I've come back to this thread several times even after your collection was completed. What a wonderful read!

May have to start something like this myself. Maybe not post it, as I'm no expert, but try to seek out RCs for the top 100 all-time Japanese players or something like that. It would be fun to do with my son so we could both learn more about Japanese baseball history and enjoy the hunt.

Thanks again!

Japanese HOF Project
 

What set is that middle one from? My buddy has a card with the same back and can’t figure out what year, set or player it is.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...4defad47e6.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...5fa70ab1f0.jpg

Those cards are from the 1950 Kagome set, often called the "Flying Bat" cards for obvious reasons. Its catalog number is JCM 5.

Frank: here are my spare vintage cards.

The menkos are Bettoh, Oshita, Bessho and Nakanishi, Iida, and Kawakami.

The bromides are Minagawa (but not the famous one) sliding home, and Kajimoto.

The Calbies are Hara and a pair of Kadotas on the top row. The bottom row is Shibata, Yamada, and a common.

Masahiro Yamamoto
 

The results of the voting of the Japanese hall of fame were announced a few days ago. And, unlike last year, they actually elected a player this year. Two players, in fact. Both were recent players, so no cool old menko are coming your way. But a couple new posts are. First up: Masahiro Yamamoto got the call.

Yamamoto is already in the mekyukai, so this will be my second post about him. First one here.

He retired in 2015, so I think this was his second year of eligibility for the hall. Which isn’t bad. The Japanese hall, even more than the American one, likes to make players wait for induction.

Yamamoto was occasionally a great pitcher, and was a pitcher, of one sort of another, for an exceptionally long time. He pitched his first two-thirds of an inning with the Dragons at age 20, in 1986, and made his last appearance for them in 2015, at age 50. My last post about him covered the high points of his career, so what I want to do with this post is compare him to some American players.

The only American players to have appeared in an MLB game after their 50th birthday are:

Satchel Paige (age 59)
Charlie O’Leary (age 58)
Nick Altrock (57)
Jim O’Rourke (54)
Jack Quinn (50)
And String Bean Williams appeared in a Negro League game at 52 (after being a 50 year old rookie a couple years previously).

Now, some asterisks are involved here. Paige’s age 59 appearance was a publicity stunt arranged by Charlie Finley. His last appearance in MLB on his merits was at the sprightly young age of 46. O’Leary retired after the 1913 season at age 37, and then had a pinch hitting appearance in 1934. (And got a single, not bad for an old man.) But it was just one at bat. Nick Altrock’s chronologically advanced MLB appearances were publicity stunts. Altrock was as famous for his clowning as his playing. I presume he was a fan favorite. Although he appeared in games every few seasons for years, the last time he was on an MLB roster for what he could do to help his team win appears to have been during his age 32 season (which would have been 1909). New hall of famer Minoso’s post-age-50 appearances (1976 and 1980) were also publicity stunts. Fellow hall of famer Orator Jim O’Rourke played one game for the Giants at age 54; he had retired ten years earlier. It was also a publicity stunt. The Giants were about to clinch their first pennant since 1889, and John McGraw gave O’Rourke, a member of that 1889 team, one last MLB appearance.

Jack Quinn was different. He was active continuously from age 34 through age 50 (he broke into the majors at 25, but spent the 1916 and 1917 seasons in the PCL). And he would go on to pitch a few more innings in the minor leagues over the next couple seasons. Quinn and Williams, then, are the only players to appear in a major league game past the age of 50 for any reason besides publicity stunts.

However, Yamamoto’s age 50 season also appears to have been a publicity stunt. It’s true that he was active continuously, he didn’t sit out a year, but he spent almost all of 2015 in the Western League – that is, in the minors. The Dragons promoted their long-time star to pitch two games, totaling one and a third innings. That looks like a publicity stunt to me. That means that his last merited JPL appearance was at age 49.

