Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Shunichi Amachi was a manager for the Dragons. He piloted the team from 1949 to 1951, again in 1954, and then in 1957-8. It was under his guidance that they won their first Japan Series, and their last for another half century. Oddly, he never played baseball professionally. At Meiji University he was a catcher, but he never did make it to NPB as a player. Albright ranks him as Japan’s 18th most successful manager, but his methodology leaves something to be desired. (It’s a system of the “assign X points for Y” type, where there’s no reason that X is worth Y points, and so nothing that the system actually measures.)

In addition to serving as a manager, he had a decent career as an umpire. He was an umpire for a league of six universities based in Tokyo from 1929 to 1947. In addition to college umpiring he put in some work umpiring high school matches, most notably in the Koshien tournament. Following his career as an umpire he took over managing Teikyo Commercial School baseball club, for whom his future ace with the Dragons, Shigeru Sugishita, pitched. Their careers would be fairly well intertwined, as it was on the back of Sugishita’s forkball that Amachi’s Dragons won their Japan Series.

Amachi was not on my original list of hall of famers to acquire. I set out to get cards of professional hall of fame players, and while I’ve made exceptions for players who were inducted as managers but who had long and successful playing careers (Hara comes to mind as an example), Amachi definitely doesn’t fall into that category. (Given that he didn’t play baseball post-college.) However, this is the only Amachi card that I’ve ever seen for sale (outside of uncut JCM21 sheets), this particular card is from JGA16, a set that I’d never encountered before. Indeed, Engel gives is rarity level R4 – indicating only 5-10 of each card known to exist. And while I think that Engel’s rarity levels should probably taken with a grain of salt, it surely at least indicates that there aren’t many of these floating around. So I picked up Amachi-san. JGA16 was issued in 1949, making this Amachi’s rookie card, if that’s what you call a manager’s first card.

[nat]

The first post in this thread featured Kazuhisa Inao, sharing a card with Takehiko Bessho. That was almost 11 months ago. My early write-ups about Japanese players were pretty skimpy (just five lines for Inao), and given that I’ve picked up a new Inao card, I’d like to take this opportunity to do a better job.

So:

Kazuhisa Inao pitched for the Nishitetsu Lions from 1956 to 1969. Inao did not begin his baseball career as a pitcher – when he was in high school he was a catcher with a famously strong arm. Strong enough that taking up a role on the other side of the battery was the obvious move as soon as he went pro. As a 19 year old rookie he posted a 1.06 ERA in a league with a 2.60 ERA as a whole. Put that in the 2018 National League and you get a 1.65 ERA, AKA, a little bit better than DeGrom, who led the league by 70 points and won the Cy Young Award. He was never again quite that good, but he was pretty close through his mid 20s. Both the 1957 and 1958 seasons concluded with MVP awards for Inao. As was standard in the 1950s and 60s, he pitched an insane number of innings, topping 400 in two different years. Then he pitched 11 innings in 1964. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what happened there. From there on out his innings pitched were severely limited (although still healthy by contemporary MLB standards). Shoulder injuries were the main problem in 1964, and a training program that involved throwing an iron baseball didn’t help.

Despite the late career injuries, Inao was obviously one of Japan's greatest starters. In a league in which 200 wins is a notable achievement (it’s the bar for the Golden Player’s Club), Inao won 273, along with an ERA that is third-lowest all-time. (Behind Hideo Fujimura and Jiro Noguchi. And, yes, it was in a low-run environment.) Albright has him ninth all-time, and third among pitchers.

A curious thing about Inao is that, despite being one of Japan’s greatest starting pitchers, he actually made more appearances out of the bullpen than he did as a starter. It was common for starting pitchers to frequently make relief appearances, but Inao did a lot of it. He appeared in 754 games, but started only 304 of them. Along the way he put up a career 276-137 record, good for a .668 winning percentage. (Including 42 wins in 1961.) Now a pitcher has only limited control over their wins and losses, but it goes without saying that that is an impressive record.

And the Lions were good. They won the Japan Series from 1956-1958. But of course their goodness was due in no small part to Inao himself. In the 1958 Series he won four consecutive games. It’s like Randy Johnson from 2001, but, like, times two. In all he appeared in games 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Game five concluded with Inao hitting a walk-off home run in the 10th inning.

