by Thomas Love Seagull

A recent poll for a TV special saw more than 50,000 people in Japan vote for their favorite retired baseball players. 20 players emerged from a pool of 9,000. Yes, they could only vote for players who are no longer active, so you won’t see Shohei Ohtani or other current stars on this list. Which is probably smart because I’m sure Ohtani would win by default. There are, however, players who were beloved but not necessarily brilliant, and foreign stars who found success after coming to NPB. Unsurprisingly, the list leans heavily towards the past 30 years, with a few legends thrown in for good measure.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling each of these players. Some of these players I know only a little about, so this will be as much a journey for me as, hopefully, it will be for you. It’ll be a mix of history, stats, and whatever interesting stories I can dig up.

For now, have a look at the list below and see how the public ranked them. I’ve included the years they played in NPB in parentheses.

20. Alex Ramirez (2001-2013); 19. Yoshinobu Takahashi (1998-2015); 18. Warren Cromartie (1984-1990), 17. Takashi Toritani (2004-2021); 16. Suguru Egawa (1979-1987); 15. Katsuya Nomura (1954-1980); 14. Tatsunori Hara (1981-1995); 13. Kazuhiro Kiyohara (1985-2008); 12. Masayuki Kakefu (1974-1988); 11. Masumi Kuwata (1986-2006); 10. Atsuya Furuta (1990-2007); 9. Randy Bass (1983-1988); 8. Daisuke Matsuzaka (1999-2006, 2015-2016, 2018-2019, 2021); 7. Tsuyoshi Shinjo (1991-2000, 2004-2006); 6. Hiromitsu Ochiai (1979-1998); 5. Hideo Nomo (1990-1994); 4. Hideki Matsui (1993-2002); 3. Shigeo Nagashima (1958-1974); 2. Sadaharu Oh (1958-1980); 1. Ichiro Suzuki (1992-2000).

The quiet slugger from Oklahoma who became a Kansai folk hero

For a time in Japan, Randy Bass was mentioned in the same breath as gods.

It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a chant.

Kamisama. Hotokesama. Baasu-sama.

God. Buddha. Bass.

It rose from the outfield stands at Koshien, carried by brass horns and plastic bats and voices from the Tigers’ faithful that had long ago decided that baseball was not a sport but a way of life. The chant sounded playful at first, the way Osaka humor often does: there is always a wink somewhere in Kansai. Because the single-character abbreviation for Hanshin can also be read as kami, meaning “god,” television captions and newspapers sometimes labeled him simply: Bass (God)*. But by the fall of 1985, when the Tigers were winning in a way they had not won in a generation, the wink was gone.

*Hanshin is written as 阪神. The shorthand for it is 神.

They meant it.

The unmistakably American Randy Bass, blond, bearded, and broad-shouldered, had become something that rarely exists in Japanese baseball: a foreign player who did not feel foreign.

And like many greats in baseball, he wasn’t supposed to be great.

He had already been labeled in America. A hitter whose power sounded bigger than it actually was. A man once described as capable of hitting a ball from New York to Los Angeles, but whose real reputation settled into something less romantic: a warning-track hitter, vulnerable to fastballs, limited defensively, and slowed by a childhood leg injury that never fully healed. He moved from team to team in Major League Baseball—Minnesota, Kansas City, Montreal, San Diego, Texas—never quite settling in anywhere long enough to become a fixture. In 1981, at the age of 27, with the Padres, he hit .210/.293/.313 with 4 home runs in 69 games. That would be the longest look he would get at the big league level.

In the minors, though, oh boy. After being drafted by the Twins out of high school, he led the Florida Coast League with 10 home runs in 1972. At 20, he hit 30 home runs for single-A Lynchburg. At 23, he slashed .321/.456/.560 with 25 home runs and 117 RBI for Tacoma in the Pacific Coast League. By the early 1980s, he was the sort of player baseball produces by the hundreds: talented enough to reach the majors, not quite good enough to stay.

In the winter of 1982, several Japanese clubs considered signing Bass. Yakult nearly did, but they had too many first basemen already. Hankyu was close to making an effort, but decided on Boomer Wells instead. When the Hanshin Tigers went shopping that winter, they did not circle Randy Bass’s name. Manager Motoo Andoh flew to the United States in search of power, yes, but not specifically his power. Bass was the second signing. Steve Stroughter was their first target. Bass was insurance.

After all, he had only hit nine home runs in the major leagues.

Nine.