MLB players to have appeared in a game after their 49th birthday, but before their 50th:

Hoyt Wilhelm
Jimmy Austin
Arlie Latham
Jamie Moyer
Hughie Jennings
Julio Franco

Wilhelm was a great pitcher who was at the end of the line at 49. He pitched 25 non-publicity-stunt innings. Austin played in one game at 49, one at 46, and one at 45. He was a coach with the Browns, and they allowed him to get into a game every once in a while, for old time’s sake. As with O’Rourke, McGraw was instrumental in getting Latham into a game in his geriatric years. Latham was a coach for the Giants, and McGraw put him in a few games. He got a total of two plate appearances. Doesn’t count. Jamie Moyer you know. He was legitimately playing MLB at 49. In fact, I think the Orioles should have given him another chance. They cut him after 16 innings in AAA with a 1.69 ERA. Obviously he wasn’t a building block for the future, but he threw 16 of the more effective innings on the team, and it’s not like the 2012 Orioles really needed to give relief innings to Randy Wolf. Anyways. Hughie Jennings probably needs no introduction to a board dedicated to pre-war baseball. He was the manager of the 1918 team, and put himself into a game. Julio Franco, on the other hand, was legitimately playing big-league ball at 49. After the Mets released him mid-season, the Braves even saw fit to sign him and put him at first base. So, age-wise, that’s the company that Yamamoto is keeping: Hoyt Wilhelm, Jamie Moyer, and Julio Franco.

Comparing Japanese starters to American relievers is going to be difficult. I can’t tell you if Yamamoto or Wilhelm was the greater player. Yamamoto pitched 1000 more innings than did Wilhelm, so I guess that’s what I’d use to make the decision. But he’s obviously better than the other two. Would that I’m able to do my job longer than almost anyone else ever.

Of course, retiring would be nice too.


Meikyukai: YES – Hall of Fame: YES

1992 BBM

You forgot HOFer Minnie Minoso

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/arUAA...nl/s-l1600.jpg

No, he said that they were publicity stunts. I love Minnie, but that's probably a correct evaluation.

Shingo Takatsu
 

Shingo Takatsu is the other player who was elected to the hall of fame this year. He was a relief pitcher who spent the Japanese portion of his career with Yakult. But he’s sort of a cosmopolitan guy. In 2004 and 2005 he pitched for the Chicago White Sox and (very briefly) the New York Mets. After that he returned to Yakult for a couple years, before spending his age 39 season playing for the Woori Heroes in Korea, his age 40 season with Fresno (the San Francisco Giants’ AAA affiliate), and then his age 41 season with the Sinon Bulls in Taiwan. But even then he wasn’t done. After his stint in Taiwan, Takatsu returned to Japan to play in the Baseball Challenge League – their version of Indy ball. Dude gets around.

He has a low delivery point, varying between sidearm and genuine submarine. His specialty is the ability to precisely locate his wide variety of sinkers. But he doesn’t have any heat to back these sinkers up, topping out in the mid 80s.

He has two claims to fame in Japan. The first is—or rather, was—holding the all-time saves record. It had previously belonged to Kaz Sasaki. Although Takatsu’s mark would latter be broken. The second was not allowing a run 11 Japan Series games. For this latter feat he was nicknamed “Mr. Zero.”

Relief pitchers rarely impress me, and Takatsu is no exception. He pitched 950 innings in his career, which is maybe four seasons from a top starting pitcher today, to say nothing of historical examples. (Check out Hiroshi Gondo’s 1961 season. He threw about half of Takatsu’s career innings in one season.) It’s just extremely difficult to make much of a difference to your team when you’re pitching 60 innings a year. Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher ever, managed to accrue only 56.3 WAR, which is good for 79th all-time among pitchers. One slot below Tim Hudson, who got all of 3% in the hall of fame vote that was announced yesterday. Now look, 56 WAR isn’t bad, it’s more than Waite Hoyt or Early Wynn managed. But it’s very “meh” for a hall of famer. And, AND, it’s aided by a leverage multiplier, which gives relief pitchers a bonus for pitching in late-and-close games. (It multiplies WAR earned in such games.) Philosophically, I think that including leverage in WAR (or any other serious attempt to measure a player’s value) is a mistake. A run that’s scored in the first inning counts just as much as a run that’s scored in the 9th inning, and if it ends up being a close game, then a lot depended on that first inning run, just like a lot depends on a 9th inning run. Leverage tells you how exciting a player’s appearance was, but it’s irrelevant to how much it mattered. Given how few innings they pitch, it’s just not possible for a relief pitcher to be very valuable. Compare Takatsu to the guy he was elected with, Masahiro Yamamoto. Yamamoto pitched 3600 innings in his career. Given that he pitched about 1/4th as many innings as Yamamoto, to equal Yamamoto’s value, Takatsu would need to pitch about 4x better than him. Suffice it to say that he didn’t. (Consider that his ERA is only 10% than Yamamoto’s.)

