Japanese HOF Project

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Yasunori Oshima was a 1B/OF who played mostly for Chunichi (and a while with the Fighters) from 1971 to 1994. He had a very long career, but many of his seasons were abbreviated, and indeed failed to clear 100 hits in many seasons. That makes Meikyukai membership all the more impressive. Lots of players just barely qualify – it seems likely to me that they hang on just to get their 2000th hit – but Oshima got up to 2200. No threat to Harimoto or anything, but it looks like he was active for four seasons after qualifying for the Meikyukai. He had power (382 career home runs) but no speed; about what you expect from a corner outfielder/first baseman. Oshima’s best season was 1979, in which he hit 36 home runs, drove in 103, posted a 317/376/603 line, and recorded 302 total bases. Pretty good given a 130 game season. Superficially he reminds me of David Justice, but the fact that Oshima played ten years longer than did Justice suggests that he’s not the best comp.

Some of the part-time seasons were due to taking a long time to find a regular gig with the Dragons. He was originally drafted as a pitcher. Many of his early seasons involved a lot of pinch hitting. So even if he was appearing in nearly all of his team’s games, he still wasn’t getting a whole lot of playing time.

The trade from Chunichi to Nippon Ham was for Tomio Tanaka and Tatsuo Omiya. Tanaka was a lousy starting pitcher. Omiya was a catcher who had been decent, but by 1987 was a rather poor back up. Oshima was quite old at this point. I guess Nippon Ham got the better end of the deal – neither of the guys they gave up were any good – but it wasn’t the most consequential of trades.

Oshima ranks in the top 20 in a bunch of offensive categories, but that’s mostly a result of his extraordinarily long career. He was good – don’t get me wrong – but he wasn’t the kind of transcendent talent you think of when someone tells you that he’s top 20 in hits (and 22nd in home runs). He was a multi-time all-star, but never made a best-nine.

As near as I can make out from his Japanese Wikipedia page, Oshima had been a fan of sumo and the Hanshin Tigers when he was a child. Despite his affection for the Tigers, it was the Dragons who drafted him, and after he was drafted it was Shigeru Mizuhara who turned him into a position player. Post-retirement he managed the Fighters briefly and unsuccessfully, and served as a baseball commentator.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

1977 Calbee

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It’s time for another menko.

This is post #2 about Minoru Murayama. The card below is for my Meikyukai collection. (Previous post here.)

My previous post covers Murayama pretty well (and bio on thehanshintigers.com does it even better), so this one is just a few tidbits I uncovered, plus a card.

• The Giants offered him a signing bonus of 4x what the Tigers offered, but Hanshin also promised lifetime employment if the baseball thing didn’t work out, so he turned down the Giants’ money.

• He was the first professional Japanese athlete to sign a deal (as a member of their advisory staff) with a sporting goods company (SSK Baseball Products). He continued to help them develop baseball equipment into the 1970s.

• His #11 is one of only three numbers retired by the Tigers (Fujimura #10, Yoshida #23)

• He led the league in ERA three times – including his penultimate season, to go along with twice leading the league in wins, and three times each in CG, SHO and IP.

• Albright ranks him as the 64th best player in Japanese history. And while I haven’t gone though his list in detail, my initial reaction is that that seems low.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: Yes

My card is from the JCM 14g set. It was issued in 1964, so towards the end of the tobacco-menko era. There are a number of “families” of menko cards, and JCM 14 is one of the larger. It has a bunch of sets that were released between 1959 and 1964 that are very similar to each other. JCM 14f is one of the sets that was imported into the US; the primary difference between this set and that one (besides the checklist) is that 14f has the team name printed on the back of the card. Some of the sets in this family are hard to get ahold of, but this one isn’t.

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Here’s a Hideki Matsui card for the Meikyukai collection. (Earlier write-up here.)

As I suspect anyone reading this knows, Matsui defected from Yomiuri after the 2002 season, signing with the Yankees. He stayed with them through 2007, after which he spent a few seasons with the Angels/A’s/Rays to finish out his career. When he left Japan, Matsui had 332 career home runs and 1390 hits. He added 1253 hits and 175 home runs on this side of the Pacific.

