is listed as approx. 2 1/16th by 2 3/16ths, although I imagine late 40s Japanese baseball card production wasn't exactly a precisions affair.

I guess it could be the JBR 74 "full body" card - but the fact that there's no writing on the back tells pretty strongly against it.

The 75 card description is given as "RHB full body, end of swing, legs crossed", which is fine except that his legs aren't crossed. It also doesn't have any writing on the card (despite the description given for the JBR 75 set), on the other hand the example card that Engel provides also doesn't have any writing on it. So one possibility is an uncatalogued JBR 75 card; and Engel explicitly says that his list is incomplete. He says that he suspects the set has about 500 cards in it, but that he's catalogued only 209. So an uncatalogued JBR 75 card that was cut a little large sounds like a possibility.

And for anyone who is interested, I found a nice quick history of Japanese baseball here (https://www.tofugu.com/japan/japanese-baseball-history/).

nat

06-10-2018, 09:29 PM

Nice Starffin. Thanks for letting us see that one. I don't have any of his cards yet.

But I do have Kenjiro Tamiya (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=tamiya000ken) and he's the subject for today's post. He played 15 seasons, from 1949 to 1963, mostly with Osaka. He was a pitcher as a rookie, and a bad one. Surprisingly, it wasn't his terribleness that ended his pitching career, it was a shoulder injury. After that he converted to the outfield, although he still pitched a few innings here and there for the next several seasons. As a batter he had strong on-base skills and moderate power. From his stat line he looks like a "double into the gap" kind of guy, and he was reasonably fast, often among the league leaders in SB. Although he was a 7-time all-star and made five best-nine teams, his career totals are not especially impressive. If I needed an American player to compare him to, I come up with someone like Enos Slaughter, although that's probably not fair to Slaughter, as he missed what would have been some of his best seasons for the war.

The card obviously belongs to one of a bunch of very similar menko sets released in the late 1950s. This one is probably from 1959, but I'm not sure which set it's from. None of the candidate sets has Tamiya paired with 90001 as a menko number. My guess is that this is an uncatalogued card from one of those very similar and (as far as I can tell) very common late 50s sets. It has a back stamp, but I don't know why. Sets that were imported to the US often were stamped on the back, and some sets similar to this one were imported, but I had this card shipped directly from Japan, so that's not it. Sometimes back stamps were part of a contest - if you got a stamped card you would win a premium card. That could be what's going on here, but it's really impossible to know.

nat

06-13-2018, 12:41 PM

Atsuya Furuta (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=furuta001ats) was one of Japan's greatest catchers. He was a two-time MVP, a nine-time best-nine, and a 17-time all-star. He played 18 seasons with the Yakult Swallows. Despite the long career, he actually got a relatively late start. He was undrafted out of college, and went to play for Toyota's team instead. He did well enough in the industrial leagues that Yakult drafted him in the second round in 1990. He appeared in 106 games that year. Furuta excelled at every aspect of the game (well, except running, he was a catcher after all), winning a batting title and topping 30 home runs in a season (and more than 200 for his career). He was mentored by the great Katsuya Nomura, about whom more later.

In addition to his work on the field, Furuta was both a manager (indeed, a player-manager) and the head of the Japanese Player's Union. He led a strike against the proposed merging of the Kintetsu Buffalos and the Orix Blue Wave. The merger went through, but the players got the owners to agree to add a new team to the league (and so not eliminate any roster spots). The length of the strike: two days.

The card is from the 1992 BBM set. I don't care for the design: the brown border makes it look like 1987 Topps (one of my least favorite), but it's not even faux wood, it's brown with little bits of text saying 'BBM'. Anyway, this was close to the beginning of Furuta's career, he wouldn't retire until 2007.

nat

06-14-2018, 09:49 PM

Katsuya Nomura (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nomura002kat) is probably Oh's strongest competition for the greatest-of-all-time crown. He was a catcher who played 26 seasons, amassing 2901 hits, 657 home runs, and a 277/357/508 slash line. Did I mention that he was a catcher. I'm pretty sure that those hit and HR totals would be all-time records in America for a catcher. He walked almost as much as he struck out. His career lasted from 1954 to 1980, and was mostly spent with the Nankai Hawks. (Who play in Osaka, on the Pacific coast sort of on the southern half of Honshu.*) Nomura led the Pacific League in HR for eight consecutive seasons. Now, the impression I get is that the Pacific League is the Central's little brother, but eight in a row is damn impressive. Imagine Ralph Kiner, but have him lead the league in HRs another year, then make his career two-and-a-half times longer than it was, and then make him a catcher. That's Nomura.

In addition to all that, he also had a long career as a manager. He took over managing Nankai when he was 35, and managed them until he left the team in 1977 (at age 42). He seems to have been retired through the 1980s, but in 1990 he took over managing duties at Yakult, moving on to Hanshin, and finally managing the Ratuken Golden Eagles until 2009, when he was 74. Nomura has a reputation as a difficult manager, and his teams' winning percentage is just about .500.

*Funny note: I was looking around Google Maps and found that Google will let you review pretty much anything. The island of Honshu, yes the whole thing, has an average review of 3.9/5.

The set is JCM 14g. The JCM 14 sets (there are many variations) get called the "Japanese T206", but I don't think that the nickname is very apt. They're really quite similar to many of the other 1960s menko sets, and don't have the iconic appeal of the T206 set. That's not to knock them, really. They're nice cards, with good color photographs (or at least colorized photographs, I'm not 100% sure).

Regarding the project: I'm 35% of the way there, after picking up six new players today, so I'm running a bit behind on keeping this updated with my progress.

seanofjapan

06-14-2018, 10:06 PM

drmondobueno

06-15-2018, 03:43 PM

The first card is from the 1963 JCM 14f collection. It can be tough to figure out what card is from what set, looking for clues like border or no border, color or tint of stock, text or no text on front, location of text, etc. And then there is the back of the cards. I must admit the backs got me interested. Kinda like dealing with the different back combos of the (in)famous T206 set which drove me batty for a few years before I came to my senses and moved on.

The second card is of both Nomura and player number five with his back to Nomura, the runner. I understand the player is Katsuya. But I could easily be wrong about that. From the 1958 Doyusha Team Name Back borderless, catalog JCM30a. Love the color on this card, such a menko thing to do for a card.

Perspective:

In 1963 I was an eleven year old (terrible) little leaguer in San Bernardino, CA. Our field had a fence but zero grass. The field got sprayed once a year with asphalt oil to keep the dust down between the rocks.

I hated playing the infield.

In 1958 I was six playing on a homemade field in an empty lot, El Centro CA. It was toooooooo hot to wear shoes, and worse not to wear them. You could find me out there every day I was not in school.

nat

06-17-2018, 09:16 PM

Thanks for posting those Nomura cards! I especially like the bright red one.

The player I've got for you today is Isao Harimoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=harimo000isa). Japan's all-time hit king. In total he collected 3084 hits, and is the only player to pass 3000. Nomura is second and Oh is third. The record is in no danger, the active leader (Takahiro Arai) is 1000 hits behind him and is 40 years old. Kaz Matsui (yes, that Kaz Matsui) is second among active players. He spent most of his career with the Toei Flyers (who play way up north in Hokkaido). He was with them from 1959 to 1972. After that he bounced around for a bit, before retiring in 1981. This card is from relatively late in his career - 1976 - when he was with the Giants. Unlike Pete Rose, Harimoto was a big slugger. He finished his career with 504 home runs. He hit .319 for his career and walked more than he struck out.

Harimoto's record is full of black ink. His .383 batting average was a Japanese record that stood for 16 years. He captured seven batting titles, and led the league in OBP nine times. Despite being fast (with more than 300 stolen bases) he as with many great offensive players, was not much of a fielder. Apparently he played a rather indifferent left field. Strangely he was only a one-time MVP (in the year that the Flyers won the Japan Series), but I suspect that the blame for this can be pinned on the fact that Japanese MVP awards, even more than American ones, tend to go to players on championship teams.

Each player is, of course, unique, but I find thinking about comparable players as a helpful shorthand, since I know so many American players so well. It gives you a general impression, which can then be filled in with the details of the particular player's career. All that said, I think that a fair American counterpart for Harimoto would be Stan Musial.

He is of Korean descent, and has worked as a commentator in the Korean baseball league. His parents moved to Japan while Korea was still a part of the Japanese Empire. Harimoto was five years old and living in Hiroshima when it was hit with an atomic bomb. He survived (his house was shielded by a mountain), but he lost a sister in the blast. On a related note, I've been fear-binging on this blog (http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/). It's written by a historian of science who studies the Manhattan Project, and it's both fascinating and terrifying.

The card is from the enormous 1976 Calbee set.

paleocards

06-18-2018, 12:41 PM

nat

06-18-2018, 06:43 PM

This really is a fascinating thread, thanks for sharing all of this biographical information and the cards, almost all of which I've never seen. It seems like a real labor of love, and I can definitely relate to and respect where you're coming from.

Thanks for the kind words! I've been having a lot of fun with it. Frankly, I've been having more fun with Japanese cards than with American ones lately. I recently picked up a 34 Goudey Jimmie Foxx, which is a big pick-up by my standards, but it just felt like checking off a box. Having an excuse to learn about a completely new world of baseball, with it's own records and legends and quirks and so on, has been a lot more enjoyable.

I'll post another update soon (probably tonight). And I've got several more cards on hand (and dozens more to get) so I plan to keep this going for a while.

nat

06-18-2018, 08:52 PM

Tsuneo Horiuchi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=horiuc000tsu) pitched for the Giants from 1966 to 1983. This was exactly the right time to be a Giant - he got in right at the start of their nine consecutive Japan Series wins. He broke in at 18 and was great immediately. In his rookie year he won both the Rookie of the Year Award and the Sawamura Award. As might be expected from a teenager who was suddenly a huge star, Horiuchi was a bit cocky and immature. Tetsuharu Kawakami, the Giants manager who sailed a famously tight ship, sent him to the minors to teach him a lesson, even though he was the reigning Sawamura winner. (source (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2013/11/27/baseball/japanese-baseball/kawakamis-philosophy-as-manager-never-wavered/#.WyhqevZFwcg)) The exile didn't last long. As a 19 year old Horiuchi was 12-2 in 149 IP. It was a hard pace to keep up: his last really good year was 1974 (when he was 26), he pitched his last full season at 30, and hung around until 35. This is a problem faced by any professional athlete, but it's got to be hard to retire at 35 and then have to figure out what you're going to do with the rest of your life.

Anyway, Horiuchi did better with that than most. After retirement he was a coach with the Giants for years, and briefly their manager. And that's only the beginning. In 2010 he ran for parliament. Japan has a proportional representation system (like almost every democracy except the US): you vote for your party of choice, and then if, say, your party get 10% of the vote then they get 10% of the seats in the legislature. Horiuchi's party won 12 seats, but he was listed 13th on the party list. So he just missed out on getting a seat in parliament. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE! Hirohiko Nakamura, one of the members of his party who did win a seat, died while in office, and Horiuchi was named as his replacement. So he got a seat in parliament after all.

Here is a neat video of a game from 1966 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blmEwqeVSuE), Horiuchi's rookie year. He comes in as a relief pitcher at about 1:55, he's the guy wearing #21.

The card is from the 1973 Calbee set. This was their first foray into baseball cards. In Japan 1991 marks the line between vintage and modern cards, so 1973 is much longer-ago for the Japanese hobby (such as it is) than it is for American card collectors. Calbee almost had a monopoly on baseball cards through the 70s and 80s - and they're still making cards today. This is the set where it all began, the 52 Topps of Japan, if you will.

nat

06-20-2018, 07:37 PM

You guys probably know this guy. Kazuhiro Sasaki (https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/sasakka01.shtml) was one of the more successful Japanese imports into the American game (and he saved my fantasy team's bacon in 2002). He was a two-time all-star for the Seattle Mariners, but before (and after) that he was a relief pitcher for the Yokohama Bay Stars, for whom he was a 6-time all-star. Sasaki had a 2.41 ERA in 627 NPB innings, and a 3.14 in 223 American League Innings. Once in America he continued a Japanese training program, which is much more intensive than the American version, and didn't endear him to the powers that be in Seattle.

Sasaki isn't a great hall of fame choice. He was a dominant relief pitcher, but his career was short (by HOF standards), and he didn't pitch many innings. If you want an American to compare him to, I'll nominate Bruce Sutter. But then if it had been up to me they wouldn't have put Sutter in the hall either.

Outside of baseball Sasaki seems to be an interesting guy. He was married to a singer and left her for an actress. He appeared as a witness for the defense when his friend, and former ballplayer, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, was arrested for possession of drugs (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160516/p2a/00m/0sp/011000c). Jay Buhner taught him a bunch of dirty words (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2000/07/27/general/sasaki-talking-the-talk-in-seattle/#.Wyr9JvZFwdU). And he is now the general manager (https://supergtworld.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/dstation-racing-gulf-racing-japan-enter-dubai-24-hours/) of the D'Station Racing Team (they drive Porches).

But my favorite fact about Kazuhiro Sasaki is that he recorded and released a single of him doing vocals over canned electronic beats. It's terrible (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4SZh2MkgCo).

The card is from the 2005 BBM set, after he returned to Japan and just before he retired. It's one of the newest cards in my collection.

nat

06-22-2018, 07:26 PM

Shigeru Sugishita (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=sugish000shi) was a pitcher for the Dragons from 1949 to 1958, and then for the Orions in 1961. He was a high-peak short-career pitcher, winning the Sawamura award three times, and in 1954 (a year in which he went 32-12 with a 1.39 ERA) he also won the MVP award and the Japan Series MVP award. Unlike many pitchers with this career shape (e.g. Koufax) he wasn't felled by injury: he just wanted to do something else. He retired from pitching after the 1958 season to manage the Dragons, when that didn't go well he pitched one more year before getting another managing gig (which also didn't go well), and then moved into broadcasting.

Despite having been a great pitcher, Sugishita is most famous for popularizing the forkball in Japan. (It's a kind of changeup where you mash the ball between your index and middle finger.) It's a pitch that isn't thrown much in America, but is popular over there. (Hideo Nomo made his name throwing it.)

Jim Albright ranks (http://baseballguru.com/jalbright/analysisjalbright03.html#p)Sugishita as the seventh greatest Japanese pitcher of all time, and the 26th greatest player over all. I don't know what his methodology is (he crunched some numbers for this, it's not just personal opinion), so I don't know if I agree or not, but that's some indication of his standing. He also ranks him as the greatest member of the Dragons of all time. (Others may have been greater players, but spent smaller portions of their career with the Dragons.)

The card is a curious one. The front of the card is identical to the Sugishita card in the JCM 26 set, but the back of my card is blank. The JCM 26 set has a rock-paper-scissors symbol, a pillar with some writing, and a menko number at the bottom. Maybe my card is from the JCM 26 set but didn't get printed on the back? Maybe it's from a related set that's not catalogued? Hard to say.

nat

06-28-2018, 09:35 PM

I haven't been posting anything lately because I'm on vacation, but such is my dedication to Japanese baseball cards that I've decided to ignore my wife rolling her eyes at me, and post something anyway.

Kouji Yamamoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=yamamo002koj) was an outfielder for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp from 1969 to 1986. If you look at his raw stats you'll think that he had a late peak (in his early 30s), but what actually happened is that the league's offensive environment changed pretty dramatically during his career. In 1971 the Central League posted an OPS of .640, by 1978 (while he was at his apparent peak) it was up to .764. (For the sake of a comparison, the NL was at .748 in 2017.) That's a big jump, and probably explains why he was hitting twice as many home runs per year in his 30s as he was in his 20s. Even though he began playing in a relatively low-scoring environment, Yamamoto managed to knock in 536 home runs (4th all-time), and cleared 2000 hits easily.

In addition to being a great offensive player, he was a brilliant outfielder with a strong throwing arm. He won ten consecutive diamond gloves (the Japanese equivalent of the gold glove).

After his playing days were over Mr. Red Helmet (not the most imaginative nickname, but then neither is 'ARod', so Americans can't really complain) had a couple stints managing the Carp (which included winning the Japan Series with them) and a couple stints as an announcer for them. Yamamoto is also a local, having been born in Hiroshima in 1946 (although he was drafted from Hosei University in Tokyo).

The card is another one from the huge 76 Calbee set. To someone who grew up around Topps, Calbee cards often strike me as strange. This image isn't one that Topps would be likely to use for a card. There's another player featured prominently, it's weirdly cropped, it just looks like a strange image to use for a baseball card. But Calbee does this all the time. I may have mentioned this before, but Calbee cards often look to me like they're just stills from a broadcast of a game. There were a few Topps sets with unconventional image choices. 1973 Topps is one of my favorites, for precisely this reason. (Or at least half the set is. The other half is generic spring training pictures.) But the 73 Topps cards are (https://www.psacard.com/cardfacts/baseball-cards/1973-topps/dick-green-456/35079) cleverly (https://www.psacard.com/cardfacts/baseball-cards/1973-topps/vida-blue-430/35052/)unconventional (https://www.psacard.com/cardfacts/baseball-cards/1973-topps/glenn-beckert-440/35062), they're obviously carefully selected for their weirdness, whereas Calbee cards often strike me as just sort of random. This isn't to say that I dislike Calbee cards, far from it. Some are very well composed - like the Horiuchi card above. And as small of a thing as it is, I also appreciate it that Calbee uses high-quality card stock. I remember the first time I held a T201 and how I was surprised that anyone would print a baseball card on tissue paper.

nat

07-02-2018, 07:25 PM

Fumio "Mr. Tiger" Fujimura (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=fujimu000fum) was one of the first stars of Japanese professional baseball. Fujimura was extraordinarily versatile, beginning his career as a pitcher and playing a non-trivial number of games at every position except for SS and C. (And a trivial number of games at SS.) He had been a star pitcher in high school - famously striking out Kawakami three times in three at bats in one game - who led his team to the high school championships several years in a row. (High school baseball is a much bigger deal in Japan than it is in America. The finals of the Koshien tournament draw huge crowds.) He went pro rather than go to college, allegedly despite his own inclinations. Word is that his father signed his contract for him. Anyway, he was pitching for Osaka at 19 in 1936. Originally Japan split it's pro season in two: a spring and fall season. In the fall season of 1936 Fujimura had a slightly better than average ERA (2.54 to 2.84), but was a monster of a hitter, posting an OPS of .878 against a league average of .592. He also led the league in home runs, with two. Over the next several seasons Fujimura gradually transitioned into a position player, although he continued to pitch occasionally, and mostly in a relief capacity. Fujimura's career was interrupted twice for war; he served in the military from 1939 through 1942 (inclusive), and the 1945 season was canceled outright. He pitched 107 innings in 1946, but afterwards he would appear on the mound infrequently.

It was in the post-war period that he found his greatest success. In 1949 he set a single-season HR record (since eclipsed) and the following year set a single-season hits record (again, since eclipsed). As his career was winding down in the late 50s he became a player-manager, and although posting a very good record (he has a career .584 winning percentage as a manager) he resigned in favor of Tadashi Wakabayashi.

In addition to being a great player, Fujimura was a character and a fan favorite. He used an extraordinarily long bat (36 to 38 inches), and did his best to make a show of the game, by, e.g., making pickoff attempts at second base by throwing between his legs.

For a more complete bio of Fujimura (from which this one, in part, borrows), see the one at thehanshintigers.com (http://www.thehanshintigers.com/team-history/legendary-players/fumio-fujimura/).

The card is obviously a bromide, but it's not listed in Engel. There are a number of sets with a similar appearance, but it doesn't measure right to fit any of them. Presumably it is from the late 40s or early 50s, which would put it right around the peak of Fujimura's career. The back is blank.

nat

07-03-2018, 08:13 PM

Shinichi Eto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=etoh--000shi) was a 1B/OF and occasionally a catcher who played for the Dragons, Orions, Whales, and one season with the Lions, from 1959 to 1976. Offensively he was a solid all-around player, eclipsing 2000 hits (by a small amount), hitting 367 home runs, and posting a career line of 287/358/484. His career began in the industrial leagues, but it was only two years before Chunichi drafted him. It was a good choice, he went on to be an 11x all-star, a 6x best-nine, and a 3x batting champion. Albright ranks him as the third-greatest player of the 1960s (after Oh and Nagashima), and regards him as tied for the 27th greatest player of all-time.

Eto was, in some ways, a difficult person. His departure from the Dragons was a result of a dispute with his manager, Shigeru Mizuhara (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=mizuha000shi). After their run-in Eto retired (I guess out of spite) but changed his mind during the off-season. The Dragons, however, decided that their star was more trouble than he was worth, and traded him to the Lotte Orions. After he retired (for the second time) Eto ran a youth baseball academy, struggled with alcoholism, and died of liver cancer at the age of 70.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the card is from the JCM 13c set. It's a pretty ordinary 1960s menko set. This card, however, is a good excuse for a little rumination on my part, so please bear with me. Grading, for better or for worse (okay: for worse) has a place in our Hobby. I wouldn't buy a 52 Mantle or a Goudey Ruth unless it was in a holder. But I'd like to be clear that I did not send this card in for grading; it, like all of my graded cards, was bought that way. Now, grading menko cards is preposterous for reasons that extend even beyond the ordinary problems with grading cards. This card was originally cut with scissors; whether in the factory, by a sales clerk, or by a little kid, I don't know, but menko cards are all hand cut. And there is simply no chance that a card which was cut with scissors half a century ago (and which subsequently found its way over the Pacific Ocean) has those edges. It's obvious that what happened here is that someone found a 1963 JCM 13c card of a hall of famer with wide borders, and took an exact-o knife and a T-square to it with the intention of submitting it for grading, in order to get a high grade and thus increase its value. (Didn't work: I paid less than $10 for this card.) I like baseball card collecting as a hobby, but I dislike everything about it that makes it a Hobby. And although it certainly looks nicer than it must have when it had wide borders and ragged edges, I like this card a lot less than I would have had I owned it in its original state. Every time I look at it I think that someone who was looking for a quick buck mutilated this card. I've even thought about cracking it out of it's case and scuffing up those perfect corners, but that wouldn't help any, I'd just remember that I was the one who had done that. So in its plastic tomb it stays. Most of my cards are in binders, but my handful of graded cards are on display (since they won't fit in binders). Having a Japanese card on display makes for a nice conversation piece. Now, anyone who is likely to be a guest at my house is already aware that I'm a dork, but this card will confirm for them that I'm at least a cosmopolitan dork.

seanofjapan

07-04-2018, 07:50 PM

The card is another one from the huge 76 Calbee set. To someone who grew up around Topps, Calbee cards often strike me as strange. This image isn't one that Topps would be likely to use for a card. There's another player featured prominently, it's weirdly cropped, it just looks like a strange image to use for a baseball card. But Calbee does this all the time. I may have mentioned this before, but Calbee cards often look to me like they're just stills from a broadcast of a game. There were a few Topps sets with unconventional image choices. 1973 Topps is one of my favorites, for precisely this reason. (Or at least half the set is. The other half is generic spring training pictures.) But the 73 Topps cards are (https://www.psacard.com/cardfacts/baseball-cards/1973-topps/dick-green-456/35079) cleverly (https://www.psacard.com/cardfacts/baseball-cards/1973-topps/vida-blue-430/35052/)unconventional (https://www.psacard.com/cardfacts/baseball-cards/1973-topps/glenn-beckert-440/35062), they're obviously carefully selected for their weirdness, whereas Calbee cards often strike me as just sort of random. This isn't to say that I dislike Calbee cards, far from it. Some are very well composed - like the Horiuchi card above. And as small of a thing as it is, I also appreciate it that Calbee uses high-quality card stock. I remember the first time I held a T201 and how I was surprised that anyone would print a baseball card on tissue paper.

I agree about the photography, its way different from what Topps used but I much prefer it to the spring training posed shots that dominated in the 70s.

The weirdest one from that 75-76 Calbee set is probably Oda Yoshihito's card, which has him standing in a line of 6 other players and would be impossible to tell which one he is without the card saying "Third Guy from the Right" under his name:

http://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.com/2017/02/third-guy-from-left.html

Another interesting thing is that in the 1988 Calbee set there are several cards on which the picture is literally just a picture staff took of a game being played on TV. They didn't have photos of a few players and were in too much of a hurry so they just pointed the camera at the TV screen and used what they got from that on the cards. The Bill Gullickson card is one of them and the image is so blurry its insane:

http://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.com/2014/04/gets-1988-calbee-bill-gullickson-with.html

seanofjapan

07-04-2018, 10:39 PM

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the card is from the JCM 13c set. It's a pretty ordinary 1960s menko set. This card, however, is a good excuse for a little rumination on my part, so please bear with me. Grading, for better or for worse (okay: for worse) has a place in our Hobby. I wouldn't buy a 52 Mantle or a Goudey Ruth unless it was in a holder. But I'd like to be clear that I did not send this card in for grading; it, like all of my graded cards, was bought that way. Now, grading menko cards is preposterous for reasons that extend even beyond the ordinary problems with grading cards. This card was originally cut with scissors; whether in the factory, by a sales clerk, or by a little kid, I don't know, but menko cards are all hand cut. And there is simply no chance that a card which was cut with scissors half a century ago (and which subsequently found its way over the Pacific Ocean) has those edges. It's obvious that what happened here is that someone found a 1963 JCM 13c card of a hall of famer with wide borders, and took an exact-o knife and a T-square to it with the intention of submitting it for grading, in order to get a high grade and thus increase its value. (Didn't work: I paid less than $10 for this card.) I like baseball card collecting as a hobby, but I dislike everything about it that makes it a Hobby. And although it certainly looks nicer than it must have when it had wide borders and ragged edges, I like this card a lot less than I would have had I owned it in its original state. Every time I look at it I think that someone who was looking for a quick buck mutilated this card. I've even thought about cracking it out of it's case and scuffing up those perfect corners, but that wouldn't help any, I'd just remember that I was the one who had done that. So in its plastic tomb it stays. Most of my cards are in binders, but my handful of graded cards are on display (since they won't fit in binders). Having a Japanese card on display makes for a nice conversation piece. Now, anyone who is likely to be a guest at my house is already aware that I'm a dork, but this card will confirm for them that I'm at least a cosmopolitan dork.

I am in 100% agreement with you on graded cards. One thing I do like about the Japanese hobby is that almost nobody here gets their cards graded, as evidenced by the sparse populations of graded cards from the classic sets on PSA.

Another reason it makes so little sense with regard to Menko is that those cards were specifically designed to be damaged by kids throwing them at the ground!

steve B

07-05-2018, 04:28 PM

So the menko cards were all hand cut?

The very few I have were bought all together as a flea market lot, and they all seemed factory cut to me. I wouldn't have even thought they were cut by hand.

nat

07-05-2018, 09:15 PM

"So the menko cards were all hand cut?"

As far as I know, yes, they are, but I'm certainly open to being corrected on this point. (Sean?) All of mine are hand cut (I assume that's what 'H/C' refers to on the Eto flip); and uncut strips and sheets are pretty common. Now, all of the menko cards that I've seen are from the 60s or before, maybe they started factory cutting newer ones? (Not that they made many baseball menkos after the 1960s.)

Sean: I took a look at your blog links. So they literally took stills from TV broadcasts. :eek: That's really amazing. And they'd been at this for 15 years at that point, you think that they would have a regular source for photos lined up by then.

No new cards for today, but what I do have is a map with the location of each of the current Japanese teams marked on it. Central League teams are at the top, Pacific League teams below. I hope that the color coding is clear enough. There are some exceptions here*, for instance, the Fighters occasionally play "home" games in Tokyo. In fact, you'll notice that a LOT of teams call the greater Tokyo metro area home. Which, I suppose, makes sense given the population density. Japan has 127 million people (so, a bit under half of the US population) squeezed into 145 thousand square miles (roughly the size of Montana, a bit smaller than California). AND, the middle of the county is full of mountains. That makes for a lot of people all in the same place.

*The Buffaloes have two home fields. They're close together, but I've marked them both.

seanofjapan

07-06-2018, 07:47 AM

Yeah, it’s pretty crazy that they went so far as using TV screen shots. You could almost make a hobby solely out of cataloging odd photo choices by Calbee!

About the Menko, I have come across more recent (1980s) ones that were factory cut, but I am pretty sure most or all of the vintage stuff pre 70s were sold as sheets and then cut by hand. I can’t say for sure that all were as there might have been the occasional exception, but that was definitely the standard practice.

nat

07-07-2018, 07:47 PM

Morimichi Takagi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=takagi000mor) had a 21 year career playing for the Dragons. He was a second baseman with some power and some speed, but no on-base skills. Takagi started out as a lead-off type hitter, stealing 50 bases as a 21 year old in 1963, but over time his speed dropped off and power developed. (This is pretty normal as players age.) But he never did develop a lot of power, topping 20 HRs in a season only twice. Seven times he was selected for the best-nine, which is a record (shared with Chiba, more on him in a future post) for second basemen.

After retiring he managed the Dragons on-and-off, posting a total winning percentage of .524, and retiring for (I assume) the last time in 2013.

Here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ3sOmnVRcI) is some video of Takagi. It's been ages since I took Japanese, so I don't know what they're saying (beyond the occasional 'so desu ne', which is a kind of positive-but-non-committal thing you can say), but the Dragons player wearing #1 is Takagi. (The caption underneath the video says that it's about Takagi and somebody else.)

The card is an uncatalogued menko. It has the same size and shape as the "pillar" menkos that were popular in the late 1940s, but this card is obviously much newer than that. (Not least because Takagi didn't start playing until 1960.) The guy I bought it from thinks it's from the 60s; I suppose that's a good guess, if for no other reason than not many baseball menko sets were made in the 1970s.

steve B

07-08-2018, 06:31 PM

I really have to scan mine. I have all of one baseball player menko, the rest of the handful are non-sports. I'd really like to be able to at least name the subjects.

I think they're late 50's. I found the baseball player at one point a few years back, but have forgotten who he is. Got to remember to write it down next time I find out.

Jeff Alcorn

07-08-2018, 06:38 PM

Hi,

I have enjoyed following this series very much, and have a few notes that might be helpful (I hope)-

1973 were not Calbee's first cards, they actually produced some in the early 1950s that are quite difficult to get (I don't have any).

On Keith's Katsuya Nomura card from 1958, the other player wearing #5 that is greeting Nomura at home plate is not Katsuya (that is Nomura's first name) but outfielder Yoshio Anabuki. Anabuki later managed the Hawks and he also appears in the 1967 Kabaya-Leaf set.

Isao Harimoto played his entire career in the Tokyo area with the Flyers/Fighters, Giants, and Orions. The Flyers/Fighters were always in Tokyo until moving to the Sapporo Dome on Hokkaido in recent years, and the Orions were in Kawasaki which is in the Tokyo area.

The Koji Yamamoto card is from the 1976 All-Star Series and shows him scoring for the Central League with Pacific League catcher Katsuya Nomura in the background.

The Morimichi Takagi card cannot be from the 1960s since the Dragons first wore the uniform with the shoulder and side blue stripes in their pennant winning year of 1974. There are a number of anonymous menko issues from the mid-70s, and many of them were made using pirated Calbee photos that had already been issued as Calbee cards. The photos will usually lack clarity since they are photos of photos and will never have a printer's name on them.

Finally, I would like to make a comment about the cutting of menko cards. These cards that were issued from the mid to late 1950s through 1964 were not released as singles but came in uncut form in various amounts- 2, 4, 6, cards etc. The cutting was done by the purchaser, and some can still be found in uncut form. The cover of Gary Engel's 6th edition guide shows a display of uncut cards as they would have been available in a shop.

As an obvious result, the cards have various dimensions and can be found with wider borders on the sides or top, angled cuts, etc. As a general rule, the cards that were not imported to the USA in the 1960s tend to have less uniform dimensions and the cuts can range all over the place. However, the sets that were imported in the 1960s were carefully cut and are much more standardized in size and overall condition. They were sold in set form to collectors here and many remained together as sets for decades and were never played with by Japanese children.

The collectors that brought these menko cards here at the time they were released in Japan, along with the 1964 Morinaga Top Star cards, Fujiya Gum cards and the 1967 Kabaya-Leaf cards, were Bud Ackerman and Mel Bailey. Bud was responsible for the menkos that came here and Mel brought the Morinaga, Fujiya, and Kabaya-Leaf.

The Shinichi Eto card shown in the graded holder has the stamped number 9 on the back. Bud and his family cut these cards and stamped a number on the back of each card. When they sold the sets a numbered checklist that corresponded to the stamped number on each card was provided to the purchaser. Anytime one of these cards is found with the stamped number on the back it went straight from the shop to the Ackerman's house where it was cut, stamped, and bundled into sets of 40 different and sold to collectors in the USA that way.

The result is ,of course, that the imported menkos, Kabaya-Leaf cards, Morinaga Top Star and Fujiya Gum cards are usually in pretty good condition since they were never owned by the general public but were bought by Bud Ackerman or Mel Bailey from shops in Japan or direct from the producer (in the case of most of the Kabaya-Leaf cards). There should be no fear that this card was cut down from a ragged form to get a grade. All of the imported menko cards I have are in the same condition, and the cuts are quite uniform with only a few variances. This should also account for why the cards found by Steve at a flea market were cut so well- if they were some of the imported cards brought in by Bud or Mel in the 1960s.

I hope that this information is of interest, and please continue this great series, I love seeing cards I do not have and reading everyone's contributions.

Jeff

steve B

07-09-2018, 09:55 AM

Very interesting Jeff.

I only have a few Japanese cards, less than 10 baseball for sure. But they're interesting and I like learning more about them.

I'm guessing mine were brought in, as they're cut well enough I'd always thought they were factory done.

seanofjapan

07-09-2018, 08:23 PM

Great post Jeff, that is particularly interesting about Bud Ackerman and Mel Bailey.

nat

07-10-2018, 07:37 PM

Hi Jeff - Thanks for all the info! So my Takagi card is a mid 70s rip-off from Calbee? That's pretty interesting (and late for a baseball menko). Thank you also for the information about the Eto card. I knew that some sets were imported in bulk, but I usually buy cards directly from Japan so it didn't occur to me to check to see if this set was one of the ones that was imported. (Guess I should do that when buying cards from Americans.) Cards sold directly to Hobbyists is still too capital-H Hobby for my tastes, but I'm glad that it wasn't cut down for grading purposes.

Today's card is of the newest hall of famer. Tatsunori Hara (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=hara--001tat) was inducted just this year. Hara played 15 seasons (1981 to 1995) for the Giants. He was a third baseman - a contemporary of, and with basically the same offensive profile as, George Brett. Like Brett, he was a 1x MVP and many-time all-star (11x in Hara's case).* Despite a career that eventually landed him in the Hall of Fame, Hara was considered something of a disappointment. He was one of the hottest prospects ever, and was expected to replace the production of the recently-retired Oh. He was good (and won the rookie of the year award his first year), but, come on, he wasn't that good.

*The Brett comparison is the first one that came to mind, but Brett was actually the better player. Hara couldn't manage the kinds of batting average that Brett could, and unlike Brett he struck out more than he walked.

Post playing days, he became a manager, holding the reins for the Giants for ten seasons, as well as managing Japan in the World Baseball Classic.

Hara's production as a player was not quite enough to get him into the hall. In his final year of eligibility he topped out at 73% of the vote - just missing the cut off for induction. He was elected by Japan's version of the veteran's committee, which is allowed to consider his accomplishments as a manager in addition to his performance on the field. Hara himself downplayed his own accomplishments as a player:

"As a little boy, I loved baseball," Hara said (https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2018/01/adf3092a5840-baseball-former-yankee-matsui-joins-kanemoto-hara-in-japanese-hall-of-fame.html). "And naturally, I dreamed of being a pro. But even in my wildest dreams I didn't imagine this. I was nothing special as a player, but I think the managing may have had something to do with this."

And here's a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syIXxwKdJcI) of Hara from 1992, batting against Akimitsu Ito of the Swallows.

The card is from the 1985 Calbee set.

nat

07-11-2018, 08:33 PM

Tokuji Iida (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=iida--000tok) was a Hawk and a Swallow over a 17 year career, from 1947 to 1963. He just missed collecting 2000 hits (no Golden Player Club for you, not that it existed when he retired). Iida was a slugging first baseman who played through Japan's deadball era. His raw home run totals don't look impressive (after 1955 he never even made it into double digits), but no one at the time was hitting home runs, or much of anything else. For example, in 1957 he slugged .417 against a league average of .329. Last year the National League slugged .423. Iida's slugging percentage was 88 points better than league average; you would have to slug .511 to top last year's average by 88 points. That's, basically, Anthony Rizzo. But raw comparison's aren't really the way to do this. In 1957 (a year in which he hit 9 home runs) Iida had a slugging percentage that was 27% higher than league average. To match that in last year's National League you would need to slug .537, exactly what Kris Bryant did. So one way to think about Iida is that, even in the years in which he was hitting home runs in the singe-digits, he was, in context, hitting as well as Kris Bryant.

Lest you think that maybe he was a one-dimensional power hitter (like, e.g., Rob Deer), note that his on-base percentage was 25% better than league average that year as well. Which is, again, a perfect match for Bryant.

So, basically, Iida was Kris Bryant, albeit at 1B rather than 3B, for 17 years. He won the 1955 MVP award, but he does not seem to be well-remembered. He doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page. People who follow Japanese baseball apparently regard him highly though - thehanshintigers.com ranks him as one of the Hawks' five best players, and Jim Allen ranks him as the second best defensive first baseman of all time. (Although seventy year old defensive statistics should always be taken with a pretty good spoonful of salt.) Allen also ranks him as the 60th greatest player of all time. He was famous for a long consecutive-game streak (this is basically the only thing that the Japanese Hall of Fame website says about him), but he missed a bunch of games late in his career, presumably with injuries. Maybe a day off now and then would have been a good idea.

I like to find video of the players that I write about, but youtube has nothing for Iida. If you search "Tokuji Iida" on youtube the only hit you get is from an old Japanese movie called "The Burden of Life", which sounds a bit heavy for a baseball message board.

The Iida card is from the JCM 31b (type II) set. I forgot to take a picture of the back, but I think you folks can deal with just a photo of the front.

Also, it's time to report some progress. I'm now 51% of the way to my goal! On June 1st I was at 25%, so I've picked up another quarter of the hall of fame (at least, those who are in as pro players, and so for whom there are probably cards) in the past 41 days. I'll call that progress. Surely it helps that most of my cards are low grade, but this remains a (relatively) inexpensive project. I still have a couple American cards that cost more than my entire Japanese collection.

nat

07-13-2018, 08:13 PM

Manabu Kitabeppu (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kitabe000man) pitched for the Carp for 19 seasons, 1976 to 1994. He broke in when he was just 18 years old. It's got to be crazy being that young and playing on the biggest stage. (Then of course there's Joe Nuxhall (https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/n/nuxhajo01.shtml). I doubt anyone else had eight years between big league appearances.) Kitabeppu won 213 games with a 3.67 career ERA. I don't know of any website that has league ERA for ranges of seasons available; it's possible to calculate it from the data available for individual seasons, but that sounds pretty tedious. Suffice it to say that, looking over a bunch of years during Kitabeppu's career, 3.67 is a bit better than league average, but not super impressive. He's got a weird career shape. He was super good occasionally - he won an MVP award and a pair of Sawamura awards - but he mixed in a bunch of clunkers. Sort of like Zack Greinke, or, to take a much more extreme example, Steve Carlton. He was sent to the minor leagues for the first time in 1989, when he was 31 after a rough patch. He would post two more good years, but he was done at 36. Albright does not list him on his ranking of the top 115 (what a weird number to stop at) Japanese players. In all he's kind of an unexciting hall of famer. The Greinke comparison is probably a good one. They're both fine pitchers, if what's his name who is on the Phillies now hadn't gone bonkers in the second half Greinke would have two Cy Young awards also. But they're not the kind of guys whose starts I make it a point to watch.

On the other hand, Wikipedia says that he was one of the most popular right-handed pitchers ever. Now, it's possible that that was written by his mother, but it's also possible that he was a much more exciting pitcher than his statistics indicate.

YouTube doesn't seem to have any videos of him playing. Which is a surprise, given how recently he retired. It does have a short and boring interview with him from 2012, filmed a charity golf tournament. I'll spare you the link, but basically he tells kids that if they want to be good at baseball they need to practice every day.

The card is from the inaugural 1991 BBM set. Looking at his card I just noticed that the kanji for "strikeout" just means "three", which is commendably to the point. The symbol that they use for "walk" - Nishi - means "west". I guess home plate is to the north?

Eventually I'll probably end up with some more BBM cards, but I've now posted all of those that I've got on hand. It'll be back to menkos and bromides (and a few Calbees) for the near future.

Rickyy

07-15-2018, 04:00 AM

nat

07-16-2018, 08:36 PM

Yoshio Yoshida (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=yoshid000yos) played shortstop for the Tigers from 1953 to 1969. He had good speed but limited power, and was known for defense and bunting. About what you expect from a shortstop. Given his speed, the Tigers usually used him as a lead-off hitter. He finished with around 1800 hits, and offensive records that are… okay. But his hitting isn’t the main reason that he was on the team. A comparable American player might be someone like Willie Randolph, positional differences aside. He was better-appreciated in his time than Randolph was, however, as he was a 9x best-nine selection. (SABR types sometimes say that Randolph should probably be given a closer look by the HOF, but that’s a much more tepid endorsement than being named the league’s best SS nine times.)

Yoshida came from a poor family, and was orphaned while he was still young. (He was raised by his older brother after his parents died.) Unable to afford tuition he didn’t plan on attending college, until his baseball prowess gained the attention of recruiters and he was offered a scholarship. He was scouted by the Braves, but a large offer from the Tigers convinced him to drop out of school and go pro.

The really interesting thing about Yoshida, however, isn’t what he did on the baseball diamond. After he retired he managed the Tigers on-and-off, but he also went to France to develop a baseball program. Yes, France. He said that when he arrived in France the level of play was abysmal, comparable to high school ball in Japan. But under Yoshida’s influence the French national team now participates in the World Baseball Classic, the European Baseball Cup, and other international competitions. In fact, France hosts an international competition (open apparently by invitation to a few European nations and Japan) called the “Yoshida Challenge”. Yoshida is an honorary member of the French Baseball and Softball Federation. He recently (c. 2014) arranged to have some French players train with Hanshin. The French national baseball team is now ranked 23rd in the world. Which might not sound very impressive, but it’s a lot better than high school ball.

As you might expect, thehanshintigers.com has a very good biography of Yoshida. Much better than what I’ve got here. You might want to go read it (www.thehanshintigers.com/team-history/legendary-players/yoshio-yoshida/).

I'm not sure what set the card belongs to. It resembles JBR 17 and JBR 29. But it has a border. It could be from a related but uncatalogued set.

nat

07-19-2018, 02:05 PM

Jiro Noguchi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=noguch000jir) pitched for a few teams from 1939 to 1943 (the Japanese Wikipedia page seems to indicate just two teams that changed their names, but I'm not super confident about how I'm reading it), and for Hankyu from 1946 to 1952. The beginning of his career was the best part. As a rookie he posted a 2.04 ERA (against a league average of 2.50), and then proceeded to post sub-1 ERAs for the next two seasons (at ages 20 and 21). Pitching for Taiyo in 1942 he had his most remarkable season. Noguchi pitched 527 innings (!) and notched a 40-17 record. But his 1.19 ERA was only fifth in the league. At one point in 1942 he pitched a 28 inning complete game. In 1944 he was drafted and went to war. He wouldn’t have had an opportunity to pitch in 1945 even if he wasn’t enlisted, as the season was simply canceled. After the war he was still good, but declined quickly. Although he hung on for a couple years afterwards, he was essentially done at age 30.

