Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Here’s my Sachio Kinugasa card for the meikyukai collection. Original post here.

When Kinugasa originally signed with the Carp he bought himself a Ford Galaxy, which was notable at the time as most Carp players drove Mazdas, and Kinugasa’s Japanese Wikipedia page says that some of them even rode bicycles to their games.

As a young man he was fond of late nights of drinking, and would sometimes skip evening practice. One time, when he was returning to the team dormitory at 3am, Junzo Sekine (RIP – he just died the other day) was waiting for him. Sekine took him out to the practice field and made him practice until sunrise. The matter arose during his hall of fame induction, and he laughed at his youthful indiscretions. (Which, to be fair, I think we all do.)

Although he rarely led the league in anything (besides games played), Kinugasa had a long career and was consistently very good. He therefore does well on all-time lists. He’s 5th in hits, 7th in home runs, and 5th in runs. In addition, he took home the 1984 MVP award, was a member of the best-nine three times, won three gold glove awards, and had his uniform number retired by the Carp.

Hall of Fame: Yes – Meikyukai: Yes

1984 Calbee

[nat]

New Kanemoto card for the Meikyukai collection. Bio here.

I feel vaguely dirty buying modern cards. I'd like it better if he had played for the Kyojin in 1936 and this was a diecut menko instead of a foil-incrusted thing. But whatever, he's a Meikyukai member, and it was only two bucks.

[nat]

Cross posting here from the main forum so as to have all of my Japanese stuff in one place:


First, some background.

In 1909 the University of Wisconsin sent their baseball team to Japan to play against the top university teams of the day. (There wouldn’t be a professional league until 1936.) The Americans were given a hero’s welcome. They were driven to the field in rickshaws, and reportedly 20,000 spectators showed up for each game. There were some cultural differences to deal with: the spectators were absolutely silent (making noise during the game was deemed disrespectful, although by the end of the tour the Japanese fans had gotten accustomed to the Americans cheering on their own players), and the Japanese teams played a game based around bunting, base stealing, and good defense. Anyways, the Americans lost the first game to Keio University on 9/22 in 11 innings. They lost a rematch four days later in 19 innings. Their starting pitcher got injured after 16 innings, and Charles Nash, their reserve pitcher, had to pitch the rest of the tour. He’s the hero of my little story. Nash shut out a team of ex-pat Americans on the 28th, beat the Tokyo City team on the 29th, and went on to face Keio and Waseda Universities later on the trip.

Postcards were made to commemorate the tour. This one features the start of the first game against Keio. That’s not what makes it special. What makes it special is what’s written on the back:

“Sept. 29, 09. Wis. just taking the field in the first game. We won 1 + lost 2 so far. Two we lost were 3-2 11 innings + 2-1 19 innings. I had the honor of winning the only one so far. Wish you would take good notes on these few first weeks of work because I will be about 5 weeks late. This is a great country alright. Peck”

The author of this postcard claims to have been the winning pitcher of Wisconsin’s third game. This was a very exciting discovery, except that I knew that a man named Nash won the third game. So I went digging, and in the (digital) bowels of the University of Wisconsin’s archives they keep copies of their yearbooks. Apparently there was some delay in printing, but the 1911 edition of The Badger includes a feature on the 1909 trip to Japan. It includes a roster of the team – with nicknames given. I have taken the liberty of copying the roster below. Notice: Charles Nash’s nickname was ‘Peck’. (I have also included a photo of Nash taken from the yearbook.)

So what I have here is a postcard showing the start of the first game (9/22/09) that the University of Wisconsin played against Keio, that was mailed by Charles Nash, the reserve pitcher who (due to an injury to the main pitcher) ended up pitching most of the tour. (Unfortunately he’s not pictured on the card, since he didn’t play in the first game.) Nash helpfully dated the card himself (9/29/09), meaning that he wrote the card a week after the game that it pictures. Now, I also happen to know that Wisconsin played a game on the 29th, which Nash doesn’t mention on this card. So I even know the time of day that he wrote it: in the morning, before Wisconsin’s game against Tokyo City. It’s addressed to someone who I presume is Nash’s friend in Madison, asking him to take notes in class while he’s away. I, for one, find this to be 1000% cool.

There is also a postmark on the card. It gives both Western and Japanese dates, but, anyways, they agree that it was mailed on October 5, 1909. Nash wrote the card the morning of the 29th, went off to play the day’s game, and forgot or was too busy to mail the card until about a week later.

Although none of the members of the team went pro, the Wisconsin team was an interesting one. Their second baseman, Messmer, was one of the University’s most accomplished athletes (he became an architect and is a member of the University’s athletics hall of fame), and the catcher (who is maybe the guy in white standing by home plate) had a distinguished legal career and ended up on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. Information about Nash himself is hard to come by, but I did find what is probably his draft registration card. At any rate, it’s a card for one “Charles Mott Nash”, of the right age and living in Wisconsin. As of 1918 he described himself as a self-employed merchant, and claimed exemption from the draft on the grounds that he is the “sole proprietor of a store”.

