Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

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 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.