Shigeru Mizuhara
 

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.

Osamu Mihara
 

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%.

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.

JBR13 cards
 

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.

Hi Nat,

Thanks for continuing this series. The #2 listing on the back of the Kawakami card looks like the first kanji for shortstop, followed by the kana for go & ro. When you put those 2 together you get "gro" for ground- so #2 is saying "Ground ball to shortstop". You got the other 2 correct- a hit to center field and a hit to left field. These same types of abbreviations are on the back of all the Takara game cards issued from the late '70s to the late 90's, and are for playing a dice baseball game.

Thanks again,

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the info. Either this kind of game was popular long before the Takara cards were printed, or whoever wrote on this cards did it long after they were printed - the JBR13 set is a 1949 issue.

(Also - I wonder how you are supposed to roll a 1...)

Great finds, I was about to comment on the similarity to the Takara games too.

I have a couple of the Takara ones and am very tempted to try actually playing the game, I just need to find someone to play it with!

No new players, but another card that I picked up as a part of a lot, so I thought that I might as well share it.

This is Karou Betto, about whom I've written before. In America Betto is, sadly, probably best known for appearing on one of The Dude's t-shirts in The Big Lebowski. Which, let's be clear, is a fine piece of cinema, but a great player (and manager) like Betto deserves better.

The card is from the JCM 78 set, which was issued in 1949 to commemorate a tour of Japan by the San Francisco Seals. Seals players have 'Seals' written on the back of the card, Japanese players have 'Nippon' (Japan) on the back. I don't know why they decided to include the Japanese players that they did. There are only five of them in the set, so it's not like it's an all-star team that the Seals were playing against or something. Besides Betto it includes:

Takehiko Bessho - an all-time great pitcher
Takeshi Doigaki - a good catcher, but not a hall of famer
Kikuji Hirayama - an outfielder who had been a star before the war, but by 1949 was merely average
Shissho Takesue - a hotshot rookie pitcher who would quickly flame out

That Betto is awesome, I've never seen one of those before. I love how awkward the way they drew him holding the bat is, its almost like they had 8 year olds drawing these things, which I find quite endearing.

Here's another player that I've written about before. Tokuji Iida was a power hitting first baseman.

This card is an uncatalogued menko. It's a pillar-style card, however, so it's pretty easy to guess about an issue date: late 40s or maybe 1950 or so. The art is weird. It makes him look like a lizard wearing blush.

Iida played for Nankai from 1947 through 1956, and Kokutestu for the rest of his career. Wondering what happened for him to change teams, I went through the roster of the 1956 Kokutetsu and 1957 Nankai teams, trying to find the player that he was traded for. But no one played for both of those teams. Anyone know what happened such that players changed teams in the 1950s, or, even better, what Iida's story is?

It's true that in the early days the reserve clause wasn't a formal part of player contracts, but after a scandal involving Takehiko Bessho it was included in the standard player contract starting in 1951. So Iida couldn't have just declared himself a free agent the way that Bessho did. I tried looking him up on Japanese Wikipedia but - probably due to my poor Japanese - couldn't find any information.

New Oshita Bromide
 

For your baseball-card-observing enjoyment today, I have a new Hiroshi Oshita card. I’ve written about him before. Oshita was a star player in the 40s and 50s. He was Kawakami’s big rival and famous for batting with a blue bat.

I bought this card for two bad reasons and one good one. Bad reasons first. To begin with, my only other Oshita card is a part of an uncut sheet and I wanted an Oshita to put in my binder. The second reason is that I was swayed by auction copy. I was eagerly awaiting the most recent Prestige Collectibles auction, hoping to pick up an interesting pre-war hall of fame menko. They had some, but they were either of hall of famers that I’m not interested in (i.e., managers) and/or out of my price range for Japanese cards.

They did, however, have a copy of this Oshita card. Here is what Prestige says about this card: “Cards from the JBR 109 set are rarely seen. In fact, this is only the second example of this Hiroshi Oshita card that we have ever encountered. The unusual design coupled with extreme rarity makes this an especially desirable second year card of Oshita.” Reading that, my interest was piqued. Just not enough to place the minimum bid. I did not buy my card from Prestige. But I found another copy for sale at exactly the same time as the Prestige auction was running, and I got it for less than half of what their copy sold for. (Although it’s worth noting that their copy is in better shape than mine.) If this card is as rare as they say, it’s got to be an amazing coincidence that two copies came up for sale at the same time.

Now for the good reason to buy it. This is just a really nice card. There are many bromide issues that are just a more-or-less random picture with a caption thrown onto it. But some serious design work went into this one. I especially like the background. Oshita is depicted as a giant standing in the middle of a baseball stadium, with a couple fielders standing behind him. It’s the same idea as on DeLong cards, but it works for DeLong cards (the DeLong Gehrig might just be the greatest baseball card of all time) and it works with this set too. This one has the best design of any of my Japanese cards, and is among my favorite one all around.

The set is JBR 109. I have the old edition of Engel’s vintage card guide (the one distributed as a spiral bound book, not the one on flash drive) and it is not listed there. Given that Prestige only knows of two copies of this card, I assume that it’s an R5.

I made the first post to this thread one year (plus two days) ago, so this sounds like a good time to take stock. I’ve added a few players to my want list that were not originally on it (they are guys that I had characterized as managers but who were inducted as players), so my project is currently 89% complete. (Backsliding a bit because of the added players.) I’ve got cards of 82 hall of famers (and duplicates of several). That works out to about one card every four and a half days. Not bad. Keeping the mailman busy.

Last JGA16 Card
 

For the sake of completeness, I thought that I'd post my third (and last) card from the JGA16 set. This is Kazuto Yamamoto (also known as Kazuto Tsuruoka). I've written about him before. He was an infielder for Nankai in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and a manager for many years after that. This card is from 1949; he was Nankai's regular third baseman and a player/manager that year. They decided to list him as a manager on this card.

JCM2 Baseball Back
 

I have enjoyed reading this thread about Japanese baseball cards. So I picked up a bunch of Japanese cards in the recent Huggins and Scott auction. Several different types and years from 1948 Menkos to 1975-76 Calbees.

I've tried to identify the players by comparing them with advertisements on eBay and sites on the Internet. I thought that I would post a few pictures here to see if anyone can help me identify the players that I cannot find.

I will start with the 1948 JCM2 Baseball Backs. I believe the first card is Takeshi Doigaki, the second Torao Ooka, and the third Sanada ? The other 5 cards I cannot find anything.

Also does anyone know the significance of the numbers on the back of the cards?

I appreciate any help.

Best regards,

Joe

The fourth player down is Takehiko Bessho, hall of famer and star pitcher for the Giants.

As near as I can tell the guy below him his Michinori Tsubochi, a hall of fame middle infielder. I'm not 100% sure on this one though.

I think the next guy down is named 'Shibata'. There have been a bunch of Japanese players with that name, but none of them look like a match for a late 1940s pitcher. I might have mis-translated this one.

The next guy is Hideo Shimizu. He was a pitcher, mostly playing for the Dragons. Sometimes he was good, sometimes he wasn't.

The last player is Testuharu Kawakami. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese baseball. He was a star first baseman (nicknamed "The God of Batting") for the Giants, from 1938 to 1958. Probably the second or third greatest Japanese first baseman of all time. After that he became Japan's most successful manager, and the most notable advocate of the extremely harsh training and disciplinary program that Japanese baseball is famous for.

The numbers on the back are menko numbers. They don't mean anything. These are menko cards; it's a game (sort of like pogs) where kids throw their cards at piles of other cards on the ground and tried to flip them over. Keeping ones that they managed to flip over. Menko cards often have stuff on them that they thought kids would like: cartoons, rock-paper-scissors symbols, math problems (apparently menko card makers were a bit optimistic about kids' tastes), and really big numbers.

What menko numbers are useful for, from the perspective of a collector, is that in most sets card backs and card fronts are paired, so if you know which menko number corresponds to which player (Gary Engel's book will tell you for a lot of sets) you can identify players based on their menko numbers. For example, Engel says that the card whose back you displayed is "Kyuei Player (generic)".

Given that you've got one of them, it's worth mentioning that some menko cards - especially early ones - don't have specific players on them, but have representative images of a player on a team.

Thanks for sharing these cards, I'd love to see the rest of the lot that you got!

Shenichi Hoshino
 

I’ve got a couple more players to write up. Thanks to Sean for this one: I sent him a few spare Calbees and he hooked me up with a couple missing hall of famers. My first baseball card trade since I was ~13, and by far my longest-distance trade.

Senichi Hoshino pitched for the Dragons from 1969 to 1982. He compiled a 146-121 W/L record to go with a 3.60 career ERA. Of his 500 career appearances, slightly more than half of them were in relief. It was fairly common for Japanese starters to pitch out of the bullpen on some of their days off, but this is pretty extreme. In fact, there were some years in which he was almost entirely (or just entirely entirely) a relief pitcher. I’d say that 1974 (the year he took home the Sawamura award) and 1975 were his best years. He posted ERAs of 2.84 and 2.77 in those seasons, against league averages of about 3.50 and 3.30, respectively. That’s not Sandy Koufax exactly, but it’s pretty good. In addition, he was a pretty good hitter. Sort of an all-or-nothing guy at the plate, but there were a few years in which he had a better-than-league-average slugging percentage.

Probably as important to his hall of fame case as his pitching was his career as a manager. Hoshino managed Chunichi from 1987 through 1991, and then again from 1996 through 2001. After that he jumped ship, helming the Tigers for two years. Following his retirement from professional managing he took over the Japanese team in the Asian games (at which they were victorious) and the 2008 Olympics, at which they finished in fourth place. In 2011 he returned to the professional leagues, leading Ratuken through 2014. His teams made it to the Japan Series four times, but only won once. His career record is .529 – good, but not exceptional – but the raw number of wins puts him up amongst the winningest managers in Japanese history. As a manager he was… intense. He was known to beat his players and occasionally hit an umpire.

During his career Hoshino was known as the “Giant Killer”. Probably in part because the Dragons finally stopped the ON-Cannon’s run at nine consecutive championships, but also because he was a vocal critic of the Giants. (Apparently they had agreed to draft him after he graduated from Meiji and they went back on the deal.) The feelings seemed to be mutual: "I also held a burning desire to hit when I faced him because of that spirit of his”, Nagashima is reported to have said.