Anyhow, even for a relief pitcher, Takatsu doesn’t impress me much. He broke Sasaki’s saves record, but it seems clear that Sasaki was the better pitcher. Sasaki’s lifetime (Japanese) ERA is 2.41, whereas Takatsu’s is 3.20. And they were active for almost exactly the same years, so it’s not like Sasaki was benefiting from an easier context. Takatsu was good in his first taste of MLB (credit where it’s due, he came in second in rookie of the year voting, finishing behind Bobby Crosby), but bad the next year (ERA north of 5), and that was it for his MLB career. Lets compare him to the other relief pitchers in the Japanese hall of fame. Hitoki Iwase, who would break Takatsu’s saves record, had a career 2.31 ERA, and the wildly unqualified Tsunemi Tsuda had a 3.31 mark (but is really in the hall for the three seasons in which he managed an average ERA of about 1.75). Now, Takatsu did have a few big years, and played in a somewhat tougher context than did Tsuda, but among the very few relief pitchers in the Japanese hall, the only one that to whom he compares at all favorably is the one who isn’t qualified by any standard, and who got elected after tragically dying young of brain cancer.

I assume you can tell that I’m not a fan. But don’t take it too seriously. I’m not a fan of any relief pitcher.

After retiring from the Indy league, Takatsu got a gig coaching for Yakult, and eventually moved up to the top position, taking over as manager in 2020. They didn’t do well in 2020, but in 2021 they won the Japan series, and Takatsu took home the Matsutaro Shoriki Award, as the person who contributed the most to Japanese baseball during the year in question. (Special Shoriki awards were given to Shohei Ohtani and Atsunori Inaba in 2021. Ohtani you know about, Inaba’s was due to his work with the Japanese National Team.)

Takatsu is a member of both the mekyukai and the hall of fame. Accordingly, I need two of his cards. Since he’s one of the few modern mekyukai members whose cards I didn’t have before, I’ve decided to feature both cards in this post. Below you will find his 1991 and 1993 BBM cards.

Shigeru Mizuhara (per-war)
 

Shigeru Mizuhara

Some time ago Frank and I traded some cards. I’ve been meaning to do a write-up on them for, well, ever since the trade. But I’ve been busy with this and that and something else. Going to rectify that today though. Or, least, take one step towards it.

The biggest card in the trade was this: JRM 42 Shigeru Mizuhara.

This is my first pre-war hall of famer. With a few exceptions, post-war HOFers aren’t too hard to find. But pre-war are a different story. They turn up in Prestige auctions sometimes, and I put in a few bids on the last one, but didn’t win anything. So I’m happy to have this guy.

Now, this isn’t my first Mizuhara card. I wrote about the other one here. However, that card is from his days as a manager, in the post-war period. This JRM 42 card dates from c. 1930, when he was a star player for Keio University.

Mizuhara’s parents divorced when he was young, which doesn’t seem to have had any salutary effects on him. It seems that he started playing baseball as a distraction from an unhappy home life. He was high school teammates with Saburo Miyatake, and the two future hall of famers led Takamatsu Commercial High School to victory at Koshien twice. For many people, just participating at Koshien is the highlight of their lives, but Mizuhara and Miyatake actually won the thing more than once. After finishing high school, they both enrolled at Keio University, which had one of the stronger baseball programs at the time.

