Thanks for posting Nat, I always like learning more about Japanese baseball.

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.

New display
 

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.

Looks like a great way to keep them

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.

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.

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.

Nice to see you adding tothis thread again!

That stuff Kuroda went through as a kid is one thing that has discouraged me from signing my son up for ball here.

I took part in the Prestige auction and picked up my first Sadaharu Oh card.
Attachment 613246

Sent from my SM-G9900 using Tapatalk

Congrats, Tim! That is a nice one!

Picked up this one recently because I thought it was cool. Can anyone tell me what it is?

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...k%20menko.jpeg

The front of the card says “Kawakami player”, which might be Tetsuharu Kawakami.

The back says “Haruya #5”, which is probably the name of the kid that owned it (not sure what the number is for….)

Its probably an uncatalogued menko from the late 40s or early 50s.

Randy Bass
 

Randy Bass


There have been three waves of American players going to play ball in Japan. Or, better, there have been two wavelets with lots of ripples and then an actual wave. When the first professional league was formed, a handful of American players headed overseas. Some were children of Japanese immigrants, including the greatest of them, Tadashi Wakabayashi. Others were not. For example, Harris McGalliard (AKA Bucky Harris) was a part-time PCL player and briefly a Pirate farmhand who, seeking a chance to actually make a living playing baseball, headed to Japan in 1936. He played six seasons (three years, in the early days they played two seasons per year) in Japan, winning the MVP award in the fall of 1937. During the war, since he spoke Japanese, Harris was employed interrogating prisoners in the Philippines. Reportedly one of them was a former professional baseball player, and Harris spent much of the rest of the interrogation answering questions from his former colleague. Another American, Herb North, recorded the first win in Japanese professional baseball history, pitching in relief for the Nagoya Golden Dolphins over Dai Tokyo. His Japanese career lasted one season, then he returned to Hawaii to play amateur ball. That Dai Tokyo team featured another American, Jimmy Bonner, who grew up in Louisiana and played for independent Black teams in California before being recruited to play in Japan. His career there lasted only nine and two-thirds innings, but he integrated Japanese baseball more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in America.

There were only a few Americans playing in Japan in the thirties, and the war put an end to any hope of bringing in more. Wakabayashi renounced his American citizenship and stayed in Japan. Everyone else had gone home by that point, and no one else went over.

Famously, Wally Yonamine was the first American to head to Japan after the war. Several Black ball players followed him, and gradually a handful of white players as well. They trickled in through the next few decades, including a few prominent players like Larry Doby and Don Newcomb. Most played in Japan only very briefly.

The real wave began in the 1980s, or perhaps late 1970s, and has only picked up steam (if you’ll allow a very tortured mixed metaphor) since then. When people now think about American players in Japan, it’s this wave that they are thinking about. These players are (were? has this changed?) called “helpers,” indicating a popular perception that they are valuable adjuncts to a team, but not really members of it. Although there have been exceptions, most players from this wave were good minor leaguers who never really got a chance in the big leagues, or poor big leaguers, who couldn’t cut it. Mostly they have had relatively short careers; in part because the cultural transition is difficult (not just US-culture to Japanese-culture, but perhaps even more significantly US-baseball-culture to Japanese-baseball-culture), but also in part because they generally only leave for Japan after finding that their American careers have stalled-out.

Now that we’re 500 words into a post about Randy Bass, it’s time to mention Randy Bass. The Twins took him out of Lawton (OK) high school in the seventh round of the draft, and he proceeded to crush the ball. He slugged over 500 with an on-base percentage in the mid 400s as a teenager in the low minors. He skipped AA and was sent to the PCL as a 21-year-old. Bass’ first go-round in the PCL was mediocre. The stars of the team were a former Seattle Pilot named Danny Walton, and a young Lyman Bostock, who spent most of the season in Minneapolis. Bass was young for the league, however, and was asked to repeat it twice. In 1976 his on-base percentage returned to above-400 levels, but his slugging was unexceptional for a player limited to first base. The next year, his third in Tacoma, Bass blossomed, finishing second on the team in both on-base percentage and slugging percentage. (Or maybe first place, depending on how you count. In both categories Willie Northwood finished ahead of him, but Northwood appeared in only 53 games for Tacoma, and hit anomalously well.) Anyway, you’d think that would be enough for Bass to get a shot, but it wasn’t. Not really. The Twins gave him a couple weeks in the show and then sold him to the Royals, who relegated him to AAA again in 1978. For his fourth year there.