The entire Noguchi clan was athletic. His older brother Akira was a star baseball player: he made four all-star teams and had one best-nine selection. Younger brothers Noboru and Wataru made brief appearances as professional ball players as well. To be fair, though, Noboru didn’t get much of a chance. He was drafted into the Army and died in the Philippines in 1945. Apparently someone made a television special (https://tvdramaseriesserialsshows.blogspot.com/2017/09/japanese-drama-1942-no-playball-2017.html) about the family.

Jiro enrolled in Hosei University (one of the notable University teams in early baseball; maybe not equal to Waseda or Keio, but good). He did not finish his studies, however, as he was lured away by the Tokyo Senators. The Japanese Wikipedia page says that he was nicknamed “Astro Arm”. (I’m not 100% confident on this. I ran the Japanese Wikipedia page through Google Translate. It transliterated the hiragana, and then I ran the transliteration through Google Translate again. So who knows what it actually says. Unfortunately Noguchi doesn’t have an English Wikipedia page.)

In addition to being one of Japan’s great pitchers, Noguchi was a good hitter for a pitcher. Some seasons he was simply a good hitter, no “for a pitcher” required. For instance, in 1946 he posted a .708 OPS against a league average of .676. In fact, he was fourth in his team in OPS, among those who had a significant number of at bats.

The card is an early post-war menko card. It’s from the JCM 22 set, issued in 1947. This was the first year after the war that any baseball cards were issued. And it has definitely seen some play: the edges, especially at the top, are kind of squashed. It looks like it flipped over a fair number of cards in its day.

nat

07-21-2018, 08:40 PM

Tsutomu Wakamatsu (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=wakama000tsu) was an outfielder (switching between left and center) for the Yakult Swallows from 1971 to 1989. He had moderate power but high batting averages and a good walk/K rate. His career line is 319/375/481. If memory serves, that .319 batting average is tied for second best all-time in Japan. And he did it over an impressive 7500 plate appearances. He could steal a base, but that wasn’t his game exactly. Offensively he’s the same sort of player that Derek Jeter was. (Of course defensively there’s a position difference to consider.) Wakamatsu was a consistently excellent player. He made the all-star team 11 times, and was named to 10 best nines. Which is really good; it indicates that those all-star selections weren’t of the “well, we need to fill out the team, so why not this guy?” variety. Like Jeter he was a multi-gold glove winner (although only 2 in his case), although Jeter didn’t really deserve his hardware. And unlike Jeter, he won an MVP award.

Albright ranks Wakamatsu 35th all-time amongst Japanese players, and tells us that his nickname was “little big bat”, in reference to his size (5’6”) and his batting average (which was the opposite of low). The Jeter comparison is supposed to be “in-context”, so, like:

Jeter:American Baseball :: Wakamatsu:Japanese Baseball

At least in so far as their on-field production goes. I’m fairly sure that Jeter’s cultural impact was larger than Wakamatsu’s, at least given that Wakamatsu doesn’t even have a Japanese Wikipedia page. Albright tried to come up with something like MLE’s for Japanese baseball.* Given those, he lists Enos Slaughter, Tim Raines, Jose Cruz, Griffey Sr., Bill Buckner, Buddy Bell, and some other non-exciting players as comparables.

As with many great players, Wakamatsu went into coaching and managing after his retirement as an active player. He served several years in the minor leagues; managing the Swallows for seven years he posted a W/L record slightly above .500.

*MLE = major league equivalent. It’s one of the tools that we use to evaluate minor league players. Basically, MLEs try to determine what a player who does X in league Y would do if they were in the big leagues. It must be nightmarishly difficult to do this for Japanese players, given the dearth of data points.

Here is a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuxNaUtdNP0) the Swallows played at the stadium during their “Wakamatsu Day” following his retirement.

My Wakamatsu card is from the 1974/75 Calbee set.

nat

07-24-2018, 08:22 PM

Another poster showed some Starfin cards earlier in the thread, but I’ve got one now so I’m going to give him a full write-up.

Victor Starfin (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=starfi000vic) was a pitcher from 1936 to 1955. He was the second greatest pitcher in Japanese history, and Walter Johnson is, in a number of ways, a good American analogue for him. Before the war he played for the Kyojin – I assume that this is the same team now known as the ‘Giants’. After the war he moved around a bit but spent the better part of his time playing for the Stars. Starfin was the first Japanese player to win 300 games (retiring with 303), he had a career ERA of 2.09 (in an admittedly low-scoring environment), and he still holds the all-time record for shutouts in Japan. At the height of his career he was pitching an insane number of innings: 458 in 1939 (the first year in which the season was not split in two) and 436 in 1940. In the latter year he recorded an ERA of 0.97. He won consecutive MVP awards. Take that Bob Gibson.

As you might have guessed, Starfin wasn’t Japanese. He was Russian, born into an aristocratic family that sided against the Bolsheviks during the revolution. As the Bolsheviks swept to power, the Starfin family fled before them, first to Siberia, then to China, and eventually settling in Hokkaido. My guess is that he was about two years old when they left Russia and something like seven or eight when they finally arrived in Japan. It seems that his position in Japan was somewhat precarious. The family entered on transit visas, which would probably have made living there long term a dicey legal proposition. Wikipedia reports that the owner of the team (Matsutaro Shoriki) who signed him effectively blackmailed him into going pro, as he could have had the family deported.

Despite his success, Starfin’s story is, in many ways, a very sad one. That he was forced into baseball is just one aspect of it (he had wanted to attend Waseda University). Starfin struggled with depression and alcoholism through much of his life. Xenophobia also took a significant toll on him; he was forced to adopt a Japanese name, and later was confined with other foreign residents during World War II. His alcoholism might have cost him his marriage, and probably cost him his life. (To be clear, he did lose his wife. Some sources say that it was his drinking that drove her away, others that she was looking for a way out of Japan and Alexander Boloviyov offered it.) In any case, Starfin died after running his car into a train in 1957. The details of the accident are not clear, but there is a fair amount of speculation that he was driving drunk and caused the accident. (Apparently baseball-reference hasn’t heard about the accident: it lists him as still alive and 102 years old.)

Starfin named his son ‘George’, after Babe Ruth.

Amazingly there is video of Starfin pitching. Here he is in 1949 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_r29biPk6k).

My card is a bromide from the JBR53 set, issued in 1949. Although you can’t really make out the uniform, that would put him on the Stars.

nat

07-28-2018, 08:43 PM

Osamu Higashio (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=higash000osa) pitched for various incarnations of the Lions from 1969 to 1988. His career win-loss percentage is uninspiring (251/247) and a career ERA of 3.50 is good but not outstanding. To be fair, though, 251 is a large number of wins, and he pitched a huge number of innings in a league with a short season: 4086. Many of the times that he posted league-leading figures, it was simply due to the large number of innings that he pitched. This is particularly true for the (many) times that he led the league in losses, including losing 25 games (still a Pacific League record) in 1972.

In some ways it makes sense to think of Higashio’s career in two parts. During the first half of his career the Lions were terrible. He frequently led the league in losses, but also made a number of all-star teams and placed among the league leaders in ERA. During the latter half of his career the Lions blossomed (if you’ll excuse an odd metaphor). They won the Japan Series in 1982, and Higashio was named the series MVP. In 1983 they won the Japan Series again, led (again) by Higashio. After leading the league in losses on a bunch of occasions, he led the league in wins this year, and took home the Pacific League MVP award. In 1985 the Lions made it to the Japan Series again, but they lost this time. The disappointment didn’t last long. The next two seasons the Lions again won the Japan Series, with Higashio taking home another Pacific League MVP award in 1987. The following season the Lions won the Japan Series again – although by this point all the innings pitched had taken their toll on Higashio. He was relegated to part-time duty during the season, starting a game and making an appearance as a reliever in the Japan Series.

Higashio was known to pitch inside, and was frequently accused of head-hunting. (He says that 90% of batters that he hit were hit accidentally. Which, of course, leaves the other 10%.) He holds the all-time record for hit batsmen in Japan, and famously received a beating from Richard Davis after hitting him with a pitch. Higashio was not ejected and continued pitching, eventually winning the game. He rubbed many people the wrong way. In part because he hit so many batters (and came so close to hitting others), but also because he is blunt when he speaks, and (by the standards of Japanese baseball) disrespectful of other players.

After retiring Higashio took over managing duties of the Lions. He took them to two more Japan Series’, but they lost both times. He also had a Gameboy baseball game named after him (apparently only released in Japan) in 1991, and he and his daughter Riko (a professional golfer) do promotional work (e.g., for Guam Beer). The gossip pages report that Osamu is unhappy with Riko’s engagement to Junichi Ishida a twice-divorced actor who is 22 years older than she is. I don’t know why people care about this stuff. I mean, I know why Osamu cares about it, I don’t know why other people care that Osamu cares about it. Anyhow, the story that I found about it is 13 years old, so presumably Riko and Junichi are married by now. Hopefully Osamu got over it.

For a comparable American player, I’d point to someone like Tom Glavine. He was a good pitcher on a team that had been miserable but during his tenure became great, and he himself had a few seasons outstanding enough to be recognized with individual awards. (Although Glavine never took home an MVP award.)

My card is from the 1976 Calbee set. Most of the set has a standard Calbee look – full bleed photos with a little text at the bottom – but for some reason (or perhaps for no reason, I don’t know) a few of the cards have a pink frame around them. Including Mr. Higashio.

seanofjapan

07-30-2018, 06:56 PM

Loving these posts, you must be 3/4 of the way there by now?

Also a minor correction, Tsutomu Wakamatsu does have a Japanese Wikipedia page:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/若松勉

But yes, he is nowhere near as well remembered/influential in Japan as Jeter is in the US. Part of that is because he played for Yakult no doubt....

nat

07-30-2018, 08:39 PM

Thanks Sean! The pace has slowed down recently, in part because a progressively higher percentage of the guys that I need are players from the early days of pro ball who didn’t play much (or at all) after the war. Those cards are hard to find. (The hall of famers who never played as pros I’m not including in this project.) So, I’m at 58% and have about a half-dozen cards on the way from Japan. But there’s still some low-hanging fruit out there, so I’ll keep chipping away at it. And I’ve got a sizable backlog of cards already in my collection that I haven’t written about yet.

My apologies to Mr. Wakamatsu for missing his Wikipedia page. Searching for information in a language that you don’t read can be pretty hard, even with Google Translate around to help out!

Today’s player is Shigeru Chiba (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=chiba-000shi). He was the second baseman for several versions of the Giants from 1938 to 1956. If his presence on cards from the early 50s is any indication, I take it that he was one of the bigger stars of the day. He was certainly a good hitter, regularly posting seasons that wouldn’t embarrass Chase Utley, even though he was playing through the middle of Japan’s deadball period. In particular he had extremely good on-base skills, walking far more than he struck out (and leading the league four times) and posting batting averages a bit under 300 (which was very good at the time). He’d also steal 15 or so bases in a year and hit 8-10 home runs. If I’d been his manager I’d have had him batting leadoff, or maybe second. Before going pro he had been a star amateur player in middle and high school. It amazes me that they took middle school baseball seriously. But they did. He made his pro debut at 19, but played only three seasons before going to war. Upon his return he took the league by storm, winning seven consecutive best nine awards.

The coolest thing about Chiba is that he was nicknamed ‘The Formidable Buffalo’. Presumably this wasn’t done ironically, although he wasn’t an especially large guy. He’s listed at 5’6” and 140 lbs. Average male height in Japan in 1950 was 5’4”; I don’t have average weights from 1950, but 140 lbs. is a bit below average for today. So it sounds like he was probably a little bit larger than average. Anyhow, he’s got an awesome nickname.

After his playing career ended he took over managing the Kintetsu team. The team at the time was known as the ‘Pearls’, but ownership asked the fans what the team should be called, and ‘Buffaloes’ won, in honor of the manager. (Americans have done this too: remember the Cleveland Naps?)

Albright compares Chiba to Joe Gordon and considers him the greatest second baseman in Japanese history. I don’t really think that the comparison is apt. They were very different kinds of players. Gordon was a slugger, Chiba wasn’t. Now, obviously there are very serious dissimilarities between these two, but purely for on-the-field stuff, a better comparison might be Jackie Robinson. Even on-field the comparison isn’t perfect, Robinson really was an extraordinary baseball player. But Chiba was the same kind of player, just less of it.

The card is an uncatalogued menko. Somebody on QC duty messed this one up: look at the team name on his jersey. I'd write this off to the guy who designed the card not knowing English, but you don't need to know English to copy the jersey. Anyway, the card is hard to date since Chiba never changed teams and I don’t know of any other players in the set. I’m going to call it UNC Menko, c. 1950s and leave it at that.

nat

08-02-2018, 08:39 PM

Masaaki Koyama (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=koyama000mas) was a great pitcher from 1953 to 1973. The first half of his career was spent with the Tigers, the second half with the Orions. The change in teams was the result of a blockbuster trade, he was dealt for Hirokazu Yamauchi, one of Japan’s great sluggers. He was a workhorse, throwing 4899 innings and winning 320 games. Both are extremely high totals for Japan. For his career he also posted a 2.45 ERA. The IP and win totals are 3rd all-time, as are his 3159 strike outs. He was an eleven-time all-star, and won the 1962 Sawamura Award.

Although he managed to get to the pros at 18, his career didn’t start exactly as planned. He was a walk-on at a tryout for the Whales, but didn’t make the team.

The teams that he played on weren’t bad exactly, he did make it to the Japan Series three times. But he lost each time. Perhaps the lack of post-season success might explain why he doesn’t have the same kind of standing that a guy like Victor Starfin has got? But then again, Starfin doesn’t have a near-Earth asteroid (https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/index.html) named after him, does he?

Albright ranks him as the 9th best pitcher in Japanese history, and compares him to a bunch of American hall of famers. One of whom is Robin Roberts, which presents an interesting comparison. They were both durable and dominant. In context, though, I think that Koyama was the greater pitcher.

And yet for some reason it took until 2001 to get him elected to the Hall. This baffles me. Koyama is obviously one of the greatest Japanese pitchers to have ever lived, why the delay? The American Hall of Fame has committed many (many many) errors of commission: Jim Bottomley, Highpockets Kelley, Jim Rice, Maz, and on and on and on. The Japanese Hall of Fame hasn’t done as much of that, but their errors of omission are equally striking. How can it take 28 years to get Koyama elected? How is Doi not in yet? These guys aren’t marginal figures, they’re obviously all-time greats. Not electing Doi is like not electing Frank Robinson. Waiting a quarter of a century to elect Koyama is like telling Christy Matthewson that you need a little more time to think about his case. /editorial

>>

I'll use this card as an excuse for a quick kanji lesson, since I've picked up a little bit of it after staring at hundreds of Japanese baseball cards for the past few months. The symbols:

投手

mean "pitcher". The latter symbols translates as "hand" (according to Google), but it usually (or always?) turns up in specifications of a player's position. If you're looking at a card and trying to figure out what the kanji means, the bit with that symbol in it probably tells you his position.

My card is a menko from the JCM 43a set. It’s a 1957 issue (so Koyama is still on the Tigers). Many sets very similar to this one were issued over a number of years, and it can be hard to pin down which set a particular card belongs to, but I think that I’ve got this one. I don't know what the back stamp means.

nat

08-06-2018, 08:37 PM

Hideo Fujimoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=fujimo000hid) was a star pitcher for the Giants (and one season with the Dragons) during the war and in the immediate postwar years. He pitched from 1942 to 1955, of course missing 1945 when the league was suspended. For his career he has an astonishing .697 winning percentage (200 wins to 87 losses). If an American team had a .697 winning percentage they’d win 113 games. In addition he is the all-time record holder for both career ERA (1.90) and seasonal ERA (0.73). He was Korean, which confuses me a bit, since I’m pretty sure that ‘Fujimoto’ is a Japanese name. Apparently his family moved to Japan when he was eight years old.

In addition to being one of the finest pitchers in Japanese history, Fujimoto was a very skilled batter. He hit 245/319/327, which, you say “looks good for a pitcher”, but remember that the 1940s and early 50s were the Japanese deadball era. For example, in 1950 he posted an OPS of .808 against a league average of .727. It’s not that he was a good hitter for a pitcher, it’s that he was a good hitter period. There was a brief time (after his return to the Giants from the Dragons) when they experimented with him as an outfielder – it should be some indication of how highly his skill with the bat was respected that the Giants took one of the best pitchers to have ever lived and tried to make him an outfielder. In the end it didn’t stick (he played a total of 40 games in the outfield) and he went back to pitching full time.

During his career the Giants were (as usual) quite successful. They won the Japan Series from 1951-3, defeating the Hawks each time. The Giants = Yankees thing is perhaps something of a cliché, but it’s also just so true. Sometimes you gotta feel for the Dodgers/Hawks. He is best known for being the first Japanese player to throw a perfect game (in 1950). Arm troubles led him to change from an overhand to a side arm delivery, and he is credited with popularizing the slider in Japan. (If they weren’t throwing sliders before 1942, what where they throwing? If they’re not throwing sliders I have a hard time imagining them throwing curve balls. Just FB/CH and trying to pick your spots?)

Unfortunately he had a relatively short career, and an even shorter peak. From 1942 to 1950 he regularly led the league in ERA and other pitching categories (at least when he threw enough innings to qualify). He continued to be a good pitcher for a few seasons after that, but never again led the league in anything. And then his career was abruptly over. In 1954 he pitched 19 innings, in 1955 he pitched five. And that was that. Maybe injuries were involved, I don’t know. In 1955 he was 35, which is old (for a baseball player!) but not that old.

After his retirement Yomiuri took care of him. Fujimoto coached in the Giants’ minor league system, and later became a reporter in their LA bureau. (Remember that the company that owns the Giants is a media conglomerate, and a newspaper is their flagship business.)

Here are two things that I don’t know about Fujimoto. Any knowledgeable readers, feel free to fill me in. (1) Why he didn’t get started until 1942. He was 24 years old in his rookie year. I had expected that it had something to do with the war, but I couldn’t find any confirmation that he was ever in the military. (2) Why he changed his name to ‘Nakagami’. You’d think that it would have something to do with being Korean, but, like I said above, I’m pretty sure that he’s got a Japanese name anyway. He changed his name in 1943 but it doesn’t seem to have stuck, because this card is from a few years later and uses his old name.

Speaking of the card, it is a bromide from the JBR 73 set. The text on it is very hard to make out. On the far right it gives his name. The text on the left says something about "central". The first character is also the first character in 'Chunichi', the team he was with in 1947, but the second character in the team name doesn't appear. The hiragana in the middle of the card is illegible. Engel reports that this set was issued in 1947, but features pictures from 1946. He suggests that it was issued in the early spring of 1947. If so, that would make it the first postwar Japanese baseball card set.

The immediate postwar period in Japan is fascinating. The allies heavily bombed the sixty (!) largest cities in Japan during the war (except for Kyoto, which was spared the atom bomb, and I think most conventional bombing as well). Poverty was so rife that the average height of Japanese men and women actually dropped in the postwar period. Moreover, the nation was occupied by American troops, and more-or-less run as McArthur’s fiefdom. (At least, IIRC the McArthur biography that I read, until Congress recalled him.) Granted the occupation had the blessing – or rather forced acquiescence – of the emperor, but it’s still a big deal.

At Potsdam the allies demanded that Japan surrender unconditionally, Japan countered that they would surrender if (1) the emperor kept his throne, (2) there was to be no occupation, (3) Japan gets to keep Korea and Taiwan, and (4) the Japanese disarm their own armed forces. So, basically, they offered to not surrender at all. After a pair of atom bombs and Russian intervention they agreed to surrender provided that the emperor keeps this throne. It’s astonishing to me that that would be the condition that they would insist on – to this distant American view the other three seem to be much more important – and that they would rather have all of their cities erased and their county occupied by Stalin than lose their emperor. Anyway, the Americans accepted their offer, but not really.

There is still an emperor in Japan, but he doesn’t have any power anymore. McArthur realized that having the traditional authority in place and willing to go along with the occupation would make things go much more smoothly in the postwar years, and it almost unquestionably did. Allied soldiers frequently remarked on how little opposition they faced after the peace treaty was signed. The relevance to all of this to a baseball card website is that this little bromide of Hideo Fujimoto comes from a completely different world. This card was printed in a bombed out, famine stricken country, which was occupied by a foreign military. Sure, things have also changed in America since my 1956 Topps Ernie Banks was printed, but the difference between America in 1956 and America in 2018 has just got nothing on the difference between Japan in 1946 and America in 2018.

Jeff Alcorn

08-06-2018, 10:22 PM

Hi Nat,

Thanks for continuing this series. The pink bordered cards were #325 - #396 of the 1975-76 series. The first 36 cards are the Pennant Race Stars and the next 36 are the Camp Series (training camp). Many of the series are given a theme name. If you notice on the back of the Higashio card, the line of text under the card number says Pennant Race Star in kana and a little kanji.

The kanji for Walk is not nishi, it is the kanji for the number 4- it looks similar to nishi, but the kanji for 4 does not have any lines extending outside of the box like nishi does.

The writing on the left side of Hideo Fujimoto's card says Chubu Dragons. Chubu Nippon is the full name of the company that owns the Chunichi Dragons, and they used it as the team name only in 1947.

Last name changes usually happen due to marriage and men can choose to use their wife's name instead of their own. This is done for some complicated legal and inheritance reasons, and there are a few players that have done this. HOFer Kazuto Yamamoto became Kazuto Tsuruoka after playing his entire career as Yamamoto. He was already managing when he changed his name to Tsuruoka.

Thanks again, this is the best series going on Net 54.

Jeff

nat

08-08-2018, 08:54 PM

Rickey Henderson is the Yutaka Fukumoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=fukumo000yut) of America. Fukumoto was an outfielder for Hankyu from 1969 to 1988. He was blindingly, astoundingly, superlatively fast. He hit for a healthy average, knew how to draw a walk, and added a respectable amount of power.

The obvious cannot be ignored. Fukumoto stole 1065 bases. This is an all-time record in Japan. Henderson stole more than that, but he also had about 3000 extra plate appearances to do it in. If Fukumoto stole bases at his career rate, but over Rickey’s 13346 plate appearances, he’d have ended up with 1320 stolen bases. Rickey had 1406. Now of course there are a million reasons that this isn’t the way to do these comparisons. Rickey played in five more seasons than did Fukumoto, and should get credit for that longevity. Also, there’s no guarantee that Fukumoto would have kept up his prolific base-stealing ways if he’d had to do it over a full American season. So this is all really an interesting way to illustrate these numbers:

SB/PA
Rickey: 0.1053
Fukumoto: 0.1051

Rickey had the longer career, but each time that they went up to the plate, the chances that they were going to steal a base were almost exactly equal. Now, Rickey’s stolen base totals were, in part, a product of the fact that he was extraordinarily good at getting on base. I mean, not Joey Votto good, but he led the league once and was (barely) over 400 for his career. Fukumoto was a good hitter, but not that good. So let’s isolate what they’re doing once they’re on the basepaths:

SB/times on base
Rickey: 0.268
Fukumoto: 0.282

Once Rickey got on base, there was slightly less than a 27% chance that he would successfully steal a base. For Fukumoto, the odds were a bit better than 28%. Rickey was a better hitter than Fukumoto, but Fukumoto made up for it on the base paths.

“But,” I hear you say, “it’s really hard to steal third (or home!), maybe Rickey trails Fukumoto in your supposed measure of ‘base stealing ability’ because he got extra base hits so often!” No problem, let’s control for that.

SB/(singles + walks)
Rickey: 0.322
Fukumoto: 0.354

We can glean some interesting facts from these data. Fukumoto was noticeably better at stealing second base than was Rickey. He beats Rickey there by 32 points, whereas his lead in SB/times on base was only 14 points. If I’m thinking clearly (and maybe I’m not, I’ve got a pretty good cold right now) that means that Rickey must beat him somewhere to account for the 18 point difference between these two rates. So we can conclude that Fukumoto was more likely to steal a base than was Rickey, and a fair bit more likely to steal second given that he was on first (almost 10% more likely), but that Rickey was more likely to steal third, given that he was on second, than was Fukumoto. That’s really interesting. Raw speed could make up for a bad jump if you’re stealing second, but not if you’re stealing third. The throw from the catcher just isn’t long enough. This means that Rickey was probably better at reading pitchers and/or had quicker reaction times than Fukumoto. But since Fukumoto was the more successful base stealer over all (at least on a rate basis) that Fukumoto was probably the faster runner.

Regarding Fukumoto himself. Here are some facts that are probably not surprising: he was a 17-time all-star, a 10-time member of the best nine, he won 12 consecutive gold glove awards, and an MVP award. His lead in career stolen bases is absurd, Yoshinori Hirose, in second place, has just under 600 steals. Just 60% of Fukumoto’s total. In addition to the stolen base record he is the all-time leader in triples, second in runs, and tied for fifth in hits.

The card is another from the 76 Calbee set.

And thanks Jeff, I appreciate the feedback!

nat

08-14-2018, 09:50 AM

Kaoru Bettoh (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=betto-000kao) was an outfielder with the Tigers and the Orions from 1948 to 1957. Perhaps just as importantly he had a 20 year career managing a variety of teams, mostly notably the Orions as a player-manager.

Albright ranks him as the 17th most successful manager in Japanese history, but his ranking system is of the “assign 3 points for X, 2 points for Y” sort (a kind Bill James indulged in on more than one occasion), which doesn’t really measure anything. I think that the most accurate thing to say about his managing career is that it was long and had periods of sustained success.

As a player Bettoh had a very high but very brief peak. In 1950 he slugged .671 in a league that slugged .384 as a whole. It was about 75% better than league average. To do that in 2018’s American League you would need to slug .728. That figure would place 27th all-time, behind Frank Thomas’ 1994 and Hack Wilson’s 1930. In 1950 he hit 35% of his team’s home runs. In short, he was a big slugger, and fast too, stealing forty bases one season. But he didn’t get to the JPBL until he was 27, and although he hung on for a couple more seasons, he was basically done at 33. And he was really only a superstar for a couple years. The late start seems to be a product of playing in the industrial leagues – which he must have absolutely dominated, but I don’t know where to find data on it, nor even if records were kept. Albright suggests that the war might have gotten in the way. I don’t know if he served or not, but he didn’t break in until 1948, so even if he was in the war, it doesn’t explain why he wasn’t playing in 46-7.

Throughout the 20th century there were a number of attempts to bring together Japanese and American baseball, most notably the various American tours of Japan. The tours were not the only instances of Japanese/American cooperation, however. A number of Japanese teams came to spring training in the states, and every once in a while you’ll find a Japanese player who made a brief appearance in an American minor league. Walter O’Malley was especially active in these cooperative endeavors, taking the Dodgers on tour and bringing Japanese teams to train with them. Indeed, Bettoh spent the 1960 season with the Dodgers. It’s not clear what he was doing with them – he was retired as a player at that point and there’s no record of him doing any coaching for them. Perhaps he was just an observer. In any case, that was the end of his tenure with the Orions. He sat out the following season, before taking over managing Kintetsu. This must have been a change for him, the Orions were good, the Buffaloes were not. After going 55-91 in 1964 he lost his job, sat out a few years, and then took over the top job with the Whales.

Bettoh was a graduate of Keio University, which had one of the top programs in the amateur era. Baseball-Reference has a list of players (https://www.baseball-reference.com/schools/index.cgi?key_school=41e593b3) who attended Keio (and who went on to play professionally). I’m surprised by the lack of hall of famers, given the status of the program. I only noticed two others – Fujita and Mizuhara – and all three of them are in the hall largely for their work as managers. It is, of course, possible that this list in incomplete, but I expected a larger share of the early stars of Japanese baseball to have come through Keio.

The card is an uncatalogued menko. Despite being uncatalogued we can do a pretty good job dating it. Bettoh is wearing a Tigers’ uniform, which places the card either in 1948 or 1949.

nat

08-18-2018, 09:02 PM

Motoshi Fujita (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=fujita000mot) had a short career (1957 to 1964) as a pitcher, and much later (1981 to 1983 and again 1989 to 1992) a manager. All of it was spent with the Giants and all of it was exceptionally successful. As a pitcher he went 119-88 with a 2.20 ERA. The teams that he managed went 516-361.

After attending Keio University Fujita went undrafted (despite considerable success in college), and so he went to play in the industrial leagues. After four years he was selected by the Giants. He broke into the big time at 25, winning the rookie of the year award, and the MVP in both 1958 and 1959.

During his playing days the Giants made the Japan Series five times (with two wins). After his retirement he was hired as a pitching coach, and served in that capacity while the Giants had their string of nine consecutive Japan Series victories. The Giants went 2-2 in the Japan Series when he helmed the team.

Fujita was a good pitcher, even a great one, but his career was short (due to injury) and his time at the top of his game even shorter. For hall-of-fame purposes, it’s really only 1957-9 that make any difference. It’s clear that he wouldn’t be a hall of famer but for his managing career. On the other hand, his managing career was also very short (although quite successful). I don’t know how Japan treats its managers well enough to know if it would have qualified him for the hall, but I’m inclined to think not. He really seems to me like a hybrid candidate, who had to be (and was) excellent in both of his roles to make it.

It's hard to find an American player who is a good match for Fujita. Johan Santana is probably closest, although he’s not really a good match, because Fujita’s managerial career is so important to his hall of fame case.

The card is from 1959. It’s a part of the JCM 31e set.

nat

08-21-2018, 09:15 PM

Masaichi Kaneda (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kaneda002mas) is Japan’s greatest pitcher. He played for Koketetsu (the Swallows) from 1950 to 1964, and the Giants from 1965 to 1969. His career W/L record is 400-298 over an astounding 5526 innings. Kaneda combined a role in the rotation (569 games started) with regular work in the bullpen (another 375 games). The work in the bullpen wasn’t just when he was old and slipping. In 1956, when he was at the very peak of his career, he appeared in more games out of the bullpen than he did as a starter. The 5500 innings that Kaneda pitched is a mind-blowing number for any pitcher, much less one from Japan where the seasons are shorter. Nolan Ryan clocked in with about 200 fewer innings, Phil Niekro, throwing knuckleballs, pitched about 100 fewer. In fact, his IP total would rank fourth all-time in MLB, behind Cy Young, Pud Galvin, and Walter Johnson.

What accounts for Kaneda’s high IP totals is heavy work-loads (he would often pitch every three games, and appear in relief on his off days), but also an extremely early start to his career. Kaneda appeared in 30 games in his age 16 season, and logged 350 innings at 17. Astonishingly, he didn’t take up baseball until his freshman year of high school. He played for only two seasons before going pro. Here’s a list of 16 year old MLB players and what they did at that age. It’s possible that I missed someone, but I think that this list is complete:

Jim Derrington – one game, six innings pitched, five earned runs allowed, for the 1959 White Sox.
Alex George – five games, ten at bats, one hit, for the 1955 A’s.
Roger McKee – four games, thirteen innings, 9 ER, for the 1943 Phillies.
Carl Sheib – six games, eighteen innings, 9 ER, for the 1943 A’s.
Coonie Blank – one game, two AB, no hits, for the 1909 Cardinals.
Joe Stanley – one at bat (ended in a K) for the 1897 Senators.
Tom Hess – two at bats, no hits, for the 1892 Orioles.
Willie McGill – 183 IP for the 1890 Cleveland Infants of the Player’s League.
Piggy Ward – five at bats (no hits) for the 1883 Philadelphia Quakers.
Leonidas Lee – four games, 18 AB, five hits, for the 1877 Brown Stockings.
Frank Pearce – one game, four IP, for the 1876 Louisville Grays.
Jim Britt – 336 IP for the 1872 Brooklyn Atlantics (led league in losses).

Only two players did anything of note at 16, both of them played >100 years ago, and both of them played in leagues that no longer exist. In one case, the league lasted only one season, in the other it’s controversial whether the league should be counted as a major league at all (I think that MLB itself doesn’t count it). Kaneda had an ERA that was better than league average at 16, and threw 164 innings. (N.B.: I’m talking about “age 16 seasons”; some sources report that Kaneda had just turned 17 when he made his debut, but he was still in his age 16 season because of when his birthday fell.)

Kaneda’s win total came despite playing for the Swallows, a perennial cellar-dweller. (Going to the Giants must have been a welcome change.) He was noted for an extremely fast, although often erratic fastball, but his money pitch was a curve. Famously both Nagashima and Oh went 0-4 with 4 strikeouts in their first games against him. Eventually the incredible number of innings that he pitched caught up to him, and he developed an underhand delivery to help relieve the pain from pitching. Amongst his accomplishments Kaneda won three Sawamura awards. In 1963 Sports Illustrated ran a story on him (https://www.si.com/vault/1963/08/19/595755/the-winningest-japanese), calling him “an oriental Warren Spahn”, which makes sense given that Spahn was a great left-handed pitcher with a long career who was just wrapping things up in 1963. But I think that Kaneda was the greater pitcher. They note that he holds almost every Japanese pitching record, what they didn’t know was that he had six more seasons remaining in that left arm. As far as I know the only significant counting stat record that he doesn’t hold is shutouts – he trails Victor Starfin by one. (His record for appearances has since been eclipsed by relief pitchers.) It’s always dangerous to say things like this, but I’m fairly confident that most of his career records are untouchable.

After retiring from pitching he managed the Orions, winning the Japan Series with them. He also founded the Meikyukai, for reasons that I’ve never been quite clear on. It’s a club for great Japanese players born during the Showa period (1926-88), one gets in for having 2000 hits, 200 wins, or 250 saves. All stats earned after making a player’s Japanese debut count, so Hideki Matsui is a member, even though he only had about 1300 hits in Japan. (Curiously, stats earned prior to appearing in a Japanese game do not count.) They play charity golf tournaments and things like that.

Kaneda says that he considered coming over to play in the States, but doesn’t regret staying in Japan. Residual hostility from the war, together with the fact that he didn’t speak English, he says, would have made the transition difficult.

Here’s a short clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AobTFVHAlCQ) of Kaneda pitching. No date given, but he’s still on the Swallows, so it’s prior to 1965.

My card is from the JGA 149 set, issued in 1962.

Jeff Alcorn

08-21-2018, 11:35 PM

Hi Nat,

That card is not Motoshi Fujita but Yoshio Yoshida of the Hanshin Tigers, and is the card that you already used for Yoshida's biography. Can you show which Fujita you have? I would love to see it.

Jeff

nat

08-22-2018, 07:10 AM

Oops! Confused the black and white cards for each other. It should be fixed now.

nat

08-23-2018, 08:56 PM

In working through this project I've picked up a few Calbee cards that I don't need. I'd be happy to send them to a good home, preferably in exchange for something that I do need. To that end, I have available:

Koji Yamamoto (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1790703&postcount=72) - 1976 #521

Isao Harimoto (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1787536&postcount=66) - 1976 #1101

Tatsunori Hara (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1793863&postcount=85) - 1987 #290 or 1985 #197 (but not both)

Yutaka Fukumoto (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1802056&postcount=99) - 1976 #307

Osamu Higashio (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1798941&postcount=93) - 1976 #921 or #327 (but not both)

and

Nobuyuki Kagawa - 1984 #113

Yamamoto was a great slugger for the Hiroshima Carp. Harimoto is Japan's all-time hit king (and atomic bomb survivor). Hara was a great third baseman and manager. Fukumoto was Japan's greatest leadoff hitter. Higashio was the ace pitcher for a very successful Lions team. And Kagawa, well, Kagawa played professional baseball. All of them except Kagawa are hall of famers. Images of the cards are below (except for the second Higashio and the second Hara cards, which are in my write-ups of them), in the order in which they are listed above.

My first priority are the Japanese hall of famers that I'm still missing (list to be found below), but I'm willing to trade for some American cards as well. I could use a 1963 Topps Ron Santo, a 1954 Topps Whitey Ford, a 1950 or 51 Bowman Larry Doby, and, well, lots of pre-war cards. Helpfully, I'm not too particular about condition, "well loved" cards are welcome.

Here are the Japanese players I'm looking for:

[This is an evolving list. Rather than having me keep updating this post, how about anyone who wants to trade send me a PM.]

nat

08-25-2018, 09:09 PM

Hisanori Karita (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=karita000his) played for, well, lots of teams, from 1936 to 1951. He was a second baseman who starred during the deadball era of the 30s and 40s. And, man, was the ball dead. In 1939 he slugged .283, which was only five points below average. The year before he posted a slugging percentage of .411. I don’t know any easy way to find league leaders in Japan,* but that mark has to be up there. Japanese pro leagues didn’t form until he was 26, so that’s when he got his start. Like many players he missed several years during the war (and sat out 1949), but he played until he was 41. Karita’s raw totals (for example, 619 hits in his career) look extremely unimpressive – especially for a hall of famer – but this is due to three extenuating circumstances. The first, as mentioned, is that he didn’t get a chance to play pro ball in his early 20s. Most hall of famers break in very young; the guys who are 26 year old rookies tend to be barely-competent bench players and relief pitchers. Karita has an excuse, of course, but losing four or five years off the begging of your career is going to cost you. The second of the extenuating circumstances (also noted) is that Japanese baseball had basically no offense at all when he was playing. Japanese deadball was more extreme than American deadball, and American deadball was plenty extreme. Finally, while Japanese seasons are still shorter than American seasons, in the early days they were much shorter. Interestingly, they were variable even within a league: not every team played the same number of games. The fall 1936 season featured teams playing between 26 and 30 games. He played in the spring seasons as well, but when you’re playing max 60 games a year, it’s going to be hard to collect very many hits.

*I mean, I could go through and check everyone manually, but I’m much too lazy to do that. It would be nice if the raw data were available in a single file and you (meaning I) could get Excel to do it.

In addition to being a good hitter, he was known for his fielding. Fitts and Engels think that he was one of the best ever. His ability to turn double plays was especially noted. Unfortunately I have been able to find no fielding data at all, so I have no way to evaluate these claims. He also tried his hand at pitching (throwing a total of 41 innings over three seasons), but he was beyond terrible. In 1939 he pitched 31 innings to a 4.34 ERA, against a league average of 2.50. That would be like having a 7.38 ERA in today’s American League. For most of his pro career he also managed the teams that he played for, but the results were unimpressive, his teams were mostly second-division, and a few of them were quite bad.

Karita was active in baseball before the formation of the professional leagues. He attended, and presumably played for, Hosei University. He played against the Americans on the 1934 tour. On the All-Japan team he played shortstop and typically hit second. During the November 11 game, in an effort to make the games more competitive (the Americans won all of the previous games by very lopsided scores), the visitors and the Japanese all stars played mixed teams, with six Americans and three Japanese on each team. Karita played with Americans Ruth, Warstler, Foxx, Averill, and Berg (I don't know who their sixth American was). They won 13-2. Karita hit .276 for the series, which is considerably better than his career mark of .219.

Less-known than the American tour of Japan is the Japanese tour of North America. A Japanese all-star team went on a four month tour through North America in 1935. The pitching staff was led by teenagers Sawamura and Starfin. The rest of the team might not have been quite as heralded (although Starfin wasn’t yet the big star that he would become), but it did feature Karita in the middle infield. His most impressive feat was stealing three bases in a game against the Vancouver Athletics, and he hit a rare home run in Winnipeg. Here (https://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/dai-nippon-tokyo-baseball-club-tokyo-japan-at-athletic-park-vancouver-b-c-may-1935) is a picture from his time in Vancouver. His double play partner on the tour was Takeo Tabe. Like Karita, Tabe is in the hall of fame, but Tabe never did go pro, and he was killed in combat in 1945.

Karita also served in the war. I was able to locate little in the way of records concerning his service. He was stationed in China, but that’s about all that I could find. I don’t know if he was wounded (if so it would explain his absence from baseball even after the end of the war), but in any case he was in good enough shape to return to pro ball in 1947.

Albright thinks that in order for Karita to be deserving of his place in the hall of fame, he’s got to get a lot of credit for his play before the formation of the professional league. If the hall of fame is about recognizing the greatest players, that has to be right. But I suspect that the reason he’s in the hall of fame doesn’t boil down to voters evaluating his play prior to 1936 and deciding that it, plus his pro career, totals enough value to match the hall’s established standard. Karita was a star during a transitionary period in the history of Japanese baseball, when it first staked a claim on the world stage, and when it made its first foray into professionalism. I suspect that this, as much as his actual contributions on the field, is responsible for Karita’s place in the hall of fame. In some ways I like to compare him to John Ward. Now, Ward was the better player – he’s arguably qualified for the hall of fame on the merits. But even if he had come up short, the hall of fame needed, in some way, to recognize Ward because of his role in the formative years of American baseball. Karita wasn’t the mover and shaker that Ward was – he wasn’t instrumental in founding a new major league, for example – but the Japanese hall of fame would be incomplete if it didn’t recognize the contributions of the people who made Japanese baseball what it is today. Hisanori Karita is not the only one who is responsible for that, or even the one who is most responsible, but I suspect that that, more than what he accomplished as a player or as a manager, is why he is in the hall of fame.

The card is from the JRM 24 set, issued in 1947. Having ‘Tokyo’ on the card doesn’t do much to narrow down the team he’s playing for, but 1947 was his first and only year playing with the Flyers. It is blank on the back.

nat

08-27-2018, 09:30 PM

Hiromitsu Kadota (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kadota000hir) was a big immobile slugger, mostly playing for the Nankai Hawks, from 1970 to 1992. He was still slugging in excess of .600 after he turned 40. Clearly a middle-of-the-order type (he cleared 100 RBIs several times, but never made it to 100 runs), Kadota tallied 567 home runs, to go with 2566 hits and a career 289/379/529 slash line. Until 1977 he was an outfielder, but he spent basically the last 15 years of his career as a designated hitter.

Usually hitters perform less-well as DHs than they do when they are playing the field. This has been common knowledge in Sabrmetric circles for a while now. Michael Lichtman found (https://mglbaseball.com/2013/12/09/pinch-hitter-dh-and-other-penalties-revisited/), using data from 1998-2012, that DHs lose about 14 points of wOBA relative to their performance when they’re not DHing. If you’re not familiar with it, wOBA takes the weighted run-value of a player’s batting events (singles, walks, home runs, and so on), divides it by opportunities (basically plate appearances, but with adjustments for sac bunts and the like), and puts it on a scale that looks like what you’d find for OBP. 14 points isn’t a huge difference exactly, but it is pretty significant. For whatever reason (Lichtman suggests that DHs don’t have their heads in the game to the same extent that regular position players do), players hit noticeably worse when they’re DHing. Kadota seems to have been an exception to this general trend. After becoming a full-time DH, he became a truly great hitter, significantly improving on his (already pretty good) production as an outfielder. (Although Kadota might have just been ahead of his time. Some recent research – which is unfortunately behind a paywall at Baseball Prospectus – suggests that the “DH penalty” might not be a thing anymore.)

What Kadota is most famous for is his performance as an old player. He is the oldest MVP in Japanese history – taking the title in 1988 at the age of 40. In addition he is the oldest player to lead the league in RBIs, toping the league with 93 as a 41 year old. As a great player who didn’t really age, Kadota predictable ranks high on Japan’s all-time leader boards. He’s third in career home runs, and top ten in most other offensive categories. In total he was selected to seven best-nines, and was a 14x all-star. Albright regards him as the 16th greatest player in Japanese history.

Here’s some footage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKFX1smL7pg) of Kadota hitting home runs.

My card is from the 1984 Calbee set.

nat

08-30-2018, 08:58 PM

Tadashi Sugiura (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=sugiur000tad) spent thirteen years pitching for the Nankai Hawks. It was only the first half of that time, however, that he was really productive. He was an ace-quality pitcher from 1958 to 1964, at which point he became a relief pitcher. If not for the switch to relieving he would have qualified for the golden player’s club pretty easily, despite retiring at 34. As it is, he won 187 games while losing 106, with a career ERA of 2.39. That ERA is a good number, but it’s aided by his years in the bullpen. He had a number below that mark for his first three seasons, and then never again until he switched roles.

