Japanese HOF Project

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I suspect that Hideo Nomo isn’t in the hall of fame for what he did on the baseball diamond. Don’t get me wrong, he was good, but that’s not what he’s being recognized for. Nomo pitched only five seasons in Japan (all with the Kintetsu Buffaloes). He was remarkably good at the beginning of his career, posting ERAs of 2.91, 3.05, and 2.66 in his first three years. In 1993 his performance dropped off (he was slightly below average), the following year offense exploded in the Pacific League, but Nomo’s ERA was about the same as it had been the previous year, so in context he was quite a bit better than average.

As a rookie, Nomo was a huge success. He won all of the post season awards. But it was what happened during the 1994/5 off-season that won him fame. He retired. Now, of course he’s not the first player to have retired, but he was the first to realize that if he retired from Japanese baseball he wouldn’t be bound by their reserve clause anymore, and so could declare himself a free agent. Not that any Japanese team would sign him – becoming a free agent in Japan isn’t that easy. But the Dodgers would (and did) sign him.

Nomo was the first player to have ever won the rookie of the year award twice. Unless Ichiro won it in Japan, he’s the only one to have ever managed it. After he signed with the Dodgers he was an immediate success. Nomo led the league in shutouts, strikeouts, hits per nine innings, and strikeouts per nine innings. That last figure was 11.1, a number that would be excellent for a starter today, and practically unheard of in the mid 90s. Nolan Ryan only topped 11.1 K/9 twice in his career. As an American “rookie” his ERA was 2.53; remember this was during sillyball, league-wide ERA was a fair bit north of 4. Nomo wasn’t the first Japanese player to come to America, but he was the first in about thirty years. What he did was display that playing in MLB was a viable option for Japanese players. Arguably without Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki would have been a life-long member of the Orix BlueWave. (Either that or Ichiro would have been the trailblazer that Nomo in fact was.)

The honeymoon didn’t last though. Nomo was good in 96, about average in 97, and traded to the Mets in the middle of 98. He had two more good years for the Dodgers in the early 00’s, but he spent most of the rest of his career bouncing from team to team in MLB, not being especially effective for anyone. At the age of 39, after having missed two years of baseball, he tried to make a comeback with the Royals. It went about as well as a 39 year old’s comeback with the Royals, after having sat out two years, should be expected to go.

The Golden Player’s Club counts performance after a player has left Japan, and Nomo totaled just barely north of 200 wins for his career, adding Japanese and MLB totals. Hence, he’s a member of the club. But there is an element of apple-and-oranges here. The MLB season is longer than the Japanese season, so Nomo had more chances to pick up wins than a pure Japanese player would have had over the same number of seasons.

Nomo was famous for his forkball and his funky “tornado” delivery motion. Probably the closest we have today is Johnny Cueto. (Although Cueto never quite repeats the same motion twice. I like watching him pitch just for the weirdness of it.)

If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have put Nomo in the hall of fame. His Japanese career was too short, and his American career wasn’t good enough to be worth much in the way of extra credit. My first thought for an American player who would be comparable to his JPPL+MLB career was Dave McNally. That’s not fair to Nomo though, McNally’s American career was only a little better than Nomo’s. Maybe someone like Sam McDowell would be a better comparison. McDowell was a star, but nobody’s idea of a hall of famer.

Sabr has a long Nomo biography.

My card is from the 1992 BBM set. Nomo was already a star at this point, but still only 23 years old.

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Katuso Osugi was a slugging first baseman from 1965 to 1983. The first part of his career he spent with the Flyers/Fighters, and the balance of his career with Yakult. As a player, he’s a familiar type. He hit home runs, didn’t run fast, and played a defensively-unimportant position. Speaking of home runs, he totaled 486 for his career, topping 40 each year from 1970 to 1972. To go with a career slash line of 287/350/519.

Strangely, finding an analogous American player is difficult not for a dearth of comparable players, but because there are too many. Eddie Murray, Rafael Palmeiro, Carlos Delgado, Reggie Jackson if you don’t mind including outfielders. I’ll nominate Palmeiro, not because he’s statistically a better fit than Murray (or lots of other people) but because he, like Osugi, split his career almost evenly in half between two teams. (Of course Palmeiro jumped back and forth between them, whereas Osugi had a cleaner split.)

Osugi started his baseball career in the industrial leagues, playing for the Marui Department Store team. A workout with the Flyers got him his first pro contract. He was selected to five best-nines, all of them before leaving the Flyers. (The Flyers play in the Pacific League. When he moved to Yakult he also switched leagues, and someone named ‘Oh’ had the first base slot on the best-nine team locked down for the Central League.) However, he did win the Japan Series MVP award in 1978, en route to the Swallows’ first ever Japan Series championship.

