Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Shinya Miyamoto was Yakult’s shortstop (and sometimes third baseman) from 1995 to 2013. He qualified for Meikyukai as a 41 year old, in 2012, and finished his career with 2133 hits. In total, he posted a slash line of 285/329/350. That should tell you a lot about him. Somewhat surprisingly, for a shortstop with no power, he also had very little speed. For his career he stole 111 bases, which works out to an average of about five or six per year.

Do you remember Placido Polanco? Polanco put up a slash line of 297/343/397, despite playing the first part of his career during MLB’s silly ball era. (Actually, his career almost perfectly overlaps Miyamoto; Polanco played from 1998 to 2013.) Seemingly every year in the 2000s, my fantasy baseball team would manage to be short an infielder, and so I somehow always ended up with Placido Polanco. Polanco could do exactly one thing well (that was relevant to fantasy baseball), he could hit for a good batting average. Other than that – nothing. Zero power, zero speed. Polanco moved around the diamond a bit more than did Miyamoto, but in a lot of ways, these guys are twins. They were active during basically the same time. Miyamoto picked up nine more hits than did Polanco. Polanco’s batting average was a bit higher than was Miyamoto (it took him 200 more games to get those extra nine hits), but batting average was the best part of Miyamoto’s offensive game, just like it was for Polanco. Neither had any power. Miyamoto didn’t even hit doubles, not really. Polanco was a little bit better at drawing walks – he had 30 more of them in 200 fewer games.

Now, focusing on his offense would really be beside the point in a discussion of Miyamoto’s baseball career. This man was a shortstop, back when that meant something. He won nine gold gloves. And while I don’t have fielding statistics for Japan, I assume that a guy who wins nine gold gloves must have been really good out there. Thing is, Polanco was also a really good fielder. He won a pair of gold gloves, and while the years in which he won them were not his best fielding years, he did have some seasons in which he was really sharp with the glove. In 2001 he recorded 23 rField (that’s expected runs saved through fielding) which is better than Ozzie Smith’s second-best season. (In his best season Ozzie saved an incredible 32 runs.) Now, that was far and away Polanco’s best fielding season, but the point is that he was a really sharp fielder.

Miyamoto had notable pedigree in baseball. Yoshio Yoshida was his coach when he was a youngster, and in high school he won at Koshien. (With PL Gakuen, the baseball powerhouse that also featured Kazuhiro Kiyohara.) He did not, however, go straight to the pros after college, playing in the industrial leagues first.

In the late 1990s he was convicted of tax evasion, and was sentenced to ten months in prison along with a lengthy probationary period and a fine of 3.5 million yen.

After retiring he was a baseball commentator for a while, before coaching Yakult. And in 2018 he took over the field manager position with them.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

2002 BBM.

[nat]

I don't have time to write substantive posts at the moment, and don't know when I will. So for now at least I'll post guys in the Meikyukai that are also in the hall of fame. (And so for whom I already did a post.)

Here's Hisashi Yamada. Long-time submarine pitcher for the Braves and 3x MVP winner.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame - Yes

1984 Calbee

[nat]

Kazuhiro Sasaki is one of the few relief pitchers in the Meikyukai. (Off the top of my head, I can't think of any others. But I'm sure that I'm forgetting someone.) I've written about him before.

Sasaki, as you may recall, played for the Mariners from 2000-2003. He was pretty good. (138 ERA+, 3.7 WAR in 220 innings) This card is from the 1998 Calbee set, in 1998 Sasaki was at the height of his powers in Japan.

Word is that 1998 is the first of the really common Calbee sets. And that seems to check out. In my experience 1998-and-later Calbees are almost as common as BBM cards, which means that they're common. Whereas earlier Calbee cards are a hit-or-miss affair. I don't know why that is.

[Northviewcats]

Normally I would post this on the BST. But I am pretty sure that the only interest will be in the members that regularly visit this thread.

I truly admire the passion that you have for Japanese baseball cards. I had hoped to share the enthusiasm, by building a collection of my own. But I am struggling to hold interest in the project mainly because I cannot read Japanese.

I have decided to try and sell my small Japanese collection in the coming months.

However, if anyone here is interested in any of the cards that I posted in this thread I would like to give you first crack at adding them to your collection. Feel free to contact me through PM.

Thanks for all your help identifying the players and sharing your knowledge of baseball in Japan.

