Reading Korean baseball news from the United States, I often come across stories that leave me puzzled. In Korea, a player’s drunk driving or record of school bullying is a major sports story, of course. But so are marriage and divorce, even activity on social media. A player can post the best numbers in the league, yet an old controversy may resurface during national-team selection. Fans talk about a player’s conduct as much as his statistics.
In the United States, too, players’ crimes, gambling, and drug use are taken seriously. Yet an outstanding player is often given another chance after serving a punishment. There is also a tendency, at least to a degree, to separate a player’s personal life from his performance on the field.
In Korea, by contrast, ability and character are often judged together. Consider Woo-jin An. He has developed into one of the KBO League’s leading pitchers, but the school-violence controversy from his high school years still sparks debate whenever national-team selections come around. Although the legal and administrative sanctions have already ended, the same question follows him: “Is he fit to represent South Korea?”
Jae-gyun Hwang’s divorce offers a similar example. In the United States, a famous athlete’s divorce is often treated as entertainment news. In Korea, it was frequently discussed in sports articles alongside his performance on the field.
“Why, in Korea, does a player’s private life matter as much as baseball itself?”
One common explanation points to Confucian culture or the Korean national character. Cultural background has certainly played a part, but it cannot explain everything. The importance of morality in Korean baseball has much more to do with the circumstances in which professional baseball began—and with the role society has long expected players to play.
In the United States, the market built professional baseball. In Korea, the state needed it.
Korean Professional Baseball Began as a ‘National Project,’ Not a ‘Market’
Major League Baseball developed naturally into an industry as private clubs and regional leagues grew during the nineteenth century. Teams earned revenue by drawing crowds, and the league expanded through market competition. Politics sometimes influenced sports, but professional baseball itself was an industry built by private enterprise.
President Doo-hwan Chun at the opening ceremony of professional baseball in 1982
Korea was different. Professional baseball launched in 1982 with six teams. It was not long after the military government of Doo-hwan Chun had taken power, and political tensions had continued since the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement. The government sought to build a new national image through economic growth, international events, and popular culture. This period is often associated with the ‘3S policy’—Sports, Screen, Sex. The government actively supported the introduction and establishment of professional baseball, professional soccer, and professional ssireum (Korean wrestling), using sports both as popular recreation and as a way to project the nation’s image.
President Doo-hwan Chun’s ceremonial first pitch at the 1982 professional baseball opener captured this relationship. It meant something different from an American president throwing out the first pitch at a Major League Baseball opening game today. In Korea at the time, professional baseball was a new project driven by the state, and the president’s first pitch symbolized how important the league was to the government.
Professional baseball quickly became popular nationwide. As television spread, baseball became a favorite weekend program for families to watch together, and clubs came to represent their regions.
The 1982 Baseball World Cup in Seoul was especially important in making Korean baseball a symbol of national pride. South Korea defeated Japan in the final to win the championship, proving that it could compete on an international baseball stage long dominated by the United States and Japan. Baseball later appeared as a demonstration sport at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. International tournaments became a stage for showing Korean baseball’s standing in the world, and players came to be expected not only to perform well but also to fulfill a public role as representatives of their country.
This is the first difference between the United States and Korea.
Major League players have generally been seen as professionals under contract to their clubs. Korean professional players, on the other hand, were expected to act almost like public figures from the league’s earliest days. As professional baseball grew in popularity and the national team succeeded internationally, individual performances became linked to national achievement. Expectations rose—not only for how players performed, but also for what they said and how they behaved.
How Did the National Team, Military Service, and Corporate Clubs Come to Demand Players’ ‘Moral Character’ Too?
In Korea, the national team was not only a collection of the best players. It was also the face of South Korea.
This may seem unfamiliar to American fans, but in Korean sports, international tournaments have carried as much significance as professional leagues. From the 1980s onward, the Olympics and Asian Games were seen as stages for displaying the nation’s progress and international standing. Baseball grew within that larger story.
When South Korea’s baseball team went undefeated to win the gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the players were celebrated as national heroes. Many people remember that championship less as ‘a KBO success’ than as ‘a victory for South Korea.’
South Korea’s victory at the 2008 Beijing Olympics reinforced the message: ‘To join the national team is to represent the nation.’
Against this backdrop, selecting the national team was never simply a matter of judging talent. In Korea, alongside ‘Is he the best player?’ came another question: ‘Does he deserve to represent South Korea?’
The debate surrounding Woo-jin An can be understood in this light. Supporters say he has already served his punishment and should now be judged by his ability. Opponents argue that the national-team uniform symbolizes South Korea itself and therefore calls for a higher standard. At the heart of the dispute is not so much the school-violence incident itself as the question of who is ‘worthy of representing’ the country.
Military service makes national-team selection even more sensitive. In South Korea, adult men are required to serve in the military, while Olympic medalists and Asian Games gold medalists may qualify for special military-service arrangements[A1] . In South Korea, adult men are required to serve about 18 months in the military, but Olympic medalists and Asian Games gold medalists are effectively exempted: after just four weeks of basic training, they can continue their careers instead of leaving the game. Selection can shape not only a player’s chance to compete internationally but also the course of his career. Fans therefore scrutinize even more closely who deserves that opportunity.
