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 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 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.