Japanese HOF Project

[Bill77]

I am glad you posted the information on Katsumi Shiraishi. I just got one of his cards about the same time as your post.

[nat]

You got a 2-for-1 on that Shiraishi card, with Wakabayashi on the back. I wonder why they used an image of Shiraishi's back?

Today's player is a pitcher from the 1950s.

Ryohei Hasegawa was a sidearm and submarine pitcher for the Hiroshima Carp from 1950 to 1963. He had a losing record: 197-208. The Carp were not very good. In 1956 they went 45-82. Hasegawa won 22 games for them. In 1955 they were 58-70, and Hasegawa won 30 games. In 1972 Steve Carlton famously won 27 of his teams 62 victories. That’s pretty good, but not even Carlton can claim to have notched more than half of his team’s victories. As seems to have been common for aces at the time, Hasegawa threw an incredible number of innings. He pitched 348 innings as a rookie, and went as high as 387 in 1955. Immediately after that season of very heavy work his appearances dropped precipitously. One suspects injuries were involved. Again, this seems to have been very common for aces of the period. Perhaps teams would have gotten more value from their ace pitchers if they hadn’t pushed them quite so hard. Hasegawa was done at age 33, and the injuries seem to have taken their toll by the time he was 28. Of course any pitcher can get injured (and plenty do), but Japanese teams of the 1950s seem to have worse luck with this than most.

Although his career was short, due to the heavy workload he did manage to pitch 3300 innings. His career ERA of 2.65 is not outstanding given the relatively low run environment of the day. (It seems to be around league average for many of the years that he was active.) Albright thinks that he was better than that though. Hiroshima had a terrible offense, and a terrible defense. Albright says that normalizing his performance to account for the poor defensive club behind him would show that he was significantly above average for his career, despite his disappointing superficial numbers.

Hasegawa was a small man (listed at 123 pounds), without much on his fastball. His specialties were movement and location. If he’d been left handed it would be tempting to call him “crafty”. (For some reason “crafty lefty” is a thing whereas “crafty righty” is not.) He threw sliders, and sinkers, and a shuuto.

The Carp’s struggles were understandable. Unlike most Japanese teams, they weren’t controlled by a corporation, and so didn’t have deep pockets to draw from; at one point they kept the lights on through public subscription. One reason that Hasegawa is notable is that the Carp faced contraction during his tenure, but they played just well-enough (and almost certainly wouldn’t have had he not been on the team) to keep the team off of the chopping block. It wasn’t until 1968 that they got a sponsor.

My Hasegawa card is from JCM 33e, issued in 1959.

[Bill77]

I am glad I posted my card. Thank you for the heads up on the 2nd player on my card.

[nat]

I suspect that Hideo Nomo isn’t in the hall of fame for what he did on the baseball diamond. Don’t get me wrong, he was good, but that’s not what he’s being recognized for. Nomo pitched only five seasons in Japan (all with the Kintetsu Buffaloes). He was remarkably good at the beginning of his career, posting ERAs of 2.91, 3.05, and 2.66 in his first three years. In 1993 his performance dropped off (he was slightly below average), the following year offense exploded in the Pacific League, but Nomo’s ERA was about the same as it had been the previous year, so in context he was quite a bit better than average.

As a rookie, Nomo was a huge success. He won all of the post season awards. But it was what happened during the 1994/5 off-season that won him fame. He retired. Now, of course he’s not the first player to have retired, but he was the first to realize that if he retired from Japanese baseball he wouldn’t be bound by their reserve clause anymore, and so could declare himself a free agent. Not that any Japanese team would sign him – becoming a free agent in Japan isn’t that easy. But the Dodgers would (and did) sign him.