[nat]

I meant to read The Meaning of Ichiro before writing this post. To that end, and given that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do anymore, I ordered a copy of it from Amazon. Now, about a year and a half ago I bought a house. In my old neighborhood packages got stolen off of the porch more often than they didn’t, so I always had packages delivered to work. My new neighborhood is safer, but I didn’t have any particular reason to change my delivery address. Long story short: my copy of The Meaning of Ichiro is waiting for me at work, where I will be able to pick it up at some indeterminate time in the distant future. So I don't know if there’s anything original in this post. Probably not. So forgive me if I’m rehashing stuff you’ve heard before.

There’s no reason to summarize Ichiro Suzuki’s career. Of everyone I’ve written about in this thread, he is almost certainly the person who is best-known to American audiences. (Maybe to Japanese audiences too?) What I’m going to talk about, instead, is why Ichiro matters.

Japanese players in MLB are sometimes referred to as ‘imports’, but that’s not really quite right. A “re-import” is something that is produced in one country, sold in another, and then imported back into the first. Japanese players in MLB are really re-imports. Baseball evolved out of rounders sometime in the late 18th to early 19th century. It was probably a gradual thing. Anyways, certainly by the civil war something recognizable as baseball was popular throughout New England and spreading west and southward. The war suddenly took it everywhere in the country.

In the 1870s baseball was introduced into Japan by Horace Wilson, an American professor at what is now Tokyo University. By the end of the decade there were established teams no longer playing on a merely ad hoc basis. By 1891 the game was popular enough that it was being featured on postcards. Nevertheless, it was decades behind the American game. In Japan in the 1890s baseball was being played by university students and school children; in the US in the 1890s baseball had been a professional sport for going-on 30 years.

The Japanese won the first meeting between an American team and a Japanese team, but they did less well thereafter. In 1905 Waseda toured the US, playing against college teams, and went 7-19. Three years later a team composed largely of PCL players toured Japan, compiling a 17-0 record. There were a number of tours of professional American players through Japan in the first few decades of the 20th century. The American professionals went 87-1 in total. During the famous 1934 tour Eiji Sawamura famously struck out Gehringer, Ruth, Gehrig, and Foxx in a row. Less well-remembered is that he lost the game.

In recent years many Japanese players have come to the States, and many American players went the other way. Pitchers have done better than position players, but the track record of Japanese players in MLB is not good. Ichiro and Hideki Matsui are the only position players who were legitimate stars. (On the pitching side, Tanaka, Darvish, and to a lesser extent Nomo were good starters. Sasaki, Saito, and Uehara were good relief pitchers. Ohtani could be good on both sides of the ball.) Americans going to Japan have had trouble adjusting to the culture, but were much more successful on the diamond. MLB non-entities like Wladimir Balentien, Bobby Rose, and Oreste Destrade were stars in Japan.

Comparisons between American baseball and Japanese baseball are probably inevitable. And they have mostly not been flattering for Japan. That this matters to Japanese baseball as a cultural or institutional force is probably most clearly exhibited by the degree to which Sawamura is celebrated. The award for the best pitcher is named in his honor, due to a game that he lost.

All of this leads to the accomplishments of Japanese players being viewed with a jaundiced eye. Certainly on this side of the Pacific; I suspect on the other as well. And it, perhaps, engenders a certain degree of defensiveness. Kawakami was appalled at Yonamine’s American style of play, and traded him away as soon as he was in a position to do so.

The reason that Ichiro is important is that he can put some of this to rest. He is living proof that the best Japanese players are as good as the best American players. Whatever the various indignities of the past, no matter that the average level of play is lower in the Central League than in the National League, Japan can get to the very top. And the proof is that it did. Ichiro will almost certainly be the first player elected to both the American and the Japanese halls of fame. (That means that I’ll need to get two more of his cards.) Many people argue that his case for Cooperstown should include his Japanese performance, but it doesn’t really need it. Suzuki accumulated 59.7 WAR. That puts him right around Zach Wheat and Vlad Guerrero. He collected 3089 hits. That’s 24th all-time, right between Dave Winfield and Craig Biggio. (And of course he also owns the single-season record.) Ichiro would be a hall of famer even if you ignored what he did in Japan. He matters because he’s proof that, at least at the top of the game, Japan can play with anyone.

>

That’s what I wanted to say. As I warned above, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not especially original. If not, my apologies to those who came first.

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I also want to play with some numbers. Ichiro is a Meikyukai member because of what he did in the US. But we can also ask what he would likely have done had he spent his career in Japan. Or what he would likely have done if he played in the US directly out of high school. Now, we can’t know this with any certainty, but what we can do is estimate it on the basis of the numbers that he actually put up. Preferably, I’d use Davenport Translations for estimating an MLB-only Ichiro, but Clay’s website seems to be having trouble at the moment. (I keep getting 404 errors when I load Japanese stats.) So I’m going to have to do some very rough back-of-the-napkin calculations here.

