Japanese HOF Project

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Masahiko (or Masaaki) Mori was elected to the hall of fame by the special selection committee on players. If he really is being inducted for his work as a player, I would have to say that he is wildly overrated. Mori was the catcher for the Giants from 1955-1974, right through the big V9 years. He spent a few years getting his toes wet – he actually broke into the league at 18 – and was a regular at 22. My guess is that he held the job the rest of his playing career, but had a few injuries to deal with towards the end. He made 11 consecutive all-star appearances, and was picked to eight consecutive best-nines. I don’t feel like wading through Central League catchers in the mid 60s at the moment, but I am extremely skeptical about this.

As a player he was… eh… he was a catcher. Career slash line of 236/283/318 isn’t going to scare anybody, pretty much regardless of context. Little in the way of on-base skills, little power. He never cleared a 400 slugging percentage in a full season. Eyeballing it, his best year looks to have been 1964, a year in which he was a little bit worse than average in on-base percentage and a little bit better than average in slugging percentage. And that was his best year. Maybe he was good with the glove?

Allow me some speculation/commentary on American baseball. In the American game guys who play important defensive positions on great teams tend to be held in higher esteem than they actually deserve. Sometimes they even get elected to the hall of fame (cf. Phil Rizzuto). Maybe that’s what was going on with Mori, because the guy’s offensive profile is just not impressive. Albright does not rank him among the top 115 Japanese players, and doesn’t give him an honorable mention, either.

Now, catching for Yomiuri isn’t all that he did. He was also a very successful manager. Mori was in charge of Seibu (the Lions) from 1986 to 1994, and then spent a couple years in this century with the Bay Stars. This was during the Lions’ streak of dominance – they won the Japan series six times in nine years. In total the teams that he was – in one way or another – involved with finished in first place 27 times. As a manager he was relatively relaxed, not a devotee of the Kawakami school of managing. (Peculiar, since they were teammates and Kawakami was later his manager. Or maybe it’s not peculiar, maybe he hated doing 500 fungo drills per day or whatever Kawakami had them doing.) Despite being non-traditional, the success was hard to ignore, and Mori won Japan’s version of the manager of the year award (Matsutaro Shoriki award) twice.

Pictures of his hall of fame induction ceremony here.

The card is from the JCM39 set, a pretty common one. And it’s not as yellow as it looks in the picture.