Japanese HOF Project

[jjbond]

Originally Posted by Rickyy

Well then she sent me these instead.

I have a few more of these that I opened that have other players. And I had one left that was not opened.

Sean's blog had some cool info and photos about these. Although technically not cards, most of the photos have really nice action phots and some that are odd...haha.

I mean...they are cards. PSA and SGC will grade them (the best in the set are cards with the visiting American players, Boog Powell and Brooks Robinson). Keep in mind Japanese baseball cards run a huge range of traditional cardboard cards to thin photo cards. These are in the "stamp card" variety, which were intended to be collected and pasted into an album to complete the whole set. In the catalogue, they are listed as JMC 1: 1975 NST/Mr. Baseball

[Exhibitman]

Anyone get anything fun in Prestige last night? I won this one:



Arguably the two greatest hitters in the league's history on one card? Yes, please. Ironic how the hit king and home run king of the Japanese majors are ethnic Korean and Chinese, respectively.

[Rickyy]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Anyone get anything fun in Prestige last night? I won this one:



Arguably the two greatest hitters in the league's history on one card? Yes, please. Ironic how the hit king and home run king of the Japanese majors are ethnic Korean and Chinese, respectively.

Wow nice card! The color pops off the screen!

Ricky Y

[nat]

Neat card Adam! Weird cropping decision though. It's like Oh just decided to photobomb Harimoto's card.

>>>

The Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame has three new members. I’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to write up anything about them. We’ll go some distance towards correcting that today.

Today’s subjects are Ichiro Suzuki and Hitoki Iwase. They are both in the Meikyukai, so I’ve written about them before. Click on their names for links to my previous posts.

No new cards today, because I’ve decided to retire my Meikyukai collection. Hence, the cards of them that I got for that collection are just going to be shifted over to the hall of fame binder. It was hard to muster the same sense of excitement for the Meikyukai as for the hall of fame. In part because some of the players are themselves less exciting. There are some great Meikyukai players who aren’t in the hall, but there are other guys who are less great, and I just find it hard to get worked up over the Japanese version of Mark Grace. Perhaps more importantly, all Meikyukai players are relatively recent guys, and I find the early days of Japanese ball much more interesting than the recent years.

Ichiro is a lot more interesting than Iwase, so I am going to write about him today. In my last post about him I talked about the ways in which Japanese and American ball compare to each other, and what Ichiro’s success means for that comparison. Today I’m going to talk about something different. I’m going to talk about aesthetics.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, in 1961, the New York Yankees won the world series. Their starters had the following OPS+ scores: 209, 167, 153, 115, 113, 90, 79, 67. The guy they had batting leadoff, the guy who by definition gets the most at bats (assuming he doesn’t miss any games, which he didn’t) was Bobby Richardson, the guy with the 67 OPS+. They decided that their worst batter should be the one to get the most at bats, that they wanted to have a guy with a .295 on base percentage bat in front of 1961 Roger Maris. Because they had Maris and Mantle (and Berra and Ford and Howard) they won anyway, but this decision was, to put the point gently, suboptimal. But Richardson was a scrappy second baseman, and baseball tradition has it that scrappy second basemen bat leadoff. So that’s how they did it.

Not everyone bought into tradition. Earl Weaver liked to buck it. But it had a controlling influence in almost every MLB organization for decades. At some point someone, let’s say, Bill James in the late 1970s although there were a few other voices in the wilderness, starting saying “why don’t we stop taking tradition for granted?” The approach that James inaugurated gets called “analytics” and “stats” but James actually isn’t very good at statistics and some of his uses of statistics don’t, analytically-speaking, make much sense. But what he is very good at is asking questions and not assuming that he already knows the answers. The stuff about the math really isn’t at the heart of the “analytics” movement; if I was to briefly summarize it, I’d say that what “analytics” is about is investigating baseball scientifically. Math comes in because science is quantitative, and so math is the tool that lets you take observations and turn them into systematic knowledge. I am, and for a couple decades now have been, an ardent proponent of analytics in baseball. I love this sport, and I want to understand how it works. It’s this scientific approach that has allowed me to do that. And one of the things that we have learned is that baseball tradition is often mistaken. Bobby Richardson, for example, was a terrible leadoff hitter. The 61 Yankees would have been better with Elston Howard up there, even though he’s a plodding catcher and conventional wisdom says that plodding catchers will only clog up the base paths.

