I’ll do a write-up for Sotokoba in a while, but for now I’ve already got a picture of this Matsui card on my computer, so I'm going to do him first.
Japanese imports into the American game have a not-very-distinguished track record. Some of the pitchers have done reasonably well (I was just watching Tanaka pitch a nice game for the Yankees a little bit ago), but the hitters have had more trouble. (With one very notable exception, about whom more later.) Here are the top Japanese-born position players to play in MLB (Dave Roberts omitted), ordered by total WAR:
59 : Ichiro
21 : Hideki Matsui
10 : Nori Aoki
6 : Tadahiko Iguchi
6 : Shohei Ohtani (and counting, but of course he’s also a pitcher)
5 : Kenji Johjima
5 :
Kaz Matsui
5 : Akanori Iwakuma
4 : Kosuke Fukudome
4 : Tsuyoshi Shinjo
…and then a bunch of guys who basically made no impact in MLB.
So of the position players to come over from Japan to MLB, Matsui had the seventh best MLB career. A league average season is worth about two WAR, so Matsui’s MLB career was about equal to two and a half average seasons. He missed a lot of time in MLB with injuries. In 2004 he played 114 games for the Mets, on his way to a season worth 1 WAR.
(This figured pulled down by poor fielding. His oWAR – the offensive component – was worth 1.7 WAR. His fielding in 2004 was worth negative value. And while I’ve got a parenthetical note going: WAR is not oWAR plus dWAR; both the o- and d- components include a positional adjustment. If you want to break WAR down into components you need to add oWAR and Rfield/10.)
In 2007 with the Rockies and 2009 with the Astros he also eclipsed the 100 games played mark, but that was all. That 2007 season was the best of his MLB career. It was worth 3.7 WAR. Maybe not all-star caliber, but still above average. The rest of his career is about what you would expect from a bench player. He did play in the 2007 post season, mashing in the NLDS and then squeezing out just nine hits (and one walk) in the NLCS and World Series combined.
The poor showing in the field as a rookie is actually rather odd. The only thing that he was (in total) quite good at in MLB was fielding. In two of his three full seasons he led the league in range factor for a second baseman, and in 2007 also led the league in Total Zone Runs (as a second baseman).
Matsui’s MLB career is, however, only a small part of his baseball career. He broke in with Seibu in 1995 as a 19 year old. He was a middle infielder who was fast as a young man and developed into a rather complete player as he got older. In 2003, as a 27 year old, Matsui hit 33 home runs. That off season, he signed with the Mets. Now the only year in which he spent a significant amount of time in the minor leagues was 2010. By and large, he spent his time in the US in the big leagues. It’s just that most of it was spent on the disabled list. In 2011 he returned to Japan, signing with the Golden Eagles. By this point he was 36 and had lost both his speed and his power. He spent his late 30s as a doubles kind of hitter. The final year of his career was 2018; he went home to the Lions. It looks like his Meikyukai-qualifying hit came in 2015 with Ratuken.
In sum, across every level in every country that he played, Matsui managed to collect 2843 hits. That’s really good. I wonder how well he would have done had he stayed in Japan? He was averaging about 175 hits per year for Seibu in his 20s. If we’re trying to guesstimate how many hits he would have had in Japan, we need to subtract the 615 he actually got MLB and the 136 he got in MiLB and then extrapolate what he would have managed in those years from what he actually did in Japan. Here’s the way-too-simple way in which I’m going to do that. I’m going to take his average number of hits for the last few years that he played for Seibu, and the average number of hits that he collected in his first few years back with Ratuken, and assume a linear connection between the two. Let’s do it…
[math is done]
If I did this right, that would have given him 1008 hits in Japan during the seasons in which he actually played in MLB. That gives us a net difference of 257. Add that to his hit total and he comes out with 3100 total hits. That would be #1 all-time in Japan. Of course there are tons of assumptions built into that little exercise. But it’s at least not unreasonable to think that he could have surpassed Harimoto had he stayed in Japan.
Meikyukai –
Yes : Hall of Fame:
No
This card is from BBM’s 2000 set.