Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

I meant to read The Meaning of Ichiro before writing this post. To that end, and given that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do anymore, I ordered a copy of it from Amazon. Now, about a year and a half ago I bought a house. In my old neighborhood packages got stolen off of the porch more often than they didn’t, so I always had packages delivered to work. My new neighborhood is safer, but I didn’t have any particular reason to change my delivery address. Long story short: my copy of The Meaning of Ichiro is waiting for me at work, where I will be able to pick it up at some indeterminate time in the distant future. So I don't know if there’s anything original in this post. Probably not. So forgive me if I’m rehashing stuff you’ve heard before.

There’s no reason to summarize Ichiro Suzuki’s career. Of everyone I’ve written about in this thread, he is almost certainly the person who is best-known to American audiences. (Maybe to Japanese audiences too?) What I’m going to talk about, instead, is why Ichiro matters.

Japanese players in MLB are sometimes referred to as ‘imports’, but that’s not really quite right. A “re-import” is something that is produced in one country, sold in another, and then imported back into the first. Japanese players in MLB are really re-imports. Baseball evolved out of rounders sometime in the late 18th to early 19th century. It was probably a gradual thing. Anyways, certainly by the civil war something recognizable as baseball was popular throughout New England and spreading west and southward. The war suddenly took it everywhere in the country.

In the 1870s baseball was introduced into Japan by Horace Wilson, an American professor at what is now Tokyo University. By the end of the decade there were established teams no longer playing on a merely ad hoc basis. By 1891 the game was popular enough that it was being featured on postcards. Nevertheless, it was decades behind the American game. In Japan in the 1890s baseball was being played by university students and school children; in the US in the 1890s baseball had been a professional sport for going-on 30 years.

The Japanese won the first meeting between an American team and a Japanese team, but they did less well thereafter. In 1905 Waseda toured the US, playing against college teams, and went 7-19. Three years later a team composed largely of PCL players toured Japan, compiling a 17-0 record. There were a number of tours of professional American players through Japan in the first few decades of the 20th century. The American professionals went 87-1 in total. During the famous 1934 tour Eiji Sawamura famously struck out Gehringer, Ruth, Gehrig, and Foxx in a row. Less well-remembered is that he lost the game.

In recent years many Japanese players have come to the States, and many American players went the other way. Pitchers have done better than position players, but the track record of Japanese players in MLB is not good. Ichiro and Hideki Matsui are the only position players who were legitimate stars. (On the pitching side, Tanaka, Darvish, and to a lesser extent Nomo were good starters. Sasaki, Saito, and Uehara were good relief pitchers. Ohtani could be good on both sides of the ball.) Americans going to Japan have had trouble adjusting to the culture, but were much more successful on the diamond. MLB non-entities like Wladimir Balentien, Bobby Rose, and Oreste Destrade were stars in Japan.

Comparisons between American baseball and Japanese baseball are probably inevitable. And they have mostly not been flattering for Japan. That this matters to Japanese baseball as a cultural or institutional force is probably most clearly exhibited by the degree to which Sawamura is celebrated. The award for the best pitcher is named in his honor, due to a game that he lost.

All of this leads to the accomplishments of Japanese players being viewed with a jaundiced eye. Certainly on this side of the Pacific; I suspect on the other as well. And it, perhaps, engenders a certain degree of defensiveness. Kawakami was appalled at Yonamine’s American style of play, and traded him away as soon as he was in a position to do so.

The reason that Ichiro is important is that he can put some of this to rest. He is living proof that the best Japanese players are as good as the best American players. Whatever the various indignities of the past, no matter that the average level of play is lower in the Central League than in the National League, Japan can get to the very top. And the proof is that it did. Ichiro will almost certainly be the first player elected to both the American and the Japanese halls of fame. (That means that I’ll need to get two more of his cards.) Many people argue that his case for Cooperstown should include his Japanese performance, but it doesn’t really need it. Suzuki accumulated 59.7 WAR. That puts him right around Zach Wheat and Vlad Guerrero. He collected 3089 hits. That’s 24th all-time, right between Dave Winfield and Craig Biggio. (And of course he also owns the single-season record.) Ichiro would be a hall of famer even if you ignored what he did in Japan. He matters because he’s proof that, at least at the top of the game, Japan can play with anyone.

>

That’s what I wanted to say. As I warned above, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not especially original. If not, my apologies to those who came first.

>

I also want to play with some numbers. Ichiro is a Meikyukai member because of what he did in the US. But we can also ask what he would likely have done had he spent his career in Japan. Or what he would likely have done if he played in the US directly out of high school. Now, we can’t know this with any certainty, but what we can do is estimate it on the basis of the numbers that he actually put up. Preferably, I’d use Davenport Translations for estimating an MLB-only Ichiro, but Clay’s website seems to be having trouble at the moment. (I keep getting 404 errors when I load Japanese stats.) So I’m going to have to do some very rough back-of-the-napkin calculations here.

