Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Hideo Fujimoto was a star pitcher for the Giants (and one season with the Dragons) during the war and in the immediate postwar years. He pitched from 1942 to 1955, of course missing 1945 when the league was suspended. For his career he has an astonishing .697 winning percentage (200 wins to 87 losses). If an American team had a .697 winning percentage they’d win 113 games. In addition he is the all-time record holder for both career ERA (1.90) and seasonal ERA (0.73). He was Korean, which confuses me a bit, since I’m pretty sure that ‘Fujimoto’ is a Japanese name. Apparently his family moved to Japan when he was eight years old.

In addition to being one of the finest pitchers in Japanese history, Fujimoto was a very skilled batter. He hit 245/319/327, which, you say “looks good for a pitcher”, but remember that the 1940s and early 50s were the Japanese deadball era. For example, in 1950 he posted an OPS of .808 against a league average of .727. It’s not that he was a good hitter for a pitcher, it’s that he was a good hitter period. There was a brief time (after his return to the Giants from the Dragons) when they experimented with him as an outfielder – it should be some indication of how highly his skill with the bat was respected that the Giants took one of the best pitchers to have ever lived and tried to make him an outfielder. In the end it didn’t stick (he played a total of 40 games in the outfield) and he went back to pitching full time.

During his career the Giants were (as usual) quite successful. They won the Japan Series from 1951-3, defeating the Hawks each time. The Giants = Yankees thing is perhaps something of a cliché, but it’s also just so true. Sometimes you gotta feel for the Dodgers/Hawks. He is best known for being the first Japanese player to throw a perfect game (in 1950). Arm troubles led him to change from an overhand to a side arm delivery, and he is credited with popularizing the slider in Japan. (If they weren’t throwing sliders before 1942, what where they throwing? If they’re not throwing sliders I have a hard time imagining them throwing curve balls. Just FB/CH and trying to pick your spots?)

Unfortunately he had a relatively short career, and an even shorter peak. From 1942 to 1950 he regularly led the league in ERA and other pitching categories (at least when he threw enough innings to qualify). He continued to be a good pitcher for a few seasons after that, but never again led the league in anything. And then his career was abruptly over. In 1954 he pitched 19 innings, in 1955 he pitched five. And that was that. Maybe injuries were involved, I don’t know. In 1955 he was 35, which is old (for a baseball player!) but not that old.

After his retirement Yomiuri took care of him. Fujimoto coached in the Giants’ minor league system, and later became a reporter in their LA bureau. (Remember that the company that owns the Giants is a media conglomerate, and a newspaper is their flagship business.)

Here are two things that I don’t know about Fujimoto. Any knowledgeable readers, feel free to fill me in. (1) Why he didn’t get started until 1942. He was 24 years old in his rookie year. I had expected that it had something to do with the war, but I couldn’t find any confirmation that he was ever in the military. (2) Why he changed his name to ‘Nakagami’. You’d think that it would have something to do with being Korean, but, like I said above, I’m pretty sure that he’s got a Japanese name anyway. He changed his name in 1943 but it doesn’t seem to have stuck, because this card is from a few years later and uses his old name.

Speaking of the card, it is a bromide from the JBR 73 set. The text on it is very hard to make out. On the far right it gives his name. The text on the left says something about "central". The first character is also the first character in 'Chunichi', the team he was with in 1947, but the second character in the team name doesn't appear. The hiragana in the middle of the card is illegible. Engel reports that this set was issued in 1947, but features pictures from 1946. He suggests that it was issued in the early spring of 1947. If so, that would make it the first postwar Japanese baseball card set.

The immediate postwar period in Japan is fascinating. The allies heavily bombed the sixty (!) largest cities in Japan during the war (except for Kyoto, which was spared the atom bomb, and I think most conventional bombing as well). Poverty was so rife that the average height of Japanese men and women actually dropped in the postwar period. Moreover, the nation was occupied by American troops, and more-or-less run as McArthur’s fiefdom. (At least, IIRC the McArthur biography that I read, until Congress recalled him.) Granted the occupation had the blessing – or rather forced acquiescence – of the emperor, but it’s still a big deal.

