Most Japanese hall of famers have relatively little written about them in English. Some of them don’t have their own (English) Wikipedia pages. A few of them have almost no internet presence (in English) at all, short of a page of stats at Baseball-Reference and a line of commentary by Jim Albright. Wally Yonamine is an exception to this rule. A huge, glaring exception. Rob Fitts wrote an entire biography of the man. A book. In English.
I haven’t read it.
I will, I swear. But I haven’t. And time constraints being what they are, I don’t know when I will. Rumor has it that you get to read for pleasure when you’re retired.
The point of this series of posts – for me at any rate – is that they give me an excuse to learn about Japanese baseball while collecting the cards. I can say at least something interesting and/or informative about the players that I’ve written up. But I also have cards of players for whom I haven’t done a post yet, and I don’t know much of anything about these guys. What team they’re on. What position they play. That’s about it. So it seems advisable to do an entry for Yonamine now, rather than wait until I’ve read Fitts’ book. Mostly because otherwise I wouldn’t invest the time necessary to learn something about him (albeit less time than reading a book). So I researched this post the same way that I researched the other ones: digging through the nether regions of Google searches, reading Whiting’s articles for the Japan Times, stuff like that. To those that have read Fitts’ book: I apologize in advance. You will probably learn nothing from this post, and might want to skip it. Although if you want to correct me on something, or elaborate on something that I don’t know enough about to address well, please go for it.
We’ll start with this.
Wally Yonamine played halfback for the San Francisco 49ers in 1947. That was the extent of his pro-football career. He totaled 114 yards in 12 games (just three starts). I don’t have any idea if that is good or not. I am the (perhaps rare) baseball fanatic who doesn’t care at all about any other sport. If the ball is going towards the other guys’ endzone, that’s good, if not, not. That’s all I know about football. But anyway, Yonamine was a latter day Jim Thorpe, or a forerunner to Bo Jackson. Which is to say, he played both professional baseball and professional football.
His football “career” followed a brief stint in the army. After his discharge he chose to go pro immediately rather than accept a scholarship to Ohio State. A broken wrist following the 1947 season ended his time with the 49ers and dramatically changed the course of his life.
As stories about Japan, and America, and baseball, are wont to do, this one features Lefty O’Doul. At the time he was managing the San Francisco Seals, a top minor league team. Yonamine had returned to his native Hawaii, where O’Doul apparently saw him playing baseball and signed him to a contract. He wasn’t assigned to the Seals though, they farmed him out to Salt Lake City in a class C league. Bottom of the totem pole. He hit .335 in a league that hit .269; I don’t have Yonamine’s other rate stats, but I think it’s safe to say that he utterly dominated the Pioneer League.
O’Doul, of course, had many contacts in Japanese baseball, and recommended Yonamine to Matsutaro Shoriki of the Yomiuri Giants. Yonamine would spend the next 11 seasons playing baseball in Japan, nine of them with the Giants, the last two with the Chunichi Dragons. He was a fearsome baseball player. To modern eyes his stats look like those of an above-average leadoff hitter. And he was a leadoff hitter. But he was also, for his day, a terrific slugger. In 1956 (to pick one season almost at random) the Central League hit 225/274/321. Yonamine hit 338/420/487. That’s 50% higher than average in batting average, 53% higher in on-base percentage, and 66% better in slugging. To do that in the American League in 2018 you would need to hit 375/486/692. Those are a pretty good match for Babe Ruth’s career rates. Of course Ruth did this over a whole career, not just one season, so I’m not saying that Yonamine hit like Babe Ruth. He didn’t. But he did hit really damn well. And he, unlike most big sluggers, was also a fleet-of-foot outfielder. In 1956, the same year he was putting up Ruth’s career batting line, Yonamine tied for third in the league in stolen bases.
Americans are prone to think about Japanese baseball in relation to their own brand of the game. Accordingly Americans tend to remember Yonamine for two things: re-introducing American players into the Japanese game after WWII, and introducing American style play to Japan. I don’t know if this is how he is remember in Japan. My guess is that seven consecutive best-nines and eleven all-star appearances feature more prominently in the Japanese recollections of Yonamine. Nevertheless, no less an authority than
Doug Glanville (of Philadelphia Phillies fame) says that Yonamine had the blessing of the allied command to help build understanding between the Japanese and the Americans after the war. One would think that, after the American bombing campaign, there was some building to do. The firebombing of Tokyo killed about 100,000 people, mostly civilians. The bombs that were used were tested on
mock-ups of houses. Not military installations, not factories, houses. Killing civilians was the point. Nevertheless, Yonamine says that he experienced relatively little hostility due to being an American. It was more problematic, he said, to play for the always successful, and so much resented, Giants. (I don't know if this was a joke or not. He did get some abuse early on, but he says that, despite occasional comparisons to Jackie Robinson, he didn't go through anything like what Robinson went through.)
Now, I’ll admit to being a little confused by this ground-breaking role for Yonamine. Tadashi Wakabayashi was also Hawaiian, and was playing in Japan immediately after the war. Yonamine wouldn’t arrive for another five years. Of course he’d been playing in Japan since 1936 – maybe Yonamine was the first American to start his Japanese career after the war. Maybe Wakabayashi didn't count since he'd been living there for so long? Anyway, it’s not like there weren’t any other Americans around in pro ball.
As for introducing American-style ball to Japan, it sure seems that he should get credit (or debit, depending on who you talk to) for this. Prior to going over Japanese batters didn’t run out sac bunts, didn’t try to break up double plays. In general, they didn’t play aggressively. Yonamine did, and it worked. And he was soon copied. This didn’t sit well with the old guard (especially Kawakami, Yonamine’s teammate and the man who became his manager and engineered his trade to the Dragons). I wonder what happened the first time he took out an infielder turning a double play. When I played baseball, we ran drills to do that. Shortstops and second basemen also ran drills on how to avoid incoming runners who would go well out of their way to slide into them. Now, one day, shortly after I got old and started playing slow pitch softball, I was on first base when the batter hit a ground ball to the short stop. My old baseball training kicked in, and I executed a perfect take-out slide, smashing into the second baseman. This … didn’t go over well. There was shock and anger and much yelling. And a great deal of spilled beer. I like to imagine it was like that, some day in April of 1951, when Yonamine took out a Tiger second baseman.
After retiring from baseball Yonamine spent many years as a scout, and a few managing the Dragons. He also started a business dealing
pearls.
Here’s a very 1980s
video biography of Yonamine.
My card is from the JCM 41 set, issued in 1959. I like this card because whoever did the background got carried away with the airbrush and erased his right hand.