Japanese HOF Project

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Shunichi Amachi was a manager for the Dragons. He piloted the team from 1949 to 1951, again in 1954, and then in 1957-8. It was under his guidance that they won their first Japan Series, and their last for another half century. Oddly, he never played baseball professionally. At Meiji University he was a catcher, but he never did make it to NPB as a player. Albright ranks him as Japan’s 18th most successful manager, but his methodology leaves something to be desired. (It’s a system of the “assign X points for Y” type, where there’s no reason that X is worth Y points, and so nothing that the system actually measures.)

In addition to serving as a manager, he had a decent career as an umpire. He was an umpire for a league of six universities based in Tokyo from 1929 to 1947. In addition to college umpiring he put in some work umpiring high school matches, most notably in the Koshien tournament. Following his career as an umpire he took over managing Teikyo Commercial School baseball club, for whom his future ace with the Dragons, Shigeru Sugishita, pitched. Their careers would be fairly well intertwined, as it was on the back of Sugishita’s forkball that Amachi’s Dragons won their Japan Series.

Amachi was not on my original list of hall of famers to acquire. I set out to get cards of professional hall of fame players, and while I’ve made exceptions for players who were inducted as managers but who had long and successful playing careers (Hara comes to mind as an example), Amachi definitely doesn’t fall into that category. (Given that he didn’t play baseball post-college.) However, this is the only Amachi card that I’ve ever seen for sale (outside of uncut JCM21 sheets), this particular card is from JGA16, a set that I’d never encountered before. Indeed, Engel gives is rarity level R4 – indicating only 5-10 of each card known to exist. And while I think that Engel’s rarity levels should probably taken with a grain of salt, it surely at least indicates that there aren’t many of these floating around. So I picked up Amachi-san. JGA16 was issued in 1949, making this Amachi’s rookie card, if that’s what you call a manager’s first card.