What I did was take his last three seasons in Japan and calculate his hit rate, and his first three seasons in MLB and do the same. He lost only about 4% of his hits coming across the Pacific. Next I multiplied his Japanese hit totals by 96%, and then adjusted the resulting number by the differences in season length. That gives an estimated hit total of 4561. Take that Pete Rose. However, it’s unlikely that an 18 year old Ichiro would be playing in the big leagues. He actually wasn’t good until 1994, so his first two (partial) seasons would probably have been spent in Tacoma or wherever. By 1994 he was good, but was still just 20 and had struggled the past two seasons. Let’s imagine that the Mariners keep him down for the first 1/3 of the season until he really forces the issue. Two seasons in the minors cost him 41 hits, the first third of 1994 costs him an additional 80. So my hypothetical Ichiro records 4440 hits in MLB. Hypothetical Ichiro breaks Rose’s record in 2015, his first season with the Marlins. There’s quite a lot of uncertainty around a little exercise like this, so I think that the best we can say is that if Ichiro had spent his whole career in MLB, there’s a fair chance he would have surpassed Rose.

What about Japan-only Ichiro? The same (admittedly over simplified) methodology yields an estimate of 3956 hits. That would be, far-and-away, Japan’s all-time record. In fact, it’s so far beyond the record it’s hard to believe. So I also did this: I also gave him the average of his full-time numbers with Orix for as long as his peak actually lasted in MLB, and then adjusted his hit totals down proportionally as he aged. Even this method gave him >3700 hits. These are rough estimates, but I think it’s clear that if Ichiro had stayed in Japan, he would have obliterated the all-time hits record. Probably around 2010-2012.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: soon enough YES - as of 2025

The card is from the 1999 SP Calbee set. You had to send in five “winner” cards from potato chip bags to get it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is my most valuable Japanese card, although I didn’t pay much for it, as I got a good deal on the entire set.

I like it that he’s known just as ‘Ichiro’.

[seanofjapan]

Very good write up and method of estimating Ichiro's hypothetical career hit totals.

A minor but interesting point of trivia is that Ichiro's MLB career hit count is almost identical to the NPB career record (3089 versus 3085). Not sure if that is coincidental, or if Ichiro deliberately hung on in the Majors just long enough to top Harimoto's number (which in reality he had surpassed years earlier if you combine his MLB and NPB numbers).

[nat]

Michiyo Arito played third base for Lotte from 1969 to 1986. Superficially, his offense reminds me of Scott Rolen, although with more speed. (He was stealing 20ish bases per year until he got old.) Arito’s career slash line of 282/348/482 is a little bit lower than Rolen’s, but Rolen also played through the silly ball era, whereas Arito’s league was pretty low on offense (I checked the 1977 Pacific League: 255/309/382). So in context Arito was probably a somewhat better hitter than Rolen.

He was probably the best third baseman in the Pacific League in the 1970s. For his career he was named to the best nine ten times, including eight in a row. He won a batting title, and four gold glove awards. Lotte won the Japan series once during his career.

I don't know quite how far to carry the Rolen comparison. Arito was a somewhat better hitter, and I assume he was a good fielder if he won four gold gloves. But Rolen was more than a good fielder. Among third baseman he's 4th all-time in dWAR, behind Brooks, Clete Boyer, and Nettles. (I was eyeballing the dWAR leader list, so it's possible I missed someone.) Maybe tone down the defense a bit, and bump up the offense a bit, and Rolen isn't a bad comparison.

After retirement Arito took over as manager of Lotte, replacing the relatively relaxed Kazuhisa Inao. Arito was a hard-nosed traditionalist, and not a good manager. The Orions finished with a losing record under his management, he refused to play Leron Lee, and he forced the trade of Hiromitsu Ochiai. To be fair, Lee was at the end of the line (at 39), but he was also coming off of a 331/397/561 season. Wanting to trade Ochiai, on the other hand, was unalloyed insanity. Ochiai was a transcendent superstar coming off of the greatest season of his career.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

1980 Yamakatsu

[nat]

Nomo card for the Meikyukai collection. Write-up about Nomo here.

In 1991 Hideo Nomo was the hottest name in Japan, and BBM went out of their way to include a ton of Nomo cards in their inaugural release. There's cards celebrating leading the league in all sorts of things, and award winner cards, and so on. The base Nomo card is kind of expensive (by 1991-era baseball card standards), but the other cards (like this one) aren't so bad.

