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Old 08-25-2018, 09:09 PM
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Default Hisanori Karita

Hisanori Karita played for, well, lots of teams, from 1936 to 1951. He was a second baseman who starred during the deadball era of the 30s and 40s. And, man, was the ball dead. In 1939 he slugged .283, which was only five points below average. The year before he posted a slugging percentage of .411. I don’t know any easy way to find league leaders in Japan,* but that mark has to be up there. Japanese pro leagues didn’t form until he was 26, so that’s when he got his start. Like many players he missed several years during the war (and sat out 1949), but he played until he was 41. Karita’s raw totals (for example, 619 hits in his career) look extremely unimpressive – especially for a hall of famer – but this is due to three extenuating circumstances. The first, as mentioned, is that he didn’t get a chance to play pro ball in his early 20s. Most hall of famers break in very young; the guys who are 26 year old rookies tend to be barely-competent bench players and relief pitchers. Karita has an excuse, of course, but losing four or five years off the begging of your career is going to cost you. The second of the extenuating circumstances (also noted) is that Japanese baseball had basically no offense at all when he was playing. Japanese deadball was more extreme than American deadball, and American deadball was plenty extreme. Finally, while Japanese seasons are still shorter than American seasons, in the early days they were much shorter. Interestingly, they were variable even within a league: not every team played the same number of games. The fall 1936 season featured teams playing between 26 and 30 games. He played in the spring seasons as well, but when you’re playing max 60 games a year, it’s going to be hard to collect very many hits.

*I mean, I could go through and check everyone manually, but I’m much too lazy to do that. It would be nice if the raw data were available in a single file and you (meaning I) could get Excel to do it.

In addition to being a good hitter, he was known for his fielding. Fitts and Engels think that he was one of the best ever. His ability to turn double plays was especially noted. Unfortunately I have been able to find no fielding data at all, so I have no way to evaluate these claims. He also tried his hand at pitching (throwing a total of 41 innings over three seasons), but he was beyond terrible. In 1939 he pitched 31 innings to a 4.34 ERA, against a league average of 2.50. That would be like having a 7.38 ERA in today’s American League. For most of his pro career he also managed the teams that he played for, but the results were unimpressive, his teams were mostly second-division, and a few of them were quite bad.

Karita was active in baseball before the formation of the professional leagues. He attended, and presumably played for, Hosei University. He played against the Americans on the 1934 tour. On the All-Japan team he played shortstop and typically hit second. During the November 11 game, in an effort to make the games more competitive (the Americans won all of the previous games by very lopsided scores), the visitors and the Japanese all stars played mixed teams, with six Americans and three Japanese on each team. Karita played with Americans Ruth, Warstler, Foxx, Averill, and Berg (I don't know who their sixth American was). They won 13-2. Karita hit .276 for the series, which is considerably better than his career mark of .219.

Less-known than the American tour of Japan is the Japanese tour of North America. A Japanese all-star team went on a four month tour through North America in 1935. The pitching staff was led by teenagers Sawamura and Starfin. The rest of the team might not have been quite as heralded (although Starfin wasn’t yet the big star that he would become), but it did feature Karita in the middle infield. His most impressive feat was stealing three bases in a game against the Vancouver Athletics, and he hit a rare home run in Winnipeg. Here is a picture from his time in Vancouver. His double play partner on the tour was Takeo Tabe. Like Karita, Tabe is in the hall of fame, but Tabe never did go pro, and he was killed in combat in 1945.

Karita also served in the war. I was able to locate little in the way of records concerning his service. He was stationed in China, but that’s about all that I could find. I don’t know if he was wounded (if so it would explain his absence from baseball even after the end of the war), but in any case he was in good enough shape to return to pro ball in 1947.

Albright thinks that in order for Karita to be deserving of his place in the hall of fame, he’s got to get a lot of credit for his play before the formation of the professional league. If the hall of fame is about recognizing the greatest players, that has to be right. But I suspect that the reason he’s in the hall of fame doesn’t boil down to voters evaluating his play prior to 1936 and deciding that it, plus his pro career, totals enough value to match the hall’s established standard. Karita was a star during a transitionary period in the history of Japanese baseball, when it first staked a claim on the world stage, and when it made its first foray into professionalism. I suspect that this, as much as his actual contributions on the field, is responsible for Karita’s place in the hall of fame. In some ways I like to compare him to John Ward. Now, Ward was the better player – he’s arguably qualified for the hall of fame on the merits. But even if he had come up short, the hall of fame needed, in some way, to recognize Ward because of his role in the formative years of American baseball. Karita wasn’t the mover and shaker that Ward was – he wasn’t instrumental in founding a new major league, for example – but the Japanese hall of fame would be incomplete if it didn’t recognize the contributions of the people who made Japanese baseball what it is today. Hisanori Karita is not the only one who is responsible for that, or even the one who is most responsible, but I suspect that that, more than what he accomplished as a player or as a manager, is why he is in the hall of fame.

The card is from the JRM 24 set, issued in 1947. Having ‘Tokyo’ on the card doesn’t do much to narrow down the team he’s playing for, but 1947 was his first and only year playing with the Flyers. It is blank on the back.
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