He had spent winters working at a pipe company because minor league paychecks have a way of disappearing faster than you think they will. He had been, in the most neutral baseball sense, a professional hitter. The kind you can find every spring in Arizona and Florida. The kind who hopes the next swing might change everything. The kind who usually learns it won’t.

When Hanshin offered him roughly double what he could expect in the United States, he did not speak of destiny or desire to experience a new culture. He spoke of practicality.

“I was honest,” he would later say. “It was the money.”

That statement is important because nothing about this story begins romantically. Even his name posed a problem.

Technically, it should have been rendered in Japanese as “Basu” like “bus.” But Hanshin was a railway company. It also ran buses. And someone in the front office imagined the newspaper headlines if the American slugger struck out three times in a big game.

“Hanshin Bus Stalls.”

Or if he had a slump.

“Hanshin Bus Breaks.”

It was too easy.

So they stretched the vowel. “Baasu.” It was long enough just to avoid unwanted wordplay.

And then he started playing.

He was hit by a pitch in an exhibition game and missed time. First base belonged to Taira Fujita, a legend, which meant Bass was shuffled into the outfield, which meant everyone in Japan could see that he was not an outfielder. He ran like a man who had once broken both feet as a child because he had. His first at-bat ended in a strikeout. He opened the season hitless in seventeen at-bats.

Someone in the front office joked that if the original spelling of his name had remained, the newspaper headline would already have written itself: “Bus Stop.”

The Tigers, constrained by the league’s limit on foreign players, soon had to make a decision. Keep Bass or keep Stroughter, whose production was nearly identical. The club valued his effort and attitude, but Bass survived largely because he was two years younger.

Bass did something that many foreign players do not do. He paid attention. He watched teammates crowd around a small dormitory table late at night, tiles clicking and laughter bouncing off the walls. Mahjong. He asked to learn. Akinobu Okada, who would one day manage the Tigers to another championship decades later, shrugged and told him it wasn’t worth it because he wouldn’t be in Japan long enough.

There is something beautifully human about that moment. Or maybe just blunt honesty. Okada assumed Bass was only passing through. It made sense: most foreigners only lasted a season or two. But Randy Bass was not like most foreigners.

When his wife Linda struggled with homesickness, it was those same teammates who helped her adjust. When veteran Kozo Kawato introduced him to shogi, Bass did not treat it as a novelty. He studied it seriously. Kawato would later say what struck him most was not the power in Bass’s swing but the care in his questions. Where should I stand? Why do pitchers throw this way? How do fans think here?

He learned to use chopsticks with ease. He embraced Japanese food, developing a love for Kobe beef and even the stadium udon at Koshien. There are foreign players who live in a country for years and never lean into it. Bass leaned into it.

And then he leaned into the strike zone. Japanese pitchers did not challenge him the way American pitchers had. They worked the edges relentlessly. They lived outside. And umpires, for reasons cultural and practical, granted that outside pitch, especially against foreigners. Players called it the “gaijin strike.” Bass could have complained. Many did. Instead, he recalibrated.

Under batting coach Teruo Namiki, he shortened his swing. He studied Japanese baseball deliberately. He learned about ballparks and winds from fellow foreigner Boomer Wells. Teammate Masayuki Kakefu showed him how to use the famous Koshien breeze, teaching him to guide pitches toward left field. Bass expanded his approach until even a controlled swing could carry into the stands.

By late 1983, something changed. He hit in 25 consecutive games. He finished with 35 home runs. He was no longer the insurance option. He was an established star. But a star is not yet divine. Divinity came later.

And it began, as so many good baseball stories do, with the Giants. You cannot understand the Randy Bass story without understanding the Yomiuri Giants.

The Giants were not merely a rival. They were the sun while the rest of the teams were merely planets. They were Tokyo. They were money and history and television contracts and Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima and the assumption that, eventually, things would tilt in their favor. For decades, the Hanshin Tigers had been loud and loyal and theatrical but always second.

Hanshin did not simply want to win. Hanshin wanted to beat Yomiuri.

April 17, 1985, was only the fourth game of the season. That is important. This was not September. This was not a pennant race at its climax. The year before, the Tigers had finished in 4th place, behind the Giants, and twenty-three games behind the first-place Carp. But it was early enough that hope still existed and doubt had not yet hardened into place.

Koshien was full, of course. It always was when the Giants came to town. Forty-five thousand voices, whistles bleating, yellow plastic bats clacking together, horns blaring in organized rhythm. The Tigers had lost two of their first three games. Bass was in a slump. Two hits in fifteen at-bats. Six strikeouts. No home runs.