Best regards,

Joe

[nat]

Kimiyasu Kudo is a member of both the hall of fame and the Meikyukai. Among his career highlights, he:

• played in 29 seasons
• played in 14 Japan Series
• won the Japan Series 10 times
• was a 2x Japan Series MVP
• was a 2x Pacific League MVP
• was an 8x all-star
• won 3 gold gloves

He's a southpaw who pitched for the Lions from 1982 to 1994, the Hawks from 1995 to 1999, the Giants from 2000 to 2006, the BayStars from 2007 to 2009, and then finished with another stint on the Lions in 2010.

The card is from 2002 BBM. Presumably a subset of some kind. I like the front of this one better than most modern card designs. Which, granted, is a low bar, but still, it's pretty good. I also appreciate it that the card is printed on nice and sturdy stock. You'd think it wouldn't matter, but I much prefer a card with a little heft to it. (Long live Goudeys. Those things are basically hockey pucks.)

[nat]

Kazahiro Yamauchi is a guy to whom I was unfair in my first write-up. I compared him to Duke Snider. And, while being compared to a legitimate hall of famer isn't very harsh criticism, Yamauchi was, in his game, a greater player than was Snider. Superficially their statistics look pretty similar, but in context they're not.

Yamauchi was a 13x all-star (that's from baseball-reference, his Japanese Wikipedia page says 16x), 10x best-nine, and the 1960 MVP. He was the first Japanese player to reach 300 home runs, and the second to get to 2000 hits. When he retired he was the all-time leader in doubles. (Since he was the first to 300 home runs, he must have been the all-time home run leader at some point.) He still ranks in the top ten in some offensive categories, and top twenty in many.

As near as I can tell, he led the league in doubles four times and home runs twice. Looks like he was also a 4x RBI leader, took home one batting title, led the league in OBP 4x, and slugging 3x.

Yeah, so the Duke Snider comp was wrong. He's more like Frank Robinson.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Yes

This is my first gum card. Engel calls the set "Lili" gum. The guy that I bought it from (who is Japanese) calls it "Lilly" gum. Now, I don't doubt that 'Lili' is the correct transliteration of the Japanese symbols, but I wonder how it's pronounced. Is it supposed to be an importation of the English word for the flower (even if it's not spelled that way)? On the back it gives the name of the company as リリー. The former symbols have a 'ri' sound. The latter extends a vowel (if I remember my high school Japanese classes).

The card itself is tiny. It's printed on thick cardboard, but it's less than one inch on a side. Maybe packaged with a single piece of gum? It's got a designation of R3 - meaning you aren't likely to run into very many of them. Now, it may just be the very limited number of suppliers that I've got to buy Japanese cards from, but in my experience gum cards are much harder to find than menko cards of corresponding rarities. The guy that I bought this from had several Lili cards for sale, but that was the first (and so far only) time that I've ever encountered them.

[nat]

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.

[Exhibitman]

More bromides from the 1949 Seals tour:


O'Doul with Betto and Wakabayashi



Translations would be appreciated.

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

More bromides from the 1949 Seals tour:


O'Doul with Betto and Wakabayashi



Translations would be appreciated.

Upper Left: Bit hard to make out, I think it says "Young Coach" then "Itouru" which is probably a mangling of someobody's name.

Upper right: Third Baseman Frank Shofner

Lower Left: Spring Training

Lower Right: The Seals' Dynamite Lineup

[nat]

Sadaharu Oh

1. Preliminary Remarks

There are some figures that are so humongous that they are hard to comprehend. There are 225,622 miles between here and the moon. The Pacific Ocean weighs 1.483×10^21 pounds. That sort of thing. Here is another: Sadaharu Oh hit 868 homeruns.

Eight hundred and sixty-eight.

There are a number of ways you can try to make sense of this record. One is to ask what a similar record in the US would look like. Another, and one that American baseball fans inevitably ask when they start thinking about Oh, is to ask how many home runs he would have hit if he had played in the US. The “what if he had played in the US?” question is partly asked out of sheer parochialism, and part of it is a disbelief that someone could accomplish a feat that seems to be impossible in the American game, but part of it is hoping that there is some way to comprehend this record, something that would make it intelligible. Like when Bill Nye builds a scale model of the solar system.

This is my second post about Oh. You can read the first one here. There’s been enough written about Oh, including by Oh himself, that you don’t need me to tell much of his story. So in this post I’m going to play with some numbers. In particular, I’m going to take a swing (if you’ll forgive the baseball metaphor) at answering the questions posed in the last paragraph. The first question—what would a similar US record look like?—is relatively straightforward. And I’ll answer that one in a minute. The other—what would he have done if he had played in the US?—is utterly unanswerable. A bit later I’ll explain why, and then I’ll make an effort at answering some other related questions.


