Japanese HOF Project

[NVPackFan]

Hello and thank you for your posts. Very educational as I'm just now starting to learn about vintage Japanese cards. I have some questions though that I can't seem to find answers to so thought maybe you all can help.

First, can you explain the "JCM..." set name system? it appears that there are the same numbers but for different years. Then, when I look on eBay, I see these two cards of Sadaharu Oh listed that look virtually identical but one is "JCM12e" but the other one is "JCM12b." I honestly can't see what the difference is but can you tell me how they differ?

Thanks for any info you can provide.

-Damon

[seanofjapan]

JCM = "Japanese Card Menko". Menko are a kind of card playing game in Japan with cards made of thick cardboard which were meant to be thrown against other cards on the ground in an attempt to flip them over. Most Japanese cards from the 50s and 60s are Menko and the numbering system is confusing because so many sets are being discovered basically out of order. Also a lot of slightly different sets were issued by the same maker in the same year, so they are given the same number but with an a,b,c etc added.

The cards of some players from JCM 12b and 12e sets are almost identical. They just know that they are different sets from uncut sheets, the 12e set has more players. According to Engel the distinguishing feature of a 12e cards is that the player image has a more painted look to it.

[nat]

Kazuya Fukuura played first base for the Marines for, approximately, ever. He broke in as a 21 year old in 1997, and was still an active player as of this year, although he has appeared in only nine games for the Marines’ minor league team. He has announced that he is retiring at the end of the season, but given that he’s only managed to play in nine games this year, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was, in fact, retired already. Fukuura always seems to be compared to Mark Grace, and the comparison seems apt, at least in that they’re both singles hitting first basemen. Fukuura has no power to speak of. In 2003 he managed 21 home runs, but he’s usually in single digits, and from 2012 to 2018 he managed a total of three. Fukuura’s 2000th (and so Meikyukai-qualifying) hit was a double on September 22nd of last year. Of all of the players who managed to get 2000 hits, he was the second oldest when he pulled it off, and he had appeared in the third-most games. Mike Bolsinger (former Diamondback-Dodger-BlueJay, and currently Marine) has a really nice clip of Fukuura’s 2000th hit on his twitter feed.

Given his background, that he was a singles hitter shouldn’t be much of a surprise. He was originally a pitcher, and was, in that capacity, the Marines’ 7th round draft pick in 1993. An injury curtailed his pitching career, and led to a transition to being a position player. As a left-handed thrower, his only options were first base or the outfield. He wasn’t fast, which probably explains opting for first base. He was a three-time gold glove award winner, and was selected to the best nine team in 2010.

Now, about that Mark Grace comparison. Grace was actually a good hitter, and decent player all-around, until the last year or so of his career. Fukuura… wasn’t. The last year that Fukuura was any good was 2010. He was bad in 2011, and his playing time diminished thereafter. As befits a singles hitter, he managed to keep a healthy on base percentage for a few years, but his power, never notable to begin with, slipped even further. The final 500 hits took him about 800 games spread out over nine seasons. Given that he had exactly 2000 hits at the big league level, I’m guessing that he was demoted immediately after qualifying for the Meikyukai.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is from the 2001 Calbee set.

[nat]

I’ve got an Aota card on an uncut menko sheet. But it doesn’t really fit in my binder. Tough life, I know. So anyways, I picked up another one.

Here’s what I wrote about him before.

Aota was a slugging outfielder who played with several different teams from 1942 to 1959. He held the career home run record for a little while, and led the league in home runs five times. In 1948, one of the years in which he led the league in home runs, he also led the league in batting average (barely, .001 over Kozuru and Yamamoto), but missed out on a triple crown by nine RBIs. B-R says that he was traded by the Giants to the Whales, but as always I can’t find the player who went the other way. I’m starting to doubt that they actually traded players back then.

Let’s do some adjustments for context, and see how big of a slugger Aota was. We’ll start with that 1948 season in which he nearly won a triple crown. His raw numbers were: 306/339/499, against a league average of 242/300/329. Put that into the 2018 American League and you get a 315 batting average, 359 on base percentage, and 632 slugging percentage. Let’s look at 1951 also. His raw line was 312/378/582. League average was 264/329/375. In a 2018 American League context that works out to 294/366/645. That slugging percentage is better than anyone managed in 2018, the on-base percentage, while good, wouldn’t have ranked among the league leaders. It’s a reasonably good match for what Nelson Cruz is doing for MIN this year. Given his home run hitting ways, I want to compare him to Ralph Kiner, but Aota was much faster, and Kiner was much better at getting on base. Positional differences aside, maybe Home Run Baker is the comparable American player.

Aota was elected to the hall of fame in 2009. Since he had died some years earlier, Shigeru Sugishita gave a part of his acceptance speech (his widow also gave a speech) and said that, while he was in the army, Aota was capable of throwing a grenade 84 meters. Which sounds like a hell of a long throw to me. The hall notes that he was nicknamed “Unruly Bronco”. Albright thinks he was Japan’s 71st greatest player.

