Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Junzo Sekine was a two-way player. Early in his career he was a pitcher; from 1957-on he was an outfielder. From 1950 to 1964 he played for Kintetsu, 1965 was the last year of his career, and he spent it with the Giants. The switch to the outfield was probably a good idea. In 1957 his OPS was 100 points above league average – that’s 16%. It would be like having an 850 OPS in today’s American League. Basically, in 1957 he was Nelson Cruz. He totaled 1137 hits, 59 home runs, and a 279/336/372 slash line. As a pitcher he had his moments, but was really only above average in 1954; the rest of the time he was a middle of the road starter.

Sekine was a star at Hosei, and was recruited to play for Kintetsu by their manager (and his former manager at Hosei).

One of his claims to fame is that he was selected to the all star game as both a pitcher and an outfielder. Albright does not rank him on his list of the top 114 Japanese players, and says that he thinks that he doesn’t belong in the hall of fame. I agree. Because he was a two way player there really aren’t any American comps. He’s no Babe Ruth, and even John Ward was better than he was. He had one above average season as a pitcher (and a bunch of average-ish seasons), and then a run as Nelson Cruz. That’s a nice career, but it really doesn’t add up to being a hall of famer.

After retirement he spent a while as a manager, helming the Whales from 1982-4 and Yakult from 87-89. None of his teams had a winning percentage above 500. However, if Wikipedia is to be believed, he was instrumental in helping Sachio Kinugasa develop as a batter. He was the hitting coach for the Carp in 1970 and reportedly forced Kinugasa to practice long after everyone else had left the field – including catching him coming home from carousing with his friends at 3am and forcing him to practice until daybreak.

It seems that early pro ball in Japan had no shortage of pitchers who could hit. Sekine and Fujimura are probably the best examples, but Sanada was also a good hitter. This is purely anecdotal of course, but it seems to me that competence on both sides of the ball was more common then than it is now (and than it ever has been in the US). If that’s right, it should tell us something about the level of play in early pro ball in Japan. The skills involved in hitting and in pitching are very different. So the probability that you’re good at hitting, conditional on the fact that you’re good at pitching, isn’t much higher the probability that you’re good at hitting, conditional on background conditions alone. And vice versa. So if a player is on the far right tail of the distribution of hitting ability, it’s not very likely that he’ll be on the far right tail of the distribution of pitching ability. (Nor vice versa.)

Now it’s certainly possible that there’s some player who is good at both – Babe Ruth did exist. But if there are a bunch of players who are good at both, it’s likely that they’re not being drawn from the far right tail of the hitting distribution, or from the far right tail of the pitching distribution, or both. More likely is that their skill level is closer towards the mean. (I am assuming that these skills are normally distributed, that is that the distribution makes a bell curve. Hence the “far right tail” is the small number of people who are really good, and the mean is the top of the bell.) Which is all a long-winded way of saying that if a league has a bunch of people who are good pitchers and good hitters, it is likely that the level of play in the league is pretty low. If all this is right, and if hitting and pitching skill is normally distributed, it means that the pipe-line that fed Japan’s early pro leagues wasn’t very efficient. There were probably guys who were better hitters or better pitchers than the people playing pro ball who, for one reason or another, never got a chance.

The card is from JCM 123. Its date of issue is uncertain, either 1950 or 1951. If the former, then this is Sekine’s rookie card.

[nat]

Atsushi Aramaki had a 13 year career, pitching mostly for the Orions. He pitched from 1950 (at age 24) through 1962. While the inning totals that he posted were certainly healthy, he didn’t put up the quantity of innings that other star pitchers of his day did. As a rookie he pitched 274 innings, and he never again topped that mark. Several times he would have been among the league leaders in rate stats, but he didn’t pitch enough innings to qualify. Nevertheless, he was effectively finished in 1959, pitching a total of ~60 innings during his last two seasons with the Orions, and making two nominal appearances for the Braves. On a rate basis his career numbers are good. Aramaki posted a 2.23 career ERA, which is a very nice mark even in a league with a collective ERA well below 3. (It’s 8th all-time.) Because his career was so short, and his innings pitched per season were not on a par with his contemporaries, his counting stats are unimpressive. He totaled just 173 wins (although he lost barely more than 100 games, so his winning percentage is quite nice), pitched 2200 innings, and struck out barely more than 1000 batters.