Although he was a great player – maybe the greatest amateur player in the days before the Japanese professional league was founded – his time with Keio was not free of drama, and ended early. The start of the trouble was a huge brawl during a game between Keio and their arch-rival Waseda University. The two schools played a tense back-and-forth game. Throughout the game there were many acrimonious calls, some of which were overturned on appeal (displeasing the team that benefited from the original call), along with much heckling. Mizuhara seems to have been at the center of many of the day’s incidents. Anyway. After the game concluded the Keio and Waseda cheering sections seem to have had enough of each other, someone from Waseda threw a half-eaten apple at Mizuhara, which he threw back at the Waseda fans, and the stadium descended into generalized combat. It was front-page news.

So, Mizuhara was already under something of a cloud. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested for illegal gambling while playing mahjong, and Keio had had enough. They cut their biggest star, and his college baseball career was over.

In 1936, when the Japanese professional league was founded, Mizuhara joined the Giants. He played pro ball through 1942. (Mostly at second base, but he also pitched a little bit.) Just as his college career was abbreviated, however, so was his pro career. After the 1942 season he joined the war effort, and eventually found himself as a prisoner of war in Siberia. (Rumor is that he taught the Russians how to play baseball.) When the war ended and he returned to Japan, the Giants welcomed him back, but extreme malnutrition during his time as a POW precluded a resumption of his baseball career. He transitioned, instead, to a managerial role, and led the Giants to their first stretch of postwar dominance. It’s for his work as a manager that Mizuhara is enshrined in the hall of fame.

(Most of the preceding comes from Mizuhara’s Japanese Wikipedia page.)

--

As noted, this card is from the JRM 42 set, issued around 1930. The set has an R5 designation, and for a card that is that rare, I know of a surprisingly large number of these. Sean has one. Prestige sold one in 2016 (which is the same card that was used as the example in Engel’s guide), they sold a different one in 2018,
and then there’s mine.

There are two versions, one with the K over a solid red background, and one with the K over a yellow-and-red grid. Three of the four (all except the 2016 card) have the grid behind the K.

That's a very cool story, and a nice looking card.

I love how four known examples is relatively a lot.

Hey awesome, I’m glad you found a copy of that Mizuhara too!

With at least four of them out there, I wonder if it might become an R4 in the near future!

I was wondering with Sadaharu Oh is how many rookie cards are there of him? Which one is the hardest and which one is the easiest to get? Getting a Sadaharu Oh card is something I like to explore this year.

There a ton of Sadaharu Oh rookie cards. 1959 had a lot of card sets. Because I'm not really a Japanese card collector I don't know any more than that.

As a kid, I tried to do a pen pal thing, I think through Baseball Digest. I wrote 1 for sure, maybe a coupl letters to someone in Japan and we exchanged some cards. I felt like I was on the losing end when I sent him some current star cards, including Rickey Henderson (his favorite top request, I recall - this was early-mid 80s) and I got back 5-6 Japanese cards. I still have them, but have no idea who they are. I think they were from the early 80s. Smaller than our cards, maybe 2" x 1.5" or so. The numbers (stats) on back didn't look impressive, which is why i figured I got dumped on with a bunch of commons after I sent him budding superstar Rickey. I either stopped writing or he did. It was a bit of a bust.

Years later, I made it to Japan with the Navy (1991) and I was hoping to find some cards or other memorabilia while we were there, but the only thing I found close was a few new magazines and some soccer cards that reminded me of action packed embossed cards. I had limited time and no knowledge of the country or language, so big disadvantage in seeking out cards.

It still surprises me that we don't see more of that kind of foreign stuff with todays global online market, but maybe I just don't know where to look for it even today.

I still have all the cards. I'll have ti try to find them and show them here, just in case I did get something OK all those years ago.

As John said, there are many Oh rookie cards. There is one with red (or, sometimes, gold) borders that also features Nagashima that is popular and always seems to sell for a healthy amount. It's from the JCM 24 set.

