Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

The early days of Japanese baseball were a very low offense affair. I've often wondered why. Now, I was watching this video of Starfin pitching. Check out the stadium that you can see starting at 0:08. It has HUGE amounts of foul territory in the infield. Just unbelievably enormous, the fans were sitting miles away from the action. It looks like the stadium wasn't originally designed for baseball.

Anyway, if that was anything close to normal then it would go at least some distance towards explaining the low run scoring environment. Having distant fences decreases home runs, but it increases doubles and triples, so it doesn't necessarily reduce scoring. But large amounts of foul territory does: all that leads to is more foul outs.

I tried to figure out which stadium this is. Google tells me that the caption at the top says "All Japan vs. Tools, 1949", but I'm pretty sure that should be "Seals" and that this is footage from the Seals' 1949 tour. Unfortunately they played games all over the place for that tour. There's probably records of which games Starfin pitched somewhere, but I'm not up for finding them at the moment.

Any other theories (or maybe someone actually knows) about why no one was scoring any runs in early Japanese baseball?

[nat]

Santa was good to me this year, so I have a few more cards to post.

Keishi Suzuki pitched for Kintetsu from 1966 to 1985. In total he pitched 4600 innings and won 317 games. During his career league ERA appears to have averaged around the mid-3s, although with significant variation. I’m just eyeballing this, so that number could be off. But anyway, some years it was down around 3.20 and others up around 4.20. For his career Suzuki had a 3.11 ERA, so he was good for a really long time. 1978 was his best season. He was 30 years old, and posted a 2.02 ERA to go along with 25 wins in just shy of 300 innings, against a league average ERA of 3.68.

Suzuki’s stats look a lot like those of a bunch of American pitchers of the same generation (although his innings pitched totals are more impressive, given the shorter season). If you took his career numbers and shuffled them up with those of Gaylord Perry, Bert Blyleven, Phil Niekro and a handful of other guys, I’m not entirely certain that I could tell you which one is Suzuki. In a way, Nolan Ryan isn’t the worst comp. Suzuki barely cleared 3000 strikeouts, but led the league in K’s eight times (vs. 11 for Ryan). Blyleven is pretty good, but he led the league in strikeouts only once. Maybe I’ll go with Steve Carlton as a compromise. Lefty was a five-time K champ, and, like Suzuki but unlike Ryan and Blyleven, left handed. (Or, well, sort of. Suzuki was naturally right handed but learned, at his father’s behest, to throw from the port side.) Also, the Phillies and the Buffaloes were both pretty bad teams. Albright doesn’t like him as much, comparing him to Jim Bunning and Vida Blue.

As with most strikeout-friendly pitchers, he relied on a mean fastball (at least early in his career). And like most pitchers who rely on a mean fastball, he was homer-prone, giving up 560 for his career. The MLB record is 522. That Jamie Moyer holds the record doesn’t help my claim about fastball pitchers being homer prone, but I’m pretty sure it’s true anyway. Elevating the bat takes time, so a high pitch is going to give you a little extra “effective speed” (if you will). So if you’re relying on your speed it’s a good idea to throw high fastballs, i.e., one’s that batters can get under and hit in the air. This is why Max Scherzer (for example) is such an extreme flyball pitcher. Suzuki was the same kind of guy.

Albright ranks Suzuki was the 79th greatest player of all time. He was a 3x best nine and a 15x all star.

Post playing, Suzuki managed the Buffaloes for a few years. He is “credited” with “helping” Nomo come to the US. Apparently (I’m getting this from Albright who is getting it from “The Meaning of Ichiro” so hopefully nothing is getting lost here) Suzuki favored the traditional intense Japanese training program, and didn’t pay any attention to pitchers’ workloads. Albright reports that he had Nomo throw a 191 pitch game once, which would probably get an American manager burned at the stake. Whiting reports that Suzuki was of the opinion that the best way to cure a hurt arm was to pitch even more. Nomo realized that his arm was getting shredded and wanted to get out. Hence, the Dodgers.

The Suzuki card is from the 1976 Calbee set.

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by nat

The early days of Japanese baseball were a very low offense affair. I've often wondered why. Now, I was watching this video of Starfin pitching. Check out the stadium that you can see starting at 0:08. It has HUGE amounts of foul territory in the infield. Just unbelievably enormous, the fans were sitting miles away from the action. It looks like the stadium wasn't originally designed for baseball.