The Giants led 3-1 in the seventh inning. Warren Cromartie had hit a two-run home run in the first to give the Giants the lead.

Hiromi Makihara, just 21 years old, stood on the mound. He would go on to have a long, distinguished career. That night he was young and confident and throwing well.

Two outs. Runners on first and second.

Bass walked to the plate. The number 44 stretched across his back.

Makihara wanted a quick strike. The plan, as later told, was to induce contact. Perhaps a ground ball. Perhaps a fly ball that held up in the night air. But the pitch drifted too much toward the inside of the plate.

He had been waiting for that pitch for two years.

The ball left the bat with a sound that experienced hitters recognized instantly.

It rose toward center field.

Koshien’s batter’s eye loomed like a black rectangle against the night.

The ball disappeared into it.

The Tigers led 4-3. A come-from-behind three-run home run.

Next, Masayuki Kakefu stepped in and hit one to almost the same place. He embraced Bass when he reached the dugout.

Then Akinobu Okada did, too. He smiled as he rounded the bases.

Three consecutive home runs to center field.

The “Backscreen Three.” The phrase still lives on in Kansai.

But players would later say something specific and revealing: it was Bass’s home run that mattered most. When he hit that ball, they believed. They won the game. And then they kept winning. What began as a comeback rally changed the course of the season.

He hit third in a lineup that felt engineered for pressure. Akinobu Mayumi at the top, fast and dangerous. Bass was third, compact and merciless. Kakefu behind him, the long-time star of the franchise. Okada after that, the hometown pride. If you walked Bass, Kakefu punished you. If you pitched to him, he punished you.

By the All-Star break, Bass had already hit 30 home runs and the Tigers stood in first place for the first time in years. “Tiger Fever” swept across the nation. In early August, he fouled a ball off his ankle and suffered a small fracture expected to sideline him for two weeks. Reporters immediately wondered how Hanshin could possibly survive without him.

But only days later, when the Tigers arrived for a game in Tokyo, players were stunned to see Bass already sitting in the dugout, dressed in uniform despite the injury. Doctors had not cleared him to play, and the coaching staff suggested he limit himself to a pinch-hit appearance. Bass refused. With his ankle heavily taped and wearing modified shoes to dull the pain, he insisted on starting. That night he drove in a run with a line drive off the wall and slid hard into second base despite the injury.

The Tigers won, and teammates later said the mere sight of Bass in the dugout had lifted the entire club. During the following days he continued hitting as if nothing had happened, and the momentum of the season never slowed. Hanshin hit 219 home runs that season, more than any other team. Four players topped thirty. The ball left Koshien in waves.

But the real tension began when the number 55 entered the conversation. That was Sadaharu Oh’s record. Fifty-five home runs in 1964.

In Japan, records are not just numbers. They are history. And they are protected.

By late September, Bass had 54. Fifty-four with two games left. Both against the Giants. Managed by, of course, Sadaharu Oh. It could not have felt more scripted.

Bass came to the plate nine times in those final two games. He drew six walks. The Giants pitched around him without apology. There was nothing subtle about it. Bass swung at balls he would not normally swing at. He chased. He reached. He tried to force the issue.

He finished at 54.

He understood something about baseball in Japan that took others longer to grasp: sacred numbers are not surrendered lightly. Oh denied ordering intentional walks. Bass later admitted disappointment but praised pitchers like Suguru Egawa who had faced him honestly.

He had come within one swing of tying the most hallowed home-run record in Japanese history. He did not get that swing. But at the same time, something else was happening. He and Okada were racing for the batting title. With three games remaining, Okada briefly led.

Imagine the tension in that clubhouse. Two teammates. Two friends. Both chasing something that would last forever. And then, almost ironically, it was the walks that helped Bass.

While he was being pitched around in the home-run chase, his average did not drop. Okada pressed. He tried to do too much. When it was over, Bass had edged him by eight thousandths of a point.

Triple Crown.

.350 average. 54 home runs. 134 runs batted in.

The Tigers clinched the pennant on October 16 at Jingu Stadium, their first one since 1964.

Fans flooded the Dotonbori district in Osaka to celebrate. Supporters called out players’ names one by one, and for each name, a fan resembling that player leapt into the canal below.

When it came time for Bass, there was a problem. There were no bearded American sluggers nearby. So they found the closest available substitute—a statue of Colonel Sanders from outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken—and threw it into the water instead.

It sounds absurd. It was perfectly Kansai.

