Japanese HOF Project

[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

[nat]

Oops! Confused the black and white cards for each other. It should be fixed now.

[nat]

In working through this project I've picked up a few Calbee cards that I don't need. I'd be happy to send them to a good home, preferably in exchange for something that I do need. To that end, I have available:


Koji Yamamoto - 1976 #521

Isao Harimoto - 1976 #1101

Tatsunori Hara - 1987 #290 or 1985 #197 (but not both)

Yutaka Fukumoto - 1976 #307

Osamu Higashio - 1976 #921 or #327 (but not both)

and

Nobuyuki Kagawa - 1984 #113

Yamamoto was a great slugger for the Hiroshima Carp. Harimoto is Japan's all-time hit king (and atomic bomb survivor). Hara was a great third baseman and manager. Fukumoto was Japan's greatest leadoff hitter. Higashio was the ace pitcher for a very successful Lions team. And Kagawa, well, Kagawa played professional baseball. All of them except Kagawa are hall of famers. Images of the cards are below (except for the second Higashio and the second Hara cards, which are in my write-ups of them), in the order in which they are listed above.

My first priority are the Japanese hall of famers that I'm still missing (list to be found below), but I'm willing to trade for some American cards as well. I could use a 1963 Topps Ron Santo, a 1954 Topps Whitey Ford, a 1950 or 51 Bowman Larry Doby, and, well, lots of pre-war cards. Helpfully, I'm not too particular about condition, "well loved" cards are welcome.

Here are the Japanese players I'm looking for:

[This is an evolving list. Rather than having me keep updating this post, how about anyone who wants to trade send me a PM.]

[nat]

Hisanori Karita played for, well, lots of teams, from 1936 to 1951. He was a second baseman who starred during the deadball era of the 30s and 40s. And, man, was the ball dead. In 1939 he slugged .283, which was only five points below average. The year before he posted a slugging percentage of .411. I don’t know any easy way to find league leaders in Japan,* but that mark has to be up there. Japanese pro leagues didn’t form until he was 26, so that’s when he got his start. Like many players he missed several years during the war (and sat out 1949), but he played until he was 41. Karita’s raw totals (for example, 619 hits in his career) look extremely unimpressive – especially for a hall of famer – but this is due to three extenuating circumstances. The first, as mentioned, is that he didn’t get a chance to play pro ball in his early 20s. Most hall of famers break in very young; the guys who are 26 year old rookies tend to be barely-competent bench players and relief pitchers. Karita has an excuse, of course, but losing four or five years off the begging of your career is going to cost you. The second of the extenuating circumstances (also noted) is that Japanese baseball had basically no offense at all when he was playing. Japanese deadball was more extreme than American deadball, and American deadball was plenty extreme. Finally, while Japanese seasons are still shorter than American seasons, in the early days they were much shorter. Interestingly, they were variable even within a league: not every team played the same number of games. The fall 1936 season featured teams playing between 26 and 30 games. He played in the spring seasons as well, but when you’re playing max 60 games a year, it’s going to be hard to collect very many hits.

*I mean, I could go through and check everyone manually, but I’m much too lazy to do that. It would be nice if the raw data were available in a single file and you (meaning I) could get Excel to do it.

In addition to being a good hitter, he was known for his fielding. Fitts and Engels think that he was one of the best ever. His ability to turn double plays was especially noted. Unfortunately I have been able to find no fielding data at all, so I have no way to evaluate these claims. He also tried his hand at pitching (throwing a total of 41 innings over three seasons), but he was beyond terrible. In 1939 he pitched 31 innings to a 4.34 ERA, against a league average of 2.50. That would be like having a 7.38 ERA in today’s American League. For most of his pro career he also managed the teams that he played for, but the results were unimpressive, his teams were mostly second-division, and a few of them were quite bad.

Karita was active in baseball before the formation of the professional leagues. He attended, and presumably played for, Hosei University. He played against the Americans on the 1934 tour. On the All-Japan team he played shortstop and typically hit second. During the November 11 game, in an effort to make the games more competitive (the Americans won all of the previous games by very lopsided scores), the visitors and the Japanese all stars played mixed teams, with six Americans and three Japanese on each team. Karita played with Americans Ruth, Warstler, Foxx, Averill, and Berg (I don't know who their sixth American was). They won 13-2. Karita hit .276 for the series, which is considerably better than his career mark of .219.