Meikyukai: No – Hall of Fame: Yes

The card is an uncatalogued bromide. There must be a zillion uncatalogued bromide sets. I did a quick scan over my collection, and more than half of my bromides are from uncatalogued sets. I’ve got plenty of uncatalogued menko cards too, but the percentage isn’t that extreme. Lots of these sets are also very similar. The only difference between this card and my Tsubouchi card is that it is ever so slightly smaller. Since I already had an Aota card (if only as a part of an uncut sheet), this one doesn’t get me any closer to finishing the hall of fame collection. It’s impossible to tell precisely when this card was issued. Aota is on the Giants, so that narrows it down to 1948 to 1952, but I can’t say anything more definitive than that.

[nat]

Kazuhiro Kiyohara was one of Japan’s greatest players. He was first baseman for the Lions from 1986 through 1996, for the Giants until 2005, and then for the Buffaloes for a couple years. The Meikyukai came calling upon his 2000th hit (for the Giants in 2004), and of his 2122 hits, 525 were home runs. That figure puts him 5th all-time for home runs, just above Ochiai and just below Koji Yamamoto. He appears to have been a lumbering slugger, as both his SB and 3B figures are quite low. But if you’ve got a player who puts up a 389/520 batting line, you can put up with a certain amount of plodding.

Kiyohara’s tenure with the Lions was exceptionally successful. They were the dominant team in the late 80-early 90s period. Let’s take a look at one of these teams. Here’s the OPS leaders from the 1991 Seibu Lions: Orestes Destrade, Koji Akiyama, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Hiromichi Ishige, Norio Tanabe. Seven guys with above average OPSs (below average and part-timers omitted from the list). Destrade was an infield-outfield type from Cuba who mucked around in the Yankees and Pirates minor league systems (with a couple cups of coffee) starting in 1983. He went to Seibu and instantly became a huge slugger. Coming back to the states he was on the inaugural Marlins team, and was the second best hitter (after Mr. Marlin himself, Jeff Conine) on the team. Destrade spent 94 with the Marlins but didn’t wait out the strike. He returned to Seibu for 1995, then retired. Akiyama was one of Japan’s great players and I’ve written about him elsewhere. Ishige was the third baseman. He was a strong player in his own right. He didn’t get into the Meikyukai, but he came close. I don’t know what his glove was like, but offensively you might compare him to someone like Scott Rolen. Tanabe was a doubles hitting shortstop. Looking over his stat line, he doesn’t seem like a star to me.

They also had a nice starting rotation, or at least a nice top-3. (After that most teams sort of mix-and-match anyway.) Watanabe, the starter with the best ERA, appears to have blown out his arm in 1992, but he was a young star before that. Taigen Kaku had a relatively short but reasonably successful career. He reminds me of someone like Jimmy Key. And then there was Kimiyasu Kudo. In 1991 he was at the top of his considerable game, and he would continue pitching until he was 47. This was a really good team: a couple hall of famers, a Meikyukai member, a young star, and (effectively) Scott Rolen and Jimmy Key. That’s a team that will win you a lot of games.

Now, back to Kiyohara. He was a 17x all-star and won the Japan Series eight times. But great as he was, he could have been better. Throughout basically the last half of his career he was constantly sidelined by injuries. There were significant differences between them (first base vs. center field being one of them), but in some ways his career has the feel of Ken Griffey Jr.’s. Amazing first acts, followed by a debilitating rash of injuries. Both ended up being all-time greats, but Griffey in the 1990s felt like “great” wasn’t going to do it. At the time it felt like they were going to have to come up with some new words in order to describe him. I wasn’t hanging around Saitama in the 1990s, but I bet Kiyohara had the same feel to him.

Kiyohara was drafted out of PL Gakuen, one of the main powerhouses of Japanese high school baseball. Robert Whiting reports that the school has (or, at least, as of the writing of You Gotta Have Wa, had) a practice field with the same dimensions as Koshien Stadium at which the annual high school baseball championship tournament was held. PL Gakuen won Koshien twice while Kiyohara was a student, although perhaps ‘student’ is a bit too strong of a word. PL Gakuen’s focus is on baseball in a way that might be familiar from certain football programs in America. Hara, another Gakuen product, is alleged, upon being asked what he would major in when he went to college, to ask what a major is.

Japan takes Koshien seriously in a way that is hard for me to make sense of. I grew up next to a top college football program, and yes, reminders of that are everywhere (even people who didn’t attend the school wear school gear), but even in a huge college football town, football isn’t given the… religious?... dedication that Koshien summons. Whiting describes it as a combination of the World Series and the Superbowl, except that it also seems to be regarded as a test of character, and an embodiment of a kind of Japanese ideal. The approach to baseball and, I guess, to life, that leads to the 1000-fungo drill (doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what that is), corporal punishment for players, and “voluntary” practices that last hours after official practice ends is celebrated, finds its apotheosis maybe, in Koshien. None of that quite expresses what I’m trying to say – one of the hazards of saying something when you’re not quite sure what you’re trying to say – but there seems to be a deeply weird attitude that attends what is really a kids’ baseball tournament.

