Minoru Murayama pitched for the Tigers from 1959 to 1972. He compiled a 222-147 record to go with a 2.09 ERA in just over 3000 innings. Although mostly a starter, he also made about 150 relief appearances. Offense was still low in the 1960s, but some of Murayama’s performances nevertheless stand out. As a rookie he posted a 1.19 ERA, and had ERAs below two in four other seasons. Towards the end of his career he was a player/manager, and he took over the Tigers again for a couple seasons in the late 80s. It is, of course, hard to tell which managers are good ones and which are bad ones (isolating their contribution from those of the players is really hard), but suffice it to say that the teams that he managed were unsuccessful.
I always find it curious that league-wide strikeout rates don’t correlate very well with league-wide scoring trends. League ERA in 1962 was 2.63. Taking out errors inflate scoring, but it’s still low (RA9 is 3.09). But the league-wide K/9 figure is just 5.6. Murayama was well above that, but still striking out fewer than seven batters per nine innings. You see the same thing in America. Strikeout rates during the deadball era were very low. Intuitively you’d think that low run scoring environments would have high strikeout rates, since a strikeout can’t do anything to help a team score a run. The answer to this riddle is probably that what makes these environments low scoring ones is that batters are choking up and just putting the ball in play without trying to drive it. If you make sure that you put the ball in play you’re not going to strike out, but you likely will ground out to the shortstop. Anyway, Murayama was better than average at striking out batters, but his numbers, good in context, would be pathetic by today’s standards.
Murayama won the college baseball championship (playing for Kansai). One must feel for players who faced him in college. While pitching for Kansai he posted an ERA of 0.91. When he went pro he was an immediate success. As noted, he had a 1.19 ERA as a rookie, and he also took home the first of three Sawamura Awards. Although Kaneda was clearly the better pitcher overall, at his best Murayama was his rival, and he tied Kaneda’s record of three Sawamura awards. (Although Murayama had to share one. In 1966 he and Tsuneo Horiuchi were declared co-winners.) Oddly, the year in which Murayama won his MVP award (1962) was not one of the years in which he took home a Sawamura (1959, 65, 66).
His 2.09 career ERA mark is a Central League record, as is his career WHIP. The 0.784 WHIP that he posted in 1959 is an all-time single season record, which must have mightily impressed Japanese fantasy baseball players in the late 50s.
Unfortunately, despite being a great pitcher the most famous moment in Murayama’s career was one of failure. In 1959 the Emperor of Japan attended his first baseball game. This was a Big Deal. The Tigers faced off against the Yomiuri Giants. Masaaki Koyama was the Tigers’ starting pitcher, but he was pulled in the seventh. Murayama was brought in to pitch in relief. In the bottom of the ninth, shortly before the Emperor was due to leave the game, Shigeo Nagashima hit one of Murayama’s pitches for a game winning, walk-off home run. He was a rookie, and would go on to have an extremely successful career. But, here’s an indication of how much of a Big Deal this was: sixty years later an American is devoting an entire paragraph to it in a short biography of Murayama. For the record, Murayama claimed that the ball was foul.
Here is what looks to me like a video retrospective on his career. The voice-over is in Japanese, and so are the subtitles, so some guessing is involved on my part. It looks like it include Nagashima’s home run, and then it’s got Murayama striking out Nagashima several times, and a much older Murayama striking out Oh to finish the clip.
My card is from JCM 138, issued in 1960. It's unusual for its era in that it's not standard tobacco-menko sized. Pillar shaped menko were popular in the late 40s to early 50s, but had largely dropped out of the scene (except for this set) by 1960.