2. Oh’s production in an American context

Oh played from 1959 to 1980. He spent his entire career with the Yomiuri Giants. I am going to use the most straightforward way that I can think of to translate his production into an American context. Basically, what I’m going to do is compare Oh’s homerun rate to league average, and then use the resulting figure to calculate what a comparable homerun rate would be in the target league (I’m going to use the NL from 1959 to 1980). Then I’ll adjust Oh’s plate appearances by the difference in league schedules, and multiply the adjusted homerun rate by this number of plate appearances.

The math is just arithmetic, but I’ll explain each step and then provide the formula. Since we want to know how much better Oh was at hitting homeruns than his contemporaries, we need to know how good they were at hitting homeruns. So the first step is to divide the number of plate appearances that batters in the Central League recorded by the number of homeruns that they hit. That gives us:

(LgPA/LgHR)

We’re going to want to compare this number to Oh’s homerun rate, so we then divide Oh’s PA by his HRs. And we get the comparison between Oh and the league by dividing the league homerun rate by Oh’s. So far we’ve got:

(LgPA/LgHR)/(Oh’s PA/Oh’s HR)

So, for example, in 1964 the Central League hit a homerun every 38.6 PA, and Oh hit one every 10.8 PA. Divide the first number by the second number, and you find that Oh was about 3.5x more efficient at hitting homeruns than was the 1964 Central League. Now, we are interested in translating Oh’s performance into MLB context, so we need to calculate MLB homerun rates:

MLB_PA/MLB_HR

Then you divide the latter number by the former number. This tells you how many plate appearances an MLB player would go between home runs, if he was as far above league average at hitting home runs as Oh was:

(MLB_PA / MLB_HR) / ((LgPA/LgHR) / (Oh’s PA/Oh’s HR))

In 1964 National League players hit a home run about once ever 50.5 plate appearances. If you divide that by 3.5 you get 14.42. So, to be as far above NL average as Oh was above CL average in 1964, you would need to hit a homerun once every 14.42 plate appearances.

That gives us a rate stat, but we want a counting stat: a number of home runs. So we need to do three things. We need to adjust Oh’s plate appearances by the difference in the schedule length between MLB and Japan. We then need to adjust this number by the percentage of league games that Oh actually appeared in. Finally, we divide this adjusted number of plate appearances by the rate that we calculated above. The number of games the Central League played varied by year, but was usually 130. MLB season length switched in 1962 from 154 games to 162, so there will be some differences in the calculations from year-to-year, but the general idea is this:

(Oh’s PA)*((#NL games/#CL games)*(Oh’s games played/#CL games))

Let’s go through this part slowly. “Oh’s PA” is just his actual number of plate appearances. “#NL games” is the number of games scheduled in the National League, either 154 or 162 depending on the year. “#CL games” is the number of games in the Central League, either 130 or 140. Dividing NL games by CL games tells us how much longer, in percentage terms, the NL season is. We’re going to multiply Oh’s actual PA in order to account for the fact that an American version of Oh would have played in more games, but he doesn’t get credit for the entire difference in the schedule, because Oh missed some games here and there. That’s what “(Oh’s games played/#CL games)” is all about. It tells us what percentage of Central League games Oh actually played in. By multiplying the (percentage) difference in the league schedules by the percentage of games that Oh actually played in, we ensure that our Oh clone doesn’t get too much credit for playing in a league with a longer season.

So, this whole figure gives us a number of MLB-adjusted plate appearances for our Oh clone. If we divide this number by the average number of plate appearances per homerun (calculated above), we get our MLB translation for Oh’s homerun production. Here’s the final formula:

((Oh’s PA)*((#NL games/#CL games)*(Oh’s games played/#CL games))) / ((MLB_PA / MLB_HR) / ((LgPA/LgHR) / (Oh’s PA/Oh’s HR)))

Feel free to check my math, but I think that works. I did this calculation for each season of Oh’s career, and then summed the number of homeruns hit in each season (rounded to the nearest whole, it looks odd to have him hitting 45.2 homeruns). Here’s the table:

Year HRs
1959 9
1960 27
1961 25
1962 65
1963 45
1964 56
1965 62
1966 65
1967 43
1968 33
1969 40
1970 52
1971 37
1972 43
1973 56
1974 36
1975 26
1976 26
1977 38
1978 27
1979 23
1980 21
Total 855

In a curious twist, the differences in season length almost completely make up for differences in homerun rates. Translated into the National League, 868 homeruns in the 1959-1980 Central League is… 855 homeruns. Yowza. The top figure is 65, a number achieved in both 1962 and 1966. (Years in which Oh actually hit 38 and 47 homeruns.) Ten of these figures would have led the league: 1962-1967, 1970, and 1972-1974.

