Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Tomoaki Kanemoto was a slugging outfielder with very good on-base skills. He played from 1992 to 2012, and is one of the most recent inductees into the hall of fame. From 1992 to 2002 he played for the Carp, and he spent the balance of his career with Hanshin. For career numbers he’s got slightly more than 2500 hits, 476 home runs, and a 285/382/503 slash line. It seems that he had a fair amount of speed, but he didn’t always make good use of it, and lost it as he got older. But anyway, he did manage to steal 30 bases one year. Just going by his raw numbers, 2005 stands out as his best year. He managed better than 120 runs and RBIs, knocked in 40 homers, and put up a 327/429/615 line. All of those numbers except for the on-base percentage were career highs.

Let’s compare that 2005 season to league average. The Central League that year hit 270/331/411. That’s a pretty good match for the current American League. Last year they put up a 249/318/416 line. The lower batting average was driving the lower OBP (made up for by a few more walks it looks like), but otherwise pretty similar. To translate Kanemoto’s 2005 season into a contemporary American context, you don’t need to do much at all. Shave off a little AVG and OBP, but it’s close enough I’m not going to bother actually calculating this one. Nobody in the American League had a season last year that was a good match for Kanemoto’s 2005, but Christian Yelich, MVP winner over in the NL, is close enough. They’re actually the same kind of player, it’s just that, except for this past year, Kanemoto was better than Yelich.

The weird thing about this guy is that he got such a late start. Kanemoto broke into the league at 24, but didn’t play a full season until he was 28. That’s really old for a hall of famer. Usually those guys have established themselves as superior ball players when they’re in their early 20s (or, in plenty of cases, earlier). Kanemoto has such good career numbers because he managed to hang around so long. He played through his age 44 season. If he’d gotten started at a more normal age (for a hall of famer) he might have managed to join Harimoto in the 3000 hit club. Super weirdly, he made a best nine even before he played a full season. He was selected in 1995 despite missing about 20% of his team's games.

One thing that he was known for was endurance. He appeared in 1,766 consecutive games, and broke Cal Ripken’s streak for consecutive innings. (Ripken sent him a bat to commemorate the occasion.) The game that ended his consecutive-games streak almost didn’t. He was sent up to pinch hit, but a runner got thrown out to end the inning and so he wasn’t credited with an at bat.

Although he played in the outfield for his entire career he seems to have had a rather weak arm. He was nicknamed “Mole Killer” for bouncing throws to the infield. That’s pretty harsh.

Even late in his career Kanemoto was one of the highest paid players in Japan, pulling in more than $5MM per year. (Also, can this possibly be right? In 2008 the Carp were, on average, paying their players <$20K?)
After retiring Kanemoto took over managing the Tigers. They finished the 2018 season in last place and Kanemoto apparently blamed himself. Despite attempts by ownership to get him to sign a multiyear contract, he announced last October that he was resigning.

As with many former Tigers, thehanshintigers.com has a nice biography of him.

And I can’t read it, but he also has his own website.

In the early 2000s Upper Deck made a foray into the Japanese market. It didn’t last long, but they did put out a few sets. This card is from the 2000 Ovation set. It's got one nice feature. The stitches on the baseball are... what's the opposite of embossed? Exbossed? Anyway, they stick out, which is a neat touch.