Most Oh rookies look like the standard "tobacco" style menko - rectangular, a bit larger than a T206, a photo with Japanese text overlaid, usually giving his name, his team, and his position, and one of various menko-style backs. Some of these sets are quite common. I don't have an Oh rookie, but if you want one, they're not hard to find. Other sets of this kind are practically impossible, to the point that some Oh rookies are, as far as anyone knows, unique. I don't know that there is one issue that is THE Oh rookie, like the 52T is THE Mantle rookie. But there are plenty of nice ones. Now, menko cards are toys, they were meant for kids to play with. So condition on them is often pretty rough. But if you're patient you'll be able to find one in decent shape with a good image. Unless you want one of the rare ones, expect to spend in the low three figures.

mrmopar: you've probably got Calbee cards. Early Calbee cards were a little smaller than standard baseball card size, but then in the 80s they started making tiny ones. (They went back to the old size at the end of the decade.) They would have originally been packaged with potato chips. I'd love to see them if you've got a picture to share.

Picked up this Oh card recently:

https://prestigecollectiblesauction....98_1_13987.jpg

1978 JY 6 Yamakatsu Baseball Card Sadaharu Oh (HOF) Home Run Prize Card Overprint Variation

I'm a big Yamakatsu fan. By and large, less is better for baseball card design, and they nailed it.

Not much to add today, but I got a few other cards in the trade involving the Mizuhara, so I thought I'd share.

My side of the trade involved the game card of Bessho that I wrote about earlier, so Frank sent along a replacement Bessho.

That is a cool Bessho, I love the old round menko.

I agree about Yamakatsu too.

Osamu Mihara

Mihara was a notable (indeed, hall of fame) manager in the post-war period. He holds the record for most games managed, and was nicknamed ‘Sorcerer.’ I’ve written about that part of his career elsewhere. Today, I’ve got a pre-war Mihara card to share.

He was the first player to sign a contract with Yomiuri, upon their formation in 1934. Contrary to my expectations, however, this does not make him Japan’s first professional player. There was a short-lived professional team run by Hankyu in the 1920s, originally conceived as a way to encourage railway ridership (they figured folks would take the train to see a ball game). Hankyu’s team played local college teams and the like, but no one else started a professional team, and they folded in short order.

Unlike most American players of the time, Mihara grew up wealthy. His father had plans for him to get a high-ranking position in the government, but he enrolled at Waseda, was recruited for their storied baseball team, and that was that. And things with dad must have gotten even messier after that. Japanese colleges at the time did not approve of married students, but Mihara couldn’t wait, so he dropped out of college, tied the knot, and moved back home.

In college he played second base. After going pro he was an infielder, often at second, sometimes at third. Unfortunately, he had a parallel career, which would often get in the way of baseball: the military. He missed time in 1935, and again in 1937, when he was wounded fighting in China.

As with his college career, Mihara’s professional career came to an untimely end. Near as I can tell, his manager was trying to protest a call, and he chased after him trying to get him to stop, and was subsequently suspended for insubordination (and maybe for threatening the manager with a bat? the story isn’t so clear); he wasn’t one to take this lightly, and so retired from the team out of spite. Not that it mattered much: he was more-or-less immediately called up to fight in Burma. American players mostly got non-dangerous jobs, I imagine that the government didn't want the bad PR that would come with getting famous ball players killed. Japan was not so generous with their athletes, lots of them saw battle, and not a few were killed. Mihara, however, made it through. After returning from the war, he got a job with a newspaper.

Evidently he was remembered fondly in baseball circles (maybe the bat incident blew over by then) because the Giants hired him to manage the team starting in 1947.

Mihara’s tenure with the Giants was short, and ended in controversy. Giants management wanted to hire Shigeru Mizuhara, who had been Mihara’s rival since their school days, and there was an ensuring power struggle. Mizuhara won, and had Mihara promoted out of his way. Mihara became a vice president, with, apparently, no portfolio. Japanese Wikipedia (my source for most of this post) remarks that he spent his days playing Go and being very bored.