They advanced to face the Seibu Lions in the Japan Series. Bass hit .368 in the Series with three home runs and 9 RBI to take home MVP. The Tigers captured their first championship of the two-league era that began in 1950.

The Tigers would not win another title for decades. The statue would not be recovered until 2009. The “Curse of the Colonel” would become part of baseball folklore. But that night, there was no curse. For a fanbase that had waited generations, Bass was no longer just a foreign star. He was a god.

Then came the next season. Because while maybe 1985 could be explained as magic, 1986 could not.

There is something about the number .400 that makes reasonable people unreasonable. In American baseball, it is myth. Everybody knows Ted Williams was the last to do it in MLB. In Japanese baseball, it is impossibility. It had never been done.

By the time the 1986 season began, Randy Bass was already something larger than a player. He had won a Triple Crown. He had helped deliver a championship that felt like civic duty. His beard was the most recognizable facial hair in Japan. Gillette had paid him an extraordinary sum to shave it for a television commercial. Candy bars bore his name. Children in Osaka wore fake blond beards to games.

But in the beginning of the season, he looked ordinary. He arrived at spring camp heavier than ideal. He had trained lightly over the winter. There was a sense, perhaps subconscious, that he had climbed the mountain and could breathe a little. He dealt with back pain. Heel trouble. Blisters that split open on his hands. He struck out three times on Opening Day.

Baseball specializes in humbling men who believe momentum carries over. Through April he lagged behind the leaders in all three Triple Crown categories. The Tigers stumbled out of the gate. Then, in late May, something aligned.

It began quietly in a series against the Yokohama Taiyo Whales. Three games. Three home runs. Six hits. Eight runs batted in. The swing had been found again and by the end of May, his average had climbed past .340.

In June, it exploded. He hit .473 for the month. Think about that number. Nearly half the time he walked to the plate, he walked back having reached base with a hit.

On July 1, he was flirting with .390. On July 2, he crossed .400.

Sports pages began printing his batting average daily in bold. Television commentators led broadcasts with updates. Opposing pitchers were asked before games how they planned to retire him. Retired pitcher Yutaka Enatsu, the man who struck out 401 while pitching for the Tigers in 1968, wrote a column that cut through the politeness: If Bass Hits .400, It Will Be the Shame of the Central League.

Isao Harimoto’s .383 in 1970 stood as the modern standard*. To surpass it, to even approach it, felt like heresy.

*Harimoto is ethnically Korean but born and raised in Japan. His Korean name is Jan Hun. He survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. He holds the NPB record for hits with 3,085 and is the only player in history to hit 500 home runs and steal 300 bases.

He once said that if the Japanese Self-Defense Force worked as hard as the media had to find weaknesses in his swing, Japan would have the strongest military in the world.

The joke landed because it carried the truth. There were magazine spreads analyzing his mechanics. Computer-generated charts mapping his contact zones. Articles detailing how to pitch him inside, how to change speeds, how to disrupt timing. It became a national project.

Yet still, he hit.

He tied Sadaharu Oh’s professional record with a home run in seven consecutive games, the seventh coming off Suguru Egawa. The poetry was impossible to ignore. Oh again, always Oh. Oh publicly complained that Bass was applying too much grip spray to his bat before stepping into the box.

The umpires issued a warning. Bass shrugged then he hit another home run. He drove in runs in thirteen consecutive games, a Japanese record. Through his first sixty-nine games, he was hitting .399. The difference between .399 and .400 is microscopic. It is also infinite. When he went hitless in a game before the All-Star break and slipped to .399, it felt like a national event. When he collected three hits the next day and climbed again, the noise returned.

Somewhere in the middle of that summer, Bass began thinking about something no one else knew. He worried that if his average fell below Harimoto’s .383, pitchers would simply stop challenging him altogether. They would walk him. They would pitch around him. They would protect the record through avoidance.

He had seen it happen the previous year with 55. He quietly considered sitting out if necessary to preserve the average before it dipped below the record. But it never became necessary because he kept hitting.

Multi-hit games appeared every few days. Hitless nights were rare and brief. In August, with its heat and humidity, he hovered around .390. In September he refused to collapse under the weight of attention.

He finished the season at .389. 47 home runs. 109 RBI. Another Triple Crown. And the highest batting average in Japanese professional baseball history. A record that still stands.

Even then, he sounded surprised.

“I didn’t think I could hit this much,” he said later. “I was lucky.”

There is something charming about that answer. Luck does not re-engineer a stance to conquer the outside strike. Luck does not survive two years of near dismissal. What Bass had done was not lucky. It was adaptive and patient. And it was a little unsettling.