Finding a comparable American player it tough, if only because so few successful pitchers become managers. Maybe this is the way to do it: imagine a pitcher sort of like Orel Hershiser, and then also make him a reasonably successful manager. Still not perfect, because Hoshino spent so much time in the bullpen and Hershiser’s stretch of dominance was longer. But that’s as close as I’m going to get.

The card is a 1976 Calbee.

Identification of Menko cards
 

Thanks. I really appreciate your help and all of the information. Here are a couple of JCM8 Red Border strip cards. I believe from 1952. The first card is Micho Nishizawa, I don't know the player in the second card.

I will try to post some more of the cards in the lot tomorrow.

Best regards,

Joe

Glad to see the Hoshino made it safe and sound into your collection! As an anti-Giant myself I've always had a soft spot for him and felt bad when he passed on last year.

Maybe he is the equivalent of Orel Hersheiser and Tommy Lasorda combined?

The other player must be Kawakami. He's wearing a Giants hat, and Kawakami is the only Giant that Engel lists as being in the set. (And Engel definitely knows about this card: it's the one that he uses to illustrate the set.)

Now, the kanji for 'Kawakami' is 川上. If you sort of squint you can kind of make the second character on the card look like 'kami'. The first character looks like the hiragana for 'i', but I guess if it's super stylized it sort of maybe could possibly be 川?

Anyways, the Giants hat is what seals the deal. The baseball players in the set are Nishizawa (whom you've got), Kawakami, Kaoru Betto - who was on the Mainichi Orions at the time, and Fumio Fujimura, who spent his whole career with Osaka. So just by process of elimination it must be Kawakami.

And yeah, I like a Hershiser/Lasorda hybrid as a match for Hoshino. In fact, it works on all sorts of levels. The Dodgers have traditionally been the American Giants' nemesis. Heck, the Dragons' uniforms even look like Dodger blue!

Thanks for the information. I appreciate it. You really have a passion for Japanese cards. Here are scans of four other cards that I received in the lot. Huggins and Scott listed them as 1958 JCM23 Playing Card Backs. Not sure if this is correct. The cards are thicker than the other cards and have a glossy finish. I didn't find any matching listings on eBay. Any help identifying the players is appreciated.

Best regards,

Joe

The players are:

Masaichi Kaneda
Yoshio Yoshida
Kazuhiro Yamauchi
Shigeo Nagashima

All four are hall of famers!

Tsunemi Tsuda
 

Tsunemi Tsuda pitched for the Hiroshima Carp from 1982 to 1991. Early in his career he was a starting pitcher. As a 21 year old rookie he pitched 166 innings and was not good exactly, but good enough to take home the rookie of the year award. The following year he appeared in 19 games (17 starts) and was actually quite good. In his third year he made ten starts and four relief appearances, totaling only 54 innings, and he went back to being bad. After that he was converted into a relief pitcher. The Japanese Hall of Fame says that his conversion was necessitated by a ‘disrupture of blood in the middle finger’. I don’t have any idea what that is. But anyway, his first season out of the bullpen, 1985, did not go as planned. Tsuda was terrible: 50% worse than league average. His ERA that year was 6.64, and league-wide scoring was about the same as in 2018’s American League, so that doesn’t require any adjustment. His fame really rests on three of the following four seasons. In 1986, 87, and 89 he was terrific.

But then tragedy struck.

In the spring of 1990 he needed surgery because he was suffering from cerebral edema. That is, excess fluid built up in his brain. Cerebral edema can result from traumatic injury, but it can also result from cancer. In Tsuda’s case, it was the latter. He pitched six innings in 1990, one in 1991, and then he died of brain cancer.

The man nicknamed “the flaming stopper” remains as popular as ever. His son wanted to build a museum to his father, and crowd sourced funds for it. His goal was to raise four million yen (something like $40,000) to renovate Tsuda’s old house. The Yomiuri Shimbun (the newspaper that owns the Giants) reports that he hit his initial target in five hours, and eventually raised twenty-six million yen, for a much nicer museum.

The American hall of fame has been known to cut some slack for players who died suddenly and tragically. Ross Youngs comes to mind. Addie Joss didn’t even meet the 10 year requirement, but they put him in anyway. The Japanese voters did the same for Tsuda, but on the merits he’s even less deserving than Youngs or Joss. Joss was legitimately an all-time great, even if his career was short. (For what it’s worth, and yes he was a deadball pitcher, but he still holds the all-time record for WHIP.) Youngs, eh, had half of a hall of fame career. If he’d lived he probably wouldn’t have made it, but he might have. Tsuda is a different animal. Imagine if, instead of retiring at 32, Eric Gagne had died. That would be the American version of Tsuda.

This is a 1987 Calbee card.

Thanks Sean and Nat for all of your help identifying the players on my cards. I wish that I could add more to the discussion than just show pictures.

Here are four more thick cardboard cards that were in with a group labeled miscellaneous Japanese cards in the Huggins and Scott lot. I know the first two are of famous Home Run King Sadaharu Oh, but can you tell me anything about the other two players? Also any information on the year of manufacture and type of card?

I love the cheesy artwork on the back of the cards. The little girl in card 3 looks like she is about to murder her mom.

Best regards,

Joe

I don't know what set the first Oh card is from, but that's definitely Oh. It looks to me like a later issue; I'd guess 1970s.

The other three cards are from JCM58, which was issued between 1975 and 1976. The first guy is Oh. The second guy is Sumio Hirota. He played 1972 to 1987, mostly for the Lotte Orions. Early in his career he had a couple good seasons, but was mostly a below average hitter. He stole lots of bases though; I'm guessing a good-glove no-hit center fielder. Think of someone like Rajai Davis. The last player is Jinten Haku, also known as In-Cheon Paek. He was a productive hitter: about 15 HRs per year, around the same number of steals. He was named to one best-nine. After retiring from Japanese baseball he went to Korea, and is still the only player to have posted a .400 batting average in the KBO.

As for type of card: these are still menkos. Traditionally menko cards were printed on thick stock, since they were meant to be flipped around and thrown on the ground. That's why these cards are so thick. Some sets are very robust - put a Goudey to shame.

On the other hand, I've noticed that menkos printed immediately post-war are often very thin. Much too thin to actually play menko with. My guess is that a shortage of paper had something to do with that. "Tobacco" menkos from the late 50s and early 60s are better about stock quality, but still pretty thin if you're thinking about using them as game pieces. Presumably paper supply wasn't a problem by that point. Maybe kids were appreciating the cards more as baseball cards than as menko cards in that period, and produces responded by cutting corners? If anyone else knows why the tobacco menkos are relatively thin I'd love to hear about it.

Yeah, he really is one of the oddest HOF inclusions based on career stats and accomplishments, he isn't really even a Hall of Very Gooder by most standards.

His tragic story really drives interest in him. Even his cards sell for the same prices as super stars with way more impressive resumes.

Hiroshi Gondo
 

Hiroshi Gondo pitched for the Chunichi from 1961 to 1964, transitioned to a position player for a few seasons, and tried to make a comeback on the mound in 1968. To say that he was abused by the Dragons doesn’t even begin to cover it. As a 22 year old rookie he pitched 429 innings, starting 44 games (including 32 complete games) and finishing 24 games. He appeared in 69 games that season, so I guess he pitched in middle relief once. It was an amazing year. He won 35 games with an ERA of 1.70 against a league mark of 2.68. That would be like having a 2.69 ERA in last year’s American League. So, a good ERA over an unthinkably large number of innings. That year he took home both the rookie of the year award and the Sawamura Award, and led the Central League in practically everything. The following year he won 30 games over 362 innings (with a 2.33 ERA), and then things started going downhill. In 1963 Gondo’s ERA jumped a run-and-a-half while his innings pitched declined by about 1/3. In 1964 his ERA was over four and he only pitched about 100 innings. And that was that.

After blowing out his arm, Gondo stuck around for a few years playing SS and 3B. I don’t know what his defense was like, but, as befits a pitcher, he was not a good batter. The Dragons didn’t give him a starting gig; from his stats it looks like he was a bench player, the kind of guy who pinch hits and fills in when a regular is injured.

Although he had a relatively short playing career, he spent a long time as a coach and baseball analyst. Many years after retiring, he got a managerial spot, leading the Yokohama Bay Stars (1998-2000). They won the Japan Series under his guidance, but his managerial career lasted only those three seasons. In 2017 he was the pitching coach for Japan’s entry in the World Baseball Classic, and cautioned against over use of his pitchers. One wonders why.

Gondo was elected by the “expert” division of the player’s committee. It has purview over managers, coaches, and players who have been retired for a long time. Gondo had a short career as a player, but a long career as a coach and baseball analyst. Presumably that’s what he got elected for, as his pitching career, though notable, was extremely brief. Comparable American players are people like Herb Score and Mark Prior. Exciting young pitchers, good too, but no where near qualified for the hall on the basis of their playing careers.

The card is from the JCM 55 menko set, released in 1962. It was probably one of the most desirable cards in the set when it was released.

1909 Wisconsin Keio Game
 

I estimate that there is only a 46% change that today’s entry features a hall of famer. Even so, it’s worth writing about.

There have been several distinct eras in the history of Japanese baseball cards:

• Early 20th century – Postcards, usually featuring university teams and/or visiting American teams. Menko cards from this era are very rare.

• 1930s – First time that menkos and bromides featuring baseball players were widely available. Relatively few of these cards survive (I don’t have any), but you can still find them sometimes.

• WWII – no cards issued

• 1947 through early 1950s – golden age of baseball bromides. Round and pillar menkos common.

• Late 1950s through mid-1960s – “tobacco” menkos common. Throughout the postwar period game cards and cards packaged with candy and gum can be found. The former are common, the latter are not. (I own several game cards despite generally disliking them. I have only a single candy card.)

• 1973 through 1990 – Calbee era. Calbee cards are distributed 1-to-a-pack with potato chips. A few other companies produced cards during this period, but most were short-lived. Calbee was king.

• 1991 – current. BBM era. BBM cards are basically typical American-style baseball cards. Calbee still makes cards, and other companies sometimes put out a set, but BBM fundamentally changed the Japanese baseball card market.


The cards that have been posted to this thread have all been post war. (That’s why this thread is on this side of the board.) Time to change that. I recently picked up a couple early postcards. Today I’ll post the first one, and I’ll do a write-up for the other one later.