The beginning to his career really was quite impressive. He took home the rookie of the year award in 1958, no doubt thanks to 27 wins in 299 innings pitched, with an ERA of 2.05. (Now don’t get too excited about that ERA, the league as a whole had a 2.83 mark. So it’s good, but this was a pretty low scoring league.) The following year he won 38 games over 371 innings pitched, and took home both the Pacific League MVP Award, as well as the Japan Series MVP award (he pitched every game of the series). It was certainly his best year. He recorded an ERA of 1.41, and was only 23 years old. But as a 23 year old he already had more than six hundred professional innings on his arm (after who knows how much pitching in high school and college). At the age of 24 he pitched 334 innings, and his workload dropped off thereafter, culminating in relegation to the bullpen in 1965. It’s hard not to imagine that all the abuse his arm suffered when he was young had something to do with it, despite the fact that he was a submarine pitcher. Just how much heavy workloads contribute to arm injuries is controversial, but it’s hard to deny that they do. Throwing a ball overhand at extremely high speeds is just not something that we evolved to do. And, perhaps more to the point, every time you do it is a time that something can snap. Perhaps a heavy workload increases injury risk not because the tendons or ligaments or whatever wear down, perhaps it increase injury risk just because each time you throw a ball you’re rolling the dice, and if you roll the dice enough times eventually you’re going to lose.

Albright ranks him as the 65th greatest Japanese baseball player, and 17th greatest pitcher. Admittedly I haven’t tried to put together anything like Albright’s ranking system, but this sounds aggressive to me. In part this could be a matter of taste. I’m happy saying that Sugiura’s 1959 was one of the greatest pitching seasons of all time, and since he was extremely good in 1958 and 1960-1 as well, he’s got a very respectable peak. Now, peak performance is clearly important, if for no other reason than in order to win a pennant a team needs above average performance (just by definition), and so above average performance squeezed into a small number of years is more valuable than an equivalent amount of performance stretched out into more years. But I don’t think it’s so much more valuable that it means that someone who’s career was basically four really great seasons, a few in which he was starting to deal with injuries, a few as a relief pitcher, and then an early retirement, is a top-20 pitcher.

Now, I said that this may be a matter of taste. I’m inclined to think that when ranking baseball players what you want to rank is how much they did for their teams, given what they could control (this last qualification ensures that we don’t put much emphasis on RBIs when evaluating players, something based on linear weights is much better). Now, as I’ve just argued, measuring “how much they did for their teams” is not just a matter of multiplying their rate of production by their opportunities, putting more production into smaller spaces is more valuable than stretching it out. But a lot of people seem to think that what “greatness” amounts to isn’t “how much they did for their teams” but also “how good they were at their best”. Of course I account for that too – since, as I said, being really good for a little while is more valuable than being pretty good for a long time – but they want it to be something that doesn’t reduce to the value that a player contributes to his teams. I don’t know if this is what Albright is doing, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Let me argue, very briefly, that this is a bad idea. First of all, the only reason to care about how good a player is, is that it helps his team win ball games. We want talented players because we want wins, the value of great performance itself is instrumental. So if you give a player credit for his great performances, you’re double counting; he gets credit for a great performance (which, remember, matters because it helps his team win games), and he gets credit for the wins that that performance generated for his teams. My second complaint is that “at his best” is objectionably imprecise, and the only non-arbitrary way to make it precise is to extend it out to his entire career. Is it his best game that counts? His best week? His best year? His best X years? And, for any answer that you give, you need to give a non-arbitrary reason why that’s the timeframe that counts. Stretching the timeframe out to his entire career has a non-arbitrary reason – there’s nothing else that we could take into consideration. But there’s no non-arbitrary reason to stop short of that. So I’m not inclined to look favorably on players like Sugiura, guys who were exceptionally great for a short while but without the surrounding bulk that we ordinarily expect from a hall of fame type career.

This card sure looks like it belongs to JCM 33d. The only problem is that Engel associates this menko number with Inao. I see three possibilities: (1) there’s an error in the book, (2) it’s an uncatalogued variation, (3) it belongs to an uncatalogued set that is nearly indistinguishable from JCM 33d. I don’t know which it is. Option (1) is certainly possible: I’ve written things shorter than Engel’s book that were professionally copyedited and errors still snuck through. But it could also be (2), there are plenty of sets that re-use menko numbers. And of course what (3) has going for it is that there are still plenty of uncatalogued menko sets. So who knows.

nat

09-01-2018, 09:50 PM

Most Japanese hall of famers have relatively little written about them in English. Some of them don’t have their own (English) Wikipedia pages. A few of them have almost no internet presence (in English) at all, short of a page of stats at Baseball-Reference and a line of commentary by Jim Albright. Wally Yonamine is an exception to this rule. A huge, glaring exception. Rob Fitts wrote an entire biography of the man. A book. In English.

I haven’t read it.

I will, I swear. But I haven’t. And time constraints being what they are, I don’t know when I will. Rumor has it that you get to read for pleasure when you’re retired.

The point of this series of posts – for me at any rate – is that they give me an excuse to learn about Japanese baseball while collecting the cards. I can say at least something interesting and/or informative about the players that I’ve written up. But I also have cards of players for whom I haven’t done a post yet, and I don’t know much of anything about these guys. What team they’re on. What position they play. That’s about it. So it seems advisable to do an entry for Yonamine now, rather than wait until I’ve read Fitts’ book. Mostly because otherwise I wouldn’t invest the time necessary to learn something about him (albeit less time than reading a book). So I researched this post the same way that I researched the other ones: digging through the nether regions of Google searches, reading Whiting’s articles for the Japan Times, stuff like that. To those that have read Fitts’ book: I apologize in advance. You will probably learn nothing from this post, and might want to skip it. Although if you want to correct me on something, or elaborate on something that I don’t know enough about to address well, please go for it.

We’ll start with this. Wally (https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/Y/YonaWa20.htm) Yonamine (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=yonami001wal) played halfback for the San Francisco 49ers in 1947. That was the extent of his pro-football career. He totaled 114 yards in 12 games (just three starts). I don’t have any idea if that is good or not. I am the (perhaps rare) baseball fanatic who doesn’t care at all about any other sport. If the ball is going towards the other guys’ endzone, that’s good, if not, not. That’s all I know about football. But anyway, Yonamine was a latter day Jim Thorpe, or a forerunner to Bo Jackson. Which is to say, he played both professional baseball and professional football.

His football “career” followed a brief stint in the army. After his discharge he chose to go pro immediately rather than accept a scholarship to Ohio State. A broken wrist following the 1947 season ended his time with the 49ers and dramatically changed the course of his life.

As stories about Japan, and America, and baseball, are wont to do, this one features Lefty O’Doul. At the time he was managing the San Francisco Seals, a top minor league team. Yonamine had returned to his native Hawaii, where O’Doul apparently saw him playing baseball and signed him to a contract. He wasn’t assigned to the Seals though, they farmed him out to Salt Lake City in a class C league. Bottom of the totem pole. He hit .335 in a league that hit .269; I don’t have Yonamine’s other rate stats, but I think it’s safe to say that he utterly dominated the Pioneer League.

O’Doul, of course, had many contacts in Japanese baseball, and recommended Yonamine to Matsutaro Shoriki of the Yomiuri Giants. Yonamine would spend the next 11 seasons playing baseball in Japan, nine of them with the Giants, the last two with the Chunichi Dragons. He was a fearsome baseball player. To modern eyes his stats look like those of an above-average leadoff hitter. And he was a leadoff hitter. But he was also, for his day, a terrific slugger. In 1956 (to pick one season almost at random) the Central League hit 225/274/321. Yonamine hit 338/420/487. That’s 50% higher than average in batting average, 53% higher in on-base percentage, and 66% better in slugging. To do that in the American League in 2018 you would need to hit 375/486/692. Those are a pretty good match for Babe Ruth’s career rates. Of course Ruth did this over a whole career, not just one season, so I’m not saying that Yonamine hit like Babe Ruth. He didn’t. But he did hit really damn well. And he, unlike most big sluggers, was also a fleet-of-foot outfielder. In 1956, the same year he was putting up Ruth’s career batting line, Yonamine tied for third in the league in stolen bases.

Americans are prone to think about Japanese baseball in relation to their own brand of the game. Accordingly Americans tend to remember Yonamine for two things: re-introducing American players into the Japanese game after WWII, and introducing American style play to Japan. I don’t know if this is how he is remember in Japan. My guess is that seven consecutive best-nines and eleven all-star appearances feature more prominently in the Japanese recollections of Yonamine. Nevertheless, no less an authority than Doug Glanville (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/remembering-wally-yonamine/471210/) (of Philadelphia Phillies fame) says that Yonamine had the blessing of the allied command to help build understanding between the Japanese and the Americans after the war. One would think that, after the American bombing campaign, there was some building to do. The firebombing of Tokyo killed about 100,000 people, mostly civilians. The bombs that were used were tested on mock-ups of houses (http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/30/who-made-that-firebomb/). Not military installations, not factories, houses. Killing civilians was the point. Nevertheless, Yonamine says that he experienced relatively little hostility due to being an American. It was more problematic, he said, to play for the always successful, and so much resented, Giants. (I don't know if this was a joke or not. He did get some abuse early on, but he says that, despite occasional comparisons to Jackie Robinson, he didn't go through anything like what Robinson went through.)

Now, I’ll admit to being a little confused by this ground-breaking role for Yonamine. Tadashi Wakabayashi was also Hawaiian, and was playing in Japan immediately after the war. Yonamine wouldn’t arrive for another five years. Of course he’d been playing in Japan since 1936 – maybe Yonamine was the first American to start his Japanese career after the war. Maybe Wakabayashi didn't count since he'd been living there for so long? Anyway, it’s not like there weren’t any other Americans around in pro ball.

As for introducing American-style ball to Japan, it sure seems that he should get credit (or debit, depending on who you talk to) for this. Prior to going over Japanese batters didn’t run out sac bunts, didn’t try to break up double plays. In general, they didn’t play aggressively. Yonamine did, and it worked. And he was soon copied. This didn’t sit well with the old guard (especially Kawakami, Yonamine’s teammate and the man who became his manager and engineered his trade to the Dragons). I wonder what happened the first time he took out an infielder turning a double play. When I played baseball, we ran drills to do that. Shortstops and second basemen also ran drills on how to avoid incoming runners who would go well out of their way to slide into them. Now, one day, shortly after I got old and started playing slow pitch softball, I was on first base when the batter hit a ground ball to the short stop. My old baseball training kicked in, and I executed a perfect take-out slide, smashing into the second baseman. This … didn’t go over well. There was shock and anger and much yelling. And a great deal of spilled beer. I like to imagine it was like that, some day in April of 1951, when Yonamine took out a Tiger second baseman.

After retiring from baseball Yonamine spent many years as a scout, and a few managing the Dragons. He also started a business dealing pearls (https://www.yonaminepearls.com/our-story).

Here’s a very 1980s video biography (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lp5j1upTWw) of Yonamine.

My card is from the JCM 41 set, issued in 1959. I like this card because whoever did the background got carried away with the airbrush and erased his right hand.

nat

09-04-2018, 09:39 PM

Minoru Murayama (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=muraya000min) pitched for the Tigers from 1959 to 1972. He compiled a 222-147 record to go with a 2.09 ERA in just over 3000 innings. Although mostly a starter, he also made about 150 relief appearances. Offense was still low in the 1960s, but some of Murayama’s performances nevertheless stand out. As a rookie he posted a 1.19 ERA, and had ERAs below two in four other seasons. Towards the end of his career he was a player/manager, and he took over the Tigers again for a couple seasons in the late 80s. It is, of course, hard to tell which managers are good ones and which are bad ones (isolating their contribution from those of the players is really hard), but suffice it to say that the teams that he managed were unsuccessful.

I always find it curious that league-wide strikeout rates don’t correlate very well with league-wide scoring trends. League ERA in 1962 was 2.63. Taking out errors inflate scoring, but it’s still low (RA9 is 3.09). But the league-wide K/9 figure is just 5.6. Murayama was well above that, but still striking out fewer than seven batters per nine innings. You see the same thing in America. Strikeout rates during the deadball era were very low. Intuitively you’d think that low run scoring environments would have high strikeout rates, since a strikeout can’t do anything to help a team score a run. The answer to this riddle is probably that what makes these environments low scoring ones is that batters are choking up and just putting the ball in play without trying to drive it. If you make sure that you put the ball in play you’re not going to strike out, but you likely will ground out to the shortstop. Anyway, Murayama was better than average at striking out batters, but his numbers, good in context, would be pathetic by today’s standards.

Murayama won the college baseball championship (playing for Kansai). One must feel for players who faced him in college. While pitching for Kansai he posted an ERA of 0.91. When he went pro he was an immediate success. As noted, he had a 1.19 ERA as a rookie, and he also took home the first of three Sawamura Awards. Although Kaneda was clearly the better pitcher overall, at his best Murayama was his rival, and he tied Kaneda’s record of three Sawamura awards. (Although Murayama had to share one. In 1966 he and Tsuneo Horiuchi were declared co-winners.) Oddly, the year in which Murayama won his MVP award (1962) was not one of the years in which he took home a Sawamura (1959, 65, 66).

His 2.09 career ERA mark is a Central League record, as is his career WHIP. The 0.784 WHIP that he posted in 1959 is an all-time single season record, which must have mightily impressed Japanese fantasy baseball players in the late 50s. ;)

Unfortunately, despite being a great pitcher the most famous moment in Murayama’s career was one of failure. In 1959 the Emperor of Japan attended his first baseball game. This was a Big Deal. The Tigers faced off against the Yomiuri Giants. Masaaki Koyama was the Tigers’ starting pitcher, but he was pulled in the seventh. Murayama was brought in to pitch in relief. In the bottom of the ninth, shortly before the Emperor was due to leave the game, Shigeo Nagashima hit one of Murayama’s pitches for a game winning, walk-off home run. He was a rookie, and would go on to have an extremely successful career. But, here’s an indication of how much of a Big Deal this was: sixty years later an American is devoting an entire paragraph to it in a short biography of Murayama. For the record, Murayama claimed that the ball was foul.

Here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTAfWoaN3dQ) is what looks to me like a video retrospective on his career. The voice-over is in Japanese, and so are the subtitles, so some guessing is involved on my part. It looks like it include Nagashima’s home run, and then it’s got Murayama striking out Nagashima several times, and a much older Murayama striking out Oh to finish the clip.

My card is from JCM 138, issued in 1960. It's unusual for its era in that it's not standard tobacco-menko sized. Pillar shaped menko were popular in the late 40s to early 50s, but had largely dropped out of the scene (except for this set) by 1960.

nat

09-07-2018, 07:35 PM

Yasumitsu Toyoda (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=toyoda000yas) spent 17 years playing shortstop for Nishitetsu (the Lions) and Kokutetsu/Sankei (the Swallows/Atoms), from 1953 to 1969. He was a power hitter who also had good speed when he was in his early 20s. Superficially he looks like a fast version of Cal Ripken (without the streak), but in context he was actually a better offensive player. He was one hell of a batter, slugging around .500 in leagues that averaged around .300. For a comparable American player I guess I’d go with someone like Alex Rodriguez. Unfortunately, he didn’t last as long as Rodriguez. Although he played until he was 34, Toyoda was basically done as a full-time player at age 29. The last few seasons of his career he played sparingly, apparently often appearing as a pinch hitter, if his game and at bat totals are to be believed. Given the propensity of Japanese stars to go on to have managerial careers, you might think that he few appearances were a result of transitioning into management. But no, Toyoda never managed even a single game. He did serve as a coach in 1968 and 69. Perhaps that accounts for his low number of games played in those seasons. Albright ranks him as Japan’s greatest shortstop, the Lions’ second-greatest player (behind Inao), and the fifteenth greatest Japanese player ever.

There is one area in which the comparison with Rodriguez breaks down rather dramatically: fielding. When he was young Rodriguez was an excellent fielder. (It was a terrible waste of resources for the Yankees to move him to third. Jeter had slow reactions times but good speed. They should have kept Rodriguez at short and moved Jeter to centerfield to take advantage of his greatest strength and hide his greatest weakness. Bernie wasn’t such a great fielder that it would have been much of a loss to move him to left.) Toyoda, on the other hand, was an atrocious fielder. Tokuji Kawasaki, a pitcher for his team, reportedly tried to induce batters to hit the ball anywhere but to short. Nevertheless, he was selected to the best-nine six times, and made the all-star team nine times.

During Toyoda’s time with them the Lions were extraordinarily successful. They won the Japan Series each year from 1956 to 1958, and Toyoda captured the Japan Series MVP in 56.

After retiring Toyoda served as a TV and radio commentator. Word on the internet is that he’s also an author, although I have had trouble finding anything that he wrote. One book comes up on the English Amazon page for him, but the title doesn’t suggest anything about baseball, so I may have the wrong “Yasumitsu Toyoda”. The Japanese Amazon page, as near as I can tell, also doesn’t have any likely hits for either ‘Yasumitsu Toyoda’ or for ‘やすみつとよだ’. He does appear to have made a cameo in a couple baseball movies, in 1957 and 1977. Not sure of his role (he’s credited as “Batter Toyoda” and “Coach Toyoda”), but he’s got his own IMDB page (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5283175/). And it is the same “Yasumitsu Toyoda”, I checked their birthdays.

The card is a menko from the JCM 69 set. Released in 1959. Someone wrote what looks to me like the hiragana symbol for ‘ya’ on the back. No idea why.

seanofjapan

09-10-2018, 12:25 AM

After retiring Toyoda served as a TV and radio commentator. Word on the internet is that he’s also an author, although I have had trouble finding anything that he wrote.

I don't think he wrote any books, but he had a regular column in the magazine Shukan Baseball and also in the Nihon Keizai Newspaper until 2013, which is probably what that is in reference to.

nat

09-10-2018, 08:40 PM

Tetsuharu Kawakami (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kawaka000tet) was a first baseman (and briefly a pitcher) for several incarnations of the Giants from 1938 to 1958. Appropriately nicknamed ‘The God of Batting’, Kawakami was a devastating offensive force. In 1939, at the age of 19, he hit .338 in a league that hit .224. That’s 51% better than average, for those keeping score at home. His OBP was 27% better than average, and slugging 71% better. To pull that off in the 2018 American League you would need to hit 377/403/713. (Look at that slugging percentage!) Kawakami’s career rate stats are excellent, his counting totals are good. He cleared 2000 hits comfortably, but managed only 181 home runs. Some years he was hitting nearly 30, others he was in single digits. He seems to have been injured in 1951 (during what would have been his best year) and his power never came back. I wonder if he had a back or wrist injury, something notorious for sapping power and not healing quite right. Albright says that the change resulted from a conversation with Ted Williams, in which Williams suggested aiming for more line drives instead of selling out for so much power. The conversation reportedly happened during 1950, however, and in 51 he was the same power hitter that he had been the previous few years. It wasn’t until after his abbreviated 1951 season that his output changed. During the war (1943-45) Kawakami served in the military, spending his time as a drill sergeant in the Imperial Army. He did not see battle.

During the postwar period Kawakami was Oshita’s rival. Oshita used a bat painted blue. Kawakami painted his red.

As a young man Kawakami was a pitcher. The 1939 Kyojin had a pitching staff that was something else. The old man of the staff, 23 year old Victor Starfin, threw 458 innings. Fellow hall of famer (and 19 year old) Hiroshi Nakao threw 224 innings. Kawakami (also 19 years old) threw about 100. Yasuo Kusunoki filled out the staff, pitching 70 innings at a respectable 2.17 ERA. That’s three hall of famers and a guy with an ERA just a nose above two.

Kawakami is one of the rare men who has two separate compelling cases for the hall of fame. In addition to being a great player, he was the manager of the ON Cannon Yomiuri Giants who won the Japan Series nine consecutive times (and 11 total). He spent fourteen years at the helm of the Giants, from 1961 to 1974. During that time the Giants compiled an astounding .591 winning percentage. By way of comparison, that’s in the same neighborhood as Joe Torre’s winning percentage as manager of the Yankees (.605 over 12 seasons) and Bobby Cox’s winning percentage with the Braves (.576, admittedly over a longer period of time). Kawakami’s managerial style was notoriously brutal, and serves as an embodiment of the traditional Japanese style of training that some recent stars (most notably Hiromitsu Ochiai) rebelled against. Robert Whiting describes (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2013/11/26/baseball/kawakami-introduced-kanri-yakyu-to-game/#.W5ccw_ZFysd) Kawakami’s managerial philosophy as combining “Zen Buddhist principles with Machiavellian tactics”. The reference to Zen Buddhism is meant in all seriousness, Kawakami was a devoted practitioner, crediting its influence with his extremely well-developed ability to concentrate (most notably on the ball), and eventually his success as a player. As a manager he demanded that his players be dedicated to their craft with the same intensity that he was dedicated to his.

Kawakami seems to have been a traditionalist in a number of ways. He was one of the chief proponents of the restrained style of ball that dominated the early years of professional Japanese baseball (and, I assume, pre-war amateur baseball as well), and ended up clashing with his teammate, Wally Yonamine, on this issue. When Kawakami finally took over managerial duties, he engineered a trade of Yonamine to the Dragons, but the damage (as he saw it) had been done. Kawakami’s managerial style, and practice regimen, had followers long after he retired* but his style of actually playing baseball did not.

*From an ESPN story (http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/22624561/ichiro-suzuki-return-seattle-mariners-resolve-internal-battle) about Ichiro Suzuki:
“When Ichiro was 3, [his father Nobuyuki] bought him his first glove, made of shiny leather. It cost two weeks' salary. Nobuyuki taught his son to clean and polish it carefully. It wasn't a toy, he said. It was a tool. ... They went to a nearby park, every day the same: 50 pitches, 200 soft-toss swings and 50 fungo drills. At night, they went to a batting cage near the Nagoya airport and Ichiro would take 250 to 300 swings on a pitching machine. They did this 365 days a year. Sometimes it got so cold that young Ichiro couldn't button his shirt, his fingers too stiff to work.” (Wright Thompson, ESPN the Magazine, April 2018)

I wonder if his nickname is a play on his real name. ‘God’ in Japanese is ‘kami’ (so much I remember from my high school Japanese class). The kanji for ‘Kawakami’ is ‘川上’. The latter symbol means ‘up’, and makes up a part of the word for heaven, superior, and, according to Google, supreme being. Maybe he was nicknamed ‘The God of Batting’ because his name (when pronounced) has the word ‘God’ in it, and (when written) has a part of it? For what it’s worth Wikipedia says that his nickname was spelled ‘打撃の神様’. But anyway, his nickname is a pretty good one in English, it might be even more clever in Japanese.

For a much better biography of Kawakami, see the Japan Times article by Robert Whiting linked above.

This clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iNNffnJGVk) is only four seconds long, but here’s Kawakami taking a swing.

As for the card, I don’t know what set it’s from. On the front it looks like lots of “tobacco style” menkos, but it’s blank on the back. Some sets are sort of hybrid menko/bromides. This card probably belongs to one of those. The front has a familiar menko design, and it’s printed on menko-style card stock (my bromides tend to be noticeably thinner). But it doesn’t have a menko number, nor a rock-paper-scissors symbol. So I guess it leans closer to the bromide end of things than the menko end. Anyways, I like it for the solid red background.

drmondobueno

09-11-2018, 09:12 PM

[QUOTE. This card sure looks like it belongs to JCM 33d. The only problem is that Engel associates this menko number with Inao. I see three possibilities: (1) there’s an error in the book, (2) it’s an uncatalogued variation, (3) it belongs to an uncatalogued set that is nearly indistinguishable from JCM 33d. I don’t know which it is. Option (1) is certainly possible: I’ve written things shorter than Engel’s book that were professionally copyedited and errors still snuck through. But it could also be (2), there are plenty of sets that re-use menko numbers. And of course what (3) has going for it is that there are still plenty of uncatalogued menko sets. So who knows.[/QUOTE]

Nat, would like to commend you on your research. Really enjoy seeing your cards and the write ups on each player.

I do not believe your card is from a catalogued set, at least not in Engel’s first guide (waiting for my thumb drive copy of the second). The text box on this Suguira card is highlighted in black and none of the sets in the JCM 33 series indicate a black text box. Nor do any of the other Yamakatsu sets have that style of text box. Hmmm. At first I thought you had a Marusan card but for the back. Anyway, you appear to have a unique example there, congrats! And thanks again for the thread!

nat

09-14-2018, 07:42 PM

Hi Keith, glad you like the thread, and thanks for pointing out that my Suguira card can't be from JCM 33. There are so many menko sets still to be catalogued. I'd considered putting together a website to crowdsource checklists for uncatalogued menko sets, but then I realized that that would entail a fair amount of work, and I remembered how lazy I am, and decided against it. I also don't know how many people would be interested in contributing. Anyway, for you today I've got one of the more obscure hall of famers (at least, obscure for a professional player; the executives and some of the amateur players probably blow this guy away for obscureness).

Katsumi Shiraishi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=shirai000kat) was a shortstop for 18 seasons. He came up at age 18 in 1936 with the Kyojin, leaving them only for the war in 1944. In 1946 he returned for only one season with Pacific team. 1947 was again a lost year. He spent it in the industrial leagues. It seems odd that a veteran player of his caliber didn’t have a pro contract. Anyway, upon returning in 1948 he spent two seasons with Yomiuri, and the balance of his career with his hometown Hiroshima Carp. He joined the team for its inaugural year and hit the first homerun in Carp history. Shiraishi was a strong hitter in a league with absolutely no offense. In 1942 the league hit 197/285/244. That’s right, the league as a whole was below the Mendoza line. There was a huge amount of variation, however. The Kyojin hit 231/342/299, whereas the Yamato team hit 181/271/217. Shiraishi himself hit 236/353/278. He had excellent on base skills, and decent power. His performance relative to his league would be the same as hitting 300/398/473 in MLB in 2018. At his peak Chase Utley was better, but they were the same kind of player. (Incidentally: Chase Utley was a legitimately great player, and I fully expect hall of fame voters to fail to recognize his greatness.) In addition to being a good hitter, Shiraishi was reasonably fast, stealing 20 or so bases per season when he was young, and 15 or so as an old man. And he was renowned for his defense. His counting stats are not impressive – 1500 or so hits, 81 home runs – which is to be expected for someone who played in short-season low-offense leagues.

For his career Shiraishi’s on-base percentage is higher than his slugging percentage. This almost never happens in MLB. (Not never never – Brett Butler pulled it off – but it’s extremely rare.) As you might expect, Shiraishi walked quite a bit. About 50% more than he struck out.

After retirement he managed the Carp for several years. They were not successful. He was known as a strict no non-sense manager, and one who was fond of small-ball tactics.

This bromide is from the JBR 75 set, issued between 1948 and 1949. That means that this card is from the brief post-war period in which Shiraishi played for the Giants.

Bill77

09-16-2018, 10:16 PM

I am glad you posted the information on Katsumi Shiraishi. I just got one of his cards about the same time as your post.

nat

09-17-2018, 07:57 PM

You got a 2-for-1 on that Shiraishi card, with Wakabayashi on the back. I wonder why they used an image of Shiraishi's back?

Today's player is a pitcher from the 1950s.

Ryohei Hasegawa (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=hasega000ryo) was a sidearm and submarine pitcher for the Hiroshima Carp from 1950 to 1963. He had a losing record: 197-208. The Carp were not very good. In 1956 they went 45-82. Hasegawa won 22 games for them. In 1955 they were 58-70, and Hasegawa won 30 games. In 1972 Steve Carlton famously won 27 of his teams 62 victories. That’s pretty good, but not even Carlton can claim to have notched more than half of his team’s victories. As seems to have been common for aces at the time, Hasegawa threw an incredible number of innings. He pitched 348 innings as a rookie, and went as high as 387 in 1955. Immediately after that season of very heavy work his appearances dropped precipitously. One suspects injuries were involved. Again, this seems to have been very common for aces of the period. Perhaps teams would have gotten more value from their ace pitchers if they hadn’t pushed them quite so hard. Hasegawa was done at age 33, and the injuries seem to have taken their toll by the time he was 28. Of course any pitcher can get injured (and plenty do), but Japanese teams of the 1950s seem to have worse luck with this than most.

Although his career was short, due to the heavy workload he did manage to pitch 3300 innings. His career ERA of 2.65 is not outstanding given the relatively low run environment of the day. (It seems to be around league average for many of the years that he was active.) Albright thinks that he was better than that though. Hiroshima had a terrible offense, and a terrible defense. Albright says that normalizing his performance to account for the poor defensive club behind him would show that he was significantly above average for his career, despite his disappointing superficial numbers.

Hasegawa was a small man (listed at 123 pounds), without much on his fastball. His specialties were movement and location. If he’d been left handed it would be tempting to call him “crafty”. (For some reason “crafty lefty” is a thing whereas “crafty righty” is not.) He threw sliders, and sinkers, and a shuuto.

The Carp’s struggles were understandable. Unlike most Japanese teams, they weren’t controlled by a corporation, and so didn’t have deep pockets to draw from; at one point they kept the lights on through public subscription. One reason that Hasegawa is notable is that the Carp faced contraction during his tenure, but they played just well-enough (and almost certainly wouldn’t have had he not been on the team) to keep the team off of the chopping block. It wasn’t until 1968 that they got a sponsor.

My Hasegawa card is from JCM 33e, issued in 1959.

Bill77

09-18-2018, 11:33 AM

I am glad I posted my card. Thank you for the heads up on the 2nd player on my card.

nat

09-21-2018, 08:32 PM

I suspect that Hideo Nomo (https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/n/nomohi01.shtml) isn’t in the hall of fame for what he did on the baseball diamond. Don’t get me wrong, he was good, but that’s not what he’s being recognized for. Nomo pitched only five seasons in Japan (all with the Kintetsu Buffaloes). He was remarkably good at the beginning of his career, posting ERAs of 2.91, 3.05, and 2.66 in his first three years. In 1993 his performance dropped off (he was slightly below average), the following year offense exploded in the Pacific League, but Nomo’s ERA was about the same as it had been the previous year, so in context he was quite a bit better than average.

As a rookie, Nomo was a huge success. He won all of the post season awards. But it was what happened during the 1994/5 off-season that won him fame. He retired. Now, of course he’s not the first player to have retired, but he was the first to realize that if he retired from Japanese baseball he wouldn’t be bound by their reserve clause anymore, and so could declare himself a free agent. Not that any Japanese team would sign him – becoming a free agent in Japan isn’t that easy. But the Dodgers would (and did) sign him.

Nomo was the first player to have ever won the rookie of the year award twice. Unless Ichiro won it in Japan, he’s the only one to have ever managed it. After he signed with the Dodgers he was an immediate success. Nomo led the league in shutouts, strikeouts, hits per nine innings, and strikeouts per nine innings. That last figure was 11.1, a number that would be excellent for a starter today, and practically unheard of in the mid 90s. Nolan Ryan only topped 11.1 K/9 twice in his career. As an American “rookie” his ERA was 2.53; remember this was during sillyball, league-wide ERA was a fair bit north of 4. Nomo wasn’t the first Japanese player to come to America, but he was the first in about thirty years. What he did was display that playing in MLB was a viable option for Japanese players. Arguably without Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki would have been a life-long member of the Orix BlueWave. (Either that or Ichiro would have been the trailblazer that Nomo in fact was.)

The honeymoon didn’t last though. Nomo was good in 96, about average in 97, and traded to the Mets in the middle of 98. He had two more good years for the Dodgers in the early 00’s, but he spent most of the rest of his career bouncing from team to team in MLB, not being especially effective for anyone. At the age of 39, after having missed two years of baseball, he tried to make a comeback with the Royals. It went about as well as a 39 year old’s comeback with the Royals, after having sat out two years, should be expected to go.

The Golden Player’s Club counts performance after a player has left Japan, and Nomo totaled just barely north of 200 wins for his career, adding Japanese and MLB totals. Hence, he’s a member of the club. But there is an element of apple-and-oranges here. The MLB season is longer than the Japanese season, so Nomo had more chances to pick up wins than a pure Japanese player would have had over the same number of seasons.

Nomo was famous for his forkball and his funky “tornado” delivery motion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u-KYpVT3Zw). Probably the closest we have today is Johnny Cueto. (Although Cueto never quite repeats the same motion twice. I like watching him pitch just for the weirdness of it.)

If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have put Nomo in the hall of fame. His Japanese career was too short, and his American career wasn’t good enough to be worth much in the way of extra credit. My first thought for an American player who would be comparable to his JPPL+MLB career was Dave McNally. That’s not fair to Nomo though, McNally’s American career was only a little better than Nomo’s. Maybe someone like Sam McDowell would be a better comparison. McDowell was a star, but nobody’s idea of a hall of famer.

Sabr has a long Nomo biography (https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/770b6679).

My card is from the 1992 BBM set. Nomo was already a star at this point, but still only 23 years old.

nat

09-25-2018, 09:42 PM

Katuso Osugi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=osugi-000kat) was a slugging first baseman from 1965 to 1983. The first part of his career he spent with the Flyers/Fighters, and the balance of his career with Yakult. As a player, he’s a familiar type. He hit home runs, didn’t run fast, and played a defensively-unimportant position. Speaking of home runs, he totaled 486 for his career, topping 40 each year from 1970 to 1972. To go with a career slash line of 287/350/519.

Strangely, finding an analogous American player is difficult not for a dearth of comparable players, but because there are too many. Eddie Murray, Rafael Palmeiro, Carlos Delgado, Reggie Jackson if you don’t mind including outfielders. I’ll nominate Palmeiro, not because he’s statistically a better fit than Murray (or lots of other people) but because he, like Osugi, split his career almost evenly in half between two teams. (Of course Palmeiro jumped back and forth between them, whereas Osugi had a cleaner split.)

Osugi started his baseball career in the industrial leagues, playing for the Marui Department Store team. A workout with the Flyers got him his first pro contract. He was selected to five best-nines, all of them before leaving the Flyers. (The Flyers play in the Pacific League. When he moved to Yakult he also switched leagues, and someone named ‘Oh’ had the first base slot on the best-nine team locked down for the Central League.) However, he did win the Japan Series MVP award in 1978, en route to the Swallows’ first ever Japan Series championship.

It turns out that the Buffaloes aren’t the only team named after one of their players (Shigeru Chiba, in their case). The Fighters are also named after one of their players. The story goes that the team had a contest to pick a name (to replace ‘Flyers’), and the winning entry suggested naming the team ‘Fighters’ in honor of Osugi’s fighting spirit. And then they traded him the next year, but whatevs. Luckily the internet didn’t exist yet, or else they would have ended being the Nippon Ham Baseballteam McBaseteamface.

Albright considers him the sixth-greatest Japanese first baseman, and 25th greatest player overall. Osugi’s batting style involved, he said, “hitting towards the moon”, about which Albright dryly remarks (http://baseballguru.com/jalbright/analysisjalbright01.html) “I gather [it] involved uppercutting”.

My card is from the 1979 Yamakatsu set. My main source for Calbee cards has dried up, so I’ve had to start looking for other manufacturers for post-1960s cards. For what little it’s worth (=probably nothing, since there are only two graded examples total) this is the only PSA 10 1979 Yamakatsu Katsuo Osugi. It’s my first Yamakatsu card; it has a nice bright image and a few basic stats on the back. You can tell from the mylar shrink wrap in a standard holder that it’s about the size of the 1980s Calbee cards. Unfortunately, the slab has a crack in it (along the bottom). Given how thinly collected Japanese cards are, it’s probably not worth re-holdering. (To give you an idea, Robb Fitts has the only 1978 Yamakatsu PSA registry set. There aren’t any 1979 registry sets.) I might liberate it from its tomb, to allow it its rightful place in my binder. But, given all the talk of how picky PSA is with their high-grade cards, it also seems like a shame to give up an official Gem Mint designation.

Edit: And I'm at 66% now.

nat

10-02-2018, 09:46 PM

Tetsuya Yoneda (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=yoneda000tet) spent 22 years pitching, mostly for the Hankyu Braves. He broke in as an 18 year old in 1956, and pitched until 1977. Only the last couple seasons did he appear for any team besides Hankyu. Over the course of those 22 years he managed to become one of Japan’s winningest pitchers (#2 in fact, behind Kaneda), with a career record of 350-285. (I assume he’s also one of Japan’s losingest pitchers.) As one might expect from someone who pitched for 22 years and won 350 games, his career innings pitched total is quite impressive, at 5130. That figure would put him 11th all-time in MLB, between Grover Cleveland Alexander and Kid Nichols. Incidentally, his win total would put him 10th in MLB history, below Roger Clemens and above Tim Keefe. Early in his career he was a strikeout monster, but dropped to only above average in K rate shortly thereafter. His raw totals make it look like his ability to strike out batters steadily degraded as he got older (which wouldn’t really be a surprise), but this is actually an artifact of changing context. Apparently batters just started putting more balls in play. Due to an above-average ability to strike out batters, and an extremely long career, he is second all-time in strike outs (although he is way behind Kaneda for the lead).

One thing that he can’t blame on league context is his reduced workload over the years. Early on he was pitching ~300 innings per year, but 1970 was the last season in which he threw more than 200 innings, and he was largely a relief pitcher for his last couple seasons.

Seaver-like his career started with controversy. The Tigers signed him out of high school, but Hankyu complained that the contract was invalid (on grounds that are unclear at the moment). The league ruled in their favor. And so although the Braves missed out on Seaver, they did get Yoneda. Or something like that.

Probably the biggest problem that Yoneda ran into is that Hankyu was not especially competitive for the first half of his career. Despite good pitching, the offense couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain. In 1959 he had a 2.12 ERA and still lost 24 games. In the mid-60s they had something of a rebirth, however, and he ended up appearing in the Japan Series five times. They lost all five.

Albright has him ranked as the 15th greatest Japanese pitcher, and 75th greatest player over all. I’m inclined to think that he rates peak performance too highly, there’s a huge amount of value in being a good pitcher for 5000 innings. Now, my inclination is not exactly dispositive evidence, but if I was starting a team and had to choose between a pitcher that would go on to have Yoneda’s career, and one that would go on to have Hideo Fujimoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=fujimo000hid)’s career, it’s not obvious to me that I would pick Fujimoto. Now, Fujimoto was clearly the more talented pitcher, but he also pitched only half as many innings as Yoneda. The MLB pitchers that Albright lists as comps are: Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton, Early Wynn, Robin Roberts, Fergie Jenkins, Steve Carlton, Bert Blyleven, Jim Kaat and Tommy John. This is a pretty good list. Before reading Albright’s article I had Niekro and Blyleven picked out as comparable major leaguers.

Everyone who writes about Yoneda mentions his prowess with the bat. So I guess that I will too. Now, it’s not that he had a very refined hit tool. He seems to have been a “swing hard at anything near the strike zone” kind of hitter – the pitcher version of Adam Dunn – but he did (like Dunn) have good power (for a pitcher). He totaled 33 home runs, including multiple seasons of 4 and 5, to go with a Dunn-like .171 batting average. His bat was sufficiently well-respected that he made 22 appearances at positions other than pitcher.

The card is a menko from 1960. The set is JCM 12e.

nat

10-07-2018, 02:28 PM

Junzo Sekine (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=sekine000jun) was a two-way player. Early in his career he was a pitcher; from 1957-on he was an outfielder. From 1950 to 1964 he played for Kintetsu, 1965 was the last year of his career, and he spent it with the Giants. The switch to the outfield was probably a good idea. In 1957 his OPS was 100 points above league average – that’s 16%. It would be like having an 850 OPS in today’s American League. Basically, in 1957 he was Nelson Cruz. He totaled 1137 hits, 59 home runs, and a 279/336/372 slash line. As a pitcher he had his moments, but was really only above average in 1954; the rest of the time he was a middle of the road starter.

Sekine was a star at Hosei, and was recruited to play for Kintetsu by their manager (and his former manager at Hosei).

One of his claims to fame is that he was selected to the all star game as both a pitcher and an outfielder. Albright does not rank him on his list of the top 114 Japanese players, and says that he thinks that he doesn’t belong in the hall of fame. I agree. Because he was a two way player there really aren’t any American comps. He’s no Babe Ruth, and even John Ward was better than he was. He had one above average season as a pitcher (and a bunch of average-ish seasons), and then a run as Nelson Cruz. That’s a nice career, but it really doesn’t add up to being a hall of famer.

After retirement he spent a while as a manager, helming the Whales from 1982-4 and Yakult from 87-89. None of his teams had a winning percentage above 500. However, if Wikipedia is to be believed, he was instrumental in helping Sachio Kinugasa develop as a batter. He was the hitting coach for the Carp in 1970 and reportedly forced Kinugasa to practice long after everyone else had left the field – including catching him coming home from carousing with his friends at 3am and forcing him to practice until daybreak.

It seems that early pro ball in Japan had no shortage of pitchers who could hit. Sekine and Fujimura are probably the best examples, but Sanada was also a good hitter. This is purely anecdotal of course, but it seems to me that competence on both sides of the ball was more common then than it is now (and than it ever has been in the US). If that’s right, it should tell us something about the level of play in early pro ball in Japan. The skills involved in hitting and in pitching are very different. So the probability that you’re good at hitting, conditional on the fact that you’re good at pitching, isn’t much higher the probability that you’re good at hitting, conditional on background conditions alone. And vice versa. So if a player is on the far right tail of the distribution of hitting ability, it’s not very likely that he’ll be on the far right tail of the distribution of pitching ability. (Nor vice versa.)

Now it’s certainly possible that there’s some player who is good at both – Babe Ruth did exist. But if there are a bunch of players who are good at both, it’s likely that they’re not being drawn from the far right tail of the hitting distribution, or from the far right tail of the pitching distribution, or both. More likely is that their skill level is closer towards the mean. (I am assuming that these skills are normally distributed, that is that the distribution makes a bell curve. Hence the “far right tail” is the small number of people who are really good, and the mean is the top of the bell.) Which is all a long-winded way of saying that if a league has a bunch of people who are good pitchers and good hitters, it is likely that the level of play in the league is pretty low. If all this is right, and if hitting and pitching skill is normally distributed, it means that the pipe-line that fed Japan’s early pro leagues wasn’t very efficient. There were probably guys who were better hitters or better pitchers than the people playing pro ball who, for one reason or another, never got a chance.

The card is from JCM 123. Its date of issue is uncertain, either 1950 or 1951. If the former, then this is Sekine’s rookie card.

nat

10-11-2018, 10:12 PM

Atsushi Aramaki (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=aramak000ats) had a 13 year career, pitching mostly for the Orions. He pitched from 1950 (at age 24) through 1962. While the inning totals that he posted were certainly healthy, he didn’t put up the quantity of innings that other star pitchers of his day did. As a rookie he pitched 274 innings, and he never again topped that mark. Several times he would have been among the league leaders in rate stats, but he didn’t pitch enough innings to qualify. Nevertheless, he was effectively finished in 1959, pitching a total of ~60 innings during his last two seasons with the Orions, and making two nominal appearances for the Braves. On a rate basis his career numbers are good. Aramaki posted a 2.23 career ERA, which is a very nice mark even in a league with a collective ERA well below 3. (It’s 8th all-time.) Because his career was so short, and his innings pitched per season were not on a par with his contemporaries, his counting stats are unimpressive. He totaled just 173 wins (although he lost barely more than 100 games, so his winning percentage is quite nice), pitched 2200 innings, and struck out barely more than 1000 batters.