I think that the back notes past rookie of the year winners. But if so, then Japan has a serious pro-pitcher bias. The pair of kanji that you see over and over again on the right-hand column means 'pitcher'.

[nat]

Masahiro Yamamoto pitched for the Dragons from, get this, 1986 to 2015. That’s 30 years, although he missed 2011, so he actually appeared in “only” 29 seasons. To be sure, some asterisks are involved here. His 1986 and 1987 seasons combined totaled two and a third innings, and in 2015 he pitched only an inning and a third, but that’s still an astonishingly long career. Eye-balling his stats, he seems to have been sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Inconsistent, in a Steve Carlton sort of way. He compiled 219 wins, so he wasn’t hanging around for the Meikyukai. In fact, he qualified in 2008, during his age 42 season, at which point there were still seven years to go in his career. His best year looks to have been 1993, when he went 17-5 with a 2.05 ERA. It was, however, the following year that he won the Sawamura award (for the only time in his career); his ERA was much worse (3.49), but he won 19 games, and it’s rarely a mistake to assume that award voters are going to over-rate pitcher wins. (Happily this is changing in the US, but for ages it was pretty much an iron-clad law.) For his career his ERA is 3.45, over a total of 3348 innings.

Although it lasted three decades, Yamamoto’s career did not start auspiciously. He was a fifth round draft pick, and was apparently not highly regarded until coming to America. As a 22 year old he played for the Dodgers’ Vero Beach team, with whom he learned a screwball and pitched to a 2.00 ERA in 148 innings. I don’t know exactly what went on there, but a number of Japanese players spent time in American minor leagues. Maybe it’s some sort of exchange program? The Dodgers were famous for their connections to Japan, so it’s not a surprise that Yamamoto would end up in their system if he ended up anywhere, but I swear that I’ve seen players on minor league squads affiliated with other teams too. In any case, it seems clear that he was never Dodgers property, and he returned to Chunichi in time to appear in the Japan Series. (The Lions won it in five, and Yamamoto was the losing pitcher in game three.) The Dragons would win the Japan Series only once during his time with them, but for Yamamoto it must be bitter-sweet. They were the champions in 2007, but that season the 41 year old pitched terribly early in the year and was demoted to the minor league squad. So he spent three decades with the Dragons, and yet the only Japan Series that they won in that time he didn’t get to appear in.

As you might expect from a pitcher with a 30 year career, he owns most of Japan’s age-related pitching records. Most of these records had belonged to Shinji Hamasaki, who made his professional debut in 1947 at the age of 45. He managed and (every once in a while) pitched for Hankyu. I’m sure there’s a story there, but I don’t know what it is.

As you might expect, given that he was a screwball artist, Yamamoto was not a power pitcher. In the US we’d call him a “crafty lefty”. Motonobu Tanishige, his long-time catcher (and fellow Meikyukai member) once said that his “He had the special ability to make the distance to the mound seem shorter. His 130 kph pitches looked like 140”. Maybe this was meant in all seriousness, but it sounds like a burn to me. 130 kph is only 80 mph. Crank that up to 140, and you’ve got pitches that look like they’re coming in at all of 87.

Finding a comparable American player for a guy with this unusual of a career is, of course, going to be tough. The obvious choice is Jamie Moyer, but Yamamoto was a bigger star than was Moyer. He was inconsistent, but sometimes great, like Steve Carlton. But he wasn’t as great as Carlton, and as a pitcher he seems to have been more in Moyer’s mold.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: YES - elected 2022

1991 BBM. This is my only Yamamoto card, but NPB Guy has a bunch more.

[nat]

Time for another Dragon.

Kenichi Yazawa was a Waseda product who played OF-1B for Chunichi from 1970 to 1986. He joined the Meikyukai in 1985, returned for an encore in 86, and then hung them up, finishing with 2062 hits. Offensively, he looks to have been a strong player, posting a career batting line of 302/368/481. If you just look at his raw numbers it will look like he got better as he got older (something that you almost never see), but he didn’t really. The Central League became more offense-heavy as his career went on. I picked an early and late year from his career at random: in 1974 the league-wide slugging percentage in the Central League was 392, in 1984 it was 425. League OBP also went up (albeit by not quite as much). In baseball, a rising tide lifts most boats, and so it was with Yazawa. That said, he did age well; he lost some batting average towards the end, and missed a number of games, but he was still a productive player when he was on the field. He had started coaching part-time for the Dragons while he was still a player, and there are rumors that Senichi Hoshino, who took over as manager in 1987, was not happy with this arrangement and forced his retirement as a player.

In total, Yazawa was a rookie of the year winner, an 11-time all-star, and two-time batting champion. (He won in 1976 with a 355 mark, and 1980, when he hit 369.)