In 1872 an American teacher named Horace Wilson introduced Japan to baseball. In 1878 the first formal team was founded. By the turn of the century it was a popular sport in Japanese universities, and a handful of prominent universities had notable baseball teams. In the early days, Keio and Waseda Universities were the stand-outs. Baseball was, of course, already quite popular in the United States, and throughout the first few decades of the 20th century a number of American universities sent baseball teams to play their Japanese counterparts. Off hand, I know that Washington University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin sent teams across the Pacific.

The postcard below commemorates the 1909 University of Wisconsin tour. The inscription on the bottom of the card reads: “Scene of the fierce match between between United States, The baseball team of the University of Wisconsin & Keio University”.

The first game of the tour Keio won by a score of 3-2 in 11 innings on the 22nd of September. The two teams would have a rematch on the 26th, that Keio won 2-1 in 19 innings. Two days later Wisconsin trounced the Tokyo American Club 10-0, on the 29th they beat the Tokyo City Team 8-7. They beat Waseda 7-4 on Oct. 2, lost to Keio 5-4 on the 4th, beat Waseda 5-0 on the 7th, lost to Waseda 3-0 two days later, and beat Keio 8-0 on the 12th before returning to America.

Which game is pictured here? The postmark reads “26th September, Meiji 42”. The Japanese calendar tracks years since the beginning of the current emperor’s reign. 9/26 Meiji 42 = 9/26/1909. Given that the second game of the tour was played on the 26th, that must mean that the match pictured here was the inaugural game of the 22nd. (It must also mean that these postcards were printed in a hurry. The game pictured was played on four days before this card was mailed.)

One amazing thing about this tour, from the perspective of a (very) amateur historian studying it more than 100 years later, is that The Badger, a publication of the University of Wisconsin (it looks like a yearbook) recorded a detailed record of their trip. I will post the relevant pages from The Badger in the next post, but I will give some information from them here.

One Genkwan Shibata, class of 1909, arranged the trip and served as translator. Shibata had a local contact. Professor Matsuoka was a 1906 Wisconsin alum, and helped arrange the trip on the Japanese side. Matsuoka conscripted several hundred Keio students to act as designated Wisconsin fans during the tour. Keio put up $4000 to help fund the Americans’ visit. There are all sorts of problems with inflation calculators, but that’s something in the neighborhood of $100,000 today. Despite their hospitality, Keio wanted to win. As soon as the plans for the trip were finalized, the players from the Keio squad were sequestered away to spend six hours a day in training.

The Wisconsin team consisted of 13 players. They took a train to Seattle, where they spent a week practicing, and then about two weeks aboard ship headed to Japan. The Wisconsin players report that crowds of about 20,000 attended their games. They traveled to the first game by rickshaw. Although the American were impressed with the reception that they received, they also allege bias from the umpires, claiming that it cost them three games against Keio. Nobody ever likes an umpire. They note that there are not yet any professional players in Japan, but predict that there will be some. And of course they were right, although it would take another 27 years.

Now, who is pictured on this card? It’s hard to say, but I’ll give it my best shot. You can’t tell which team is at bat from the names on the uniforms. Even under 60x magnification I couldn’t even get a hint as to what it says on the jerseys.

That said, the batter is wearing white, and the catcher is wearing a light grey. Now, traditionally the home team wears white and the visitors wear grey or some other darker pattern. If the Japanese and American teams were both adhering to this tradition, then the Japanese team is at bat and the Americans are in the field. I have seen a number of other postcards commemorating this trip. Some of them seem to confirm this conjecture.

There is one other factor that favors it. In the background of my postcard is what looks like a scoreboard. It’s very grainy, and no writing on it is visible, but it sure looks like a scoreboard to me. It contains many black rectangles on the right, and a few white rectangles on the left. My guess: the black rectangles are blank boxes reflecting innings yet to be played. The white boxes are placards displaying the runs scored in innings that have already been played. There are more white boxes on the top row than on the bottom. Usually the visiting team is displayed at the top of the scoreboard (they bat first). If that’s right, and I’m counting right, that would indicate that this photo is of the bottom of the fourth inning of the first game between Keio and Wisconsin, September 22nd, 1909.

I’ll admit to being somewhat disappointed that it is probably the Americans in the field. The only hall of famer to appear on the Keio squad is catcher Zensuke Shimada. If Keio had been on defense, the would likely be Shimada you see waiting to receive the pitch. Alas, it’s probably not. I’ve decided that I’m 60% confident that it’s the Americans in the field. That gives me a 40% probability that it’s Shimada playing catcher. But there’s also a Keio player at bat. There’s no indication on the card of who it is, but even so there’s an 11% chance that it is, just by luck, Shimada who is batting. 40% + (60% x 11%) = 46%, hence my estimate at the top of this post. (N.B. Niese says that Konosuke Fukada was the Keio catcher. If he’s right, then my estimate is way off.)

If those are the Americans in the field then the catcher is either Elmer Barlow (aka ‘Spike’, class of ’09), or Arthur Kleinpell (aka ‘Moose’, class of ’11). Barlow would go on to have a distinguished law career, eventually serving on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Less is known about Arthur Kleinpell. He graduated in 1911, and then completed a second degree at Wisconsin in 1917. He died in Michigan. The pitcher is Doug Knight. He pitched all 11 innings of the first game, and the first 16 innings of the second, before injuring his arm and sitting out the rest of the tour. Also visible are first baseman Micque Timbers, and either John Messmer or Kenneth “Buck” Fellows at second. Messmer was Wisconsin’s most accomplished athlete. He won nine letters, later became an architect, and was inducted into the University of Wisconsin Athletics Hall of Fame.

If anyone can read the handwritten text on the card, please let me know. I would very much like to know what they were writing about on this card just after the first game of the tour. I've included a photo of the message with the contrast increased to make it easier to read.

Some of the information in this post was drawn from: Niese, Jon 2013. Voyage to the land of the rising sun: The Wisconsin Badger nine’s 1909 trip to Japan. Nine: A journal of baseball history and culture, 22:1, 11-19.

Beautiful postcard!

I'm having a lot of difficulty reading the written text due to the handwriting and the pre-war style.

I can say that it was addressed to someone living in the Hakozaki area in Fukuoka city and I don't see any baseball terms used in the written text, which I think is just a personal note unrelated to baseball.

Very nice post cards. Congratulations on the pick up. Admire all of your research. I really enjoy reading your detective work on the history of the players.

Here are a few more Post-war cards from the Huggins and Scott lot that I purchased last month. They were listed as 1950 JK18 Pro Baseball cards in the auction. I haven't been able to find similar examples on eBay. They are all blank backed and printed on thin cardboard stock. Any help on identifying any of the players or confirming the set would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Joe

Those are karuta cards. Karuta is sort of a party game. Each player card is paired with a "reading card" that's got information on it. You mix up all the player cards on the table and players take turns reading the reading cards. After a card has been read, all the other players try to be the first to grab the corresponding player card. They would have originally been sold in a box as a complete set. The hiragana symbols on the cards don't have anything to do with the players' names, they just let you pair players cards with reading cards. But, the pictures are pretty good likenesses of the players, so it's not that hard to figure out who is who. (And, moreover, Engel already did the work for us.)

You have, in order:

Juzo Sekine (HOF), Hiroshi Oshita (HOF)
Michio Nishizawa (HOF), Makoto Kozuru (HOF)
Meiji Tezuka, Shissho Takesue
Hideo Fujimoto (HOF), Hiroshi Nakao (HOF)
Shigeru Mizuhara (HOF), Noboru Aota (HOF)
Tokuji Kawasaki, Shigeru Chiba (HOF)
Tetsuharu Kawakami (HOF)

Pretty good selection of players.



Also, in my last post I promised copies of the relevant pages from the UW Yearbook. Unfortunately this website doesn't let you post large files, so the legibility of the text below has been compromised. But you'll get the idea. I also think it's neat that the yearbook includes images of several postcards that were obviously produced together with the one that I posted above. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the yearbook, but the UW library has a nice digitized copy that you can read on-line.

An early postcard
 

Here is my other recent pick up. It’s another postcard. The image is obviously generic, so no hall of famers here. The person that I bought it from thinks that it was originally included in a magazine. And it does appear to be perforated along one side. The printed text along the bottom says that it is a “secondary education postcard”, for whatever that’s worth. I haven’t found anyone who has been able to read the handwriting.

But what is really interesting about this card is the date. On the back is a 15 sen stamp that dates from the 1880s to 1890s. Now, companies were not permitted to produce postcards in Japan until the Postal Act of 1900 was passed, which creates a little bit of a mystery. But I think that the answer is this: this isn’t, legally speaking, a postcard. It’s a (part of) a page from a magazine – which just coincidentally happens to be the size and shape of a postcard, to be perforated for easy removal, and to say ‘postcard’ on it. But that’s all – the publisher could insist – just a coincidence. And if the reader of the magazine wants to rip out the page and mail it, well, that’s their business. Anyway, since the card was postally used, we can date it quite precisely. The postal cancellation says: June 1, Meiji 24. That’s 1891.

This is very early for Japanese baseball. Horace Wilson introduced baseball to Japan only about 20 years before this card was mailed. It postdates the establishment of Japan’s first organized baseball team by only 13 years. So at this point baseball in Japan was, if not in its infancy, at least in its toddlerhood. American teams wouldn’t start visiting Japan for about another 15 years after this.

This is the earliest piece of Japanese baseball-themed ephemera that I’ve ever seen. The earliest known baseball menko card dates from 1897, and all of the other postcards that I’ve seen are from after the turn of the century. I asked Robert Klevens about it, and he says that, while he has books with woodblock prints that predate this, none of his cards do. Now, whether or not postcards “count” as baseball cards is a fraught and kind of pointless question. We know what they are and we know what they’re not. If you want to count them as baseball cards, then this is likely the earliest known Japanese baseball card. If not, then it’s not, but it’s still a memento from a very early period of Japanese baseball history.

Mission Creep
 

I am not, I would like to be clear, a patient man. When I started going for the Japanese hall of fame, I managed to find something that I needed, basically every other day. Lately I’ve gone, well, rather more time between pickups.

This does not please me.

But the fact is that among the post-war hall of famers – so, the one’s that I’m actively chasing – there just aren’t very many left to find. I’m at 94% on my project and only need five more players. But obviously the last ones to get will, on average, be the hardest ones to find. And they have been the hardest ones to find.