In fact, as near as I can tell, Aramaki was a below-average strike out pitcher. That probably means he was a pitch-to-contact type. I haven’t (yet) read anything about his arsenal, but I’m guessing that it included lots of slow breaking stuff. His statistical profile is not that of a fireballer. (Ah, and the internet confirms my suspicions (https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1951-osato-gangu-atsushi-aramaki-psa-1826623927).)

Bill Veeck wanted him on the Indians, and gave him a standing-offer of a tryout. Enos Slaughter thought that he was major league caliber. (Despite being just 5’8” and 135.)

Injuries must have been a large part of Aramaki’s story. It’s hard to believe that the Orions would have coddled him when Inao, Kaneda, and so on, were being forced to pitch 7,000 innings per season (approximately, number may be exaggerated). It’s also the only plausible explanation for the sudden cliff that he fell off. Absent a major injury, players have some ups and downs as they get older, and in general see their production drop off steadily. Aramaki suddenly lost it. Like Roy Halladay. Like Brandon Webb. Like a million other guys who felt something pop in their shoulder and suddenly couldn’t get the ball to move any more. This is speculation on my part (although Albright, who ranks him as the 103rd greatest player, thinks along the same lines as me), it’s not like I have a report of an injury, but it is also the only plausible explanation.

The card is from JCM 129, issued in 1958. Cards from this set generally feature two players, one action shot, and a headshot of a different player. Aramaki is the guy pitching. The headshot is of an unidentified member of the Hawks. The word always used to describe this set is ‘garish’. And it’s the right one. This is one ugly set. The backs are variable, so the set designers weren’t making any statement about Aramaki by paring him with the ace of spades and the atomic bomb. One thing that I do like about this set is that it’s printed on thick, high-quality card stock. There are lots of “menko” cards that are printed on glorified flash cards, you couldn’t possible flip them over or flip anything over with them. The card stock on the JCM 129s, however, is more like what you’d find on a Goudey. A very satisfying card to hold. But my most favorite thing about this card is that they were really really really not messing around with that menko number.

nat

10-15-2018, 09:54 PM

Hiroshi Nakao (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nakao-000hir) pitched for the Giants for 16 seasons. He broke in as a 19 year old in 1939, missed several seasons for the war, and pitched until 1957. He was great when he was young, but his production quickly tailed off; his last couple seasons were pretty good, but 1948 was the last season in which he was really a star performer. At least season was a good one: he won just the second Sawamura award ever given out in 1948. (Bessho won the inaugural award a year earlier.)

Statistically, what is most noticeable about him was his ability to strike batters out. When he was young his strikeout rate was almost double the league average. That’s… that’s not something you can really do today. To double the league K rate in the 2018 AL you would need to strike out 17 batters per nine innings, which is something that no one has ever done. Gerrit Cole led the AL this year with a mark a bit above 12. Which is remarkable in its own right (especially considering that he’s a starting pitcher), but nothing like what Nakao was doing. He finished with a 209-127 record – which is good – and would have done much better if he hadn’t lost the heart of his career to the war. Which, as tragedies resulting from WWII go, is pretty low on the list, but it’s still regrettable. He served in the army, but I have been unable to determine whether he ever saw combat. With some very notable exceptions, prominent American ball players mostly did not. Likewise, I have found a suspiciously high percentage of Japanese players that were given not-very-dangerous postings (of course these things are relative, given how thoroughly the Japanese main islands were bombed, even civilians were in considerable danger), so there may have been some element of favoritism going on in the Japanese military as well. Although, as Eiji Sawamura can attest, not as much as in the American military.

As might be expected from an extraordinary strikeout pitcher, he was also extremely wild. He once threw a no hitter despite allowing ten baserunners on walks and hit batsmen. (It was the fifth no hitter in JBL history.) His walk totals were regularly among the league leaders. Nolan Ryan was the Platonic form of this kind of pitcher. Notice that despite all the no-hitters, Ryan never pitched a perfect game. A Nakao/Ryan comparison isn’t apt, however, because Ryan was basically indestructible, whereas Nakao was very destructible. His innings pitched totals dropped and his ERA rose dramatically starting in his late twenties, basically the opposite of Ryan. Actually, on second thought, it’s Nakao who is the Platonic form of the pitcher with a blazing fastball but no idea where its going. At least Ryan struck out more batters than he walked. That’s not something that Nakao can say.

After retiring Nakao coached in the Giants’ system. As a coach he subscribed to Kawakami’s intense training philosophy, and he (and Kawakami) came in for criticism when a young pitcher (Toshihiko Yoguchi) had a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized, and died. Officially the cause of death was heart failure, but Whiting reports (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2013/06/02/baseball/japanese-baseball/severe-sports-training-methods-became-taibatsu-in-time/#.W8VU9_ZFysc) that an investigation by the Shuken Post concluded that it was suicide.

By 1955 Nakao was the team captain of the Giants. I don’t know exactly what this means. In America its an entirely honorary post. In Japan its different than the team’s manager, but I don’t know what duties accompany it. Anyway, I discovered this tidbit in the 2/25/55 issue of the Kingston Gleaner (https://newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner-feb-25-1955-p-14/). It contained an article about a goodwill tour that the Giants engaged in across South America, Jamaica, the D.R. and neighboring countries.

Fun fact: this thread has made its way into Google’s algorithm. While researching this post I encountered one of my earlier posts in which I mentioned Nakao.

Today’s card is from the JGA 19 set. The picture picked up every speck of dirt on the card, in hand it looks a good bit nicer than this picture. The card was distributed in the 1/1/52 issue of Shonen Club magazine. Originally it was a part of a 16 card sheet that was then cut into individual cards by the kid with the magazine subscription. Engel calls it a game card: above and below the picture of the player are printed the names of baseball plays. It is not clear to me that this is sufficient to make it a game card, how you are supposed to use the names of baseball plays to play a game is not exactly clear. My card is actually cut down quite a bit, as the names of the plays are completely gone.

Engel says that this set has an R4 rarity, fewer than ten of each card known. Now, Engel's rarity classifications are not to be trusted, and I have no idea how many of these cards are out there. But it would make sense if they were pretty unusual. It’s not like you could stop into the store at any point all summer and pick up a wax pack of these. These cards were distributed with one issue of one magazine.

nat

10-25-2018, 09:25 PM

Shosei Go (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=go----000sho) had a long career, mostly in the outfield, for the Giants, Tigers, and Mainichi Orions. He broke in in 1937 and played until 1957. Oddly, after playing the thirties and early forties as an outfielder, he spent a considerable part of 1946 pitching. And then he went right back to being an outfielder. Especially when he was young, Go was a really terrific player. What stands out immediately is that he was fast. For example, he stole 54 bases in 84 games in 1943. That’s pretty amazing. To American eyes his stat line looks like that of a speedy leadoff hitter with good on-base skills, but given the environment in which he played (e.g., one with absolutely zero offense), he was actually terrific at every offensive aspect of the game. He had great on-base skills, to go with lots of power. He was hitting .300 in leagues that collectively had batting averages below .200. Even if you’re not hitting lots of home runs (and he wasn’t), that’s going to give you a lot more power than most of the people in the league. For that all-around skill set in a very weak league, it’s tempting to compare him to Ty Cobb. On the other hand, Cobb is a top-5 player all-time, and Go isn’t that. But they were both really fast, with really high batting averages (in context), and high slugging percentages that are due more to high batting averages than to lots of home runs. Other people you might compare him to have severe deficiencies in their cases. “A faster Kirby Puckett” came to mind as a comp, but Go was better at getting on base than Puckett was. Maybe “Rod Carew with more power” would give you the right idea, but none of these comps are really very good ones.

Despite his power (or because of his speed) he was a leadoff hitter. He recorded a pair of batting titles, and led the league in stolen bases once. In addition, he was the 1943 MVP.

As a pitcher he was above average. But he didn’t spend much time doing it. He was a more-or-less full-time pitcher in 1946, but he appeared in only four other games as a pitcher throughout the rest of his career. A casual perusal of the internet fails to yield an explanation as to why one of the game’s top position players would temporarily become a pitcher.

His nickname was ‘The Human Locomotive’, and hails from Taiwan originally. If you count him as foreign-born he leads all foreign-born Japanese players in stolen bases (https://notanotherbaseballblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/14/slugging-it-out-in-japan-a-listing-of-the-top-foreign-hitters-in-the-history-of-japans-npb/). But considering that Taiwan was a Japanese colony when he was born, it’s something of a fraught issue. Albright regards him as the 45th greatest player in Japanese history, and the greatest outfielder of the one-league era (that is, before 1950).

Finding a Go card took some patience. For whatever reason (maybe none?) I’d been looking for a Go card in particular for quite a while. The first one that I saw was a round menko, but it was being sold as part of a large lot that I didn’t want. This is only the second one that I’ve ever found; since I bought this one I’ve located one other, but didn’t need it any more. Part of the (apparent) scarcity of Go cards is due to the fact that he retired right as they started producing tobacco-style menko cards, which, in my experience, are far more common than other kinds of vintage Japanese cards. Engel has only one set listed from 1956, and only a couple from 1957. So he’s not in any of the really common sets. But there were plenty of pre-tobacco-style sets that he could have appeared in, so it may just be random variation that accounts for the fact that I’ve encountered relatively few Go cards. There aren’t many Japanese cards for sale period, so it wouldn’t take much to have an unrepresentative sample. In any case, this card is a bromide, from JBR 2. It was issued in 1950. At this point Go had a couple outstanding seasons left, but he was getting older and starting into a late career slide. Not that he ended up being bad exactly, he just declined from excellent to good.

My apologies for the time between posts. Part of it is that I’ve been busy, and the last couple days I blame the World Series. I’ve also burned through most of my backlog of cards – I’ve got just a couple other hall of famers in hand that I haven’t written up yet – so pretty soon posts are going to have to wait until more mail from Japan arrives.

nat

10-29-2018, 09:32 PM

There is a peculiar gift to making the familiar seem unfamiliar. J.K. Rowling’s platform 9 ¾ did it well (at least for those who frequent King’s Cross). Disaster movies play on this all the time: world famous streets, usually teeming with life, completely empty, famous landmarks toppled over.

I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes, but I’m going to try.

Hideki Matsui (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=matsui001hid) is one of the all-time greats. He is a fearsome slugger, who also posted on-base percentages north of 400 for seven years running. He broke into baseball as a raw 19 year old in 1993, slugging a modest 451. By the time he was 28 his slugging percentage was just shy of 700. That year he hit 50 home runs and he walked more than he struck out. In fact, look at this slash line: 334/461/692. Mike Trout has never matched any of those numbers, much less put them all up in the same year. To be fair, he was only one point off on OBP this year, but he’s never been particularly close to either of the other marks. And of course he’s never hit 50 home runs either. I don’t know whether Matsui got nicknamed ‘Godzilla’ before or after leaving Japan, but it’s apt. Throughout his 20s he was a monster, smashing his way through Tokyo. Or at least the Tokyo Dome.

Matsui is a line-drive hitter, who has power to his pull side. A natural right hander, he nevertheless bats lefthanded. (This is surprisingly common. I guess it’s a good idea if you can manage it, but I can’t even imagine batting left handed.) His reputation as a tremendous player predates his professional career. He appeared in Koshien tournament four times, once drawing five (!) intentional walks in a single game.

Statistically, the American player that he most reminds me of is Sammy Sosa. Matsui’s own transition to American did not go quite as well as expected – this is why “Hideki Matsui, all-time great” might seem odd to American audiences. Davenport suggested (http://web.archive.org/web/20030207043159/http://www.baseballprospectus.com:80/news/20020221davenport.html) that >90% of his production would carry over to his new environs. That didn’t happen. It’s not that he was bad or anything. On the contrary, he’s got a World Series MVP trophy to show off. But he hit a total of 16 home runs in his first season (162 games!) in MLB, and his annual output topped out at 31. In Japan he was Sammy Sosa, in America he was, well, Hideki Matsui. After his age 38 season he hung up his spikes for the last time. In Japan he played for the Giants, in America he spent most of his time with the Yankees (and brief stints with the A’s, Angels, and Rays). The Golden Player’s Club counts production in MLB, provided that a player began his career in Japan prior to coming over, so Matsui gets credit for what he did on this side of the Pacific. Consequently, he is a member of both of Japan’s halls of fame. Post-retirement he has stayed in the US. He has a house in Connecticut, and is a roving minor-league hitting instructor for the Yankees.

He's a clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeHrGC4cqpg) of Matsui in action. ;)

My card is from the 1997 BBM set. Pretty much in the middle of his career in Japan. I’ll free this card from its case eventually. The case is cracked (and is BCCG anyway). I just haven’t gotten around to it.

nolemmings

10-31-2018, 12:46 PM

I appreciate the thread--I think. Didn't own any Japanese cards until a few days ago, until I won the three below-- an Oh rookie with two Starffins. Now I find myself searching through even more cards on Ebay.
https://photos.imageevent.com/imoverhere/postwar/websize/jcm41Oh.jpg
https://photos.imageevent.com/imoverhere/postwar/websize/jcm5starffin.jpg
https://photos.imageevent.com/imoverhere/postwar/websize/bromidestarffin.jpg

nat

10-31-2018, 08:42 PM

Nice way to start a Japanese collection! An Oh rookie is always nice, and I really like that bromide. Much though I adore menko cards, in some ways I like the black and white photography on bromides even more.

When you said that you were new to collecting Japanese cards, my first thought was to direct you to Prestige Collectibles. But I see that that's not really necessary!

nat

11-01-2018, 08:51 PM

Kazuhiro Yamauchi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=yamauc001kaz) was a righthanded slugger who played for three franchises between 1952 and 1970. The bulk of his career, including all of the seasons in which he was a real star, were spent with the Mainichi/Daimai Orions. In 1964 he joined Hanshin, and the last three years of his career he spent with the Carp down in Hiroshima. Yamauchi’s best season was probably 1957 when, as a 25 year old, he put up a slash line of 331/451/621 over 126 games. The late 50s were not a super low offense era, like early Japanese baseball had been, but it was still a pitcher’s era. League-wide OPS that year was more than 400 points below Yamauchi’s mark. To match his 1957 production (relative to league average) in 2018’s NL, you would need an OPS of about 1200. That would rank 20th all-time in MLB, tied with Jeff Bagwell’s 1994.

As for a comparable American player, I’d nominate a second-tier slugging hall of fame outfielder. Someone like Duke Snider. They’re both good power hitters with a little bit of speed. Snider struck out more than Yamauchi did though. In fact, Yamauchi walked more times than he struck out, which is quite an accomplishment for someone who was obviously swinging from his heels pretty often. Actually, if you ignore the positional difference, Bagwell isn’t that bad of a comp.

In context, however, Yamauchi was probably a bigger star than either of those guys. He made 13 consecutive all-star games (and ten best nines). Bagwell was selected for the all-star game a shockingly low number of times for as great of a player as he was, and Snider, despite being a deserving hall of famer, was obviously overshadowed by the other two centerfielders in New York at the time. Yamauchi is top 20 in many offensive categories, and is top ten in doubles. Albright probably thinks that my Snider/Bagwell comparisons are hilariously wrong: he’s got Yamauchi ranked as Japan’s 8th greatest player of all time and the best outfielder of the 1950s. That’s more Ted Williams than Duke Snider.

He did win an MVP award, although not for his best year. He missed out in 1957, but took home the hardware in 1960. Three years later he was dealt to the Tigers in a blockbuster challenge trade. The Orions got pitcher Maasaki Koyama (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=koyama000mas) out of the deal. Trades like this are fun but super rare: superstars being traded for each other. Usually when a superstar gets dealt, there are prospects or some larger package involved. Colavito for Kuenn, Frisch for Hornsby, that sort of thing.

Post retirement Yamauchi spent a few years managing and many years coaching. He also has a company that sells sports equipment.

The card is from the JCM 12d set, issued in 1961. It’s a pretty standard tobacco-style menko card.

nat

11-04-2018, 06:38 PM

I decided to upgrade (?) my Kaneda card. Really, I have no confidence that this card is an upgrade, in any value or rarity sense, over my other one, but I like it better. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's a downgrade value-wise, as I paid more for the other one than I did for this one.

Until picking up this card I'd resisted duplicating any players who I've already got. This keeps costs down, and keeps the collection focused. But I've also passed on a number of cards that I would have liked to have. Now that I've crossed this bridge, however, who knows if my self control will hold.

It's from the JCM 69 set, from 1959. At this point Kaneda was 25 years old, in his 10th season, he'd won 31 games the previous year, and was right in the middle of the most impressive run of pitching in Japanese history.

nat

11-07-2018, 08:39 PM

Kazuto Tsuruoka (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=tsuruo002kaz) (neé Yamamoto) was a power hitting star infielder for Osaka. He only played in parts of eight seasons, a few of which were very part time. In 1939 he was a 22 year old third baseman who hit 285/403/407 against a league average of 224/315/288. That would be like hitting 313/407/568 in today’s National League. Pretty good. Imagine if Nolan Arenado had a somewhat higher batting average, and that his power wasn’t partially a product of playing in Colorado. That’s the idea. Yamamoto didn’t appear in another professional game for seven years. One assumes that the war got on the way. When he returned, as a 29 year old in 1946, his power wasn’t quite as good, but he was still a top player. Most of the time he was a third baseman, but he also played a significant amount of second base, and a little bit at first and in the outfield. Despite having a short playing career, Yamamoto was a 3x MVP winner.

All of this, however, is really beside the point. Yamamoto is a special figure in the history of Japanese baseball not because he was a short-lived version of Nolan Arenado, but because he was one of Japan’s great managers. He was player-manager for the Great Ring/Hawks from 1946 through the end of his playing career, and continued to manage them until 1968, when he was 51 years old. His teams went 1773-1140 during his tenure. A 609 winning percentage would be perfectly respectable for one season: that was Yamamoto’s winning percentage over 23 years. Between 1950 and 1966 none of his teams finished below second place. He is the winningest manager in Japanese history. Despite his unparalleled regular season success, however, things did not go so well for Yamamoto during the post season. His teams made it to the post season on many occasions, and tended to lose the Japan Series to the Giants. Unlike Kawakami – whose Giants he would face late in his career – Yamamoto was not an advocate of the traditional (and grueling) Japanese training routine. Word is that he was widely respected by his players, not least by his American players, for whom Kawakami’s approach was not only grueling but also unusual and perhaps unexpected.

1946 was quite a year for him. He returned from the Army, led the league in RBI, became a manager (despite having only one season experience in professional baseball), won the MVP award, and his team won the championship. Albright gives him credit for the time that he missed in the military, and accordingly ranks him as the 63th greatest Japanese player. Without any war credit presumably he wouldn’t make the list at all (his playing career was quite short). Whether to give players credit for time that they missed in the military is a bit of a philosophical question. It’s a question of whether, when ranking greatest players you are recording what they did, how many games they helped their teams win, or whether you’re doing something else. I’m happy to admit that they deserve the credit, but if a ranking of great players is just a record of what happened, then, to quote Clint Eastwood, deserve ain’t got nothing to do with it. But anyways, it’s a common enough practice, and if you follow it then Yamamoto does pretty well. He was a really good infielder.

As a manager Yamamoto was hands-on and innovative. He personally scounted Kastuya Nomura. Let’s call that a success. Jim Allen also credits him with developing specialized roles for starter/relief pitchers. For something like the first twenty years of pro ball Japanese pitchers were being worked like Old Hoss Radbourne. The introduction of relief specialists no doubt saved some careers. (Incidentally, it’s also really effective. Relief pitchers, on average, perform at much higher levels than starting pitchers, even though they have traditionally simply been failed starters. American teams have really picked up on it, which is why few starters go more than ~5 innings anymore.)

The card is a blank-backed uncatalogued menko. Other than the shape (round menkos started to fall out of favor as the 50s progressed) I don’t have any indication of the year in which it was issued.

nat

11-09-2018, 10:15 PM

Lefty O’Doul (https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/o/o'doule01.shtml) needs no introduction on a website dedicated to pre-war baseball cards. You folks know who this guy is, so I’ll keep this entry short and sweet.

In many ways O’Doul was a baseball renaissance man. He pitched for the Yankees, won batting titles for the (New York) Giants, managed the San Francisco Seals for twenty years, taught or mentored Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and others, was good friends with Joe DiMaggio, served as a baseball instructor at the Big Six universities in Japan, led numerous baseball tours of Japan and the far East, scouted Wally Yonamine for the (Yomiuri) Giants, supervised the construction of the (Yomiuri) Giants’ stadium, and founded an iconic bar/restaurant in San Francisco. Many times I’ve heard people complain that Lefty doesn’t have a plaque in Cooperstown. But the part with the bronze on the wall is actually a pretty small part of the hall of fame; and while he didn’t have the kind of career that the (American) hall of fame tends to honor (he is, of course, in the Japanese hall), he absolutely had the kind of career (and life) that the museum it’s attached to likes to feature. It’s been 20 years since I visited the hall of fame, but I can only hope and assume that they have an exhibit on Lefty.

The tours of Japan started in the early 1930s, and continued regularly until they suffered a geopolitical interruption. O’Doul is said to have taken the attack on Pearl Harbor as a “personal affront”. Nevertheless, he returned to Japan after the war and continued his involvement with Japanese baseball into the 1950s.

He was instrumental in founding professional baseball in Japan. It was with in consultation with O’Doul that the original professional teams (and, in particular, the Giants, who are named in honor of O’Doul’s old MLB team) were founded. I think it would be fair to say that O’Doul is the patron saint of Japanese baseball. His American counterpart (if you will) would be someone like Harry Wright, although I get the impression that O’Doul is (or was) adored or revered in a way that Wright was not.

I’m going to leave it with that. There are many more resources, all over the internet, giving details of the various tours. They’re comprehensive enough, and easy enough to find, that I don’t think I can do anything to add to them.

Here’s a promotional video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPv41VZ68yE) that the PCL shot in 1946. They’ve got Lefty taking some swings at around 2:40.

I've (mostly) restricted this project to people who were great Japanese players, but I couldn't resist including O'Doul. My card is from the JRM 7 set, issued in 1949 in conjunction with a tour of Japan by the San Francisco Seals. And here (http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=177039) are a bunch of other cards, curtesy of our own members.

nat

11-12-2018, 06:54 AM

Yoshiyuki Iwamoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=iwamot001yos) was an outfielder who played from 1940 to 1957, although he missed time both for the war and from 1954-5. He was both older and peripatetic. In 1940, when he got his start with Nankai, he was already 28. Over the next seventeen years he would also play for the Robins/Whales, and the Flyers. Iwamoto made his last appearance on the field (he continued to manage for several more years) as a 45 year old.

When he first broke in, Iwamoto was offensively a little bit better than average, but nothing special. Since he was an outfielder – where more offensive is expected – one imagines that he relative to his position he was quite ordinary. Now, usually baseball players reach their peak performance around age 27 (this is especially true of position players, aging curves for pitchers are less predictable), so ordinarily you would not have expected Iwamoto to get much better. But he did. This could be random variation: not everyone follows the same aging curve. But it could also be due to his unusual development pattern. The standard aging curves were drawn up on the basis of MLB performance, and most MLB players spend a considerable amount of time in the minors before making it to The Show. Japan has the Industrial Leagues, but top players often go straight to the highest level. Now, Iwamoto did play in the Industrial League for three years, so he had an apprenticeship that many don’t get, but after he made it to the highest level he spent his entire first season sitting on the bench, and then (in 1939) he was drafted.
His first really good season was his third, at age 30. Then he went to war. In 1949 he was working on getting his sea legs back, but in 1950 he really hit his stride. In addition to hitting his stride, he also hit baseballs. Lots of them. A really long way. His slash line in 1950 was 317/372/583. To go with those rate stats he scored 121 runs and hit 38 homers. In 1951 he was even better, hitting 351/448/628. The Central League in these years was not quite the pitcher-friendly league that Japanese players had grown used to, but it still featured less offense than today’s MLB, so Iwamoto was a huge slugger.

The thing is, that was it for him as a star. His 1952 was respectable. He played in 1953. And then he made a brief comeback in 56-7. But his career as a great player lasted only two seasons. Finding comparable MLB players is really hard. Typically, if you’re good enough to be genuinely great, you’ve got more than four good seasons in your career, and your career is considerably longer than Iwamoto’s (considering the years that he spent as a part-time player). Although he’s certainly a special case, and not really comparable otherwise, Josh Hamilton comes to mind as a similar player. Power hitting outfielders whose skill quickly disappeared on them. Al Rosen is probably an even better comp. Players like this really don’t get into the American hall of fame. The Kirby Pucketts and Ross Youngs of the world aren’t quite in the same boat. Those guys were elected because the voters were dreaming about their potential, and they decided not to hold tragic circumstances against them. That’s really not what was going on with Iwamoto. He played until he was 45. There are some HOFers who are in the hall for the work that they did over a very short period of time – Ducky Medwick comes to mind – but outside of Koufax they still added considerable bulk to their careers. If you absolutely had to have an American hall of famer to compare Iwamoto to, I guess you go with Chuck Klein, but you’d do better with Rosen and forget about the hall.

Outside of anecdotes, little is known about fielding in early Japanese ball. But Iwamoto was probably pretty good, or, at any rate, he had a strong arm. He set a record with eight double plays from the outfield; I do not have figures for outfield assists of other kinds.

He was a player/manager, with heavy emphasis of ‘manager’ and not much on ‘player’ during his last two seasons, and after retiring from active duty continued to manage, first the Flyers and later the Kintetsu Buffaloes. His teams were terrible. Only one of them finished above 500, and his lifetime winning percentage is barely above 400.

I’ll admit that I really don’t have any idea why Iwamoto is in the hall of fame. He was very good. For a minute. You can call the war an extenuating circumstance, but even so it’s hard to argue that he had the kind of peak performance – to say nothing of career performance – that we ask of hall of famers. Some players benefit from having managerial careers in addition to appearing as players, but presumably that only helps if you’re the skipper of a good team. All in all, a very perplexing decision to induct him.

The card that I have for you today comes from the JBR 9 set. It was issued between 1950 and 1951. This would put him on the Robins/Whales, right at the height of his career. (Although in this picture it sure looks like he’s popping out to the catcher.)

rfitts

12-08-2018, 04:31 AM

I also collect a card and autograph for every Japanese HOFer. I've got plenty of every post 1948 player for sale. Just find me at RobFitts.com if you are interested
Rob Fitts
robsJapanesecards.com

nat

12-09-2018, 08:14 PM

Juzo Sanada (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=sanada000juz) played 11 seasons, mostly for the Robins and the Tigers. He was a pitcher who played a non-trivial number of games at 3B late in his career. 1943 was his rookie year, spent with Asahi. As a 20 year old pitcher he was just about average, posting a 1.97 ERA in a league with a 1.94 ERA. (Yes, that’s how low-scoring early pro ball was in Japan. The league as a whole had an ERA below two.) Then the war interrupted his career. In 1946 he was back with Pacific, posting an ERA slightly better than league average. This would continue for the next few years. He was never more than 50 points better than league average, and never more than about 20 points worse.

During his time with the Robins Sanada was usually his staff ace. They usually had Sanada pitching far more innings than anyone else on the team. I looked at the other teams in 1948 and this arraignment seems to have been unusual. Nobody was doing a strict rotation the way that they do now, but only the Stars had one pitcher (Starfin) whom they rode the way that the Robins were doing with Sanada. Everyone else split up pitching duties much more evenly.

This went on until 1951, when Sanada had a very poor year. His ERA was well over five, in a league that averaged 4.41. By the start of the next season he was on the Tigers. I tried to figure out what happened. Baseball-Reference doesn’t give transaction information for foreign leagues, so I tried to reconstruct it. But it turns out that no one else played for both the Robins and Osaka between 1951 and 1952. I had hoped to find someone who went Tigers-Robins at the same time that Sanada went Robins-Tigers and so figure out who he was traded for. But it looks like he wasn’t traded at all. Maybe he was sold, maybe he was simply released. Anyway, the Robins’ lack of faith came back to bite them. In 1952 he posted a 1.97 ERA against a league average of 3.28. Pretty good. Although his innings pitched were down a long ways from what he’d been doing in the mid-to-late 1940s, by some measures it was his best year. At any rate, it was the year in which he was most effective. Things unraveled quickly after that. His innings pitched dropped further, he spent 1954 mostly pitching out of the bullpen, and he retired after 1956.

Although Sanada was primarily a pitcher, he also played third base in 1954 and 56. Throughout his career he’d been a decent hitter – sometimes below average, sometimes above average, but the dude was a pitcher, so we can forgive him his below average years. In total he appeared in 65 games at third base. I think that his offensive performance can best be characterized as “okay”. Probably good enough to hold down a starting job, although he never got a chance. In 54 he played backup to Shinsuki Yogi at third (in addition to pitching). They were about equally good hitters. Yogi was out of the league the following year, but oddly Sanada didn’t appear in the infield in 1955. He returned in 1956, this time playing second fiddle to Hideshi Miyake. By this point Sanada was right at the end of his career and Miyake, who would go on to have a substantial career as an infielder, was just starting his. So that was that for Sanada.

The high points of Sanada’s career were a pair of no hitters. In addition, he was named to two best-nines and won a Sawamura award. Albright ranks him as the 76th greatest player of all time, right behind Yoneda. This ranking seems to me to be… aggressive. Sanada was an adequate pitcher, and for one season a very good one. He threw a lot of innings per year, but (1) not all that many more than his competition, and (2) his career was short. It’s true that he was good enough with the bat to spend the equivalent of about a half season playing the infield. But he wasn’t that good with the bat, about average, so let’s not get carried away, and, moreover, there were a lot of good hitting pitchers in his day. Probably most notably his teammate Fujimura. As discussed in a previous post, this is probably an indication not that the baseball Gods walked the Earth in Japan in the late 1940s, but that the level of play was pretty low, and so guys who were generally good athletes were able to perform at a high level in multiple roles. Sanada looks like a rather poor choice for the hall of fame to me.

The card is from the JCM 124 set, issued in 1950.

nat

12-17-2018, 09:45 PM

The early days of Japanese baseball were a very low offense affair. I've often wondered why. Now, I was watching this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_r29biPk6k) of Starfin pitching. Check out the stadium that you can see starting at 0:08. It has HUGE amounts of foul territory in the infield. Just unbelievably enormous, the fans were sitting miles away from the action. It looks like the stadium wasn't originally designed for baseball.

Anyway, if that was anything close to normal then it would go at least some distance towards explaining the low run scoring environment. Having distant fences decreases home runs, but it increases doubles and triples, so it doesn't necessarily reduce scoring. But large amounts of foul territory does: all that leads to is more foul outs.

I tried to figure out which stadium this is. Google tells me that the caption at the top says "All Japan vs. Tools, 1949", but I'm pretty sure that should be "Seals" and that this is footage from the Seals' 1949 tour. Unfortunately they played games all over the place for that tour. There's probably records of which games Starfin pitched somewhere, but I'm not up for finding them at the moment.

Any other theories (or maybe someone actually knows) about why no one was scoring any runs in early Japanese baseball?

nat

01-06-2019, 09:44 PM

Santa was good to me this year, so I have a few more cards to post.

Keishi Suzuki pitched for Kintetsu from 1966 to 1985. In total he pitched 4600 innings and won 317 games. During his career league ERA appears to have averaged around the mid-3s, although with significant variation. I’m just eyeballing this, so that number could be off. But anyway, some years it was down around 3.20 and others up around 4.20. For his career Suzuki had a 3.11 ERA, so he was good for a really long time. 1978 was his best season. He was 30 years old, and posted a 2.02 ERA to go along with 25 wins in just shy of 300 innings, against a league average ERA of 3.68.

Suzuki’s stats look a lot like those of a bunch of American pitchers of the same generation (although his innings pitched totals are more impressive, given the shorter season). If you took his career numbers and shuffled them up with those of Gaylord Perry, Bert Blyleven, Phil Niekro and a handful of other guys, I’m not entirely certain that I could tell you which one is Suzuki. In a way, Nolan Ryan isn’t the worst comp. Suzuki barely cleared 3000 strikeouts, but led the league in K’s eight times (vs. 11 for Ryan). Blyleven is pretty good, but he led the league in strikeouts only once. Maybe I’ll go with Steve Carlton as a compromise. Lefty was a five-time K champ, and, like Suzuki but unlike Ryan and Blyleven, left handed. (Or, well, sort of. Suzuki was naturally right handed but learned, at his father’s behest, to throw from the port side.) Also, the Phillies and the Buffaloes were both pretty bad teams. Albright doesn’t like him as much, comparing him to Jim Bunning and Vida Blue.

As with most strikeout-friendly pitchers, he relied on a mean fastball (at least early in his career). And like most pitchers who rely on a mean fastball, he was homer-prone, giving up 560 for his career. The MLB record is 522. That Jamie Moyer holds the record doesn’t help my claim about fastball pitchers being homer prone, but I’m pretty sure it’s true anyway. Elevating the bat takes time, so a high pitch is going to give you a little extra “effective speed” (if you will). So if you’re relying on your speed it’s a good idea to throw high fastballs, i.e., one’s that batters can get under and hit in the air. This is why Max Scherzer (for example) is such an extreme flyball pitcher. Suzuki was the same kind of guy.

Albright ranks Suzuki was the 79th greatest player of all time. He was a 3x best nine and a 15x all star.

Post playing, Suzuki managed the Buffaloes for a few years. He is “credited” with “helping” Nomo come to the US. Apparently (I’m getting this from Albright who is getting it from “The Meaning of Ichiro” so hopefully nothing is getting lost here) Suzuki favored the traditional intense Japanese training program, and didn’t pay any attention to pitchers’ workloads. Albright reports that he had Nomo throw a 191 pitch game once, which would probably get an American manager burned at the stake. Whiting reports that Suzuki was of the opinion that the best way to cure a hurt arm was to pitch even more. Nomo realized that his arm was getting shredded and wanted to get out. Hence, the Dodgers.

The Suzuki card is from the 1976 Calbee set.

seanofjapan

01-08-2019, 08:54 PM

nat

01-08-2019, 09:41 PM

Thanks for the info Sean! Great to have someone around who actually recognizes the stadium. And A's batters think that they have it bad with foul territory!

I've been posting mostly menkos and bromides (with a few Calbees and BBMs thrown in); today I've got my first candy card.

Kihachi Enomoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=enomot000kih) was a first baseman who played for the Orions until his very last season. Between 1955 and 1972 he logged 9000 plate appearances with a batting average just under 300. He had good-but-not-great power. Scouts would have said that his real advantage is with his hit tool. Frequently he hit above .300, topping out at .351 in 1966, and he walked quite a bit more than he struck out. Indeed, Enomoto was extremely good at not striking out. Maybe not Joe Sewell good, but, you know, Yogi Berra good. From his statistical profile I’m imagining a player with a really good batting eye who hits line drives and uses the whole field. Probably not a pull hitter. The 24 homers that he hit in 1966 were the most he had in a single season, and represent about 10% of his career output.

Let’s look at that 1966 season for a minute. He hit 351/434/571 to go with 81 runs, 24 HR, 74 RBI and 14 steals, in 133 games. The league as a whole hit 238/290/358. Let’s translate his performance into the 2018 American League…

*crunches some numbers*

That would give us a batting line of 367 AVG / 476 OBP / 663 SLG and 121 runs, 42 HR, and 110 RBI. The rate stats would all have led the league. He would have placed 3rd in runs, 3rd in home runs, and 3rd in RBI. The difference between his rate stats and his run and RBI totals is probably due to his teammates - Yamauchi was long gone by this point and the Orions weren't any good. They finished in the middle of the pack in 1966, a bit below .500. Give him a better supporting cast and he’s probably got much better R and RBI figures. Now sure, that’s his best season, but anyone who can put up a season like that is a beast.

He also struck out only 20 times that season. (Actual figure, not adjusted to 2018 AL.)

Parenthetical remark that I’m not going to actually put in parentheses: a few grains of salt may be necessary when looking at those numbers. Jim Allen has done some really nice work (https://jballallen.com/best-hall-of-fame-candidates/) showing that the mean standard deviation across a bunch of measures (win%, batting average, etc.) have gone down consistently over time. In short, dominant performances from early decades of Japanese ball shouldn’t be as surprising as in more recent decades. Now, 1966 wasn’t early exactly, but it’s not recent either.
/Parenthetical remark

His greatness was recognized at the time. He was a 9x best nine and 12x all star. On the other hand, he never did win an MVP award. Katsuya Nomura won in 1966. There were two reasons for this, one respectable, the other less so. Nomura, while not being as strong of an offensive force, was a catcher rather than a first baseman. And he also played for the first place Nankai Hawks as opposed to the fourth place Tokyo Orions. I guess that I would have voted for Nomura as well, given their positional differences, but Japan’s tradition of giving the MVP award to players from winning teams basically meant that Enomoto didn’t have a chance. Albright calls him the 17th greatest Japanese player, and 4th greatest first baseman. Great though he was, it’s hard to argue that point. Oh, Ochiai, and Kawakami put up some stiff competition.

Enomoto played against the Dodgers during their 1956 tour of Japan. He tied the score in an Oct. 26th game, driving in Yasumitsu Toyoda with a single off of reliever Don Bessent. The game was subsequently called for darkness with the score tied at 3. Rookie or not, Brooklyn should have left Drysdale in.

Like Hiramatsu Ochiai, but no one else, Enomoto is qualified for the meikyukai but not a member. (Enomoto’s 2000th hit came curtesy of Keishi Suzuki, the player featured in my last post.) He is, of course, a member of the hall of fame, but that was a near thing. He received exactly the number of votes that he needed for election. Not one vote to spare.

This is my first caramel card. It’s from the JF2 set. It’s tiny and made of paper. Granted it’s a durable and glossy paper, but it’s definitely not card stock. I wonder how the caramels were packaged? If they were individually wrapped and kind of large (for caramels not baseball cards) I could see this being an insert with a single piece of candy.

seanofjapan

01-09-2019, 08:39 PM

Nice caramel card, I don't have any of those in my collection. I'm not sure how they would have originally come packaged either, its an interesting question.

Sportscards1086

01-10-2019, 04:29 PM

Good stuff in here!!

nat

01-12-2019, 07:22 PM

Tomoaki Kanemoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kanemo001tom) was a slugging outfielder with very good on-base skills. He played from 1992 to 2012, and is one of the most recent inductees into the hall of fame. From 1992 to 2002 he played for the Carp, and he spent the balance of his career with Hanshin. For career numbers he’s got slightly more than 2500 hits, 476 home runs, and a 285/382/503 slash line. It seems that he had a fair amount of speed, but he didn’t always make good use of it, and lost it as he got older. But anyway, he did manage to steal 30 bases one year. Just going by his raw numbers, 2005 stands out as his best year. He managed better than 120 runs and RBIs, knocked in 40 homers, and put up a 327/429/615 line. All of those numbers except for the on-base percentage were career highs.

Let’s compare that 2005 season to league average. The Central League that year hit 270/331/411. That’s a pretty good match for the current American League. Last year they put up a 249/318/416 line. The lower batting average was driving the lower OBP (made up for by a few more walks it looks like), but otherwise pretty similar. To translate Kanemoto’s 2005 season into a contemporary American context, you don’t need to do much at all. Shave off a little AVG and OBP, but it’s close enough I’m not going to bother actually calculating this one. Nobody in the American League had a season last year that was a good match for Kanemoto’s 2005, but Christian Yelich, MVP winner over in the NL, is close enough. They’re actually the same kind of player, it’s just that, except for this past year, Kanemoto was better than Yelich.

The weird thing about this guy is that he got such a late start. Kanemoto broke into the league at 24, but didn’t play a full season until he was 28. That’s really old for a hall of famer. Usually those guys have established themselves as superior ball players when they’re in their early 20s (or, in plenty of cases, earlier). Kanemoto has such good career numbers because he managed to hang around so long. He played through his age 44 season. If he’d gotten started at a more normal age (for a hall of famer) he might have managed to join Harimoto in the 3000 hit club. Super weirdly, he made a best nine even before he played a full season. He was selected in 1995 despite missing about 20% of his team's games.

One thing that he was known for was endurance. He appeared in 1,766 consecutive games, and broke Cal Ripken’s streak for consecutive innings. (Ripken sent him a bat to commemorate the occasion.) The game that ended his consecutive-games streak almost didn’t. He was sent up to pinch hit, but a runner got thrown out to end the inning and so he wasn’t credited with an at bat.

Although he played in the outfield for his entire career he seems to have had a rather weak arm. He was nicknamed “Mole Killer” for bouncing throws to the infield. That’s pretty harsh.

Even late in his career Kanemoto was one of the highest paid players in Japan, pulling in more than $5MM per year. (Also, can this (http://www.npbtracker.com/2009/04/2009-npb-average-salary/#content) possibly be right? In 2008 the Carp were, on average, paying their players <$20K?)
After retiring Kanemoto took over managing the Tigers. They finished the 2018 season in last place and Kanemoto apparently blamed himself. Despite attempts by ownership to get him to sign a multiyear contract, he announced last October that he was resigning.

As with many former Tigers, thehanshintigers.com has a nice biography (http://www.thehanshintigers.com/team-history/legendary-players/tomoaki-kanemoto/) of him.

And I can’t read it, but he also has his own website (http://tomoaki-kanemoto.com/).

In the early 2000s Upper Deck made a foray into the Japanese market. It didn’t last long, but they did put out a few sets. This card is from the 2000 Ovation set. It's got one nice feature. The stitches on the baseball are... what's the opposite of embossed? Exbossed? Anyway, they stick out, which is a neat touch.

seanofjapan

01-13-2019, 09:04 AM

Even late in his career Kanemoto was one of the highest paid players in Japan, pulling in more than $5MM per year. (Also, can this (http://www.npbtracker.com/2009/04/2009-npb-average-salary/#content) possibly be right? In 2008 the Carp were, on average, paying their players <$20K?)
.

Doing the math, that page says it is the average of 738 players. Divideby the 12 teams and that is about 60 players per team.

So that average pay includes that paid to the minor league 2 gun players, who would draw the average down a bit, though not that much. The author seems to have understated the average by a factor of 10 when doing the conversion into US dollars, it should be about 200k US for the Carp!

nat

01-15-2019, 09:22 PM

Michio Nishizawa (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nishiz000mic) had a long and storied carrier with the Dragons and the Stars. Incredibly, he broke into the league at the age of 15. Granted it was only ten innings pitched, but I sure wasn’t playing professional baseball at 15. The only American to manage it was Joe Nuxhall. Nishizawa still holds the record as the youngest professional Japanese player.

Early Japanese pro ball had lots of two-way players, but Nishizawa was probably (with maybe the exception of Fujimura) the greatest of them. He was a good pitcher from 1937 (age 15) through 1943 (age 21). In that time he managed about 1100 innings pitched. 1944-5 were lost years. In 1946 he came back to pitch another 120 innings. That was the end of his pitching career. In total Nishizawa pitched 1297 innings, almost exactly the same number of innings as Mariano Rivera, and he managed it before turning 25 and after losing two seasons to the war.

Nishizawa served in the war for two years. Wikipedia says that he was injured, baseball-reference merely says that the war “put additional toll on his arm”. Both sources agree that something war-and-arm-related led to his conversion into a position player.

His early years were spent with Nagoya – later called the Dragons – and he returned to them immediately after the war, but switched teams, to Gold Star (later Kinsei Stars), mid season. It was with the Stars that he transitioned into a position player. When he returned to the Dragons two years later, it was as a first baseman. His first year in the field he was below average as a hitter, but only slightly, and it didn’t take long for him to develop into an offensive force. He had an OBP 100 points above league average in 1948, and 200 points above average in 1949. His best season as a hitter was 1950, when he slugged 46 home runs and drove in 135 despite the short season. As a hitter he was a slow slugger, and patient too. He walked more than he struck out, and while there were seasons in which the league as a whole did that, his ratio was better than normal. Not, that is, that he did much of either. He was walking and striking out around 40-45 times a year, so he made a lot of hard contact.

