Japanese HOF Project

[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.

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by nat

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.

Great write up about Kondo. I saw that Prestige auction for the Kondo card ended at 61$, not bad (I don't have any card of his....)! The scarcity of his cards really reflects the effect of having almost all the card sets of the 50s and 60s having less than 40 cards each, so anyone lower than superstar level doesn't have many/any. Then of course even with the massive Calbee sets in the 70s they were still stocking it with stars/Giants players so even the gigantic 1472 card 75-76-77 monster set is missing a lot of players who were active in those years....

That is an interesting point about the uncatalogued cards too. I have a few menko that are uncatalogued and while some of them seem rare (like you I haven't seen any other cards from the same set), some seem more common but for whatever reason (not having a full checklist, difficulty in ascertaining which cards belong to the same set, etc) just aren't in the catalogue yet!

[nat]

I thought I was done.

In fact, I was pretty sure that I was done.

And now I'm pretty sure that I'm not.

Mutsuo Minagawa was the last player on my list.

Here's the card that I tracked down. It's of someone named 'Minagawa', so there's that. Now, vintage Japanese cards usually (always?) omit first names, so sometimes figuring out who you've got requires a little detective work, but it's often sufficient to figure out which team the guy is playing for. Mutsuo Minagawa spent his entire career with Nankai. There were only two Minagawas active during the period in which bromides were issued. The top line of kanji on this card says "Tokyo vs. Nankai". So I thought "great! I've got him!" And proceeded to buy the card. On top of it, I was excited because it's a really great action shot. Minagawa is sliding into home plate just ahead of the catcher's tag.

I realized yesterday that the other Minagawa played for the Flyers. The TOKYO Flyers.

Mutsuo was active 1954 to 1971. Sadayuki Minagawa played 1937 to 1951. While it's possible for a player to appear on a bromide in the mid 1950s, they were much more popular in the late 40 - early 50s era. And Mutsuo played sparingly his first two seasons. 1956 was his first really full-time season. So the years that they were active makes it more likely that this is a Sadayuki Minagawa card.

Comparing pictures of the guys, it also looks more like Sadayuki than like Mutsuo. I'm terrible with faces so I asked my wife, and she confirmed.

The only letter on his jersey that's clearly visible is an 'S', which doesn't help much. The one next to it you can sort-of see. It's not clear, and it could go either way, but it seems more likely to be an 'R' than a 'K'.

In short, this is probably a card of Sadayuki Minagawa, not Mutsuo Minagawa. It turns out that my yakyu dendo collection is not finished.

Rats.

And so, here's a quick summary of Sadayuki Minagawa's career. He was a shortstop who went pro shortly after the first professional league was founded. Considering that he was 17 as a rookie, I'm guessing he didn't have the option of signing up any earlier than he did. The Tigers were his first team, from 1937 to 1941. After that there was a long interruption in his career. Considering that he was a 21 year old athlete, I'm guessing some time in the military was involved. In 1948 he returned to baseball, joining the Flyers, for whom he played for the rest of his career. He retired from the Flyers after the 1952 season. For a while during the 1948 season he was a player-manager, and they had a good record while he was managing, but the team finished in 5th place and he never got another shot at it.

As a batter, I would characterize him as "extremely bad". Even by the extraordinarily low standards of the day, Sadayuki couldn't hit a lick. Presumably he was a good glove man, but I don't have fielding statistics from Japan in the 1940s, so I'm just going to assume that he couldn't keep his job as long as he did if he couldn't field. It sure wasn't the career 204/303/264 batting line that kept him employed. That on base percentage was okay given his context, but even in the JPBL and JPPL of the 40s and 50s, a .264 slugging percentage wasn't going to cut it.

Meikyukai - No : Hall of Fame: No

The card is an uncatalogued bromide. It's printed on thin stock with a glossy finish.

I'm at 98% on my project. If anybody's got a lead on a Mutsuo Minagawa card, let me know.

[Jeff Alcorn]

Hi,

The top line on the card actually says Tokyu vs. Nankai- not Tokyo. The Flyers were the Tokyu Flyers in 1947 and then again from 1949-1953 (they went by Kyuei Flyers in 1948), so the card is definitely not Mutsuo Minagawa, the Nankai Hawks great pitcher. The second line says that the picture is of Minagawa scoring.

Mutsuo Minagawa is in the Kabaya-Leaf set and I also have 2 menko cards of him from the late 1950s that I have gotten recently, so keep searching one of his cards will come up.

Thanks for the great series, keep it going.