Nomo was the first player to have ever won the rookie of the year award twice. Unless Ichiro won it in Japan, he’s the only one to have ever managed it. After he signed with the Dodgers he was an immediate success. Nomo led the league in shutouts, strikeouts, hits per nine innings, and strikeouts per nine innings. That last figure was 11.1, a number that would be excellent for a starter today, and practically unheard of in the mid 90s. Nolan Ryan only topped 11.1 K/9 twice in his career. As an American “rookie” his ERA was 2.53; remember this was during sillyball, league-wide ERA was a fair bit north of 4. Nomo wasn’t the first Japanese player to come to America, but he was the first in about thirty years. What he did was display that playing in MLB was a viable option for Japanese players. Arguably without Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki would have been a life-long member of the Orix BlueWave. (Either that or Ichiro would have been the trailblazer that Nomo in fact was.)

The honeymoon didn’t last though. Nomo was good in 96, about average in 97, and traded to the Mets in the middle of 98. He had two more good years for the Dodgers in the early 00’s, but he spent most of the rest of his career bouncing from team to team in MLB, not being especially effective for anyone. At the age of 39, after having missed two years of baseball, he tried to make a comeback with the Royals. It went about as well as a 39 year old’s comeback with the Royals, after having sat out two years, should be expected to go.

The Golden Player’s Club counts performance after a player has left Japan, and Nomo totaled just barely north of 200 wins for his career, adding Japanese and MLB totals. Hence, he’s a member of the club. But there is an element of apple-and-oranges here. The MLB season is longer than the Japanese season, so Nomo had more chances to pick up wins than a pure Japanese player would have had over the same number of seasons.

Nomo was famous for his forkball and his funky “tornado” delivery motion. Probably the closest we have today is Johnny Cueto. (Although Cueto never quite repeats the same motion twice. I like watching him pitch just for the weirdness of it.)

If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have put Nomo in the hall of fame. His Japanese career was too short, and his American career wasn’t good enough to be worth much in the way of extra credit. My first thought for an American player who would be comparable to his JPPL+MLB career was Dave McNally. That’s not fair to Nomo though, McNally’s American career was only a little better than Nomo’s. Maybe someone like Sam McDowell would be a better comparison. McDowell was a star, but nobody’s idea of a hall of famer.

Sabr has a long Nomo biography.

My card is from the 1992 BBM set. Nomo was already a star at this point, but still only 23 years old.

[nat]

Katuso Osugi was a slugging first baseman from 1965 to 1983. The first part of his career he spent with the Flyers/Fighters, and the balance of his career with Yakult. As a player, he’s a familiar type. He hit home runs, didn’t run fast, and played a defensively-unimportant position. Speaking of home runs, he totaled 486 for his career, topping 40 each year from 1970 to 1972. To go with a career slash line of 287/350/519.

Strangely, finding an analogous American player is difficult not for a dearth of comparable players, but because there are too many. Eddie Murray, Rafael Palmeiro, Carlos Delgado, Reggie Jackson if you don’t mind including outfielders. I’ll nominate Palmeiro, not because he’s statistically a better fit than Murray (or lots of other people) but because he, like Osugi, split his career almost evenly in half between two teams. (Of course Palmeiro jumped back and forth between them, whereas Osugi had a cleaner split.)

Osugi started his baseball career in the industrial leagues, playing for the Marui Department Store team. A workout with the Flyers got him his first pro contract. He was selected to five best-nines, all of them before leaving the Flyers. (The Flyers play in the Pacific League. When he moved to Yakult he also switched leagues, and someone named ‘Oh’ had the first base slot on the best-nine team locked down for the Central League.) However, he did win the Japan Series MVP award in 1978, en route to the Swallows’ first ever Japan Series championship.

It turns out that the Buffaloes aren’t the only team named after one of their players (Shigeru Chiba, in their case). The Fighters are also named after one of their players. The story goes that the team had a contest to pick a name (to replace ‘Flyers’), and the winning entry suggested naming the team ‘Fighters’ in honor of Osugi’s fighting spirit. And then they traded him the next year, but whatevs. Luckily the internet didn’t exist yet, or else they would have ended being the Nippon Ham Baseballteam McBaseteamface.