The culture of corporate-owned clubs is another important part of the story. In Major League Baseball, a city gives a team its identity. In Korea, the parent company’s name appears in the club’s name: the Samsung Lions, LG Twins, Hanwha Eagles, and KIA Tigers. A player’s public controversy can affect not just the club but the corporate brand behind it. Clubs therefore often impose their own disciplinary measures, and companies place considerable weight on players’ social responsibility as well.
A Korean professional baseball player, then, is an athlete, a potential national-team member, and a representative of a corporate brand and a local community—all at once. In this environment, a culture took root that asks more social responsibility of players than of ordinary working professionals.
Today’s moral standards in Korean baseball are therefore less a reflection of any fixed national character than the accumulated result of the national-team system, military service, corporate-owned clubs, and the media environment.
What Kind of ‘Public Figure’ Does Korean Baseball Want Now?
As we have seen, Korean baseball’s high moral expectations of players took shape over time through the combined influence of the national team, military service, corporate-owned clubs, and the media.
But should those same standards still apply to professional baseball today? Actions that directly harm others, crimes, match-fixing, drunk driving, should be judged strictly. As long as professional sports depend on public trust, there is little difference between the United States and Korea on this point.
Woo-jin An, one of the KBO’s leading pitchers. Yet debate over his eligibility for the national team continues.
Whether lawful romantic relationships, marriage, divorce, political opinions, mistakes made long ago, and social-media activity should all be subjects of public judgment is a different matter. In Korea, debate continues over how far reporting on players’ private lives should go, and for how long mistakes made in adolescence should count against national-team selection.
These questions are not unique to Korea. The United States, too, has continued to debate the boundary between athletic performance and social responsibility, as seen in disputes over Pete Rose’s Hall of Fame eligibility and Trevor Bauer’s return to baseball.
More than forty years after its founding, Korean professional baseball has grown into an independent professional sports industry. Perhaps the standards by which players are judged also need to be reconsidered for the times. Social responsibility still matters for athletes. But how far that responsibility extends, and which actions should be judged separately from performance, cannot be decided by history alone.
The next forty years of Korean baseball may well be a process of drawing a new line between public responsibility and individual rights. And that question reaches beyond Korean baseball. How far should professional athletes be treated as public figures? It is a question every professional sport is grappling with today.
[A1]In South Korea, adult men are required to serve about 18 months in the military, but Olympic medalists and Asian Games gold medalists are effectively exempted: after just four weeks of basic training, they can continue their careers instead of leaving the game.
There has been an extensive amount of study on home field advantage in baseball and in sports in general. Home field advantage in baseball is known to exist, but the exact reasons for it remain elusive. Do teams perform better at home because of friendly fans? Because the players slept in their own beds the night before and didn’t have to travel? Because of familiarity with the batter’s eye and the physical field itself?
The CPBL offers an opportunity to attempt to isolate some of these possibilities. Since the opening of the Taipei Dome in late 2023, teams in Taiwan have been playing some of their “home” games at the dome. Over the course of 2024, 2025, and 2026, all six teams have played a decent number of games there. Teams also play a few “countryside” games per year, where they play outside of their normal home stadium. These two things combined give us a pretty large sample size of what I’ll call “phantom home games.” Large enough that I think we can begin to draw some conclusions about them and if/how they differ from a normal home game. The CPBL is not the only league with phantom home games; we see alternate home stadiums in other Asian leagues and in many baseball leagues around the world (and even in MLB from time to time), but it does have an unusually high percentage of them which gives us a good sample over the past three seasons.
So what I did was take each team from the previous three seasons and charted their Overall Home Record, True Home Record (their record at their normal home field), and Phantom Home Record (their record at alternate home fields). I excluded the 2025 Lions because their main stadium was damaged by a typhoon halfway through the year and they played an abnormal schedule with more than one “true” home. This left 17 different teams in the dataset. I also excluded ties for simplicity’s sake. The results are charted below:
Wins
Losses
Win Percentage
Overall Home
525
488
.519
True Home
411
383
.518
Phantom Home
114
105
.520
Looking at the totals, we see that the Overall Home Winning Percentage is .519 while the “True” Home Winning Percentage is .518 and the “Phantom” Home Winning Percentage is .520. This is a very small difference, well within the range where it is best to chalk up the gap between these rates to statistical noise. In other words, the data suggests that true home games and phantom home games are functionally the same thing as far as wins and losses are concerned.
This is an interesting finding. Phantom home games often do not provide many of the advantages typically associated with home field. In many Taipei Dome games, for example, the “home” team has a longer travel distance than the road team. It is also not unusual for the away team to have a majority of the crowd in certain circumstances. And in the case of the Taipei Dome, the “home” team doesn’t have any sort of extra familiarity with the park’s batter’s eye, wall dimensions, etc. because the entire league is more or less equally familiar with those things at this point.