So I decided to set out on another project. Something to keep me busy while those last five stragglers find their way into my collection. As noted up-thread, Japan has two halls of fame. There’s the yakyu dendo, which I’ve been chasing. It’s the one that people vote on, and they’ve got a museum in the Tokyo Dome. It is, in many respects, like the one in Cooperstown. But there’s also the Meikyukai, AKA The Golden Player’s Club. The Meikyukai is Masaichi Kaneda’s club. He founded it in 1978. Eligible players are those born during the Shōwa period (1926-1988) who have either 2000 hits, 200 wins, or 250 saves. Membership is more-or-less automatic. Or, at any rate, once a player hits the relevant milestones, he’s in unless he doesn’t want to be. The only players who are eligible but not in the Meikyukai are Kihachi Enomoto and Hiramitsu Ochiai. (Turning down Meikyukai membership was very on-brand for Ochiai.) Statistics accumulated outside of Japan count, but only so long as the player appeared in professional Japanese baseball before he accumulated them.

There are many reasons that the automatic qualifications are poorly chosen. They're arbitrary, they're poor measures of player skill or value, and they don't take context into account. The point that I’m trying to make is that if you’re trying to measure career quality, using wins, saves, and hits as proxies is a terrible way to do it.

Nevertheless, anyone who can hang around long enough to hit the milestones is probably a pretty good player, even if the milestones themselves are a poor way to evaluate them. And the Yakyu Dendo has some peculiar omissions, some of which, like Masahiro Doi, the Meikyukai does better with.

Meikyukai players are overwhelmingly recent players. Some of them are still active. So, fair warning: there are a lot of 2.5x3.5 cards with various amounts of foil embossing on the way.

Let’s start with this guy. This is Tomonori Maeda, an outfielder who played for the Carp for ages. And I mean ages. He had a 23 year career, and that doesn’t even count the 2009 season, which he missed completely. He’s in the Meikyukai on the strength of 2119 hits which go with a 302/358/484 slash line, over the years 1990-2013. Maeda had moderately good power – 295 home runs for his career, 20ish a year when he was playing full years (he had many partial seasons) – and little speed. His best season seems to have been 1993, when as a 22 year old he hit 27 home runs on the way to a 317/392/553 line.

The partial seasons were due to injury. Baseball-reference compares him to Eric Davis, due to the fact that they’re talented outfielders who were frequently injured and played for teams that used the same logo. That’s not a good comp though. Davis, at least when young, was amazingly fast. Seriously, check this out, in 1986 Davis hit 27 home runs and stole 80 bases. If he could have cut down on the injuries he could have been a modern-day Ty Cobb. (Some batting average aside.)

Maeda made the best nine four times, but the Carp are a traditionally weak team, and he managed to play in only one Japan Series. (They lost in seven to the Lions.)

The internet tells me that this is a clip of Maeda interviewing players (including Trout) about their swings.

This is a clip of the Carp against the Dragons in what looks like Maeda’s final game.

And here’s a compilation of a bunch of Maeda’s home runs. (Warning: the music is terrible.)

The card is a 1998 Calbee.

Wow, that is a really interesting find.

Just FYI, it is addressed to someone named Kimura who lived in Nagano Prefecture. The pink lettered "K Miyashita" on the front in Roman letters seems to be the name of the sender, the name also appears (in kanji) as the sender on the flip side. I tried but couldn't make out what the pink lettered writing on the top says.

Also glad to see you have the Meikyukai posts started, I'm still going through my doubles to see what I can send you!

Kosuke Fukudome
 

Kosuke Fukudome is an outfielder (converted from shortstop early in his pro career). He broke in with Chunichi in 1999 and played for the Dragons until coming to America in 2008. He signed a deal with the Cubs at made the all-star team as a 31 year old “rookie”. (This is a settled issue by now, but guys with long and successful careers in Japan counting as rookies always struck me as a bit absurd.) Fukudome spent three and a half years with the Cubs before being traded to the Indians and signing a one-year deal with the White Sox. After the 2012 season he returned to Japan, roaming the outfield for the Hanshin Tigers. He spent 56 games with Hanshin this year, but was really bad. B-R reports that he spent two games with Hanshin's minor league team in the Western League. Since Fukudome is a 42 year old who has apparently washed out of NPB, I’m guessing this is curtains for him.

Still, it’s a career to be proud of. Over sixteen seasons in Japan he collected 1855 hits, had a healthy on-base percentage, and slugged nearly 500. His time with the Cubs was not as successful: he posted a 258/359/395 line. The on-base percentage is okay. You’d want more power from an outfielder unless he was a real speedster, which Fukudome wasn’t. In MLB he went 29/58 in stolen bases. Which isn’t good. The big difference between his Japanese production and his American production was the power. In Japan he was a real slugger, with slugging percentages in the high 500 to low 600s, with one great season around 650. Granted, this was in his late 20s, which is traditionally a player’s prime. He was past that when he went overseas, so that explains part of the drop off, but not nearly all of it. Especially since he got to call Wrigley Field home, and Wrigley is noteworthy for being homerun friendly.

It’s really hard not to conclude that it’s harder to hit for power over here. Hideki Matsui is the only Japanese player to manage to be a power hitter in America, and even he lost a lot of power when he came over. Albright helpfully has a table with dimensions of Japanese parks. His website is a bit old, so it might be out of date, but it’s convenient and will give us the general idea.

Using his data, here are the average dimensions:
LF Line 315
LF Gap 372
Dead C 395
RF Gap 373
RF Line 315

This guy has MLB dimensions. I’m not completely certain that its current either, and it is definitely incomplete, but we’re just after the general idea here. We want, if you’ll forgive a pun, to get a number that’s in the right ballpark.

Let’s compare:
LF 331
LF Gap 369
Dead C 405
RF Gap 374
RF 331

American parks are a little bigger, but not by a huge amount. And the LF/RF differences could just reflect measurement differences. The site with American dimensions doesn’t say “LF Line” like the Japanese one does. So the stadia seem like they’re about the same size. Even if Japanese players are, on average, smaller than Americans, if the stadia are the same size, that shouldn’t account for the difference. Do Japanese pitchers like to work up in the zone more than Americans do? Are lineups more balanced, and hence pitchers have less of an incentive to work around power hitters?

Anyway, when he returned to Japan Fukudome might have gotten a little of his power back, but not much of it. That, I think, can be explained by age. He was 31 when he came to America, but 36 when he returned. While 31 isn’t 21, it’s not all that old, exactly. You might still, if you’re lucky, be in the prime of your baseball career at 31. At 36… not so much.

Prior to going pro, Fukudome played briefly in the industrial leagues. He was apparently a first round pick by the Buffaloes, but he played industrial ball rather end up with Kintetsu. He’s also a 2x Olympian, taking home bronze and silver medals. In Japan he was a multiple gold glove winner (including a win at 38, making him Japan’s oldest gold glove winner), a 1x MVP, and a 4x member of the best nine team.

As is so often the case with star players on Hanshin, thehanshintigers.com has a nice biography for Fukudome.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

My card is from the 2013 BBM (first version) set, after his return to Japan.

Great thread. Learned some new stuff.

Hiroki Kokubo
 

Hiroki Kokubo was an infielder who spent a plurality of his time at 3B, but also played a significant amount of first and second base. He spent most of his career with the Hawks, with a three year break on the Giants (and missed 2003 after injuring his knee in a collision at home plate). As you might expect, he slid down the defensive spectrum as he got older, beginning in the middle infield, shifting to third about 2000, and then became a full-time first baseman in his old age. At his peak Kokubo was a huge slugger. He managed 44 home runs in 2001 in just 138 games. (That’s a 50 HR pace over 162 games.) The peak didn’t last long though. He showed flashes of it in his mid-20s, but inconsistency, some injuries, and problems with the tax authorities, prevented him from being the dominant force that he could have been. It was in his early 30s that he really came into his power, but he lost one season to injury, lost about 50 games (to a broken thumb) in 2006, and was never the same after that.

Despite a relatively short peak and frequent injuries, Kokubo is one of Japan’s better home run hitters. He managed 413 for his career, which puts him 16th all-time. In MLB Mike Schmidt is 16th all-time (with 548).

Kokubo spent three years with Yomiuri. The trade was for literally nothing. They just gave away a star player. This did not go over well with the fans, and he was re-acquired (by the now rebranded Fukuoka Softbank Hawks) shortly thereafter. This “trade” was peculiar, to say the least. The best that anyone can seem to do is guess that the Hawks, despite having just won the Japan Series, were strapped for cash and looking to unload a contract. But it’s weird that they’ve got a star player and wouldn’t even ask for anything back in return.

Tuffy Rhodes managed to upstage Kokubo in his best seasons. In 2001 Kokubo hit 44 home runs on the way to a 290/364/600 line. You would expect the slugging numbers at least to lead the league and for Kokubo to be front-page news. (At least in the sports section.) But Rhodes, playing for Kintetsu, managed 55 home runs and a 327/421/662 slash line. Just miles better than Kokubo. 2004 was also a very good season, in which he hit 41 home runs. Rhodes hit 45. Kokubo at least bested him elsewhere (despite the home run lead, Rhodes had a lower slugging percentage than did Kokubo), but Rhodes took the top line number. Oddly, the only year in which Kokubo led the league in home runs was 1995, when he hit a relatively pedestrian 28.

About that tax fraud thing. Ten Japanese players were caught evading income taxes in 1994. Kokubo was the highest-profile of them. He pleaded guilty to evading $215,400 in taxes. I haven't been able to figure out how this led to missing most of a season. The most obvious explanation - prison time - you'd think would leave evidence on the internet, you know, articles about how a big sports star ended up in prison. Since I haven't found any of those, I'm guessing that that wasn't it.

He was a 3x best nine, and 13x all-star (appearing in 11 of those games), but never won an MVP award.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

Two cards this time: the first is from the 2002 BBM set. It appears to be part of an all-star subset. The other is a 1999 Calbee prize card. Sometimes in a bag of chips you’d find (I don’t know if they still do this) “winner” cards, which can be mailed back to Calbee for some sort of premium. Which premium you get depends on how many prize cards you send back. In 1999 five prize cards got you a special set of a dozen cards on premium card stock with lots of foil coating. There were at least a couple sets issued. I’ve got one of them. And while I plan on trading it (most of the players I don’t need), I figure that I’ll post them while I’ve got them.

Great post, as always!

There were two factors that contributed to the odd Kokubo-for-nothing trade. One is that after his 2003 injury he went to the US for treatment (expensive treatment), which the team refused to pay for, which broke down the relationship between Kokubo and management (who had disagreed with him going to the US in the first place). So Daiei wanted to get rid of him despite him being a key player.