After retiring from the mound, Inao took up managing. He found a difficult time to do it. In the late 60s and early 70s Japan was rocked by a series of game-fixing scandals that collectively became known as the ‘Black Mist Scandal’. (B-R has a nice summary here.) It first broke with the Nishitetsu team, so Inao was at the center of the storm immediately. He managed the Lions to five sub-500 seasons before retiring. A decade later he took up the top spot for the Lotte Orions, managing them to a mixed record over three seasons.

My new Inao card is from the JCM41 set, which was issued in 1959. It's a couple years more recent than my other Inao card, but still early in his career.

[nat]

Takehiko Bessho was, like Inao, featured in the first post in this thread, and, like Inao, did not get the write-up that he deserves. My biographical efforts today represent an attempt to remedy this situation.

Bessho began his career before WWII, playing for Nankai. He would continue playing for them when he returned from the war, but soon found himself with the Giants. As best I can make out from the Japanese Wikipedia page, there was no uniform player contract at the time, and the reserve clause was something more like a tradition than a legally enforceable contractual provision. In any case, it seems that substantial bonuses (Wiki mentions cars and houses) were used to ensure that players did not seek employment elsewhere. But Bessho was dissatisfied with the skimpy renumeration offered by Nankai, and had long wanted to play for the Giants, so he bucked tradition and declared himself a free agent.

However – however – it also seems that the Giants were writing checks and making promises (viz. for a house in Tokyo) while he was still under contract with Nankai. There may have been some extra-contractual inducements for Bessho to seek free agency. The Giants were ultimately fined for tampering with Nankai’s property, and Bessho was suspended for the start of the season, but the contract with the Giants was deemed legal. (How you can be fined for entering into a legal contract is beyond me. You’d think either everything is okay, or the fines are imposed and the contract voided.) The reserve clause was formally incorporated into Japanese contracts starting in 1951.

Anyway, it worked out well for the Giants. Bessho would go on to the be greatest pitcher in Giants’ history. In total he pitched 4350 innings at a 2.18 ERA, to garner 310 wins (against 178 losses). He was consistently excellent. In 1952 (a year that I picked literally at random) he had an ERA half of the league average. In the 2018 AL you’d need a 2.13 ERA to cut the league rate in half. Blake Snell was the only pitcher with a mark better than that, and he won the Cy Young Award. (Wow, the leaders ran away from the pack in the AL last year. Mike Fiers with 10th in the league in ERA with a 3.56 mark.) To eyes accustomed to modern MLB numbers, his strikeout-to-walk rates don’t look good (below 2:1 for the first half of his career), but in context they were terrific. The Central League in the 40s and 50s drew lots of walks and didn’t strike out much.

Due to variation in league context it’s hard to pin down Bessho’s best season. It might actually have been 1952. That wasn’t the year in which he had the lowest ERA, but some of those early seasons of Japanese ball didn’t see many runs scored. And anyway, he was regularly far better than average. As with many starting pitchers of his day, Bessho made plenty of appearances out of the bullpen on his days off, although he wasn’t as extreme about it as was Inao. Twice he cleared 30 wins in a season, which has got to be hard to do in a season that’s only 120 games long.

He was a pretty good hitter too. But unlike lots of his contemporaries (Fujimura, Nishizawa, Sekine) he didn’t get a lot of playing time at other positions, at least not after his rookie year. He played 36 games at 1B and 27 in the outfield, putting up a .254 batting average to go with 35 career home runs in about 2100 at bats.

Bessho’s fame in baseball started before his professional career did. As a high schooler in the Koshien tournament he pitched 14 innings despite having broken his non-pitching arm. He had it in a sling and the catcher rolled the ball back to him. After failing to get in to Keio he briefly attended a vocational school and pitched for Great Ring before being drafted. Initially he was sent to Manchuria. At the time it was controlled by Manchuckuo, a monarchy that was a de facto puppet of Japan. I’ve tried to figure out if he would have seen combat there. It seems unlikely. The territory was seized by Japan in the early 1930s, and the Soviets didn’t invade until 1945, by which point Bessho was gone.

For his career Bessho was a 2x MVP, 2x Japan Series MVP, 2x Sawamura Award winner, and 6x Best Nine. Albright ranks him 11th all-time.

I picked up this card in the same lot as the Amachi card posted above. It’s also from the rare JGA16 set, issued in 1949. (And I’ve got a Kazuto Yamamoto from the same set if any type collectors need one.)

The JGA16 set must have been released rather late in the year. 1949 was Bessho's first season with the Giants (and there was a legal kerfluffle at the beginning of the season), but he's already pictured as a member of the Giants on this card.