Albright considers him the sixth-greatest Japanese first baseman, and 25th greatest player overall. Osugi’s batting style involved, he said, “hitting towards the moon”, about which Albright dryly remarks “I gather [it] involved uppercutting”.

My card is from the 1979 Yamakatsu set. My main source for Calbee cards has dried up, so I’ve had to start looking for other manufacturers for post-1960s cards. For what little it’s worth (=probably nothing, since there are only two graded examples total) this is the only PSA 10 1979 Yamakatsu Katsuo Osugi. It’s my first Yamakatsu card; it has a nice bright image and a few basic stats on the back. You can tell from the mylar shrink wrap in a standard holder that it’s about the size of the 1980s Calbee cards. Unfortunately, the slab has a crack in it (along the bottom). Given how thinly collected Japanese cards are, it’s probably not worth re-holdering. (To give you an idea, Robb Fitts has the only 1978 Yamakatsu PSA registry set. There aren’t any 1979 registry sets.) I might liberate it from its tomb, to allow it its rightful place in my binder. But, given all the talk of how picky PSA is with their high-grade cards, it also seems like a shame to give up an official Gem Mint designation.

Edit: And I'm at 66% now.

[nat]

Tetsuya Yoneda spent 22 years pitching, mostly for the Hankyu Braves. He broke in as an 18 year old in 1956, and pitched until 1977. Only the last couple seasons did he appear for any team besides Hankyu. Over the course of those 22 years he managed to become one of Japan’s winningest pitchers (#2 in fact, behind Kaneda), with a career record of 350-285. (I assume he’s also one of Japan’s losingest pitchers.) As one might expect from someone who pitched for 22 years and won 350 games, his career innings pitched total is quite impressive, at 5130. That figure would put him 11th all-time in MLB, between Grover Cleveland Alexander and Kid Nichols. Incidentally, his win total would put him 10th in MLB history, below Roger Clemens and above Tim Keefe. Early in his career he was a strikeout monster, but dropped to only above average in K rate shortly thereafter. His raw totals make it look like his ability to strike out batters steadily degraded as he got older (which wouldn’t really be a surprise), but this is actually an artifact of changing context. Apparently batters just started putting more balls in play. Due to an above-average ability to strike out batters, and an extremely long career, he is second all-time in strike outs (although he is way behind Kaneda for the lead).

One thing that he can’t blame on league context is his reduced workload over the years. Early on he was pitching ~300 innings per year, but 1970 was the last season in which he threw more than 200 innings, and he was largely a relief pitcher for his last couple seasons.

Seaver-like his career started with controversy. The Tigers signed him out of high school, but Hankyu complained that the contract was invalid (on grounds that are unclear at the moment). The league ruled in their favor. And so although the Braves missed out on Seaver, they did get Yoneda. Or something like that.

Probably the biggest problem that Yoneda ran into is that Hankyu was not especially competitive for the first half of his career. Despite good pitching, the offense couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain. In 1959 he had a 2.12 ERA and still lost 24 games. In the mid-60s they had something of a rebirth, however, and he ended up appearing in the Japan Series five times. They lost all five.

Albright has him ranked as the 15th greatest Japanese pitcher, and 75th greatest player over all. I’m inclined to think that he rates peak performance too highly, there’s a huge amount of value in being a good pitcher for 5000 innings. Now, my inclination is not exactly dispositive evidence, but if I was starting a team and had to choose between a pitcher that would go on to have Yoneda’s career, and one that would go on to have Hideo Fujimoto’s career, it’s not obvious to me that I would pick Fujimoto. Now, Fujimoto was clearly the more talented pitcher, but he also pitched only half as many innings as Yoneda. The MLB pitchers that Albright lists as comps are: Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton, Early Wynn, Robin Roberts, Fergie Jenkins, Steve Carlton, Bert Blyleven, Jim Kaat and Tommy John. This is a pretty good list. Before reading Albright’s article I had Niekro and Blyleven picked out as comparable major leaguers.