A second point is that the parent company Daiei was in a financial crisis at that time, having to slash its costs which would ultimately lead to its selling the team a year later as part of its restructuring. In the early 2000s Daiei was a major supermarket retailer across Japan, but the result of that crisis is that its now a minor subsidiary of one of its former rivals and the brand is almost non-existent today.

So it can also be seen as part of a fire sale by sinking ownership. By the time Kokubo came back to the Hawks they were under new ownership that invested heavily in the team and turned it into the powerhouse of the Pacific League that it has been ever since.

Atsuya Furuta (redux)
 

Covered this guy already. Furuta is, for my money, Japan's second-greatest catcher. Trailing only his mentor, Katsuya Nomura. B-R says that he was voted (doesn't say by whom) the greatest catcher in Japanese history, which is absurd. But he was really good.

He qualified for the Meikyukai with his 2000th hit in 2005.

He was due to be drafted out of college (he was a business major) by Nippon Ham, but they backed out. Maybe because of his eyesight. Instead he began his pro career playing for Toyota in the industrial leagues, and was later drafted by Yakult. At Toyota he worked in human resources, with whom he planned "in-house recreation" for the company. (I'm guessing this means company picnics and such that HR thinks that employees like?)

Anyway, Furuta posts pictures of food on his Instagram account just like everyone else does. Among his hobbies he lists shogi (a board game), golf, and watching movies. His favorite band is U2. (Which, eh, at least War was a good album.)

Post retirement he has taken up marathon running, written a book, and made lots and lots of TV appearances.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Yes

Perhaps it's excessive to buy a second card of a player just because he's in both the Meikyukai and the Yakyu Dendo. And clearly I don't spend enough money on baseball cards already. But anyways, I decided that a player doesn't count for the Meikyukai collection just because he's in the Yakyu Dendo collection. (They are in different binders after all.) So I've got more cards to post today.

The cards: 1993 BBM. I love the big stripes on the uniform. It almost looks like pajamas. The other is another 1999 Calbee prize card.

Really enjoying the thread, Nat. Probably my favorite thread here at Net54. Also appreciated this one for two reasons: (1) Furuta is one of my favorite Nippon League players, and I do have several of his cards over the years, and (2) The Yakult Swallows are my favorite team. Why? Well, although I've collected Japanese cards since 1980, I've only been collecting them "hot and heavy" since 2013, and I realized to better appreciate Japanese baseball I needed to pick a "favorite" team and start following them, so I picked the Swallows because of Furuta and because of their excellent uniforms from about 1978 - mid 1990s (now, not so much with the lime green road unis). They remind me a lot of the Atlanta Braves unis worn from 1976-79. Keep up the great posts! (By the way, I wonder how many Net54 members are Japanese baseball card collectors? 6? 7?)

Manabu Kitabeppu (redux)
 

Glad you enjoy the thread Jay! It never occurred to me to pick a favorite team, but that does seem like a great way to learn more about the game over there. One reason (besides getting bored waiting for the HOFers that I still need) that I decided to chase the Meikyukai too is that it's an excuse to learn about modern Japanese baseball. I could tell you a lot more about Japanese baseball from the 1950s than I could about it from the 2010s, reading up on some of the active players who are Meikyukai members should help with that. Not the same as actually following a team, but it's a start. Let's see your favorite Swallows card, if you've got a scan handy! They've had some pretty good players over the years; aside from Oh, Kaneda may have had the most impressive career of any NPBL player.

It's true that Japanese baseball is a niche interest on Net54, but I don't know of anywhere better to put these posts. At least the folks here are guaranteed to be interested in baseball cards. And besides, even if the number of active collectors is relatively small, somebody is interested, this thread has got plenty of views.

Also: it's time for another card.

Here's another guy that I've written about before. Manabu Kitabeppu was a star pitcher for the Hiroshima Carp for many years, although a very inconsistent one. Some years he was great, others, not so much. He qualified for the Meikyukai with his 200th win in 1992.

I don't have much to add to what I wrote before, so I'm going to leave you with a few fun Kitabeppu-related links.

He has his own website. He's got a Facebook page. And he has his own blog. All of foregoing are in Japanese, so English monolinguists (or at least non-Japanese speakers) will want to run them through the translator in Chrome or something similar. (Which will give you something that looks a little bit like English. They've still got a ways to go on the computer translators.) Post retirement, Kitabeppu spent a while as a pitching coach, and has been a media personality since c. 2005. He also grows vegetables and posts about it on his blog.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Yes

The card is a part of the "Gold Card" subset from BBM's 1993 issue. (Or maybe 92? It's says 1992 on the front but has a 1993 copyright date.) Apparently this particular subset has no premium attached to it, since I picked up this card for a dollar or two. I'm not really a fan of subsets (old school all-star cards excepted), but that probably just shows that I'm getting to be an old stick in the mud.

Takahiro Arai
 

Takahiro Arai was a 3B/1B who played for Hiroshima, Hanshin, and then back to Hiroshima, from 1999 through 2018. He had one year (2005) in which he displayed some terrific power, but was mostly more like an above-average power threat. In total he had 321 home runs and 388 doubles, which should give you the right idea. For his career he had a .339 on-base percentage, which was right around average. And he had no speed to speak of: 22 career triples, 43 steals at a very poor rate. You know this sort of player. I’m guessing the Carp used him as a cleanup hitter, as he cleared 100 RBIs a few times, despite the relatively short season. Arai was often in the top ten in offensive categories, but rarely led in anything.

He was 30 and still good when he went to Hanshin as a free agent. His return to Hiroshima followed his age 37 season, which was catastrophically bad. Ordinarily you’d think that a 37 year old’s career would be over after a season like that, but Hiroshima took him back, and while the age definitely showed, he had another year or two of productively (and a little while just hanging on) left in him. Arai qualified for the Meikyukai in 2016 as a 39 year old. He was a local boy, maybe he was a fan favorite which gave them some extra reason to bring him back. Arai was born in Hiroshima and went to high school there; although admittedly he left for college (Komazawa University in Tokyo, which, according to its website, was founded in 1592. Not Oxford old, but that’s pretty impressive).

Apparently he wasn’t much of a prospect. As a college player he managed only two home runs, and the Carp didn’t select him until the sixth round. (I don’t know how many rounds there are in the Japanese draft, but given the small number of minor league teams, I’m guessing “not very many”.) Among players who managed 2000 hits, Arai was drafted in the second-lowest spot in the draft (Yutaka Fukumoto). (Hat tip to the B-R bullpen for a lot of this information.)

In 2008 he took over as head of the Japanese player’s union. A position that, a few years earlier, had been held by Atsuya Furuta (for more on whom, see above). The union is rather weak (much weaker than the American counterpart), but they do have some victories, most notably when the owners tried to contract a team.

Although he is a pretty stand type of player, I’m having trouble finding a close American match. My first thought was Matt Williams, and while there are some similarities, power was a bigger part of Williams’ game. Ditto Scott Rolen. Gary Gaetti is a tempting name to throw out there, but Arai was just a better all-around player than he was.

Arai was a 2x best-nine player and a 1x MVP. He took home the MVP award in 2016 when the Carp won the pennant. Even ignoring Japan’s tendency to give the MVP to a player on the championship team (something the Americans are also guilty of, but not to the same extent), this was an absurd choice. Pick an MVP from the stat lines below (AVG/OBP/SLB, SB, position):

335/404/612, 16, OF
291/389/481, 23, OF
300/372/485, 0, 1B

The last one is Arai, and he’s the one they gave the MVP award to. The other two are Seiya Suzuki and Yoshihiro Maru, outfielders for the Carp. He was the third-best position player on his own team. And Kris Johnson had a heck of a season on the mound, too.

Digression time: I know that this is a post about Arai, but I want to talk about Seiya Suzuki for a minute. He was 21 when the Carp won the pennant in 2016 and was the best player on the team after being a part-timer since he was 18. He followed up that performance with a 300/389/547 line in 2017, 321/439/625 in 2018, and so far this year he’s hitting 313/438/572. The Carp seem to have got their own Mike Trout. I have a feeling that I’ll be writing about him in a few years.

Arai is either unpopular, or has a bunch of friends who really like to mess with him. During one interview fellow star Kanemoto walked in, asked him why there are so few reporters talking to him (compared to an interview that he, Kanemoto, had given earlier), left, and then returned with photographers, explaining to them that Arai is a star and that they should take pictures of him. Later on, Arai was answering questions on a radio show, including questions about which team he liked playing for the most, and why he tends to drop easy fly balls. Turns out Kanemoto called in with the questions. And it’s not just Kanemoto. When it was announced that Arai was retiring, Kenta Maeda (another former teammate) appeared in television with a shirt that had a picture of Arai on it, along with his career totals in strikeouts, errors, and double plays.

But anyway, interviewed in 2011 (while he was on the Tigers), Arai was asked about his goals for the season. His response was, I think, just right: “I’d like to win a championship and spray beer all over the place.”

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

The card is from the 2013 BBM “Crosswind” subset. They do a cross-something subset pretty frequently.

Kenjiro Nomura
 

Kenjiro Nomura was Hiroshima’s shortstop from 1989 to 2005. As a young man he had good power, good speed, a healthy OBP, and played pretty much every day. Sort of Alan-Trammell-like. Age 31 was his last really good year, after that he missed lots of time every season for the rest of his career, retiring after his age 38 season. Nomura’s best season was 1995, in which he hit 32 home runs (double the figure that is his career high otherwise), stole 30 bases (three off his career high), and slashed 315/380/560. While playing shortstop. The HR total was second in the league, as was his batting average, and he was third in slugging percentage. In total he was an all-star eight times and was selected to three best-nines. Albright regards him as Japan’s 9th greatest shortstop.

Nomura really wasn’t a good player in his 30s, he lost his SS job to Eddy Diaz and age quickly caught up with him. But he did hang on long enough to qualify for the Meikyukai with his 2000th hit in 2005. Replacing Nomura was kind of weird. He went downhill quickly, but he was still a star when he lost his job. Diaz was not immediately an improvement. He had two iffy seasons, one season that matched Nomura’s 1995, one decent season, and then he was off to Korea.

After retiring he coached the Carp and spent five seasons managing them. Traditionally the Carp have been a second-division team, but under Nomura they managed to improve pretty steadily. Nevertheless, his tenure was for only those five years. As of 2016 he was a member of the Kansas City Royals’ baseball-ops team in Japan. I presume that means scouting. And in 2017 he enrolled in the Hiroshima University’s MA program in “Coaching Science and Sports Psychology”, saying something about how he expects it to be useful in his second career. Which makes it sound like he wants to get back into managing.