Jeff

[nat]

Masahiro Doi was one of Japan’s great sluggers. In a career spanning 1962 to 1981, he clobbered 465 home runs, which places him 12th all-time, between Koichi Tabuchi and Tuffy Rhodes. The bulk of Doi’s career was spent with the Kintetsu Buffaloes; in 1975 he joined the Lions, for whom he spent the balance of his baseball-playing days. Doi’s best season was probably 1971, a year in which he hit 40 home runs, drove in 113 (topping 100 RBIs for the only time in his career), and putting up a 309/395/603 slash line. In addition to ranking well in career home runs, Doi is 10th all-time in hits (2452, and the player with the highest figure who has not been elected to the hall of fame), and 12th in RBIs.

Over the course of his 20 year career, Doi was selected to 15 all-star teams. As you might expect for a big slugger, he played LF-1B. (Going over MLB all-time HR leaders, guys who weren’t corner outfielders, DH, or 1B: Alex Rodriguez (3B, #4), Ken Griffey Jr (CF, #7), Mike Schmidt (3B #16), Mickey Mantle (CF #18); that’s it for the top 20.) Despite being one of the top home run hitters in Japanese history, Doi led the league in homers only once, in his first season with the Lions. He never won an MVP award. In the US the MVP awards are biased towards players from good teams, in Japan, even more so. The Buffalos are traditionally cellar-dwellers, and Doi never did play in the Japan Series. Let’s see if that’s what made the difference. Below I’ve got his best seasons, and I've compared them to the eventual winners:

1967
Doi: 28 HR, 93 RBI, 323/386/567
Mitsuhiro Adachi: 1.75 ERA, 20-10 record for the 1st place Braves

1971
Doi: 40 HR, 113 RBI, 309/395/603
Atsushi Nagaike: 40 HR, 114 RBI, 317/404/618

1972
Doi: 30 HR, 84 RBI, 300/393/554
Yutaka Fukumoto: 106 SB

1973
Doi: 29 HR, 76 RBI, 316/417/563
Katsyua Nomura: 28 HR, 96 RBI, 309/373/524 (played catcher)

1975
Doi: 34 HR, 84 RBI, 260/352/491
Hideji Kato: 32 HR, 97 RBI, 309/388/572

So, not really. Maybe he got robbed in 1967, but Adachi pitched really well, so it’s hard to say that this was a terrible injustice or anything. The league had an ERA of 3.05, so his 1.75 ERA isn’t quite as impressive as it looks, but that’s still some damn fine pitching. Every other season Doi just got out-played by the eventual winner.

Doi did lose one month of his career to the Black Mist Scandal. This was a big gambling scandal in Japanese baseball that ran from 1969 to 1971. Doi had a small part in it, and got a short suspension as a result. The central figures were members of the Lions who were throwing games (this is while Doi was still with Kintetsu). He doesn’t seem to have been accused of doing that; he was prosecuted and suspended for ‘illegal gambling’, but I don’t have details beyond that. Anyways, he got a rather light punishment, so I’m guessing that whatever he was up to was comparatively innocuous.

The transfer from Kintetsu to the Lions was a trade for Yutaka Yanagita and Hiroaki Shibaike. The former was a still fairly young pitcher (22 at the time of the trade) who would have a good couple seasons, but who I would characterize as an “innings eater”. The latter was a 28 year old relief pitcher who… eh. He was a relief pitcher with a short career. The Lions got the better player, but Yanagita was a productive pitcher for a long time.

It’s a mystery to me why Doi isn’t in the hall of fame yet. He’s clearly qualified. For comparable American players I’d look to someone like Eddie Murray or Rafeal Palmeiro. Guys who hit a fair number of home runs, and played forever (thus finishing high on all-time lists), but who weren’t A-list stars. Doi was probably better than them at his best, but the Americans who are better versions of this kind of player were better than he was. I was tempted to compare him to Carl Yestrzemksi, and while that’s not absurd, Doi didn’t have any triple crown seasons. Maybe Manny Ramirez is a good comp. Consistently one of the better players in the league, but never the best, and a long enough career to be among the all-time leaders in various slugging categories. I’m going to go with that: Masahiro Doi is the Japanese Manny Ramirez. I know why Manny isn’t in the hall yet. But unless Doi’s involvement in the Black Mist Scandal was much more serious than it appears, I don’t know why he’s not in yet.

Meikyukai: Yes – Hall of Fame: No

This card is from the massive 1976 Calbee set. Thanks to Sean for this one. I’ve still got a stack of cards that he sent me that I need to post something about.