(Incidentally, does anyone know how to insert a table into a Net54 post? I tried HTML, and it accepted the code but yielded weird results. Obvious possibility is that I was doing it wrong, but any advice is appreciated.)


3. The counterfactual question

It’s important to see that the foregoing does not tell you what Oh himself would have done if he had played in the National League. It tells you what a player who was as much better than NL average as Oh was better than CL average would have done. If the counterfactual question ‘how many home runs would Oh have hit if he had played in the National League?’ is taken literally, I don’t think that there’s any way to answer it. A 19 year old Sadaharu Oh might have gotten homesick during spring training, gone home, and joined Yomiuri. Or he might not have been able to keep up with a 162 game schedule and succumbed to chronic injuries. Or he might have been just fine. There’s no way to tell.

So the counterfactual question is unanswerable. We can, however, answer another question that might be found in the vicinity of that one. To explain that question, I think it would be best if I were to talk about MLEs for a while.

‘MLE’ stands for Major League Equivalence. You use MLEs to evaluate minor league performance. The idea is that you’ve got Joe McMinorLeaguer and you want to know what to expect from him. You’ve got his minor league numbers, but they were put up against minor league pitching, in minor league ballparks, and so on. And it’s hard to know what they tell you about his potential major league performance. So what you do is you find a bunch of players who have appeared in the same minor league as Joe and also appeared in the major leagues, and you see how strong the correlation was between their minor league performance and their major league performance. (It’s obviously a lot better if they played in the majors during the same year that they played in Joe’s league.) You then assume that Joe’s numbers would translate as well as this comparison class, and you adjust his minor league numbers accordingly. Those major league equivalences are not what Joe would have done if he had been in the major leagues—that’s unknowable—but they do give you some idea about what he would have done, and they can be fed into a projection system with some degree of confidence that the projection it will give you isn’t just nonsense.

The crucial bit for my purposes is that you can do this with Japanese statistics too. The guy to look to here is Clay Davenport, co-founder of Baseball Prospectus and guru of baseball statistics. His Davenport Translations give us just what we want. He’s got two sets of translations, a normal one and a ‘peak’ translation. I’m not clear on the differences between the two models, although it is obvious that the latter is more forgiving for hitters. Whether this is due to different comparison classes, or regressing numbers to the mean less (or more) aggressively, or what, I don’t know. In any case, here are the Davenport translations for Oh’s home runs:

Normal Translation

Year HRs
1959 3
1960 9
1961 7
1962 19
1963 18
1964 25
1965 22
1966 23
1967 20
1968 20
1969 18
1970 24
1971 19
1972 23
1973 26
1974 21
1975 16
1976 19
1977 19
1978 16
1979 13
1980 13
Total 393


Peak Translation

Year HRs
1959 5
1960 11
1961 8
1962 21
1963 19
1964 25
1965 22
1966 23
1967 20
1968 20
1969 18
1970 24
1971 19
1972 24
1973 27
1974 23
1975 18
1976 22
1977 24
1978 22
1979 19
1980 22
Total 436

Both versions of the Davenport Translation see Oh as a mid-range slugger in MLB. Perhaps his biggest strength was his consistency, so if an MLB team saw fit to keep a player with 20ish HR power at 1B, it’s not unreasonable to think that he could have had a very long career. Davenport uses the 1992 American League as his target league, so the statistics in the above tables are translated into that context.

However, the Davenport Translations don't account for differences in the league schedule. Once you work that in, the picture changes:


Peak

Year HRs
1959 5
1960 14
1961 10
1962 27
1963 25
1964 34
1965 28
1966 28
1967 25
1968 25
1969 22
1970 30
1971 24
1972 30
1973 34
1974 29
1975 22
1976 26
1977 30
1978 27
1979 22
1980 27
Total 544

That total would place him 17th all-time, just between David Ortiz and Mike Schmidt. Under the normal translation, adjusted for league schedule, he ends up with 486 home runs, good for 30th all time, above Adrian Beltre and Miguel Cabrera, and below Lou Gehrig and Fred McGriff.