Meikyukai: yes - Hall of Fame: no

My card is from the 1994 BBM set. Over time (probably due to hanging out on a pre-war baseball card message board) I have developed a casual distaste for standard, post 1956 American-style baseball cards. And that means BBM cards. That said, the design on their 1994 offering is pretty nice. If we should have learned anything from 1953 Bowman, it’s that less (usually-I’ll admit to a certain affection for Delongs) is more on baseball cards. And, except for the logo, the 1994 BBM set is nice and clean.

Masaji Hiramatsu (pt. 2)
 

My policy is that I get a copy of a player's card for each collection that he's a part of. Hall of fame collection =/= meikyukai collection, so I need a second card for each player who is a member of both.

Hence today's post.

Masaji Hiramatsu was a great pitcher for the Whales. I said rather more about him in the piece just linked than I will say here.

Hiramatsu was elected to the hall of fame by the experts committee - which has jurisdiction over players who have been retired for at least 21 years. Sounds a lot like the Veteran's Committee here. There is also a player's committee, which is basically a guy's first shot at election, and special committees that elect umpires, guys who published baseball's rule book (I'm not kidding, check out Mirei Suzuki), and so on.

Japanese starters have always pitched more in relief than American starters do, but here's a fun fact about Hiramatsu: he has almost exactly the same number of complete games as games finished. 145/146, respectively.

One thing that I find curious about Japanese baseball is how seriously they take the Koshien tournament. It's the high school baseball championship, and it's a huge deal. This comes to mind at the moment because Hiramatsu's team won the tournament, and whenever someone is writing about him that fact always gets mentioned right next to the fact that he won the Sawamura Award, which, to an American mind, would seem to be a much bigger deal.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of fame: Yes

Round menkos are best known for dominating the early post-war menko scene. Basically, menko cards from the late 1940s to early 1950s are either round or relatively narrow pillars. There are many sets of each, but the round sets tend, in my observation, to be more common. Round menko cards (of baseball players at least) then disappeared for a couple decades. There was a sort of mini-revival in the 1970s. This card is from the JRM 10 set, issued in 1976. It's a common and inexpensive set (I paid more for shipping on this card than I did for the card itself).

General Question about Menko Cards
 

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

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.

Kazuya Fukuura
 

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.

Noboru Aota (part 2)
 

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.

Kazuhiro Kiyohara
 

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.

Seiichi Uchikawa
 

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.

Picked up this Bromide at the National:

http://photos.imageevent.com/exhibit...20Mizuhara.jpg

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).

Isao Shibata
 

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.

Calbee
 

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

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

Thanks; my bad.

Atsunori Inaba
 

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.

Shinichi Eto (again)
 

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.

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.

identification help
 

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

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)!

Norihiro Nakamura
 

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.

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.

Choji Murata (for the meikyukai collection)
 

This is my second post about Choji Murata. (Here’s the first.) I thought I’d take what appears to be his best season (1976) and adjust it to fit the 2019 AL context, to give us a better idea of what he was up to.

In 1976 Murata had a 1.82 ERA, to go with 21 wins and 202 strike outs, in 257 innings pitched. Murata led the league in ERA, IP, and K’s, but did not win the Sawamura award. (The Sawamura award went to Kojiro Ikegaya of the Carp.) He was second in wins.

That year the Pacific League managed a 3.34 ERA and 0.48 K/IP. I don’t know how to get league-wide data for performance as a starter, so I really can’t normalize wins. But I can approximate it with innings pitched. Here's the plan: I'm going to adjust his number of starts for the shorter schedule, and then multiply that number by the average innings per start in the 2019 American League. That will get something like a translation of his innings pitched into the 2019 AL context. If he was pitching more/less than the league average innings per appearance, this figure will be off. I'm going to assume that relief appearances are 1-inning long.

Now, the 2019 AL has an ERA of 4.60 and a K rate of .96 per inning. (Yikes! That’s a lot of strike outs!) Starting pitchers pitch an average of 5.23 innings per start. Maybe bump it up to 5.5 due to openers pulling down the average.

Murata made 24 starts in a season 80% as long as MLB’s. So let’s give him 29 starts. He also made 22 relief appearances, with the season-length adjustment that becomes 26. Call those relief appearances one inning each (just a wild guess on that one). That comes out to an adjusted 186 innings. That’s maybe a bit on the light side, but not unreasonable for a contemporary starter. Blake Snell won the Cy Young award last year with fewer innings pitched than that.

Murata was striking out batters at a rate 40% better than league average. Adjusted to the 2019 AL that comes out to 1.3 K’s per inning, which is extremely good. It’s just about what Justin Verlander does. Over 186 innings that would give him 250 Ks. If you adjust his ERA for the 2019 AL context, you end up with 2.51. There isn’t any way to adjust wins, so here’s what Murata’s 1976 looks like if it happens in the 2019 American League:

186 innings pitched, 250 strikeouts (12 K/9), and a 2.51 ERA.

That ERA would lead the league (by a little bit). The K figures are good but not league leading. The innings pitched are a bit light for a full season, but not very low. He in fact pitched far more innings than that, but that has to do with differences in pitcher usage between the 1976 Pacific League and the 2019 American League. He actually pitched 18 complete games that year, adjusted for context and that becomes, eh, like, 1 or 2. Basically nobody pitches complete games anymore, or even very deep into games. The longer schedule isn’t enough to make up for the reduced workloads. (There’s also the possibility that his relief outings were longer than one inning each.)

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

These cards are mid-80s Calbee cards. I bought them in a lot, it’s not like I was all like “I already have one boring headshot of Choji Murata, surely need to buy another”.

Takao Kajimoto
 

Takao Kajimoto is a hall of famer and Meikyukai member who pitched for the Braves. He was featured in one on the earliest posts in this thread (which weren’t very high quality) so I’ll try to do better here.

Kajimoto pitched from 1954 to 1973, compiling a record of 254-255 (that’s right, a losing record). I wonder if that’s the highest number of wins for a pitcher with a losing record? My guess would be “yes”. Wikipedia (Japanese version) says that it is the highest total for anyone to have never led the league in wins, which also sounds plausible. Although he was a 12x all-star, he was selected for just a single best-nine team.

Kajimoto’s father died when he was in middle school, and he was raised by his mother alone thereafter. He was a sensation as a rookie, signing directly out of high school with a 93 mph fastball.

With a rotation led by Kajimoto and Tetsuya Yoneda, Hankyu has something of a golden age in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, they ran into the buzz saw of the V9 Giants, and didn’t manage to win the Japan Series. For a while the Dodgers did a lot of things with various Japanese teams, and in the late 1950s they went to Japan to play against an all-star team. This could have turned out better for Kajimoto. He started the Oct. 31st, 1956 game, and Gino Cimoli hit a line drive that bounced off of Kajimoto’s shoulder (ouch!) and went for a triple.

After he retired Kajimoto spent many years as a coach. His advice to (at least some of his pitchers) was… peculiar. Apparently he recommended drinking before appearing in a game, on the grounds that it worked for him. There’s a reason that anecdotes don’t really count as evidence. #obviouslybadideas.

Kajimoto still holds the record for consecutive batters struck out, at nine. His pitch of choice was something that Google Translate’s version of Kajimoto’s Japanese Wikipedia page is calling a ‘palm ball’, which I gather is a kind of change up. A good change up is a nice thing to have if you can pair it was a blazing fastball. (Or, well, blazing in context. No one is going to be impressed with a 93mph fastball anymore.)

Meikyukai – Yes (he was one of the founding members) : Hall of Fame – Yes

My card is from the JCM 43a set. It’s one of a bunch of almost indistinguishable sets released between c. 1958 and 1960.

Tokuro Ishii
 

Takuro Ishii played baseball (mostly SS) for 24 seasons, spending most of the time with the same franchise (albeit carrying over through the change from the Taiyo Whales to the Yokohama Bay Stars). His last few years were spent with Hiroshima. Ishii had no power at all, averaging four home runs per year for his career. On the other hand, he was pretty fast, stealing 20-40 bases a year for a long time. Basically what you expect from a shortstop. He played from 1989 to 2012, and collected 2432 hits (this figure is 14th all-time). His 2000th hit came in 2006, and the last few years of his career he was playing part-time. In total he put up a 282/356/372 line. He never was a dangerous hitter exactly, but if you’re playing a good shortstop, that will do.

Curiously, Ishii started his career as a pitcher. He broke in as an 18 year old with the Whales and pitched 30 innings to a 3.56 ERA. His pitching career would be short, however, a total of 49 innings spread over three seasons. By 1993 he was a regular third baseman. (It would be a couple years before he moved to short.) But his start as a pitcher didn’t exactly go smoothly either. He was undrafted out of high school, and didn’t make a pro team until he won a spot at a tryout with the Whales.

Sacrifice hits seem to have been a specialty of his. In both 1993 and 1994 he had 39 of them, which sounds like a very large number to me. The MLB record is 67 by Ray Chapman in 1917. Pretty much all of the top MLB seasons in sac hits are from the deadball era. There are a couple high figures from the early 1920s (old habits die hard). The top figure from after the early 20s is Pie Traynor’s 42 in 1928. Ishii’s 39 would tie him for 50th in MLB history, and remember he did that twice in consecutive seasons. I’m guessing third baseman played pretty far in when they saw him come up to bat.

Although Ishii was fast, he was also reckless, leading the league in times caught stealing during a bunch of seasons.

In total, over his 24 seasons he made six all-star teams and five best-nines. In addition he won four gold gloves awards. Post retirement, he has coached for the Carp, and is currently a coach with the Swallows.

As for a comparable American player: I can’t help but pick Omar Vizquel. They played the same position, they both started their careers in 1989 and retired in 2012, and they both amassed a whole bunch of hits. Vizquel won more gold gloves, but most of those he won on reputation. With the exception of an anomalous 1999, his defensive stats from 1994 to 2001 (all years in which he won the GG) were nothing special. (When he actually was a good fielder was right at the beginning of his career, but he didn’t have the reputation yet and so didn’t win the award.) On the whole, they’re quite similar players.

The Bay Stars released him after something like 20 years. Rather than retire, he signed with the Carp. About this he said:

"There really weren't many [offers]. It was in fact very tough. But in the end it wasn't about money. Rather, I wanted to keep going, I wanted a fresh start. Frankly speaking, baseball is fun."

I like that sentiment.