So how can it be that with all of these advantages dulled, phantom home teams still win at almost exactly the same rate as true home teams? The obvious answer is that the real benefit of home field advantage lies in the power of batting last. Batting last is one of those things that we all intuitively know must confer some sort of advantage, but exactly how much advantage is basically impossible to quantify because batting last is normally always entangled with the other potential advantages mentioned above.
Based on the apparent lack of difference between your main home field and an alternate home field, the data suggests that almost all of the advantage of being home comes from batting last, and almost none of it comes from the other factors. But this is an unsatisfying answer. After all, home field advantage exists in every other sport, too. There is no “batting last” in basketball, yet home court advantage is absolutely a real thing, and there is statistical proof of its existence. Same for soccer, and ice hockey, and American football, and every other team sport that I’m aware of. So on the other hand, this suggests that some combination of travel/friendly crowd/familiarity with the venue/influence over refs does have an effect on athletes. Does that just not hold true for baseball? These factors affect every other athlete in the world besides baseball players? It does not seem to add up.
There is a dangerous path that some statistical analysis follows where everything that cannot be quantified is written off as either not real or just random luck. This at various times has included things like chemistry, morale, the impact of managers, clutchness (or lack thereof), and more. The absence of statistical evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. I do not think it is wise to definitively say that these various factors of home field advantage do not exist, particularly because they are shown to exist in other team sports. But if those factors do exist, they aren’t showing up in the CPBL data.
There is some other evidence that these environmental factors are overstated. We learned from the 2020 season that fans do not seem to have much impact on results, as home field advantage maintained a normal rate in both MLB and the CPBL. MLB home teams won at a .557 rate that year, while CPBL teams had a .525 rate, both actually a little bit higher than average.
One other part of the data sticks out to me. As noted in the table above, the overall CPBL home winning percentage over these three years is .519. The MLB rolling average for home winning percentage is a bit higher, hovering around .540. So home field advantage appears to be larger in MLB than in the CPBL, and of course, this tracks with our intuitions because MLB has much greater travel distances and much more unique ballparks. Perhaps it is batting last that makes up the initial 52-48 split, and the other factors that push things further to 54-46 in MLB. But those factors are largely minimized in the CPBL, so they don’t really factor into home field advantage in Taiwan. This is only speculation of course, but it provides a plausible explanation for the gap between the two leagues.
Would this same behavior with alternate stadiums continue in other leagues? I am inclined to say yes, though there are a few potential hiccups. Taiwan is a relatively small place, so any effects of travel that appear to be reduced in Taiwan may be more pronounced elsewhere. It’s also only a six team circuit, and players end up having high familiarity with every stadium in the league pretty quickly, which again is not always the case in other leagues. The stadiums are also all relatively uniform compared to the stadiums seen in the Americas. So there are some reasons to believe this trend would not be reproduced across all baseball leagues even if they played phantom home games at the same rate as the CPBL.
Ultimately, even with the increase in phantom home games over the past three years thanks to the opening of the Taipei Dome, we are still working with a relatively small sample size and I don’t think it’s safe to draw any definitive conclusions from this data. But I do think there is enough evidence to take it with a grain of salt the next time you hear a pundit talk about a hostile crowd or the other vague benefits of home field advantage. All we can say definitively is that being listed as the home team provides a real advantage, and that batting last is at least part of the reason why that is.
Join SABR’s Asian Baseball Research Committee for this special zoom event with Max Ratch of the Hiroshima Carp. Max will talk about the importance of mascots in Nippon Professional Baseball as well as his career as a mascot actor. Get the inside (pun intended) scoop on Slyly and other iconic mascots.
Register for this free event below:
Asian Baseball Committee meeting
When: Nov 9, 2026 08:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
With the DeNA BayStars entering their second Japan Series in three years, this week I’ve decided to post this 2024 interview with the team owner Tomoko Namba. Namba explains how DeNA acquired the BayStars and transformed a money-losing franchise into a profitable and winning club. This interview was previously published in the 2025 book In the Japanese Ballpark: behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball (University of Nebraska Press) by Robert Fitts.
After receiving her MBA from Harvard Business School, Tomoko Namba became a partner at McKinsey & Company before she founded DeNA, one of Japan’s largest mobile- technology companies. She became the first woman to own an NPB team when she took control of the BayStars in 2015. Six months after this interview, the BayStars won their first Japan Series under DeNA’s ownership.
As the owner of the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, my passion for baseball runs deep. I often enjoy watching games from a regular seat in the stands, where I find immense pleasure in cheering along with our fans, enjoying a beer under the bright blue sky. The atmosphere is electric, and I love singing along and high fiving with everyone.
My love for baseball dates back to my childhood, when it was the only professional sport available. Growing up in Niigata, I could only watch Giants games on tv. In those days, everyone was either a Giants fan or simply anti- Giants. The first professional NPB game I attended was between the Nankai Hawks and the Lotte Orions from the Pacific League. This was a monumental event in my life because professional baseball games were a rare occurrence in rural areas. It was something special, a spectacle usually confined to television.