What I want to do today is estimate what his career would have looked like if he hadn’t left Japan. Of course you can’t actually know this, but an educated guess is possible. Here’s how I’m going to do it. The Davenport Translation of his 1996 is about 25% better than his actually 2003 MLB performance. So I’m going to take his actual 1996 stats, and reduce them by 25%, and use that as his projected 2003. After that I’m going to find changes in his actual performance from year to year, and adjust his projected performance by the same amount. So, say that his performance from one year to the next decreased by x%. I’m going to take his projected performance for the first year, and multiply it by 1-x to get his projected performance for the next year. That way his projected aging pattern matches his actual aging pattern.

My calculations give him an additional 803 hits and 312 home runs, for career totals of 2193 hits and 644 home runs. Fewer hits because the season is shorter, but more home runs, because Japanese players tend to lose a lot of power when they come to MLB. If this is right he would still have gotten Meikyukai membership, and would have ended up third all-time for home runs in Japan. It also gives him a career slash line of 297/399/611. There are some oddities of this little system that aren’t especially believable. Most notably, the fact that his home run total doubled from 2003 to 2004 makes his 2004 projection a bit screwy. But this is just for fun, so it’s good enough.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame – Yes

1999 Calbee SP. This set is a premium that you could only get by sending in “winner” cards from packs of Calbee chips.

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Makoto Matsubara was mostly a first baseman (also sometimes a third baseman) who played 1962 to 1980 with Taiyo, and a few games in 1981 with the Giants. He seems to have originally been a catcher, and appeared in at least one game at every infield position, and also spent 49 games in the outfield. For his career he totaled 2095 hits, 331 home runs, and a 276/330/465 line. On the face of it those numbers don’t seem too good, but he was playing a relatively low-offense league. In context, he was a star. Matsubara made 11 all-star teams, but having to compete with Oh and Nagashima kept him out of the best nine.

He had the misfortune of spending most of his career with the Whales. They were to the Central League as the St. Louis Browns were to the American League. They managed a couple second-place finishes, but a plurality of the seasons in which he played for them they finished fifth. In his one season with the Giants, however, they won the Japan Series (of course).

Since retirement Matsubara has been active with the Meikyukai. In particular, he been working with the Meikyukai to popularize baseball around southeast Asia. As of 2017 he was working with local teams in Malaysia.

And here’s a tumblr page with a whole bunch of Mastubara cards on it.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

1976 Calbee. It’s from a “then-and-now” style subset.

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Here's my original post about Kadota.

Kadota was an outfielder for the first half of his career, and a DH for the second half. He played for Nankai from 1970 to 1988, Orix in 89 and 90, and Daiei in 91 and 92. He's weird in a bunch of ways. Or, rather, he's weird in that he seems to be impervious to the laws of aging, and this manifests itself in a bunch of ways.

He was good as a young man. And good (perhaps even better, although eyeballing the adjustments necessary to account for changing context is hard) when he was an old man. And good even as a very old man. He had an above average OPS at the age of 44.

Consistency is really valuable. Hank Aaron was a great player, but what made him a GREAT player is that he never had an off year. (Cf. also Mike Trout) Kadota was the same way.

I was trying to think of a comparable American player, but there aren't any good fits. He's got Aaron's consistency. And he was a huge slugger. But Aaron played a good right field, whereas Kadota was a DH. But there aren't any American DHs, or even first basemen, that, in context, hit like Kadota did. If you adjust his HR totals for differences in the length of the American vs. Japanese season, you end up with 680. There are no good matches up that high in the US. Bonds, Aaron, and Ruth were better fielders. Rodriguez was an infielder. Mays was a much better fielder. Pujols doesn't have the consistency, neither does Sosa. Thome, although also a slugging DH, wasn't the same kind of slugging DH. Thome and Kadota played in just about the same number of games in their respective careers, but Thome's walk and HR totals are far higher. Kadota put the ball in play a lot more than he did. Frank Thomas had a better batting eye. David Ortiz isn't too bad, although Kadota hit more home runs in fewer games than did Ortiz.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: Yes

Two cards today. One is from 1987 Calbee, the other is 1988.

