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Old 12-09-2018, 08:14 PM
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Default Juzo Sanada

Juzo Sanada played 11 seasons, mostly for the Robins and the Tigers. He was a pitcher who played a non-trivial number of games at 3B late in his career. 1943 was his rookie year, spent with Asahi. As a 20 year old pitcher he was just about average, posting a 1.97 ERA in a league with a 1.94 ERA. (Yes, that’s how low-scoring early pro ball was in Japan. The league as a whole had an ERA below two.) Then the war interrupted his career. In 1946 he was back with Pacific, posting an ERA slightly better than league average. This would continue for the next few years. He was never more than 50 points better than league average, and never more than about 20 points worse.

During his time with the Robins Sanada was usually his staff ace. They usually had Sanada pitching far more innings than anyone else on the team. I looked at the other teams in 1948 and this arraignment seems to have been unusual. Nobody was doing a strict rotation the way that they do now, but only the Stars had one pitcher (Starfin) whom they rode the way that the Robins were doing with Sanada. Everyone else split up pitching duties much more evenly.

This went on until 1951, when Sanada had a very poor year. His ERA was well over five, in a league that averaged 4.41. By the start of the next season he was on the Tigers. I tried to figure out what happened. Baseball-Reference doesn’t give transaction information for foreign leagues, so I tried to reconstruct it. But it turns out that no one else played for both the Robins and Osaka between 1951 and 1952. I had hoped to find someone who went Tigers-Robins at the same time that Sanada went Robins-Tigers and so figure out who he was traded for. But it looks like he wasn’t traded at all. Maybe he was sold, maybe he was simply released. Anyway, the Robins’ lack of faith came back to bite them. In 1952 he posted a 1.97 ERA against a league average of 3.28. Pretty good. Although his innings pitched were down a long ways from what he’d been doing in the mid-to-late 1940s, by some measures it was his best year. At any rate, it was the year in which he was most effective. Things unraveled quickly after that. His innings pitched dropped further, he spent 1954 mostly pitching out of the bullpen, and he retired after 1956.

Although Sanada was primarily a pitcher, he also played third base in 1954 and 56. Throughout his career he’d been a decent hitter – sometimes below average, sometimes above average, but the dude was a pitcher, so we can forgive him his below average years. In total he appeared in 65 games at third base. I think that his offensive performance can best be characterized as “okay”. Probably good enough to hold down a starting job, although he never got a chance. In 54 he played backup to Shinsuki Yogi at third (in addition to pitching). They were about equally good hitters. Yogi was out of the league the following year, but oddly Sanada didn’t appear in the infield in 1955. He returned in 1956, this time playing second fiddle to Hideshi Miyake. By this point Sanada was right at the end of his career and Miyake, who would go on to have a substantial career as an infielder, was just starting his. So that was that for Sanada.

The high points of Sanada’s career were a pair of no hitters. In addition, he was named to two best-nines and won a Sawamura award. Albright ranks him as the 76th greatest player of all time, right behind Yoneda. This ranking seems to me to be… aggressive. Sanada was an adequate pitcher, and for one season a very good one. He threw a lot of innings per year, but (1) not all that many more than his competition, and (2) his career was short. It’s true that he was good enough with the bat to spend the equivalent of about a half season playing the infield. But he wasn’t that good with the bat, about average, so let’s not get carried away, and, moreover, there were a lot of good hitting pitchers in his day. Probably most notably his teammate Fujimura. As discussed in a previous post, this is probably an indication not that the baseball Gods walked the Earth in Japan in the late 1940s, but that the level of play was pretty low, and so guys who were generally good athletes were able to perform at a high level in multiple roles. Sanada looks like a rather poor choice for the hall of fame to me.

The card is from the JCM 124 set, issued in 1950.
Attached Images
File Type: jpg Sanada.jpg (56.7 KB, 222 views)
File Type: jpg Sanada back.jpg (67.9 KB, 226 views)
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