I vividly remember the excitement when a game was scheduled in Niigata. My father asked if I wanted to go, and my sister and I eagerly agreed. On the day of the game, my mother, dressed in her best clothes, looked noticeably different and was the most excited among us. However, my father hadn’t anticipated her enthusiasm and had only secured three tickets. True to her traditional Japanese values, my mother gracefully bowed out, joking she had forgotten to wash the dishes and returned home. This memory is etched in my mind, a bittersweet yet cherished moment. Although we felt sorry for my mother, we thoroughly enjoyed the game and shared every detail with her upon our return. Her excitement to hear about the game made the experience even more memorable.
I founded DeNA, but after twelve years, my husband fell seriously ill, and I decided to step down to care for him. We faced this challenge together. During this time, the new management team expressed interest in acquiring a baseball team. Initially, I was against the idea, arguing that it was a significant departure from our core business and that we lacked experience in this field. However, they saw it as a rare and prestigious opportunity, given the limited number of teams. After thorough discussions and addressing my concerns about profitability and operational knowledge, they presented well- prepared answers and convinced me to consider the acquisition.
DeNA was relatively new and not widely recognized at the time. While we excelled at college- campus recruiting, parents were often unfamiliar with DeNA, leading to questions like, “What is DeNA?” and “The founder is female?” To establish a stronger reputation and improve our branding, acquiring a baseball team seemed advantageous. It would increase DeNA’s visibility and prestige. Additionally, the management team had a genuine passion for baseball. Trusting their preparation and vision, I agreed to pursue the acquisition of the Yokohama BayStars.
I was not the initial owner of the team, as I was absent at the time. Makoto Haruta, who became the chairman of DeNA after I stepped down, served as the first owner. He had a deep understanding of baseball. I later returned to DeNA full- time, and I assumed the role of owner in January 2015, becoming the first female owner in the NPB. While this made head-lines, it didn’t hold much personal significance for me, as I’ve often been the first woman to achieve a number of milestones in my career.
Historically, professional baseball was seen as a philanthropic endeavor or a means to boost employee morale, often operating at a loss. Ownership changes typically occurred when the parent company could no longer sustain these losses. We aimed to shift this paradigm by leveraging our business acumen to make the BayStars a successful enterprise. Achieving profitability ensures the team’s stability, irrespective of DeNA’s business performance, and eliminates the possible need to sell the team down the line. This financial stability is crucial for providing a consistent environment for players and coaches.
By demonstrating how to make the BayStars profitable, we also contributed to the sports industry as a whole. For the sports industry to grow, the sport itself must be profitable, creating a virtuous cycle of expanding growth. If baseball teams cannot achieve profitability, there is little hope for other professional sports like basketball or soccer, as baseball is the biggest professional sport in Japan. Increasing the business scale of the NPB is crucial, requiring collective efforts from all twelve teams. In this regard, there is much we can learn from the United States. While the level of baseball here is very high, the business scale is vastly different. We cannot pay star players the same salaries as in the United States due to our business size.
Running a baseball business is relatively straightforward, with revenue streams from tickets, concessions, merchandise, broadcasting, and sponsorships— all interlinked with attendance. When we acquired the Bay Stars, attendance was abysmal. We understood it would take time to improve the team’s strength, so our immediate focus was on other ways to engage fans and make it exciting and fun to be in the stadium, even if the team lost. That was a major reason why we appointed Kiyoshi Nakahata as our first manager. He is an iconic and energetic figure who was also an entertainer, and his charisma and engagement with fans and media created a lively atmosphere. Nakahata-san’s popularity helped draw more fans, and his enthusiastic fan interactions inspired the players to do the same. This decision was strategic, and Nakahata-san’s presence indeed immediately boosted fan engagement.
As the number of fans increased, we introduced various attractions and special packages, such as ¥1 million tickets that included perks like getting to ride in a limousine and helicopter tours, and a full ticket refund if you were dissatisfied with the game. These innovative offerings, along with our targeted marketing efforts, significantly increased attendance.
We also introduced innovations in how the time between innings was utilized. While most attendees typically get up to go buy food or beverages or use the restroom, we decided to challenge that norm. Instead, we aimed to provide entertainment during these intervals to make them livelier and more engaging for the audience.
We also brainstormed ways to bring content to our fans beyond the games and the stadium. One notable project was the creation of a documentary video that highlighted key moments from the season. This allowed fans to relive exciting moments even after the season had ended, helping to keep them engaged and building anticipation for the upcoming season.
The team also did not have a solid marketing strategy. Leveraging DeNA’s strong marketing capabilities, we identified our target segments and tailored everything— from seating to concessions— to their preferences. Through marketing analysis, we identified the primary target segment as business professionals in their thirties who would attend games with colleagues or partners. We aligned our marketing strategy to effectively go after this target segment. The entire staff took part in distributing flyers, with Yota Kimura, the current president of the BayStars who incidentally majored in rocket science at the University of Tokyo, personally handing them out at train stations during commuting hours. We placed advertisements in business magazines and online. Additionally, we aimed to make the stadium a popular dating spot for young professionals. One of my initial directives was to improve the women’s restrooms, as I recognized that cleanliness is crucial for attracting female fans. Ensuring comfortable facilities for women was a key aspect of our strategy.
