Japanese HOF Project

[PANAMABASEBALL]

is Dave Roberts in the Hall of Fame ?

[nat]

Originally Posted by PANAMABASEBALL

is Dave Roberts in the Hall of Fame ?

No, he's not. The Japanese hall of fame has been very reluctant to induct gaijin. Lefty O'Doul is in, as are a couple Americans of Japanese descent, but that's it. (And Victor Starffin, who was Russian but lived most of his life in Japan.) I imagine that eventually Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Ramirez will be elected, but I don't know about Roberts. He had some good years, but he was already in his mid-30s when he started playing Japanese ball.

[nat]

No new cards today, but I've reorganized the collection and thought I'd show it off. (IRL I don't know anyone who cares about Japanese baseball cards, so you guys get to see it.)

Each page of the binder now has the player's career statistics (managing record for managers) with their name in both kanji and romanji. One card per page. And a black sheet of paper providing a nice frame for the card. It means that the collection now takes up twice as much space (and twice as many binders) as it did before, but my baseball card collection is relatively small (maybe 350 cards) so I've got the space for it.

HOF results are announced in January, so maybe I'll have something more interesting to share next month.

[GrewUpWithJunkWax]

Looks like a great way to keep them

[nat]

Ramirez and Tanishige

I've been lax with updates to this thread. Since I last posted, we've had four more people elected to the hall of fame. We'll do two of them today, I'll write up another later. And then I need to track down a Randy Bass card. The only Japanese Bass cards on e-bay right now are autographed with a $70 asking price. Considering that I don't care about the autograph, and that the cards are only worth about a buck or so without it, I'm going to hold off on him for a while.

Motonobu Tanishige was elected to the hall of fame about a month ago. He was already in the meikukai, so I've already done a write up about. You can read it here.

The long and short of it is that he was a catcher for the Whales, Bay Stars, and Dragons, for many years. He played from age 18 to age 44. He had a couple good seasons in his early 30s, but was mostly a meh hitter. I'm guessing a defensive specialist. Hard to pick a comparable American player. Maybe think, like, Jim Sundberg, but give him a much longer career.

The other player featured in today's post is Alex Ramirez. He's also a meikukai member for whom I've previously done a write up. It's here. Ramirez is Venezuelan, he played briefly for Cleveland and Pittsburgh, but couldn't stick in the major leagues. While he was with Cleveland he was reasonably good, but those teams were stacked and he couldn't secure a permanent job. The Pirates had an opening in the outfield, but he struggled in his time with Pittsburgh, and wasn't given a second chance. After leaving MLB he played 13 seasons in Japan, mostly with the Swallows and Giants. In Japan he was a big slugger.

In the past few decades the number of American players headed to Japan has increased dramatically. (Up from just, like, three of four back in the 1950s/60s.) A fair number of these guys became stars. But until last year the hall of fame ignored them. Tuffy Rhodes still isn't in, which is kind of bizarre. But the hall has seen fit to elect Ramirez (and Bass), so maybe things are changing.

No new card for Ramirez. But I decided to buy another Tanishige card. This one is from 1992 BBM.

[John1941]

Wow - Tanishige was incredible! Catching over 100 games in eighteen consecutive seasons - would have been 21 with eight more in 1995 - is mind-blowing.

Based on the fielding stats available for him on BR, it does seem like he was a defensive wizard. From 2005 to 2015 (the years with data) he made 19 errors and turned 106 double plays - for comparison, major league catchers in 2023 made 365 errors and 209 double plays.

[nat]

Hiroki Kuroda


Kuroda had a 20-year career, spent with the Hiroshima Carp, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the New York Yankees. Baseball came naturally to him – his father, Kazuhiro, was also a professional baseball player. Kazuhiro spent seven seasons roaming the outfield, mostly for the Hawks. Offensively, his dad was a bit below average, mostly because he drew very few walks. If he had a really good glove he might have been a decent player, or maybe he would have been okay as the short side of a platoon.

His father was apparently a positive influence; for a while his dad was his coach, and he said that he enjoyed playing under him. But other formative experiences with baseball were not so good. He said that when he was in elementary school, if he performed poorly he would be hit on the butt with a bat so hard that it hurt to sit down the next day. And in high school, practices started at 6am and didn’t end until 9pm. Presumably during the school year there were classes the broke up the practice routine, but he also played summer ball, and during the summer the team really did have 15-hour practices. Once, as punishment for having poor location during a game, his coach told him to run laps, without water, for the entire duration of practice, for four days. After each day, he returned to the dormitory, and was not allowed to bathe. Now, he says that he did walk (instead of run) when the coach wasn’t looking, and that his teammates snuck him water when they could, but this is rather shocking all the same. In college things did not get much better. Freshmen, he says, were “basically slaves,” required to work for upper classmen (e.g., by doing their laundry), and that punishment for performing these duties below expectations included things like kneeling on the hot roof of the dormitory for hours on end. (Source)

The only professional Japanese team that he played for was the Hiroshima Carp. Historically, the Carp have not been good. They had a moment in the late-70s and into the 80s, but mostly they have been doormats. And Kuroda played for during their “dark years.” While he was playing, he was one of the highest paid players in team history, making (after adjusting for inflation) about $1.7 million per year. Now, the Carp had a policy of not negotiating with players who had declared free agency (to the point of refusing to bring a player back who had declared free agency, regardless of their asking price), but in 2006 their pitching staff was so thin, they agreed to re-sign Kuroda, although his salary increase (25%) was presumably smaller than he could have gotten on the open market.

The Dodgers and the Yankees were quite a bit more successful than the Carp were, although during his time in the US, Kuroda never got to play in the World Series. I would characterize his US performance as “good.” He had a career ERA+ of 115, which isn’t ace material exactly but is better than average. ERA+ takes a player’s ERA, adjusts it for the park that they play in, compares it to league average, and then puts it on a scale where 100 is average and higher is better. If you want to compare that to a few pitchers: Andy Pettitte 117, David Cone 120, David Wells 108, Tim Hudson 120. He had 21 career WAR over seven seasons, aged 33-39. That sounds pretty good to me. Over those same ages, Hudson had 13, Wells had 25, Cone 20, Pettitte 20. That sounds like a pretty good comp list; think of Kuroda as a Japanese Andy Pettitte. His performance in Japan was comparable to his performance in MLB too. He struggled early in his career, but settled into being a generally good pitcher.

As a hall of fame candidate, I guess he’s okay. If Pettitte got in to Cooperstown, it wouldn’t be a disgrace. I wouldn’t support it, but, oh boy, are there worse pitchers in the hall already. If they are going to count work that he did while in the US, Kuroda is probably qualified for the hall. They don’t really need him there, sort of like the one in Cooperstown isn’t really any worse-off for not having Andy Pettitte in it. But he was an above average pitcher for 20 years, and if they want to honor him for that, that’s fine.

The card is from the Diamond Heroes subset of the 2000 BBM set.