Anyway, if that was anything close to normal then it would go at least some distance towards explaining the low run scoring environment. Having distant fences decreases home runs, but it increases doubles and triples, so it doesn't necessarily reduce scoring. But large amounts of foul territory does: all that leads to is more foul outs.

I tried to figure out which stadium this is. Google tells me that the caption at the top says "All Japan vs. Tools, 1949", but I'm pretty sure that should be "Seals" and that this is footage from the Seals' 1949 tour. Unfortunately they played games all over the place for that tour. There's probably records of which games Starfin pitched somewhere, but I'm not up for finding them at the moment.

Any other theories (or maybe someone actually knows) about why no one was scoring any runs in early Japanese baseball?

That is actually Meiji Jingu Stadium which is actually still in existence and the home of the Yakult Swallows (though it is scheduled to be replaced in a few years unfortunately).

That was probably from Game 2 of the Seals 1949 tour, in which Starfin was the starting pitcher.

The stadium still has pretty big foul territory!

[nat]

Thanks for the info Sean! Great to have someone around who actually recognizes the stadium. And A's batters think that they have it bad with foul territory!

I've been posting mostly menkos and bromides (with a few Calbees and BBMs thrown in); today I've got my first candy card.

Kihachi Enomoto was a first baseman who played for the Orions until his very last season. Between 1955 and 1972 he logged 9000 plate appearances with a batting average just under 300. He had good-but-not-great power. Scouts would have said that his real advantage is with his hit tool. Frequently he hit above .300, topping out at .351 in 1966, and he walked quite a bit more than he struck out. Indeed, Enomoto was extremely good at not striking out. Maybe not Joe Sewell good, but, you know, Yogi Berra good. From his statistical profile I’m imagining a player with a really good batting eye who hits line drives and uses the whole field. Probably not a pull hitter. The 24 homers that he hit in 1966 were the most he had in a single season, and represent about 10% of his career output.

Let’s look at that 1966 season for a minute. He hit 351/434/571 to go with 81 runs, 24 HR, 74 RBI and 14 steals, in 133 games. The league as a whole hit 238/290/358. Let’s translate his performance into the 2018 American League…

*crunches some numbers*

That would give us a batting line of 367 AVG / 476 OBP / 663 SLG and 121 runs, 42 HR, and 110 RBI. The rate stats would all have led the league. He would have placed 3rd in runs, 3rd in home runs, and 3rd in RBI. The difference between his rate stats and his run and RBI totals is probably due to his teammates - Yamauchi was long gone by this point and the Orions weren't any good. They finished in the middle of the pack in 1966, a bit below .500. Give him a better supporting cast and he’s probably got much better R and RBI figures. Now sure, that’s his best season, but anyone who can put up a season like that is a beast.

He also struck out only 20 times that season. (Actual figure, not adjusted to 2018 AL.)

Parenthetical remark that I’m not going to actually put in parentheses: a few grains of salt may be necessary when looking at those numbers. Jim Allen has done some really nice work showing that the mean standard deviation across a bunch of measures (win%, batting average, etc.) have gone down consistently over time. In short, dominant performances from early decades of Japanese ball shouldn’t be as surprising as in more recent decades. Now, 1966 wasn’t early exactly, but it’s not recent either.
/Parenthetical remark

His greatness was recognized at the time. He was a 9x best nine and 12x all star. On the other hand, he never did win an MVP award. Katsuya Nomura won in 1966. There were two reasons for this, one respectable, the other less so. Nomura, while not being as strong of an offensive force, was a catcher rather than a first baseman. And he also played for the first place Nankai Hawks as opposed to the fourth place Tokyo Orions. I guess that I would have voted for Nomura as well, given their positional differences, but Japan’s tradition of giving the MVP award to players from winning teams basically meant that Enomoto didn’t have a chance. Albright calls him the 17th greatest Japanese player, and 4th greatest first baseman. Great though he was, it’s hard to argue that point. Oh, Ochiai, and Kawakami put up some stiff competition.

Enomoto played against the Dodgers during their 1956 tour of Japan. He tied the score in an Oct. 26th game, driving in Yasumitsu Toyoda with a single off of reliever Don Bessent. The game was subsequently called for darkness with the score tied at 3. Rookie or not, Brooklyn should have left Drysdale in.

Like Hiramatsu Ochiai, but no one else, Enomoto is qualified for the meikyukai but not a member. (Enomoto’s 2000th hit came curtesy of Keishi Suzuki, the player featured in my last post.) He is, of course, a member of the hall of fame, but that was a near thing. He received exactly the number of votes that he needed for election. Not one vote to spare.