Of course, all of these initiatives contributed to improving our performance, but the best possible delight we can provide to our fans is victory on the field. Throughout this time, we steadily invested to strengthen the team. All these efforts were part of our push to do everything we could to improve the team’s business performance. Before we bought the BayStars, they were losing more than $20 million every year. We reduced these losses to $2– 3 million per year. However, we still couldn’t make a profit because we had to share the revenue with the Yokohama Stadium Company. The stadium is very important to us since it hosts our games and other events. We often had to ask them to change the setup for these events. Also, we were always negotiating how much of the revenue we had to share, which was not a good situation. Since the stadium is so important to our business, we waited for the chance to buy the stadium company.
There was one individual in the stadium company who fully understood our vision. He recognized that it would benefit the fans, businesses, and local municipal government if we controlled the stadium. With our aggressive approach, we could transform it into a versatile business venue, hosting not only baseball games but also concerts and other events. Thus, in 2016, we successfully acquired the stadium company through a friendly takeover. With ownership, we took control of the concessions. As a foodie, I prioritized enhancing the quality of the ballpark food. We have our own tenants for food services, and we also introduced our own brand, including our own beer. While we outsource the food preparation, it is done according to our specifications to ensure high quality. We have two types of tenants: those who use our space and those who operate independently. This dual approach allows us to maintain excellent food standards. After gaining control of the stadium, we turned a profit immediately in that same year.
As the owner, my focus is on the big picture and the future goal for the team. My primary responsibilities include setting the overall budget frame-work and making key personnel decisions, such as appointing the manager and GM. Beyond that, the team’s management operates independently. I consciously refrain from intervening or even asking questions about player decisions, as I once inadvertently influenced the manager’s choices by merely asking about a player’s usage. To avoid such issues, I leave baseball operations entirely to the professionals. However, as a fan, it can be challenging! In private, I often express my thoughts to my family and friends, but I never interfere with the manager’s or GM’s decisions.
On the business side, I actively suggest improvements, such as enhancing the food in the suites or the types of merchandise we should offer. These are merely fan suggestions, and it’s up to the team whether to implement them. In managing my company, my philosophy is to delegate responsibilities and encourage independent thinking rather than issuing direct orders. While there are times when decisions must be made and directives given, it’s crucial for team members to understand the reasoning behind them. This approach ensures that if they need to make decisions independently, they do so with a deep understanding of the rationale. At DeNA, we maintain a flat organizational structure, fostering open discussions without hierarchical barriers. This management style contrasts with the more directive, hierarchical approach typical of sports teams. Our team embraces a more liberal approach, involving coaches and players in discussions. That being said, we haven’t yet proven this method effective, seeing as we haven’t won a championship, so we remain open to adapting our strategies.
I was surprised at how challenging it is to win a championship. There are only six teams in the Central League, yet we haven’t won since 1998. I’ve heard about the celebrations in Yokohama when the team won in 1998— I heard that the entire city was in festive chaos, with shops giving away products for free and four hundred thousand people attending the parade. Some people got on top of cars. I dream of witnessing such excitement, with my team at the center. Unlike movies, where the excitement comes from someone else’s creation, sports offer a unique thrill because the players are competing for themselves. The DeNA BayStars hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Yokohama. No matter where I am, I’ll be heading to Yokohama when we win.
One of the reasons for owning a baseball team is to contribute to society. To achieve this, the team must be profitable. Our success directly benefits the surrounding community. The team is an icon for the people of Yokohama, and when the BayStars perform well, it brings happiness and smiles to everyone. Although Yokohama is adjacent to Tokyo, it is not merely an extension of the metropolis; Yokohama stands proudly as its own city with a strong sense of civic pride.
Beyond baseball, the stadium also plays a vital role in supporting the community. With only seventy home games a year, there are over 290 days without professional baseball. As owners, we are responsible for making the stadium a lively place during these off days by hosting concerts and other events. Additionally, we support local businesses by attracting visitors to the stadium, who then explore nearby areas like Yokohama Chinatown and other local attractions. Increasing foot traffic at the stadium helps boost the local economy. In many ways, owning the team allows us to contribute significantly to society.
We also look beyond the stadium. Right in between Yokohama Stadium and nearby Kannai Station is the old city hall district of the City of Yokohama, which we are in the process of redeveloping. This site is an excellent location for driving activity and engagement in the community. Having the opportunity to develop such a prime site in the heart of Yokohama, next to our stadium, and engage with fans is rare, rivaling the significance of the opening of the port of Yokohama to the West back in the 1800s. We are planning a number of new initiatives to attract people to the area on both game and nongame days by leveraging DeNA and BayStars content. Through these efforts, we aim to give back to the community. This is the key role that DeNA strives to fill.
In the broader region, I applaud MLB’s efforts to expand into the Asian market. It is a welcome development because baseball, despite being a great sport, is relatively local, primarily played in a few Asian countries like Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. MLB’s substantial financial power entering the Asian market can bring attention to baseball in other Asian countries, allowing more people to experience it and get excited about the sport. Expanding the market benefits everyone in the industry. In the future, we aim to play baseball games internationally and to attract world baseball fans. Hosting international games, such as MLB or WBC events, in Japan can bring many fans from Asian countries, which will help to extend the market for baseball.