[nat]

Another guy who wasn’t on my initial want list. But I was getting bored of not finding any cards that I needed, so I decided to pick up a couple more managers.

Shigeru Mizuhara played at Keio and joined the Giants as soon as the professional league formed. He was a second baseman who was pretty good with the bat. In the fall season of 1937 he was legitimately great, but mostly he was just pretty good. Since the pro league didn’t form until he was 27, it wasn’t long before he was past his prime. At age 29, in 1938, he tried pitching (as an amateur he pitched in addition to playing the field) and was quite good. His ERA was something like 40% better than average in the fall season. However he pitched only two unsuccessful innings in the spring, and never appeared on the mound again. It looks like the war was essentially the end of his playing career. Mizuhara was 33 in 1942, but still pretty solid with the bat. He posted an OPS of only 603, but against a league average of 528, that’s a healthy figure. (It’s almost impossible to imagine a league with a 528 OPS. Games must have been twenty minutes long and scores must have been easy to confuse with soccer.) Unlike Bessho – who as far as I can tell never saw combat – Mizuhara ended up in Siberia as a Russian prisoner of war. Word is that he taught baseball to the Russians.

Before the professional league formed, Mizuhara was a star amateur player. Maybe the best. He appeared in the all-Japan team that played the touring Americans in 1934. As a pitcher he got mauled in the November 13 game, even giving up a hit to Moe Berg.

Waseda and Keio had a famously contentious rivalry, and Mizuhara was at the center of it in the 1930s. In a game between the two universities in 1933 Waseda players who so incised with Mizuhara that they threw garbage at him. Most of which he ignored, but when they threw a half-eaten apple at him he threw it back. Which prompted an enormous riot. They don’t make college baseball like they used to.

But anyway, the important thing about Mizuhara was his work as a manager. From 1950 to 1960 (inclusive) he managed the Giants. They were great. This was the Giants of Bessho, Kawakami, and Yonamine. They won eight pennants and four Japan Series. In 61 he left for the Flyers, staying with them through 1967. The Flyers were always the Giants’ little brothers (at the time both teams played in Tokyo), but they were good in Mizuhara’s time with them and won a pennant of their own. In fact, between 1950 and 1967 none of Mizuhara’s teams finished below 500, and only the 1967 Flyers were exactly a 500 team. In 1969 he returned to the dugout, managing the Dragons for three mostly unsuccessful seasons. Albright regards him as the second greatest manager in history and credits him with being one of the managers who introduced platoon match ups to Japan.

The card is a small bromide from the JBR 41 set, issued in 1950.

[nat]

Osamu Mihara was a force in Japanese baseball for decades. He rose to prominence with Waseda, and went pro as soon as it was an option. At 24 he was playing for the Giants (then Kyojin). He made his debut in the fall of 1936. All of his professional appearances (as a player) would be at second base, and there would be a total of 108 of them between 1936 and 1938. Although he was a part of the All-Japan team that played the Americans in 1934, once he went pro he was, at least as a batter, nothing special. He never hit a home run, although he did steal a few bases. His batting lines are about what you would expect from Japanese baseball in the 30s. I don’t know what his fielding was like, but whatever reputation he had at the time couldn’t have been from his offensive production.

B-R says of his role in the war only that he was a private in the army. Presumably that’s what interrupted his playing career. When he came back from the war he was 35 and hadn’t played professional baseball in nearly a decade. A return to the field was not in the cards. He seems to have quickly secured a role managing the Giants, however. In 1947 Mihara supplanted Nakajima. The Giants, as usual, were extremely successful, but he didn’t last long as the helm. Yomiuri replaced him briefly with Nakajima again, and then permanently with Shigeru Mizuhara (see the post above this one).

Because I’m looking into it: here’s an aside on Giants managers. The Giants are looking pretty good on this one: Fujimoto, Yokozawa, Nakajima, Mihara, Nakajima again, Mizuhara, Kawakami, Nagashima, Fujita, Oh, back to Fujita, back to Nagashima, Hara, Horiuchi, back to Hara. That is a heck of a lot of hall of famers managing the Giants, although admittedly not all of them are in the hall because of what they did as managers. Yoshinobu Takahashi breaks the streak. Although he was pretty good in his own right, we’ll see. Everyone who managed the Giants from their founding in 1936 through 2015 is in the hall of fame. One starts to wonder in which direction causality runs here. Are the Giants super good at finding gifted managers, or does managing the Giants make a manager look like they’re gifted?

