Japanese HOF Project

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Tsutomu Wakamatsu was an outfielder (switching between left and center) for the Yakult Swallows from 1971 to 1989. He had moderate power but high batting averages and a good walk/K rate. His career line is 319/375/481. If memory serves, that .319 batting average is tied for second best all-time in Japan. And he did it over an impressive 7500 plate appearances. He could steal a base, but that wasn’t his game exactly. Offensively he’s the same sort of player that Derek Jeter was. (Of course defensively there’s a position difference to consider.) Wakamatsu was a consistently excellent player. He made the all-star team 11 times, and was named to 10 best nines. Which is really good; it indicates that those all-star selections weren’t of the “well, we need to fill out the team, so why not this guy?” variety. Like Jeter he was a multi-gold glove winner (although only 2 in his case), although Jeter didn’t really deserve his hardware. And unlike Jeter, he won an MVP award.

Albright ranks Wakamatsu 35th all-time amongst Japanese players, and tells us that his nickname was “little big bat”, in reference to his size (5’6”) and his batting average (which was the opposite of low). The Jeter comparison is supposed to be “in-context”, so, like:

Jeter:American Baseball :: Wakamatsu:Japanese Baseball

At least in so far as their on-field production goes. I’m fairly sure that Jeter’s cultural impact was larger than Wakamatsu’s, at least given that Wakamatsu doesn’t even have a Japanese Wikipedia page. Albright tried to come up with something like MLE’s for Japanese baseball.* Given those, he lists Enos Slaughter, Tim Raines, Jose Cruz, Griffey Sr., Bill Buckner, Buddy Bell, and some other non-exciting players as comparables.

As with many great players, Wakamatsu went into coaching and managing after his retirement as an active player. He served several years in the minor leagues; managing the Swallows for seven years he posted a W/L record slightly above .500.

*MLE = major league equivalent. It’s one of the tools that we use to evaluate minor league players. Basically, MLEs try to determine what a player who does X in league Y would do if they were in the big leagues. It must be nightmarishly difficult to do this for Japanese players, given the dearth of data points.

Here is a video the Swallows played at the stadium during their “Wakamatsu Day” following his retirement.

My Wakamatsu card is from the 1974/75 Calbee set.