Everyone who writes about Yoneda mentions his prowess with the bat. So I guess that I will too. Now, it’s not that he had a very refined hit tool. He seems to have been a “swing hard at anything near the strike zone” kind of hitter – the pitcher version of Adam Dunn – but he did (like Dunn) have good power (for a pitcher). He totaled 33 home runs, including multiple seasons of 4 and 5, to go with a Dunn-like .171 batting average. His bat was sufficiently well-respected that he made 22 appearances at positions other than pitcher.

The card is a menko from 1960. The set is JCM 12e.

[nat]

Junzo Sekine was a two-way player. Early in his career he was a pitcher; from 1957-on he was an outfielder. From 1950 to 1964 he played for Kintetsu, 1965 was the last year of his career, and he spent it with the Giants. The switch to the outfield was probably a good idea. In 1957 his OPS was 100 points above league average – that’s 16%. It would be like having an 850 OPS in today’s American League. Basically, in 1957 he was Nelson Cruz. He totaled 1137 hits, 59 home runs, and a 279/336/372 slash line. As a pitcher he had his moments, but was really only above average in 1954; the rest of the time he was a middle of the road starter.

Sekine was a star at Hosei, and was recruited to play for Kintetsu by their manager (and his former manager at Hosei).

One of his claims to fame is that he was selected to the all star game as both a pitcher and an outfielder. Albright does not rank him on his list of the top 114 Japanese players, and says that he thinks that he doesn’t belong in the hall of fame. I agree. Because he was a two way player there really aren’t any American comps. He’s no Babe Ruth, and even John Ward was better than he was. He had one above average season as a pitcher (and a bunch of average-ish seasons), and then a run as Nelson Cruz. That’s a nice career, but it really doesn’t add up to being a hall of famer.

After retirement he spent a while as a manager, helming the Whales from 1982-4 and Yakult from 87-89. None of his teams had a winning percentage above 500. However, if Wikipedia is to be believed, he was instrumental in helping Sachio Kinugasa develop as a batter. He was the hitting coach for the Carp in 1970 and reportedly forced Kinugasa to practice long after everyone else had left the field – including catching him coming home from carousing with his friends at 3am and forcing him to practice until daybreak.

It seems that early pro ball in Japan had no shortage of pitchers who could hit. Sekine and Fujimura are probably the best examples, but Sanada was also a good hitter. This is purely anecdotal of course, but it seems to me that competence on both sides of the ball was more common then than it is now (and than it ever has been in the US). If that’s right, it should tell us something about the level of play in early pro ball in Japan. The skills involved in hitting and in pitching are very different. So the probability that you’re good at hitting, conditional on the fact that you’re good at pitching, isn’t much higher the probability that you’re good at hitting, conditional on background conditions alone. And vice versa. So if a player is on the far right tail of the distribution of hitting ability, it’s not very likely that he’ll be on the far right tail of the distribution of pitching ability. (Nor vice versa.)

Now it’s certainly possible that there’s some player who is good at both – Babe Ruth did exist. But if there are a bunch of players who are good at both, it’s likely that they’re not being drawn from the far right tail of the hitting distribution, or from the far right tail of the pitching distribution, or both. More likely is that their skill level is closer towards the mean. (I am assuming that these skills are normally distributed, that is that the distribution makes a bell curve. Hence the “far right tail” is the small number of people who are really good, and the mean is the top of the bell.) Which is all a long-winded way of saying that if a league has a bunch of people who are good pitchers and good hitters, it is likely that the level of play in the league is pretty low. If all this is right, and if hitting and pitching skill is normally distributed, it means that the pipe-line that fed Japan’s early pro leagues wasn’t very efficient. There were probably guys who were better hitters or better pitchers than the people playing pro ball who, for one reason or another, never got a chance.

The card is from JCM 123. Its date of issue is uncertain, either 1950 or 1951. If the former, then this is Sekine’s rookie card.