Japanese HOF Project

[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.

[nat]

Most Japanese hall of famers have relatively little written about them in English. Some of them don’t have their own (English) Wikipedia pages. A few of them have almost no internet presence (in English) at all, short of a page of stats at Baseball-Reference and a line of commentary by Jim Albright. Wally Yonamine is an exception to this rule. A huge, glaring exception. Rob Fitts wrote an entire biography of the man. A book. In English.

I haven’t read it.

I will, I swear. But I haven’t. And time constraints being what they are, I don’t know when I will. Rumor has it that you get to read for pleasure when you’re retired.

The point of this series of posts – for me at any rate – is that they give me an excuse to learn about Japanese baseball while collecting the cards. I can say at least something interesting and/or informative about the players that I’ve written up. But I also have cards of players for whom I haven’t done a post yet, and I don’t know much of anything about these guys. What team they’re on. What position they play. That’s about it. So it seems advisable to do an entry for Yonamine now, rather than wait until I’ve read Fitts’ book. Mostly because otherwise I wouldn’t invest the time necessary to learn something about him (albeit less time than reading a book). So I researched this post the same way that I researched the other ones: digging through the nether regions of Google searches, reading Whiting’s articles for the Japan Times, stuff like that. To those that have read Fitts’ book: I apologize in advance. You will probably learn nothing from this post, and might want to skip it. Although if you want to correct me on something, or elaborate on something that I don’t know enough about to address well, please go for it.

We’ll start with this. Wally Yonamine played halfback for the San Francisco 49ers in 1947. That was the extent of his pro-football career. He totaled 114 yards in 12 games (just three starts). I don’t have any idea if that is good or not. I am the (perhaps rare) baseball fanatic who doesn’t care at all about any other sport. If the ball is going towards the other guys’ endzone, that’s good, if not, not. That’s all I know about football. But anyway, Yonamine was a latter day Jim Thorpe, or a forerunner to Bo Jackson. Which is to say, he played both professional baseball and professional football.

His football “career” followed a brief stint in the army. After his discharge he chose to go pro immediately rather than accept a scholarship to Ohio State. A broken wrist following the 1947 season ended his time with the 49ers and dramatically changed the course of his life.

As stories about Japan, and America, and baseball, are wont to do, this one features Lefty O’Doul. At the time he was managing the San Francisco Seals, a top minor league team. Yonamine had returned to his native Hawaii, where O’Doul apparently saw him playing baseball and signed him to a contract. He wasn’t assigned to the Seals though, they farmed him out to Salt Lake City in a class C league. Bottom of the totem pole. He hit .335 in a league that hit .269; I don’t have Yonamine’s other rate stats, but I think it’s safe to say that he utterly dominated the Pioneer League.

O’Doul, of course, had many contacts in Japanese baseball, and recommended Yonamine to Matsutaro Shoriki of the Yomiuri Giants. Yonamine would spend the next 11 seasons playing baseball in Japan, nine of them with the Giants, the last two with the Chunichi Dragons. He was a fearsome baseball player. To modern eyes his stats look like those of an above-average leadoff hitter. And he was a leadoff hitter. But he was also, for his day, a terrific slugger. In 1956 (to pick one season almost at random) the Central League hit 225/274/321. Yonamine hit 338/420/487. That’s 50% higher than average in batting average, 53% higher in on-base percentage, and 66% better in slugging. To do that in the American League in 2018 you would need to hit 375/486/692. Those are a pretty good match for Babe Ruth’s career rates. Of course Ruth did this over a whole career, not just one season, so I’m not saying that Yonamine hit like Babe Ruth. He didn’t. But he did hit really damn well. And he, unlike most big sluggers, was also a fleet-of-foot outfielder. In 1956, the same year he was putting up Ruth’s career batting line, Yonamine tied for third in the league in stolen bases.

Americans are prone to think about Japanese baseball in relation to their own brand of the game. Accordingly Americans tend to remember Yonamine for two things: re-introducing American players into the Japanese game after WWII, and introducing American style play to Japan. I don’t know if this is how he is remember in Japan. My guess is that seven consecutive best-nines and eleven all-star appearances feature more prominently in the Japanese recollections of Yonamine. Nevertheless, no less an authority than Doug Glanville (of Philadelphia Phillies fame) says that Yonamine had the blessing of the allied command to help build understanding between the Japanese and the Americans after the war. One would think that, after the American bombing campaign, there was some building to do. The firebombing of Tokyo killed about 100,000 people, mostly civilians. The bombs that were used were tested on mock-ups of houses. Not military installations, not factories, houses. Killing civilians was the point. Nevertheless, Yonamine says that he experienced relatively little hostility due to being an American. It was more problematic, he said, to play for the always successful, and so much resented, Giants. (I don't know if this was a joke or not. He did get some abuse early on, but he says that, despite occasional comparisons to Jackie Robinson, he didn't go through anything like what Robinson went through.)

Now, I’ll admit to being a little confused by this ground-breaking role for Yonamine. Tadashi Wakabayashi was also Hawaiian, and was playing in Japan immediately after the war. Yonamine wouldn’t arrive for another five years. Of course he’d been playing in Japan since 1936 – maybe Yonamine was the first American to start his Japanese career after the war. Maybe Wakabayashi didn't count since he'd been living there for so long? Anyway, it’s not like there weren’t any other Americans around in pro ball.

As for introducing American-style ball to Japan, it sure seems that he should get credit (or debit, depending on who you talk to) for this. Prior to going over Japanese batters didn’t run out sac bunts, didn’t try to break up double plays. In general, they didn’t play aggressively. Yonamine did, and it worked. And he was soon copied. This didn’t sit well with the old guard (especially Kawakami, Yonamine’s teammate and the man who became his manager and engineered his trade to the Dragons). I wonder what happened the first time he took out an infielder turning a double play. When I played baseball, we ran drills to do that. Shortstops and second basemen also ran drills on how to avoid incoming runners who would go well out of their way to slide into them. Now, one day, shortly after I got old and started playing slow pitch softball, I was on first base when the batter hit a ground ball to the short stop. My old baseball training kicked in, and I executed a perfect take-out slide, smashing into the second baseman. This … didn’t go over well. There was shock and anger and much yelling. And a great deal of spilled beer. I like to imagine it was like that, some day in April of 1951, when Yonamine took out a Tiger second baseman.

After retiring from baseball Yonamine spent many years as a scout, and a few managing the Dragons. He also started a business dealing pearls.

Here’s a very 1980s video biography of Yonamine.

My card is from the JCM 41 set, issued in 1959. I like this card because whoever did the background got carried away with the airbrush and erased his right hand.

[drmondobueno]

[QUOTE. 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.[/QUOTE]

Nat, would like to commend you on your research. Really enjoy seeing your cards and the write ups on each player.

I do not believe your card is from a catalogued set, at least not in Engel’s first guide (waiting for my thumb drive copy of the second). The text box on this Suguira card is highlighted in black and none of the sets in the JCM 33 series indicate a black text box. Nor do any of the other Yamakatsu sets have that style of text box. Hmmm. At first I thought you had a Marusan card but for the back. Anyway, you appear to have a unique example there, congrats! And thanks again for the thread!