Japanese HOF Project

[Exhibitman]

More bromides from the 1949 Seals tour:


O'Doul with Betto and Wakabayashi



Translations would be appreciated.

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

More bromides from the 1949 Seals tour:


O'Doul with Betto and Wakabayashi



Translations would be appreciated.

Upper Left: Bit hard to make out, I think it says "Young Coach" then "Itouru" which is probably a mangling of someobody's name.

Upper right: Third Baseman Frank Shofner

Lower Left: Spring Training

Lower Right: The Seals' Dynamite Lineup

[nat]

Sadaharu Oh

1. Preliminary Remarks

There are some figures that are so humongous that they are hard to comprehend. There are 225,622 miles between here and the moon. The Pacific Ocean weighs 1.483×10^21 pounds. That sort of thing. Here is another: Sadaharu Oh hit 868 homeruns.

Eight hundred and sixty-eight.

There are a number of ways you can try to make sense of this record. One is to ask what a similar record in the US would look like. Another, and one that American baseball fans inevitably ask when they start thinking about Oh, is to ask how many home runs he would have hit if he had played in the US. The “what if he had played in the US?” question is partly asked out of sheer parochialism, and part of it is a disbelief that someone could accomplish a feat that seems to be impossible in the American game, but part of it is hoping that there is some way to comprehend this record, something that would make it intelligible. Like when Bill Nye builds a scale model of the solar system.

This is my second post about Oh. You can read the first one here. There’s been enough written about Oh, including by Oh himself, that you don’t need me to tell much of his story. So in this post I’m going to play with some numbers. In particular, I’m going to take a swing (if you’ll forgive the baseball metaphor) at answering the questions posed in the last paragraph. The first question—what would a similar US record look like?—is relatively straightforward. And I’ll answer that one in a minute. The other—what would he have done if he had played in the US?—is utterly unanswerable. A bit later I’ll explain why, and then I’ll make an effort at answering some other related questions.


2. Oh’s production in an American context

Oh played from 1959 to 1980. He spent his entire career with the Yomiuri Giants. I am going to use the most straightforward way that I can think of to translate his production into an American context. Basically, what I’m going to do is compare Oh’s homerun rate to league average, and then use the resulting figure to calculate what a comparable homerun rate would be in the target league (I’m going to use the NL from 1959 to 1980). Then I’ll adjust Oh’s plate appearances by the difference in league schedules, and multiply the adjusted homerun rate by this number of plate appearances.

The math is just arithmetic, but I’ll explain each step and then provide the formula. Since we want to know how much better Oh was at hitting homeruns than his contemporaries, we need to know how good they were at hitting homeruns. So the first step is to divide the number of plate appearances that batters in the Central League recorded by the number of homeruns that they hit. That gives us:

(LgPA/LgHR)

We’re going to want to compare this number to Oh’s homerun rate, so we then divide Oh’s PA by his HRs. And we get the comparison between Oh and the league by dividing the league homerun rate by Oh’s. So far we’ve got:

(LgPA/LgHR)/(Oh’s PA/Oh’s HR)

So, for example, in 1964 the Central League hit a homerun every 38.6 PA, and Oh hit one every 10.8 PA. Divide the first number by the second number, and you find that Oh was about 3.5x more efficient at hitting homeruns than was the 1964 Central League. Now, we are interested in translating Oh’s performance into MLB context, so we need to calculate MLB homerun rates:

MLB_PA/MLB_HR

Then you divide the latter number by the former number. This tells you how many plate appearances an MLB player would go between home runs, if he was as far above league average at hitting home runs as Oh was:

(MLB_PA / MLB_HR) / ((LgPA/LgHR) / (Oh’s PA/Oh’s HR))

In 1964 National League players hit a home run about once ever 50.5 plate appearances. If you divide that by 3.5 you get 14.42. So, to be as far above NL average as Oh was above CL average in 1964, you would need to hit a homerun once every 14.42 plate appearances.

