Japanese HOF Project

[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.

[Northviewcats]

Originally Posted by 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.

Love this thread. Learning so much. Thought that I would share a few scans of a few Calbee baseball cards from the 1970s that I have in my collection.

First group is from 1973. Three of the cards are of Sadaharu Oh. Not sure who is the other player.

Second group is from 1974. The cards are numbered in English. I believe all three are of Oh.

Third group is from 1975-76. Three of the cards are of Oh, number 1190 is of Harimoto.

Best regards,

Joe

[seanofjapan]

Nice cards Joe!

The player other than Oh in your 1973 lot is Tsuneo Horiuchi, a HOF pitcher for the Giants.

With your 1974s two of them are Sadaharu Oh, but one of them (card #20) is Yukinobu Kuroe who also played for the Giants.

One of your 1975-76 Ohs (#789) is from the series commemorating his 700th home run, which is one of the harder series to find in that set.

[Northviewcats]

Originally Posted by seanofjapan

Nice cards Joe!

The player other than Oh in your 1973 lot is Tsuneo Horiuchi, a HOF pitcher for the Giants.

With your 1974s two of them are Sadaharu Oh, but one of them (card #20) is Yukinobu Kuroe who also played for the Giants.

One of your 1975-76 Ohs (#789) is from the series commemorating his 700th home run, which is one of the harder series to find in that set.

Thanks Sean for the information. I appreciate it.

Best regards,

Joe

[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.

[nat]

If you reversed Atsunori Inaba’s career – made the second half the first half and the first half the second half – it would look pretty normal. He was an outfielder who split his time between Yakult (when he was young) and Nippon Ham (for his second act). As a hitter: he had intermediate power, and on base skills that varied widely during his career. Home runs you’ll get some of, but we’re usually talking teens in the HR department, sometimes into the 20s per year. In the early part of his career he was posting OBPs in the low 300s, rising to the upper 300s in his mid 30s.

That’s part of what would make his career look normal in reverse. He also had much more playing time latter in his career. In large part this seems to have been due to injuries. That a player would be injury plagued as a young man, and not when they’re older, is super weird. One of the best predictors of future injury is past injury, in large measure because there are lots of injuries that never heal quite right. This will lead to more missed time because of a recurrence, or missed time because a player injures himself compensating for the injury that didn’t really heal. Back injuries are notorious for this, but hand/wrist injuries do it to, and so do, to a lesser extent, lots of others. So if a young player is missing a lot of playing time due to injuries, you’d expect him to either continue missing time when he gets older (Eric Chavez, for example), or simply be unable to continue (like Troy Tulowitzki).

Inaba often missed 40 or 50 games per year when he was with Yakult. Sounds a lot like Tulowitzki. And you would expect his career to end about age 30, just like Tulo’s did. (Technically Tulowitzki played until age 34, but he only appeared in five games this year, none last year, and missed most of the year before.) Entirely unexpectedly, Inaba stopped getting hurt and played full seasons from age 31 through 39. It’s really his 30s that make him a great player. If he had followed a more normal career path, he would have been a promising young player who didn’t pan out. He collected his 2000th (and so Meikyukai-qualifying) hit in 2012 while playing for Nippon Ham.

A word about Japanese team names. “Nippon Ham Fighters” is every American’s favorite Japanese team name, because Americans either don’t know or don’t care that ‘Nippon Ham’ is the name of the company that owns the team, and ‘Fighters’ is the name of the team itself. Americans, me included, really like to imagine a baseball team fighting a ham. Or maybe a ham that is itself a fighter. Sadly, that’s not the way that it works. Japanese teams are often referred to by the name of the corporation that owns them, and then their team’s nickname. Or sometimes (as I was doing at the beginning of this post) just by the company name. Because ‘Hankyu and ‘Yomiuri’ aren’t recognizable to Americans, this doesn’t sound too weird. But imagine if MLB had similar naming conventions: The Rodgers Communication Blue Jays, The Liberty Media Braves, I guess ‘The Nintendo of America Mariners’ isn’t as bad as it could be. Imagine saying that Chipper Jones spent his entire career playing third base for Liberty Media (although of course they were called ‘Warner Broadcasting’ during his early days). Imagine rooting for “Yankee Global Enterprises LLC”. (That’s the name of the company that the Steinbrenner family mostly controls that actually owns the Yankees.) The idea is gross. The old joke goes that in the 50s rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for US Steel. What if it was rooting for US Steel?

