Hideo Fujimoto was a star pitcher for the Giants (and one season with the Dragons) during the war and in the immediate postwar years. He pitched from 1942 to 1955, of course missing 1945 when the league was suspended. For his career he has an astonishing .697 winning percentage (200 wins to 87 losses). If an American team had a .697 winning percentage they’d win 113 games. In addition he is the all-time record holder for both career ERA (1.90) and seasonal ERA (0.73). He was Korean, which confuses me a bit, since I’m pretty sure that ‘Fujimoto’ is a Japanese name. Apparently his family moved to Japan when he was eight years old.
In addition to being one of the finest pitchers in Japanese history, Fujimoto was a very skilled batter. He hit 245/319/327, which, you say “looks good for a pitcher”, but remember that the 1940s and early 50s were the Japanese deadball era. For example, in 1950 he posted an OPS of .808 against a league average of .727. It’s not that he was a good hitter for a pitcher, it’s that he was a good hitter period. There was a brief time (after his return to the Giants from the Dragons) when they experimented with him as an outfielder – it should be some indication of how highly his skill with the bat was respected that the Giants took one of the best pitchers to have ever lived and tried to make him an outfielder. In the end it didn’t stick (he played a total of 40 games in the outfield) and he went back to pitching full time.
During his career the Giants were (as usual) quite successful. They won the Japan Series from 1951-3, defeating the Hawks each time. The Giants = Yankees thing is perhaps something of a cliché, but it’s also just so true. Sometimes you gotta feel for the Dodgers/Hawks. He is best known for being the first Japanese player to throw a perfect game (in 1950). Arm troubles led him to change from an overhand to a side arm delivery, and he is credited with popularizing the slider in Japan. (If they weren’t throwing sliders before 1942, what where they throwing? If they’re not throwing sliders I have a hard time imagining them throwing curve balls. Just FB/CH and trying to pick your spots?)
Unfortunately he had a relatively short career, and an even shorter peak. From 1942 to 1950 he regularly led the league in ERA and other pitching categories (at least when he threw enough innings to qualify). He continued to be a good pitcher for a few seasons after that, but never again led the league in anything. And then his career was abruptly over. In 1954 he pitched 19 innings, in 1955 he pitched five. And that was that. Maybe injuries were involved, I don’t know. In 1955 he was 35, which is old (for a baseball player!) but not that old.
After his retirement Yomiuri took care of him. Fujimoto coached in the Giants’ minor league system, and later became a reporter in their LA bureau. (Remember that the company that owns the Giants is a media conglomerate, and a newspaper is their flagship business.)
Here are two things that I don’t know about Fujimoto. Any knowledgeable readers, feel free to fill me in. (1) Why he didn’t get started until 1942. He was 24 years old in his rookie year. I had expected that it had something to do with the war, but I couldn’t find any confirmation that he was ever in the military. (2) Why he changed his name to ‘Nakagami’. You’d think that it would have something to do with being Korean, but, like I said above, I’m pretty sure that he’s got a Japanese name anyway. He changed his name in 1943 but it doesn’t seem to have stuck, because this card is from a few years later and uses his old name.
Speaking of the card, it is a bromide from the JBR 73 set. The text on it is very hard to make out. On the far right it gives his name. The text on the left says something about "central". The first character is also the first character in 'Chunichi', the team he was with in 1947, but the second character in the team name doesn't appear. The hiragana in the middle of the card is illegible. Engel reports that this set was issued in 1947, but features pictures from 1946. He suggests that it was issued in the early spring of 1947. If so, that would make it the first postwar Japanese baseball card set.
The immediate postwar period in Japan is fascinating. The allies heavily bombed the sixty (!) largest cities in Japan during the war (except for Kyoto, which was spared the atom bomb, and I think most conventional bombing as well). Poverty was so rife that the average height of Japanese men and women actually dropped in the postwar period. Moreover, the nation was occupied by American troops, and more-or-less run as McArthur’s fiefdom. (At least, IIRC the McArthur biography that I read, until Congress recalled him.) Granted the occupation had the blessing – or rather forced acquiescence – of the emperor, but it’s still a big deal.
At Potsdam the allies demanded that Japan surrender unconditionally, Japan countered that they would surrender if (1) the emperor kept his throne, (2) there was to be no occupation, (3) Japan gets to keep Korea and Taiwan, and (4) the Japanese disarm their own armed forces. So, basically, they offered to not surrender at all. After a pair of atom bombs and Russian intervention they agreed to surrender provided that the emperor keeps this throne. It’s astonishing to me that that would be the condition that they would insist on – to this distant American view the other three seem to be much more important – and that they would rather have all of their cities erased and their county occupied by Stalin than lose their emperor. Anyway, the Americans accepted their offer, but not really.
There is still an emperor in Japan, but he doesn’t have any power anymore. McArthur realized that having the traditional authority in place and willing to go along with the occupation would make things go much more smoothly in the postwar years, and it almost unquestionably did. Allied soldiers frequently remarked on how little opposition they faced after the peace treaty was signed. The relevance to all of this to a baseball card website is that this little bromide of Hideo Fujimoto comes from a completely different world. This card was printed in a bombed out, famine stricken country, which was occupied by a foreign military. Sure, things have also changed in America since my 1956 Topps Ernie Banks was printed, but the difference between America in 1956 and America in 2018 has just got nothing on the difference between Japan in 1946 and America in 2018.