Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

I am not, I would like to be clear, a patient man. When I started going for the Japanese hall of fame, I managed to find something that I needed, basically every other day. Lately I’ve gone, well, rather more time between pickups.

This does not please me.

But the fact is that among the post-war hall of famers – so, the one’s that I’m actively chasing – there just aren’t very many left to find. I’m at 94% on my project and only need five more players. But obviously the last ones to get will, on average, be the hardest ones to find. And they have been the hardest ones to find.

So I decided to set out on another project. Something to keep me busy while those last five stragglers find their way into my collection. As noted up-thread, Japan has two halls of fame. There’s the yakyu dendo, which I’ve been chasing. It’s the one that people vote on, and they’ve got a museum in the Tokyo Dome. It is, in many respects, like the one in Cooperstown. But there’s also the Meikyukai, AKA The Golden Player’s Club. The Meikyukai is Masaichi Kaneda’s club. He founded it in 1978. Eligible players are those born during the Shōwa period (1926-1988) who have either 2000 hits, 200 wins, or 250 saves. Membership is more-or-less automatic. Or, at any rate, once a player hits the relevant milestones, he’s in unless he doesn’t want to be. The only players who are eligible but not in the Meikyukai are Kihachi Enomoto and Hiramitsu Ochiai. (Turning down Meikyukai membership was very on-brand for Ochiai.) Statistics accumulated outside of Japan count, but only so long as the player appeared in professional Japanese baseball before he accumulated them.

There are many reasons that the automatic qualifications are poorly chosen. They're arbitrary, they're poor measures of player skill or value, and they don't take context into account. The point that I’m trying to make is that if you’re trying to measure career quality, using wins, saves, and hits as proxies is a terrible way to do it.

Nevertheless, anyone who can hang around long enough to hit the milestones is probably a pretty good player, even if the milestones themselves are a poor way to evaluate them. And the Yakyu Dendo has some peculiar omissions, some of which, like Masahiro Doi, the Meikyukai does better with.

Meikyukai players are overwhelmingly recent players. Some of them are still active. So, fair warning: there are a lot of 2.5x3.5 cards with various amounts of foil embossing on the way.

Let’s start with this guy. This is Tomonori Maeda, an outfielder who played for the Carp for ages. And I mean ages. He had a 23 year career, and that doesn’t even count the 2009 season, which he missed completely. He’s in the Meikyukai on the strength of 2119 hits which go with a 302/358/484 slash line, over the years 1990-2013. Maeda had moderately good power – 295 home runs for his career, 20ish a year when he was playing full years (he had many partial seasons) – and little speed. His best season seems to have been 1993, when as a 22 year old he hit 27 home runs on the way to a 317/392/553 line.

The partial seasons were due to injury. Baseball-reference compares him to Eric Davis, due to the fact that they’re talented outfielders who were frequently injured and played for teams that used the same logo. That’s not a good comp though. Davis, at least when young, was amazingly fast. Seriously, check this out, in 1986 Davis hit 27 home runs and stole 80 bases. If he could have cut down on the injuries he could have been a modern-day Ty Cobb. (Some batting average aside.)

Maeda made the best nine four times, but the Carp are a traditionally weak team, and he managed to play in only one Japan Series. (They lost in seven to the Lions.)

The internet tells me that this is a clip of Maeda interviewing players (including Trout) about their swings.

This is a clip of the Carp against the Dragons in what looks like Maeda’s final game.

And here’s a compilation of a bunch of Maeda’s home runs. (Warning: the music is terrible.)

The card is a 1998 Calbee.