Post-retirement, Yazawa has kept busy. He was a radio commentator and batting coach for a number of years, and then in the late 1990s he earned a masters degree from Waseda in international business administration. He’s currently a visiting professor at Waseda, teaching “sports theory” (that’s how Google Translate translates it, don’t know what it actually is), and he works with the University’s baseball team. He also seems to be involved in professional baseball (his Japanese Wikipedia page says that he founded a team), although obviously not top-tier pro ball. Maybe there’s Indy ball in Japan?

Here’s (what I assume is) his Instagram.

Allen has a nice interview with Yazawa about sign-stealing in Japan. Apparently it’s a big thing. He dishes dirt on the Carp and cops to it himself.


Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

1978 Yamakatsu. These are nice cards. Like Calbees, there’s no boarder, but unlike Calbees there isn’t any text on the front. Just a full-bleed photo.

[nat]

Alex Ramirez played 135 MLB games, about two thirds with the Indians and a few with the Pirates. A teenage amateur free agent from Venezuela, Ramirez showed early power but poor strike zone judgment. After some promise in the Appalachian League as an 18 year old, he struggled in the Sally league at 19, and posted a healthy batting average but otherwise had an unexciting year in Bakersfield at age 20. It was the following season that made him into a real prospect and probably gave him a shot at the majors. As a 21 year old he hit 329/353/519 in AA. Still not much of a walk rate, but if you can hit well over 300, you can made do. At this point he had a sort of poor man’s Vlad Guerrero look to him. The following year he was basically stalled in Buffalo, but he came on strong in 1998, hitting around 300 with a 566 slugging percentage. After that the Indians gave him a shot in the big leagues.

And it didn’t go well. His career batting line is 259/293/437, and he hit a total of 12 home runs. That’s one win below replacement level for his career.

The second act of his career was more successful than the first. Following the 2000 season he signed with Yakult and hit a respectable 280/320/496. Still a bit light on walks, but that’s respectable. Ramirez would play with Yakult through 2007, after which he signed with Yomiuri, and he finished up his career with a couple seasons with Yokohama, and retired in 2013. While in Japan he hit 380 home runs, and posted a career slash line of 301/336/523. It’s hard to identify his best year, as he had a few that were pretty similar, but I’m going to go with 2008. In his first year with the Giants Ramirez hit 45 home runs and drove in 125, to go with a 317/373/617 line.

Ramirez won a pair of MVP awards and was a best-nine selection several times. He is the first (and so far only) Western player to join the Meikyukai, and, in fact, was the second fastest (in terms of games played) to reach 2000 hits. Throughout his career he was frequently among the league leaders in most offensive categories. He is only the third players to manage to collect 200 hits in a season.

Japan has limitations on the number of foreign players that are permitted to appear on a roster and in a single game. (I think the latter is four. Less sure of the former.) After a player accrues eight years of service time, however, they are not counted against this limit, and Ramirez is one of the few Westerners to have reached this milestone, and since retiring he has become a naturalized Japanese citizen. There was apparently some difficulty in this. Naturalizing in Japan involves creating an entry in the Japanese Family Registry, which requires getting official documentation of things like marriages and births for those in the family of the person who is naturalizing. Venezuela is not exactly a well-functioning nation at the moment, so it’s no surprise that there might be some delay in getting paperwork done. But anyway, he did sort it out, and is a Japanese citizen as of 2019.

Ramirez had offers to return to MLB, but declined, saying that he’d rather spend the rest of his career in Japan. He’s probably not the greatest Western Japanese player (I suppose my nomination goes to Tuffy Rhodes, although I admit I haven’t put too much thought into it), but he’s certainly up there. He was a great player, and he really found a home in Japan as well.

He’s managing the BayStars now, and apparently having some success with it. Tatsunari Hara, the hall of fame manager for the Giants, said just before his induction into the hall of fame that he was impressed with Ramirez’ unconventional use of his pitchers, and thinks that Ramirez was doing things as a manager that he would not have been capable of. Ramirez also opened a Puerto Rican restaurant in Tokyo. It seems not to have lasted long, but it’s an interesting idea.

He is known as ‘Rami-chan’. ‘-chan’ is an affectionate suffix usually reserved for girlfriends, little kids, and, apparently, popular athletes.

Here’s his Instagram. Looks like he advertises fancy water, lifts massive weights, and spends lots of time with his kids. (I love the one where they all have matching pajamas.) Granted, what I know about him I learned exclusively from one afternoon on the internet, but he seems like a thoughtful, interesting, and nice guy. I think I'm a fan.

Meikyukai: Yes
Hall of Fame: No, but he might yet make it. He debuted on the 2019 ballot with 40% of the vote. UPDATE: as of 20023, he is a hall of famer.

2006 BBM