Now, to some extent this is understandable. The Twins had Rod Carew playing first base, and no matter how well Bass was hitting in the PCL, he’s not supplanting Rod Carew. But this was 1977, there was a DH slot to fill. The 77 Twins filled their DH slot mostly with a platoon consisting of Craig Kusick and Rich Chiles. Cusick was 28 and had hit well in limited playing time for the past three seasons. Bass was younger and had more room for growth, but in 1977 it was reasonable to think that one day Randy Bass might grow into being Craig Kusick. And, well, the Twins already had one of those. Chiles’ role on the team is harder to understand. He played nearly half of his career MLB games in 1977, and didn’t hit particularly well. The previous year he’d be an adequate AAA player, but he was older and no better than Bass. Cusick did have a nasty platoon split, so he needed a lefty bat to share the position with him. The Twins chose Chiles, but I don’t see any reason to expect better performance, in 1977, from Chiles than from Bass.

Anyhow, the Royals sent a 24 year old Randy Bass to cool his heels in Omaha. He was the best player on the minor league team, and it earned him two at bats with the Royals. Their main first baseman that season was Pete LaCock, who put up a 110 OPS+ in 1978, but still hit all of five home runs and was below replacement level for his career. (The DH slot was more competently filled by Hal McRae.) I suppose the Royals figured that LaCock is 26, a good age for a breakout, and putting up production that, if below average, is at least not terrible. They opted to stick with him for another year and sold Bass to the Expos.

The story was basically the same in Montreal. Playing in Denver he hit 333/454/660. These numbers are, of course, inflated by the fact that he was playing on the top of a mountain, but he was still the best player on the team. The Expos rewarded him by, I’m not making this up, giving him one at bat on the major league team. He was blocked by an elderly Tony Perez, who, unlike LaCock, at least had a history of good performance. This being the National League, they didn’t have a DH spot at which to hide him either. (And in any case they had Rusty Staub in the fold. Presumably he’d have DH’d if it had been an option.) Even so, they couldn’t even find any pinch hitting at bats for him.

The 1980 season, in what must have been a tiring routine for Bass, was more of the same. He and a very young Tim Raines were the best offensive players on the Denver team. Perez had moved on, and in 1980 the Expos were playing Bass’ fellow future-JPBL-star Warren Cromartie at first base. Cromartie was an established big leaguer, and even had one good major league season under his belt, so there was no place for Bass to play. In September, Bass was named as the player-to-be-named-later in an earlier deal, and sent to San Diego, where he finally got a chance to play major league baseball, if only for a few weeks. He got into 19 games, and put up a 286/386/510 line. That’s good! It was good enough to get him his only real break in major league baseball. In 1981 he played 69 games for the Padres, but, for the first time in his career, he didn’t hit well. In his only extended period of major league play, Bass hit 210/293/313 and was released. The following season he was again the best hitter on his AAA team (again in Denver, although this time as a Rangers affiliate). He played poorly for a couple weeks in Texas, was waived, played poorly for another couple weeks in a second go-round in San Diego, and that was that for the 1982 season.

Going into 1983, Bass was 29 years old and had a reputation as a AAAA player. He was the best (or tied with Tim Raines for the best) batter on his AAA teams for five years running, but got only inconsistent playing time in the major leagues, being yanked around for a total of 130 games over six seasons. It’s hard to know how he would have fared if he hadn’t been blocked by Rod Carew when he was a young man, or if he would have learned to hit major league pitching if he’s been given more of a chance to work at it. But at this point it was too late. A 29 year old first baseman who has yet to have major league success isn’t going to have a big league career. Traditionally, his future would have been as an organizational player, someone to fill out a AAA roster and give the actual prospects a warm body to play against. Maybe spend a few weeks in the big leagues, here and there, when someone gets injured.

Bass decided to go to Japan instead. There were already some American players playing prominent roles in Japan when he went over, most notably the Lee brothers. Leron Lee had been a star for Lotte since 1977 and his brother Leon joined him a year later. Both were legitimate stars. So Bass wasn’t a trailblazer, but he was part of a generation of ball players who came to see playing in Japan has a viable career move, not a bizarre exception to the norm, but a part of it. The wave crested gradually, with more-and-more American players building substantial careers in Japan, and, increasingly, others using time in Japan (or Korea) as a springboard to return to MLB. Bass went over relatively early in this process, and never returned to American ball. I wonder if it was seen as a one-way ticket at the time? Japanese players did not come play in the US at the time, and the Japanese professional leagues were long viewed with suspicion on this side of the Pacific. That attitude has changed – in part because we’ve gotten better at understanding differences in context between different leagues, and in part because of the success in MLB of Japanese players – but it seems to have been the norm for a long time. I’m not sure about this, but there’s a chance that, in 1983, going to Japan was professional suicide, at least as far as MLB was concerned.

Hanshin gave Bass more chances than any American team ever did. And they were rewarded handsomely for it. His performance in 1983 was in line with what he had been doing in AAA (so, it was good), but he took a big step forward the following year. He won his first of four consecutive batting titles, and would also win the triple crown in both 1985 (when he led the Tigers to a championship) and 1986. In his magical 1985 season he nearly broke Saduharu Oh’s single-season home run record, but in the last game of the season the Giants (then managed by Oh) intentionally walked him every time he came to bat. In Japan Bass was a superstar, posting on base percentages above 400 every year except his first. And except for an abbreviated 1988, his lowest slugging percentage while in Japan was 598.