[nat]

Michihiro Ogasawara was a corner infielder (mostly first base) who, at his peak, was a phenomenal batter. He played 1997 to 2015; until 2006 he was with Nippon Ham, then the Giants, and he finished his career with Chunichi. That timeline is a little bit misleading, however, as he broke into the league slowly (he was a catcher initially), and played part-time for quite a while at the end of his career. His full-time seasons (>100 games) were those from 1999 to 2010. During that stretch, he was a beast of a hitter, clobbering 30-35 home runs annually and regularly posting batting averages well over 300. Indeed, in that 12 year stretch there were only two seasons in which he hit fewer than 30 home runs (1999 and 2004) and only two in which he posted a batting average below 300 (1999 and 2005). Ogasawara’s best season looks to have been 2003, when he posted a 360/473/649 line. It’s true that it was a relatively high-scoring league, but that’s ridiculous. Let’s adjust it for context and see what it would look like in the 2019 American League.

*does math*

That’s 330/442/640. Except for the batting average, that’s a dead ringer for Mike Trout’s MVP winning 2019 season. (Trout gets the same OBP through more walks and fewer hits.) That wasn’t the year that he won the MVP award, however, as he took that trophy home in 2006 with a 313/397/573 line (it was a good year, the Fighters also won the Japan Series), and again in 2007 while hitting 313/368/539. It was almost a threepeat, as he finished second in the voting in 2008.

Because seven of Ogasawara’s 19 seasons were part-time efforts, his career counting stats are not that impressive. He qualified for the Meikyukai in 2011, but still managed only 2120 hits, of which 378 were home runs. As might be expected for someone who played seldomly apart from his peak, however, he’s got a nice slash line of 310/389/540.

Several sources report that Chunichi mainly used him as pinch hitter. No word on why he wasn’t playing full-time for the Giants before that. I guess injuries are the most likely explanation.

If you’re looking for a comparable American player, a two-time MVP who didn’t do much outside of his peak seasons calls to mind Dale Murphy. Ogasawara was the better player though. Maybe he’s a rich man’s Dale Murphy. If he had gotten an earlier start, and could have stayed on the field longer, he would have put up the bulk that you expect from the inner-circle types. But he didn’t. If he makes the hall of fame it will be on the basis of his peak performance, not his career accomplishments. In other ways he reminds me of Vlad Guerrero. Both were sluggers with high batting averages, although Vlad was faster. No surprise, since Ogasawara began life as a catcher.

He is, apparently, the “goodwill ambassador” for Ogasawara village (which, I gather, he’s not actually from or anything). In celebration of his 2000th hit they gave him a mini barrel of local rum, and he donated a jersey to the local youth baseball team.

At least one website reports that his nickname is ‘Guts’.

After retirement, Ogasawara coached in the Dragon’s minor league team. Two months ago the Dragons elected not to bring him back. It all worked out in the end, however, as it was announced on 10/10/19 that he’ll be the Fighters’ manager next season.

Here’s Ogasawara hitting a bunch of home runs.

Meikyukai – Yes : Hall of Fame – No (probably not eligible yet)

2000 Upper Deck.

[nat]

Here's the Akiyama card for my Meikyukai collection. The original post about him can be found here. I'll add a little more to it.

Akiyama was a power-speed threat, hitting 437 home runs and stealing 303 bases in his career. He was the first Japanese player to lead the league in both categories in the same year. He won an MVP award in 1987 to go along with eleven consecutive gold glove awards. The first twelve years of his career were spent with the Lions, who were the powerhouse team of the 1980s. They finished in first place nine times during his tenure. After the 1993 season he was traded to the Daiei Hawks. Let's take a look at this deal.

The deal was Akiyama, Takehiro Hashimoto and Katsuyoshi Murata for Makoto Sasaki, Tomio Watanabe and Tomoyuki Uchiyama. Hashimoto was a poor relief pitcher who would go on to have a few solid seasons with his new team. Murata was just 23 but had developed into a reasonably good starting pitcher, who would promptly lose it and wash out of baseball after his age 27 season. Sasaki looks to have been a star, albeit one coming off of a down year. His skill set was basically the same as Akiyama's just not as advanced. Watanabe was a pitcher with some success in his past, but who missed the entire season (presumably with an injury) and would never be the same. Uchiyama was a promising young relief pitcher who didn't amount to much.

So this deal looks, essentially, to have been Akiyama for Sasaki, with lots of filler. Akiyama was clearly the bigger star, but he was on the wrong side of 30. Seibu got a younger-but-worse version of him in Sasaki. This looks like one of those headline grabbing deals, but one that didn't end up making much difference. Maybe the Hawks got the better end of it, if only because Hashimoto was the only one of the filler players to have real value post-trade?

After retirement Akiyama became the Hawks' manager and led them to victory in the 2011 Japan Series. In total he won the Matsutaro Shoriki Award three times, which ranks second all-time to Oh's four. (This award is given to the person - sometimes a player, sometimes a manager - who has done the most to develop professional baseball. No, I don't know what that means. Winner list here.)

Meikyukai - Yes : Hall of Fame - Yes

My card is from the 1998 Calbee set, after the trade to the Hawks.