That gives us a rate stat, but we want a counting stat: a number of home runs. So we need to do three things. We need to adjust Oh’s plate appearances by the difference in the schedule length between MLB and Japan. We then need to adjust this number by the percentage of league games that Oh actually appeared in. Finally, we divide this adjusted number of plate appearances by the rate that we calculated above. The number of games the Central League played varied by year, but was usually 130. MLB season length switched in 1962 from 154 games to 162, so there will be some differences in the calculations from year-to-year, but the general idea is this:

(Oh’s PA)*((#NL games/#CL games)*(Oh’s games played/#CL games))

Let’s go through this part slowly. “Oh’s PA” is just his actual number of plate appearances. “#NL games” is the number of games scheduled in the National League, either 154 or 162 depending on the year. “#CL games” is the number of games in the Central League, either 130 or 140. Dividing NL games by CL games tells us how much longer, in percentage terms, the NL season is. We’re going to multiply Oh’s actual PA in order to account for the fact that an American version of Oh would have played in more games, but he doesn’t get credit for the entire difference in the schedule, because Oh missed some games here and there. That’s what “(Oh’s games played/#CL games)” is all about. It tells us what percentage of Central League games Oh actually played in. By multiplying the (percentage) difference in the league schedules by the percentage of games that Oh actually played in, we ensure that our Oh clone doesn’t get too much credit for playing in a league with a longer season.

So, this whole figure gives us a number of MLB-adjusted plate appearances for our Oh clone. If we divide this number by the average number of plate appearances per homerun (calculated above), we get our MLB translation for Oh’s homerun production. Here’s the final formula:

((Oh’s PA)*((#NL games/#CL games)*(Oh’s games played/#CL games))) / ((MLB_PA / MLB_HR) / ((LgPA/LgHR) / (Oh’s PA/Oh’s HR)))

Feel free to check my math, but I think that works. I did this calculation for each season of Oh’s career, and then summed the number of homeruns hit in each season (rounded to the nearest whole, it looks odd to have him hitting 45.2 homeruns). Here’s the table:

Year HRs
1959 9
1960 27
1961 25
1962 65
1963 45
1964 56
1965 62
1966 65
1967 43
1968 33
1969 40
1970 52
1971 37
1972 43
1973 56
1974 36
1975 26
1976 26
1977 38
1978 27
1979 23
1980 21
Total 855

In a curious twist, the differences in season length almost completely make up for differences in homerun rates. Translated into the National League, 868 homeruns in the 1959-1980 Central League is… 855 homeruns. Yowza. The top figure is 65, a number achieved in both 1962 and 1966. (Years in which Oh actually hit 38 and 47 homeruns.) Ten of these figures would have led the league: 1962-1967, 1970, and 1972-1974.

(Incidentally, does anyone know how to insert a table into a Net54 post? I tried HTML, and it accepted the code but yielded weird results. Obvious possibility is that I was doing it wrong, but any advice is appreciated.)


3. The counterfactual question

It’s important to see that the foregoing does not tell you what Oh himself would have done if he had played in the National League. It tells you what a player who was as much better than NL average as Oh was better than CL average would have done. If the counterfactual question ‘how many home runs would Oh have hit if he had played in the National League?’ is taken literally, I don’t think that there’s any way to answer it. A 19 year old Sadaharu Oh might have gotten homesick during spring training, gone home, and joined Yomiuri. Or he might not have been able to keep up with a 162 game schedule and succumbed to chronic injuries. Or he might have been just fine. There’s no way to tell.

So the counterfactual question is unanswerable. We can, however, answer another question that might be found in the vicinity of that one. To explain that question, I think it would be best if I were to talk about MLEs for a while.

‘MLE’ stands for Major League Equivalence. You use MLEs to evaluate minor league performance. The idea is that you’ve got Joe McMinorLeaguer and you want to know what to expect from him. You’ve got his minor league numbers, but they were put up against minor league pitching, in minor league ballparks, and so on. And it’s hard to know what they tell you about his potential major league performance. So what you do is you find a bunch of players who have appeared in the same minor league as Joe and also appeared in the major leagues, and you see how strong the correlation was between their minor league performance and their major league performance. (It’s obviously a lot better if they played in the majors during the same year that they played in Joe’s league.) You then assume that Joe’s numbers would translate as well as this comparison class, and you adjust his minor league numbers accordingly. Those major league equivalences are not what Joe would have done if he had been in the major leagues—that’s unknowable—but they do give you some idea about what he would have done, and they can be fed into a projection system with some degree of confidence that the projection it will give you isn’t just nonsense.