Let’s look at his performance relative to the league. In 1983 he finished 22nd in the league in on-base percentage (OBP) and second in slugging percentage (SLG), behind Reggie Smith. In 1984 he was fifth in OBP and second in SLG (behind Sadashi Yoshimura, although Bass had substantially more at bats than did Yoshimura). His great season, 1985, saw Bass finish first in both categories (as well as in hits and the triple crown stats). In his second triple crown season Bass again finished first in all three slash stats (BA/OBP/SLG), as well as hits, and second in runs scored. In 1987 he was third in OBP and third in SLG. We’ll get to 1988 in a minute.

In 1985 the Central League as a whole hit 272/341/430. That’s a relatively high-offense league. But Bass was 41% better than average in OBP and 81% better in SLG. To do that in the 2024 American League you would need an OBP of 435 and a slugging percentage of 713. That’s not a bad match for what Aaron Judge did in 2024. Judge’s OBP was a little bit higher, but his slugging percentage was a little bit lower. So that’s how you should think about Randy Bass’ best year. He hit approximately as well (in context) as Aaron Judge c. 2024. And his 1986 was almost as good. Maybe Judge is a pretty good comp, at least offensively. (Defensively there’s a difference. Judge can play the outfield.)

So much for the happy part of the story. This is where things get dark. In 1988 Bass’ eight-year-old son was diagnosed with brain cancer. He returned to the United States to get him treatment. The Tigers insisted that he left the team without permission and released him. (Bass also had a contractual provision that required Hanshin to pay for his family's healthcare, and he speculated that they may have thought that they could get out of paying for the cancer treatment if they released him.) In any event, he claimed that they had given him permission to leave the team and produced a recording proving it. The Tigers' new GM (he had been on the job for only 40 days), Shingo Furuya, a close friend of Bass’, came under intense criticism for how the team handled the situation. He met with Bass in LA to try to negotiate his return to the team (and perhaps to negotiate paying a smaller portion of the cost of the child’s treatment?), but Bass refused to leave his son. Shortly thereafter Furuya jumped to his death from the 8th floor of a hotel in Tokyo. Bass explained that leaving the team (even if done with the team’s blessing) is not what would have been expected in Japan. He said: "I don't think any of the Japanese players would have left. In Japan, the wife takes care of the children and takes care of the money; she does it all. The man's place is his job."

Fortunately, Bass’ son survived, but the affair marked the end of his dad’s career. Bass claims that he was labeled a “troublemaker” and blacklisted from Japanese ball. He never did return to pro ball in the US, either. Post career, he ran a farm in Oklahoma, and was elected to the state senate, serving there until he ran up against a term limit and had to retire.

Hall of Fame: Yes | Meikyukai: No

The card is a 1986 Calbee. Probably the best card in the set at the time. Bass was coming off of a triple crown year and was about to win another one.

It was sad how his career ended and how long it took for him to be properly recognized for his accomplishments there, but glad he was able to be finally inducted to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. My late uncle in Japan was a big Hanshin fan and he used to love him.

Ricky Y

NST Stamps of Oh and Nagashima
 

I forgot I had these (sorry for the fuzzy pictures). Just found them over at my parent's house.

My aunt in Japan had sent me some Calbee Japanese Cards back in the early 70's when I went back home and told her I collected baseball cards.

I asked her to send me some when I returned back to the US.

Well then she sent me these instead. :p

I have a few more of these that I opened that have other players. And I had one left that was not opened.

Sean's blog had some cool info and photos about these. Although technically not cards, most of the photos have really nice action phots and some that are odd...haha.

I was lucky enough when I was little to see Nagashima and Oh play while still with the Giants at Koraku-en stadium before the Tokyo Dome was built against the Hanshin Tigers. If I recall, the Giants won and Takahashi Kazumi started for the Giants.

Ricky Y

I mean...they are cards. PSA and SGC will grade them (the best in the set are cards with the visiting American players, Boog Powell and Brooks Robinson). Keep in mind Japanese baseball cards run a huge range of traditional cardboard cards to thin photo cards. These are in the "stamp card" variety, which were intended to be collected and pasted into an album to complete the whole set. In the catalogue, they are listed as JMC 1: 1975 NST/Mr. Baseball

Anyone get anything fun in Prestige last night? I won this one:

https://prestigecollectiblesauction....77_1_15889.jpg

Arguably the two greatest hitters in the league's history on one card? Yes, please. Ironic how the hit king and home run king of the Japanese majors are ethnic Korean and Chinese, respectively.

You're right... no matter what form, it is a card. I love this issue for its pure photos!

Ricky Y

Wow nice card! The color pops off the screen!

Ricky Y