The card is from the 1993 BBM set.

Playing Back Cards
 

Here are some 1958 JCM23 Playing Card Back cards that I picked up. Any help identifying the players is appreciated.

Best regards,

Joe

Hi Joe,

You've got the set wrong. Those aren't JCM 23 they're JGA 21. They were produced by the Shonen Magazine. The year on the set is 1961.

The ace of spades is Kazuto Tsuruoka (aka Yamamoto). He was briefly a very good player, and is in the hall of fame for his work as a manager of the Nankai Hawks.

The queen of spades is Tadashi Sugiura, a hall of fame pitcher.

Jack of diamonds is Futushi Nakanishi, a hall of famer (played 3B). He was superbly great when he was young (and married his manager's daughter) but tailed off towards the end of his career. He played for the Lions.

Six of diamonds is Noboru Akiyama. He was a hall of fame pitcher for the Taiyo Whales. He had his moments, but on the whole - largely due to a short career - he's one of the weaker members of the hall of fame.

Harayasu Nakajima
 

Haruyasu Nakajima was a star in the early days of Japanese pro ball. He played with the Giants (through several incarnations) from 1936 through 1949, and spent the last couple years of his career with Taiyo. An outfielder, he posted a career line of 270/324/393, managing 897 hits, 57 home runs, and 103 stolen bases over the course of his career. Remember that in early Japanese baseball, very few runs were scored. His best season was probably the fall season of 1938. The league as a whole hit 219/319/293. Only 110 home runs were hit in the whole league that season, 22 of them by the Kyojin. Get this: in that league, Nakajima hit 361/428/626, and bashed out ten home runs. That’s completely nuts, and it was Japan’s first triple crown. He hit almost 50% of his team’s home runs that year, and, what, like, 9% of the home runs in the entire league. (You actually just couldn’t do this anymore. To do that in the 2019 American League – to this point in the season – you would need to hit 286 home runs.) Nakajima’s slugging percentage that season was more than double the league average. I decided to check out Babe Ruth real quick. In 1918 (so this is still during the deadball era) he slugged 555 against a league average of 322. In 1919 he slugged 657 and the league mark was 359. Neither of those seasons matched Nakajima’s feat. His best season – as far as raw slugging percentage goes – was 1920, when he slugged 847 and the league managed 387. Okay, so Ruth did manage to double the league mark for slugging percentage. But that’s what we need to compare Nakajima’s fall 1938 season to: perhaps the best season of Babe Ruth’s career. (By WAR Ruth’s best season is 1923, but that’s being propped up by an anomalous 19 runs saved in the field.) As you might have surmised, power was Nakajima’s calling card. In fact, he hit the first home run in Giants’ history (off of Tadashi Wakabayashi).

Nakajima didn’t have the consistency that Ruth did, but at his best he was Ruthian in his performance. Japan didn’t go to a single season each year (as opposed to split between fall and spring seasons) until 1940, when Nakajima was 30 years old. His batting average and on-base percentage were better than average that year, but his slugging percentage was still excellent, about 50% higher than average. That’s quite a drop-off from his Ruthian heights, but he was still hitting roughly like (this year’s version of) George Springer.

Then the war came calling. His 1943 season was abbreviated, whether that was due to injury or enlistment I don’t know. But he lost his entire 1944 and 1945 seasons to the war. When he came back he was 36 years old, and not at the top of his game anymore. In 1946 he was a little below average in the on-base department, and a little above average in the slugging department. My guess (and this is only a guess) as to what happened: he found that he was old and out of practice, and started selling out for power. Guessing on fastballs and trying to pull things. That would explain a precipitous drop in BA/OBP and a still-healthy SLG.

By 1947 he was genuinely bad, but at this point he had been relegated to a part-time role anyhow, probably at his own choosing, since he took over as manager of the Giants in 1946. Nakajima’s managerial career was brief, 1943 with the Giants, continuing after the war through 47. They got a slow start to the season and he was relieved of his duties, only to take the top spot again in 1949. But that didn’t last. He managed a partial season in 1949, and then another partial season with the Whales in 1951. Under Nakajima’s leadership the Giants were good and the Whales were not. About what you expect. I don’t know about his other managerial abilities, but he seems to have been a good judge of talent. Tetsuharu Kawakami was originally moved from pitcher to first base at his suggestion, and he, together with Shigeru Mizuhara, scouted Takahiko Bessho for the Giants. (They didn't manage to sign him - he went to Nankai instead.)

The professional part of Nakajima’s career was in fact only the fourth act of his life in baseball. In 1928 he led his high school team to victory at Koshien. Afterwards he starred at Waseda, playing for one of Japan’s most storied university baseball teams. At the time, baseball at the Big Six universities was the highest caliber baseball in Japan. After he graduated he played in the industrial leagues (which pre-date genuinely professional baseball in Japan). He then joined the Giants as soon as that was an option.

The other player on the card is Kikuji Hirayama. He’s the one throwing on the left, Nakajima is standing on the right. Hirayama is not in the hall of fame, but was a pretty good outfielder in his own right, playing for the Giants from 1937 to 1949, and then leaving with Nakajima for the Whales. There’s a nice write-up about him on Noburo Aota’s Fan Notes.

Meikyukai – No : Hall of Fame – Yes

The card is an uncatalogued bromide. The back has the players’ names, but nothing else. (Unless, that is, you count damage due to being removed from a scrap book.) The condition of this card is obviously terrible, and I’d be happy to upgrade it at some point. Since both players featured left the Giants after 1949, this card must be a late 40s issue.

Nakajima is not a meikyukai member (his disqualification is over determined, he has neither enough hits nor the right birthday), but he is in the hall of fame. In fact, he was the third player ever elected. This card does, therefore, contribute to my hall of fame project. I just need three more cards at this point.

Wow, getting that close!

I can guess that Eiji Sawamura would be one of the three, who are the other two?

As far as anybody knows, no cards of Sawamura were ever made, so I'm not counting him. I'm also not counting guys who only played pre-war. Some of those guys have cards (others don't) but they're very rare and expensive. When I set out on this project I didn't know anything about Japanese cards and wasn't really up for tracking down rare and expensive ones, so while I'd like to get them, I didn't include them on the list. I've also included some but not all of the managers. Everyone who is in the hall as a manager, and who also had a long and successful career as a player (think the Japanese version of Joe Torre) is included, but only some of the managers who didn't have much of a pro career themselves are included. Obviously there is an element of arbitrariness to the parameters of my project.

Anyways, as to your question Sean:

As of yesterday the list of missing players is down to two. Sotokoba was one of the missing guys, and I got a letter from a certain friend in Japan (;)) with a Sotokoba card in it. Many thanks. The other two players are Sadao Kondo and Mutsuo Minagawa. But I've got a lead on both of them, so I'm going to be done pretty soon.

I saw him pitch against the Giants when I lived as a kid in Japan. Famous as you mentioned in the original link.... shuuto pitch. It was often called Kamisori shhuto (like Japanese razor blade).

Ricky Y

Kaz Matsui
 

I’ll do a write-up for Sotokoba in a while, but for now I’ve already got a picture of this Matsui card on my computer, so I'm going to do him first.

Japanese imports into the American game have a not-very-distinguished track record. Some of the pitchers have done reasonably well (I was just watching Tanaka pitch a nice game for the Yankees a little bit ago), but the hitters have had more trouble. (With one very notable exception, about whom more later.) Here are the top Japanese-born position players to play in MLB (Dave Roberts omitted), ordered by total WAR:

59 : Ichiro
21 : Hideki Matsui
10 : Nori Aoki
6 : Tadahiko Iguchi
6 : Shohei Ohtani (and counting, but of course he’s also a pitcher)
5 : Kenji Johjima
5 : Kaz Matsui
5 : Akanori Iwakuma
4 : Kosuke Fukudome
4 : Tsuyoshi Shinjo
…and then a bunch of guys who basically made no impact in MLB.

So of the position players to come over from Japan to MLB, Matsui had the seventh best MLB career. A league average season is worth about two WAR, so Matsui’s MLB career was about equal to two and a half average seasons. He missed a lot of time in MLB with injuries. In 2004 he played 114 games for the Mets, on his way to a season worth 1 WAR.

(This figured pulled down by poor fielding. His oWAR – the offensive component – was worth 1.7 WAR. His fielding in 2004 was worth negative value. And while I’ve got a parenthetical note going: WAR is not oWAR plus dWAR; both the o- and d- components include a positional adjustment. If you want to break WAR down into components you need to add oWAR and Rfield/10.)

In 2007 with the Rockies and 2009 with the Astros he also eclipsed the 100 games played mark, but that was all. That 2007 season was the best of his MLB career. It was worth 3.7 WAR. Maybe not all-star caliber, but still above average. The rest of his career is about what you would expect from a bench player. He did play in the 2007 post season, mashing in the NLDS and then squeezing out just nine hits (and one walk) in the NLCS and World Series combined.

The poor showing in the field as a rookie is actually rather odd. The only thing that he was (in total) quite good at in MLB was fielding. In two of his three full seasons he led the league in range factor for a second baseman, and in 2007 also led the league in Total Zone Runs (as a second baseman).

Matsui’s MLB career is, however, only a small part of his baseball career. He broke in with Seibu in 1995 as a 19 year old. He was a middle infielder who was fast as a young man and developed into a rather complete player as he got older. In 2003, as a 27 year old, Matsui hit 33 home runs. That off season, he signed with the Mets. Now the only year in which he spent a significant amount of time in the minor leagues was 2010. By and large, he spent his time in the US in the big leagues. It’s just that most of it was spent on the disabled list. In 2011 he returned to Japan, signing with the Golden Eagles. By this point he was 36 and had lost both his speed and his power. He spent his late 30s as a doubles kind of hitter. The final year of his career was 2018; he went home to the Lions. It looks like his Meikyukai-qualifying hit came in 2015 with Ratuken.

In sum, across every level in every country that he played, Matsui managed to collect 2843 hits. That’s really good. I wonder how well he would have done had he stayed in Japan? He was averaging about 175 hits per year for Seibu in his 20s. If we’re trying to guesstimate how many hits he would have had in Japan, we need to subtract the 615 he actually got MLB and the 136 he got in MiLB and then extrapolate what he would have managed in those years from what he actually did in Japan. Here’s the way-too-simple way in which I’m going to do that. I’m going to take his average number of hits for the last few years that he played for Seibu, and the average number of hits that he collected in his first few years back with Ratuken, and assume a linear connection between the two. Let’s do it…

[math is done]

If I did this right, that would have given him 1008 hits in Japan during the seasons in which he actually played in MLB. That gives us a net difference of 257. Add that to his hit total and he comes out with 3100 total hits. That would be #1 all-time in Japan. Of course there are tons of assumptions built into that little exercise. But it’s at least not unreasonable to think that he could have surpassed Harimoto had he stayed in Japan.