Fleeing Yomiuri, he took a job as a field manager for the Lions, and quickly built a powerhouse of a team. Since I’ve written about his managerial career before, I’ll skip over the remainder of it.

This card is from the JBR 71 set, issued in 1932. It originally came as an insert in the February 1932 issue of Yakyukai Magazine. The cards are fairly large – roughly postcard size – but thin (they are bromides after all). There are only three cards in the set. It was issued during Mihara’s college days, hence the ‘W’ on his cap. He’s playing for Waseda here.

Great write up, glad the card arrived in good time!

Thanks for posting Nat, I always like learning more about Japanese baseball.

is Dave Roberts in the Hall of Fame ?

No, he's not. The Japanese hall of fame has been very reluctant to induct gaijin. Lefty O'Doul is in, as are a couple Americans of Japanese descent, but that's it. (And Victor Starffin, who was Russian but lived most of his life in Japan.) I imagine that eventually Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Ramirez will be elected, but I don't know about Roberts. He had some good years, but he was already in his mid-30s when he started playing Japanese ball.

New display
 

No new cards today, but I've reorganized the collection and thought I'd show it off. (IRL I don't know anyone who cares about Japanese baseball cards, so you guys get to see it.)

Each page of the binder now has the player's career statistics (managing record for managers) with their name in both kanji and romanji. One card per page. And a black sheet of paper providing a nice frame for the card. It means that the collection now takes up twice as much space (and twice as many binders) as it did before, but my baseball card collection is relatively small (maybe 350 cards) so I've got the space for it.

HOF results are announced in January, so maybe I'll have something more interesting to share next month.

Looks like a great way to keep them

Ramirez and Tanishige

I've been lax with updates to this thread. Since I last posted, we've had four more people elected to the hall of fame. We'll do two of them today, I'll write up another later. And then I need to track down a Randy Bass card. The only Japanese Bass cards on e-bay right now are autographed with a $70 asking price. Considering that I don't care about the autograph, and that the cards are only worth about a buck or so without it, I'm going to hold off on him for a while.

Motonobu Tanishige was elected to the hall of fame about a month ago. He was already in the meikukai, so I've already done a write up about. You can read it here.

The long and short of it is that he was a catcher for the Whales, Bay Stars, and Dragons, for many years. He played from age 18 to age 44. He had a couple good seasons in his early 30s, but was mostly a meh hitter. I'm guessing a defensive specialist. Hard to pick a comparable American player. Maybe think, like, Jim Sundberg, but give him a much longer career.

The other player featured in today's post is Alex Ramirez. He's also a meikukai member for whom I've previously done a write up. It's here. Ramirez is Venezuelan, he played briefly for Cleveland and Pittsburgh, but couldn't stick in the major leagues. While he was with Cleveland he was reasonably good, but those teams were stacked and he couldn't secure a permanent job. The Pirates had an opening in the outfield, but he struggled in his time with Pittsburgh, and wasn't given a second chance. After leaving MLB he played 13 seasons in Japan, mostly with the Swallows and Giants. In Japan he was a big slugger.

In the past few decades the number of American players headed to Japan has increased dramatically. (Up from just, like, three of four back in the 1950s/60s.) A fair number of these guys became stars. But until last year the hall of fame ignored them. Tuffy Rhodes still isn't in, which is kind of bizarre. But the hall has seen fit to elect Ramirez (and Bass), so maybe things are changing.

No new card for Ramirez. But I decided to buy another Tanishige card. This one is from 1992 BBM.

Wow - Tanishige was incredible! Catching over 100 games in eighteen consecutive seasons - would have been 21 with eight more in 1995 - is mind-blowing.

Based on the fielding stats available for him on BR, it does seem like he was a defensive wizard. From 2005 to 2015 (the years with data) he made 19 errors and turned 106 double plays - for comparison, major league catchers in 2023 made 365 errors and 209 double plays.