In fact, as near as I can tell, Aramaki was a below-average strike out pitcher. That probably means he was a pitch-to-contact type. I haven’t (yet) read anything about his arsenal, but I’m guessing that it included lots of slow breaking stuff. His statistical profile is not that of a fireballer. (Ah, and the internet confirms my suspicions.)

Bill Veeck wanted him on the Indians, and gave him a standing-offer of a tryout. Enos Slaughter thought that he was major league caliber. (Despite being just 5’8” and 135.)

Injuries must have been a large part of Aramaki’s story. It’s hard to believe that the Orions would have coddled him when Inao, Kaneda, and so on, were being forced to pitch 7,000 innings per season (approximately, number may be exaggerated). It’s also the only plausible explanation for the sudden cliff that he fell off. Absent a major injury, players have some ups and downs as they get older, and in general see their production drop off steadily. Aramaki suddenly lost it. Like Roy Halladay. Like Brandon Webb. Like a million other guys who felt something pop in their shoulder and suddenly couldn’t get the ball to move any more. This is speculation on my part (although Albright, who ranks him as the 103rd greatest player, thinks along the same lines as me), it’s not like I have a report of an injury, but it is also the only plausible explanation.

The card is from JCM 129, issued in 1958. Cards from this set generally feature two players, one action shot, and a headshot of a different player. Aramaki is the guy pitching. The headshot is of an unidentified member of the Hawks. The word always used to describe this set is ‘garish’. And it’s the right one. This is one ugly set. The backs are variable, so the set designers weren’t making any statement about Aramaki by paring him with the ace of spades and the atomic bomb. One thing that I do like about this set is that it’s printed on thick, high-quality card stock. There are lots of “menko” cards that are printed on glorified flash cards, you couldn’t possible flip them over or flip anything over with them. The card stock on the JCM 129s, however, is more like what you’d find on a Goudey. A very satisfying card to hold. But my most favorite thing about this card is that they were really really really not messing around with that menko number.

[nat]

Hiroshi Nakao pitched for the Giants for 16 seasons. He broke in as a 19 year old in 1939, missed several seasons for the war, and pitched until 1957. He was great when he was young, but his production quickly tailed off; his last couple seasons were pretty good, but 1948 was the last season in which he was really a star performer. At least season was a good one: he won just the second Sawamura award ever given out in 1948. (Bessho won the inaugural award a year earlier.)

Statistically, what is most noticeable about him was his ability to strike batters out. When he was young his strikeout rate was almost double the league average. That’s… that’s not something you can really do today. To double the league K rate in the 2018 AL you would need to strike out 17 batters per nine innings, which is something that no one has ever done. Gerrit Cole led the AL this year with a mark a bit above 12. Which is remarkable in its own right (especially considering that he’s a starting pitcher), but nothing like what Nakao was doing. He finished with a 209-127 record – which is good – and would have done much better if he hadn’t lost the heart of his career to the war. Which, as tragedies resulting from WWII go, is pretty low on the list, but it’s still regrettable. He served in the army, but I have been unable to determine whether he ever saw combat. With some very notable exceptions, prominent American ball players mostly did not. Likewise, I have found a suspiciously high percentage of Japanese players that were given not-very-dangerous postings (of course these things are relative, given how thoroughly the Japanese main islands were bombed, even civilians were in considerable danger), so there may have been some element of favoritism going on in the Japanese military as well. Although, as Eiji Sawamura can attest, not as much as in the American military.

As might be expected from an extraordinary strikeout pitcher, he was also extremely wild. He once threw a no hitter despite allowing ten baserunners on walks and hit batsmen. (It was the fifth no hitter in JBL history.) His walk totals were regularly among the league leaders. Nolan Ryan was the Platonic form of this kind of pitcher. Notice that despite all the no-hitters, Ryan never pitched a perfect game. A Nakao/Ryan comparison isn’t apt, however, because Ryan was basically indestructible, whereas Nakao was very destructible. His innings pitched totals dropped and his ERA rose dramatically starting in his late twenties, basically the opposite of Ryan. Actually, on second thought, it’s Nakao who is the Platonic form of the pitcher with a blazing fastball but no idea where its going. At least Ryan struck out more batters than he walked. That’s not something that Nakao can say.

