View Single Post
  #108  
Old 08-30-2018, 08:58 PM
nat's Avatar
nat nat is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2016
Posts: 925
Default Tadashi Sugiura

Tadashi Sugiura spent thirteen years pitching for the Nankai Hawks. It was only the first half of that time, however, that he was really productive. He was an ace-quality pitcher from 1958 to 1964, at which point he became a relief pitcher. If not for the switch to relieving he would have qualified for the golden player’s club pretty easily, despite retiring at 34. As it is, he won 187 games while losing 106, with a career ERA of 2.39. That ERA is a good number, but it’s aided by his years in the bullpen. He had a number below that mark for his first three seasons, and then never again until he switched roles.

The beginning to his career really was quite impressive. He took home the rookie of the year award in 1958, no doubt thanks to 27 wins in 299 innings pitched, with an ERA of 2.05. (Now don’t get too excited about that ERA, the league as a whole had a 2.83 mark. So it’s good, but this was a pretty low scoring league.) The following year he won 38 games over 371 innings pitched, and took home both the Pacific League MVP Award, as well as the Japan Series MVP award (he pitched every game of the series). It was certainly his best year. He recorded an ERA of 1.41, and was only 23 years old. But as a 23 year old he already had more than six hundred professional innings on his arm (after who knows how much pitching in high school and college). At the age of 24 he pitched 334 innings, and his workload dropped off thereafter, culminating in relegation to the bullpen in 1965. It’s hard not to imagine that all the abuse his arm suffered when he was young had something to do with it, despite the fact that he was a submarine pitcher. Just how much heavy workloads contribute to arm injuries is controversial, but it’s hard to deny that they do. Throwing a ball overhand at extremely high speeds is just not something that we evolved to do. And, perhaps more to the point, every time you do it is a time that something can snap. Perhaps a heavy workload increases injury risk not because the tendons or ligaments or whatever wear down, perhaps it increase injury risk just because each time you throw a ball you’re rolling the dice, and if you roll the dice enough times eventually you’re going to lose.

Albright ranks him as the 65th greatest Japanese baseball player, and 17th greatest pitcher. Admittedly I haven’t tried to put together anything like Albright’s ranking system, but this sounds aggressive to me. In part this could be a matter of taste. I’m happy saying that Sugiura’s 1959 was one of the greatest pitching seasons of all time, and since he was extremely good in 1958 and 1960-1 as well, he’s got a very respectable peak. Now, peak performance is clearly important, if for no other reason than in order to win a pennant a team needs above average performance (just by definition), and so above average performance squeezed into a small number of years is more valuable than an equivalent amount of performance stretched out into more years. But I don’t think it’s so much more valuable that it means that someone who’s career was basically four really great seasons, a few in which he was starting to deal with injuries, a few as a relief pitcher, and then an early retirement, is a top-20 pitcher.

Now, I said that this may be a matter of taste. I’m inclined to think that when ranking baseball players what you want to rank is how much they did for their teams, given what they could control (this last qualification ensures that we don’t put much emphasis on RBIs when evaluating players, something based on linear weights is much better). Now, as I’ve just argued, measuring “how much they did for their teams” is not just a matter of multiplying their rate of production by their opportunities, putting more production into smaller spaces is more valuable than stretching it out. But a lot of people seem to think that what “greatness” amounts to isn’t “how much they did for their teams” but also “how good they were at their best”. Of course I account for that too – since, as I said, being really good for a little while is more valuable than being pretty good for a long time – but they want it to be something that doesn’t reduce to the value that a player contributes to his teams. I don’t know if this is what Albright is doing, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Let me argue, very briefly, that this is a bad idea. First of all, the only reason to care about how good a player is, is that it helps his team win ball games. We want talented players because we want wins, the value of great performance itself is instrumental. So if you give a player credit for his great performances, you’re double counting; he gets credit for a great performance (which, remember, matters because it helps his team win games), and he gets credit for the wins that that performance generated for his teams. My second complaint is that “at his best” is objectionably imprecise, and the only non-arbitrary way to make it precise is to extend it out to his entire career. Is it his best game that counts? His best week? His best year? His best X years? And, for any answer that you give, you need to give a non-arbitrary reason why that’s the timeframe that counts. Stretching the timeframe out to his entire career has a non-arbitrary reason – there’s nothing else that we could take into consideration. But there’s no non-arbitrary reason to stop short of that. So I’m not inclined to look favorably on players like Sugiura, guys who were exceptionally great for a short while but without the surrounding bulk that we ordinarily expect from a hall of fame type career.

This card sure looks like it belongs to JCM 33d. The only problem is that Engel associates this menko number with Inao. I see three possibilities: (1) there’s an error in the book, (2) it’s an uncatalogued variation, (3) it belongs to an uncatalogued set that is nearly indistinguishable from JCM 33d. I don’t know which it is. Option (1) is certainly possible: I’ve written things shorter than Engel’s book that were professionally copyedited and errors still snuck through. But it could also be (2), there are plenty of sets that re-use menko numbers. And of course what (3) has going for it is that there are still plenty of uncatalogued menko sets. So who knows.
Attached Images
File Type: jpg sugiura.jpg (41.5 KB, 269 views)
File Type: jpg sugiura back.jpg (43.6 KB, 268 views)
Reply With Quote