Back to Inaba. He was a 5x best nine and seven time all-star. His fans have a special cheer for him called the ‘Inaba jump’. Enough people participate that the TV feed from the Sapporo Dome might shake when he comes to bat. He admits to loving potato chips and says that during the off season sometimes he gets fat because he eats too many potato chips and doesn’t work out enough. He says that he likes wearing uniform number 41 because it kind of looks like his initials. For a comparable American player – maybe Hunter Pence? (Except for the weird injury pattern.) Medium range power, unexceptional OBP, let Pence play until he’s in his early 40s and their careers might look similar. Or maybe if Torii Hunter had been a slow corner outfielder instead of a fairly speedy center fielder? Given his number of best-nine selections, however, he clearly had more star power than either of those guys.

After he retired he became the manager of the Japanese national team, and is tasked with leading the team in the 2020 Olympics.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is another one from the 2013 BBM Crosswind subset.

[nat]

Here’s another card of Shinichi Eto.

He was a slugger, primarily for Chunichi, and one of the best players of the 1960s. I mean, not Oh or Nagashima good, but at his best he was really something. In 1969 he got into it with his manager (and fellow hall of famer) Shigeru Mizuhara. Mizuhara was publicly berating the team’s second baseman for muffing a play, and Eto let him have it for being so harsh. This did not go over well. Eto ended up retiring over the incident, but then thought better of it. The Dragons wouldn’t take him back, and dealt him to Lotte for Kazuto Kawabata. Basically, they gave him away for a bag of baseballs. Kawabata was a poor relief pitcher with a short career. In America we would call him a AAAA player. Two years later he was dealt to the Taiyo Whales for Osamu Nomura. Nomura was actually a good pitcher. He was a 4x all-star and had just finished his age 24 season when he was dealt. Basically, Japanese Baseball knew that Eto was still good, it’s just that the Dragons couldn’t accept a player who loudly and publicly stood up to his manager and had to exile him. But his reputation was apparently rehabilitated pretty quickly, because he was traded only two years later for a legitimately good pitcher. For what it’s worth, his run in with Mizuhara over the ground ball seems to have been a last-straw kind of deal – they had run ins before, over, e.g. curfew and paying fines.

For a comparable American player (at least as far as on-the-field stuff goes), I nominate Johnny Mize. Eto spent some time at first base, but was primarily an outfielder, and The Big Cat was pretty much solely a first baseman, but their offensive profiles are similar. Both were power hitters with good on base skills. Mize may have been the better player (seriously: check out Mize from 1937 to 1948. Dude was an absolute beast. He just ran into a cliff immediately after that), but they were both really good.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

I like this card. It’s from the JCM 55 set. And while the production values on JCM 55 were admittedly pretty low, what I like about it is that Eto is in his catching gear. As a youngster he would catch a few games here and there. In 1962 he was primarily a catcher (>2/3 games played). Then in 1963 he appeared in a few games behind the dish, and after that was strictly a 1B/OF. So this is the only year in which you had a chance to get him on a card wearing catching armor.

[seanofjapan]

I agree about the JCM 55, I have a few cards from that set (including Eto) and while its correct that the production values were low (as with most cards of the era), the design does make them stick out in a stack of old menko.

[Northviewcats]

Here are a couple more old cards that I picked up. Comparing the pictures with the other cards I have I'm guessing the guy swinging the bat is Shigeo Nagashima. The player on the left on the multiplayer card also looks like Nagashima, but I have no idea who the other player is.

Any idea of the type of cards? the players? and the years?

Thanks,

Joe

[seanofjapan]

Nice cards!

The one on the left is indeed Shigeo Nagashima, from the 1958 All Star Awase Trump set (JGA 177).

The one on the right is also Nagashima, along with a player named Yoshio Yoshida, who played for the Tigers (and is also a HOFer). Its from the 1958 Mitsuwa War/playing card set (JCM 129)!