At Potsdam the allies demanded that Japan surrender unconditionally, Japan countered that they would surrender if (1) the emperor kept his throne, (2) there was to be no occupation, (3) Japan gets to keep Korea and Taiwan, and (4) the Japanese disarm their own armed forces. So, basically, they offered to not surrender at all. After a pair of atom bombs and Russian intervention they agreed to surrender provided that the emperor keeps this throne. It’s astonishing to me that that would be the condition that they would insist on – to this distant American view the other three seem to be much more important – and that they would rather have all of their cities erased and their county occupied by Stalin than lose their emperor. Anyway, the Americans accepted their offer, but not really.

There is still an emperor in Japan, but he doesn’t have any power anymore. McArthur realized that having the traditional authority in place and willing to go along with the occupation would make things go much more smoothly in the postwar years, and it almost unquestionably did. Allied soldiers frequently remarked on how little opposition they faced after the peace treaty was signed. The relevance to all of this to a baseball card website is that this little bromide of Hideo Fujimoto comes from a completely different world. This card was printed in a bombed out, famine stricken country, which was occupied by a foreign military. Sure, things have also changed in America since my 1956 Topps Ernie Banks was printed, but the difference between America in 1956 and America in 2018 has just got nothing on the difference between Japan in 1946 and America in 2018.

[Jeff Alcorn]

Hi Nat,

Thanks for continuing this series. The pink bordered cards were #325 - #396 of the 1975-76 series. The first 36 cards are the Pennant Race Stars and the next 36 are the Camp Series (training camp). Many of the series are given a theme name. If you notice on the back of the Higashio card, the line of text under the card number says Pennant Race Star in kana and a little kanji.

The kanji for Walk is not nishi, it is the kanji for the number 4- it looks similar to nishi, but the kanji for 4 does not have any lines extending outside of the box like nishi does.

The writing on the left side of Hideo Fujimoto's card says Chubu Dragons. Chubu Nippon is the full name of the company that owns the Chunichi Dragons, and they used it as the team name only in 1947.

Last name changes usually happen due to marriage and men can choose to use their wife's name instead of their own. This is done for some complicated legal and inheritance reasons, and there are a few players that have done this. HOFer Kazuto Yamamoto became Kazuto Tsuruoka after playing his entire career as Yamamoto. He was already managing when he changed his name to Tsuruoka.

Thanks again, this is the best series going on Net 54.

Jeff

[nat]

Rickey Henderson is the Yutaka Fukumoto of America. Fukumoto was an outfielder for Hankyu from 1969 to 1988. He was blindingly, astoundingly, superlatively fast. He hit for a healthy average, knew how to draw a walk, and added a respectable amount of power.

The obvious cannot be ignored. Fukumoto stole 1065 bases. This is an all-time record in Japan. Henderson stole more than that, but he also had about 3000 extra plate appearances to do it in. If Fukumoto stole bases at his career rate, but over Rickey’s 13346 plate appearances, he’d have ended up with 1320 stolen bases. Rickey had 1406. Now of course there are a million reasons that this isn’t the way to do these comparisons. Rickey played in five more seasons than did Fukumoto, and should get credit for that longevity. Also, there’s no guarantee that Fukumoto would have kept up his prolific base-stealing ways if he’d had to do it over a full American season. So this is all really an interesting way to illustrate these numbers:

SB/PA
Rickey: 0.1053
Fukumoto: 0.1051

Rickey had the longer career, but each time that they went up to the plate, the chances that they were going to steal a base were almost exactly equal. Now, Rickey’s stolen base totals were, in part, a product of the fact that he was extraordinarily good at getting on base. I mean, not Joey Votto good, but he led the league once and was (barely) over 400 for his career. Fukumoto was a good hitter, but not that good. So let’s isolate what they’re doing once they’re on the basepaths:

SB/times on base
Rickey: 0.268
Fukumoto: 0.282

Once Rickey got on base, there was slightly less than a 27% chance that he would successfully steal a base. For Fukumoto, the odds were a bit better than 28%. Rickey was a better hitter than Fukumoto, but Fukumoto made up for it on the base paths.