I don’t think it should have to be this way. Japan has the potential to be an attractive and competitive destination for top talent. I deeply love Japanese baseball and envision a future where American star players might come to Japan for higher compensation and a more enjoyable experience. Baseball was introduced from the United States, so catching up is challenging; still, that remains the dream.
Get the inside scoop on Japanese baseball from n the Japanese Ballpark: behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball (University of Nebraska Press) by Robert Fitts.
Everyone knows the Black Sox. NPB had a scandal of its own that involved multiple players, multiple teams, and cost one young star everything.
Everybody knows about the Black Sox Scandal. Even casual fans know all about the 1919 White Sox, the fixed World Series, and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Heck, MLB just had another Field of Dreams game. Even after a hundred years, people are still pushing for Shoeless Joe to be put into the Hall of Fame. And he may well get his chance, as his permanent ban was lifted last year by Commissioner Rob Manfred.
What many don’t know is that Japanese baseball has its own famous scandal, and it even shares a word with its American counterpart: the Black Mist Scandal. It spanned multiple years, players from multiple teams, organized crime, auto-racing, and even an investigation from the Diet, Japan’s legislative body.
Let’s start on a July afternoon in 1969. The president of the Nishitetsu Lions, Kunihiro Naotoshi, was watching his team lose to the Nankai Hawks at Osaka stadium and noticed his pitcher didn’t seem to mind. We all know what a pitcher looks like when he’s getting hit hard, or when the calls don’t go his way. He winces or mutters to himself. Maybe throws up his hands in frustration or disbelief. But Lions pitcher Masayuki Nagayasu wasn’t doing any of those things. He just kept pitching and Kunihiro just chalked it up to one of those things that you notice but can’t really explain. Kunihiro wasn’t the only one—Carl Boles, the Lions’ imported slugger, had been telling a Hochi Shimbun reporter that there was a player on the team who was making mistakes on purpose. By October, the team had heard enough and launched its own investigation, and Nagayasu was asked, straight out, if he’d been fixing games.
Nagayasu didn’t say yes, and he also didn’t say no. He just sat, trembling slightly with sweat beading down his face, and the Lions took that as a confession. On October 8, the Yomiuri and Hochi papers ran the story: a Nishitetsu pitcher had been taking money from organized crime (the yakuza!) to lose games on purpose. Reports swarmed Nagayasu’s apartment before the sun even rose. He admitted that Kunihiro had confronted him back in August and that he’d denied it back then. He denied it once again to the reports outside his door and then left his apartment and didn’t return. It would be another six months before anyone got a real answer out of it.
Of course, it was against the rules to throw games. Heck, even if it wasn’t an official rule, anybody involved in playing sports knows that losing on purpose is an unthinkable act. But it had been an official rule in NPB since 1953 (remember that the league only started in 1950). There’s an article in the “Harmful Acts” section that says any player, coach, or official who lost a game on purpose, or who knew about someone losing a game on purpose and failed to report it, could be permanently banned from the sport by the Commissioner. League officials deliberated on what to do, as they worried that kicking him out of the sport would mean that Nagayasu couldn’t be compelled to talk anymore or answer more questions. But it didn’t matter because by the end of November, the league decided to ban him for life anyway—the first lifetime ban in NPB history for misconduct. Story over, right?
Not at all. It wouldn’t be much of a scandal if it only involved one player. In the same winter, a Giants pitching coach got tangled up in his brother-in-law’s business dispute when a middleman hired to pressure an executive into resigning turned out to have yakuza connections. It wasn’t game-fixing and it actually did not have anything to do with baseball at all. But it didn’t matter because baseball had a problem with organized crime. Newspapers borrowed the term kuro kiri—black mist—from a political corruption scandal from the mid-1960s, back when bribery was said to cover Japanese politics like a fog nobody could see through.
By the spring, the government had gotten involved. Roughly three hundred Diet members formed a caucus to take up baseball’s black mist on the legislative floor. Members from the Commisssoner’s office were called to testify in front of the committee. One lawmaker even floated a theory that Nagayasu, still missing, might be being held against his will. Police searched for him and concluded it probably wasn’t true since he was still making regular phone calls to his family. He was just in hiding, hoping for the story to blow away.
In the end, it was a freelance writer named Joji Otaki who tracked him down through his sister. Otaki had previously covered Nagayasu and had earned his trust. What Nagayasu wound up telling him was worse than anything that had come out by that point: he hadn’t acted alone, and Nishitetsu paid him to stay quiet about it all.
The story came out in bits and pieces throughout March and April, in a tabloid scoop here and a taped late-night interview there. Team owner Muneo Kusune, when reached by phone call while on business in Moscow, dismissed the whole thing as impossible. On April 6, a tabloid quoted Nagayasu using teammates’ initials, naming only one player outright: Tsutomu Tanaka, a Chunichi Dragons pitcher he said had recruited multiple Lions to join the scheme in the first place. Kyodo News identified the players by full name the next day, and by April 8 it was running in every sports paper in the country.