As a pitcher, he was good but not great. His best season as a pitcher was probably the spring season of 1938 (this was back when they still played split seasons), when he posted an ERA about 30% better than league average. His most successful season was 1940, when Nagoya finished with a winning record for a change (but still finished in just 5th place); he won 20 games that year. The pitching feat for which he is best remember is a 28 inning, 311 pitch complete game against Taiyo. The game ended in a tie.

This is just my second die-cut card. It’s from the JDM21 issued in 1949, so it’s from the brief period when Nishizawa was on the Stars. If a player has a team that he’s really associated with, I never know quite how to feel about cards from when he was with some other team. Somewhere around here I’ve got a 1975 Willie McCovey, which was issued during those five minutes (okay, 2.5 years) that he was on the Padres. And whenever I see it I always say to myself “really, the Padres?”

nat

01-24-2019, 09:39 PM

Masahiko (or Masaaki) Mor (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=mori--000mas)i was elected to the hall of fame by the special selection committee on players. If he really is being inducted for his work as a player, I would have to say that he is wildly overrated. Mori was the catcher for the Giants from 1955-1974, right through the big V9 years. He spent a few years getting his toes wet – he actually broke into the league at 18 – and was a regular at 22. My guess is that he held the job the rest of his playing career, but had a few injuries to deal with towards the end. He made 11 consecutive all-star appearances, and was picked to eight consecutive best-nines. I don’t feel like wading through Central League catchers in the mid 60s at the moment, but I am extremely skeptical about this.

As a player he was… eh… he was a catcher. Career slash line of 236/283/318 isn’t going to scare anybody, pretty much regardless of context. Little in the way of on-base skills, little power. He never cleared a 400 slugging percentage in a full season. Eyeballing it, his best year looks to have been 1964, a year in which he was a little bit worse than average in on-base percentage and a little bit better than average in slugging percentage. And that was his best year. Maybe he was good with the glove?

Allow me some speculation/commentary on American baseball. In the American game guys who play important defensive positions on great teams tend to be held in higher esteem than they actually deserve. Sometimes they even get elected to the hall of fame (cf. Phil Rizzuto). Maybe that’s what was going on with Mori, because the guy’s offensive profile is just not impressive. Albright does not rank him among the top 115 Japanese players, and doesn’t give him an honorable mention, either.

Now, catching for Yomiuri isn’t all that he did. He was also a very successful manager. Mori was in charge of Seibu (the Lions) from 1986 to 1994, and then spent a couple years in this century with the Bay Stars. This was during the Lions’ streak of dominance – they won the Japan series six times in nine years. In total the teams that he was – in one way or another – involved with finished in first place 27 times. As a manager he was relatively relaxed, not a devotee of the Kawakami school of managing. (Peculiar, since they were teammates and Kawakami was later his manager. Or maybe it’s not peculiar, maybe he hated doing 500 fungo drills per day or whatever Kawakami had them doing.) Despite being non-traditional, the success was hard to ignore, and Mori won Japan’s version of the manager of the year award (Matsutaro Shoriki award) twice.

Pictures of his hall of fame induction ceremony here (http://english.baseball-museum.or.jp/baseball_hallo/news/halloffame2005_03.html).

The card is from the JCM39 set, a pretty common one. And it’s not as yellow as it looks in the picture.

nat

02-10-2019, 09:44 PM

Choji Murata (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=murata000cho) pitched for the Orions for 22 years – 1968 to 1990. He was 18 in his first taste of pro ball, and retired at 40 with a 3.24 ERA in 3331 innings. (He couldn’t manage just two more innings?) The mid-to-late 70s were his best period. During this stretch he regularly logged an ERA in the 2s with innings totals that wouldn’t be embarrassing in MLB. 1976 was his single best season: he went 21-11 with a 1.89 ERA in 257 innings.

Murata was the second Japanese pitcher to get Tommy John surgery. The arm abuse that Japanese pitchers put up with took its expected toll, and in 1982, at 32, he, like so many pitchers before him, simply couldn’t pitch anymore. He tried basically everything else that you can do to get your arm working again, including, unwisely, trying to pitch through the pain. Predictably, it didn’t work. As a 32 year old he pitched 40 innings, and then that looked like that. In a last-ditch effort he flew to LA to get ligament-replacement surgery and missed the entire 1983 season and almost all of the 1984 season. He would never again manage the kind of innings pitched that he did as a young man, but by the time he was back on the field he was in his mid-30s, so some age-related decline is to be expected. By age 35 Murata was again pitching more-or-less full-time. He was reasonably successful in 85 and 86, dipping to below-average production for a couple seasons afterwards, and then led the league in ERA in his penultimate season. The same year he was named the all-star game MVP and given a $14,000 prize. (Presumably the amount is approximate. The figure is from the AP.) If forced to pick a comparable American player, I might come up with someone like C.C. Sabathia.

He was a three-time ERA leader, but made only a single best-nine and never won a Sawamura Award.

Post-career, Murata stayed in shape. In what appears to have been a publicity stunt NPB had Kazuhiro Kiyohara-he was retired already, this was in 2013-try to hit a home run off of a few old-time pitching greats. Anyways, Murata struck him out, topping out at 83 mph. Now, 83 mph is really slow for a professional, but considering that Murata was sixty four years old at the time, I think that we can forgive him.

Here’s a short clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6by6IQc2V4) of Murata pitching.

The card is a Calbee, from the 1989 set. The last (I think) of the super small cards that Calbee produced in the 80s.

nat

02-12-2019, 07:22 PM

Yoshinori Hirose (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=hirose000yos) was an outfielder (although one with a fair amount of time at shortstop and a small number of games elsewhere in the infield) for the Nankai Hawks from 1956 to 1977. After 1972, however, he was strictly a part-time player. Hirose’s biggest calling card was his speed. With a total of 596 stolen bases he’s Japan’s #2 all-time base stealer. Now that’s still only 60% of Fukumoto’s total, so Fukumoto basically laps the field on base stealing, but it’s pretty good.

Actually, I’m surprised that there aren’t more big base stealers in Japan. Japan is famous for playing small ball: bunts, hit and runs, etc. The stolen base should fit into their tactical philosophy perfectly. Of course Japanese seasons are shorter than American ones, and the history of Japanese pro ball is shorter than American pro ball, but Hirose’s stolen base total, #2 in Japan, would be tied with Dummy Hoy for #19 all-time in MLB. As for efficiency: he was successful in 82.9% of his stolen base attempts, which would be 26th all-time in MLB, a fraction above Jacoby Ellsbury.

As a batter Hirose was above average in both OBP and SLG, but neither one was outstanding exactly. I grabbed 1961 (age 24) pretty much randomly, and decided to translate it given the context of the 2018 NL. You’d end up with an OBP of about 350 and a slugging percentage of 457. That’s good and all, but neither mark would be among the league leaders. He’d also have (eyeballing this one) stolen base totals in the low 50s. For a comparable American player I’m going with Max Carey. In context Hirose may have been a somewhat better hitter, but they’re pretty close. His best season was 1964 when he was a huge offensive monster, with a slugging percentage like 66% higher than average, albeit one driven by batting average not by power hitting. Presumably that was a result of an unsustainable batting average on balls in play. Players (in MLB at least, probably elsewhere) have more control over their BABiP than do pitchers, but they also each have an established level to which they tend to regress. Given that Hirose never again (and never before) approached a 366 batting average, my guess is that he got lucky on balls in play that year.

This blog (http://noboruaota.blogspot.com/2009/02/kizuka-kanayama-theft-champs-of-1950s.html) has a really nice progressive leaderboard for stolen bases (as well as lots of nice pieces on Japanese baseball). Hirose was the all-time leader from 1970 to 1976 (inclusive).

The card is a menko from JCM 13a. It was issued in 1960.

I sent Rob Fitts (from whom I bought this card) my want list and he said that several of the players on it have no playing-days cards available. I’m not interested in modern cards commemorating older players, so I’ve removed them from the list of players that I’m targeting. With those guys now excluded, I’m pretty close to finished: 90%. (This figure includes a couple players whose cards I have in hand but haven’t posted about yet. Expect write ups on them later in the week.)

seanofjapan

02-13-2019, 10:26 PM

I sent Rob Fitts (from whom I bought this card) my want list and he said that several of the players on it have no playing-days cards available. I’m not interested in modern cards commemorating older players, so I’ve removed them from the list of players that I’m targeting. With those guys now excluded, I’m pretty close to finished: 90%. (This figure includes a couple players whose cards I have in hand but haven’t posted about yet. Expect write ups on them later in the week.)

Nice, you are getting close. I'm curious, besides Sawamura, which other members of the Hall of Fame have no career contemporary cards of them?

nat

02-15-2019, 10:18 AM

Rob tells me that there are no playing-days cards of Masaru Kageura, Miyoshi Nakagawa, Yukio Nishimura, Eiji Sawamura, or Masaki Yoshihara.

My want list didn't have any of the players who made the hall of fame for their amateur play on it, so there may be (almost certainly are) amateur HOFers for whom there are no vintage cards.

nat

02-15-2019, 09:11 PM

Masaji Hiramatsu (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=hirama000mas) pitched for the Taiyo Whales for 18 years. In 1967 he broke in as a 19 year old, and he retired at 36 after the 1984 season. He was consistently very good. But the Whales… the Whales were not. Despite being a very good pitcher, Hiramatsu just barely managed a winning record: 201-196. I nominate Ted Lyons as a similar American player (although Lyons played until he was much older). In what was probably his best season he went 25-19 (both figures led the league) with a 1.95 ERA for a Whales team that managed to claw its way up to third place. But within a couple seasons they were back to fifth.

Japan in general seems to be more contact-oriented than the US, and Hiramatsu’s strike out rate doesn’t seem to be especially impressive. He was K’ing 5.5 per nine innings. Spot-checking a few seasons, it looks like his strikeout rate was slightly better than average. Likewise his control – about 2 K’s per walk for his career – was a little bit better than average. With that kind of profile, my guess is that he had some good defenders behind him.

And sure enough. I just checked the Whales’ shortstop, who would make the biggest difference for a contact-friendly pitcher. For most of Hiramatsu’s career it was a man named Daisuke Yamashita (https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Daisuke_Yamashita). I’d never heard of him before just now, but he is an 8x gold glove winner, and baseball-reference refers to him as a “defensive wizard at shortstop”. Yamashita isn’t in the hall of fame, but I sure hope that Hiramatsu gave him a nice tip of the cap during his acceptance speech.

Hiramatsu himself made eight all-star teams, two best-nines, and took home the Sawamura award in 1970. His trademark was his shuuto pitch – sort of a hard slider/curve which is very popular in Japan but almost unheard of in the US. It may have been the best shuuto of all time. Over time arm injuries caught up with him, however, and he had to start mixing in more pitches that are easier on the arm.

As a boy Hiramatsu had been a huge Giants fan. I get the impression that just about every baseball fan in Japan is a huge Giants fan. Anyway, he starred at the Koshien tournament in high school (his team won; and in 2018 he was invited back to throw out the ceremonial first pitch in a few of the matches) and turned down a contract with the Dragons to play in the industrial leagues. Jim Allen reports (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2017/01/18/baseball/japanese-baseball/desire-beat-giants-spurred-hall-famers-glory/#.XGeDHvZFxn0) that the Giants busily tried to recruit him during this time, but once he was eligible they turned him down. Ouch. He did get a little bit of revenge: despite playing for the dismally bad Whales, he had a winning record against the Giants.

Here (http://column.sp.baseball.findfriends.jp/?pid=column_detail&id=097-20180404-13) is a really interesting look at his delivery. The text below talks about the nature of his shuuto and how he delivered it.

My card is from the 1979 Yamakatsu set.

seanofjapan

02-16-2019, 02:03 AM

There is a weird error on that card. It depicts Masaji Hiramatsu, and correctly shows the kanji for his name on the back. But the furigana version of his first name says “Seiji” instead of Masaji. The kanji can be read either way, so likely whoever wrote the card back just didn’t know how to read his name (a common problem in Japan)!

nat

02-25-2019, 08:29 PM

Kazuyoshi Tatsunami (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=tatsun001kaz) was an infielder for the Dragons from 1988 to 2009. Over the course of 2586 games he accumulated 2480 hits, walked more than he struck out, and posted a batting line of 285/366/408. He wasn’t a power hitter, although he would sometimes post above-average slugging percentages. Likewise, he’d occasionally record double digit stolen bases, but it wasn’t really a part of his arsenal. In some ways he reminds me of Pete Rose. Both were versatile defensive players (Tatsunami was mostly a second baseman, but he played about three seasons worth of games at both third and short, and another 150 games in the outfield). They were both table-setter type hitters, although without much speed. Now obviously Tatsunami didn’t break Ty Cobb’s hits record, but he and Rose were the same kinds of player. Moreover, as befits a player with gap power and a long career, he is Japan’s all-time leader in doubles, with 487. (Although the shorter season must be noted, I expected the Japanese leader to have a higher mark than this: it would put him 76th in MLB, just below, among others Mel Ott, and just above Lou Brock.)

Despite being consistently very good, he was selected to only two best-nines of the course of his 22 year career. He did win a Rookie of the Year award, and several gold gloves. But he rarely led the league in any offensive category. Allen remarks that he was never the best player on his own team. On the other hand, as a veteran player in 2007 he led the Dragons to only their second Japan Series championship, and their first in more than half a century. And Albright likes him well enough, ranking him as Japan’s 48th greatest player

To all appearances, he has spent his retirement writing. Amazon has an author page (https://www.amazon.com/Kazuyosi-Tatunami/e/B004LWCBZK/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0) for him. And while I’m not 100% sure this is the same guy, it looks like him, some of the books are about baseball, and Hiroki Nomura – one of his coauthors – was also a professional baseball player.

Tatsunami is one of the newest members of the hall of fame. And I mean new. He was elected in 2019.

My card is from the 2000 Calbee set. It’s much larger than the tiny 80s Calbee cards, but still slightly smaller than standard baseball card size. Somewhere along the line (1990?) Calbee started putting text on the front of the cards in English instead of Kanji. I don’t know why.

seanofjapan

02-25-2019, 09:13 PM

My card is from the 2000 Calbee set. It’s much larger than the tiny 80s Calbee cards, but still slightly smaller than standard baseball card size. Somewhere along the line (1990?) Calbee started putting text on the front of the cards in English instead of Kanji. I don’t know why.

Nice write up, I like Tatsunami quite a bit and was happy he got in.

Calbee started writing player names in Roman letters on the front of the cards literally in the middle of the 1990 set - the first series had the names in kanji then series 2 had them in Roman letters (and the size switched then too). I think the decision was specifically made to make the cards more accessible to foreign collectors, they actually presaged this in the 1989 set by writing the player's names in Roman letters on the card backs for the first time.

Since 2016 they have reverted back to putting the names in kanji on the front and back, I kind of like them better that way, though it does make them more of a challenge.

buymycards

02-28-2019, 12:27 PM

Hi, I am hoping that someone can help me identify these. I have 21 of these cards, which are approximately 1 5/8" x 2 1/16. They have the same fronts as the 1950 JCM21 Menko's, but the backs are blank. The ones that are listed on eBay have backs similar to the back of a playing card. The other Japanese cards that I have had over the years were thicker than American cards, but these are thinner.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks much! Rick

nat

03-01-2019, 09:45 PM

Hi Rick!

I'm afraid that I don't have much insight to offer, but I'll do my best. Those sure do look like JCM21 cards, but I've never heard of them with blank backs before. It's possible that they are JCM21s that didn't get printed on the back. Quality control for Japanese baseball cards circa 1950 can't have been too good. There are lots of uncatalogued sets, but it seems weird to me that they would issue an identical set that's just missing the printing on the back.

As for the thickness, again I can offer only a guess. Menko cards from the early 50s tend to be relatively sturdy, a few of them are almost Goudey-like. Which makes sense, since they were intended to be thrown at the ground. They weren't baseball cards exactly, they were toys that had pictures of baseball players printed on them. Despite how it's catalogued, it's not clear to me that JCM21 is a menko set. They've got no menko numbers, and no rock-paper-scissors symbols. It seems to me that JCM21 is really just a deck of playing cards. Now, I don't have any cards from the set, so I can't say anything about it's thickness. But if JCM21s were meant to be used as playing cards and not menko cards, it's no surprise that they would be much thinner than is normal.

Sorry I can't be any more help than that. Hopefully some of our more knowledgeable collectors can chime in.

You know, I might as well include a card in this post. Here's an upgrade to my Futoshi Nakanishi. Or, well, 'upgrade' is the wrong word. On my other card (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1774925&postcount=11) he's sharing the spotlight with Takahiko Bessho, whereas here he has the whole card to himself. I'm not sure which set this card is from. It looks like it belongs to several of the JCM12 variations, but the only one that both has a border and pairs Nakanishi with this menko number is 12e, which Engel describes as "painted looking". This card doesn't look especially "painted" to me, but that's my best guess. In any case, it belongs to the JCM12 family.

buymycards

03-02-2019, 07:09 AM

Thank you, I appreciate your help!

Rick

nat

03-04-2019, 07:56 PM

Takeshi Koba (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=koba--000tak) was a middle infielder, mostly playing for Hiroshima, from 1958 to 1971. The leagues that he played in were very low offense affairs, but even by those standards he wasn’t a stand-out offensive player. Some years he was above average, some years he was below. His best season was clearly 1963, when he hit 339/380/441, but then in 1964 he “hit” 218/272/261, so it all balances out in the end. Eyeballing this, but I’d guess that he was, on the whole, a roughly league-average batter. Which of course would make him above average offensively for a shortstop/second baseman, but we’re not talking about Ernie Banks here or anything. His career totals are well-short of Meikyukai standards, in part because of his offensive troubles, in part because he career was a bit short for a hall of famer, and in part because he was a part-time player his last few seasons.

Presumably he was a strong gloveman. As befits a shortstop, he wore uniform number 1.

There may have been some degree of tragedy involved in Koba’s offensive ineptitude. His 1963 ended with getting hit in the face with a pitch, prompting a fear of inside pitches that apparently never abated. Not being able to protect in the inside corner is going to make being an adequate batter pretty difficult.

It’s common to see Japanese players, at least those who play at a hall of fame level, in NPB as teenagers, since Japan doesn’t have the same kind of minor league system that MLB does. (They have a B squad for each team, and those teams do play against each other, but it’s not nearly the same thing.) Koba was 22 as a rookie; B-R says that he spent the time playing the industrial leagues. Which, I gather, is more like playing Indy ball in the US than it is like playing in the affiliated minors. And while Indy players to, occasionally, make the big leagues, it’s not something that they should plan their careers around exactly. On the other hand, Wikipedia says that he had to get a job after his father died, and that working at a real job delayed the start of his baseball career. I suppose these two explanations aren’t entirely inconsistent. Perhaps he had a job with a firm and played on their baseball team on the side? (Is that how the industrial leagues work? Or is it more like, a firm sponsors a baseball club?)

After retiring as a player Koba turned to managing. From the mid 70s to the mid 80s he managed the Hiroshima team, having quite a bit of success with what has traditionally been something of a sad sack franchise. Three years managing Taiyo in the late 80s didn’t go as well. As a manager his trademarks were running and versatility. The Carp had base stealers who could play lots of positions and switch hit. Classic gritty small-ball stuff. Man, I bet MLB these days makes him roll his eyes. Joey Gallo is, like, the anti-Koba. Since leaving the Whales he has not returned to pro ball, but has gone to work in amateur baseball. Like Yoshio Yoshida (who is credited with developing baseball in France), Koba has spent his time working to spread baseball to countries in which it is not popular, and he is currently the manager for the baseball team at Tokyo International University. In 2002 he ran for mayor of Hiroshima, but lost to Tadoshi Akiba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadatoshi_Akiba).

The card is from JCM 14c, issued in 1960.

nat

03-06-2019, 08:58 PM

Shunichi Amachi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=amachi000shu) was a manager for the Dragons. He piloted the team from 1949 to 1951, again in 1954, and then in 1957-8. It was under his guidance that they won their first Japan Series, and their last for another half century. Oddly, he never played baseball professionally. At Meiji University he was a catcher, but he never did make it to NPB as a player. Albright ranks him as Japan’s 18th most successful manager, but his methodology leaves something to be desired. (It’s a system of the “assign X points for Y” type, where there’s no reason that X is worth Y points, and so nothing that the system actually measures.)

In addition to serving as a manager, he had a decent career as an umpire. He was an umpire for a league of six universities based in Tokyo from 1929 to 1947. In addition to college umpiring he put in some work umpiring high school matches, most notably in the Koshien tournament. Following his career as an umpire he took over managing Teikyo Commercial School baseball club, for whom his future ace with the Dragons, Shigeru Sugishita, pitched. Their careers would be fairly well intertwined, as it was on the back of Sugishita’s forkball that Amachi’s Dragons won their Japan Series.

Amachi was not on my original list of hall of famers to acquire. I set out to get cards of professional hall of fame players, and while I’ve made exceptions for players who were inducted as managers but who had long and successful playing careers (Hara comes to mind as an example), Amachi definitely doesn’t fall into that category. (Given that he didn’t play baseball post-college.) However, this is the only Amachi card that I’ve ever seen for sale (outside of uncut JCM21 sheets), this particular card is from JGA16, a set that I’d never encountered before. Indeed, Engel gives is rarity level R4 – indicating only 5-10 of each card known to exist. And while I think that Engel’s rarity levels should probably taken with a grain of salt, it surely at least indicates that there aren’t many of these floating around. So I picked up Amachi-san. JGA16 was issued in 1949, making this Amachi’s rookie card, if that’s what you call a manager’s first card.

nat

03-25-2019, 09:02 PM

The first post in this thread featured Kazuhisa Inao, sharing a card with Takehiko Bessho. That was almost 11 months ago. My early write-ups about Japanese players were pretty skimpy (just five lines for Inao), and given that I’ve picked up a new Inao card, I’d like to take this opportunity to do a better job.

So:

Kazuhisa Inao (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=inao--000kaz) pitched for the Nishitetsu Lions from 1956 to 1969. Inao did not begin his baseball career as a pitcher – when he was in high school he was a catcher with a famously strong arm. Strong enough that taking up a role on the other side of the battery was the obvious move as soon as he went pro. As a 19 year old rookie he posted a 1.06 ERA in a league with a 2.60 ERA as a whole. Put that in the 2018 National League and you get a 1.65 ERA, AKA, a little bit better than DeGrom, who led the league by 70 points and won the Cy Young Award. He was never again quite that good, but he was pretty close through his mid 20s. Both the 1957 and 1958 seasons concluded with MVP awards for Inao. As was standard in the 1950s and 60s, he pitched an insane number of innings, topping 400 in two different years. Then he pitched 11 innings in 1964. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what happened there. From there on out his innings pitched were severely limited (although still healthy by contemporary MLB standards). Shoulder injuries were the main problem in 1964, and a training program that involved throwing an iron baseball didn’t help.

Despite the late career injuries, Inao was obviously one of Japan's greatest starters. In a league in which 200 wins is a notable achievement (it’s the bar for the Golden Player’s Club), Inao won 273, along with an ERA that is third-lowest all-time. (Behind Hideo Fujimura and Jiro Noguchi. And, yes, it was in a low-run environment.) Albright has him ninth all-time, and third among pitchers.

A curious thing about Inao is that, despite being one of Japan’s greatest starting pitchers, he actually made more appearances out of the bullpen than he did as a starter. It was common for starting pitchers to frequently make relief appearances, but Inao did a lot of it. He appeared in 754 games, but started only 304 of them. Along the way he put up a career 276-137 record, good for a .668 winning percentage. (Including 42 wins in 1961.) Now a pitcher has only limited control over their wins and losses, but it goes without saying that that is an impressive record.

And the Lions were good. They won the Japan Series from 1956-1958. But of course their goodness was due in no small part to Inao himself. In the 1958 Series he won four consecutive games. It’s like Randy Johnson from 2001, but, like, times two. In all he appeared in games 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Game five concluded with Inao hitting a walk-off home run in the 10th inning.

After retiring from the mound, Inao took up managing. He found a difficult time to do it. In the late 60s and early 70s Japan was rocked by a series of game-fixing scandals that collectively became known as the ‘Black Mist Scandal’. (B-R has a nice summary here (https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Black_Mist_Scandal).) It first broke with the Nishitetsu team, so Inao was at the center of the storm immediately. He managed the Lions to five sub-500 seasons before retiring. A decade later he took up the top spot for the Lotte Orions, managing them to a mixed record over three seasons.

My new Inao card is from the JCM41 set, which was issued in 1959. It's a couple years more recent than my other Inao card, but still early in his career.

nat

03-31-2019, 07:57 PM

Takehiko Bessho (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=bessho000tak) was, like Inao, featured in the first post in this thread, and, like Inao, did not get the write-up that he deserves. My biographical efforts today represent an attempt to remedy this situation.

Bessho began his career before WWII, playing for Nankai. He would continue playing for them when he returned from the war, but soon found himself with the Giants. As best I can make out from the Japanese Wikipedia page, there was no uniform player contract at the time, and the reserve clause was something more like a tradition than a legally enforceable contractual provision. In any case, it seems that substantial bonuses (Wiki mentions cars and houses) were used to ensure that players did not seek employment elsewhere. But Bessho was dissatisfied with the skimpy renumeration offered by Nankai, and had long wanted to play for the Giants, so he bucked tradition and declared himself a free agent.

However – however – it also seems that the Giants were writing checks and making promises (viz. for a house in Tokyo) while he was still under contract with Nankai. There may have been some extra-contractual inducements for Bessho to seek free agency. The Giants were ultimately fined for tampering with Nankai’s property, and Bessho was suspended for the start of the season, but the contract with the Giants was deemed legal. (How you can be fined for entering into a legal contract is beyond me. You’d think either everything is okay, or the fines are imposed and the contract voided.) The reserve clause was formally incorporated into Japanese contracts starting in 1951.

Anyway, it worked out well for the Giants. Bessho would go on to the be greatest pitcher in Giants’ history. In total he pitched 4350 innings at a 2.18 ERA, to garner 310 wins (against 178 losses). He was consistently excellent. In 1952 (a year that I picked literally at random) he had an ERA half of the league average. In the 2018 AL you’d need a 2.13 ERA to cut the league rate in half. Blake Snell was the only pitcher with a mark better than that, and he won the Cy Young Award. (Wow, the leaders ran away from the pack in the AL last year. Mike Fiers with 10th in the league in ERA with a 3.56 mark.) To eyes accustomed to modern MLB numbers, his strikeout-to-walk rates don’t look good (below 2:1 for the first half of his career), but in context they were terrific. The Central League in the 40s and 50s drew lots of walks and didn’t strike out much.

Due to variation in league context it’s hard to pin down Bessho’s best season. It might actually have been 1952. That wasn’t the year in which he had the lowest ERA, but some of those early seasons of Japanese ball didn’t see many runs scored. And anyway, he was regularly far better than average. As with many starting pitchers of his day, Bessho made plenty of appearances out of the bullpen on his days off, although he wasn’t as extreme about it as was Inao. Twice he cleared 30 wins in a season, which has got to be hard to do in a season that’s only 120 games long.

He was a pretty good hitter too. But unlike lots of his contemporaries (Fujimura, Nishizawa, Sekine) he didn’t get a lot of playing time at other positions, at least not after his rookie year. He played 36 games at 1B and 27 in the outfield, putting up a .254 batting average to go with 35 career home runs in about 2100 at bats.

Bessho’s fame in baseball started before his professional career did. As a high schooler in the Koshien tournament he pitched 14 innings despite having broken his non-pitching arm. He had it in a sling and the catcher rolled the ball back to him. After failing to get in to Keio he briefly attended a vocational school and pitched for Great Ring before being drafted. Initially he was sent to Manchuria. At the time it was controlled by Manchuckuo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchukuo), a monarchy that was a de facto puppet of Japan. I’ve tried to figure out if he would have seen combat there. It seems unlikely. The territory was seized by Japan in the early 1930s, and the Soviets didn’t invade until 1945, by which point Bessho was gone.

For his career Bessho was a 2x MVP, 2x Japan Series MVP, 2x Sawamura Award winner, and 6x Best Nine. Albright ranks him 11th all-time.

I picked up this card in the same lot as the Amachi card posted above. It’s also from the rare JGA16 set, issued in 1949. (And I’ve got a Kazuto Yamamoto from the same set if any type collectors need one.)

The JGA16 set must have been released rather late in the year. 1949 was Bessho's first season with the Giants (and there was a legal kerfluffle at the beginning of the season), but he's already pictured as a member of the Giants on this card.

nat

04-01-2019, 10:11 PM

Another guy who wasn’t on my initial want list. But I was getting bored of not finding any cards that I needed, so I decided to pick up a couple more managers.

Shigeru Mizuhara (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=mizuha000shi) played at Keio and joined the Giants as soon as the professional league formed. He was a second baseman who was pretty good with the bat. In the fall season of 1937 he was legitimately great, but mostly he was just pretty good. Since the pro league didn’t form until he was 27, it wasn’t long before he was past his prime. At age 29, in 1938, he tried pitching (as an amateur he pitched in addition to playing the field) and was quite good. His ERA was something like 40% better than average in the fall season. However he pitched only two unsuccessful innings in the spring, and never appeared on the mound again. It looks like the war was essentially the end of his playing career. Mizuhara was 33 in 1942, but still pretty solid with the bat. He posted an OPS of only 603, but against a league average of 528, that’s a healthy figure. (It’s almost impossible to imagine a league with a 528 OPS. Games must have been twenty minutes long and scores must have been easy to confuse with soccer.) Unlike Bessho – who as far as I can tell never saw combat – Mizuhara ended up in Siberia as a Russian prisoner of war. Word is that he taught baseball to the Russians.

Before the professional league formed, Mizuhara was a star amateur player. Maybe the best. He appeared in the all-Japan team that played the touring Americans in 1934. As a pitcher he got mauled in the November 13 game, even giving up a hit to Moe Berg.

Waseda and Keio had a famously contentious rivalry, and Mizuhara was at the center of it in the 1930s. In a game between the two universities in 1933 Waseda players who so incised with Mizuhara that they threw garbage at him. Most of which he ignored, but when they threw a half-eaten apple at him he threw it back. Which prompted an enormous riot. They don’t make college baseball like they used to.

But anyway, the important thing about Mizuhara was his work as a manager. From 1950 to 1960 (inclusive) he managed the Giants. They were great. This was the Giants of Bessho, Kawakami, and Yonamine. They won eight pennants and four Japan Series. In 61 he left for the Flyers, staying with them through 1967. The Flyers were always the Giants’ little brothers (at the time both teams played in Tokyo), but they were good in Mizuhara’s time with them and won a pennant of their own. In fact, between 1950 and 1967 none of Mizuhara’s teams finished below 500, and only the 1967 Flyers were exactly a 500 team. In 1969 he returned to the dugout, managing the Dragons for three mostly unsuccessful seasons. Albright regards him as the second greatest manager in history and credits him with being one of the managers who introduced platoon match ups to Japan.

The card is a small bromide from the JBR 41 set, issued in 1950.

nat

04-04-2019, 09:44 PM

Osamu Mihara (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=mihara000osa) was a force in Japanese baseball for decades. He rose to prominence with Waseda, and went pro as soon as it was an option. At 24 he was playing for the Giants (then Kyojin). He made his debut in the fall of 1936. All of his professional appearances (as a player) would be at second base, and there would be a total of 108 of them between 1936 and 1938. Although he was a part of the All-Japan team that played the Americans in 1934, once he went pro he was, at least as a batter, nothing special. He never hit a home run, although he did steal a few bases. His batting lines are about what you would expect from Japanese baseball in the 30s. I don’t know what his fielding was like, but whatever reputation he had at the time couldn’t have been from his offensive production.

B-R says of his role in the war only that he was a private in the army. Presumably that’s what interrupted his playing career. When he came back from the war he was 35 and hadn’t played professional baseball in nearly a decade. A return to the field was not in the cards. He seems to have quickly secured a role managing the Giants, however. In 1947 Mihara supplanted Nakajima. The Giants, as usual, were extremely successful, but he didn’t last long as the helm. Yomiuri replaced him briefly with Nakajima again, and then permanently with Shigeru Mizuhara (see the post above this one).

Because I’m looking into it: here’s an aside on Giants managers. The Giants are looking pretty good on this one: Fujimoto, Yokozawa, Nakajima, Mihara, Nakajima again, Mizuhara, Kawakami, Nagashima, Fujita, Oh, back to Fujita, back to Nagashima, Hara, Horiuchi, back to Hara. That is a heck of a lot of hall of famers managing the Giants, although admittedly not all of them are in the hall because of what they did as managers. Yoshinobu Takahashi breaks the streak. Although he was pretty good in his own right, we’ll see. Everyone who managed the Giants from their founding in 1936 through 2015 is in the hall of fame. One starts to wonder in which direction causality runs here. Are the Giants super good at finding gifted managers, or does managing the Giants make a manager look like they’re gifted?

Mihara’s tenure at the head of the Giants was short-lived. Three seasons and then out. He sat out the 1950 season and then took over the top job for Nishitetsu. This is where he really made his name. The Lions were the powerhouse of the Pacific League during the 1950s and Mihara led the team through all of it. Their star third baseman was Futoshi Nakanishi, who married Mihara’s daughter. Probably a good way to ensure that you’ve got a spot on the team, but Nakanishi (a hall of famer in his own right) didn’t need the help. In 1960 he moved on to the Taiyo Whales, leading them to their lone championship. In 1968 he joined the Kintetsu Buffaloes, with whom he had a fair amount of success. And then the last three years (starting in 1971) he managed the Yakult Atoms. They were a bit below 500 while he was there. Mihara was famous for a relatively gentle managing style. For instance, he never hit his players. The fact that this was notable I leave here without comment.

The card today is an uncatalogued bromide. Mihara is on the Giants, so that means the card is from 1947-9, but I can’t pin it down any better than that. He’s talking to Shigeru Chiba, which is neat, two hall of famers on the same card, but it doesn’t help date the card. Chiba played his entire career for the Giants, including the entirety of Mihara’s tenure there. The back of the card has a stamp which, if my high-school Japanese doesn’t fail me, is the kanji for ‘roku’ or ‘five’. It’s common for bromides to have back stamps – usually they indicate that the stamped card was a “winner” which could be redeemed for a prize (usually a bigger card). I’ve never heard of a fifth-place prize (1 through 3 is pretty common), but I guess that’s what it could be.

Mihara is another late addition to my list, so picking up this card doesn’t advance me towards my goal very much. I’m at 91%.

nat

04-06-2019, 08:49 PM

No cards today, but some interesting video. The internet thinks that this is video of Eiji Sawamura (http://www.honus.fr/des-images-de-eiji-sawamura). Strangely enough, on a French website. I don't know enough Japanese to follow the voice-over.

Somebody also has a gif (https://gfycat.com/detailedbigheartedafghanhound) of (what is allegedly) his delivery.

nat

04-15-2019, 09:36 PM

These guys duplicate players that I already have, so no advancement on the project here, but thought I’d share anyway. On the left we have Bozo Wakabayashi, in the middle is Tetsuharu Kawakami, and on the right is Hiroshi Oshita. These cards are from the JBR13 set – or at least the Oshita card is. The other two are identical to JBR13 cards except that they are blank on the back. (Or, well, they were before someone wrote on them.) My guess is that all three of them are JBR13 cards, just missing a pass on the back. Although I guess it’s possible that they’re from a set that’s identical but for the printing on the back. I’m really not a fan of this set – all the cards are boring headshots printed in sepia tone. Moreover, these three examples are in pretty rough shape: creasing, staining, writing, etc. On that note, however, I will say that I kind of like the writing.

The text in the parentheses on the front of the cards gives the player’s team. On the Wakabayashi card it has been scratched out and replaced. Both the text and the replacement writing are illegible (at least to a non-Japanese reader like me), but I’d be willing to bet that it originally said “Osaka” and that the handwritten bit says “Mainichi”. The cards were issued in 1949, and the following season Wakabayashi was traded. You see this all the time on old American cards, it seems pretty likely that that’s what happening here.

As for the writing on the back: it appears to be a dice game. There are twelve, numbered, lines of text. I copied the first three lines from the Kawakami card into Google Translate and got “middle hit”, “chicken neck”, and “left hit”. While I suppose “chicken neck” might be late-40s slang for a strikeout or something, my guess is that I mis-transcribed one of the symbols. Anyways, “middle hit” and “left hit” sure make this sound like a game. Some of the text is repeated on the other cards. My guess is that each kid is supposed to pick a card (or maybe form a lineup – if they had enough cards), then they take turns rolling dice to see what happens in the game. The handwriting on all three cards looks the same to me, so they probably came from the same collection and it was the same kid drawing up the dice game.

Jeff Alcorn

04-17-2019, 10:05 AM

Hi Nat,

Thanks for continuing this series. The #2 listing on the back of the Kawakami card looks like the first kanji for shortstop, followed by the kana for go & ro. When you put those 2 together you get "gro" for ground- so #2 is saying "Ground ball to shortstop". You got the other 2 correct- a hit to center field and a hit to left field. These same types of abbreviations are on the back of all the Takara game cards issued from the late '70s to the late 90's, and are for playing a dice baseball game.

Thanks again,

Jeff

nat

04-17-2019, 06:50 PM

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the info. Either this kind of game was popular long before the Takara cards were printed, or whoever wrote on this cards did it long after they were printed - the JBR13 set is a 1949 issue.

(Also - I wonder how you are supposed to roll a 1...)

seanofjapan

04-17-2019, 09:01 PM

Great finds, I was about to comment on the similarity to the Takara games too.

I have a couple of the Takara ones and am very tempted to try actually playing the game, I just need to find someone to play it with!

nat

04-22-2019, 07:36 PM

No new players, but another card that I picked up as a part of a lot, so I thought that I might as well share it.

This is Karou Betto, about whom I've written before (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1803700&postcount=100). In America Betto is, sadly, probably best known for appearing on one of The Dude's t-shirts in The Big Lebowski. Which, let's be clear, is a fine piece of cinema, but a great player (and manager) like Betto deserves better.

The card is from the JCM 78 set, which was issued in 1949 to commemorate a tour of Japan by the San Francisco Seals. Seals players have 'Seals' written on the back of the card, Japanese players have 'Nippon' (Japan) on the back. I don't know why they decided to include the Japanese players that they did. There are only five of them in the set, so it's not like it's an all-star team that the Seals were playing against or something. Besides Betto it includes:

Takehiko Bessho - an all-time great pitcher
Takeshi Doigaki - a good catcher, but not a hall of famer
Kikuji Hirayama - an outfielder who had been a star before the war, but by 1949 was merely average
Shissho Takesue - a hotshot rookie pitcher who would quickly flame out

seanofjapan

04-22-2019, 07:49 PM

That Betto is awesome, I've never seen one of those before. I love how awkward the way they drew him holding the bat is, its almost like they had 8 year olds drawing these things, which I find quite endearing.

nat

04-24-2019, 08:16 PM

Here's another player that I've written about before (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1794190&postcount=86). Tokuji Iida was a power hitting first baseman.

This card is an uncatalogued menko. It's a pillar-style card, however, so it's pretty easy to guess about an issue date: late 40s or maybe 1950 or so. The art is weird. It makes him look like a lizard wearing blush.

Iida played for Nankai from 1947 through 1956, and Kokutestu for the rest of his career. Wondering what happened for him to change teams, I went through the roster of the 1956 Kokutetsu and 1957 Nankai teams, trying to find the player that he was traded for. But no one played for both of those teams. Anyone know what happened such that players changed teams in the 1950s, or, even better, what Iida's story is?

It's true that in the early days the reserve clause wasn't a formal part of player contracts, but after a scandal involving Takehiko Bessho it was included in the standard player contract starting in 1951. So Iida couldn't have just declared himself a free agent the way that Bessho did. I tried looking him up on Japanese Wikipedia but - probably due to my poor Japanese - couldn't find any information.

nat

05-10-2019, 07:44 PM

For your baseball-card-observing enjoyment today, I have a new Hiroshi Oshita card. I’ve written about him before (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1780567&postcount=43). Oshita was a star player in the 40s and 50s. He was Kawakami’s big rival and famous for batting with a blue bat.

I bought this card for two bad reasons and one good one. Bad reasons first. To begin with, my only other Oshita card is a part of an uncut sheet and I wanted an Oshita to put in my binder. The second reason is that I was swayed by auction copy. I was eagerly awaiting the most recent Prestige Collectibles auction, hoping to pick up an interesting pre-war hall of fame menko. They had some, but they were either of hall of famers that I’m not interested in (i.e., managers) and/or out of my price range for Japanese cards.

They did, however, have a copy of this Oshita card. Here is what Prestige says about this card: “Cards from the JBR 109 set are rarely seen. In fact, this is only the second example of this Hiroshi Oshita card that we have ever encountered. The unusual design coupled with extreme rarity makes this an especially desirable second year card of Oshita.” Reading that, my interest was piqued. Just not enough to place the minimum bid. I did not buy my card from Prestige. But I found another copy for sale at exactly the same time as the Prestige auction was running, and I got it for less than half of what their copy sold for. (Although it’s worth noting that their copy is in better shape than mine.) If this card is as rare as they say, it’s got to be an amazing coincidence that two copies came up for sale at the same time.

Now for the good reason to buy it. This is just a really nice card. There are many bromide issues that are just a more-or-less random picture with a caption thrown onto it. But some serious design work went into this one. I especially like the background. Oshita is depicted as a giant standing in the middle of a baseball stadium, with a couple fielders standing behind him. It’s the same idea as on DeLong cards, but it works for DeLong cards (the DeLong Gehrig might just be the greatest baseball card of all time) and it works with this set too. This one has the best design of any of my Japanese cards, and is among my favorite one all around.

The set is JBR 109. I have the old edition of Engel’s vintage card guide (the one distributed as a spiral bound book, not the one on flash drive) and it is not listed there. Given that Prestige only knows of two copies of this card, I assume that it’s an R5.

I made the first post to this thread one year (plus two days) ago, so this sounds like a good time to take stock. I’ve added a few players to my want list that were not originally on it (they are guys that I had characterized as managers but who were inducted as players), so my project is currently 89% complete. (Backsliding a bit because of the added players.) I’ve got cards of 82 hall of famers (and duplicates of several). That works out to about one card every four and a half days. Not bad. Keeping the mailman busy.

nat

05-15-2019, 07:26 PM

For the sake of completeness, I thought that I'd post my third (and last) card from the JGA16 set. This is Kazuto Yamamoto (also known as Kazuto Tsuruoka). I've written about him before. He was an infielder for Nankai in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and a manager for many years after that. This card is from 1949; he was Nankai's regular third baseman and a player/manager that year. They decided to list him as a manager on this card.

Northviewcats

06-04-2019, 10:07 AM

I have enjoyed reading this thread about Japanese baseball cards. So I picked up a bunch of Japanese cards in the recent Huggins and Scott auction. Several different types and years from 1948 Menkos to 1975-76 Calbees.

I've tried to identify the players by comparing them with advertisements on eBay and sites on the Internet. I thought that I would post a few pictures here to see if anyone can help me identify the players that I cannot find.

I will start with the 1948 JCM2 Baseball Backs. I believe the first card is Takeshi Doigaki, the second Torao Ooka, and the third Sanada ? The other 5 cards I cannot find anything.

Also does anyone know the significance of the numbers on the back of the cards?

I appreciate any help.