This is my first caramel card. It’s from the JF2 set. It’s tiny and made of paper. Granted it’s a durable and glossy paper, but it’s definitely not card stock. I wonder how the caramels were packaged? If they were individually wrapped and kind of large (for caramels not baseball cards) I could see this being an insert with a single piece of candy.

[seanofjapan]

Nice caramel card, I don't have any of those in my collection. I'm not sure how they would have originally come packaged either, its an interesting question.

[Sportscards1086]

Good stuff in here!!

[nat]

Tomoaki Kanemoto was a slugging outfielder with very good on-base skills. He played from 1992 to 2012, and is one of the most recent inductees into the hall of fame. From 1992 to 2002 he played for the Carp, and he spent the balance of his career with Hanshin. For career numbers he’s got slightly more than 2500 hits, 476 home runs, and a 285/382/503 slash line. It seems that he had a fair amount of speed, but he didn’t always make good use of it, and lost it as he got older. But anyway, he did manage to steal 30 bases one year. Just going by his raw numbers, 2005 stands out as his best year. He managed better than 120 runs and RBIs, knocked in 40 homers, and put up a 327/429/615 line. All of those numbers except for the on-base percentage were career highs.

Let’s compare that 2005 season to league average. The Central League that year hit 270/331/411. That’s a pretty good match for the current American League. Last year they put up a 249/318/416 line. The lower batting average was driving the lower OBP (made up for by a few more walks it looks like), but otherwise pretty similar. To translate Kanemoto’s 2005 season into a contemporary American context, you don’t need to do much at all. Shave off a little AVG and OBP, but it’s close enough I’m not going to bother actually calculating this one. Nobody in the American League had a season last year that was a good match for Kanemoto’s 2005, but Christian Yelich, MVP winner over in the NL, is close enough. They’re actually the same kind of player, it’s just that, except for this past year, Kanemoto was better than Yelich.

The weird thing about this guy is that he got such a late start. Kanemoto broke into the league at 24, but didn’t play a full season until he was 28. That’s really old for a hall of famer. Usually those guys have established themselves as superior ball players when they’re in their early 20s (or, in plenty of cases, earlier). Kanemoto has such good career numbers because he managed to hang around so long. He played through his age 44 season. If he’d gotten started at a more normal age (for a hall of famer) he might have managed to join Harimoto in the 3000 hit club. Super weirdly, he made a best nine even before he played a full season. He was selected in 1995 despite missing about 20% of his team's games.

One thing that he was known for was endurance. He appeared in 1,766 consecutive games, and broke Cal Ripken’s streak for consecutive innings. (Ripken sent him a bat to commemorate the occasion.) The game that ended his consecutive-games streak almost didn’t. He was sent up to pinch hit, but a runner got thrown out to end the inning and so he wasn’t credited with an at bat.

Although he played in the outfield for his entire career he seems to have had a rather weak arm. He was nicknamed “Mole Killer” for bouncing throws to the infield. That’s pretty harsh.

Even late in his career Kanemoto was one of the highest paid players in Japan, pulling in more than $5MM per year. (Also, can this possibly be right? In 2008 the Carp were, on average, paying their players <$20K?)
After retiring Kanemoto took over managing the Tigers. They finished the 2018 season in last place and Kanemoto apparently blamed himself. Despite attempts by ownership to get him to sign a multiyear contract, he announced last October that he was resigning.

As with many former Tigers, thehanshintigers.com has a nice biography of him.

And I can’t read it, but he also has his own website.

In the early 2000s Upper Deck made a foray into the Japanese market. It didn’t last long, but they did put out a few sets. This card is from the 2000 Ovation set. It's got one nice feature. The stitches on the baseball are... what's the opposite of embossed? Exbossed? Anyway, they stick out, which is a neat touch.

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by nat

Even late in his career Kanemoto was one of the highest paid players in Japan, pulling in more than $5MM per year. (Also, can this possibly be right? In 2008 the Carp were, on average, paying their players <$20K?)
.

Doing the math, that page says it is the average of 738 players. Divideby the 12 teams and that is about 60 players per team.

So that average pay includes that paid to the minor league 2 gun players, who would draw the average down a bit, though not that much. The author seems to have understated the average by a factor of 10 when doing the conversion into US dollars, it should be about 200k US for the Carp!