It turns out that the Buffaloes aren’t the only team named after one of their players (Shigeru Chiba, in their case). The Fighters are also named after one of their players. The story goes that the team had a contest to pick a name (to replace ‘Flyers’), and the winning entry suggested naming the team ‘Fighters’ in honor of Osugi’s fighting spirit. And then they traded him the next year, but whatevs. Luckily the internet didn’t exist yet, or else they would have ended being the Nippon Ham Baseballteam McBaseteamface.

Albright considers him the sixth-greatest Japanese first baseman, and 25th greatest player overall. Osugi’s batting style involved, he said, “hitting towards the moon”, about which Albright dryly remarks “I gather [it] involved uppercutting”.

My card is from the 1979 Yamakatsu set. My main source for Calbee cards has dried up, so I’ve had to start looking for other manufacturers for post-1960s cards. For what little it’s worth (=probably nothing, since there are only two graded examples total) this is the only PSA 10 1979 Yamakatsu Katsuo Osugi. It’s my first Yamakatsu card; it has a nice bright image and a few basic stats on the back. You can tell from the mylar shrink wrap in a standard holder that it’s about the size of the 1980s Calbee cards. Unfortunately, the slab has a crack in it (along the bottom). Given how thinly collected Japanese cards are, it’s probably not worth re-holdering. (To give you an idea, Robb Fitts has the only 1978 Yamakatsu PSA registry set. There aren’t any 1979 registry sets.) I might liberate it from its tomb, to allow it its rightful place in my binder. But, given all the talk of how picky PSA is with their high-grade cards, it also seems like a shame to give up an official Gem Mint designation.

Edit: And I'm at 66% now.

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Tetsuya Yoneda spent 22 years pitching, mostly for the Hankyu Braves. He broke in as an 18 year old in 1956, and pitched until 1977. Only the last couple seasons did he appear for any team besides Hankyu. Over the course of those 22 years he managed to become one of Japan’s winningest pitchers (#2 in fact, behind Kaneda), with a career record of 350-285. (I assume he’s also one of Japan’s losingest pitchers.) As one might expect from someone who pitched for 22 years and won 350 games, his career innings pitched total is quite impressive, at 5130. That figure would put him 11th all-time in MLB, between Grover Cleveland Alexander and Kid Nichols. Incidentally, his win total would put him 10th in MLB history, below Roger Clemens and above Tim Keefe. Early in his career he was a strikeout monster, but dropped to only above average in K rate shortly thereafter. His raw totals make it look like his ability to strike out batters steadily degraded as he got older (which wouldn’t really be a surprise), but this is actually an artifact of changing context. Apparently batters just started putting more balls in play. Due to an above-average ability to strike out batters, and an extremely long career, he is second all-time in strike outs (although he is way behind Kaneda for the lead).

One thing that he can’t blame on league context is his reduced workload over the years. Early on he was pitching ~300 innings per year, but 1970 was the last season in which he threw more than 200 innings, and he was largely a relief pitcher for his last couple seasons.

Seaver-like his career started with controversy. The Tigers signed him out of high school, but Hankyu complained that the contract was invalid (on grounds that are unclear at the moment). The league ruled in their favor. And so although the Braves missed out on Seaver, they did get Yoneda. Or something like that.

Probably the biggest problem that Yoneda ran into is that Hankyu was not especially competitive for the first half of his career. Despite good pitching, the offense couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain. In 1959 he had a 2.12 ERA and still lost 24 games. In the mid-60s they had something of a rebirth, however, and he ended up appearing in the Japan Series five times. They lost all five.

Albright has him ranked as the 15th greatest Japanese pitcher, and 75th greatest player over all. I’m inclined to think that he rates peak performance too highly, there’s a huge amount of value in being a good pitcher for 5000 innings. Now, my inclination is not exactly dispositive evidence, but if I was starting a team and had to choose between a pitcher that would go on to have Yoneda’s career, and one that would go on to have Hideo Fujimoto’s career, it’s not obvious to me that I would pick Fujimoto. Now, Fujimoto was clearly the more talented pitcher, but he also pitched only half as many innings as Yoneda. The MLB pitchers that Albright lists as comps are: Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton, Early Wynn, Robin Roberts, Fergie Jenkins, Steve Carlton, Bert Blyleven, Jim Kaat and Tommy John. This is a pretty good list. Before reading Albright’s article I had Niekro and Blyleven picked out as comparable major leaguers.

Everyone who writes about Yoneda mentions his prowess with the bat. So I guess that I will too. Now, it’s not that he had a very refined hit tool. He seems to have been a “swing hard at anything near the strike zone” kind of hitter – the pitcher version of Adam Dunn – but he did (like Dunn) have good power (for a pitcher). He totaled 33 home runs, including multiple seasons of 4 and 5, to go with a Dunn-like .171 batting average. His bat was sufficiently well-respected that he made 22 appearances at positions other than pitcher.

The card is a menko from 1960. The set is JCM 12e.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.