Best regards,

Joe

nat

06-04-2019, 07:08 PM

The fourth player down is Takehiko Bessho, hall of famer and star pitcher for the Giants.

As near as I can tell the guy below him his Michinori Tsubochi, a hall of fame middle infielder. I'm not 100% sure on this one though.

I think the next guy down is named 'Shibata'. There have been a bunch of Japanese players with that name, but none of them look like a match for a late 1940s pitcher. I might have mis-translated this one.

The next guy is Hideo Shimizu (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=shimiz000hid). He was a pitcher, mostly playing for the Dragons. Sometimes he was good, sometimes he wasn't.

The last player is Testuharu Kawakami (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kawaka000tet). He was one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese baseball. He was a star first baseman (nicknamed "The God of Batting") for the Giants, from 1938 to 1958. Probably the second or third greatest Japanese first baseman of all time. After that he became Japan's most successful manager, and the most notable advocate of the extremely harsh training and disciplinary program that Japanese baseball is famous for.

The numbers on the back are menko numbers. They don't mean anything. These are menko cards; it's a game (sort of like pogs) where kids throw their cards at piles of other cards on the ground and tried to flip them over. Keeping ones that they managed to flip over. Menko cards often have stuff on them that they thought kids would like: cartoons, rock-paper-scissors symbols, math problems (apparently menko card makers were a bit optimistic about kids' tastes), and really big numbers.

What menko numbers are useful for, from the perspective of a collector, is that in most sets card backs and card fronts are paired, so if you know which menko number corresponds to which player (Gary Engel's book will tell you for a lot of sets) you can identify players based on their menko numbers. For example, Engel says that the card whose back you displayed is "Kyuei Player (generic)".

Given that you've got one of them, it's worth mentioning that some menko cards - especially early ones - don't have specific players on them, but have representative images of a player on a team.

Thanks for sharing these cards, I'd love to see the rest of the lot that you got!

nat

06-04-2019, 08:05 PM

I’ve got a couple more players to write up. Thanks to Sean for this one: I sent him a few spare Calbees and he hooked me up with a couple missing hall of famers. My first baseball card trade since I was ~13, and by far my longest-distance trade.

Senichi Hoshino (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=hoshin000sen) pitched for the Dragons from 1969 to 1982. He compiled a 146-121 W/L record to go with a 3.60 career ERA. Of his 500 career appearances, slightly more than half of them were in relief. It was fairly common for Japanese starters to pitch out of the bullpen on some of their days off, but this is pretty extreme. In fact, there were some years in which he was almost entirely (or just entirely entirely) a relief pitcher. I’d say that 1974 (the year he took home the Sawamura award) and 1975 were his best years. He posted ERAs of 2.84 and 2.77 in those seasons, against league averages of about 3.50 and 3.30, respectively. That’s not Sandy Koufax exactly, but it’s pretty good. In addition, he was a pretty good hitter. Sort of an all-or-nothing guy at the plate, but there were a few years in which he had a better-than-league-average slugging percentage.

Probably as important to his hall of fame case as his pitching was his career as a manager. Hoshino managed Chunichi from 1987 through 1991, and then again from 1996 through 2001. After that he jumped ship, helming the Tigers for two years. Following his retirement from professional managing he took over the Japanese team in the Asian games (at which they were victorious) and the 2008 Olympics, at which they finished in fourth place. In 2011 he returned to the professional leagues, leading Ratuken through 2014. His teams made it to the Japan Series four times, but only won once. His career record is .529 – good, but not exceptional – but the raw number of wins puts him up amongst the winningest managers in Japanese history. As a manager he was… intense. He was known to beat his players and occasionally hit an umpire.

During his career Hoshino was known as the “Giant Killer”. Probably in part because the Dragons finally stopped the ON-Cannon’s run at nine consecutive championships, but also because he was a vocal critic of the Giants. (Apparently they had agreed to draft him after he graduated from Meiji and they went back on the deal.) The feelings seemed to be mutual: "I also held a burning desire to hit when I faced him because of that spirit of his”, Nagashima is reported (http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201801060021.html) to have said.

Finding a comparable American player it tough, if only because so few successful pitchers become managers. Maybe this is the way to do it: imagine a pitcher sort of like Orel Hershiser, and then also make him a reasonably successful manager. Still not perfect, because Hoshino spent so much time in the bullpen and Hershiser’s stretch of dominance was longer. But that’s as close as I’m going to get.

The card is a 1976 Calbee.

Northviewcats

06-04-2019, 09:33 PM

seanofjapan

06-04-2019, 11:41 PM

Glad to see the Hoshino made it safe and sound into your collection! As an anti-Giant myself I've always had a soft spot for him and felt bad when he passed on last year.

Maybe he is the equivalent of Orel Hersheiser and Tommy Lasorda combined?

nat

06-05-2019, 07:36 PM

The other player must be Kawakami. He's wearing a Giants hat, and Kawakami is the only Giant that Engel lists as being in the set. (And Engel definitely knows about this card: it's the one that he uses to illustrate the set.)

Now, the kanji for 'Kawakami' is 川上. If you sort of squint you can kind of make the second character on the card look like 'kami'. The first character looks like the hiragana for 'i', but I guess if it's super stylized it sort of maybe could possibly be 川?

Anyways, the Giants hat is what seals the deal. The baseball players in the set are Nishizawa (whom you've got), Kawakami, Kaoru Betto - who was on the Mainichi Orions at the time, and Fumio Fujimura, who spent his whole career with Osaka. So just by process of elimination it must be Kawakami.

And yeah, I like a Hershiser/Lasorda hybrid as a match for Hoshino. In fact, it works on all sorts of levels. The Dodgers have traditionally been the American Giants' nemesis. Heck, the Dragons' uniforms even look like Dodger blue!

Northviewcats

06-06-2019, 04:59 PM

seanofjapan

06-06-2019, 10:25 PM

The players are:

Masaichi Kaneda
Yoshio Yoshida
Kazuhiro Yamauchi
Shigeo Nagashima

All four are hall of famers!

nat

06-07-2019, 07:39 PM

Tsunemi Tsuda (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=tsuda-000tsu) pitched for the Hiroshima Carp from 1982 to 1991. Early in his career he was a starting pitcher. As a 21 year old rookie he pitched 166 innings and was not good exactly, but good enough to take home the rookie of the year award. The following year he appeared in 19 games (17 starts) and was actually quite good. In his third year he made ten starts and four relief appearances, totaling only 54 innings, and he went back to being bad. After that he was converted into a relief pitcher. The Japanese Hall of Fame says (http://english.baseball-museum.or.jp/topics/letter/vol21_04.html) that his conversion was necessitated by a ‘disrupture of blood in the middle finger’. I don’t have any idea what that is. But anyway, his first season out of the bullpen, 1985, did not go as planned. Tsuda was terrible: 50% worse than league average. His ERA that year was 6.64, and league-wide scoring was about the same as in 2018’s American League, so that doesn’t require any adjustment. His fame really rests on three of the following four seasons. In 1986, 87, and 89 he was terrific.

But then tragedy struck.

In the spring of 1990 he needed surgery because he was suffering from cerebral edema. That is, excess fluid built up in his brain. Cerebral edema can result from traumatic injury, but it can also result from cancer. In Tsuda’s case, it was the latter. He pitched six innings in 1990, one in 1991, and then he died of brain cancer.

The man nicknamed “the flaming stopper” remains as popular as ever. His son wanted to build a museum to his father, and crowd sourced funds for it. His goal was to raise four million yen (something like $40,000) to renovate Tsuda’s old house. The Yomiuri Shimbun (the newspaper that owns the Giants) reports (http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0005777313) that he hit his initial target in five hours, and eventually raised twenty-six million yen, for a much nicer museum.

The American hall of fame has been known to cut some slack for players who died suddenly and tragically. Ross Youngs comes to mind. Addie Joss didn’t even meet the 10 year requirement, but they put him in anyway. The Japanese voters did the same for Tsuda, but on the merits he’s even less deserving than Youngs or Joss. Joss was legitimately an all-time great, even if his career was short. (For what it’s worth, and yes he was a deadball pitcher, but he still holds the all-time record for WHIP.) Youngs, eh, had half of a hall of fame career. If he’d lived he probably wouldn’t have made it, but he might have. Tsuda is a different animal. Imagine if, instead of retiring at 32, Eric Gagne had died. That would be the American version of Tsuda.

This is a 1987 Calbee card.

Northviewcats

06-08-2019, 07:03 AM

The players are:

Masaichi Kaneda
Yoshio Yoshida
Kazuhiro Yamauchi
Shigeo Nagashima

All four are hall of famers!

Thanks Sean and Nat for all of your help identifying the players on my cards. I wish that I could add more to the discussion than just show pictures.

Here are four more thick cardboard cards that were in with a group labeled miscellaneous Japanese cards in the Huggins and Scott lot. I know the first two are of famous Home Run King Sadaharu Oh, but can you tell me anything about the other two players? Also any information on the year of manufacture and type of card?

I love the cheesy artwork on the back of the cards. The little girl in card 3 looks like she is about to murder her mom.

Best regards,

Joe

nat

06-09-2019, 08:56 PM

I don't know what set the first Oh card is from, but that's definitely Oh. It looks to me like a later issue; I'd guess 1970s.

The other three cards are from JCM58, which was issued between 1975 and 1976. The first guy is Oh. The second guy is Sumio Hirota. He played 1972 to 1987, mostly for the Lotte Orions. Early in his career he had a couple good seasons, but was mostly a below average hitter. He stole lots of bases though; I'm guessing a good-glove no-hit center fielder. Think of someone like Rajai Davis. The last player is Jinten Haku, also known as In-Cheon Paek. He was a productive hitter: about 15 HRs per year, around the same number of steals. He was named to one best-nine. After retiring from Japanese baseball he went to Korea, and is still the only player to have posted a .400 batting average in the KBO.

As for type of card: these are still menkos. Traditionally menko cards were printed on thick stock, since they were meant to be flipped around and thrown on the ground. That's why these cards are so thick. Some sets are very robust - put a Goudey to shame.

On the other hand, I've noticed that menkos printed immediately post-war are often very thin. Much too thin to actually play menko with. My guess is that a shortage of paper had something to do with that. "Tobacco" menkos from the late 50s and early 60s are better about stock quality, but still pretty thin if you're thinking about using them as game pieces. Presumably paper supply wasn't a problem by that point. Maybe kids were appreciating the cards more as baseball cards than as menko cards in that period, and produces responded by cutting corners? If anyone else knows why the tobacco menkos are relatively thin I'd love to hear about it.

seanofjapan

06-12-2019, 07:46 PM

nat

06-12-2019, 08:25 PM

Hiroshi Gondo (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=gondo-000hir) pitched for the Chunichi from 1961 to 1964, transitioned to a position player for a few seasons, and tried to make a comeback on the mound in 1968. To say that he was abused by the Dragons doesn’t even begin to cover it. As a 22 year old rookie he pitched 429 innings, starting 44 games (including 32 complete games) and finishing 24 games. He appeared in 69 games that season, so I guess he pitched in middle relief once. It was an amazing year. He won 35 games with an ERA of 1.70 against a league mark of 2.68. That would be like having a 2.69 ERA in last year’s American League. So, a good ERA over an unthinkably large number of innings. That year he took home both the rookie of the year award and the Sawamura Award, and led the Central League in practically everything. The following year he won 30 games over 362 innings (with a 2.33 ERA), and then things started going downhill. In 1963 Gondo’s ERA jumped a run-and-a-half while his innings pitched declined by about 1/3. In 1964 his ERA was over four and he only pitched about 100 innings. And that was that.

After blowing out his arm, Gondo stuck around for a few years playing SS and 3B. I don’t know what his defense was like, but, as befits a pitcher, he was not a good batter. The Dragons didn’t give him a starting gig; from his stats it looks like he was a bench player, the kind of guy who pinch hits and fills in when a regular is injured.

Although he had a relatively short playing career, he spent a long time as a coach and baseball analyst. Many years after retiring, he got a managerial spot, leading the Yokohama Bay Stars (1998-2000). They won the Japan Series under his guidance, but his managerial career lasted only those three seasons. In 2017 he was the pitching coach for Japan’s entry in the World Baseball Classic, and cautioned against over use of his pitchers. One wonders why.

Gondo was elected by the “expert” division of the player’s committee. It has purview over managers, coaches, and players who have been retired for a long time. Gondo had a short career as a player, but a long career as a coach and baseball analyst. Presumably that’s what he got elected for, as his pitching career, though notable, was extremely brief. Comparable American players are people like Herb Score and Mark Prior. Exciting young pitchers, good too, but no where near qualified for the hall on the basis of their playing careers.

The card is from the JCM 55 menko set, released in 1962. It was probably one of the most desirable cards in the set when it was released.

nat

06-18-2019, 09:07 PM

I estimate that there is only a 46% change that today’s entry features a hall of famer. Even so, it’s worth writing about.

There have been several distinct eras in the history of Japanese baseball cards:

• Early 20th century – Postcards, usually featuring university teams and/or visiting American teams. Menko cards from this era are very rare.

• 1930s – First time that menkos and bromides featuring baseball players were widely available. Relatively few of these cards survive (I don’t have any), but you can still find them sometimes.

• WWII – no cards issued

• 1947 through early 1950s – golden age of baseball bromides. Round and pillar menkos common.

• Late 1950s through mid-1960s – “tobacco” menkos common. Throughout the postwar period game cards and cards packaged with candy and gum can be found. The former are common, the latter are not. (I own several game cards despite generally disliking them. I have only a single candy card.)

• 1973 through 1990 – Calbee era. Calbee cards are distributed 1-to-a-pack with potato chips. A few other companies produced cards during this period, but most were short-lived. Calbee was king.

• 1991 – current. BBM era. BBM cards are basically typical American-style baseball cards. Calbee still makes cards, and other companies sometimes put out a set, but BBM fundamentally changed the Japanese baseball card market.

The cards that have been posted to this thread have all been post war. (That’s why this thread is on this side of the board.) Time to change that. I recently picked up a couple early postcards. Today I’ll post the first one, and I’ll do a write-up for the other one later.

In 1872 an American teacher named Horace Wilson introduced Japan to baseball. In 1878 the first formal team was founded. By the turn of the century it was a popular sport in Japanese universities, and a handful of prominent universities had notable baseball teams. In the early days, Keio and Waseda Universities were the stand-outs. Baseball was, of course, already quite popular in the United States, and throughout the first few decades of the 20th century a number of American universities sent baseball teams to play their Japanese counterparts. Off hand, I know that Washington University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin sent teams across the Pacific.

The postcard below commemorates the 1909 University of Wisconsin tour. The inscription on the bottom of the card reads: “Scene of the fierce match between between United States, The baseball team of the University of Wisconsin & Keio University”.

The first game of the tour Keio won by a score of 3-2 in 11 innings on the 22nd of September. The two teams would have a rematch on the 26th, that Keio won 2-1 in 19 innings. Two days later Wisconsin trounced the Tokyo American Club 10-0, on the 29th they beat the Tokyo City Team 8-7. They beat Waseda 7-4 on Oct. 2, lost to Keio 5-4 on the 4th, beat Waseda 5-0 on the 7th, lost to Waseda 3-0 two days later, and beat Keio 8-0 on the 12th before returning to America.

Which game is pictured here? The postmark reads “26th September, Meiji 42”. The Japanese calendar tracks years since the beginning of the current emperor’s reign. 9/26 Meiji 42 = 9/26/1909. Given that the second game of the tour was played on the 26th, that must mean that the match pictured here was the inaugural game of the 22nd. (It must also mean that these postcards were printed in a hurry. The game pictured was played on four days before this card was mailed.)

One amazing thing about this tour, from the perspective of a (very) amateur historian studying it more than 100 years later, is that The Badger, a publication of the University of Wisconsin (it looks like a yearbook) recorded a detailed record of their trip. I will post the relevant pages from The Badger in the next post, but I will give some information from them here.

One Genkwan Shibata, class of 1909, arranged the trip and served as translator. Shibata had a local contact. Professor Matsuoka was a 1906 Wisconsin alum, and helped arrange the trip on the Japanese side. Matsuoka conscripted several hundred Keio students to act as designated Wisconsin fans during the tour. Keio put up $4000 to help fund the Americans’ visit. There are all sorts of problems with inflation calculators, but that’s something in the neighborhood of $100,000 today. Despite their hospitality, Keio wanted to win. As soon as the plans for the trip were finalized, the players from the Keio squad were sequestered away to spend six hours a day in training.

The Wisconsin team consisted of 13 players. They took a train to Seattle, where they spent a week practicing, and then about two weeks aboard ship headed to Japan. The Wisconsin players report that crowds of about 20,000 attended their games. They traveled to the first game by rickshaw. Although the American were impressed with the reception that they received, they also allege bias from the umpires, claiming that it cost them three games against Keio. Nobody ever likes an umpire. They note that there are not yet any professional players in Japan, but predict that there will be some. And of course they were right, although it would take another 27 years.

Now, who is pictured on this card? It’s hard to say, but I’ll give it my best shot. You can’t tell which team is at bat from the names on the uniforms. Even under 60x magnification I couldn’t even get a hint as to what it says on the jerseys.

That said, the batter is wearing white, and the catcher is wearing a light grey. Now, traditionally the home team wears white and the visitors wear grey or some other darker pattern. If the Japanese and American teams were both adhering to this tradition, then the Japanese team is at bat and the Americans are in the field. I have seen a number of other postcards (https://prestigecollectiblesauction.com/bids/bidplace?itemid=1286) commemorating this trip. Some of them seem to confirm this conjecture.

There is one other factor that favors it. In the background of my postcard is what looks like a scoreboard. It’s very grainy, and no writing on it is visible, but it sure looks like a scoreboard to me. It contains many black rectangles on the right, and a few white rectangles on the left. My guess: the black rectangles are blank boxes reflecting innings yet to be played. The white boxes are placards displaying the runs scored in innings that have already been played. There are more white boxes on the top row than on the bottom. Usually the visiting team is displayed at the top of the scoreboard (they bat first). If that’s right, and I’m counting right, that would indicate that this photo is of the bottom of the fourth inning of the first game between Keio and Wisconsin, September 22nd, 1909.

I’ll admit to being somewhat disappointed that it is probably the Americans in the field. The only hall of famer to appear on the Keio squad is catcher Zensuke Shimada (http://english.baseball-museum.or.jp/baseball_hallo/detail/detail_033.html). If Keio had been on defense, the would likely be Shimada you see waiting to receive the pitch. Alas, it’s probably not. I’ve decided that I’m 60% confident that it’s the Americans in the field. That gives me a 40% probability that it’s Shimada playing catcher. But there’s also a Keio player at bat. There’s no indication on the card of who it is, but even so there’s an 11% chance that it is, just by luck, Shimada who is batting. 40% + (60% x 11%) = 46%, hence my estimate at the top of this post. (N.B. Niese says that Konosuke Fukada was the Keio catcher. If he’s right, then my estimate is way off.)

If those are the Americans in the field then the catcher is either Elmer Barlow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_E._Barlow) (aka ‘Spike’, class of ’09), or Arthur Kleinpell (aka ‘Moose’, class of ’11). Barlow would go on to have a distinguished law career, eventually serving on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Less is known about Arthur Kleinpell. He graduated in 1911, and then completed a second degree at Wisconsin in 1917. He died in Michigan. The pitcher is Doug Knight. He pitched all 11 innings of the first game, and the first 16 innings of the second, before injuring his arm and sitting out the rest of the tour. Also visible are first baseman Micque Timbers, and either John Messmer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Messmer) or Kenneth “Buck” Fellows at second. Messmer was Wisconsin’s most accomplished athlete. He won nine letters, later became an architect, and was inducted into the University of Wisconsin Athletics Hall of Fame.

If anyone can read the handwritten text on the card, please let me know. I would very much like to know what they were writing about on this card just after the first game of the tour. I've included a photo of the message with the contrast increased to make it easier to read.

Some of the information in this post was drawn from: Niese, Jon 2013. Voyage to the land of the rising sun: The Wisconsin Badger nine’s 1909 trip to Japan. Nine: A journal of baseball history and culture, 22:1, 11-19.

seanofjapan

06-19-2019, 01:20 AM

Beautiful postcard!

I'm having a lot of difficulty reading the written text due to the handwriting and the pre-war style.

I can say that it was addressed to someone living in the Hakozaki area in Fukuoka city and I don't see any baseball terms used in the written text, which I think is just a personal note unrelated to baseball.

Northviewcats

06-19-2019, 11:03 AM

Very nice post cards. Congratulations on the pick up. Admire all of your research. I really enjoy reading your detective work on the history of the players.

Here are a few more Post-war cards from the Huggins and Scott lot that I purchased last month. They were listed as 1950 JK18 Pro Baseball cards in the auction. I haven't been able to find similar examples on eBay. They are all blank backed and printed on thin cardboard stock. Any help on identifying any of the players or confirming the set would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Joe

nat

06-19-2019, 08:02 PM

Those are karuta cards. Karuta is sort of a party game. Each player card is paired with a "reading card" that's got information on it. You mix up all the player cards on the table and players take turns reading the reading cards. After a card has been read, all the other players try to be the first to grab the corresponding player card. They would have originally been sold in a box as a complete set. The hiragana symbols on the cards don't have anything to do with the players' names, they just let you pair players cards with reading cards. But, the pictures are pretty good likenesses of the players, so it's not that hard to figure out who is who. (And, moreover, Engel already did the work for us.)

You have, in order:

Juzo Sekine (HOF), Hiroshi Oshita (HOF)
Michio Nishizawa (HOF), Makoto Kozuru (HOF)
Meiji Tezuka, Shissho Takesue
Hideo Fujimoto (HOF), Hiroshi Nakao (HOF)
Shigeru Mizuhara (HOF), Noboru Aota (HOF)
Tokuji Kawasaki, Shigeru Chiba (HOF)
Tetsuharu Kawakami (HOF)

Pretty good selection of players.

Also, in my last post I promised copies of the relevant pages from the UW Yearbook. Unfortunately this website doesn't let you post large files, so the legibility of the text below has been compromised. But you'll get the idea. I also think it's neat that the yearbook includes images of several postcards that were obviously produced together with the one that I posted above. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the yearbook, but the UW library has a nice digitized copy that you can read on-line.

nat

06-22-2019, 01:36 PM

Here is my other recent pick up. It’s another postcard. The image is obviously generic, so no hall of famers here. The person that I bought it from thinks that it was originally included in a magazine. And it does appear to be perforated along one side. The printed text along the bottom says that it is a “secondary education postcard”, for whatever that’s worth. I haven’t found anyone who has been able to read the handwriting.

But what is really interesting about this card is the date. On the back is a 15 sen stamp that dates from the 1880s to 1890s. Now, companies were not permitted (https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/04/how-to-ascertain-the-date-or-time-period-of-a-japanese-postcard/) to produce postcards in Japan until the Postal Act of 1900 was passed, which creates a little bit of a mystery. But I think that the answer is this: this isn’t, legally speaking, a postcard. It’s a (part of) a page from a magazine – which just coincidentally happens to be the size and shape of a postcard, to be perforated for easy removal, and to say ‘postcard’ on it. But that’s all – the publisher could insist – just a coincidence. And if the reader of the magazine wants to rip out the page and mail it, well, that’s their business. Anyway, since the card was postally used, we can date it quite precisely. The postal cancellation says: June 1, Meiji 24. That’s 1891.

This is very early for Japanese baseball. Horace Wilson introduced baseball to Japan only about 20 years before this card was mailed. It postdates the establishment of Japan’s first organized baseball team by only 13 years. So at this point baseball in Japan was, if not in its infancy, at least in its toddlerhood. American teams wouldn’t start visiting Japan for about another 15 years after this.

This is the earliest piece of Japanese baseball-themed ephemera that I’ve ever seen. The earliest known baseball menko card dates from 1897, and all of the other postcards that I’ve seen are from after the turn of the century. I asked Robert Klevens about it, and he says that, while he has books with woodblock prints that predate this, none of his cards do. Now, whether or not postcards “count” as baseball cards is a fraught and kind of pointless question. We know what they are and we know what they’re not. If you want to count them as baseball cards, then this is likely the earliest known Japanese baseball card. If not, then it’s not, but it’s still a memento from a very early period of Japanese baseball history.

nat

06-30-2019, 06:48 PM

I am not, I would like to be clear, a patient man. When I started going for the Japanese hall of fame, I managed to find something that I needed, basically every other day. Lately I’ve gone, well, rather more time between pickups.

This does not please me.

But the fact is that among the post-war hall of famers – so, the one’s that I’m actively chasing – there just aren’t very many left to find. I’m at 94% on my project and only need five more players. But obviously the last ones to get will, on average, be the hardest ones to find. And they have been the hardest ones to find.

So I decided to set out on another project. Something to keep me busy while those last five stragglers find their way into my collection. As noted up-thread, Japan has two halls of fame. There’s the yakyu dendo, which I’ve been chasing. It’s the one that people vote on, and they’ve got a museum in the Tokyo Dome. It is, in many respects, like the one in Cooperstown. But there’s also the Meikyukai, AKA The Golden Player’s Club. The Meikyukai is Masaichi Kaneda’s club. He founded it in 1978. Eligible players are those born during the Shōwa period (1926-1988) who have either 2000 hits, 200 wins, or 250 saves. Membership is more-or-less automatic. Or, at any rate, once a player hits the relevant milestones, he’s in unless he doesn’t want to be. The only players who are eligible but not in the Meikyukai are Kihachi Enomoto and Hiramitsu Ochiai. (Turning down Meikyukai membership was very on-brand for Ochiai.) Statistics accumulated outside of Japan count, but only so long as the player appeared in professional Japanese baseball before he accumulated them.

There are many reasons that the automatic qualifications are poorly chosen. They're arbitrary, they're poor measures of player skill or value, and they don't take context into account. The point that I’m trying to make is that if you’re trying to measure career quality, using wins, saves, and hits as proxies is a terrible way to do it.

Nevertheless, anyone who can hang around long enough to hit the milestones is probably a pretty good player, even if the milestones themselves are a poor way to evaluate them. And the Yakyu Dendo has some peculiar omissions, some of which, like Masahiro Doi, the Meikyukai does better with.

Meikyukai players are overwhelmingly recent players. Some of them are still active. So, fair warning: there are a lot of 2.5x3.5 cards with various amounts of foil embossing on the way.

Let’s start with this guy. This is Tomonori Maeda (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=maeda-001tom), an outfielder who played for the Carp for ages. And I mean ages. He had a 23 year career, and that doesn’t even count the 2009 season, which he missed completely. He’s in the Meikyukai on the strength of 2119 hits which go with a 302/358/484 slash line, over the years 1990-2013. Maeda had moderately good power – 295 home runs for his career, 20ish a year when he was playing full years (he had many partial seasons) – and little speed. His best season seems to have been 1993, when as a 22 year old he hit 27 home runs on the way to a 317/392/553 line.

The partial seasons were due to injury. Baseball-reference compares him to Eric Davis, due to the fact that they’re talented outfielders who were frequently injured and played for teams that used the same logo. That’s not a good comp though. Davis, at least when young, was amazingly fast. Seriously, check this out (https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/daviser01.shtml), in 1986 Davis hit 27 home runs and stole 80 bases. If he could have cut down on the injuries he could have been a modern-day Ty Cobb. (Some batting average aside.)

Maeda made the best nine four times, but the Carp are a traditionally weak team, and he managed to play in only one Japan Series. (They lost in seven to the Lions.)

The internet tells me that this is a clip (https://streamable.com/i4d73) of Maeda interviewing players (including Trout) about their swings.

This is a clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5tAj44WKPo&list=PLcznDg5B5adKiMdNtJeHkJiMjedc0DJ8W) of the Carp against the Dragons in what looks like Maeda’s final game.

And here’s a compilation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBVh1dYo0n0) of a bunch of Maeda’s home runs. (Warning: the music is terrible.)

The card is a 1998 Calbee.

seanofjapan

06-30-2019, 09:22 PM

nat

07-04-2019, 11:49 AM

Kosuke Fukudome (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=fukudo001kos) is an outfielder (converted from shortstop early in his pro career). He broke in with Chunichi in 1999 and played for the Dragons until coming to America in 2008. He signed a deal with the Cubs at made the all-star team as a 31 year old “rookie”. (This is a settled issue by now, but guys with long and successful careers in Japan counting as rookies always struck me as a bit absurd.) Fukudome spent three and a half years with the Cubs before being traded to the Indians and signing a one-year deal with the White Sox. After the 2012 season he returned to Japan, roaming the outfield for the Hanshin Tigers. He spent 56 games with Hanshin this year, but was really bad. B-R reports that he spent two games with Hanshin's minor league team in the Western League. Since Fukudome is a 42 year old who has apparently washed out of NPB, I’m guessing this is curtains for him.

Still, it’s a career to be proud of. Over sixteen seasons in Japan he collected 1855 hits, had a healthy on-base percentage, and slugged nearly 500. His time with the Cubs was not as successful: he posted a 258/359/395 line. The on-base percentage is okay. You’d want more power from an outfielder unless he was a real speedster, which Fukudome wasn’t. In MLB he went 29/58 in stolen bases. Which isn’t good. The big difference between his Japanese production and his American production was the power. In Japan he was a real slugger, with slugging percentages in the high 500 to low 600s, with one great season around 650. Granted, this was in his late 20s, which is traditionally a player’s prime. He was past that when he went overseas, so that explains part of the drop off, but not nearly all of it. Especially since he got to call Wrigley Field home, and Wrigley is noteworthy for being homerun friendly.

It’s really hard not to conclude that it’s harder to hit for power over here. Hideki Matsui is the only Japanese player to manage to be a power hitter in America, and even he lost a lot of power when he came over. Albright helpfully has a table (http://baseballguru.com/jalbright/stadiums.htm) with dimensions of Japanese parks. His website is a bit old, so it might be out of date, but it’s convenient and will give us the general idea.

Using his data, here are the average dimensions:
LF Line 315
LF Gap 372
Dead C 395
RF Gap 373
RF Line 315

This guy (http://www.andrewclem.com/Baseball/Dimensions.html) has MLB dimensions. I’m not completely certain that its current either, and it is definitely incomplete, but we’re just after the general idea here. We want, if you’ll forgive a pun, to get a number that’s in the right ballpark.

Let’s compare:
LF 331
LF Gap 369
Dead C 405
RF Gap 374
RF 331

American parks are a little bigger, but not by a huge amount. And the LF/RF differences could just reflect measurement differences. The site with American dimensions doesn’t say “LF Line” like the Japanese one does. So the stadia seem like they’re about the same size. Even if Japanese players are, on average, smaller than Americans, if the stadia are the same size, that shouldn’t account for the difference. Do Japanese pitchers like to work up in the zone more than Americans do? Are lineups more balanced, and hence pitchers have less of an incentive to work around power hitters?

Anyway, when he returned to Japan Fukudome might have gotten a little of his power back, but not much of it. That, I think, can be explained by age. He was 31 when he came to America, but 36 when he returned. While 31 isn’t 21, it’s not all that old, exactly. You might still, if you’re lucky, be in the prime of your baseball career at 31. At 36… not so much.

Prior to going pro, Fukudome played briefly in the industrial leagues. He was apparently a first round pick by the Buffaloes, but he played industrial ball rather end up with Kintetsu. He’s also a 2x Olympian, taking home bronze and silver medals. In Japan he was a multiple gold glove winner (including a win at 38, making him Japan’s oldest gold glove winner), a 1x MVP, and a 4x member of the best nine team.

As is so often the case with star players on Hanshin, thehanshintigers.com has a nice biography (https://www.thehanshintigers.com/player-info/outfielders/8-kosuke-fukudome/) for Fukudome.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

My card is from the 2013 BBM (first version) set, after his return to Japan.

MRSPORTSCARDCOLLECTOR

07-05-2019, 11:06 PM

Great thread. Learned some new stuff.

nat

07-07-2019, 12:56 PM

Hiroki Kokubo (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kokubo001hir) was an infielder who spent a plurality of his time at 3B, but also played a significant amount of first and second base. He spent most of his career with the Hawks, with a three year break on the Giants (and missed 2003 after injuring his knee in a collision at home plate). As you might expect, he slid down the defensive spectrum as he got older, beginning in the middle infield, shifting to third about 2000, and then became a full-time first baseman in his old age. At his peak Kokubo was a huge slugger. He managed 44 home runs in 2001 in just 138 games. (That’s a 50 HR pace over 162 games.) The peak didn’t last long though. He showed flashes of it in his mid-20s, but inconsistency, some injuries, and problems with the tax authorities, prevented him from being the dominant force that he could have been. It was in his early 30s that he really came into his power, but he lost one season to injury, lost about 50 games (to a broken thumb) in 2006, and was never the same after that.

Despite a relatively short peak and frequent injuries, Kokubo is one of Japan’s better home run hitters. He managed 413 for his career, which puts him 16th all-time. In MLB Mike Schmidt is 16th all-time (with 548).

Kokubo spent three years with Yomiuri. The trade was for literally nothing. They just gave away a star player. This did not go over well with the fans, and he was re-acquired (by the now rebranded Fukuoka Softbank Hawks) shortly thereafter. This “trade” was peculiar, to say the least. The best that anyone can seem to do is guess that the Hawks, despite having just won the Japan Series, were strapped for cash and looking to unload a contract. But it’s weird that they’ve got a star player and wouldn’t even ask for anything back in return.

Tuffy Rhodes managed to upstage Kokubo in his best seasons. In 2001 Kokubo hit 44 home runs on the way to a 290/364/600 line. You would expect the slugging numbers at least to lead the league and for Kokubo to be front-page news. (At least in the sports section.) But Rhodes, playing for Kintetsu, managed 55 home runs and a 327/421/662 slash line. Just miles better than Kokubo. 2004 was also a very good season, in which he hit 41 home runs. Rhodes hit 45. Kokubo at least bested him elsewhere (despite the home run lead, Rhodes had a lower slugging percentage than did Kokubo), but Rhodes took the top line number. Oddly, the only year in which Kokubo led the league in home runs was 1995, when he hit a relatively pedestrian 28.

About that tax fraud thing. Ten Japanese players were caught evading income taxes in 1994. Kokubo was the highest-profile of them. He pleaded guilty to evading $215,400 in taxes. I haven't been able to figure out how this led to missing most of a season. The most obvious explanation - prison time - you'd think would leave evidence on the internet, you know, articles about how a big sports star ended up in prison. Since I haven't found any of those, I'm guessing that that wasn't it.

He was a 3x best nine, and 13x all-star (appearing in 11 of those games), but never won an MVP award.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

Two cards this time: the first is from the 2002 BBM set. It appears to be part of an all-star subset. The other is a 1999 Calbee prize card. Sometimes in a bag of chips you’d find (I don’t know if they still do this) “winner” cards, which can be mailed back to Calbee for some sort of premium. Which premium you get depends on how many prize cards you send back. In 1999 five prize cards got you a special set of a dozen cards on premium card stock with lots of foil coating. There were at least a couple sets issued. I’ve got one of them. And while I plan on trading it (most of the players I don’t need), I figure that I’ll post them while I’ve got them.

seanofjapan

07-08-2019, 08:08 PM

Kokubo spent three years with Yomiuri. The trade was for literally nothing. They just gave away a star player. This did not go over well with the fans, and he was re-acquired (by the now rebranded Fukuoka Softbank Hawks) shortly thereafter. This “trade” was peculiar, to say the least. The best that anyone can seem to do is guess that the Hawks, despite having just won the Japan Series, were strapped for cash and looking to unload a contract. But it’s weird that they’ve got a star player and wouldn’t even ask for anything back in return.

Great post, as always!

There were two factors that contributed to the odd Kokubo-for-nothing trade. One is that after his 2003 injury he went to the US for treatment (expensive treatment), which the team refused to pay for, which broke down the relationship between Kokubo and management (who had disagreed with him going to the US in the first place). So Daiei wanted to get rid of him despite him being a key player.

A second point is that the parent company Daiei was in a financial crisis at that time, having to slash its costs which would ultimately lead to its selling the team a year later as part of its restructuring. In the early 2000s Daiei was a major supermarket retailer across Japan, but the result of that crisis is that its now a minor subsidiary of one of its former rivals and the brand is almost non-existent today.

So it can also be seen as part of a fire sale by sinking ownership. By the time Kokubo came back to the Hawks they were under new ownership that invested heavily in the team and turned it into the powerhouse of the Pacific League that it has been ever since.

nat

07-12-2019, 09:21 PM

Jayworld

07-16-2019, 02:31 PM

Covered this guy already. (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1786314&postcount=62) Furuta is, for my money, Japan's second-greatest catcher. Trailing only his mentor, Katsuya Nomura. B-R says that he was voted (doesn't say by whom) the greatest catcher in Japanese history, which is absurd. But he was really good.

He qualified for the Meikyukai with his 2000th hit in 2005.

He was due to be drafted out of college (he was a business major) by Nippon Ham, but they backed out. Maybe because of his eyesight. Instead he began his pro career playing for Toyota in the industrial leagues, and was later drafted by Yakult. At Toyota he worked in human resources, with whom he planned "in-house recreation" for the company. (I'm guessing this means company picnics and such that HR thinks that employees like?)

Anyway, Furuta posts pictures of food on his Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/atsuyafuruta/) just like everyone else does. Among his hobbies he lists shogi (a board game), golf, and watching movies. His favorite band is U2. (Which, eh, at least War was a good album.)

Post retirement he has taken up marathon running, written a book, and made lots and lots of TV appearances.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Yes

Perhaps it's excessive to buy a second card of a player just because he's in both the Meikyukai and the Yakyu Dendo. And clearly I don't spend enough money on baseball cards already. But anyways, I decided that a player doesn't count for the Meikyukai collection just because he's in the Yakyu Dendo collection. (They are in different binders after all.) So I've got more cards to post today.

The cards: 1993 BBM. I love the big stripes on the uniform. It almost looks like pajamas. The other is another 1999 Calbee prize card.

Really enjoying the thread, Nat. Probably my favorite thread here at Net54. Also appreciated this one for two reasons: (1) Furuta is one of my favorite Nippon League players, and I do have several of his cards over the years, and (2) The Yakult Swallows are my favorite team. Why? Well, although I've collected Japanese cards since 1980, I've only been collecting them "hot and heavy" since 2013, and I realized to better appreciate Japanese baseball I needed to pick a "favorite" team and start following them, so I picked the Swallows because of Furuta and because of their excellent uniforms from about 1978 - mid 1990s (now, not so much with the lime green road unis). They remind me a lot of the Atlanta Braves unis worn from 1976-79. Keep up the great posts! (By the way, I wonder how many Net54 members are Japanese baseball card collectors? 6? 7?)

nat

07-17-2019, 09:05 PM

Glad you enjoy the thread Jay! It never occurred to me to pick a favorite team, but that does seem like a great way to learn more about the game over there. One reason (besides getting bored waiting for the HOFers that I still need) that I decided to chase the Meikyukai too is that it's an excuse to learn about modern Japanese baseball. I could tell you a lot more about Japanese baseball from the 1950s than I could about it from the 2010s, reading up on some of the active players who are Meikyukai members should help with that. Not the same as actually following a team, but it's a start. Let's see your favorite Swallows card, if you've got a scan handy! They've had some pretty good players over the years; aside from Oh, Kaneda may have had the most impressive career of any NPBL player.

It's true that Japanese baseball is a niche interest on Net54, but I don't know of anywhere better to put these posts. At least the folks here are guaranteed to be interested in baseball cards. And besides, even if the number of active collectors is relatively small, somebody is interested, this thread has got plenty of views.

Also: it's time for another card.

Here's another guy that I've written about before. Manabu Kitabeppu (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1794687&postcount=87) was a star pitcher for the Hiroshima Carp for many years, although a very inconsistent one. Some years he was great, others, not so much. He qualified for the Meikyukai with his 200th win in 1992.

I don't have much to add to what I wrote before, so I'm going to leave you with a few fun Kitabeppu-related links.

He has his own website (http://kitabeppu.com). He's got a Facebook page (https://ja-ks.facebook.com/manabu.kitabeppu/). And he has his own blog (https://ameblo.jp/manabu-kitabeppu/). All of foregoing are in Japanese, so English monolinguists (or at least non-Japanese speakers) will want to run them through the translator in Chrome or something similar. (Which will give you something that looks a little bit like English. They've still got a ways to go on the computer translators.) Post retirement, Kitabeppu spent a while as a pitching coach, and has been a media personality since c. 2005. He also grows vegetables and posts about it on his blog.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Yes

The card is a part of the "Gold Card" subset from BBM's 1993 issue. (Or maybe 92? It's says 1992 on the front but has a 1993 copyright date.) Apparently this particular subset has no premium attached to it, since I picked up this card for a dollar or two. I'm not really a fan of subsets (old school all-star cards excepted), but that probably just shows that I'm getting to be an old stick in the mud.

nat

07-21-2019, 08:29 PM

Takahiro Arai (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=arai--001tak) was a 3B/1B who played for Hiroshima, Hanshin, and then back to Hiroshima, from 1999 through 2018. He had one year (2005) in which he displayed some terrific power, but was mostly more like an above-average power threat. In total he had 321 home runs and 388 doubles, which should give you the right idea. For his career he had a .339 on-base percentage, which was right around average. And he had no speed to speak of: 22 career triples, 43 steals at a very poor rate. You know this sort of player. I’m guessing the Carp used him as a cleanup hitter, as he cleared 100 RBIs a few times, despite the relatively short season. Arai was often in the top ten in offensive categories, but rarely led in anything.

He was 30 and still good when he went to Hanshin as a free agent. His return to Hiroshima followed his age 37 season, which was catastrophically bad. Ordinarily you’d think that a 37 year old’s career would be over after a season like that, but Hiroshima took him back, and while the age definitely showed, he had another year or two of productively (and a little while just hanging on) left in him. Arai qualified for the Meikyukai in 2016 as a 39 year old. He was a local boy, maybe he was a fan favorite which gave them some extra reason to bring him back. Arai was born in Hiroshima and went to high school there; although admittedly he left for college (Komazawa University in Tokyo, which, according to its website, was founded in 1592. Not Oxford old, but that’s pretty impressive).

Apparently he wasn’t much of a prospect. As a college player he managed only two home runs, and the Carp didn’t select him until the sixth round. (I don’t know how many rounds there are in the Japanese draft, but given the small number of minor league teams, I’m guessing “not very many”.) Among players who managed 2000 hits, Arai was drafted in the second-lowest spot in the draft (Yutaka Fukumoto). (Hat tip to the B-R bullpen for a lot of this information.)

In 2008 he took over as head of the Japanese player’s union. A position that, a few years earlier, had been held by Atsuya Furuta (for more on whom, see above). The union is rather weak (much weaker than the American counterpart), but they do have some victories, most notably when the owners tried to contract a team.

Although he is a pretty stand type of player, I’m having trouble finding a close American match. My first thought was Matt Williams, and while there are some similarities, power was a bigger part of Williams’ game. Ditto Scott Rolen. Gary Gaetti is a tempting name to throw out there, but Arai was just a better all-around player than he was.

Arai was a 2x best-nine player and a 1x MVP. He took home the MVP award in 2016 when the Carp won the pennant. Even ignoring Japan’s tendency to give the MVP to a player on the championship team (something the Americans are also guilty of, but not to the same extent), this was an absurd choice. Pick an MVP from the stat lines below (AVG/OBP/SLB, SB, position):

335/404/612, 16, OF
291/389/481, 23, OF
300/372/485, 0, 1B

The last one is Arai, and he’s the one they gave the MVP award to. The other two are Seiya Suzuki and Yoshihiro Maru, outfielders for the Carp. He was the third-best position player on his own team. And Kris Johnson had a heck of a season on the mound, too.