Hiroki Kuroda


Kuroda had a 20-year career, spent with the Hiroshima Carp, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the New York Yankees. Baseball came naturally to him – his father, Kazuhiro, was also a professional baseball player. Kazuhiro spent seven seasons roaming the outfield, mostly for the Hawks. Offensively, his dad was a bit below average, mostly because he drew very few walks. If he had a really good glove he might have been a decent player, or maybe he would have been okay as the short side of a platoon.

His father was apparently a positive influence; for a while his dad was his coach, and he said that he enjoyed playing under him. But other formative experiences with baseball were not so good. He said that when he was in elementary school, if he performed poorly he would be hit on the butt with a bat so hard that it hurt to sit down the next day. And in high school, practices started at 6am and didn’t end until 9pm. Presumably during the school year there were classes the broke up the practice routine, but he also played summer ball, and during the summer the team really did have 15-hour practices. Once, as punishment for having poor location during a game, his coach told him to run laps, without water, for the entire duration of practice, for four days. After each day, he returned to the dormitory, and was not allowed to bathe. Now, he says that he did walk (instead of run) when the coach wasn’t looking, and that his teammates snuck him water when they could, but this is rather shocking all the same. In college things did not get much better. Freshmen, he says, were “basically slaves,” required to work for upper classmen (e.g., by doing their laundry), and that punishment for performing these duties below expectations included things like kneeling on the hot roof of the dormitory for hours on end. (Source)

The only professional Japanese team that he played for was the Hiroshima Carp. Historically, the Carp have not been good. They had a moment in the late-70s and into the 80s, but mostly they have been doormats. And Kuroda played for during their “dark years.” While he was playing, he was one of the highest paid players in team history, making (after adjusting for inflation) about $1.7 million per year. Now, the Carp had a policy of not negotiating with players who had declared free agency (to the point of refusing to bring a player back who had declared free agency, regardless of their asking price), but in 2006 their pitching staff was so thin, they agreed to re-sign Kuroda, although his salary increase (25%) was presumably smaller than he could have gotten on the open market.

The Dodgers and the Yankees were quite a bit more successful than the Carp were, although during his time in the US, Kuroda never got to play in the World Series. I would characterize his US performance as “good.” He had a career ERA+ of 115, which isn’t ace material exactly but is better than average. ERA+ takes a player’s ERA, adjusts it for the park that they play in, compares it to league average, and then puts it on a scale where 100 is average and higher is better. If you want to compare that to a few pitchers: Andy Pettitte 117, David Cone 120, David Wells 108, Tim Hudson 120. He had 21 career WAR over seven seasons, aged 33-39. That sounds pretty good to me. Over those same ages, Hudson had 13, Wells had 25, Cone 20, Pettitte 20. That sounds like a pretty good comp list; think of Kuroda as a Japanese Andy Pettitte. His performance in Japan was comparable to his performance in MLB too. He struggled early in his career, but settled into being a generally good pitcher.

As a hall of fame candidate, I guess he’s okay. If Pettitte got in to Cooperstown, it wouldn’t be a disgrace. I wouldn’t support it, but, oh boy, are there worse pitchers in the hall already. If they are going to count work that he did while in the US, Kuroda is probably qualified for the hall. They don’t really need him there, sort of like the one in Cooperstown isn’t really any worse-off for not having Andy Pettitte in it. But he was an above average pitcher for 20 years, and if they want to honor him for that, that’s fine.

The card is from the Diamond Heroes subset of the 2000 BBM set.

Nice to see you adding tothis thread again!

That stuff Kuroda went through as a kid is one thing that has discouraged me from signing my son up for ball here.

I took part in the Prestige auction and picked up my first Sadaharu Oh card.
Attachment 613246

Sent from my SM-G9900 using Tapatalk

Congrats, Tim! That is a nice one!

Picked up this one recently because I thought it was cool. Can anyone tell me what it is?

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...k%20menko.jpeg

The front of the card says “Kawakami player”, which might be Tetsuharu Kawakami.

The back says “Haruya #5”, which is probably the name of the kid that owned it (not sure what the number is for….)

Its probably an uncatalogued menko from the late 40s or early 50s.