The crucial bit for my purposes is that you can do this with Japanese statistics too. The guy to look to here is Clay Davenport, co-founder of Baseball Prospectus and guru of baseball statistics. His Davenport Translations give us just what we want. He’s got two sets of translations, a normal one and a ‘peak’ translation. I’m not clear on the differences between the two models, although it is obvious that the latter is more forgiving for hitters. Whether this is due to different comparison classes, or regressing numbers to the mean less (or more) aggressively, or what, I don’t know. In any case, here are the Davenport translations for Oh’s home runs:

Normal Translation

Year HRs
1959 3
1960 9
1961 7
1962 19
1963 18
1964 25
1965 22
1966 23
1967 20
1968 20
1969 18
1970 24
1971 19
1972 23
1973 26
1974 21
1975 16
1976 19
1977 19
1978 16
1979 13
1980 13
Total 393


Peak Translation

Year HRs
1959 5
1960 11
1961 8
1962 21
1963 19
1964 25
1965 22
1966 23
1967 20
1968 20
1969 18
1970 24
1971 19
1972 24
1973 27
1974 23
1975 18
1976 22
1977 24
1978 22
1979 19
1980 22
Total 436

Both versions of the Davenport Translation see Oh as a mid-range slugger in MLB. Perhaps his biggest strength was his consistency, so if an MLB team saw fit to keep a player with 20ish HR power at 1B, it’s not unreasonable to think that he could have had a very long career. Davenport uses the 1992 American League as his target league, so the statistics in the above tables are translated into that context.

However, the Davenport Translations don't account for differences in the league schedule. Once you work that in, the picture changes:


Peak

Year HRs
1959 5
1960 14
1961 10
1962 27
1963 25
1964 34
1965 28
1966 28
1967 25
1968 25
1969 22
1970 30
1971 24
1972 30
1973 34
1974 29
1975 22
1976 26
1977 30
1978 27
1979 22
1980 27
Total 544

That total would place him 17th all-time, just between David Ortiz and Mike Schmidt. Under the normal translation, adjusted for league schedule, he ends up with 486 home runs, good for 30th all time, above Adrian Beltre and Miguel Cabrera, and below Lou Gehrig and Fred McGriff.


4. The card

This is a post to a baseball card website, and so is ostensibly about a baseball card. So here’s a baseball card. It’s a 1977 Calbee. In 1977 Calbee released many sets; at least, Engel catalogues them as separate although closely related sets. (How they were actually distributed I don’t know.) I have been unable to determine which of the many ’77 Calbee sets this one belongs to. There is one promising candidate (although I don’t have my copy of Engel handy and I don’t remember which one it is), but the book says that the back of this particular set is framed by ‘weeds’—a leaf motif that turns up both on Calbee cards and on some menko sets. And my card doesn’t have a frame around the text on the back. So I can’t say any more than that it is a ’77 Calbee.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

[nat]

Tsutomu Wakamatsu was an outfielder with the Yakult Swallows from 1971 to 1989. He is a member of both the hall of fame and the Meikyukai. Accordingly, I've written about him before. Here’s my first post. I don’t have much to add, so this one will be fairly short. Wakamatsu was nicknamed “Mr. Swallows” and also “small hitter” (he’s 5’6” and 162). When he was in school he was an avid skier, and struggled with the decision about whether to focus on baseball or skiing. I think it’s safe to say that he made the right choice. He was a third round draft pick, and his first season he played for legendary manager Osamu Mihara, in the latter’s final managerial stop.

Wakamatsu’s game revolved around getting on base; he had a healthy on base percentage with a high batting average and medium power. His .319 career batting average is one of the better marks in Japanese history. In fact, it may be the best, depending on the restrictions that you put on qualified batters. It is the highest mark for batters with more than 5000 at bats, but if you drop that floor down to 4900 Leron Lee takes over the lead with a .320 mark. Wakamatsu’s on base percentage really was driven by his batting average. He didn’t walk much, and he struck out even less. His career high in walks was 49 in 1978, and in strike outs it was 43 in 1973. In some ways he’s sort of the opposite of the contemporary American player. Far from being a “three true outcome” batter, he nearly always put the ball into play.