Digression time: I know that this is a post about Arai, but I want to talk about Seiya Suzuki for a minute. He was 21 when the Carp won the pennant in 2016 and was the best player on the team after being a part-timer since he was 18. He followed up that performance with a 300/389/547 line in 2017, 321/439/625 in 2018, and so far this year he’s hitting 313/438/572. The Carp seem to have got their own Mike Trout. I have a feeling that I’ll be writing about him in a few years.

Arai is either unpopular, or has a bunch of friends who really like to mess with him. During one interview fellow star Kanemoto walked in, asked him why there are so few reporters talking to him (compared to an interview that he, Kanemoto, had given earlier), left, and then returned with photographers, explaining to them that Arai is a star and that they should take pictures of him. Later on, Arai was answering questions on a radio show, including questions about which team he liked playing for the most, and why he tends to drop easy fly balls. Turns out Kanemoto called in with the questions. And it’s not just Kanemoto. When it was announced that Arai was retiring, Kenta Maeda (another former teammate) appeared in television with a shirt that had a picture of Arai on it, along with his career totals in strikeouts, errors, and double plays.

But anyway, interviewed in 2011 (while he was on the Tigers), Arai was asked about his goals for the season. His response was, I think, just right: “I’d like to win a championship and spray beer all over the place.”

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is from the 2013 BBM “Crosswind” subset. They do a cross-something subset pretty frequently.

nat

07-28-2019, 11:36 AM

Kenjiro Nomura (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nomura001ken) was Hiroshima’s shortstop from 1989 to 2005. As a young man he had good power, good speed, a healthy OBP, and played pretty much every day. Sort of Alan-Trammell-like. Age 31 was his last really good year, after that he missed lots of time every season for the rest of his career, retiring after his age 38 season. Nomura’s best season was 1995, in which he hit 32 home runs (double the figure that is his career high otherwise), stole 30 bases (three off his career high), and slashed 315/380/560. While playing shortstop. The HR total was second in the league, as was his batting average, and he was third in slugging percentage. In total he was an all-star eight times and was selected to three best-nines. Albright regards him as Japan’s 9th greatest shortstop.

Nomura really wasn’t a good player in his 30s, he lost his SS job to Eddy Diaz and age quickly caught up with him. But he did hang on long enough to qualify for the Meikyukai with his 2000th hit in 2005. Replacing Nomura was kind of weird. He went downhill quickly, but he was still a star when he lost his job. Diaz was not immediately an improvement. He had two iffy seasons, one season that matched Nomura’s 1995, one decent season, and then he was off to Korea.

After retiring he coached the Carp and spent five seasons managing them. Traditionally the Carp have been a second-division team, but under Nomura they managed to improve pretty steadily. Nevertheless, his tenure was for only those five years. As of 2016 he was a member of the Kansas City Royals’ baseball-ops team in Japan. I presume that means scouting. And in 2017 he enrolled in the Hiroshima University’s MA program in “Coaching Science and Sports Psychology”, saying something about how he expects it to be useful in his second career. Which makes it sound like he wants to get back into managing.

Meikyukai: yes - Hall of Fame: no

My card is from the 1994 BBM set. Over time (probably due to hanging out on a pre-war baseball card message board) I have developed a casual distaste for standard, post 1956 American-style baseball cards. And that means BBM cards. That said, the design on their 1994 offering is pretty nice. If we should have learned anything from 1953 Bowman, it’s that less (usually-I’ll admit to a certain affection for Delongs) is more on baseball cards. And, except for the logo, the 1994 BBM set is nice and clean.

nat

07-29-2019, 09:47 PM

My policy is that I get a copy of a player's card for each collection that he's a part of. Hall of fame collection =/= meikyukai collection, so I need a second card for each player who is a member of both.

Hence today's post.

Masaji Hiramatsu (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1855075&postcount=150) was a great pitcher for the Whales. I said rather more about him in the piece just linked than I will say here.

Hiramatsu was elected to the hall of fame by the experts committee - which has jurisdiction over players who have been retired for at least 21 years. Sounds a lot like the Veteran's Committee here. There is also a player's committee, which is basically a guy's first shot at election, and special committees that elect umpires, guys who published baseball's rule book (I'm not kidding, check out Mirei Suzuki), and so on.

Japanese starters have always pitched more in relief than American starters do, but here's a fun fact about Hiramatsu: he has almost exactly the same number of complete games as games finished. 145/146, respectively.

One thing that I find curious about Japanese baseball is how seriously they take the Koshien tournament. It's the high school baseball championship, and it's a huge deal. This comes to mind at the moment because Hiramatsu's team won the tournament, and whenever someone is writing about him that fact always gets mentioned right next to the fact that he won the Sawamura Award, which, to an American mind, would seem to be a much bigger deal.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of fame: Yes

Round menkos are best known for dominating the early post-war menko scene. Basically, menko cards from the late 1940s to early 1950s are either round or relatively narrow pillars. There are many sets of each, but the round sets tend, in my observation, to be more common. Round menko cards (of baseball players at least) then disappeared for a couple decades. There was a sort of mini-revival in the 1970s. This card is from the JRM 10 set, issued in 1976. It's a common and inexpensive set (I paid more for shipping on this card than I did for the card itself).

NVPackFan

08-01-2019, 08:13 PM

Hello and thank you for your posts. Very educational as I'm just now starting to learn about vintage Japanese cards. I have some questions though that I can't seem to find answers to so thought maybe you all can help.

First, can you explain the "JCM..." set name system? it appears that there are the same numbers but for different years. Then, when I look on eBay, I see these two cards of Sadaharu Oh listed that look virtually identical but one is "JCM12e" but the other one is "JCM12b." I honestly can't see what the difference is but can you tell me how they differ?

Thanks for any info you can provide.

-Damon

seanofjapan

08-01-2019, 10:38 PM

JCM = "Japanese Card Menko". Menko are a kind of card playing game in Japan with cards made of thick cardboard which were meant to be thrown against other cards on the ground in an attempt to flip them over. Most Japanese cards from the 50s and 60s are Menko and the numbering system is confusing because so many sets are being discovered basically out of order. Also a lot of slightly different sets were issued by the same maker in the same year, so they are given the same number but with an a,b,c etc added.

The cards of some players from JCM 12b and 12e sets are almost identical. They just know that they are different sets from uncut sheets, the 12e set has more players. According to Engel the distinguishing feature of a 12e cards is that the player image has a more painted look to it.

nat

08-02-2019, 07:11 PM

Kazuya Fukuura (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=fukuur001kaz) played first base for the Marines for, approximately, ever. He broke in as a 21 year old in 1997, and was still an active player as of this year, although he has appeared in only nine games for the Marines’ minor league team. He has announced that he is retiring at the end of the season, but given that he’s only managed to play in nine games this year, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was, in fact, retired already. Fukuura always seems to be compared to Mark Grace, and the comparison seems apt, at least in that they’re both singles hitting first basemen. Fukuura has no power to speak of. In 2003 he managed 21 home runs, but he’s usually in single digits, and from 2012 to 2018 he managed a total of three. Fukuura’s 2000th (and so Meikyukai-qualifying) hit was a double on September 22nd of last year. Of all of the players who managed to get 2000 hits, he was the second oldest when he pulled it off, and he had appeared in the third-most games. Mike Bolsinger (former Diamondback-Dodger-BlueJay, and currently Marine) has a really nice clip (https://twitter.com/mbolsinger/status/1043413976955084800) of Fukuura’s 2000th hit on his twitter feed.

Given his background, that he was a singles hitter shouldn’t be much of a surprise. He was originally a pitcher, and was, in that capacity, the Marines’ 7th round draft pick in 1993. An injury curtailed his pitching career, and led to a transition to being a position player. As a left-handed thrower, his only options were first base or the outfield. He wasn’t fast, which probably explains opting for first base. He was a three-time gold glove award winner, and was selected to the best nine team in 2010.

Now, about that Mark Grace comparison. Grace was actually a good hitter, and decent player all-around, until the last year or so of his career. Fukuura… wasn’t. The last year that Fukuura was any good was 2010. He was bad in 2011, and his playing time diminished thereafter. As befits a singles hitter, he managed to keep a healthy on base percentage for a few years, but his power, never notable to begin with, slipped even further. The final 500 hits took him about 800 games spread out over nine seasons. Given that he had exactly 2000 hits at the big league level, I’m guessing that he was demoted immediately after qualifying for the Meikyukai.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is from the 2001 Calbee set.

nat

08-05-2019, 10:10 PM

I’ve got an Aota card on an uncut menko sheet. But it doesn’t really fit in my binder. Tough life, I know. So anyways, I picked up another one.

Here’s what I wrote about him before (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1780567&postcount=43).

Aota was a slugging outfielder who played with several different teams from 1942 to 1959. He held the career home run record for a little while, and led the league in home runs five times. In 1948, one of the years in which he led the league in home runs, he also led the league in batting average (barely, .001 over Kozuru and Yamamoto), but missed out on a triple crown by nine RBIs. B-R says that he was traded by the Giants to the Whales, but as always I can’t find the player who went the other way. I’m starting to doubt that they actually traded players back then.

Let’s do some adjustments for context, and see how big of a slugger Aota was. We’ll start with that 1948 season in which he nearly won a triple crown. His raw numbers were: 306/339/499, against a league average of 242/300/329. Put that into the 2018 American League and you get a 315 batting average, 359 on base percentage, and 632 slugging percentage. Let’s look at 1951 also. His raw line was 312/378/582. League average was 264/329/375. In a 2018 American League context that works out to 294/366/645. That slugging percentage is better than anyone managed in 2018, the on-base percentage, while good, wouldn’t have ranked among the league leaders. It’s a reasonably good match for what Nelson Cruz is doing for MIN this year. Given his home run hitting ways, I want to compare him to Ralph Kiner, but Aota was much faster, and Kiner was much better at getting on base. Positional differences aside, maybe Home Run Baker is the comparable American player.

Aota was elected to the hall of fame in 2009. Since he had died some years earlier, Shigeru Sugishita gave a part of his acceptance speech (his widow also gave a speech) and said that, while he was in the army, Aota was capable of throwing a grenade 84 meters. Which sounds like a hell of a long throw to me. The hall notes that he was nicknamed “Unruly Bronco”. Albright thinks he was Japan’s 71st greatest player.

Meikyukai: No – Hall of Fame: Yes

The card is an uncatalogued bromide. There must be a zillion uncatalogued bromide sets. I did a quick scan over my collection, and more than half of my bromides are from uncatalogued sets. I’ve got plenty of uncatalogued menko cards too, but the percentage isn’t that extreme. Lots of these sets are also very similar. The only difference between this card and my Tsubouchi card is that it is ever so slightly smaller. Since I already had an Aota card (if only as a part of an uncut sheet), this one doesn’t get me any closer to finishing the hall of fame collection. It’s impossible to tell precisely when this card was issued. Aota is on the Giants, so that narrows it down to 1948 to 1952, but I can’t say anything more definitive than that.

nat

08-07-2019, 10:04 PM

Kazuhiro Kiyohara (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kiyoha001kaz) was one of Japan’s greatest players. He was first baseman for the Lions from 1986 through 1996, for the Giants until 2005, and then for the Buffaloes for a couple years. The Meikyukai came calling upon his 2000th hit (for the Giants in 2004), and of his 2122 hits, 525 were home runs. That figure puts him 5th all-time for home runs, just above Ochiai and just below Koji Yamamoto. He appears to have been a lumbering slugger, as both his SB and 3B figures are quite low. But if you’ve got a player who puts up a 389/520 batting line, you can put up with a certain amount of plodding.

Kiyohara’s tenure with the Lions was exceptionally successful. They were the dominant team in the late 80-early 90s period. Let’s take a look at one of these teams. Here’s the OPS leaders from the 1991 Seibu Lions: Orestes Destrade, Koji Akiyama, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Hiromichi Ishige, Norio Tanabe. Seven guys with above average OPSs (below average and part-timers omitted from the list). Destrade was an infield-outfield type from Cuba who mucked around in the Yankees and Pirates minor league systems (with a couple cups of coffee) starting in 1983. He went to Seibu and instantly became a huge slugger. Coming back to the states he was on the inaugural Marlins team, and was the second best hitter (after Mr. Marlin himself, Jeff Conine) on the team. Destrade spent 94 with the Marlins but didn’t wait out the strike. He returned to Seibu for 1995, then retired. Akiyama was one of Japan’s great players and I’ve written about him elsewhere. Ishige was the third baseman. He was a strong player in his own right. He didn’t get into the Meikyukai, but he came close. I don’t know what his glove was like, but offensively you might compare him to someone like Scott Rolen. Tanabe was a doubles hitting shortstop. Looking over his stat line, he doesn’t seem like a star to me.

They also had a nice starting rotation, or at least a nice top-3. (After that most teams sort of mix-and-match anyway.) Watanabe, the starter with the best ERA, appears to have blown out his arm in 1992, but he was a young star before that. Taigen Kaku had a relatively short but reasonably successful career. He reminds me of someone like Jimmy Key. And then there was Kimiyasu Kudo. In 1991 he was at the top of his considerable game, and he would continue pitching until he was 47. This was a really good team: a couple hall of famers, a Meikyukai member, a young star, and (effectively) Scott Rolen and Jimmy Key. That’s a team that will win you a lot of games.

Now, back to Kiyohara. He was a 17x all-star and won the Japan Series eight times. But great as he was, he could have been better. Throughout basically the last half of his career he was constantly sidelined by injuries. There were significant differences between them (first base vs. center field being one of them), but in some ways his career has the feel of Ken Griffey Jr.’s. Amazing first acts, followed by a debilitating rash of injuries. Both ended up being all-time greats, but Griffey in the 1990s felt like “great” wasn’t going to do it. At the time it felt like they were going to have to come up with some new words in order to describe him. I wasn’t hanging around Saitama in the 1990s, but I bet Kiyohara had the same feel to him.

Kiyohara was drafted out of PL Gakuen, one of the main powerhouses of Japanese high school baseball. Robert Whiting reports that the school has (or, at least, as of the writing of You Gotta Have Wa, had) a practice field with the same dimensions as Koshien Stadium at which the annual high school baseball championship tournament was held. PL Gakuen won Koshien twice while Kiyohara was a student, although perhaps ‘student’ is a bit too strong of a word. PL Gakuen’s focus is on baseball in a way that might be familiar from certain football programs in America. Hara, another Gakuen product, is alleged, upon being asked what he would major in when he went to college, to ask what a major is.

Japan takes Koshien seriously in a way that is hard for me to make sense of. I grew up next to a top college football program, and yes, reminders of that are everywhere (even people who didn’t attend the school wear school gear), but even in a huge college football town, football isn’t given the… religious?... dedication that Koshien summons. Whiting describes it as a combination of the World Series and the Superbowl, except that it also seems to be regarded as a test of character, and an embodiment of a kind of Japanese ideal. The approach to baseball and, I guess, to life, that leads to the 1000-fungo drill (doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what that is), corporal punishment for players, and “voluntary” practices that last hours after official practice ends is celebrated, finds its apotheosis maybe, in Koshien. None of that quite expresses what I’m trying to say – one of the hazards of saying something when you’re not quite sure what you’re trying to say – but there seems to be a deeply weird attitude that attends what is really a kids’ baseball tournament.

Incidentally, the chapter on high school baseball is the best part of You Gotta Have Wa, and comes highly recommended. Here’s an article about Koshien that Whiting wrote (https://features.japantimes.co.jp/koshien/) for the Japan Times.

PL Gakuen has produced 65 professional baseball players. (I wonder what the record for an American high school is.) Including one major leaguer: Kenta Maeda, currently a starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. As of 2016, however (I couldn’t find anything more recent), it had suspended its baseball program in response to what the Mainichi newspaper calls (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160716/p2a/00m/0sp/008000c) a “series of abuse scandals”. They do have a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/PerfeLiber), so maybe they’re still active, but it’s hard for me to understand what’s going on in a regular Twitter feed, much less one that I can’t read, so I’m not sure. They at any rate didn’t appear in the 2018 tournament.

Kiyohara was a flashy star. He once said that he only wanted to play professional baseball because it allowed him meet beautiful women and buy fast cars. However, he was arrested for drug possession shortly after his retirement from baseball (he was given a suspended sentence of two and a half years), and later admitted to using amphetamines while he was playing. (Rumors of steroids have also followed him around for years, but those are so far unsubstantiated.) Amphetamines were once common in MLB, but they are now prohibited and are, I think, among the substances that MLB tests for. The arrest was apparently a big scandal. Kiyohara’s kids were told to leave the prestigious school (elementary/middle in both cases) that they attended when news of their father’s problem came out. Word is that they’re moving to the US to avoid further fall out. The hall of fame had him on the ballot for several years (it seems to be common in Japan for even big stars to wait years to get elected), but removed him from the ballot after his conviction. They left open the possibility that he would be reinstated (who knows how the voting would go), but said that it would require significant rehabilitation, and that “the road is steep”. In recent years he has done things like appear at anti-addiction events organized by the Ministry of Health.

And finally, my favorite Kiyohara fact: he said that he has a very big head, and that when he joined Seibu they didn’t have a helmet that fit him. Nosing around in the team storage lockers, however, he found one of Katsuya Nomura’s old helmets (which must have been sitting there for the past six years), and it fit perfectly. He used the same helmet for his entire career, and had it repainted whenever he changed teams. (Source (https://www.daily.co.jp/newsflash/baseball/2015/12/18/0008656706.shtml))

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of fame: No

The card is from the 1993 BBM set.

nat

08-12-2019, 07:16 PM

Seiichi Uchikawa (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=uchika001sei) is a LF/RF/1B kind of guy, currently with Softbank. He broke into the league in 2001 at an 18 year old with the Yokohama Bay Stars, then left for the Hawks in 2011 and has been with them ever since. Uchikawa has a little power, but more of what we’d think of as “gap power” than the real thing. Expect teens HR numbers each year, topping out at 19. Likewise, his batting average is healthy but he’s not a guy whose game solely depends on it (like Gwynn, or Boggs, or Ichiro). That said, he did win two batting titles, in 2008 and 2011. That 2011 batting title also came with an MVP award. For his career he’s got a 304/350/443 batting line and 2140 hits. He’s one of the newer Meikyukai members, having qualified just last year. Allow me to nominate Fred Lynn as a comparable player, with the notable exception that Lynn was a center fielder. Looks like he was a 5x best-nine, and made a bunch of all-star teams. Notably, he had a key pinch hit in the 2017 all-star game. Who was he pinch hitting for? Shohei Otani. You’d think that wouldn’t be necessary, even though he’s a pitcher. But Otani wasn’t even pitching in this game, he was in at DH. Maybe this was one of those “get everybody into the all-star game” moves. Which I sort of understand (especially when the game is in Baltimore and Mike Mussina is in the pen), but it also leads to some very weird outcomes, where, e.g., Dereck Turnbow ends up pitching important innings in a close game.

As near as I can tell, his Japanese Wikipedia page says that his .378 batting average in 2008 is the record for a right-handed hitter in Japan. The previous mark was Tetsuharu Kawakami’s .377 mark in 1951. It also lists this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwrXluAZusU) as “his song”. Which I guess means walk-up music?

His initial contract with Softbank was worth 1.36 billion Yen. Which sounds like a lot of money, until you remember that one Yen is worth about a penny. I mean, I’ll take a 4 year, 13 million dollar contract, but if that’s the kind of cash that star players are pulling down it’s no surprise that Otani wanted to come to the US. (Of course what is surprising is that he didn’t wait until he was a free agent, but that’s another matter.)

Now is a good time to be a Hawk. Uchikawa has won the Japan Series five times since joining the Hawks, including four of the past five years. Things are looking promising for them this year too, they’re in first place in the Pacific League, with a healthy but not insurmountable lead over the Lions.

The Japan Times refers to him as a “future hall of famer”, which, I guess. Now I'm not advocating his induction, but Fred Lynn wouldn’t exactly be an embarrassment to the US hall either.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of fame: No

The card is from the 2013 BBM set. BBM sure loves its subsets. The one that this card is drawn from celebrates league leaders.

Exhibitman

08-18-2019, 05:29 PM

Picked up this Bromide at the National:

http://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/frankleftyodoulcard/websize/ODoul%20Mizuhara.jpg

Lefty O'Doul and Giants manager Mizuhara

seanofjapan

08-18-2019, 07:59 PM

Picked up this Bromide at the National:

http://photos.imageevent.com/exhibitman/frankleftyodoulcard/websize/ODoul%20Mizuhara.jpg

Lefty O'Doul and Giants manager Mizuhara

Nice pick up!

Though that isn't actually Giants Manager Mizuhara, the Japanese guy is Shinji Hamazaki (manager of the Braves).

nat

08-18-2019, 09:44 PM

Love the bromide Adam! I'm a big fan of pretty much anything Lefty O'Doul related. Probably one of the most interesting people ever associated with baseball.

The cards that I've got to post today aren't as cool as an old bromide, but old Calbees are nice too.

Isao Shibata (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=shibat000isa) was an outfielder for the V9-era Giants. He played for them from 1962 to 1981, from the ages of 18 to 37. Offensively, his game appears to have been built around speed. The 400 career slugging percentage indicates that hitting long balls wasn’t part of the plan. (Fortunately he had Oh and Nagashima in the line up to handle that part of the game.) If I had to guess, I’d say that he was probably the V9’s leadoff hitter. (N.B.: confirmed by B-R.) For his career he put up a 267/347/400 batting line. None of those marks are particularly impressive. His 579 career stolen bases are somewhat better. A cursory internet search doesn’t turn up a list of career leaders, but I’m guessing that that’s third all-time in Japan. Hirose is second all-time, and he’s only about 10 steals ahead of Shibata.

There is, however, a problem with trying to build your career around your feet. The run-value of a stolen base just isn’t very high, and the cost, in terms of expected runs, of getting thrown out stealing, is. Just how proficient you must be at stealing bases for it to be worthwhile depends on the context in which you play. Higher scoring contexts make stealing a riskier bet for two reasons: (1) if you don’t steal, there’s a fair chance that one of the guys behind you will drive you in anyways, and (2) in a high scoring environment, each out is worth a greater amount of runs, so you’re betting more runs on your ability to successfully steal a base than you would be in a low run scoring environment.

The Book (https://www.amazon.com/Book-Playing-Percentages-Baseball/dp/1494260174/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2T0AW41W3K90D&keywords=tom+tango+the+book&qid=1566161196&s=gateway&sprefix=tom+tango%2Caps%2C172&sr=8-1) goes into this in some detail. They found that as of (IIRC) 2005, in MLB you needed to steal at a 75% success rate in order to break even; that is, if you were getting thrown out more than 25% of the time, then you were costing your team runs by trying to steal. Now, since the context in which Shibata was playing isn’t the same as the context that Tango et al. used to generate data for their calculations, you can’t just import that number over in order to evaluate Shibata. Doing all the calculations for Japan in the sixties and seventies would be a lot of work, and I’m much too lazy to do it. Quickly eyeballing it will give us some idea, however. The 2003 NL scored an average of 4.61 runs per team game, the 1971 Central League (to pick a year from the middle of Shibata’s career) scored 3.23 runs per team game. That’s a big difference. They really weren’t scoring any runs in the Central League in the early 70s. So that’s, what, 25% fewer runs in the Central League than in the leagues Tango was using for his data? So the run value of an out in the context in which Shibata was playing was considerably lower than early 2000s NL. Which means that he would need a success rate of a good bit less than 75% in order for him to contribute value with those stolen bases. And, in fact, Shibata stole bases at exactly a 75% success rate for his career.

In the MLB that would put him tied for 194th for career stolen base percentage. (Tied with, among others, Dustin Pedroia, Brian Dozier, and Michael Young.) Given the higher scoring environment in which these Americans play, they’re not contributing much value with their steal attempts. (Yes, yes, it’s a discretional play, you’re more likely to try it when one run matters and the hitters coming up behind you stink, etc etc. I know. But R/G is even higher now than it was in 2003, and even if it’s discretionary, if you’re below the average break even point, you’re not helping too much.) But given that they were only scoring a bit more than 3 runs per game, Shibata was adding a fair amount of value with his 75% success rate.

Like Kawakami had his red bat, Shibata had his red gloves. The story goes (Japanese Wikipedia page for the source) that when he was practicing with the Dodgers (for a while MLB teams and Japanese teams would do spring training together) he found that he had forgotten his batting gloves. He went next door to a golf club to try to find something that would do, and all they had were red women’s gloves. I don’t know if he continued using golf gloves in place of batting gloves, but red gloves apparently became his trademark.

He was originally drafted as a pitcher. In fact, his initial claim to fame was leading his high school team to a pair of championships at Koshien on the mound. That didn’t last. As a pro, he was terrible. But he had a strong arm, and a transition to the outfield was natural. His Japanese Wikipedia page says that he was Japan’s first switch hitter. (Really? They didn’t have switch hitters until the 1960s?)

Shibata was a 12x all-star and a 4x member of the best nine team. He’s in the top 20 all-time in triples, runs, steals, and walks. Albright considers him to be Japan’s 68th greatest player and thinks that he’s worthy of the hall of fame. I don’t know about how precisely he compares to #s 67 or 69, but I agree that he would be a good fit for the hall of fame. He just isn’t in yet.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

My cards are mid 70s Calbee cards. I think one is from 77 and the other from 76.

Northviewcats

08-19-2019, 11:37 AM

seanofjapan

08-19-2019, 07:58 PM

Nice cards Joe!

The player other than Oh in your 1973 lot is Tsuneo Horiuchi, a HOF pitcher for the Giants.

With your 1974s two of them are Sadaharu Oh, but one of them (card #20) is Yukinobu Kuroe who also played for the Giants.

One of your 1975-76 Ohs (#789) is from the series commemorating his 700th home run, which is one of the harder series to find in that set.

Northviewcats

08-20-2019, 03:44 PM

Exhibitman

08-21-2019, 04:33 PM

Nice pick up!

Though that isn't actually Giants Manager Mizuhara, the Japanese guy is Shinji Hamazaki (manager of the Braves).

Thanks; my bad.

nat

08-21-2019, 09:33 PM

If you reversed Atsunori Inaba (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=inaba-001ats)’s career – made the second half the first half and the first half the second half – it would look pretty normal. He was an outfielder who split his time between Yakult (when he was young) and Nippon Ham (for his second act). As a hitter: he had intermediate power, and on base skills that varied widely during his career. Home runs you’ll get some of, but we’re usually talking teens in the HR department, sometimes into the 20s per year. In the early part of his career he was posting OBPs in the low 300s, rising to the upper 300s in his mid 30s.

That’s part of what would make his career look normal in reverse. He also had much more playing time latter in his career. In large part this seems to have been due to injuries. That a player would be injury plagued as a young man, and not when they’re older, is super weird. One of the best predictors of future injury is past injury, in large measure because there are lots of injuries that never heal quite right. This will lead to more missed time because of a recurrence, or missed time because a player injures himself compensating for the injury that didn’t really heal. Back injuries are notorious for this, but hand/wrist injuries do it to, and so do, to a lesser extent, lots of others. So if a young player is missing a lot of playing time due to injuries, you’d expect him to either continue missing time when he gets older (Eric Chavez, for example), or simply be unable to continue (like Troy Tulowitzki).

Inaba often missed 40 or 50 games per year when he was with Yakult. Sounds a lot like Tulowitzki. And you would expect his career to end about age 30, just like Tulo’s did. (Technically Tulowitzki played until age 34, but he only appeared in five games this year, none last year, and missed most of the year before.) Entirely unexpectedly, Inaba stopped getting hurt and played full seasons from age 31 through 39. It’s really his 30s that make him a great player. If he had followed a more normal career path, he would have been a promising young player who didn’t pan out. He collected his 2000th (and so Meikyukai-qualifying) hit in 2012 while playing for Nippon Ham.

A word about Japanese team names. “Nippon Ham Fighters” is every American’s favorite Japanese team name, because Americans either don’t know or don’t care that ‘Nippon Ham’ is the name of the company that owns the team, and ‘Fighters’ is the name of the team itself. Americans, me included, really like to imagine a baseball team fighting a ham. Or maybe a ham that is itself a fighter. Sadly, that’s not the way that it works. Japanese teams are often referred to by the name of the corporation that owns them, and then their team’s nickname. Or sometimes (as I was doing at the beginning of this post) just by the company name. Because ‘Hankyu and ‘Yomiuri’ aren’t recognizable to Americans, this doesn’t sound too weird. But imagine if MLB had similar naming conventions: The Rodgers Communication Blue Jays, The Liberty Media Braves, I guess ‘The Nintendo of America Mariners’ isn’t as bad as it could be. Imagine saying that Chipper Jones spent his entire career playing third base for Liberty Media (although of course they were called ‘Warner Broadcasting’ during his early days). Imagine rooting for “Yankee Global Enterprises LLC”. (That’s the name of the company that the Steinbrenner family mostly controls that actually owns the Yankees.) The idea is gross. The old joke goes that in the 50s rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for US Steel. What if it was rooting for US Steel?

Back to Inaba. He was a 5x best nine and seven time all-star. His fans have a special cheer for him called the ‘Inaba jump’. Enough people participate that the TV feed from the Sapporo Dome might shake when he comes to bat. He admits to loving potato chips and says that during the off season sometimes he gets fat because he eats too many potato chips and doesn’t work out enough. He says that he likes wearing uniform number 41 because it kind of looks like his initials. For a comparable American player – maybe Hunter Pence? (Except for the weird injury pattern.) Medium range power, unexceptional OBP, let Pence play until he’s in his early 40s and their careers might look similar. Or maybe if Torii Hunter had been a slow corner outfielder instead of a fairly speedy center fielder? Given his number of best-nine selections, however, he clearly had more star power than either of those guys.

After he retired he became the manager of the Japanese national team, and is tasked with leading the team in the 2020 Olympics.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is another one from the 2013 BBM Crosswind subset.

nat

08-26-2019, 07:49 PM

Here’s another card of Shinichi Eto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=etoh--000shi).

He was a slugger, primarily for Chunichi, and one of the best players of the 1960s. I mean, not Oh or Nagashima good, but at his best he was really something. In 1969 he got into it with his manager (and fellow hall of famer) Shigeru Mizuhara. Mizuhara was publicly berating the team’s second baseman for muffing a play, and Eto let him have it for being so harsh. This did not go over well. Eto ended up retiring over the incident, but then thought better of it. The Dragons wouldn’t take him back, and dealt him to Lotte for Kazuto Kawabata. Basically, they gave him away for a bag of baseballs. Kawabata was a poor relief pitcher with a short career. In America we would call him a AAAA player. Two years later he was dealt to the Taiyo Whales for Osamu Nomura. Nomura was actually a good pitcher. He was a 4x all-star and had just finished his age 24 season when he was dealt. Basically, Japanese Baseball knew that Eto was still good, it’s just that the Dragons couldn’t accept a player who loudly and publicly stood up to his manager and had to exile him. But his reputation was apparently rehabilitated pretty quickly, because he was traded only two years later for a legitimately good pitcher. For what it’s worth, his run in with Mizuhara over the ground ball seems to have been a last-straw kind of deal – they had run ins before, over, e.g. curfew and paying fines.

For a comparable American player (at least as far as on-the-field stuff goes), I nominate Johnny Mize. Eto spent some time at first base, but was primarily an outfielder, and The Big Cat was pretty much solely a first baseman, but their offensive profiles are similar. Both were power hitters with good on base skills. Mize may have been the better player (seriously: check out Mize from 1937 to 1948. Dude was an absolute beast. He just ran into a cliff immediately after that), but they were both really good.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

I like this card. It’s from the JCM 55 set. And while the production values on JCM 55 were admittedly pretty low, what I like about it is that Eto is in his catching gear. As a youngster he would catch a few games here and there. In 1962 he was primarily a catcher (>2/3 games played). Then in 1963 he appeared in a few games behind the dish, and after that was strictly a 1B/OF. So this is the only year in which you had a chance to get him on a card wearing catching armor.

seanofjapan

08-26-2019, 08:12 PM

I agree about the JCM 55, I have a few cards from that set (including Eto) and while its correct that the production values were low (as with most cards of the era), the design does make them stick out in a stack of old menko.

Northviewcats

08-27-2019, 01:08 PM

Here are a couple more old cards that I picked up. Comparing the pictures with the other cards I have I'm guessing the guy swinging the bat is Shigeo Nagashima. The player on the left on the multiplayer card also looks like Nagashima, but I have no idea who the other player is.

Any idea of the type of cards? the players? and the years?

Thanks,

Joe

seanofjapan

08-27-2019, 08:00 PM

Nice cards!

The one on the left is indeed Shigeo Nagashima, from the 1958 All Star Awase Trump set (JGA 177).

The one on the right is also Nagashima, along with a player named Yoshio Yoshida, who played for the Tigers (and is also a HOFer). Its from the 1958 Mitsuwa War/playing card set (JCM 129)!

nat

08-29-2019, 08:12 PM

Norihiro Nakamura (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nakamu001nor) was a standard issue slugger. Usually he’d have unexceptional batting averages (266 for his career), but smack a good number of home runs, topping out at 46 in 2001. As you expect for middle of the order guys, he wasn’t fast: 22 stolen bases for his career. In total he played 23 years and put up a 266/352/469 batting line, to go along with 404 home runs and 2101 hits. The bulk of his career he spent with Kintetsu: 1992 through 2004. Then he defected for the US, spending most of 2005 playing for Las Vegas, the Dodgers’ AAA team. He did play in the majors leagues, but only 17 games, and not well. In Las Vegas he hit 249/331/487. The first two numbers are as bad as they look. That last one looks like it’s healthy, but it isn’t really. The 51s play in the Pacific Coast League, and the PCL plays in some absurd parks. Imagine a league where most of the parks resemble Coors Field. That's the idea. Any PCL numbers have to be taken with huge heaping spoonfuls of salt, Nakamura’s included. That 487 slugging percentage was fourth-best on the team (among those who got regular playing time), trailing the immortals Bryan Myrow (547), Cody Ross (509), Chin-Feng Chen (495). All three of those guys played in the major leagues, but no, I don’t remember them either.*

After not managing to break into MLB, Nakamura returned to Japan, spending 2006 with Orix, and then jumped around for his last few seasons between Chunichi, Rakuten, and Yokohama. He had a couple good seasons left in his mid 30s, but was mostly over the hill after he came back from the US.

Orix decided that his poor play in his first season back in Japan merited a huge reduction in salary (down to about $800k). This did not sit will with Nakamura (understandably: after Ichiro left he had been the highest paid player in Japan), who did not sign the contract and was eventually released. Whether it was officially done or not, he was effectively blackballed the following season, and eventually forced to settle for what was essentially a minor league deal with the Dragons (later changed to a major league deal after he performed well). Although he ended up making much less money than he had turned down from Blue Wave, to some extent it worked out well. The Dragons won the Japan Series and Nakamura took home the series MVP award.

Going to the Dodgers in 2005 was Nakamura’s second attempt to come to the US. A few seasons earlier he had an agreement to join the Mets on a two year, seven million dollar deal. But the deal was announced on the Mets’ website before Nakamura had a chance to inform the Buffaloes about it, and he decided to back out of it and stay in Japan.

Nakamura was a third baseman, and between having good power, playing third, and having a long career, he probably produced quite a lot of value for his teams. Mostly in a compiling sort of way (his peak was there but not very long), but that’s valuable too. I wouldn't be surprised if he's elected to the hall of fame eventually. Superficially his stat line looks a lot like Paul Konerko’s, but there are some really big differences. First, Konerko was playing in some really high-offense environments, second, Konerko was a first baseman, and third, even by first base standards, Konerko was a pretty lousy fielder. So despite their superficial similarity, I’m comfortable saying that Nakamura was much better than Konerko. No comparable American player comes immediately to mind, however. The really good American third basemen either had better on-base skills than Nakamura, or shorter careers.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is from a 2000 Upper Deck set. It’s weird. The design is obviously pretty strange, and on top of that it’s an odd size. Most Calbee cards are a little bit smaller than standard baseball cards, and this one is smaller than those. But it’s also larger than the tiny cards that Calbee made in the 80s.

*Just double checked these guys. Apparently Cody Ross had a real major league career. The other two did not. Myrow spent one season in Korea, but then was back to playing the in PCL. He was playing quite well around age 30, he seems like the kind of guy that you expect to try to jump to Japan, actually. Instead he played Indy ball for Grand Prairie through 2015.

seanofjapan

09-04-2019, 07:55 PM

Those cards are kind of interesting.

I remember when Nakamura went over to the US the first time and I just couldn't figure out why. He was an established star here but it was really obvious that he didn't have the skill set needed to do the same in the Majors and would (as he ultimately did) just end up toiling in the minors. I think everyone who knew anything about Japanese baseball at the time was thinking the same and nobody was surprised when he failed to make it.

nat

09-05-2019, 02:29 PM

This is my second post about Choji Murata. (Here’s the first. (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1853631&postcount=146)) I thought I’d take what appears to be his best season (1976) and adjust it to fit the 2019 AL context, to give us a better idea of what he was up to.

In 1976 Murata had a 1.82 ERA, to go with 21 wins and 202 strike outs, in 257 innings pitched. Murata led the league in ERA, IP, and K’s, but did not win the Sawamura award. (The Sawamura award went to Kojiro Ikegaya of the Carp.) He was second in wins.

That year the Pacific League managed a 3.34 ERA and 0.48 K/IP. I don’t know how to get league-wide data for performance as a starter, so I really can’t normalize wins. But I can approximate it with innings pitched. Here's the plan: I'm going to adjust his number of starts for the shorter schedule, and then multiply that number by the average innings per start in the 2019 American League. That will get something like a translation of his innings pitched into the 2019 AL context. If he was pitching more/less than the league average innings per appearance, this figure will be off. I'm going to assume that relief appearances are 1-inning long.

Now, the 2019 AL has an ERA of 4.60 and a K rate of .96 per inning. (Yikes! That’s a lot of strike outs!) Starting pitchers pitch an average of 5.23 innings per start. Maybe bump it up to 5.5 due to openers pulling down the average.

Murata made 24 starts in a season 80% as long as MLB’s. So let’s give him 29 starts. He also made 22 relief appearances, with the season-length adjustment that becomes 26. Call those relief appearances one inning each (just a wild guess on that one). That comes out to an adjusted 186 innings. That’s maybe a bit on the light side, but not unreasonable for a contemporary starter. Blake Snell won the Cy Young award last year with fewer innings pitched than that.

Murata was striking out batters at a rate 40% better than league average. Adjusted to the 2019 AL that comes out to 1.3 K’s per inning, which is extremely good. It’s just about what Justin Verlander does. Over 186 innings that would give him 250 Ks. If you adjust his ERA for the 2019 AL context, you end up with 2.51. There isn’t any way to adjust wins, so here’s what Murata’s 1976 looks like if it happens in the 2019 American League:

186 innings pitched, 250 strikeouts (12 K/9), and a 2.51 ERA.

That ERA would lead the league (by a little bit). The K figures are good but not league leading. The innings pitched are a bit light for a full season, but not very low. He in fact pitched far more innings than that, but that has to do with differences in pitcher usage between the 1976 Pacific League and the 2019 American League. He actually pitched 18 complete games that year, adjusted for context and that becomes, eh, like, 1 or 2. Basically nobody pitches complete games anymore, or even very deep into games. The longer schedule isn’t enough to make up for the reduced workloads. (There’s also the possibility that his relief outings were longer than one inning each.)

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

These cards are mid-80s Calbee cards. I bought them in a lot, it’s not like I was all like “I already have one boring headshot of Choji Murata, surely need to buy another”.

nat

09-07-2019, 09:07 PM

Takao Kajimoto is a hall of famer and Meikyukai member who pitched for the Braves. He was featured in one on the earliest posts (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1775094&postcount=14) in this thread (which weren’t very high quality) so I’ll try to do better here.

Kajimoto pitched from 1954 to 1973, compiling a record of 254-255 (that’s right, a losing record). I wonder if that’s the highest number of wins for a pitcher with a losing record? My guess would be “yes”. Wikipedia (Japanese version) says that it is the highest total for anyone to have never led the league in wins, which also sounds plausible. Although he was a 12x all-star, he was selected for just a single best-nine team.

Kajimoto’s father died when he was in middle school, and he was raised by his mother alone thereafter. He was a sensation as a rookie, signing directly out of high school with a 93 mph fastball.

With a rotation led by Kajimoto and Tetsuya Yoneda, Hankyu has something of a golden age in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, they ran into the buzz saw of the V9 Giants, and didn’t manage to win the Japan Series. For a while the Dodgers did a lot of things with various Japanese teams, and in the late 1950s they went to Japan to play against an all-star team. This could have turned out better for Kajimoto. He started the Oct. 31st, 1956 game, and Gino Cimoli hit a line drive that bounced off of Kajimoto’s shoulder (ouch!) and went for a triple.

After he retired Kajimoto spent many years as a coach. His advice to (at least some of his pitchers) was… peculiar. Apparently he recommended drinking before appearing in a game, on the grounds that it worked for him. There’s a reason that anecdotes don’t really count as evidence. #obviouslybadideas.

Kajimoto still holds the record for consecutive batters struck out, at nine. His pitch of choice was something that Google Translate’s version of Kajimoto’s Japanese Wikipedia page is calling a ‘palm ball’, which I gather is a kind of change up. A good change up is a nice thing to have if you can pair it was a blazing fastball. (Or, well, blazing in context. No one is going to be impressed with a 93mph fastball anymore.)

Meikyukai – Yes (he was one of the founding members) : Hall of Fame – Yes

My card is from the JCM 43a set. It’s one of a bunch of almost indistinguishable sets released between c. 1958 and 1960.

nat

09-11-2019, 09:24 PM

Takuro Ishii (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=ishii-003tak) played baseball (mostly SS) for 24 seasons, spending most of the time with the same franchise (albeit carrying over through the change from the Taiyo Whales to the Yokohama Bay Stars). His last few years were spent with Hiroshima. Ishii had no power at all, averaging four home runs per year for his career. On the other hand, he was pretty fast, stealing 20-40 bases a year for a long time. Basically what you expect from a shortstop. He played from 1989 to 2012, and collected 2432 hits (this figure is 14th all-time). His 2000th hit came in 2006, and the last few years of his career he was playing part-time. In total he put up a 282/356/372 line. He never was a dangerous hitter exactly, but if you’re playing a good shortstop, that will do.

Curiously, Ishii started his career as a pitcher. He broke in as an 18 year old with the Whales and pitched 30 innings to a 3.56 ERA. His pitching career would be short, however, a total of 49 innings spread over three seasons. By 1993 he was a regular third baseman. (It would be a couple years before he moved to short.) But his start as a pitcher didn’t exactly go smoothly either. He was undrafted out of high school, and didn’t make a pro team until he won a spot at a tryout with the Whales.

Sacrifice hits seem to have been a specialty of his. In both 1993 and 1994 he had 39 of them, which sounds like a very large number to me. The MLB record is 67 by Ray Chapman in 1917. Pretty much all of the top MLB seasons in sac hits are from the deadball era. There are a couple high figures from the early 1920s (old habits die hard). The top figure from after the early 20s is Pie Traynor’s 42 in 1928. Ishii’s 39 would tie him for 50th in MLB history, and remember he did that twice in consecutive seasons. I’m guessing third baseman played pretty far in when they saw him come up to bat.

Although Ishii was fast, he was also reckless, leading the league in times caught stealing during a bunch of seasons.

In total, over his 24 seasons he made six all-star teams and five best-nines. In addition he won four gold gloves awards. Post retirement, he has coached for the Carp, and is currently a coach with the Swallows.