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of Fame: No


This card is from BBM’s 2000 set.

Oh awesome, glad they arrived!!!

And I feel kind of stupid asking that question forgetting that one of the ones you needed was the card I had just sent you!

Yoshiro Sotokoba
 

Yoshiro Sotokoba pitched for the Carp from 1965 to 1979. Some of those were some pretty abbreviated seasons though. His full-time work was just 1968 to 1976. Quite short for a hall of famer. In total he logged about 2400 innings with a 2.88 ERA. His best season was almost certainly his first as a full-time pitcher. In 1968 he threw 302 innings and posted a 1.93 ERA (this figure led the league). Historically the Carp have been a bad team, and it shows in the win/loss records of their pitchers. Including Sotokoba. For his career he’s got a 131-138 record. To their credit, the Japanese voters didn’t let the losing record discourage them from inducting him into the hall of fame. But that a pitcher with a sub-3 ERA for his career has a losing record really tells you something about his team. (They went 25 years without a pennant. Not Cubs territory exactly, but pretty rough, especially considering the fact that the league is smaller.)

I wonder what the American electorate would do with an otherwise-qualified hall of fame candidate who had a losing record? It’s hard to know, since there’s never been such a creature. They did give Felix Hernandez a Cy Young award despite having only 13 wins. But he did, at least, have a winning record.

Anyways, as was long common for Japanese pitchers, Sotokoba did a lot of pitching in relief in between his starts. He finished 86 games (Japan seems not to have recognized saves as a statistic until 1974, so we don’t really know what kind of games he was finishing), and in total seems to have made about 120 relief appearances.

Sotokoba’s biggest claim to fame is his no hitters. In fact, his very first win was a no hitter. Three years later (so 1968), he threw a perfect game against the Whales. In 1970 he tossed his third and final no hitter (over the Giants). This feat equaled Eiji Sawamura’s record. There have been 93 no hitters in Japan’s history (regular season only, and counting combined no hitters), so Sotokoba is responsible for something in the neighborhood of 4% of them.

Japan doesn’t have many pitchers that have thrown multiple no hitters. Hiroshi Nakao threw two of them, so did Hideo Fujimoto, Juzo Sanada, Masaichi Kaneda, and Keishi Suzuki. Everyone else who has thrown a no hitter managed only one. (source)

Although I think that 1968 was his best season, it was in 1975, toward the end of his career, that Sotokoba won the Sawamura award. He pitched a tremendous number of innings, and so led the league in most of the counting stats. The Carp were, unusually for them, also good this year. They made a very unusual appearance in the Japan Series, but lost to the Braves.

Meikyukai – No : Hall of Fame – Yes

One down, two to go.

1976 Calbee.

Tsuneo Horiuchi (2)
 

This is post #2 about Tsuneo Horiuchi. He was the Giants ace from the mid 1960s. Many Japanese pitchers crumple under frankly insane workloads. Horiuchi’s workload was more reasonable than many (no 400 inning seasons for instance), but he was pitching full-time while he was still just 18, and was done as a full-time starter after his age 30 season. He finished with 203 wins, and qualified for the Meikyukai with his 200th win in 1980.

Horiuchi won the 1966 and 1972 Sawamura awards. (Baseball-reference says that he also won in 1974, but that appears to be an error.) In 72 he was also the MVP. In 1966 he was a young phenom, going 16-2 with a 1.39 ERA in 181 innings pitched as an 18 year old. His second win may not have been quite as exciting, but it was probably a more valuable season. He had a record of 26-9 to go with a 2.91 ERA in 312 innings.

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of fame: Yes

1976 Calbee

Shinnosuke Abe
 

Shinnosuke Abe is the Giants’ first baseman. He’s been with them since 2001 when he broke in as a 22 year old catcher. Most of his career has been spent behind the plate, but he’s getting older and has transitioned to first in the past few years. And he’s still good. This season he’s got a 297/406/465 batting line. That would be a lot more impressive if he was still a catcher, but still, every one of those figures is considerably better than average. Abe’s best season, well, it’s hard to say. In 2010 he hit 281/368/608 with 44 home runs. One hell of a line for a catcher. On the other hand, his 2012 and 2013 seasons were also excellent and were pretty much identical, at least as far as total batting value is concerned. 340/429/565 in 2012, 296/427/564 in 2013. Of course the batting average in 2012 was a lot higher, and since he’s never been a 340 kind of hitter before I’m guessing that he got lucky with some balls in play. Anyway, he made up for it the following season with an improved batting eye. Upon reflection, the 2012/2013 seasons were probably better than 2010. A point of on base percentage is worth more, in terms of expected runs, than is a point in slugging percentage, but I’m certainly not going to complain about a catcher who slugs 600. That 2012 season earned him a nearly unanimous MVP award.

Abe qualified for the Meikyukai in 2017, and while his playing time has decreased the past couple years, he still got into 93 games this year. He joked that although many people have 2000 hits, he’s so slow that no one in the Meikyukai has fewer infield hits than he does.

It turns out that Abe’s hit total is complete at 2131, as is his home run total, 405. Last Wednesday he announced that this would be his final season. Which means that yesterday’s game was his final regular season game with the Giants.

Abe was a 9x best-nine and 4x gold glove winner. It’s often hard to find comparable American players, but in Abe’s case it’s easy, at least if you ignore the gold gloves. This guy is Mike Piazza.

Here’s a story about Abe’s final game.

“I like baseball more than anyone” he said during his retirement press conference.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Eventually

The card is from the 2013 BBM set.

Morimichi Takagi (2)
 

This is my second post about Morimichi Takagi. (Here’s number one.)

Takagi qualified for the Meikyukai in 1978. He has a total of 2274 hits, all of them with the Dragons. I don’t know what their record is, but I’m guessing that’s up there. While he was a 7x best nine, he was oddly named to the all-star team only four times. Maybe he doesn’t like cold weather and so got better as the season progressed?

As a freshman in high school Takagi was a pitcher, but Shigeo Nagashima – then at Rikkyu University – was coaching high school players, and suggested to his manager that Takagi be converted to an infielder. His high school team would go on to play in Koshien, and made it to the final round in 1959, but ended up losing the tournament.

In 1968 he was hit in the face with a pitch by Tsuneo Horiuchi (see two posts above this one) and was seriously injured. His batting average dropped considerably thereafter, through what should have been his peak seasons. He had been hitting 290-300, but settled in around 230-250 for the next several seasons. He retired in 1980, due to declining vision. (No word on whether it was related to the beaning.)

In addition to being a great offensive force, Takagi was known for his slick fielding. He holds Japan’s record for range factor at 2B. Range factor is certainly a crude tool, and I wouldn’t want to dub someone a great fielder based solely on their range factor. But despite being crude, if you’ve got limited information (like I’ve got about Japanese fielding), it’s not bad exactly. Given that he’s the all-time leader, I’m confident at least in saying that he was a good defensive second baseman.

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of Fame – Yes

1976 Calbee.

Nice card :)

Takagi also managed the Dragons a few years ago, he took over from Hiromitsu Ochiai so had pretty big shoes to fill.

Shinya Miyamoto
 

Shinya Miyamoto was Yakult’s shortstop (and sometimes third baseman) from 1995 to 2013. He qualified for Meikyukai as a 41 year old, in 2012, and finished his career with 2133 hits. In total, he posted a slash line of 285/329/350. That should tell you a lot about him. Somewhat surprisingly, for a shortstop with no power, he also had very little speed. For his career he stole 111 bases, which works out to an average of about five or six per year.

Do you remember Placido Polanco? Polanco put up a slash line of 297/343/397, despite playing the first part of his career during MLB’s silly ball era. (Actually, his career almost perfectly overlaps Miyamoto; Polanco played from 1998 to 2013.) Seemingly every year in the 2000s, my fantasy baseball team would manage to be short an infielder, and so I somehow always ended up with Placido Polanco. Polanco could do exactly one thing well (that was relevant to fantasy baseball), he could hit for a good batting average. Other than that – nothing. Zero power, zero speed. Polanco moved around the diamond a bit more than did Miyamoto, but in a lot of ways, these guys are twins. They were active during basically the same time. Miyamoto picked up nine more hits than did Polanco. Polanco’s batting average was a bit higher than was Miyamoto (it took him 200 more games to get those extra nine hits), but batting average was the best part of Miyamoto’s offensive game, just like it was for Polanco. Neither had any power. Miyamoto didn’t even hit doubles, not really. Polanco was a little bit better at drawing walks – he had 30 more of them in 200 fewer games.

Now, focusing on his offense would really be beside the point in a discussion of Miyamoto’s baseball career. This man was a shortstop, back when that meant something. He won nine gold gloves. And while I don’t have fielding statistics for Japan, I assume that a guy who wins nine gold gloves must have been really good out there. Thing is, Polanco was also a really good fielder. He won a pair of gold gloves, and while the years in which he won them were not his best fielding years, he did have some seasons in which he was really sharp with the glove. In 2001 he recorded 23 rField (that’s expected runs saved through fielding) which is better than Ozzie Smith’s second-best season. (In his best season Ozzie saved an incredible 32 runs.) Now, that was far and away Polanco’s best fielding season, but the point is that he was a really sharp fielder.

Miyamoto had notable pedigree in baseball. Yoshio Yoshida was his coach when he was a youngster, and in high school he won at Koshien. (With PL Gakuen, the baseball powerhouse that also featured Kazuhiro Kiyohara.) He did not, however, go straight to the pros after college, playing in the industrial leagues first.

In the late 1990s he was convicted of tax evasion, and was sentenced to ten months in prison along with a lengthy probationary period and a fine of 3.5 million yen.

After retiring he was a baseball commentator for a while, before coaching Yakult. And in 2018 he took over the field manager position with them.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

2002 BBM.

Hisashi Yamada (2)
 

I don't have time to write substantive posts at the moment, and don't know when I will. So for now at least I'll post guys in the Meikyukai that are also in the hall of fame. (And so for whom I already did a post.)

Here's Hisashi Yamada. Long-time submarine pitcher for the Braves and 3x MVP winner.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame - Yes

1984 Calbee