Japanese HOF Project

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Thanks Sean! The pace has slowed down recently, in part because a progressively higher percentage of the guys that I need are players from the early days of pro ball who didn’t play much (or at all) after the war. Those cards are hard to find. (The hall of famers who never played as pros I’m not including in this project.) So, I’m at 58% and have about a half-dozen cards on the way from Japan. But there’s still some low-hanging fruit out there, so I’ll keep chipping away at it. And I’ve got a sizable backlog of cards already in my collection that I haven’t written about yet.

My apologies to Mr. Wakamatsu for missing his Wikipedia page. Searching for information in a language that you don’t read can be pretty hard, even with Google Translate around to help out!

Today’s player is Shigeru Chiba. He was the second baseman for several versions of the Giants from 1938 to 1956. If his presence on cards from the early 50s is any indication, I take it that he was one of the bigger stars of the day. He was certainly a good hitter, regularly posting seasons that wouldn’t embarrass Chase Utley, even though he was playing through the middle of Japan’s deadball period. In particular he had extremely good on-base skills, walking far more than he struck out (and leading the league four times) and posting batting averages a bit under 300 (which was very good at the time). He’d also steal 15 or so bases in a year and hit 8-10 home runs. If I’d been his manager I’d have had him batting leadoff, or maybe second. Before going pro he had been a star amateur player in middle and high school. It amazes me that they took middle school baseball seriously. But they did. He made his pro debut at 19, but played only three seasons before going to war. Upon his return he took the league by storm, winning seven consecutive best nine awards.

The coolest thing about Chiba is that he was nicknamed ‘The Formidable Buffalo’. Presumably this wasn’t done ironically, although he wasn’t an especially large guy. He’s listed at 5’6” and 140 lbs. Average male height in Japan in 1950 was 5’4”; I don’t have average weights from 1950, but 140 lbs. is a bit below average for today. So it sounds like he was probably a little bit larger than average. Anyhow, he’s got an awesome nickname.

After his playing career ended he took over managing the Kintetsu team. The team at the time was known as the ‘Pearls’, but ownership asked the fans what the team should be called, and ‘Buffaloes’ won, in honor of the manager. (Americans have done this too: remember the Cleveland Naps?)

Albright compares Chiba to Joe Gordon and considers him the greatest second baseman in Japanese history. I don’t really think that the comparison is apt. They were very different kinds of players. Gordon was a slugger, Chiba wasn’t. Now, obviously there are very serious dissimilarities between these two, but purely for on-the-field stuff, a better comparison might be Jackie Robinson. Even on-field the comparison isn’t perfect, Robinson really was an extraordinary baseball player. But Chiba was the same kind of player, just less of it.

The card is an uncatalogued menko. Somebody on QC duty messed this one up: look at the team name on his jersey. I'd write this off to the guy who designed the card not knowing English, but you don't need to know English to copy the jersey. Anyway, the card is hard to date since Chiba never changed teams and I don’t know of any other players in the set. I’m going to call it UNC Menko, c. 1950s and leave it at that.