“But,” I hear you say, “it’s really hard to steal third (or home!), maybe Rickey trails Fukumoto in your supposed measure of ‘base stealing ability’ because he got extra base hits so often!” No problem, let’s control for that.

SB/(singles + walks)
Rickey: 0.322
Fukumoto: 0.354

We can glean some interesting facts from these data. Fukumoto was noticeably better at stealing second base than was Rickey. He beats Rickey there by 32 points, whereas his lead in SB/times on base was only 14 points. If I’m thinking clearly (and maybe I’m not, I’ve got a pretty good cold right now) that means that Rickey must beat him somewhere to account for the 18 point difference between these two rates. So we can conclude that Fukumoto was more likely to steal a base than was Rickey, and a fair bit more likely to steal second given that he was on first (almost 10% more likely), but that Rickey was more likely to steal third, given that he was on second, than was Fukumoto. That’s really interesting. Raw speed could make up for a bad jump if you’re stealing second, but not if you’re stealing third. The throw from the catcher just isn’t long enough. This means that Rickey was probably better at reading pitchers and/or had quicker reaction times than Fukumoto. But since Fukumoto was the more successful base stealer over all (at least on a rate basis) that Fukumoto was probably the faster runner.

Regarding Fukumoto himself. Here are some facts that are probably not surprising: he was a 17-time all-star, a 10-time member of the best nine, he won 12 consecutive gold glove awards, and an MVP award. His lead in career stolen bases is absurd, Yoshinori Hirose, in second place, has just under 600 steals. Just 60% of Fukumoto’s total. In addition to the stolen base record he is the all-time leader in triples, second in runs, and tied for fifth in hits.

The card is another from the 76 Calbee set.

And thanks Jeff, I appreciate the feedback!

[nat]

Kaoru Bettoh was an outfielder with the Tigers and the Orions from 1948 to 1957. Perhaps just as importantly he had a 20 year career managing a variety of teams, mostly notably the Orions as a player-manager.

Albright ranks him as the 17th most successful manager in Japanese history, but his ranking system is of the “assign 3 points for X, 2 points for Y” sort (a kind Bill James indulged in on more than one occasion), which doesn’t really measure anything. I think that the most accurate thing to say about his managing career is that it was long and had periods of sustained success.

As a player Bettoh had a very high but very brief peak. In 1950 he slugged .671 in a league that slugged .384 as a whole. It was about 75% better than league average. To do that in 2018’s American League you would need to slug .728. That figure would place 27th all-time, behind Frank Thomas’ 1994 and Hack Wilson’s 1930. In 1950 he hit 35% of his team’s home runs. In short, he was a big slugger, and fast too, stealing forty bases one season. But he didn’t get to the JPBL until he was 27, and although he hung on for a couple more seasons, he was basically done at 33. And he was really only a superstar for a couple years. The late start seems to be a product of playing in the industrial leagues – which he must have absolutely dominated, but I don’t know where to find data on it, nor even if records were kept. Albright suggests that the war might have gotten in the way. I don’t know if he served or not, but he didn’t break in until 1948, so even if he was in the war, it doesn’t explain why he wasn’t playing in 46-7.

