Japanese HOF Project

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Tetsuharu Kawakami was a first baseman (and briefly a pitcher) for several incarnations of the Giants from 1938 to 1958. Appropriately nicknamed ‘The God of Batting’, Kawakami was a devastating offensive force. In 1939, at the age of 19, he hit .338 in a league that hit .224. That’s 51% better than average, for those keeping score at home. His OBP was 27% better than average, and slugging 71% better. To pull that off in the 2018 American League you would need to hit 377/403/713. (Look at that slugging percentage!) Kawakami’s career rate stats are excellent, his counting totals are good. He cleared 2000 hits comfortably, but managed only 181 home runs. Some years he was hitting nearly 30, others he was in single digits. He seems to have been injured in 1951 (during what would have been his best year) and his power never came back. I wonder if he had a back or wrist injury, something notorious for sapping power and not healing quite right. Albright says that the change resulted from a conversation with Ted Williams, in which Williams suggested aiming for more line drives instead of selling out for so much power. The conversation reportedly happened during 1950, however, and in 51 he was the same power hitter that he had been the previous few years. It wasn’t until after his abbreviated 1951 season that his output changed. During the war (1943-45) Kawakami served in the military, spending his time as a drill sergeant in the Imperial Army. He did not see battle.

During the postwar period Kawakami was Oshita’s rival. Oshita used a bat painted blue. Kawakami painted his red.

As a young man Kawakami was a pitcher. The 1939 Kyojin had a pitching staff that was something else. The old man of the staff, 23 year old Victor Starfin, threw 458 innings. Fellow hall of famer (and 19 year old) Hiroshi Nakao threw 224 innings. Kawakami (also 19 years old) threw about 100. Yasuo Kusunoki filled out the staff, pitching 70 innings at a respectable 2.17 ERA. That’s three hall of famers and a guy with an ERA just a nose above two.

Kawakami is one of the rare men who has two separate compelling cases for the hall of fame. In addition to being a great player, he was the manager of the ON Cannon Yomiuri Giants who won the Japan Series nine consecutive times (and 11 total). He spent fourteen years at the helm of the Giants, from 1961 to 1974. During that time the Giants compiled an astounding .591 winning percentage. By way of comparison, that’s in the same neighborhood as Joe Torre’s winning percentage as manager of the Yankees (.605 over 12 seasons) and Bobby Cox’s winning percentage with the Braves (.576, admittedly over a longer period of time). Kawakami’s managerial style was notoriously brutal, and serves as an embodiment of the traditional Japanese style of training that some recent stars (most notably Hiromitsu Ochiai) rebelled against. Robert Whiting describes Kawakami’s managerial philosophy as combining “Zen Buddhist principles with Machiavellian tactics”. The reference to Zen Buddhism is meant in all seriousness, Kawakami was a devoted practitioner, crediting its influence with his extremely well-developed ability to concentrate (most notably on the ball), and eventually his success as a player. As a manager he demanded that his players be dedicated to their craft with the same intensity that he was dedicated to his.

Kawakami seems to have been a traditionalist in a number of ways. He was one of the chief proponents of the restrained style of ball that dominated the early years of professional Japanese baseball (and, I assume, pre-war amateur baseball as well), and ended up clashing with his teammate, Wally Yonamine, on this issue. When Kawakami finally took over managerial duties, he engineered a trade of Yonamine to the Dragons, but the damage (as he saw it) had been done. Kawakami’s managerial style, and practice regimen, had followers long after he retired* but his style of actually playing baseball did not.

*From an ESPN story about Ichiro Suzuki:
“When Ichiro was 3, [his father Nobuyuki] bought him his first glove, made of shiny leather. It cost two weeks' salary. Nobuyuki taught his son to clean and polish it carefully. It wasn't a toy, he said. It was a tool. ... They went to a nearby park, every day the same: 50 pitches, 200 soft-toss swings and 50 fungo drills. At night, they went to a batting cage near the Nagoya airport and Ichiro would take 250 to 300 swings on a pitching machine. They did this 365 days a year. Sometimes it got so cold that young Ichiro couldn't button his shirt, his fingers too stiff to work.” (Wright Thompson, ESPN the Magazine, April 2018)

I wonder if his nickname is a play on his real name. ‘God’ in Japanese is ‘kami’ (so much I remember from my high school Japanese class). The kanji for ‘Kawakami’ is ‘川上’. The latter symbol means ‘up’, and makes up a part of the word for heaven, superior, and, according to Google, supreme being. Maybe he was nicknamed ‘The God of Batting’ because his name (when pronounced) has the word ‘God’ in it, and (when written) has a part of it? For what it’s worth Wikipedia says that his nickname was spelled ‘打撃の神様’. But anyway, his nickname is a pretty good one in English, it might be even more clever in Japanese.

For a much better biography of Kawakami, see the Japan Times article by Robert Whiting linked above.

This clip is only four seconds long, but here’s Kawakami taking a swing.

As for the card, I don’t know what set it’s from. On the front it looks like lots of “tobacco style” menkos, but it’s blank on the back. Some sets are sort of hybrid menko/bromides. This card probably belongs to one of those. The front has a familiar menko design, and it’s printed on menko-style card stock (my bromides tend to be noticeably thinner). But it doesn’t have a menko number, nor a rock-paper-scissors symbol. So I guess it leans closer to the bromide end of things than the menko end. Anyways, I like it for the solid red background.