Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Katuso Osugi was a slugging first baseman from 1965 to 1983. The first part of his career he spent with the Flyers/Fighters, and the balance of his career with Yakult. As a player, he’s a familiar type. He hit home runs, didn’t run fast, and played a defensively-unimportant position. Speaking of home runs, he totaled 486 for his career, topping 40 each year from 1970 to 1972. To go with a career slash line of 287/350/519.

Strangely, finding an analogous American player is difficult not for a dearth of comparable players, but because there are too many. Eddie Murray, Rafael Palmeiro, Carlos Delgado, Reggie Jackson if you don’t mind including outfielders. I’ll nominate Palmeiro, not because he’s statistically a better fit than Murray (or lots of other people) but because he, like Osugi, split his career almost evenly in half between two teams. (Of course Palmeiro jumped back and forth between them, whereas Osugi had a cleaner split.)

Osugi started his baseball career in the industrial leagues, playing for the Marui Department Store team. A workout with the Flyers got him his first pro contract. He was selected to five best-nines, all of them before leaving the Flyers. (The Flyers play in the Pacific League. When he moved to Yakult he also switched leagues, and someone named ‘Oh’ had the first base slot on the best-nine team locked down for the Central League.) However, he did win the Japan Series MVP award in 1978, en route to the Swallows’ first ever Japan Series championship.

It turns out that the Buffaloes aren’t the only team named after one of their players (Shigeru Chiba, in their case). The Fighters are also named after one of their players. The story goes that the team had a contest to pick a name (to replace ‘Flyers’), and the winning entry suggested naming the team ‘Fighters’ in honor of Osugi’s fighting spirit. And then they traded him the next year, but whatevs. Luckily the internet didn’t exist yet, or else they would have ended being the Nippon Ham Baseballteam McBaseteamface.

Albright considers him the sixth-greatest Japanese first baseman, and 25th greatest player overall. Osugi’s batting style involved, he said, “hitting towards the moon”, about which Albright dryly remarks “I gather [it] involved uppercutting”.

My card is from the 1979 Yamakatsu set. My main source for Calbee cards has dried up, so I’ve had to start looking for other manufacturers for post-1960s cards. For what little it’s worth (=probably nothing, since there are only two graded examples total) this is the only PSA 10 1979 Yamakatsu Katsuo Osugi. It’s my first Yamakatsu card; it has a nice bright image and a few basic stats on the back. You can tell from the mylar shrink wrap in a standard holder that it’s about the size of the 1980s Calbee cards. Unfortunately, the slab has a crack in it (along the bottom). Given how thinly collected Japanese cards are, it’s probably not worth re-holdering. (To give you an idea, Robb Fitts has the only 1978 Yamakatsu PSA registry set. There aren’t any 1979 registry sets.) I might liberate it from its tomb, to allow it its rightful place in my binder. But, given all the talk of how picky PSA is with their high-grade cards, it also seems like a shame to give up an official Gem Mint designation.

Edit: And I'm at 66% now.