Japanese HOF Project

[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)!

[nat]

Norihiro Nakamura was a standard issue slugger. Usually he’d have unexceptional batting averages (266 for his career), but smack a good number of home runs, topping out at 46 in 2001. As you expect for middle of the order guys, he wasn’t fast: 22 stolen bases for his career. In total he played 23 years and put up a 266/352/469 batting line, to go along with 404 home runs and 2101 hits. The bulk of his career he spent with Kintetsu: 1992 through 2004. Then he defected for the US, spending most of 2005 playing for Las Vegas, the Dodgers’ AAA team. He did play in the majors leagues, but only 17 games, and not well. In Las Vegas he hit 249/331/487. The first two numbers are as bad as they look. That last one looks like it’s healthy, but it isn’t really. The 51s play in the Pacific Coast League, and the PCL plays in some absurd parks. Imagine a league where most of the parks resemble Coors Field. That's the idea. Any PCL numbers have to be taken with huge heaping spoonfuls of salt, Nakamura’s included. That 487 slugging percentage was fourth-best on the team (among those who got regular playing time), trailing the immortals Bryan Myrow (547), Cody Ross (509), Chin-Feng Chen (495). All three of those guys played in the major leagues, but no, I don’t remember them either.*

After not managing to break into MLB, Nakamura returned to Japan, spending 2006 with Orix, and then jumped around for his last few seasons between Chunichi, Rakuten, and Yokohama. He had a couple good seasons left in his mid 30s, but was mostly over the hill after he came back from the US.

Orix decided that his poor play in his first season back in Japan merited a huge reduction in salary (down to about $800k). This did not sit will with Nakamura (understandably: after Ichiro left he had been the highest paid player in Japan), who did not sign the contract and was eventually released. Whether it was officially done or not, he was effectively blackballed the following season, and eventually forced to settle for what was essentially a minor league deal with the Dragons (later changed to a major league deal after he performed well). Although he ended up making much less money than he had turned down from Blue Wave, to some extent it worked out well. The Dragons won the Japan Series and Nakamura took home the series MVP award.

Going to the Dodgers in 2005 was Nakamura’s second attempt to come to the US. A few seasons earlier he had an agreement to join the Mets on a two year, seven million dollar deal. But the deal was announced on the Mets’ website before Nakamura had a chance to inform the Buffaloes about it, and he decided to back out of it and stay in Japan.

Nakamura was a third baseman, and between having good power, playing third, and having a long career, he probably produced quite a lot of value for his teams. Mostly in a compiling sort of way (his peak was there but not very long), but that’s valuable too. I wouldn't be surprised if he's elected to the hall of fame eventually. Superficially his stat line looks a lot like Paul Konerko’s, but there are some really big differences. First, Konerko was playing in some really high-offense environments, second, Konerko was a first baseman, and third, even by first base standards, Konerko was a pretty lousy fielder. So despite their superficial similarity, I’m comfortable saying that Nakamura was much better than Konerko. No comparable American player comes immediately to mind, however. The really good American third basemen either had better on-base skills than Nakamura, or shorter careers.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is from a 2000 Upper Deck set. It’s weird. The design is obviously pretty strange, and on top of that it’s an odd size. Most Calbee cards are a little bit smaller than standard baseball cards, and this one is smaller than those. But it’s also larger than the tiny cards that Calbee made in the 80s.

*Just double checked these guys. Apparently Cody Ross had a real major league career. The other two did not. Myrow spent one season in Korea, but then was back to playing the in PCL. He was playing quite well around age 30, he seems like the kind of guy that you expect to try to jump to Japan, actually. Instead he played Indy ball for Grand Prairie through 2015.

[seanofjapan]

Those cards are kind of interesting.

I remember when Nakamura went over to the US the first time and I just couldn't figure out why. He was an established star here but it was really obvious that he didn't have the skill set needed to do the same in the Majors and would (as he ultimately did) just end up toiling in the minors. I think everyone who knew anything about Japanese baseball at the time was thinking the same and nobody was surprised when he failed to make it.