Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

I’ve got an Aota card on an uncut menko sheet. But it doesn’t really fit in my binder. Tough life, I know. So anyways, I picked up another one.

Here’s what I wrote about him before.

Aota was a slugging outfielder who played with several different teams from 1942 to 1959. He held the career home run record for a little while, and led the league in home runs five times. In 1948, one of the years in which he led the league in home runs, he also led the league in batting average (barely, .001 over Kozuru and Yamamoto), but missed out on a triple crown by nine RBIs. B-R says that he was traded by the Giants to the Whales, but as always I can’t find the player who went the other way. I’m starting to doubt that they actually traded players back then.

Let’s do some adjustments for context, and see how big of a slugger Aota was. We’ll start with that 1948 season in which he nearly won a triple crown. His raw numbers were: 306/339/499, against a league average of 242/300/329. Put that into the 2018 American League and you get a 315 batting average, 359 on base percentage, and 632 slugging percentage. Let’s look at 1951 also. His raw line was 312/378/582. League average was 264/329/375. In a 2018 American League context that works out to 294/366/645. That slugging percentage is better than anyone managed in 2018, the on-base percentage, while good, wouldn’t have ranked among the league leaders. It’s a reasonably good match for what Nelson Cruz is doing for MIN this year. Given his home run hitting ways, I want to compare him to Ralph Kiner, but Aota was much faster, and Kiner was much better at getting on base. Positional differences aside, maybe Home Run Baker is the comparable American player.

Aota was elected to the hall of fame in 2009. Since he had died some years earlier, Shigeru Sugishita gave a part of his acceptance speech (his widow also gave a speech) and said that, while he was in the army, Aota was capable of throwing a grenade 84 meters. Which sounds like a hell of a long throw to me. The hall notes that he was nicknamed “Unruly Bronco”. Albright thinks he was Japan’s 71st greatest player.

Meikyukai: No – Hall of Fame: Yes

The card is an uncatalogued bromide. There must be a zillion uncatalogued bromide sets. I did a quick scan over my collection, and more than half of my bromides are from uncatalogued sets. I’ve got plenty of uncatalogued menko cards too, but the percentage isn’t that extreme. Lots of these sets are also very similar. The only difference between this card and my Tsubouchi card is that it is ever so slightly smaller. Since I already had an Aota card (if only as a part of an uncut sheet), this one doesn’t get me any closer to finishing the hall of fame collection. It’s impossible to tell precisely when this card was issued. Aota is on the Giants, so that narrows it down to 1948 to 1952, but I can’t say anything more definitive than that.