4. The card

This is a post to a baseball card website, and so is ostensibly about a baseball card. So here’s a baseball card. It’s a 1977 Calbee. In 1977 Calbee released many sets; at least, Engel catalogues them as separate although closely related sets. (How they were actually distributed I don’t know.) I have been unable to determine which of the many ’77 Calbee sets this one belongs to. There is one promising candidate (although I don’t have my copy of Engel handy and I don’t remember which one it is), but the book says that the back of this particular set is framed by ‘weeds’—a leaf motif that turns up both on Calbee cards and on some menko sets. And my card doesn’t have a frame around the text on the back. So I can’t say any more than that it is a ’77 Calbee.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

[nat]

Tsutomu Wakamatsu was an outfielder with the Yakult Swallows from 1971 to 1989. He is a member of both the hall of fame and the Meikyukai. Accordingly, I've written about him before. Here’s my first post. I don’t have much to add, so this one will be fairly short. Wakamatsu was nicknamed “Mr. Swallows” and also “small hitter” (he’s 5’6” and 162). When he was in school he was an avid skier, and struggled with the decision about whether to focus on baseball or skiing. I think it’s safe to say that he made the right choice. He was a third round draft pick, and his first season he played for legendary manager Osamu Mihara, in the latter’s final managerial stop.

Wakamatsu’s game revolved around getting on base; he had a healthy on base percentage with a high batting average and medium power. His .319 career batting average is one of the better marks in Japanese history. In fact, it may be the best, depending on the restrictions that you put on qualified batters. It is the highest mark for batters with more than 5000 at bats, but if you drop that floor down to 4900 Leron Lee takes over the lead with a .320 mark. Wakamatsu’s on base percentage really was driven by his batting average. He didn’t walk much, and he struck out even less. His career high in walks was 49 in 1978, and in strike outs it was 43 in 1973. In some ways he’s sort of the opposite of the contemporary American player. Far from being a “three true outcome” batter, he nearly always put the ball into play.

After his playing career ended Wakamatsu spent a few years as a baseball commentator, before becoming a hitting coach, and eventually the manager of the Swallows. He held the top job with Yakult from 1999 to 2005.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

The card is from the 1976 Calbee set.

[nat]

Taira Fujita played 19 seasons with Hanshin (1966 to 1984), mostly at shortstop. He was a pretty good hitter, especially for a shortstop. Uncharacteristically for a shortstop, however, he was slow. In home runs he topped out at 28 (but was usually in the teens; those 28 homers placed him third in the league, behind Oh and Nagashima), but only twice did he manage double digit steals. For his career Fujita posted a 286/336/435 slash line, and he qualified for the Meikyukai with his 2000th hit in 1983. From 66 through 78 (his age 30 season) he mostly played short. In 1979 he suffered a serious injury; a few years before he’d started missing about 1/4th of the season, but in 79 he appeared in only 18 games due to a torn thigh muscle. Thereafter he was exclusively a first baseman. It’s a shame to shift your shortstop to a position as defensively unimportant as first base, but apparently the injury necessitated it, and based on a casual examination of Hanshin rosters, he doesn’t seem to have been blocking anyone who could have made better use of the roster spot. And his offense was strong enough to justify a spot at first base anyway – he won a batting title in 1981 (with a .358 mark). As one might expect from a shortstop, he was a good fielder at first base (winning a diamond glove award in addition to the batting title), and was selected to the best nine in 1981. Albright thinks well of him, regarding him as Japan’s 37th greatest player.

Fujita’s career started off strong. His rookie season was nothing special, but as a 19 year old sophomore he led the league in hits, doubles, and triples, and was selected to his first (of seven) best nine. I'm guessing that this wasn’t a surprise. Fujita’s high school team reached the Koshien finals, and he was the first player in Koshien history to hit two home runs in the same game. When he became the starting shortstop (as a 19 year old) he replaced hall of famer Yoshio Yoshida.

During 1978, in what is perhaps Fujita’s best-known accomplishment, he went 208 at bats without striking out. This is a record that would stand until Ichiro came along, and went (IIRC) 216 at bats without a K. He is also known for having a central role in the “Violent Tigers Incident”. In 1982, during what had apparently been a tense game, he hit a ball down the third base line that rolled foul. The Tigers’ third base coach claimed that a fielder had touched it before it rolled foul, but the umpires refused to change their call. Two Tiger coaches were much distressed by this, and an argument with the umpire eventually led to the coaches kicking and punching him. (Fines and suspensions were, of course, forthcoming.) As near as I can tell Fujita didn’t do anything wrong, but he was the one who hit the ball that started the whole thing.

After retiring Fujita coached and briefly managed the Tigers. Apparently his managerial stints did not go well. He was extremely harsh and unpopular with his players. The team finished in sixth place both seasons that he was in charge. He has also coached in an independent league, and served as a baseball commentator on TV.

As usual with Tigers players, thehanshintigers.com has a better write up than my meager attempt at biography.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

The card is from the 1976 Calbee set.

And a random note for people who like awesome stuff: Jim Allen has a run expectancy table for Japan.