Less-known than the American tour of Japan is the Japanese tour of North America. A Japanese all-star team went on a four month tour through North America in 1935. The pitching staff was led by teenagers Sawamura and Starfin. The rest of the team might not have been quite as heralded (although Starfin wasn’t yet the big star that he would become), but it did feature Karita in the middle infield. His most impressive feat was stealing three bases in a game against the Vancouver Athletics, and he hit a rare home run in Winnipeg. Here is a picture from his time in Vancouver. His double play partner on the tour was Takeo Tabe. Like Karita, Tabe is in the hall of fame, but Tabe never did go pro, and he was killed in combat in 1945.

Karita also served in the war. I was able to locate little in the way of records concerning his service. He was stationed in China, but that’s about all that I could find. I don’t know if he was wounded (if so it would explain his absence from baseball even after the end of the war), but in any case he was in good enough shape to return to pro ball in 1947.

Albright thinks that in order for Karita to be deserving of his place in the hall of fame, he’s got to get a lot of credit for his play before the formation of the professional league. If the hall of fame is about recognizing the greatest players, that has to be right. But I suspect that the reason he’s in the hall of fame doesn’t boil down to voters evaluating his play prior to 1936 and deciding that it, plus his pro career, totals enough value to match the hall’s established standard. Karita was a star during a transitionary period in the history of Japanese baseball, when it first staked a claim on the world stage, and when it made its first foray into professionalism. I suspect that this, as much as his actual contributions on the field, is responsible for Karita’s place in the hall of fame. In some ways I like to compare him to John Ward. Now, Ward was the better player – he’s arguably qualified for the hall of fame on the merits. But even if he had come up short, the hall of fame needed, in some way, to recognize Ward because of his role in the formative years of American baseball. Karita wasn’t the mover and shaker that Ward was – he wasn’t instrumental in founding a new major league, for example – but the Japanese hall of fame would be incomplete if it didn’t recognize the contributions of the people who made Japanese baseball what it is today. Hisanori Karita is not the only one who is responsible for that, or even the one who is most responsible, but I suspect that that, more than what he accomplished as a player or as a manager, is why he is in the hall of fame.

The card is from the JRM 24 set, issued in 1947. Having ‘Tokyo’ on the card doesn’t do much to narrow down the team he’s playing for, but 1947 was his first and only year playing with the Flyers. It is blank on the back.

[nat]

Hiromitsu Kadota was a big immobile slugger, mostly playing for the Nankai Hawks, from 1970 to 1992. He was still slugging in excess of .600 after he turned 40. Clearly a middle-of-the-order type (he cleared 100 RBIs several times, but never made it to 100 runs), Kadota tallied 567 home runs, to go with 2566 hits and a career 289/379/529 slash line. Until 1977 he was an outfielder, but he spent basically the last 15 years of his career as a designated hitter.

Usually hitters perform less-well as DHs than they do when they are playing the field. This has been common knowledge in Sabrmetric circles for a while now. Michael Lichtman found, using data from 1998-2012, that DHs lose about 14 points of wOBA relative to their performance when they’re not DHing. If you’re not familiar with it, wOBA takes the weighted run-value of a player’s batting events (singles, walks, home runs, and so on), divides it by opportunities (basically plate appearances, but with adjustments for sac bunts and the like), and puts it on a scale that looks like what you’d find for OBP. 14 points isn’t a huge difference exactly, but it is pretty significant. For whatever reason (Lichtman suggests that DHs don’t have their heads in the game to the same extent that regular position players do), players hit noticeably worse when they’re DHing. Kadota seems to have been an exception to this general trend. After becoming a full-time DH, he became a truly great hitter, significantly improving on his (already pretty good) production as an outfielder. (Although Kadota might have just been ahead of his time. Some recent research – which is unfortunately behind a paywall at Baseball Prospectus – suggests that the “DH penalty” might not be a thing anymore.)

What Kadota is most famous for is his performance as an old player. He is the oldest MVP in Japanese history – taking the title in 1988 at the age of 40. In addition he is the oldest player to lead the league in RBIs, toping the league with 93 as a 41 year old. As a great player who didn’t really age, Kadota predictable ranks high on Japan’s all-time leader boards. He’s third in career home runs, and top ten in most other offensive categories. In total he was selected to seven best-nines, and was a 14x all-star. Albright regards him as the 16th greatest player in Japanese history.

Here’s some footage of Kadota hitting home runs.

My card is from the 1984 Calbee set.

[nat]

Tadashi Sugiura spent thirteen years pitching for the Nankai Hawks. It was only the first half of that time, however, that he was really productive. He was an ace-quality pitcher from 1958 to 1964, at which point he became a relief pitcher. If not for the switch to relieving he would have qualified for the golden player’s club pretty easily, despite retiring at 34. As it is, he won 187 games while losing 106, with a career ERA of 2.39. That ERA is a good number, but it’s aided by his years in the bullpen. He had a number below that mark for his first three seasons, and then never again until he switched roles.