Throughout the 20th century there were a number of attempts to bring together Japanese and American baseball, most notably the various American tours of Japan. The tours were not the only instances of Japanese/American cooperation, however. A number of Japanese teams came to spring training in the states, and every once in a while you’ll find a Japanese player who made a brief appearance in an American minor league. Walter O’Malley was especially active in these cooperative endeavors, taking the Dodgers on tour and bringing Japanese teams to train with them. Indeed, Bettoh spent the 1960 season with the Dodgers. It’s not clear what he was doing with them – he was retired as a player at that point and there’s no record of him doing any coaching for them. Perhaps he was just an observer. In any case, that was the end of his tenure with the Orions. He sat out the following season, before taking over managing Kintetsu. This must have been a change for him, the Orions were good, the Buffaloes were not. After going 55-91 in 1964 he lost his job, sat out a few years, and then took over the top job with the Whales.

Bettoh was a graduate of Keio University, which had one of the top programs in the amateur era. Baseball-Reference has a list of players who attended Keio (and who went on to play professionally). I’m surprised by the lack of hall of famers, given the status of the program. I only noticed two others – Fujita and Mizuhara – and all three of them are in the hall largely for their work as managers. It is, of course, possible that this list in incomplete, but I expected a larger share of the early stars of Japanese baseball to have come through Keio.

The card is an uncatalogued menko. Despite being uncatalogued we can do a pretty good job dating it. Bettoh is wearing a Tigers’ uniform, which places the card either in 1948 or 1949.

[nat]

Motoshi Fujita had a short career (1957 to 1964) as a pitcher, and much later (1981 to 1983 and again 1989 to 1992) a manager. All of it was spent with the Giants and all of it was exceptionally successful. As a pitcher he went 119-88 with a 2.20 ERA. The teams that he managed went 516-361.

After attending Keio University Fujita went undrafted (despite considerable success in college), and so he went to play in the industrial leagues. After four years he was selected by the Giants. He broke into the big time at 25, winning the rookie of the year award, and the MVP in both 1958 and 1959.

During his playing days the Giants made the Japan Series five times (with two wins). After his retirement he was hired as a pitching coach, and served in that capacity while the Giants had their string of nine consecutive Japan Series victories. The Giants went 2-2 in the Japan Series when he helmed the team.

Fujita was a good pitcher, even a great one, but his career was short (due to injury) and his time at the top of his game even shorter. For hall-of-fame purposes, it’s really only 1957-9 that make any difference. It’s clear that he wouldn’t be a hall of famer but for his managing career. On the other hand, his managing career was also very short (although quite successful). I don’t know how Japan treats its managers well enough to know if it would have qualified him for the hall, but I’m inclined to think not. He really seems to me like a hybrid candidate, who had to be (and was) excellent in both of his roles to make it.

It's hard to find an American player who is a good match for Fujita. Johan Santana is probably closest, although he’s not really a good match, because Fujita’s managerial career is so important to his hall of fame case.

The card is from 1959. It’s a part of the JCM 31e set.

[nat]

Masaichi Kaneda is Japan’s greatest pitcher. He played for Koketetsu (the Swallows) from 1950 to 1964, and the Giants from 1965 to 1969. His career W/L record is 400-298 over an astounding 5526 innings. Kaneda combined a role in the rotation (569 games started) with regular work in the bullpen (another 375 games). The work in the bullpen wasn’t just when he was old and slipping. In 1956, when he was at the very peak of his career, he appeared in more games out of the bullpen than he did as a starter. The 5500 innings that Kaneda pitched is a mind-blowing number for any pitcher, much less one from Japan where the seasons are shorter. Nolan Ryan clocked in with about 200 fewer innings, Phil Niekro, throwing knuckleballs, pitched about 100 fewer. In fact, his IP total would rank fourth all-time in MLB, behind Cy Young, Pud Galvin, and Walter Johnson.