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Norihiro Komada played 1B/OF for the Giants and Bay Stars from 1983 to 2000. He got a slow start – looks to have been mostly a pinch hitter for his first few seasons, but was a starter at 24 and thereafter missed very few games. Offensively he had good but rarely great power, decent on base skills, and no speed. Although he was a six-time all-star, 1x best-nine, and 10x gold glove winner, and qualified for the Meikyukai, the highlight of his career was probably his very first at bat. He hit a grand slam on April 10, 1983, on his first trip to the plate. The first Japanese player to accomplish that feat.

Komada was drafted out of high school, and although he hit .490 in high school, he was selected by the Giants as a pitcher. That didn’t last. Motoshi Fujita, managing the Giants at the time, moved him to first base before he saw any big league action on the mound.

He left the Giants after 1993 in order to make room for Hiromitsu Ochiai, who was to take over at first base. During the 1980s the Lions were the dominant team in Japan, but Komada managed to win the Japan Series with Yomiuri once. After heading to the Bay Stars, he got another chance, taking home the championship in 1998. The Bay Stars were known as the “machine gun offense” because of the regularity with which they delivered hits. The machine gun offense was led by second baseman Bobby Rose, who hit 325 with 19 home runs. Komada, despite being the first baseman, was one of the worst-hitting regulars on the team.

If you just take his offense, Komada looks like a minor star. Somebody like Shawn Green. But the ten gold gloves tell a different story. If his defense really was that good, his American counterpart is more like Keith Hernandez.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

1998 Calbee

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It’s easy to think of the Meikyukai’s 2000 hit qualification as analogous to the MLB 3000 hit club. But it’s not. The seasons are much closer in length than that. To get something analogous the qualification for the Meikyukai would need to be closer to 2400 hits. And if it was, a LOT of the players in the Meikyukai would not qualify.

Case in point: Hiromasa Arai. He hung on through a truly dreadful age 40 season to eclipse the 2000 hit mark, and retired at the end of the year. Plenty of other guys retired basically immediately after reaching 2000, but their teams were willing to let them continue to chase it even if they eat up an otherwise valuable roster spot. If the line were 2400 obviously there would still be guys doing this, but there would be a lot less of it, and the players doing it would generally be of a higher quality.

Anyways, Arai spent 18 seasons playing ichi-gun ball in Japan. From 1975 to 1985 he was with Nankai, and the balance of his career with Kintetsu. That’s the Hawks and the Buffaloes. Arai was an outfielder with basically no power and relatively little speed. He topped ten homers in a season twice, and while he often got into double digits in steals, that’s about all that you can say WRT his speed. That said, he was a good player. But his game was putting the ball where fielders can’t reach it. Basically all of his offensive value was tied to his batting average. He did walk more than he struck out, but he didn’t really do much of either. I’m imaging a guy with amazing bat control, but who never saw a pitch that he didn’t like. His best season came, surprisingly, as a 35 year old. He posted an on base percentage that was well above average, to go along with a healthy slugging percentage. But, as usual, both were driven by his batting average, in this case a career-high 366. For his career Arai sported a 291/342/395 batting line.

He was a product of the baseball powerhouse high school PL Gakuen, but did not go pro immediately. The Buffaloes selected him in the ninth round of the draft out of high school, but he was apparently not well thought of at the time (he says they didn’t even send a scout out to see him). So instead of signing he attended Hosei University and later joined the Hawks. By my count he was selected to the best nine three times, but never won an MVP award. The Buffaloes went to the Japan Series in 1989 (his only chance at a flag). And while the Buffaloes lost the Series, the Fighting Spirit Award (basically the MVP for the losing team) went to Arai.

Since retiring Arai has spent some time coaching, and has also been doing goodwill work with the Meikyukai. As of 2013 he was helping develop a baseball program in Cambodia. Two of his daughters won a Miss Japan beauty contest. One of them has athletic ambitions – she was doing something with tennis in Cambodia, and more recently worked with something called the Three Hearts Foundation to help build the popularity of baseball in Singapore. Arai and Hideo Nomo also took part in the Singaporean outreach program. Currently he is a coach with SoftBank.

Meikyukai: Yes - Hall of Fame: No

1990 Calbee