But there have been costs. Let me tell you another story. This one is about another team that won the world series. The 1985 Royals didn’t have Mantle or Maris, but they did have a pair of guys who slugged 30 HRs or more, one of whom (Brett) led the league in slugging percentage. The Royals had good power. But they also had a pair of regulars who stole more than 40 bases but hit fewer than 10 home runs (and Onix Concepcion, who did neither). And their catchers can be counted in the >10 HR club sort of out of courtesy only. Sundberg hit 10 exactly, and all of their backup catchers collectively contributed a total of one more. This meant that any given at bat is likely to be different than the one that came before it. Maybe Willie Wilson is going to hit a triple (he hit 21 of them that year). Or Lonnie Smith will hit a single and steal second. And then Brett will drive him in with a homer. The variety made the game exciting.

But it didn’t help the team win. Every team has an analytics department now, and those teams have figured out two things: that home runs are so valuable that it’s worth giving up lots of singles to get them, and that for most players there are specific things that they can do to their swing (getting the right launch angle and so on) to maximize their chances of hitting a home run. Given the state of the game (pitching trends, the elasticity of the ball, etc.) adapting players in the run-maximizing ways dictated by analytics is a winning strategy. Teams absolutely should do this! But it also imposes a kind of uniformity on the game. Seemingly everyone hits .230 with 20 HRs now, skinny shortstops included. Now, I do want to emphasize that teams (and players) are making the right decision here, this is better for your team than hitting .260 with 2 HRs. But it decreases the quality of the aesthetic experience for the fans. If you were watching the 1985 Royals there were lots of different things to anticipate, depending on who is up, and lots of different ways to be surprised. The current game features lots of players who are distinguishable not based on their skill sets, but on how good they are at employing the single set of skills that they share with seemingly everyone else.

I don’t want to exaggerate this. There is still some variation. Luis Arraez is a joy to watch. And a few superstars are either so talented (Ohtani, Judge) or have unique talents (Ronald Acuna, on a lower level Elly de la Cruz) that they spice up the modern game in something like the way that the contrast between Willie Wilson and George Brett used to. But the guys who are the exceptions to the rule today are mostly marginal players. Nick Madrigal. Esteury Ruiz got run out of the major leagues despite leading the league in stolen bases in 2023.

You can and should appreciate Ichiro for his greatness. But there are other reasons to appreciate him too. I don’t even know how you calculate a “launch angle” for that weird chopping swing of his. That he did it proves that if you’re good enough you can be a viable major leaguer even if you don’t hit 20 HRs a year. It’s not so much that I miss Ichiro’s kind of player (Tony Gwynn, Rod Carew), although I miss that too, it’s more that I miss the variety between players. That he’s of an extinct species meant that he gave the game a kind of variety that it needs.

In one of his early Baseball Abstracts, Bill James says that traditional baseball fans resent sabermetrics, even though traditional baseball fans use numbers just as much as sabermetricians do, because the traditionalists use numbers to tell stories and sabermetrics uses numbers as numbers. And I think he’s on to something here. If you run the models you’ll find that nine guys hitting .230 AVG / 20 HR has an advantage over the old kind of lineup. But .310/0, .288/6, .275/33, .220/27, etc. tells a better story. One reason to love Ichiro is that he lets you tell better stories

[Rickyy]

Originally Posted by jjbond

I mean...they are cards. PSA and SGC will grade them (the best in the set are cards with the visiting American players, Boog Powell and Brooks Robinson). Keep in mind Japanese baseball cards run a huge range of traditional cardboard cards to thin photo cards. These are in the "stamp card" variety, which were intended to be collected and pasted into an album to complete the whole set. In the catalogue, they are listed as JMC 1: 1975 NST/Mr. Baseball

You're right... no matter what form, it is a card. I love this issue for its pure photos!

Ricky Y