Because while he was climbing into the statistical stratosphere, the Tigers were descending. Hanshin finished third in 1986. A year after the parade, there was no parade. And in 1987, things worsened. The Tigers fell to last place. Bass still hit .320 with 37 home runs. But baseball has a way of reshaping narratives quickly. The man who had been called a god now felt mortal.

And then, in 1988, the story stopped being about baseball at all.

Early that season, Bass’s eight-year-old son, Zach, was diagnosed with a serious brain condition. Reports varied in translation—hydrocephalus, a tumor, complications requiring surgery—but the core was simple and devastating: his child needed treatment in the United States.

Bass left Japan with the club’s permission. At first, the departure seemed straightforward. Family before baseball. That much everyone understood. But professional baseball, especially in 1980s Japan, did not operate only on sentiment. There were timelines. There were expectations, both spoken and unspoken.

Hanshin manager Minoru Murayama, himself a Tigers legend, a man who won more than 200 games in his career, wanted his cleanup hitter back. Murayama was direct. “Bring him back,” he reportedly insisted. “As soon as possible.”

Bass stayed in America with his son. Deadlines were discussed and formalized. Then they passed. So the Tigers announced his release. It was not a clean separation.

Bass maintained that he had been granted permission to remain in the United States while his son underwent treatment. The club argued that uncertainty about his return left them little choice. There were disputes over medical expenses. There were disagreements over contractual interpretation.

In Japan (especially at the time) loyalty to a company, to a team, to an institution carries enormous weight. Leaving midseason, even for family, complicated expectations. Would a Japanese star have left? Bass left the team to attend his father’s funeral in 1984 but Sadaharu Oh famously continued managing without missing an inning after his own father died the following year.

At the same time, sympathy poured in from fans. Letters arrived by the thousands with origami cranes and messages of support. The man who had once been labeled selfish for returning home during his father’s illness was now seen through a different lens. Father first. Ballplayer second.

The dispute with Hanshin grew public. Caught in the middle of it all was a man named Shingo Furuya.

Furuya was a Hanshin executive. By all accounts, he was serious, diligent, and deeply conscientious. The Bass dispute was only one of several crises confronting the organization; there were also tensions involving Kakefu (who was injured and wanted to retire) and broader structural conflicts within the club. The pressure mounted.

In July 1988, Furuya died by suicide, jumping from a hotel in Tokyo. He’d only been managing director of the club for six weeks.

The news stunned the baseball world. For Bass, the tragedy added a layer of sorrow to an already fractured departure. Years later, he would say little publicly about that period. He spoke softly and described Furuya as a gentleman.

He never returned to professional baseball. There was no farewell tour. No ceremonial goodbye. One day he was the centerpiece of the Tigers’ lineup. The next he was back in Oklahoma, tending to family and distance.

In the years that followed, Hanshin entered what fans would call the “dark period.” The championships did not come. The Colonel Sanders statue lay in pieces at the bottom of the Dotonbori Canal. The chant quieted, but it never disappeared entirely. Bass was still a god in the hearts of the Hanshin faithful.

Bass built a life in Oklahoma. He entered politics, serving in the state senate. He even worked as a scout for the Yomiuri Giants for a few years. The relationship with Hanshin was strained but slowly, it softened.

He returned to Koshien, older, and the crowd, many of them older too, rose. Bass stood beside Kakefu and Okada again. They laughed. They remembered.

In 2023, he was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2025, he received the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese government for his contributions to Japanese society.

Think about that arc.

A man who arrived for money. A man who nearly lost his job because he was two years older than another player. A man who was once criticized for leaving to tend to family. Now formally honored by the nation he once entered as an outsider.

For a brief, incandescent stretch in the mid-1980s, Randy Bass was more than a foreign slugger. Across six seasons in Japan, Bass hit .337/.418/.660 with 202 home runs. It remains one of the most dominant peaks any hitter has ever produced in Japanese baseball.

He learned the strike zone. He learned the wind. He learned board games and how to eat without a fork. He learned how sacred numbers are guarded. He learned how loud Koshien could become when belief replaces doubt. To this day, many foreign sluggers arrive introduced as “the next Randy Bass.”

He hit 54 home runs and was denied 55. He hit .389 and threatened .400. He stood at the center of a lineup that finally defeated the Giants not just once, but psychologically.

He left abruptly. He returned gently.

And through it all, the chant remained.

Kamisama. Hotokesama. Baasu-sama.

God.

Buddha.

Bass.

Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan

https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com