Japanese HOF Project

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Kaoru Bettoh was an outfielder with the Tigers and the Orions from 1948 to 1957. Perhaps just as importantly he had a 20 year career managing a variety of teams, mostly notably the Orions as a player-manager.

Albright ranks him as the 17th most successful manager in Japanese history, but his ranking system is of the “assign 3 points for X, 2 points for Y” sort (a kind Bill James indulged in on more than one occasion), which doesn’t really measure anything. I think that the most accurate thing to say about his managing career is that it was long and had periods of sustained success.

As a player Bettoh had a very high but very brief peak. In 1950 he slugged .671 in a league that slugged .384 as a whole. It was about 75% better than league average. To do that in 2018’s American League you would need to slug .728. That figure would place 27th all-time, behind Frank Thomas’ 1994 and Hack Wilson’s 1930. In 1950 he hit 35% of his team’s home runs. In short, he was a big slugger, and fast too, stealing forty bases one season. But he didn’t get to the JPBL until he was 27, and although he hung on for a couple more seasons, he was basically done at 33. And he was really only a superstar for a couple years. The late start seems to be a product of playing in the industrial leagues – which he must have absolutely dominated, but I don’t know where to find data on it, nor even if records were kept. Albright suggests that the war might have gotten in the way. I don’t know if he served or not, but he didn’t break in until 1948, so even if he was in the war, it doesn’t explain why he wasn’t playing in 46-7.

Throughout the 20th century there were a number of attempts to bring together Japanese and American baseball, most notably the various American tours of Japan. The tours were not the only instances of Japanese/American cooperation, however. A number of Japanese teams came to spring training in the states, and every once in a while you’ll find a Japanese player who made a brief appearance in an American minor league. Walter O’Malley was especially active in these cooperative endeavors, taking the Dodgers on tour and bringing Japanese teams to train with them. Indeed, Bettoh spent the 1960 season with the Dodgers. It’s not clear what he was doing with them – he was retired as a player at that point and there’s no record of him doing any coaching for them. Perhaps he was just an observer. In any case, that was the end of his tenure with the Orions. He sat out the following season, before taking over managing Kintetsu. This must have been a change for him, the Orions were good, the Buffaloes were not. After going 55-91 in 1964 he lost his job, sat out a few years, and then took over the top job with the Whales.

Bettoh was a graduate of Keio University, which had one of the top programs in the amateur era. Baseball-Reference has a list of players who attended Keio (and who went on to play professionally). I’m surprised by the lack of hall of famers, given the status of the program. I only noticed two others – Fujita and Mizuhara – and all three of them are in the hall largely for their work as managers. It is, of course, possible that this list in incomplete, but I expected a larger share of the early stars of Japanese baseball to have come through Keio.

The card is an uncatalogued menko. Despite being uncatalogued we can do a pretty good job dating it. Bettoh is wearing a Tigers’ uniform, which places the card either in 1948 or 1949.