Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Lou Gehrig:Babe Ruth || ? :Sadaharu Oh


They were teammates for years, and played for the most successful team in history during it's most successful period in history. Forever linked as a part of the ON-Cannon. Nagashima was a gold-glove third-baseman (and in that was different than Gehrig), who hit 444 home runs and collected close to 2500 hits. He is probably a top-5 player all-time in Japan. Jim Albright ranks him 3rd over all. He was a five-time MVP and a best nine player every season of his career. (So, in context, he was better than Gehrig.) The Giants of the 1960s were just beyond belief.

The place where the Gehrig analogy really breaks down is in their respective roles in the broader culture. Oh was the better player, but not the bigger star. It's worth noting that the #1 (and #2, and #3, and so on) cards in the inaugural Calbee set were all of Nagashima. He is Japan's most beloved baseball player. He played for the Giants from 1958 to 1974, and took over managing the team after his retirement.

The card is from the JCM 54 menko set. It's a 1958 issue, which should make this one of Nagashima's rookie cards. (I don't know if that designation carries any weight or interest in Japan. The Japanese baseball card hobby is much smaller than its American counterpart, and it may have evolved in different ways. Which may be commendable, caring more about a player's first card always seemed a bit odd to me.) I'm a big fan of menko cards, and I think that I like the ones with the solid color backgrounds best of all. They're a bit artistic, sort of like 1949 Leaf (my favorite set). Engel gives this set a rarity designation of R3, indicating that 10 to 99 copies of each card are known. I wonder how he knows that. The back of the card says:

Who am I?
Team: Giants
Position: third
Number: 3
pitch right hit right
Weight 73 kg
Height 1 meter 79
School Ritsudai

I had a friend read it for me, but at this point I've encountered it often enough to know what 巨人 means.

[nat]

I'm more interested in the older cards, but Kudoh is also a hall of famer, so he gets his moment in the sun (I'm sure he's thrilled by the honor).

Kimiyasu Kudoh was a star pitcher for a bunch of teams from 1982 to 2010. That's right, 29 years. If I lived in Japan, I suspect that he'd be one of my favorite players. I love players who have strange careers, and a 29 year career counts. Kudoh appeared in the Japan Series 14 times, and although he won an MVP award he never won the Sawamura award. He first rose to prominence with the Seibu Lions, leaving in 1994 as a 31 year old. He would return in 2010 to pitch his final season (well, his final six innings) at age 47. I suspect that this was a sentimental, "retire as a Lion" sort of thing. Despite the exceptionally long career, he accumulated only about 3300 innings pitched (fewer than Smoltz pitched, even though Kudoh's career was eight years longer). In part this is due to the shorter Japanese season, and in part to the fact that he spent both the beginning and the end of his career as a reliever. He was a good fielder (and gold glove winner) but a hilariously inept batter. He was 22 for 272 for his career, a .081 batting average. 224-142 W/L record more than makes up for it though.

[Rickyy]

Funny thing growing up as a kid in Japan, we flipped menko cards all the time with both Japanese kids and American kids (who lived in and around the US military base) and I don't recall Japanese bb players on them at all. Most if not all had cartoon characters on them. Both square and round ones.

Ricky Y

[nat]

Originally Posted by Rickyy

Funny thing growing up as a kid in Japan, we flipped menko cards all the time with both Japanese kids and American kids (who lived in and around the US military base) and I don't recall Japanese bb players on them at all. Most if not all had cartoon characters on them. Both square and round ones.

Ricky Y

As near as I can tell they stopped making baseball menko cards in the 1960s. If you were growing up after that point there wouldn't have been any. Baseball menko cards were a late-40s to 1960s thing.

[seanofjapan]

Kudoh - he is the second player you listed after Koji Akiyama who went on to be a great manager of the Hawks (he is their current manager and led them to the Japan Series in 2 out of his first 3 seasons).

About menko, that is cool that you have memories of playing with them as a kid Ricky. Most of them don't have baseball players on them, anime characters are much more common to find on them (hence your childhood recollection!)

I might buy some menko for my kids to see if I can get them into them. I have some vintage ones but have never played with them (well, I'm not going to give those to the kids, but you can still buy generic new ones pretty cheap at some shops).

[Exhibitman]

There are menko like cards all across Asia. I have similar boxing cards from Malaysia and the Philippines (where they are called TEKS). Plus Bruce Lee cards from Thailand and China.

[nat]

Three hall of famers in this post.