After retiring Nakao coached in the Giants’ system. As a coach he subscribed to Kawakami’s intense training philosophy, and he (and Kawakami) came in for criticism when a young pitcher (Toshihiko Yoguchi) had a nervous breakdown, was hospitalized, and died. Officially the cause of death was heart failure, but Whiting reports that an investigation by the Shuken Post concluded that it was suicide.

By 1955 Nakao was the team captain of the Giants. I don’t know exactly what this means. In America its an entirely honorary post. In Japan its different than the team’s manager, but I don’t know what duties accompany it. Anyway, I discovered this tidbit in the 2/25/55 issue of the Kingston Gleaner. It contained an article about a goodwill tour that the Giants engaged in across South America, Jamaica, the D.R. and neighboring countries.

Fun fact: this thread has made its way into Google’s algorithm. While researching this post I encountered one of my earlier posts in which I mentioned Nakao.

Today’s card is from the JGA 19 set. The picture picked up every speck of dirt on the card, in hand it looks a good bit nicer than this picture. The card was distributed in the 1/1/52 issue of Shonen Club magazine. Originally it was a part of a 16 card sheet that was then cut into individual cards by the kid with the magazine subscription. Engel calls it a game card: above and below the picture of the player are printed the names of baseball plays. It is not clear to me that this is sufficient to make it a game card, how you are supposed to use the names of baseball plays to play a game is not exactly clear. My card is actually cut down quite a bit, as the names of the plays are completely gone.

Engel says that this set has an R4 rarity, fewer than ten of each card known. Now, Engel's rarity classifications are not to be trusted, and I have no idea how many of these cards are out there. But it would make sense if they were pretty unusual. It’s not like you could stop into the store at any point all summer and pick up a wax pack of these. These cards were distributed with one issue of one magazine.

[nat]

Shosei Go had a long career, mostly in the outfield, for the Giants, Tigers, and Mainichi Orions. He broke in in 1937 and played until 1957. Oddly, after playing the thirties and early forties as an outfielder, he spent a considerable part of 1946 pitching. And then he went right back to being an outfielder. Especially when he was young, Go was a really terrific player. What stands out immediately is that he was fast. For example, he stole 54 bases in 84 games in 1943. That’s pretty amazing. To American eyes his stat line looks like that of a speedy leadoff hitter with good on-base skills, but given the environment in which he played (e.g., one with absolutely zero offense), he was actually terrific at every offensive aspect of the game. He had great on-base skills, to go with lots of power. He was hitting .300 in leagues that collectively had batting averages below .200. Even if you’re not hitting lots of home runs (and he wasn’t), that’s going to give you a lot more power than most of the people in the league. For that all-around skill set in a very weak league, it’s tempting to compare him to Ty Cobb. On the other hand, Cobb is a top-5 player all-time, and Go isn’t that. But they were both really fast, with really high batting averages (in context), and high slugging percentages that are due more to high batting averages than to lots of home runs. Other people you might compare him to have severe deficiencies in their cases. “A faster Kirby Puckett” came to mind as a comp, but Go was better at getting on base than Puckett was. Maybe “Rod Carew with more power” would give you the right idea, but none of these comps are really very good ones.

Despite his power (or because of his speed) he was a leadoff hitter. He recorded a pair of batting titles, and led the league in stolen bases once. In addition, he was the 1943 MVP.

As a pitcher he was above average. But he didn’t spend much time doing it. He was a more-or-less full-time pitcher in 1946, but he appeared in only four other games as a pitcher throughout the rest of his career. A casual perusal of the internet fails to yield an explanation as to why one of the game’s top position players would temporarily become a pitcher.

His nickname was ‘The Human Locomotive’, and hails from Taiwan originally. If you count him as foreign-born he leads all foreign-born Japanese players in stolen bases. But considering that Taiwan was a Japanese colony when he was born, it’s something of a fraught issue. Albright regards him as the 45th greatest player in Japanese history, and the greatest outfielder of the one-league era (that is, before 1950).

Finding a Go card took some patience. For whatever reason (maybe none?) I’d been looking for a Go card in particular for quite a while. The first one that I saw was a round menko, but it was being sold as part of a large lot that I didn’t want. This is only the second one that I’ve ever found; since I bought this one I’ve located one other, but didn’t need it any more. Part of the (apparent) scarcity of Go cards is due to the fact that he retired right as they started producing tobacco-style menko cards, which, in my experience, are far more common than other kinds of vintage Japanese cards. Engel has only one set listed from 1956, and only a couple from 1957. So he’s not in any of the really common sets. But there were plenty of pre-tobacco-style sets that he could have appeared in, so it may just be random variation that accounts for the fact that I’ve encountered relatively few Go cards. There aren’t many Japanese cards for sale period, so it wouldn’t take much to have an unrepresentative sample. In any case, this card is a bromide, from JBR 2. It was issued in 1950. At this point Go had a couple outstanding seasons left, but he was getting older and starting into a late career slide. Not that he ended up being bad exactly, he just declined from excellent to good.