The beginning to his career really was quite impressive. He took home the rookie of the year award in 1958, no doubt thanks to 27 wins in 299 innings pitched, with an ERA of 2.05. (Now don’t get too excited about that ERA, the league as a whole had a 2.83 mark. So it’s good, but this was a pretty low scoring league.) The following year he won 38 games over 371 innings pitched, and took home both the Pacific League MVP Award, as well as the Japan Series MVP award (he pitched every game of the series). It was certainly his best year. He recorded an ERA of 1.41, and was only 23 years old. But as a 23 year old he already had more than six hundred professional innings on his arm (after who knows how much pitching in high school and college). At the age of 24 he pitched 334 innings, and his workload dropped off thereafter, culminating in relegation to the bullpen in 1965. It’s hard not to imagine that all the abuse his arm suffered when he was young had something to do with it, despite the fact that he was a submarine pitcher. Just how much heavy workloads contribute to arm injuries is controversial, but it’s hard to deny that they do. Throwing a ball overhand at extremely high speeds is just not something that we evolved to do. And, perhaps more to the point, every time you do it is a time that something can snap. Perhaps a heavy workload increases injury risk not because the tendons or ligaments or whatever wear down, perhaps it increase injury risk just because each time you throw a ball you’re rolling the dice, and if you roll the dice enough times eventually you’re going to lose.

Albright ranks him as the 65th greatest Japanese baseball player, and 17th greatest pitcher. Admittedly I haven’t tried to put together anything like Albright’s ranking system, but this sounds aggressive to me. In part this could be a matter of taste. I’m happy saying that Sugiura’s 1959 was one of the greatest pitching seasons of all time, and since he was extremely good in 1958 and 1960-1 as well, he’s got a very respectable peak. Now, peak performance is clearly important, if for no other reason than in order to win a pennant a team needs above average performance (just by definition), and so above average performance squeezed into a small number of years is more valuable than an equivalent amount of performance stretched out into more years. But I don’t think it’s so much more valuable that it means that someone who’s career was basically four really great seasons, a few in which he was starting to deal with injuries, a few as a relief pitcher, and then an early retirement, is a top-20 pitcher.

Now, I said that this may be a matter of taste. I’m inclined to think that when ranking baseball players what you want to rank is how much they did for their teams, given what they could control (this last qualification ensures that we don’t put much emphasis on RBIs when evaluating players, something based on linear weights is much better). Now, as I’ve just argued, measuring “how much they did for their teams” is not just a matter of multiplying their rate of production by their opportunities, putting more production into smaller spaces is more valuable than stretching it out. But a lot of people seem to think that what “greatness” amounts to isn’t “how much they did for their teams” but also “how good they were at their best”. Of course I account for that too – since, as I said, being really good for a little while is more valuable than being pretty good for a long time – but they want it to be something that doesn’t reduce to the value that a player contributes to his teams. I don’t know if this is what Albright is doing, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Let me argue, very briefly, that this is a bad idea. First of all, the only reason to care about how good a player is, is that it helps his team win ball games. We want talented players because we want wins, the value of great performance itself is instrumental. So if you give a player credit for his great performances, you’re double counting; he gets credit for a great performance (which, remember, matters because it helps his team win games), and he gets credit for the wins that that performance generated for his teams. My second complaint is that “at his best” is objectionably imprecise, and the only non-arbitrary way to make it precise is to extend it out to his entire career. Is it his best game that counts? His best week? His best year? His best X years? And, for any answer that you give, you need to give a non-arbitrary reason why that’s the timeframe that counts. Stretching the timeframe out to his entire career has a non-arbitrary reason – there’s nothing else that we could take into consideration. But there’s no non-arbitrary reason to stop short of that. So I’m not inclined to look favorably on players like Sugiura, guys who were exceptionally great for a short while but without the surrounding bulk that we ordinarily expect from a hall of fame type career.

This card sure looks like it belongs to JCM 33d. The only problem is that Engel associates this menko number with Inao. I see three possibilities: (1) there’s an error in the book, (2) it’s an uncatalogued variation, (3) it belongs to an uncatalogued set that is nearly indistinguishable from JCM 33d. I don’t know which it is. Option (1) is certainly possible: I’ve written things shorter than Engel’s book that were professionally copyedited and errors still snuck through. But it could also be (2), there are plenty of sets that re-use menko numbers. And of course what (3) has going for it is that there are still plenty of uncatalogued menko sets. So who knows.