After his playing career ended Wakamatsu spent a few years as a baseball commentator, before becoming a hitting coach, and eventually the manager of the Swallows. He held the top job with Yakult from 1999 to 2005.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

The card is from the 1976 Calbee set.

[nat]

Taira Fujita played 19 seasons with Hanshin (1966 to 1984), mostly at shortstop. He was a pretty good hitter, especially for a shortstop. Uncharacteristically for a shortstop, however, he was slow. In home runs he topped out at 28 (but was usually in the teens; those 28 homers placed him third in the league, behind Oh and Nagashima), but only twice did he manage double digit steals. For his career Fujita posted a 286/336/435 slash line, and he qualified for the Meikyukai with his 2000th hit in 1983. From 66 through 78 (his age 30 season) he mostly played short. In 1979 he suffered a serious injury; a few years before he’d started missing about 1/4th of the season, but in 79 he appeared in only 18 games due to a torn thigh muscle. Thereafter he was exclusively a first baseman. It’s a shame to shift your shortstop to a position as defensively unimportant as first base, but apparently the injury necessitated it, and based on a casual examination of Hanshin rosters, he doesn’t seem to have been blocking anyone who could have made better use of the roster spot. And his offense was strong enough to justify a spot at first base anyway – he won a batting title in 1981 (with a .358 mark). As one might expect from a shortstop, he was a good fielder at first base (winning a diamond glove award in addition to the batting title), and was selected to the best nine in 1981. Albright thinks well of him, regarding him as Japan’s 37th greatest player.

Fujita’s career started off strong. His rookie season was nothing special, but as a 19 year old sophomore he led the league in hits, doubles, and triples, and was selected to his first (of seven) best nine. I'm guessing that this wasn’t a surprise. Fujita’s high school team reached the Koshien finals, and he was the first player in Koshien history to hit two home runs in the same game. When he became the starting shortstop (as a 19 year old) he replaced hall of famer Yoshio Yoshida.

During 1978, in what is perhaps Fujita’s best-known accomplishment, he went 208 at bats without striking out. This is a record that would stand until Ichiro came along, and went (IIRC) 216 at bats without a K. He is also known for having a central role in the “Violent Tigers Incident”. In 1982, during what had apparently been a tense game, he hit a ball down the third base line that rolled foul. The Tigers’ third base coach claimed that a fielder had touched it before it rolled foul, but the umpires refused to change their call. Two Tiger coaches were much distressed by this, and an argument with the umpire eventually led to the coaches kicking and punching him. (Fines and suspensions were, of course, forthcoming.) As near as I can tell Fujita didn’t do anything wrong, but he was the one who hit the ball that started the whole thing.

After retiring Fujita coached and briefly managed the Tigers. Apparently his managerial stints did not go well. He was extremely harsh and unpopular with his players. The team finished in sixth place both seasons that he was in charge. He has also coached in an independent league, and served as a baseball commentator on TV.

As usual with Tigers players, thehanshintigers.com has a better write up than my meager attempt at biography.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

The card is from the 1976 Calbee set.

And a random note for people who like awesome stuff: Jim Allen has a run expectancy table for Japan.

[nat]

Hitoki Iwase was a Chunichi relief pitcher from 1999 through 2018. From 2004 to 2014 he was a closer, and he collected 407 saves in his career (thereby qualifying for the Meikyukai). He holds Japan’s all-time record for saves.