Mihara’s tenure at the head of the Giants was short-lived. Three seasons and then out. He sat out the 1950 season and then took over the top job for Nishitetsu. This is where he really made his name. The Lions were the powerhouse of the Pacific League during the 1950s and Mihara led the team through all of it. Their star third baseman was Futoshi Nakanishi, who married Mihara’s daughter. Probably a good way to ensure that you’ve got a spot on the team, but Nakanishi (a hall of famer in his own right) didn’t need the help. In 1960 he moved on to the Taiyo Whales, leading them to their lone championship. In 1968 he joined the Kintetsu Buffaloes, with whom he had a fair amount of success. And then the last three years (starting in 1971) he managed the Yakult Atoms. They were a bit below 500 while he was there. Mihara was famous for a relatively gentle managing style. For instance, he never hit his players. The fact that this was notable I leave here without comment.

The card today is an uncatalogued bromide. Mihara is on the Giants, so that means the card is from 1947-9, but I can’t pin it down any better than that. He’s talking to Shigeru Chiba, which is neat, two hall of famers on the same card, but it doesn’t help date the card. Chiba played his entire career for the Giants, including the entirety of Mihara’s tenure there. The back of the card has a stamp which, if my high-school Japanese doesn’t fail me, is the kanji for ‘roku’ or ‘five’. It’s common for bromides to have back stamps – usually they indicate that the stamped card was a “winner” which could be redeemed for a prize (usually a bigger card). I’ve never heard of a fifth-place prize (1 through 3 is pretty common), but I guess that’s what it could be.

Mihara is another late addition to my list, so picking up this card doesn’t advance me towards my goal very much. I’m at 91%.

[nat]

No cards today, but some interesting video. The internet thinks that this is video of Eiji Sawamura. Strangely enough, on a French website. I don't know enough Japanese to follow the voice-over.

Somebody also has a gif of (what is allegedly) his delivery.

[nat]

These guys duplicate players that I already have, so no advancement on the project here, but thought I’d share anyway. On the left we have Bozo Wakabayashi, in the middle is Tetsuharu Kawakami, and on the right is Hiroshi Oshita. These cards are from the JBR13 set – or at least the Oshita card is. The other two are identical to JBR13 cards except that they are blank on the back. (Or, well, they were before someone wrote on them.) My guess is that all three of them are JBR13 cards, just missing a pass on the back. Although I guess it’s possible that they’re from a set that’s identical but for the printing on the back. I’m really not a fan of this set – all the cards are boring headshots printed in sepia tone. Moreover, these three examples are in pretty rough shape: creasing, staining, writing, etc. On that note, however, I will say that I kind of like the writing.

The text in the parentheses on the front of the cards gives the player’s team. On the Wakabayashi card it has been scratched out and replaced. Both the text and the replacement writing are illegible (at least to a non-Japanese reader like me), but I’d be willing to bet that it originally said “Osaka” and that the handwritten bit says “Mainichi”. The cards were issued in 1949, and the following season Wakabayashi was traded. You see this all the time on old American cards, it seems pretty likely that that’s what happening here.

As for the writing on the back: it appears to be a dice game. There are twelve, numbered, lines of text. I copied the first three lines from the Kawakami card into Google Translate and got “middle hit”, “chicken neck”, and “left hit”. While I suppose “chicken neck” might be late-40s slang for a strikeout or something, my guess is that I mis-transcribed one of the symbols. Anyways, “middle hit” and “left hit” sure make this sound like a game. Some of the text is repeated on the other cards. My guess is that each kid is supposed to pick a card (or maybe form a lineup – if they had enough cards), then they take turns rolling dice to see what happens in the game. The handwriting on all three cards looks the same to me, so they probably came from the same collection and it was the same kid drawing up the dice game.

[Exhibitman]

Picked up this Bromide at the National:



Lefty O'Doul and Giants manager Mizuhara

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Picked up this Bromide at the National:



Lefty O'Doul and Giants manager Mizuhara

Nice pick up!

Though that isn't actually Giants Manager Mizuhara, the Japanese guy is Shinji Hamazaki (manager of the Braves).

[nat]

Love the bromide Adam! I'm a big fan of pretty much anything Lefty O'Doul related. Probably one of the most interesting people ever associated with baseball.

The cards that I've got to post today aren't as cool as an old bromide, but old Calbees are nice too.