Incidentally, the chapter on high school baseball is the best part of You Gotta Have Wa, and comes highly recommended. Here’s an article about Koshien that Whiting wrote for the Japan Times.

PL Gakuen has produced 65 professional baseball players. (I wonder what the record for an American high school is.) Including one major leaguer: Kenta Maeda, currently a starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. As of 2016, however (I couldn’t find anything more recent), it had suspended its baseball program in response to what the Mainichi newspaper calls a “series of abuse scandals”. They do have a Twitter account, so maybe they’re still active, but it’s hard for me to understand what’s going on in a regular Twitter feed, much less one that I can’t read, so I’m not sure. They at any rate didn’t appear in the 2018 tournament.

Kiyohara was a flashy star. He once said that he only wanted to play professional baseball because it allowed him meet beautiful women and buy fast cars. However, he was arrested for drug possession shortly after his retirement from baseball (he was given a suspended sentence of two and a half years), and later admitted to using amphetamines while he was playing. (Rumors of steroids have also followed him around for years, but those are so far unsubstantiated.) Amphetamines were once common in MLB, but they are now prohibited and are, I think, among the substances that MLB tests for. The arrest was apparently a big scandal. Kiyohara’s kids were told to leave the prestigious school (elementary/middle in both cases) that they attended when news of their father’s problem came out. Word is that they’re moving to the US to avoid further fall out. The hall of fame had him on the ballot for several years (it seems to be common in Japan for even big stars to wait years to get elected), but removed him from the ballot after his conviction. They left open the possibility that he would be reinstated (who knows how the voting would go), but said that it would require significant rehabilitation, and that “the road is steep”. In recent years he has done things like appear at anti-addiction events organized by the Ministry of Health.

And finally, my favorite Kiyohara fact: he said that he has a very big head, and that when he joined Seibu they didn’t have a helmet that fit him. Nosing around in the team storage lockers, however, he found one of Katsuya Nomura’s old helmets (which must have been sitting there for the past six years), and it fit perfectly. He used the same helmet for his entire career, and had it repainted whenever he changed teams. (Source)

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of fame: No

The card is from the 1993 BBM set.

[nat]

Seiichi Uchikawa is a LF/RF/1B kind of guy, currently with Softbank. He broke into the league in 2001 at an 18 year old with the Yokohama Bay Stars, then left for the Hawks in 2011 and has been with them ever since. Uchikawa has a little power, but more of what we’d think of as “gap power” than the real thing. Expect teens HR numbers each year, topping out at 19. Likewise, his batting average is healthy but he’s not a guy whose game solely depends on it (like Gwynn, or Boggs, or Ichiro). That said, he did win two batting titles, in 2008 and 2011. That 2011 batting title also came with an MVP award. For his career he’s got a 304/350/443 batting line and 2140 hits. He’s one of the newer Meikyukai members, having qualified just last year. Allow me to nominate Fred Lynn as a comparable player, with the notable exception that Lynn was a center fielder. Looks like he was a 5x best-nine, and made a bunch of all-star teams. Notably, he had a key pinch hit in the 2017 all-star game. Who was he pinch hitting for? Shohei Otani. You’d think that wouldn’t be necessary, even though he’s a pitcher. But Otani wasn’t even pitching in this game, he was in at DH. Maybe this was one of those “get everybody into the all-star game” moves. Which I sort of understand (especially when the game is in Baltimore and Mike Mussina is in the pen), but it also leads to some very weird outcomes, where, e.g., Dereck Turnbow ends up pitching important innings in a close game.

As near as I can tell, his Japanese Wikipedia page says that his .378 batting average in 2008 is the record for a right-handed hitter in Japan. The previous mark was Tetsuharu Kawakami’s .377 mark in 1951. It also lists this as “his song”. Which I guess means walk-up music?

His initial contract with Softbank was worth 1.36 billion Yen. Which sounds like a lot of money, until you remember that one Yen is worth about a penny. I mean, I’ll take a 4 year, 13 million dollar contract, but if that’s the kind of cash that star players are pulling down it’s no surprise that Otani wanted to come to the US. (Of course what is surprising is that he didn’t wait until he was a free agent, but that’s another matter.)

Now is a good time to be a Hawk. Uchikawa has won the Japan Series five times since joining the Hawks, including four of the past five years. Things are looking promising for them this year too, they’re in first place in the Pacific League, with a healthy but not insurmountable lead over the Lions.

The Japan Times refers to him as a “future hall of famer”, which, I guess. Now I'm not advocating his induction, but Fred Lynn wouldn’t exactly be an embarrassment to the US hall either.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of fame: No

The card is from the 2013 BBM set. BBM sure loves its subsets. The one that this card is drawn from celebrates league leaders.