Japanese HOF Project

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Sadao Kondo has the peculiar, and dubious, distinction of having been elected to the hall of fame for doing something that isn’t worth getting elected to the hall of fame for, and—and here’s the real kicker—not even do it.

Kondo pitched for three teams from 1943 to 1954. As a 17 year old rookie he was basically a league average pitcher over 114 innings for Nishitetsu. The next year found him on the Kyojin in an abbreviated season. After the war he returned to them to have a really good year; he had an ERA almost 50% better than average and pitched 300 innings. They finished second, but they had a heck of a pitching staff. Kondo was 20 years old and their best pitcher, but fellow hall of famers Hideo Fujimoto and Hiroshi Nakao rounded out the rotation. Actually, it’s hard to believe they didn’t win the pennant. Their line up featured Kawakami at first, Chiba at second, and Haruyasu Nakajima put in 50ish games in the outfield. They fell one game short, finishing behind a Great Ring team led by Takehiko Bessho and Kazuto Tsuruoka. After what I presume was an injury-shortened season with the Giants he was off to Chunichi, with whom he spent the rest of his playing career. Kondo posted three seasons in which he was somewhat better than average, and after that his playing time diminished precipitously. He was basically done as a full-time pitcher after his age 24 season.

Kondo’s second act was as a manager. In 1967 he took over Chunichi on a very temporary basis, but was back in the helm starting in 1981. His tenure there lasted three seasons. The Dragons were, on balance, about average. 1985 and 86 saw him leading Taiyo, and then he spent three seasons with Nippon Ham starting in 1989.

What got Kondo into the hall of fame is the dedicated use of relief specialists, especially via his influence as a pitching coach for the Dragons in the 1960s, before he moved into the top job. In the early days (and, in fact, quite a long while after the early days) it was very common for pitchers to pitch an insane number of innings as a starter, and appear as a relief pitcher between their starts. Sometime around the 1960s this began to change, and pitchers started specializing as either starters or relievers, but the dual role for key pitchers lasted for a very long time. Jim Allen has a nice post explaining Kondo’s contribution to this development, and the extent to which it wasn’t really his contribution. The gist of it is that under his direction Eiji Bando began transitioning into a relief pitcher, and that Kondo is known for encouraging this. But, Allen points out, he wasn’t the first pitcher to become a (more-or-less) dedicated relief pitcher, and that a number of Kazuto Tsuruoka’s pitchers beat him to it.

Albright ranks him as Japan’s 24th most successful manager. Now, I don’t think much of the kind of system that Albright uses (score X points for doing Y, Z points for…, without any rationale for why those actions merit those scores), but it might give you the general idea of how Kondo compares to other managers in Japanese history.

Meikyukai: No - Hall of Fame: Yes

Of all of the players on my list, Kondo may have been the hardest to find. Prestige has a Kondo card up for auction right now (current bid is $44 and the auction ends the day after tomorrow), and in their blurb they say that he’s got only three catalogued cards, all of which are scarce. The card that I’ve got here is uncatalogued, and, in fact, was only the second Kondo card that I’ve ever seen. It’s a very small bromide. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1x2, but I do like the image. Whatever that is in the background makes for a dramatic backdrop.

As for when the card was issued: he’s on the Dragons, so that puts it after 1947. Now, he put in only three full-time seasons, so I’m guessing it was issued during that period. So probably 1948-1950, which is just about exactly when you would expect a bromide like this to be issued.

Regarding uncatalogued cards: I wonder how rare they are. There's certainly some variation. I have an uncatalogued Fumio Fujimura bromide of which I've seen three other copies, so even if it's not in Engel's book, there must be a bunch of them out there. On the other hand, for most of my uncatalogued cards (such as this one) not only have I never seen another copy, I've never seen another card from the set. I'm guessing that these ones don't turn up much.

Only one player left for the hall of fame collection. Stay tuned.