Isao Shibata was an outfielder for the V9-era Giants. He played for them from 1962 to 1981, from the ages of 18 to 37. Offensively, his game appears to have been built around speed. The 400 career slugging percentage indicates that hitting long balls wasn’t part of the plan. (Fortunately he had Oh and Nagashima in the line up to handle that part of the game.) If I had to guess, I’d say that he was probably the V9’s leadoff hitter. (N.B.: confirmed by B-R.) For his career he put up a 267/347/400 batting line. None of those marks are particularly impressive. His 579 career stolen bases are somewhat better. A cursory internet search doesn’t turn up a list of career leaders, but I’m guessing that that’s third all-time in Japan. Hirose is second all-time, and he’s only about 10 steals ahead of Shibata.

There is, however, a problem with trying to build your career around your feet. The run-value of a stolen base just isn’t very high, and the cost, in terms of expected runs, of getting thrown out stealing, is. Just how proficient you must be at stealing bases for it to be worthwhile depends on the context in which you play. Higher scoring contexts make stealing a riskier bet for two reasons: (1) if you don’t steal, there’s a fair chance that one of the guys behind you will drive you in anyways, and (2) in a high scoring environment, each out is worth a greater amount of runs, so you’re betting more runs on your ability to successfully steal a base than you would be in a low run scoring environment.

The Book goes into this in some detail. They found that as of (IIRC) 2005, in MLB you needed to steal at a 75% success rate in order to break even; that is, if you were getting thrown out more than 25% of the time, then you were costing your team runs by trying to steal. Now, since the context in which Shibata was playing isn’t the same as the context that Tango et al. used to generate data for their calculations, you can’t just import that number over in order to evaluate Shibata. Doing all the calculations for Japan in the sixties and seventies would be a lot of work, and I’m much too lazy to do it. Quickly eyeballing it will give us some idea, however. The 2003 NL scored an average of 4.61 runs per team game, the 1971 Central League (to pick a year from the middle of Shibata’s career) scored 3.23 runs per team game. That’s a big difference. They really weren’t scoring any runs in the Central League in the early 70s. So that’s, what, 25% fewer runs in the Central League than in the leagues Tango was using for his data? So the run value of an out in the context in which Shibata was playing was considerably lower than early 2000s NL. Which means that he would need a success rate of a good bit less than 75% in order for him to contribute value with those stolen bases. And, in fact, Shibata stole bases at exactly a 75% success rate for his career.

In the MLB that would put him tied for 194th for career stolen base percentage. (Tied with, among others, Dustin Pedroia, Brian Dozier, and Michael Young.) Given the higher scoring environment in which these Americans play, they’re not contributing much value with their steal attempts. (Yes, yes, it’s a discretional play, you’re more likely to try it when one run matters and the hitters coming up behind you stink, etc etc. I know. But R/G is even higher now than it was in 2003, and even if it’s discretionary, if you’re below the average break even point, you’re not helping too much.) But given that they were only scoring a bit more than 3 runs per game, Shibata was adding a fair amount of value with his 75% success rate.

Like Kawakami had his red bat, Shibata had his red gloves. The story goes (Japanese Wikipedia page for the source) that when he was practicing with the Dodgers (for a while MLB teams and Japanese teams would do spring training together) he found that he had forgotten his batting gloves. He went next door to a golf club to try to find something that would do, and all they had were red women’s gloves. I don’t know if he continued using golf gloves in place of batting gloves, but red gloves apparently became his trademark.

He was originally drafted as a pitcher. In fact, his initial claim to fame was leading his high school team to a pair of championships at Koshien on the mound. That didn’t last. As a pro, he was terrible. But he had a strong arm, and a transition to the outfield was natural. His Japanese Wikipedia page says that he was Japan’s first switch hitter. (Really? They didn’t have switch hitters until the 1960s?)

Shibata was a 12x all-star and a 4x member of the best nine team. He’s in the top 20 all-time in triples, runs, steals, and walks. Albright considers him to be Japan’s 68th greatest player and thinks that he’s worthy of the hall of fame. I don’t know about how precisely he compares to #s 67 or 69, but I agree that he would be a good fit for the hall of fame. He just isn’t in yet.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

My cards are mid 70s Calbee cards. I think one is from 77 and the other from 76.

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by seanofjapan

Nice pick up!

Though that isn't actually Giants Manager Mizuhara, the Japanese guy is Shinji Hamazaki (manager of the Braves).

Thanks; my bad.