Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Michinori Tsubouchi 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]

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!

[drmondobueno]

Originally Posted by nat

Michinori Tsubouchi 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.

Nat,

Concerning the JBR37, my thoughts on trying to specify a card in a bromide set is to first, measure the card. I usually place the card in a semirigid holder to flatten and protect the card. I then measure the card and compare that to the set definitions I am considering. I do not pretend to be an expert but at least the use of research clues provided by the Engle guide is reasonable. Another comment: knees up, to me, may mean the photo shows the player only from knees up.

I suspect the card may be from the JBR 74 or 75 set. Measuring may help define the card as the JBR 37 and 74/75 sets have a slight difference in their sizes.

[nat]

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.

[nat]

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

But I do have Kenjiro Tamiya 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]

Atsuya Furuta 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]

Katsuya Nomura 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]

Originally Posted by nat

Katsuya Nomura 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.

Nice Nomura card!

He is also interesting due to his family - his wife Sachiyo Nomura (who passed away a few months ago) was very famous as an outspoken TV personality in Japan. She actually sunk his career as a manager with Hanshin - he had to resign after she was arrested (and later convicted) for tax evasion in 2001. She is also the mother of the agent Don Nomura who brought Hideo Nomo to the US (though Katsuya Nomura is his stepfather, not his biological father).