My apologies for the time between posts. Part of it is that I’ve been busy, and the last couple days I blame the World Series. I’ve also burned through most of my backlog of cards – I’ve got just a couple other hall of famers in hand that I haven’t written up yet – so pretty soon posts are going to have to wait until more mail from Japan arrives.

[nat]

There is a peculiar gift to making the familiar seem unfamiliar. J.K. Rowling’s platform 9 ¾ did it well (at least for those who frequent King’s Cross). Disaster movies play on this all the time: world famous streets, usually teeming with life, completely empty, famous landmarks toppled over.

I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes, but I’m going to try.

Hideki Matsui is one of the all-time greats. He is a fearsome slugger, who also posted on-base percentages north of 400 for seven years running. He broke into baseball as a raw 19 year old in 1993, slugging a modest 451. By the time he was 28 his slugging percentage was just shy of 700. That year he hit 50 home runs and he walked more than he struck out. In fact, look at this slash line: 334/461/692. Mike Trout has never matched any of those numbers, much less put them all up in the same year. To be fair, he was only one point off on OBP this year, but he’s never been particularly close to either of the other marks. And of course he’s never hit 50 home runs either. I don’t know whether Matsui got nicknamed ‘Godzilla’ before or after leaving Japan, but it’s apt. Throughout his 20s he was a monster, smashing his way through Tokyo. Or at least the Tokyo Dome.

Matsui is a line-drive hitter, who has power to his pull side. A natural right hander, he nevertheless bats lefthanded. (This is surprisingly common. I guess it’s a good idea if you can manage it, but I can’t even imagine batting left handed.) His reputation as a tremendous player predates his professional career. He appeared in Koshien tournament four times, once drawing five (!) intentional walks in a single game.

Statistically, the American player that he most reminds me of is Sammy Sosa. Matsui’s own transition to American did not go quite as well as expected – this is why “Hideki Matsui, all-time great” might seem odd to American audiences. Davenport suggested that >90% of his production would carry over to his new environs. That didn’t happen. It’s not that he was bad or anything. On the contrary, he’s got a World Series MVP trophy to show off. But he hit a total of 16 home runs in his first season (162 games!) in MLB, and his annual output topped out at 31. In Japan he was Sammy Sosa, in America he was, well, Hideki Matsui. After his age 38 season he hung up his spikes for the last time. In Japan he played for the Giants, in America he spent most of his time with the Yankees (and brief stints with the A’s, Angels, and Rays). The Golden Player’s Club counts production in MLB, provided that a player began his career in Japan prior to coming over, so Matsui gets credit for what he did on this side of the Pacific. Consequently, he is a member of both of Japan’s halls of fame. Post-retirement he has stayed in the US. He has a house in Connecticut, and is a roving minor-league hitting instructor for the Yankees.

He's a clip of Matsui in action.

My card is from the 1997 BBM set. Pretty much in the middle of his career in Japan. I’ll free this card from its case eventually. The case is cracked (and is BCCG anyway). I just haven’t gotten around to it.

[nolemmings]

I appreciate the thread--I think. Didn't own any Japanese cards until a few days ago, until I won the three below-- an Oh rookie with two Starffins. Now I find myself searching through even more cards on Ebay.

[nat]

Nice way to start a Japanese collection! An Oh rookie is always nice, and I really like that bromide. Much though I adore menko cards, in some ways I like the black and white photography on bromides even more.

When you said that you were new to collecting Japanese cards, my first thought was to direct you to Prestige Collectibles. But I see that that's not really necessary!

[dictoresno]

Originally Posted by nolemmings

I appreciate the thread--I think. Didn't own any Japanese cards until a few days ago, until I won the three below-- an Oh rookie with two Starffins. Now I find myself searching through even more cards on Ebay.

What set is that middle one from? My buddy has a card with the same back and can’t figure out what year, set or player it is.