What I did was take his last three seasons in Japan and calculate his hit rate, and his first three seasons in MLB and do the same. He lost only about 4% of his hits coming across the Pacific. Next I multiplied his Japanese hit totals by 96%, and then adjusted the resulting number by the differences in season length. That gives an estimated hit total of 4561. Take that Pete Rose. However, it’s unlikely that an 18 year old Ichiro would be playing in the big leagues. He actually wasn’t good until 1994, so his first two (partial) seasons would probably have been spent in Tacoma or wherever. By 1994 he was good, but was still just 20 and had struggled the past two seasons. Let’s imagine that the Mariners keep him down for the first 1/3 of the season until he really forces the issue. Two seasons in the minors cost him 41 hits, the first third of 1994 costs him an additional 80. So my hypothetical Ichiro records 4440 hits in MLB. Hypothetical Ichiro breaks Rose’s record in 2015, his first season with the Marlins. There’s quite a lot of uncertainty around a little exercise like this, so I think that the best we can say is that if Ichiro had spent his whole career in MLB, there’s a fair chance he would have surpassed Rose.

What about Japan-only Ichiro? The same (admittedly over simplified) methodology yields an estimate of 3956 hits. That would be, far-and-away, Japan’s all-time record. In fact, it’s so far beyond the record it’s hard to believe. So I also did this: I also gave him the average of his full-time numbers with Orix for as long as his peak actually lasted in MLB, and then adjusted his hit totals down proportionally as he aged. Even this method gave him >3700 hits. These are rough estimates, but I think it’s clear that if Ichiro had stayed in Japan, he would have obliterated the all-time hits record. Probably around 2010-2012.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: soon enough YES - as of 2025

The card is from the 1999 SP Calbee set. You had to send in five “winner” cards from potato chip bags to get it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is my most valuable Japanese card, although I didn’t pay much for it, as I got a good deal on the entire set.

I like it that he’s known just as ‘Ichiro’.

[seanofjapan]

Very good write up and method of estimating Ichiro's hypothetical career hit totals.

A minor but interesting point of trivia is that Ichiro's MLB career hit count is almost identical to the NPB career record (3089 versus 3085). Not sure if that is coincidental, or if Ichiro deliberately hung on in the Majors just long enough to top Harimoto's number (which in reality he had surpassed years earlier if you combine his MLB and NPB numbers).

[nat]

Michiyo Arito played third base for Lotte from 1969 to 1986. Superficially, his offense reminds me of Scott Rolen, although with more speed. (He was stealing 20ish bases per year until he got old.) Arito’s career slash line of 282/348/482 is a little bit lower than Rolen’s, but Rolen also played through the silly ball era, whereas Arito’s league was pretty low on offense (I checked the 1977 Pacific League: 255/309/382). So in context Arito was probably a somewhat better hitter than Rolen.

He was probably the best third baseman in the Pacific League in the 1970s. For his career he was named to the best nine ten times, including eight in a row. He won a batting title, and four gold glove awards. Lotte won the Japan series once during his career.

I don't know quite how far to carry the Rolen comparison. Arito was a somewhat better hitter, and I assume he was a good fielder if he won four gold gloves. But Rolen was more than a good fielder. Among third baseman he's 4th all-time in dWAR, behind Brooks, Clete Boyer, and Nettles. (I was eyeballing the dWAR leader list, so it's possible I missed someone.) Maybe tone down the defense a bit, and bump up the offense a bit, and Rolen isn't a bad comparison.

After retirement Arito took over as manager of Lotte, replacing the relatively relaxed Kazuhisa Inao. Arito was a hard-nosed traditionalist, and not a good manager. The Orions finished with a losing record under his management, he refused to play Leron Lee, and he forced the trade of Hiromitsu Ochiai. To be fair, Lee was at the end of the line (at 39), but he was also coming off of a 331/397/561 season. Wanting to trade Ochiai, on the other hand, was unalloyed insanity. Ochiai was a transcendent superstar coming off of the greatest season of his career.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

1980 Yamakatsu

[nat]

Nomo card for the Meikyukai collection. Write-up about Nomo here.

In 1991 Hideo Nomo was the hottest name in Japan, and BBM went out of their way to include a ton of Nomo cards in their inaugural release. There's cards celebrating leading the league in all sorts of things, and award winner cards, and so on. The base Nomo card is kind of expensive (by 1991-era baseball card standards), but the other cards (like this one) aren't so bad.

I think that the back notes past rookie of the year winners. But if so, then Japan has a serious pro-pitcher bias. The pair of kanji that you see over and over again on the right-hand column means 'pitcher'.