It all landed on April 10, at a press conference inside the Diet’s own office building, where Nagayasu finally agreed to say the whole thing himself, out loud, at once. The reporters in that room had spent months listening to his story arrive secondhand, always to whichever outlet had reached him first, and their patience was gone. Isn’t it disrespectful that you’ll talk to individual reporters and not to us? one of them asked. Nagayasu sat there with his head down, his face going a dark, blotchy red, his hands trembling. It took a sitting Diet member, seated right beside him, to finally talk him into finishing what he’d started: I understand not wanting to name your old teammates. Everyone here understands. Just say it.
So he did. “On the pitching side was Masuda, Yoda, and myself. Also Funada, Motoi, Murakami, Ikenaga, and Tanaka-san. Tanaka-san is the one who told Ikenaga.” He said it all in a single breath, and then the color drained out of his face and his shoulders dropped since the weight of the world was no longer on him. A veteran reporter in the room said afterward it reminded him of watching a murder suspect finally confess.
Tsutomu Tanaka 1967 Kobaya-Leaf
Naturally, Nishitetsu denied it all. The six players who’d been named were all questioned and every single one of them denied involvement. The club cleared them all publicly. It took the another newspaper’s own digging to make the story impossible to keep denying. On April 28, Kusune finally admitted it but dressed the hush money paid to Nagayasu up as “rehabilitation money” for a man who’d come to him in tears. The next day, under questioning from prosecutors in Tokyo, Kusune finally admitted to the exact amount he’d given to Nagayasu.
The man who’d actually done the bribing had a name too: Hirotaka Fujinawa, a milk distributor with ties to organized crime and the person Nagayasu fingered as his contact throughout it all. Fujinawa denied it all until his own arrest on unrelated motorcyle race-fixing charges, at which point he confessed to bribing Lions players. He claimed he made ten attempts but only two were successful, and that he lost a whole lot of money for his efforts anyway.
With Tanaka’s name on the record, the story was now longer contained to one team. Kentaro Ogawa, Chunichi’s ace and the 1967 Sawamura Award winner—Japan’s Cy Young—got named in connection with the race-fixing. He was arrested in early May of 1970 at the same time as Tanaka. Over at the Toei Flyers, two more players were named in connection. One of them, Toshiaki Moriyasu, a 3x All-Star, admitted to accepting ¥500,000 and was banned for life that July. A reporter asked him afterward if it’d really been worth throwing away his entire career for money and he answered flatly, “I suppose so” before his composure quickly changed, saying he wanted to get down on his knees and apologize to every single fan. Smaller cases kept trickling out into 1971, too, at Kintetsu, Hanshin, Nankai, Taiyo, Lotte, and Yakult. More than half of the teams in NPB had players who were involved in either fixing games, having knowledge of fixing games, or having ties to organized crime.
Back at Nishitetsu, the six players were questioned again for five hours on May 4, and every one of them denied it again. By May 9, the club finally admitted that it couldn’t call the six of them entirely clean anymore. Then the confessions finally came in: Masaaki Ikenaga admitted on May 10 that he’d taken ¥1 million from Tanaka. The others admitted to their own involvement over the following days, with some even clearing other teammates with their confessions.
On May 25, 1970, the league made its decision: Ikenaga along with fellow pitchers Yoshinobu Yoda and Akio Masuda were banned for life; catcher Kimiyasu Murakami and infielder Kazuhide Funada were suspended for the rest of the season; two more barred a full year from any baseball activity; and Mitsuo Motoi was given a warning because he’d refused the money, returned it, but failed to report it. Owner Kusune, whose own hush-money confession had made his position untenable, resigned from every post at the club that same day. Tanaka, the pitcher who’d started it all, was never formally banned but was blackballed by the league and never played again.
Yoshinobu Yoda 1967 Kobaya-Leaf
Of the six, Ikenaga was the one nobody in Fukuoka (the home of the Lions at the time) could believe. He’d been perhaps the best pitcher of his generation from the moment he debuted. He was Rookie of the Year in 1965 at 19 years old, had a league-leading 23 wins in 1967, and 99 total victories across his first five seasons. He was so good and so popular that he was named to the All-Star team in every one one of those five seasons. His win total had people doing the math on when he would reach 200 wins and then 300. He threw hard, but there was more to him than that. He used to say velocity accounted for maybe one or two parts out of ten of what made a pitcher good, the rest was reading a hitter’s stance and locating the ball just off the barrel of the bat. In 1970, before the ban, he was 4-3 with a 2.60 ERA in 9 games.
What happened, as best as anyone has managed to piece together, was something like this. Tanaka, who’d pitched for the Lions from 1961 through 1967, approached him and asked him to fix a game. Ikenaga said no but Tanaka kept pushing, claiming his own life was in danger if he couldn’t find someone to take the money. Ikenaga, unwilling or unable to humiliate his senior and former teammate, reluctantly took money. However, he never ended up pitching in the specific game he was asked to throw, and he was never criminally charged with anything. But the league’s own ruling cited three things: he’d kept the money rather than returning it; he hadn’t reported the solicitation; and, as supporting evidence, he’d been pulled early from two starts late in the 1969 season. Ikenaga, for the rest of his life, said the same thing: he never tried to lose a game.