Starting in the upper left we have Hiroshi Oshita. Oshita played for several teams from 1946 to 1959. The last half of his career he spent with the Nishitetsu Lions. Oshita grew up in Taiwan, but was recruited to play for Meiji University, one of the early powerhouses of Japanese baseball. During the war he attained the rank of second lieutenant, and, according to Wikipedia he trained as a kamikaze pilot. (I have not been able to confirm this report from any other sources, and Wikipedia is not, in general, to be trusted.) Anyway, Oshita quickly became one of Japan’s biggest sluggers. He famously used a bat that was painted blue, although he once went to bat with a stick of bamboo and was fined 100 Yen for it. His 20 home run season in 1946 set a record, although one that would not last long. (He himself nearly doubled that mark just three years later.) He also boasted strong on-base skills, hitting .383 in an abbreviated 1951 campaign. (My guess is that an injury was involved.) Rob Fitts reports that he was something of a bon vivant, with a taste for sake and women. Oshita tried his hand at pitching early in his career, but it didn’t go well. He tried his hand at managing late in his career, and it went worse. (The Flyers posted a 30-46 record before he was relieved of his duties.) His career .490 slugging percentage looks good-but-not-great to American eyes, but one must remember that context is everything. In 1949 he slugged .626 against a league average of .398. By comparison, the American League slugged .414 last year and, except for 2014, hasn’t had a league-wide slugging percentage below .400 since 1992. I would really really really like to find historical context-neutral statistics for Japanese baseball, even if it’s just OPS+ and ERA+. I’d even be happy to calculate them myself, but I haven’t been able to locate park factors, nor the home-vs-road splits that would be necessary to calculate park factors. You can compare a player’s OPS (or whatever stat you want) to the league average (which is available), but given the significance of park effects, this leaves out a lot of information and can be very deceiving. (For example, comparing Todd Helton’s OPS to league average doesn’t tell you much of anything at all.)

Next to Oshita you will see Henry “Bozo” Tadashi Wakabayashi. He pitched from 1936 to 1953, missing 1945 and 1952. He pitched for Hanshin, Osaka, and Mainichi. He’s pitching for Hanshin on this card, as it helpfully has his team name given in English. I don’t think I’ve seen any other Japanese cards this old (or even close to this old) with English on them. The writing is almost always in Kanji. Wakabayashi had a career 1.99 ERA, which is certainly impressive, but, as noted above, context is important. If the league is slugging below .400 it’s easier to post a low ERA. Wakabayashi was born in Hawaii and was one of the first members of the Japanese baseball hall of fame. Okay, he was 16th, but that’s pretty good. Grover Cleveland Alexander was the 16th member of the American hall. In fact, if you’re looking for a fair comparison with an American player, Alexander wouldn’t be your worst choice. Both relatively early pitchers with long and successful careers, although overshadowed by some of their contemporaries. (Matty, in Alexander’s case, Starffin for Wakabayashi.) He was of Japanese descent, and was recruited to play college ball in Japan when one of his teams in Hawaii visited to play the local teams. Incredibly, video of him pitching still exists. He apparently threw sidearm and had a crazy windup.

The third hall of famer on this sheet is Noboru Aota, on the lower left. Aota was an outfielder who played from 1942 to 1959. He hit .355 in an abbreviated debut as a 17 year old with Tokyo. After the war he spent a couple season with Hankyu before spending the bulk of his career with the Giants and the Whales. He was a slugger with a little bit of speed; basically the same kind of player at Oshita. Indeed, there were off-field similarities too. Like Oshita, Aota had a reputation for hard living. He missed time for the war, serving in the Japanese air force, but he did not see combat. At his retirement Aota held the all-time record for home runs (265), although it would be eclipsed just four years later.

The fourth player is Takeshi Doigaki. He’s not in the hall of fame, but he was a standout catcher in the post-war period. When I was a kid I always like cards of catchers – with all their armor they looked like maybe they were part insect, or part baseball-playing robot. Anyway, lots of Doigaki cards show him in his full catcher gear, unfortunately this one has only got him with his glove. Offensively he was somewhat better than average, with a Yogi Berra-like ability to avoid striking out.

These cards are catalogued as JCM 75. They were issued in 1947. Engel calls them Menko cards, although I don’t really believe it. To begin with, they have neither a menko number, nor a rock-paper-scissor symbols. That may not be dispositive evidence, but it’s pretty good. On top of that, these cards are made of very thin stock. Almost a rough paper. It’s hard to imagine these flipping over once they were on the ground, and it’s even harder to imagine that anything would flip over if hit with one of these. I think it’s best to simply think of them as trading cards. The catalogue doesn’t mention the Tarzan back on the Wakabayashi card. I’ve seen two uncut sheets, however, and in both cases Wakabayashi has this back and not a “Base Ball” back, so I suspect that it’s not an unusual variation or anything. I’ve never encountered single cards from this set, only the uncut sheets, which is probably explained by the fact that the cards are very flimsy. Any that were distributed to kids would have been destroyed pretty quickly.

I like the immediately post-war cards. One of the nice things about baseball cards is that they provide a connection to world that can be very different than the one that we live in. For example, Goudey cards were issued during the depths of the great depression. There’s every possibility that the Jimmie Foxx that sits comfortably ensconced in your PSA holder was some kid’s prize possession in 1934; pennies were hard to come by back then. I’m not an historian, and can’t tell you how extensive the war damage was to Japanese industry, but it was pretty extensive. Cards like these might have been the first toys produced after the fighting stopped, and one of the first signs of life getting back to normal.