What accounts for Kaneda’s high IP totals is heavy work-loads (he would often pitch every three games, and appear in relief on his off days), but also an extremely early start to his career. Kaneda appeared in 30 games in his age 16 season, and logged 350 innings at 17. Astonishingly, he didn’t take up baseball until his freshman year of high school. He played for only two seasons before going pro. Here’s a list of 16 year old MLB players and what they did at that age. It’s possible that I missed someone, but I think that this list is complete:

Jim Derrington – one game, six innings pitched, five earned runs allowed, for the 1959 White Sox.
Alex George – five games, ten at bats, one hit, for the 1955 A’s.
Roger McKee – four games, thirteen innings, 9 ER, for the 1943 Phillies.
Carl Sheib – six games, eighteen innings, 9 ER, for the 1943 A’s.
Coonie Blank – one game, two AB, no hits, for the 1909 Cardinals.
Joe Stanley – one at bat (ended in a K) for the 1897 Senators.
Tom Hess – two at bats, no hits, for the 1892 Orioles.
Willie McGill – 183 IP for the 1890 Cleveland Infants of the Player’s League.
Piggy Ward – five at bats (no hits) for the 1883 Philadelphia Quakers.
Leonidas Lee – four games, 18 AB, five hits, for the 1877 Brown Stockings.
Frank Pearce – one game, four IP, for the 1876 Louisville Grays.
Jim Britt – 336 IP for the 1872 Brooklyn Atlantics (led league in losses).

Only two players did anything of note at 16, both of them played >100 years ago, and both of them played in leagues that no longer exist. In one case, the league lasted only one season, in the other it’s controversial whether the league should be counted as a major league at all (I think that MLB itself doesn’t count it). Kaneda had an ERA that was better than league average at 16, and threw 164 innings. (N.B.: I’m talking about “age 16 seasons”; some sources report that Kaneda had just turned 17 when he made his debut, but he was still in his age 16 season because of when his birthday fell.)

Kaneda’s win total came despite playing for the Swallows, a perennial cellar-dweller. (Going to the Giants must have been a welcome change.) He was noted for an extremely fast, although often erratic fastball, but his money pitch was a curve. Famously both Nagashima and Oh went 0-4 with 4 strikeouts in their first games against him. Eventually the incredible number of innings that he pitched caught up to him, and he developed an underhand delivery to help relieve the pain from pitching. Amongst his accomplishments Kaneda won three Sawamura awards. In 1963 Sports Illustrated ran a story on him, calling him “an oriental Warren Spahn”, which makes sense given that Spahn was a great left-handed pitcher with a long career who was just wrapping things up in 1963. But I think that Kaneda was the greater pitcher. They note that he holds almost every Japanese pitching record, what they didn’t know was that he had six more seasons remaining in that left arm. As far as I know the only significant counting stat record that he doesn’t hold is shutouts – he trails Victor Starfin by one. (His record for appearances has since been eclipsed by relief pitchers.) It’s always dangerous to say things like this, but I’m fairly confident that most of his career records are untouchable.

After retiring from pitching he managed the Orions, winning the Japan Series with them. He also founded the Meikyukai, for reasons that I’ve never been quite clear on. It’s a club for great Japanese players born during the Showa period (1926-88), one gets in for having 2000 hits, 200 wins, or 250 saves. All stats earned after making a player’s Japanese debut count, so Hideki Matsui is a member, even though he only had about 1300 hits in Japan. (Curiously, stats earned prior to appearing in a Japanese game do not count.) They play charity golf tournaments and things like that.

Kaneda says that he considered coming over to play in the States, but doesn’t regret staying in Japan. Residual hostility from the war, together with the fact that he didn’t speak English, he says, would have made the transition difficult.

Here’s a short clip of Kaneda pitching. No date given, but he’s still on the Swallows, so it’s prior to 1965.

My card is from the JGA 149 set, issued in 1962.

[Jeff Alcorn]

Hi Nat,

That card is not Motoshi Fujita but Yoshio Yoshida of the Hanshin Tigers, and is the card that you already used for Yoshida's biography. Can you show which Fujita you have? I would love to see it.

Jeff