As for a comparable American player: I can’t help but pick Omar Vizquel. They played the same position, they both started their careers in 1989 and retired in 2012, and they both amassed a whole bunch of hits. Vizquel won more gold gloves, but most of those he won on reputation. With the exception of an anomalous 1999, his defensive stats from 1994 to 2001 (all years in which he won the GG) were nothing special. (When he actually was a good fielder was right at the beginning of his career, but he didn’t have the reputation yet and so didn’t win the award.) On the whole, they’re quite similar players.

The Bay Stars released him after something like 20 years. Rather than retire, he signed with the Carp. About this he said (http://japanesebaseball.com/writers/display.gsp?id=26056):

"There really weren't many [offers]. It was in fact very tough. But in the end it wasn't about money. Rather, I wanted to keep going, I wanted a fresh start. Frankly speaking, baseball is fun."

I like that sentiment.

The card is from the 1993 BBM set.

Northviewcats

09-13-2019, 09:11 AM

Here are some 1958 JCM23 Playing Card Back cards that I picked up. Any help identifying the players is appreciated.

Best regards,

Joe

nat

09-14-2019, 08:06 PM

Hi Joe,

You've got the set wrong. Those aren't JCM 23 they're JGA 21. They were produced by the Shonen Magazine. The year on the set is 1961.

The ace of spades is Kazuto Tsuruoka (aka Yamamoto). He was briefly a very good player, and is in the hall of fame for his work as a manager of the Nankai Hawks.

The queen of spades is Tadashi Sugiura, a hall of fame pitcher.

Jack of diamonds is Futushi Nakanishi, a hall of famer (played 3B). He was superbly great when he was young (and married his manager's daughter) but tailed off towards the end of his career. He played for the Lions.

Six of diamonds is Noboru Akiyama. He was a hall of fame pitcher for the Taiyo Whales. He had his moments, but on the whole - largely due to a short career - he's one of the weaker members of the hall of fame.

nat

09-14-2019, 08:18 PM

Haruyasu Nakajima (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nakaji001har) was a star in the early days of Japanese pro ball. He played with the Giants (through several incarnations) from 1936 through 1949, and spent the last couple years of his career with Taiyo. An outfielder, he posted a career line of 270/324/393, managing 897 hits, 57 home runs, and 103 stolen bases over the course of his career. Remember that in early Japanese baseball, very few runs were scored. His best season was probably the fall season of 1938. The league as a whole hit 219/319/293. Only 110 home runs were hit in the whole league that season, 22 of them by the Kyojin. Get this: in that league, Nakajima hit 361/428/626, and bashed out ten home runs. That’s completely nuts, and it was Japan’s first triple crown. He hit almost 50% of his team’s home runs that year, and, what, like, 9% of the home runs in the entire league. (You actually just couldn’t do this anymore. To do that in the 2019 American League – to this point in the season – you would need to hit 286 home runs.) Nakajima’s slugging percentage that season was more than double the league average. I decided to check out Babe Ruth real quick. In 1918 (so this is still during the deadball era) he slugged 555 against a league average of 322. In 1919 he slugged 657 and the league mark was 359. Neither of those seasons matched Nakajima’s feat. His best season – as far as raw slugging percentage goes – was 1920, when he slugged 847 and the league managed 387. Okay, so Ruth did manage to double the league mark for slugging percentage. But that’s what we need to compare Nakajima’s fall 1938 season to: perhaps the best season of Babe Ruth’s career. (By WAR Ruth’s best season is 1923, but that’s being propped up by an anomalous 19 runs saved in the field.) As you might have surmised, power was Nakajima’s calling card. In fact, he hit the first home run in Giants’ history (off of Tadashi Wakabayashi).

Nakajima didn’t have the consistency that Ruth did, but at his best he was Ruthian in his performance. Japan didn’t go to a single season each year (as opposed to split between fall and spring seasons) until 1940, when Nakajima was 30 years old. His batting average and on-base percentage were better than average that year, but his slugging percentage was still excellent, about 50% higher than average. That’s quite a drop-off from his Ruthian heights, but he was still hitting roughly like (this year’s version of) George Springer.

Then the war came calling. His 1943 season was abbreviated, whether that was due to injury or enlistment I don’t know. But he lost his entire 1944 and 1945 seasons to the war. When he came back he was 36 years old, and not at the top of his game anymore. In 1946 he was a little below average in the on-base department, and a little above average in the slugging department. My guess (and this is only a guess) as to what happened: he found that he was old and out of practice, and started selling out for power. Guessing on fastballs and trying to pull things. That would explain a precipitous drop in BA/OBP and a still-healthy SLG.

By 1947 he was genuinely bad, but at this point he had been relegated to a part-time role anyhow, probably at his own choosing, since he took over as manager of the Giants in 1946. Nakajima’s managerial career was brief, 1943 with the Giants, continuing after the war through 47. They got a slow start to the season and he was relieved of his duties, only to take the top spot again in 1949. But that didn’t last. He managed a partial season in 1949, and then another partial season with the Whales in 1951. Under Nakajima’s leadership the Giants were good and the Whales were not. About what you expect. I don’t know about his other managerial abilities, but he seems to have been a good judge of talent. Tetsuharu Kawakami was originally moved from pitcher to first base at his suggestion, and he, together with Shigeru Mizuhara, scouted Takahiko Bessho for the Giants. (They didn't manage to sign him - he went to Nankai instead.)

The professional part of Nakajima’s career was in fact only the fourth act of his life in baseball. In 1928 he led his high school team to victory at Koshien. Afterwards he starred at Waseda, playing for one of Japan’s most storied university baseball teams. At the time, baseball at the Big Six universities was the highest caliber baseball in Japan. After he graduated he played in the industrial leagues (which pre-date genuinely professional baseball in Japan). He then joined the Giants as soon as that was an option.

The other player on the card is Kikuji Hirayama. He’s the one throwing on the left, Nakajima is standing on the right. Hirayama is not in the hall of fame, but was a pretty good outfielder in his own right, playing for the Giants from 1937 to 1949, and then leaving with Nakajima for the Whales. There’s a nice write-up about him on Noburo Aota’s Fan Notes (https://noboruaota.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-fenceside-magician.html).

Meikyukai – No : Hall of Fame – Yes

The card is an uncatalogued bromide. The back has the players’ names, but nothing else. (Unless, that is, you count damage due to being removed from a scrap book.) The condition of this card is obviously terrible, and I’d be happy to upgrade it at some point. Since both players featured left the Giants after 1949, this card must be a late 40s issue.

Nakajima is not a meikyukai member (his disqualification is over determined, he has neither enough hits nor the right birthday), but he is in the hall of fame. In fact, he was the third player ever elected. This card does, therefore, contribute to my hall of fame project. I just need three more cards at this point.

seanofjapan

09-18-2019, 10:43 PM

This card does, therefore, contribute to my hall of fame project. I just need three more cards at this point.

Wow, getting that close!

I can guess that Eiji Sawamura would be one of the three, who are the other two?

nat

09-19-2019, 11:43 AM

As far as anybody knows, no cards of Sawamura were ever made, so I'm not counting him. I'm also not counting guys who only played pre-war. Some of those guys have cards (others don't) but they're very rare and expensive. When I set out on this project I didn't know anything about Japanese cards and wasn't really up for tracking down rare and expensive ones, so while I'd like to get them, I didn't include them on the list. I've also included some but not all of the managers. Everyone who is in the hall as a manager, and who also had a long and successful career as a player (think the Japanese version of Joe Torre) is included, but only some of the managers who didn't have much of a pro career themselves are included. Obviously there is an element of arbitrariness to the parameters of my project.

Anyways, as to your question Sean:

As of yesterday the list of missing players is down to two. Sotokoba was one of the missing guys, and I got a letter from a certain friend in Japan (;)) with a Sotokoba card in it. Many thanks. The other two players are Sadao Kondo and Mutsuo Minagawa. But I've got a lead on both of them, so I'm going to be done pretty soon.

Rickyy

09-19-2019, 01:57 PM

nat

09-19-2019, 08:37 PM

I’ll do a write-up for Sotokoba in a while, but for now I’ve already got a picture of this Matsui card on my computer, so I'm going to do him first.

Japanese imports into the American game have a not-very-distinguished track record. Some of the pitchers have done reasonably well (I was just watching Tanaka pitch a nice game for the Yankees a little bit ago), but the hitters have had more trouble. (With one very notable exception, about whom more later.) Here are the top Japanese-born position players to play in MLB (Dave Roberts omitted), ordered by total WAR:

59 : Ichiro
21 : Hideki Matsui
10 : Nori Aoki
6 : Tadahiko Iguchi
6 : Shohei Ohtani (and counting, but of course he’s also a pitcher)
5 : Kenji Johjima
5 : Kaz Matsui (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=matsui001kaz)
5 : Akanori Iwakuma
4 : Kosuke Fukudome
4 : Tsuyoshi Shinjo
…and then a bunch of guys who basically made no impact in MLB.

So of the position players to come over from Japan to MLB, Matsui had the seventh best MLB career. A league average season is worth about two WAR, so Matsui’s MLB career was about equal to two and a half average seasons. He missed a lot of time in MLB with injuries. In 2004 he played 114 games for the Mets, on his way to a season worth 1 WAR.

(This figured pulled down by poor fielding. His oWAR – the offensive component – was worth 1.7 WAR. His fielding in 2004 was worth negative value. And while I’ve got a parenthetical note going: WAR is not oWAR plus dWAR; both the o- and d- components include a positional adjustment. If you want to break WAR down into components you need to add oWAR and Rfield/10.)

In 2007 with the Rockies and 2009 with the Astros he also eclipsed the 100 games played mark, but that was all. That 2007 season was the best of his MLB career. It was worth 3.7 WAR. Maybe not all-star caliber, but still above average. The rest of his career is about what you would expect from a bench player. He did play in the 2007 post season, mashing in the NLDS and then squeezing out just nine hits (and one walk) in the NLCS and World Series combined.

The poor showing in the field as a rookie is actually rather odd. The only thing that he was (in total) quite good at in MLB was fielding. In two of his three full seasons he led the league in range factor for a second baseman, and in 2007 also led the league in Total Zone Runs (as a second baseman).

Matsui’s MLB career is, however, only a small part of his baseball career. He broke in with Seibu in 1995 as a 19 year old. He was a middle infielder who was fast as a young man and developed into a rather complete player as he got older. In 2003, as a 27 year old, Matsui hit 33 home runs. That off season, he signed with the Mets. Now the only year in which he spent a significant amount of time in the minor leagues was 2010. By and large, he spent his time in the US in the big leagues. It’s just that most of it was spent on the disabled list. In 2011 he returned to Japan, signing with the Golden Eagles. By this point he was 36 and had lost both his speed and his power. He spent his late 30s as a doubles kind of hitter. The final year of his career was 2018; he went home to the Lions. It looks like his Meikyukai-qualifying hit came in 2015 with Ratuken.

In sum, across every level in every country that he played, Matsui managed to collect 2843 hits. That’s really good. I wonder how well he would have done had he stayed in Japan? He was averaging about 175 hits per year for Seibu in his 20s. If we’re trying to guesstimate how many hits he would have had in Japan, we need to subtract the 615 he actually got MLB and the 136 he got in MiLB and then extrapolate what he would have managed in those years from what he actually did in Japan. Here’s the way-too-simple way in which I’m going to do that. I’m going to take his average number of hits for the last few years that he played for Seibu, and the average number of hits that he collected in his first few years back with Ratuken, and assume a linear connection between the two. Let’s do it…

[math is done]

If I did this right, that would have given him 1008 hits in Japan during the seasons in which he actually played in MLB. That gives us a net difference of 257. Add that to his hit total and he comes out with 3100 total hits. That would be #1 all-time in Japan. Of course there are tons of assumptions built into that little exercise. But it’s at least not unreasonable to think that he could have surpassed Harimoto had he stayed in Japan.

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of Fame: No

This card is from BBM’s 2000 set.

seanofjapan

09-19-2019, 11:23 PM

As of yesterday the list of missing players is down to two. Sotokoba was one of the missing guys, and I got a letter from a certain friend in Japan (;)) with a Sotokoba card in it. Many thanks. The other two players are Sadao Kondo and Mutsuo Minagawa. But I've got a lead on both of them, so I'm going to be done pretty soon.

Oh awesome, glad they arrived!!!

And I feel kind of stupid asking that question forgetting that one of the ones you needed was the card I had just sent you!

nat

09-21-2019, 10:11 PM

Yoshiro Sotokoba (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=sotoko000yos) pitched for the Carp from 1965 to 1979. Some of those were some pretty abbreviated seasons though. His full-time work was just 1968 to 1976. Quite short for a hall of famer. In total he logged about 2400 innings with a 2.88 ERA. His best season was almost certainly his first as a full-time pitcher. In 1968 he threw 302 innings and posted a 1.93 ERA (this figure led the league). Historically the Carp have been a bad team, and it shows in the win/loss records of their pitchers. Including Sotokoba. For his career he’s got a 131-138 record. To their credit, the Japanese voters didn’t let the losing record discourage them from inducting him into the hall of fame. But that a pitcher with a sub-3 ERA for his career has a losing record really tells you something about his team. (They went 25 years without a pennant. Not Cubs territory exactly, but pretty rough, especially considering the fact that the league is smaller.)

I wonder what the American electorate would do with an otherwise-qualified hall of fame candidate who had a losing record? It’s hard to know, since there’s never been such a creature. They did give Felix Hernandez a Cy Young award despite having only 13 wins. But he did, at least, have a winning record.

Anyways, as was long common for Japanese pitchers, Sotokoba did a lot of pitching in relief in between his starts. He finished 86 games (Japan seems not to have recognized saves as a statistic until 1974, so we don’t really know what kind of games he was finishing), and in total seems to have made about 120 relief appearances.

Sotokoba’s biggest claim to fame is his no hitters. In fact, his very first win was a no hitter. Three years later (so 1968), he threw a perfect game against the Whales. In 1970 he tossed his third and final no hitter (over the Giants). This feat equaled Eiji Sawamura’s record. There have been 93 no hitters in Japan’s history (regular season only, and counting combined no hitters), so Sotokoba is responsible for something in the neighborhood of 4% of them.

Japan doesn’t have many pitchers that have thrown multiple no hitters. Hiroshi Nakao threw two of them, so did Hideo Fujimoto, Juzo Sanada, Masaichi Kaneda, and Keishi Suzuki. Everyone else who has thrown a no hitter managed only one. (source (https://www.nonohitters.com/japan-baseball-leaguenippon-professional-baseball-no-hitters/))

Although I think that 1968 was his best season, it was in 1975, toward the end of his career, that Sotokoba won the Sawamura award. He pitched a tremendous number of innings, and so led the league in most of the counting stats. The Carp were, unusually for them, also good this year. They made a very unusual appearance in the Japan Series, but lost to the Braves.

Meikyukai – No : Hall of Fame – Yes

One down, two to go.

1976 Calbee.

nat

09-24-2019, 09:29 PM

This is post #2 (http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?p=1787831&highlight=horiuchi#post1787831) about Tsuneo Horiuchi. He was the Giants ace from the mid 1960s. Many Japanese pitchers crumple under frankly insane workloads. Horiuchi’s workload was more reasonable than many (no 400 inning seasons for instance), but he was pitching full-time while he was still just 18, and was done as a full-time starter after his age 30 season. He finished with 203 wins, and qualified for the Meikyukai with his 200th win in 1980.

Horiuchi won the 1966 and 1972 Sawamura awards. (Baseball-reference says that he also won in 1974, but that appears to be an error.) In 72 he was also the MVP. In 1966 he was a young phenom, going 16-2 with a 1.39 ERA in 181 innings pitched as an 18 year old. His second win may not have been quite as exciting, but it was probably a more valuable season. He had a record of 26-9 to go with a 2.91 ERA in 312 innings.

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of fame: Yes

1976 Calbee

nat

09-28-2019, 09:39 PM

Shinnosuke Abe (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=abe---001shi) is the Giants’ first baseman. He’s been with them since 2001 when he broke in as a 22 year old catcher. Most of his career has been spent behind the plate, but he’s getting older and has transitioned to first in the past few years. And he’s still good. This season he’s got a 297/406/465 batting line. That would be a lot more impressive if he was still a catcher, but still, every one of those figures is considerably better than average. Abe’s best season, well, it’s hard to say. In 2010 he hit 281/368/608 with 44 home runs. One hell of a line for a catcher. On the other hand, his 2012 and 2013 seasons were also excellent and were pretty much identical, at least as far as total batting value is concerned. 340/429/565 in 2012, 296/427/564 in 2013. Of course the batting average in 2012 was a lot higher, and since he’s never been a 340 kind of hitter before I’m guessing that he got lucky with some balls in play. Anyway, he made up for it the following season with an improved batting eye. Upon reflection, the 2012/2013 seasons were probably better than 2010. A point of on base percentage is worth more, in terms of expected runs, than is a point in slugging percentage, but I’m certainly not going to complain about a catcher who slugs 600. That 2012 season earned him a nearly unanimous MVP award.

Abe qualified for the Meikyukai in 2017, and while his playing time has decreased the past couple years, he still got into 93 games this year. He joked that although many people have 2000 hits, he’s so slow that no one in the Meikyukai has fewer infield hits than he does.

It turns out that Abe’s hit total is complete at 2131, as is his home run total, 405. Last Wednesday he announced that this would be his final season. Which means that yesterday’s game was his final regular season game with the Giants.

Abe was a 9x best-nine and 4x gold glove winner. It’s often hard to find comparable American players, but in Abe’s case it’s easy, at least if you ignore the gold gloves. This guy is Mike Piazza.

Here’s a story (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2019/09/27/baseball/japanese-baseball/shinnosuke-abe-says-goodbye-giants-fans-winning-note/#.XZAf8W5Fxn0) about Abe’s final game.

“I like baseball more than anyone” he said (https://www.tellerreport.com/sports/2019-09-25---giant-shinosuke-abe-retires-to-say-“i-like-baseball-more-than-anyone”-%7C-nhk-news-.SygRw39OvS.html) during his retirement press conference.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Eventually

The card is from the 2013 BBM set.

nat

10-03-2019, 08:38 PM

This is my second post about Morimichi Takagi. (Here’s number one. (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1793047&postcount=80))

Takagi qualified for the Meikyukai in 1978. He has a total of 2274 hits, all of them with the Dragons. I don’t know what their record is, but I’m guessing that’s up there. While he was a 7x best nine, he was oddly named to the all-star team only four times. Maybe he doesn’t like cold weather and so got better as the season progressed?

As a freshman in high school Takagi was a pitcher, but Shigeo Nagashima – then at Rikkyu University – was coaching high school players, and suggested to his manager that Takagi be converted to an infielder. His high school team would go on to play in Koshien, and made it to the final round in 1959, but ended up losing the tournament.

In 1968 he was hit in the face with a pitch by Tsuneo Horiuchi (see two posts above this one) and was seriously injured. His batting average dropped considerably thereafter, through what should have been his peak seasons. He had been hitting 290-300, but settled in around 230-250 for the next several seasons. He retired in 1980, due to declining vision. (No word on whether it was related to the beaning.)

In addition to being a great offensive force, Takagi was known for his slick fielding. He holds Japan’s record for range factor at 2B. Range factor is certainly a crude tool, and I wouldn’t want to dub someone a great fielder based solely on their range factor. But despite being crude, if you’ve got limited information (like I’ve got about Japanese fielding), it’s not bad exactly. Given that he’s the all-time leader, I’m confident at least in saying that he was a good defensive second baseman.

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of Fame – Yes

1976 Calbee.

seanofjapan

10-03-2019, 09:12 PM

Nice card :)

Takagi also managed the Dragons a few years ago, he took over from Hiromitsu Ochiai so had pretty big shoes to fill.

nat

10-05-2019, 08:32 PM

Shinya Miyamoto (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=miyamo001shi) was Yakult’s shortstop (and sometimes third baseman) from 1995 to 2013. He qualified for Meikyukai as a 41 year old, in 2012, and finished his career with 2133 hits. In total, he posted a slash line of 285/329/350. That should tell you a lot about him. Somewhat surprisingly, for a shortstop with no power, he also had very little speed. For his career he stole 111 bases, which works out to an average of about five or six per year.

Do you remember Placido Polanco? Polanco put up a slash line of 297/343/397, despite playing the first part of his career during MLB’s silly ball era. (Actually, his career almost perfectly overlaps Miyamoto; Polanco played from 1998 to 2013.) Seemingly every year in the 2000s, my fantasy baseball team would manage to be short an infielder, and so I somehow always ended up with Placido Polanco. Polanco could do exactly one thing well (that was relevant to fantasy baseball), he could hit for a good batting average. Other than that – nothing. Zero power, zero speed. Polanco moved around the diamond a bit more than did Miyamoto, but in a lot of ways, these guys are twins. They were active during basically the same time. Miyamoto picked up nine more hits than did Polanco. Polanco’s batting average was a bit higher than was Miyamoto (it took him 200 more games to get those extra nine hits), but batting average was the best part of Miyamoto’s offensive game, just like it was for Polanco. Neither had any power. Miyamoto didn’t even hit doubles, not really. Polanco was a little bit better at drawing walks – he had 30 more of them in 200 fewer games.

Now, focusing on his offense would really be beside the point in a discussion of Miyamoto’s baseball career. This man was a shortstop, back when that meant something. He won nine gold gloves. And while I don’t have fielding statistics for Japan, I assume that a guy who wins nine gold gloves must have been really good out there. Thing is, Polanco was also a really good fielder. He won a pair of gold gloves, and while the years in which he won them were not his best fielding years, he did have some seasons in which he was really sharp with the glove. In 2001 he recorded 23 rField (that’s expected runs saved through fielding) which is better than Ozzie Smith’s second-best season. (In his best season Ozzie saved an incredible 32 runs.) Now, that was far and away Polanco’s best fielding season, but the point is that he was a really sharp fielder.

Miyamoto had notable pedigree in baseball. Yoshio Yoshida (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1795508&postcount=89) was his coach when he was a youngster, and in high school he won at Koshien. (With PL Gakuen, the baseball powerhouse that also featured Kazuhiro Kiyohara.) He did not, however, go straight to the pros after college, playing in the industrial leagues first.

In the late 1990s he was convicted of tax evasion, and was sentenced to ten months in prison along with a lengthy probationary period and a fine of 3.5 million yen.

After retiring he was a baseball commentator for a while, before coaching Yakult. And in 2018 he took over the field manager position with them.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

2002 BBM.

nat

10-12-2019, 11:01 AM

I don't have time to write substantive posts at the moment, and don't know when I will. So for now at least I'll post guys in the Meikyukai that are also in the hall of fame. (And so for whom I already did a post.)

Here's Hisashi Yamada (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1783999&postcount=54). Long-time submarine pitcher for the Braves and 3x MVP winner.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame - Yes

1984 Calbee

nat

10-19-2019, 03:11 PM

Kazuhiro Sasaki is one of the few relief pitchers in the Meikyukai. (Off the top of my head, I can't think of any others. But I'm sure that I'm forgetting someone.) I've written about him before (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1788394&postcount=70).

Sasaki, as you may recall, played for the Mariners from 2000-2003. He was pretty good. (138 ERA+, 3.7 WAR in 220 innings) This card is from the 1998 Calbee set, in 1998 Sasaki was at the height of his powers in Japan.

Word is that 1998 is the first of the really common Calbee sets. And that seems to check out. In my experience 1998-and-later Calbees are almost as common as BBM cards, which means that they're common. Whereas earlier Calbee cards are a hit-or-miss affair. I don't know why that is.

Northviewcats

10-23-2019, 11:14 AM

Normally I would post this on the BST. But I am pretty sure that the only interest will be in the members that regularly visit this thread.

I truly admire the passion that you have for Japanese baseball cards. I had hoped to share the enthusiasm, by building a collection of my own. But I am struggling to hold interest in the project mainly because I cannot read Japanese.

I have decided to try and sell my small Japanese collection in the coming months.

However, if anyone here is interested in any of the cards that I posted in this thread I would like to give you first crack at adding them to your collection. Feel free to contact me through PM.

Thanks for all your help identifying the players and sharing your knowledge of baseball in Japan.

Best regards,

Joe

nat

10-30-2019, 05:17 PM

Kimiyasu Kudo (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1779334&postcount=38) is a member of both the hall of fame and the Meikyukai. Among his career highlights, he:

played in 29 seasons
played in 14 Japan Series
won the Japan Series 10 times
was a 2x Japan Series MVP
was a 2x Pacific League MVP
was an 8x all-star
won 3 gold gloves

He's a southpaw who pitched for the Lions from 1982 to 1994, the Hawks from 1995 to 1999, the Giants from 2000 to 2006, the BayStars from 2007 to 2009, and then finished with another stint on the Lions in 2010.

The card is from 2002 BBM. Presumably a subset of some kind. I like the front of this one better than most modern card designs. Which, granted, is a low bar, but still, it's pretty good. I also appreciate it that the card is printed on nice and sturdy stock. You'd think it wouldn't matter, but I much prefer a card with a little heft to it. (Long live Goudeys. Those things are basically hockey pucks.)

nat

11-07-2019, 09:40 PM

Kazahiro Yamauchi (http://net54baseball.com/showpost.php?p=1824027&postcount=129) is a guy to whom I was unfair in my first write-up. I compared him to Duke Snider. And, while being compared to a legitimate hall of famer isn't very harsh criticism, Yamauchi was, in his game, a greater player than was Snider. Superficially their statistics look pretty similar, but in context they're not.

Yamauchi was a 13x all-star (that's from baseball-reference, his Japanese Wikipedia page says 16x), 10x best-nine, and the 1960 MVP. He was the first Japanese player to reach 300 home runs, and the second to get to 2000 hits. When he retired he was the all-time leader in doubles. (Since he was the first to 300 home runs, he must have been the all-time home run leader at some point.) He still ranks in the top ten in some offensive categories, and top twenty in many.

As near as I can tell, he led the league in doubles four times and home runs twice. Looks like he was also a 4x RBI leader, took home one batting title, led the league in OBP 4x, and slugging 3x.

Yeah, so the Duke Snider comp was wrong. He's more like Frank Robinson.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Yes

This is my first gum card. Engel calls the set "Lili" gum. The guy that I bought it from (who is Japanese) calls it "Lilly" gum. Now, I don't doubt that 'Lili' is the correct transliteration of the Japanese symbols, but I wonder how it's pronounced. Is it supposed to be an importation of the English word for the flower (even if it's not spelled that way)? On the back it gives the name of the company as リリー. The former symbols have a 'ri' sound. The latter extends a vowel (if I remember my high school Japanese classes).

The card itself is tiny. It's printed on thick cardboard, but it's less than one inch on a side. Maybe packaged with a single piece of gum? It's got a designation of R3 - meaning you aren't likely to run into very many of them. Now, it may just be the very limited number of suppliers that I've got to buy Japanese cards from, but in my experience gum cards are much harder to find than menko cards of corresponding rarities. The guy that I bought this from had several Lili cards for sale, but that was the first (and so far only) time that I've ever encountered them.

nat

11-14-2019, 08:16 PM

Sadao Kondo (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=kondo-000sad) has the peculiar, and dubious, distinction of having been elected to the hall of fame for doing something that isn’t worth getting elected to the hall of fame for, and—and here’s the real kicker—not even do it.

Kondo pitched for three teams from 1943 to 1954. As a 17 year old rookie he was basically a league average pitcher over 114 innings for Nishitetsu. The next year found him on the Kyojin in an abbreviated season. After the war he returned to them to have a really good year; he had an ERA almost 50% better than average and pitched 300 innings. They finished second, but they had a heck of a pitching staff. Kondo was 20 years old and their best pitcher, but fellow hall of famers Hideo Fujimoto and Hiroshi Nakao rounded out the rotation. Actually, it’s hard to believe they didn’t win the pennant. Their line up featured Kawakami at first, Chiba at second, and Haruyasu Nakajima put in 50ish games in the outfield. They fell one game short, finishing behind a Great Ring team led by Takehiko Bessho and Kazuto Tsuruoka. After what I presume was an injury-shortened season with the Giants he was off to Chunichi, with whom he spent the rest of his playing career. Kondo posted three seasons in which he was somewhat better than average, and after that his playing time diminished precipitously. He was basically done as a full-time pitcher after his age 24 season.

Kondo’s second act was as a manager. In 1967 he took over Chunichi on a very temporary basis, but was back in the helm starting in 1981. His tenure there lasted three seasons. The Dragons were, on balance, about average. 1985 and 86 saw him leading Taiyo, and then he spent three seasons with Nippon Ham starting in 1989.

What got Kondo into the hall of fame is the dedicated use of relief specialists, especially via his influence as a pitching coach for the Dragons in the 1960s, before he moved into the top job. In the early days (and, in fact, quite a long while after the early days) it was very common for pitchers to pitch an insane number of innings as a starter, and appear as a relief pitcher between their starts. Sometime around the 1960s this began to change, and pitchers started specializing as either starters or relievers, but the dual role for key pitchers lasted for a very long time. Jim Allen has a nice post (https://jballallen.com/the-hall-of-fame-sadao-kondos-claim-to-fame/) explaining Kondo’s contribution to this development, and the extent to which it wasn’t really his contribution. The gist of it is that under his direction Eiji Bando began transitioning into a relief pitcher, and that Kondo is known for encouraging this. But, Allen points out, he wasn’t the first pitcher to become a (more-or-less) dedicated relief pitcher, and that a number of Kazuto Tsuruoka’s pitchers beat him to it.

Albright ranks him as Japan’s 24th most successful manager. Now, I don’t think much of the kind of system that Albright uses (score X points for doing Y, Z points for…, without any rationale for why those actions merit those scores), but it might give you the general idea of how Kondo compares to other managers in Japanese history.

Meikyukai: No - Hall of Fame: Yes

Of all of the players on my list, Kondo may have been the hardest to find. Prestige has a Kondo card up for auction right now (current bid is $44 and the auction ends the day after tomorrow), and in their blurb they say that he’s got only three catalogued cards, all of which are scarce. The card that I’ve got here is uncatalogued, and, in fact, was only the second Kondo card that I’ve ever seen. It’s a very small bromide. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1x2, but I do like the image. Whatever that is in the background makes for a dramatic backdrop.

As for when the card was issued: he’s on the Dragons, so that puts it after 1947. Now, he put in only three full-time seasons, so I’m guessing it was issued during that period. So probably 1948-1950, which is just about exactly when you would expect a bromide like this to be issued.

Regarding uncatalogued cards: I wonder how rare they are. There's certainly some variation. I have an uncatalogued Fumio Fujimura bromide of which I've seen three other copies, so even if it's not in Engel's book, there must be a bunch of them out there. On the other hand, for most of my uncatalogued cards (such as this one) not only have I never seen another copy, I've never seen another card from the set. I'm guessing that these ones don't turn up much.

Only one player left for the hall of fame collection. Stay tuned.

seanofjapan

11-17-2019, 06:44 PM

Of all of the players on my list, Kondo may have been the hardest to find. Prestige has a Kondo card up for auction right now (current bid is $44 and the auction ends the day after tomorrow), and in their blurb they say that he’s got only three catalogued cards, all of which are scarce. The card that I’ve got here is uncatalogued, and, in fact, was only the second Kondo card that I’ve ever seen. It’s a very small bromide. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1x2, but I do like the image. Whatever that is in the background makes for a dramatic backdrop.

As for when the card was issued: he’s on the Dragons, so that puts it after 1947. Now, he put in only three full-time seasons, so I’m guessing it was issued during that period. So probably 1948-1950, which is just about exactly when you would expect a bromide like this to be issued.

Regarding uncatalogued cards: I wonder how rare they are. There's certainly some variation. I have an uncatalogued Fumio Fujimura bromide of which I've seen three other copies, so even if it's not in Engel's book, there must be a bunch of them out there. On the other hand, for most of my uncatalogued cards (such as this one) not only have I never seen another copy, I've never seen another card from the set. I'm guessing that these ones don't turn up much.

Only one player left for the hall of fame collection. Stay tuned.

Great write up about Kondo. I saw that Prestige auction for the Kondo card ended at 61$, not bad (I don't have any card of his....)! The scarcity of his cards really reflects the effect of having almost all the card sets of the 50s and 60s having less than 40 cards each, so anyone lower than superstar level doesn't have many/any. Then of course even with the massive Calbee sets in the 70s they were still stocking it with stars/Giants players so even the gigantic 1472 card 75-76-77 monster set is missing a lot of players who were active in those years....

That is an interesting point about the uncatalogued cards too. I have a few menko that are uncatalogued and while some of them seem rare (like you I haven't seen any other cards from the same set), some seem more common but for whatever reason (not having a full checklist, difficulty in ascertaining which cards belong to the same set, etc) just aren't in the catalogue yet!

nat

11-22-2019, 07:58 PM

I thought I was done.

In fact, I was pretty sure that I was done.

And now I'm pretty sure that I'm not.

Mutsuo Minagawa was the last player on my list.

Here's the card that I tracked down. It's of someone named 'Minagawa', so there's that. Now, vintage Japanese cards usually (always?) omit first names, so sometimes figuring out who you've got requires a little detective work, but it's often sufficient to figure out which team the guy is playing for. Mutsuo Minagawa spent his entire career with Nankai. There were only two Minagawas active during the period in which bromides were issued. The top line of kanji on this card says "Tokyo vs. Nankai". So I thought "great! I've got him!" And proceeded to buy the card. On top of it, I was excited because it's a really great action shot. Minagawa is sliding into home plate just ahead of the catcher's tag.

I realized yesterday that the other Minagawa played for the Flyers. The TOKYO Flyers.

Mutsuo was active 1954 to 1971. Sadayuki Minagawa played 1937 to 1951. While it's possible for a player to appear on a bromide in the mid 1950s, they were much more popular in the late 40 - early 50s era. And Mutsuo played sparingly his first two seasons. 1956 was his first really full-time season. So the years that they were active makes it more likely that this is a Sadayuki Minagawa card.

Comparing pictures of the guys, it also looks more like Sadayuki than like Mutsuo. I'm terrible with faces so I asked my wife, and she confirmed.

The only letter on his jersey that's clearly visible is an 'S', which doesn't help much. The one next to it you can sort-of see. It's not clear, and it could go either way, but it seems more likely to be an 'R' than a 'K'.

In short, this is probably a card of Sadayuki Minagawa, not Mutsuo Minagawa. It turns out that my yakyu dendo collection is not finished.

Rats.

And so, here's a quick summary of Sadayuki Minagawa's career. He was a shortstop who went pro shortly after the first professional league was founded. Considering that he was 17 as a rookie, I'm guessing he didn't have the option of signing up any earlier than he did. The Tigers were his first team, from 1937 to 1941. After that there was a long interruption in his career. Considering that he was a 21 year old athlete, I'm guessing some time in the military was involved. In 1948 he returned to baseball, joining the Flyers, for whom he played for the rest of his career. He retired from the Flyers after the 1952 season. For a while during the 1948 season he was a player-manager, and they had a good record while he was managing, but the team finished in 5th place and he never got another shot at it.

As a batter, I would characterize him as "extremely bad". Even by the extraordinarily low standards of the day, Sadayuki couldn't hit a lick. Presumably he was a good glove man, but I don't have fielding statistics from Japan in the 1940s, so I'm just going to assume that he couldn't keep his job as long as he did if he couldn't field. It sure wasn't the career 204/303/264 batting line that kept him employed. That on base percentage was okay given his context, but even in the JPBL and JPPL of the 40s and 50s, a .264 slugging percentage wasn't going to cut it.

Meikyukai - No : Hall of Fame: No

The card is an uncatalogued bromide. It's printed on thin stock with a glossy finish.

I'm at 98% on my project. If anybody's got a lead on a Mutsuo Minagawa card, let me know.

Jeff Alcorn

11-24-2019, 01:28 AM

Hi,

The top line on the card actually says Tokyu vs. Nankai- not Tokyo. The Flyers were the Tokyu Flyers in 1947 and then again from 1949-1953 (they went by Kyuei Flyers in 1948), so the card is definitely not Mutsuo Minagawa, the Nankai Hawks great pitcher. The second line says that the picture is of Minagawa scoring.

Mutsuo Minagawa is in the Kabaya-Leaf set and I also have 2 menko cards of him from the late 1950s that I have gotten recently, so keep searching one of his cards will come up.

Thanks for the great series, keep it going.

Jeff

nat

11-26-2019, 09:03 PM

Masahiro Doi (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=doi---002mas) was one of Japan’s great sluggers. In a career spanning 1962 to 1981, he clobbered 465 home runs, which places him 12th all-time, between Koichi Tabuchi and Tuffy Rhodes. The bulk of Doi’s career was spent with the Kintetsu Buffaloes; in 1975 he joined the Lions, for whom he spent the balance of his baseball-playing days. Doi’s best season was probably 1971, a year in which he hit 40 home runs, drove in 113 (topping 100 RBIs for the only time in his career), and putting up a 309/395/603 slash line. In addition to ranking well in career home runs, Doi is 10th all-time in hits (2452, and the player with the highest figure who has not been elected to the hall of fame), and 12th in RBIs.

Over the course of his 20 year career, Doi was selected to 15 all-star teams. As you might expect for a big slugger, he played LF-1B. (Going over MLB all-time HR leaders, guys who weren’t corner outfielders, DH, or 1B: Alex Rodriguez (3B, #4), Ken Griffey Jr (CF, #7), Mike Schmidt (3B #16), Mickey Mantle (CF #18); that’s it for the top 20.) Despite being one of the top home run hitters in Japanese history, Doi led the league in homers only once, in his first season with the Lions. He never won an MVP award. In the US the MVP awards are biased towards players from good teams, in Japan, even more so. The Buffalos are traditionally cellar-dwellers, and Doi never did play in the Japan Series. Let’s see if that’s what made the difference. Below I’ve got his best seasons, and I've compared them to the eventual winners:

1967
Doi: 28 HR, 93 RBI, 323/386/567
Mitsuhiro Adachi: 1.75 ERA, 20-10 record for the 1st place Braves

1971
Doi: 40 HR, 113 RBI, 309/395/603
Atsushi Nagaike: 40 HR, 114 RBI, 317/404/618

1972
Doi: 30 HR, 84 RBI, 300/393/554
Yutaka Fukumoto: 106 SB

1973
Doi: 29 HR, 76 RBI, 316/417/563
Katsyua Nomura: 28 HR, 96 RBI, 309/373/524 (played catcher)

1975
Doi: 34 HR, 84 RBI, 260/352/491
Hideji Kato: 32 HR, 97 RBI, 309/388/572

So, not really. Maybe he got robbed in 1967, but Adachi pitched really well, so it’s hard to say that this was a terrible injustice or anything. The league had an ERA of 3.05, so his 1.75 ERA isn’t quite as impressive as it looks, but that’s still some damn fine pitching. Every other season Doi just got out-played by the eventual winner.

Doi did lose one month of his career to the Black Mist Scandal. This was a big gambling scandal in Japanese baseball that ran from 1969 to 1971. Doi had a small part in it, and got a short suspension as a result. The central figures were members of the Lions who were throwing games (this is while Doi was still with Kintetsu). He doesn’t seem to have been accused of doing that; he was prosecuted and suspended for ‘illegal gambling’, but I don’t have details beyond that. Anyways, he got a rather light punishment, so I’m guessing that whatever he was up to was comparatively innocuous.

The transfer from Kintetsu to the Lions was a trade for Yutaka Yanagita and Hiroaki Shibaike (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=shibai000hir). The former was a still fairly young pitcher (22 at the time of the trade) who would have a good couple seasons, but who I would characterize as an “innings eater”. The latter was a 28 year old relief pitcher who… eh. He was a relief pitcher with a short career. The Lions got the better player, but Yanagita was a productive pitcher for a long time.

It’s a mystery to me why Doi isn’t in the hall of fame yet. He’s clearly qualified. For comparable American players I’d look to someone like Eddie Murray or Rafeal Palmeiro. Guys who hit a fair number of home runs, and played forever (thus finishing high on all-time lists), but who weren’t A-list stars. Doi was probably better than them at his best, but the Americans who are better versions of this kind of player were better than he was. I was tempted to compare him to Carl Yestrzemksi, and while that’s not absurd, Doi didn’t have any triple crown seasons. Maybe Manny Ramirez is a good comp. Consistently one of the better players in the league, but never the best, and a long enough career to be among the all-time leaders in various slugging categories. I’m going to go with that: Masahiro Doi is the Japanese Manny Ramirez. I know why Manny isn’t in the hall yet. But unless Doi’s involvement in the Black Mist Scandal was much more serious than it appears, I don’t know why he’s not in yet.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

This card is from the massive 1976 Calbee set. Thanks to Sean for this one. I’ve still got a stack of cards that he sent me that I need to post something about.

nat

11-29-2019, 10:00 PM

Michihiro Ogasawara (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=ogasaw001mic) was a corner infielder (mostly first base) who, at his peak, was a phenomenal batter. He played 1997 to 2015; until 2006 he was with Nippon Ham, then the Giants, and he finished his career with Chunichi. That timeline is a little bit misleading, however, as he broke into the league slowly (he was a catcher initially), and played part-time for quite a while at the end of his career. His full-time seasons (>100 games) were those from 1999 to 2010. During that stretch, he was a beast of a hitter, clobbering 30-35 home runs annually and regularly posting batting averages well over 300. Indeed, in that 12 year stretch there were only two seasons in which he hit fewer than 30 home runs (1999 and 2004) and only two in which he posted a batting average below 300 (1999 and 2005). Ogasawara’s best season looks to have been 2003, when he posted a 360/473/649 line. It’s true that it was a relatively high-scoring league, but that’s ridiculous. Let’s adjust it for context and see what it would look like in the 2019 American League.

*does math*

That’s 330/442/640. Except for the batting average, that’s a dead ringer for Mike Trout’s MVP winning 2019 season. (Trout gets the same OBP through more walks and fewer hits.) That wasn’t the year that he won the MVP award, however, as he took that trophy home in 2006 with a 313/397/573 line (it was a good year, the Fighters also won the Japan Series), and again in 2007 while hitting 313/368/539. It was almost a threepeat, as he finished second in the voting in 2008.

Because seven of Ogasawara’s 19 seasons were part-time efforts, his career counting stats are not that impressive. He qualified for the Meikyukai in 2011, but still managed only 2120 hits, of which 378 were home runs. As might be expected for someone who played seldomly apart from his peak, however, he’s got a nice slash line of 310/389/540.

Several sources report that Chunichi mainly used him as pinch hitter. No word on why he wasn’t playing full-time for the Giants before that. I guess injuries are the most likely explanation.

If you’re looking for a comparable American player, a two-time MVP who didn’t do much outside of his peak seasons calls to mind Dale Murphy. Ogasawara was the better player though. Maybe he’s a rich man’s Dale Murphy. If he had gotten an earlier start, and could have stayed on the field longer, he would have put up the bulk that you expect from the inner-circle types. But he didn’t. If he makes the hall of fame it will be on the basis of his peak performance, not his career accomplishments. In other ways he reminds me of Vlad Guerrero. Both were sluggers with high batting averages, although Vlad was faster. No surprise, since Ogasawara began life as a catcher.

He is, apparently, the “goodwill ambassador” for Ogasawara village (which, I gather, he’s not actually from or anything). In celebration of his 2000th hit they gave him a mini barrel of local rum, and he donated a jersey to the local youth baseball team.

At least one website reports that his nickname is ‘Guts’.

After retirement, Ogasawara coached in the Dragon’s minor league team. Two months ago the Dragons elected not to bring him back. It all worked out in the end, however, as it was announced on 10/10/19 that he’ll be the Fighters’ manager next season.

Here’s Ogasawara hitting a bunch of home runs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax--x7E2cL8).

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of Fame – No (probably not eligible yet)

2000 Upper Deck.