You got a 2-for-1 on that Shiraishi card, with Wakabayashi on the back. I wonder why they used an image of Shiraishi's back?
Today's player is a pitcher from the 1950s.
Ryohei Hasegawa was a sidearm and submarine pitcher for the Hiroshima Carp from 1950 to 1963. He had a losing record: 197-208. The Carp were not very good. In 1956 they went 45-82. Hasegawa won 22 games for them. In 1955 they were 58-70, and Hasegawa won 30 games. In 1972 Steve Carlton famously won 27 of his teams 62 victories. That’s pretty good, but not even Carlton can claim to have notched more than half of his team’s victories. As seems to have been common for aces at the time, Hasegawa threw an incredible number of innings. He pitched 348 innings as a rookie, and went as high as 387 in 1955. Immediately after that season of very heavy work his appearances dropped precipitously. One suspects injuries were involved. Again, this seems to have been very common for aces of the period. Perhaps teams would have gotten more value from their ace pitchers if they hadn’t pushed them quite so hard. Hasegawa was done at age 33, and the injuries seem to have taken their toll by the time he was 28. Of course any pitcher can get injured (and plenty do), but Japanese teams of the 1950s seem to have worse luck with this than most.
Although his career was short, due to the heavy workload he did manage to pitch 3300 innings. His career ERA of 2.65 is not outstanding given the relatively low run environment of the day. (It seems to be around league average for many of the years that he was active.) Albright thinks that he was better than that though. Hiroshima had a terrible offense,
and a terrible defense. Albright says that normalizing his performance to account for the poor defensive club behind him would show that he was significantly above average for his career, despite his disappointing superficial numbers.
Hasegawa was a small man (listed at 123 pounds), without much on his fastball. His specialties were movement and location. If he’d been left handed it would be tempting to call him “crafty”. (For some reason “crafty lefty” is a thing whereas “crafty righty” is not.) He threw sliders, and sinkers, and a shuuto.
The Carp’s struggles were understandable. Unlike most Japanese teams, they weren’t controlled by a corporation, and so didn’t have deep pockets to draw from; at one point they kept the lights on through public subscription. One reason that Hasegawa is notable is that the Carp faced contraction during his tenure, but they played just well-enough (and almost certainly wouldn’t have had he not been on the team) to keep the team off of the chopping block. It wasn’t until 1968 that they got a sponsor.
My Hasegawa card is from JCM 33e, issued in 1959.