Iwase was good, as a career 2.31 ERA attests. It is, however, important to remember that relief pitchers always have lower ERAs (on average) than do starting pitchers. Popular speculation is that this is because they can put everything they’ve got into each pitch, knowing that they’re only going to pitch an inning or two. And as you expect from a relief pitcher, Iwase didn’t pitch much. He totaled 985 innings pitched in 1005 games (so, even less than one inning per appearance). My guess is that 2002 was his best season. That year Iwase posted a career-best 1.06 ERA over 59 innings. A few years earlier he did pitch 80 innings to the tune of 1.90 ERA, and while that mark is very good, it’s still almost double his 2002 figure. In 2002 he was still pitching in middle relief – he was setting up for Eddie Gaillard, who was mostly unsuccessful in a short MLB career, but who would go on to have three solid years pitching in Nagoya. Gaillard left the team (probably traded?) mid-way through 2003, but Iwase still didn’t get the closing gig. Akinori Otsuka took over after Gaillard left. I’m not convinced that Otsuka was a better option than Iwase, but, anyways, the next year Otsuka went to pitch for the Padres and Iwase finally got the top spot in the Dragons’ bullpen. And ‘finally’ is a good word to use here: Iwase was 29 when he inherited the spot. He would pitch until he was 43.

Maybe the hesitancy involved in giving him the closers spot was due to the that he’s left handed. Left handed pitchers are usually at a platoon disadvantage, and managers seems to be loath to give up the platoon advantage when bringing in a relief pitcher. If he’s good enough (e.g. Aroldis Chapman) it can, however, be worthwhile.

Iwase was a part of the first Dragons team to win the Japan Series in half a century in 2007. He was, during the series, brought in as a relief pitcher in the 9th inning of a perfect game. I can’t imagine the guts involved in removing a pitcher in the 9th inning of a perfect game. (Or even what the manager must be thinking. It’s not like the guy has painted himself into a corner or something – there’s nobody on base! He must have just really lost his command or was visibly tired or something. It was Hiromitsu Ochiai managing, if somebody is going to do something daring and controversial, it's him.) Anyhow, it ended well. Iwase did not allow a runner, preserved the perfect game, and won the Series. The Dragons were good during his time with them, appearing in the Japan Series six times. They managed, however, to win only in 2007.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of fame: No YES - as of 2025

2002 BBM

[nat]

Tadahito Iguchi played from 1997 to 2017, mostly at second base. He broke in as a 22 year old with the Daiei Hawks, with whom he stayed until 2005, when he signed with the White Sox. Position players imported from Japan mostly do not have a good track record in the US, but Iguchi was more successful than most. He was already past his prime, but still put in a couple years playing a solid second base on the south side. Mid 2007 he found himself traded to the Phillies. They released him at the end of the year, and he signed with the Padres. Most of the way through a poor 2008, they released him and he returned to the Phillies for their stretch run. In 2009 he went back to Japan, joining the Chiba Lotte Marines this time. (His initial contract upon his return to Japan was a three-year deal for about $6m total.) He had some good years left, but looks to me like he was a minor star for the balance of his career. In Japan he collected 1760 hits, but the 494 that he recorded in MLB put him over the top as far as Meikyukai membership is concerned.

As a young man, Iguchi had good power and very good speed. In 2001 (age 26) he hit 30 home runs and stole 44 bases. But his best season was probably 2003, in which he hit 27, stole 42, and posted a slash line of 340/438/573. That slugging percentage was an outlier, he was usually in the mid-400s before coming to the States, and ended up with a 268/338/401 line. Reportedly his success in 2003 was due to a change in approach: instead of trying to pull the ball, he started going the other way. If true, it’s a bit odd, as his slugging didn’t suffer any. Usually you hit for more power to your pull side.

Although his MLB career was brief, it was eventful. Iguchi managed a seven RBI game, that, incredibly, his team lost. He was also a member of the 2005 World Champion White Sox, hitting a crucial playoff home run along the way. As a member of the Marines he won the Japan Series. And as an Olympian he took home a silver medal.

If you’re looking for a comparable American player, you need a middle infielder with moderate power, good speed, and a long career. Julio Franco comes to mind. So does Paul Molitor. They were the same kind of player (even if Molitor was better). Neither one is a perfect match. Iguchi ended up moving to first base eventually, but he stayed at an important defensive position longer than did Molitor. But I think that Molitor was the better hitter. On the other hand, Iguchi clearly had more power than Franco.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

I’m not super happy with the card. It’s from the 2013 BBM set, but it’s a card celebrating the history of the Hawks franchise. So although Iguchi was on the Marines at the time that the card was printed, it shows him on the Hawks. Some day I’m sure I’ll get around to shelling out ~$2 for a different Iguchi card.