Ikenaga was only 23 years old when the ban came down, with 103 wins and what everyone figured was a surefire Hall of Fame career ahead of him. Yoda and Masuda—who, by their own admission, were actually guilty of match-fixing—cried when the ruling was announced, telling reporters that punishing him the same as them was a loss the baseball world would never get back. Their cries fell on deaf ears as it didn’t change anything.
Well, I guess it changed some things. The Lions finished last in 1970, for the first time in franchise history, then again in 1971 and 1972. Attendance and popularity fell off a cliff and showed no signs of recovering. By the end of 1972, Nishitetsu sold the team and by the end of the decade, the team had relocated to Tokorozawa, Saitama to become the Seibu Lions everybody knows now.
Not everybody’s story had a sad ending. Murakami and Yoda were both traded after the 1971 season, to Lotte and Yakult, respectively; both won Japan Series titles with their new teams. There was even a real silver lining: a 1968 draft pick named Osamu Higashio, who’d lost enough confidence as a rookie to ask about becoming a position player, suddenly found himself pitching regularly once the scandal emptied the rotation around him. he called it, years later, the biggest break of his career, and became the ace of the Seibu teams that eventually made people forget what the franchise had been through. Higashio was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2010.
Masaaki Ikenaga 1967 Kobaya-Leaf
As for Ikenaga, he stayed in Fukuoka and opened a bar, trying to live an honest life. Fans who came in wrote messages of encouragement on the bathroom walls until there was no space left. But his plight was not forgotten by those who had played with him, either. Former teammates and coaches spent decades organizing campaigns to get him reinstated. Petitions to the league in 1997 and 2002 were both rejected, with the league arguing it had no authority to revert the original ruling. Uh, okay.
What seemed to finally move the needle was Ikenaga throwing three innings of no-hit ball in relief for an old-timers’ league in late 2001. It was the first time in thirty-one years anyone in Fukuoka had been able to see him pitch in public. A former teammate, managing the team, asked him so fans could see him take the mound one more time. Ikenaga said after that all he hoped was to eventually be forgiven.
In 2004, a new commissioner struck a different note, reasoning that even a man serving a life sentence usually gets a shot at parole after fifteen or twenty years. The following March, the league amended its own bylaws to let banned players petition for reinstatement after fifteen years, provided the commissioner judged they’d shown real remorse. Ikenaga applied. After thirty-five long years, on April 25, 2005, Nippon Professional Baseball let him back in.
Just a few weeks later, on May 11, Ikenaga threw out the ceremonial first pitch in Fukuoka for a game between the Hawks and Carp. He was 58 years old by then, and the newspaper couldn’t resist mentioning that his hair had gone completely white. Still, he managed to hurl the ball over the middle of the plate, showing off the pitching form that made him a star.
He died of cancer in 2022. Isao Harimoto, the man with more hits in NPB history than anyone, summed up Ikenaga best: black mist and all that came with it, the man still could have won 250 games.
We are thrilled that the SABR publication How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945 edited by Russ Speiller and James Forr is now available. The book is accompanied by a website featuring more photographs, interviews, video clips and more.
Within the pages of our new SABR Digital Library book and companion website, How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945, you won’t find names of legendary American baseball heroes like Mickey Mantle or Ken Griffey Jr., but you will most definitely find American heroes. People such as Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi, Pete Mitsui, George Tamura, Jim Morita, and Mary Matsuno Miya didn’t just excel at playing ball. They excelled at perseverance, after having their lives taken away from them to be detained at the Manzanar incarceration camp during World War II.
How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945 Edited by Russ Speiller and James Forr Associate Editor: Bill Nowlin Foreword by Dave Roberts, Los Angeles Dodgers manager ISBN (paperback): 978-1-960819-67-3, $19.95 ISBN (ebook): 978-1-960819-66-6, $9.99 8.5″ x 11″, 162 pages
How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945 tells the story of baseball at Manzanar. The volume is illustrated with many historical photos, some taken by Toyo Miyatake, an incarceree who snuck a forbidden lens into the camp and built his own camera, and some by famed photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Contributors include over a dozen members of the Society for American Baseball Research and several other key individuals such as Dan Kwong, the son of an incarceree and leader of the effort to restore the baseball field on the Manzanar historic site, and Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project. This team has joined forces to tell the story of how the Japanese Americans incarcerated at Manzanar played the game.
Our special Featured Spotlight web project complements the new Digital Library book. At SABR.org/baseball-at-manzanar, explore the Baseball at Manzanar companion website to find more essays and stories, rare photos, interviews, and multimedia clips with survivors of the camp and their families in their own words, plus special coverage of the reconstruction and reclamation of the Manzanar baseball field leading up to a historic doubleheader played there in 2024 and the ballfield’s grand opening in October 2026.
Visit SABR.org/baseball-at-manzanar to download the free e-book edition, save 50% off the purchase of the paperback, or learn more.
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Susan Miyagi McCormac focus on the last MLB All-Star tour of Japan.
Since baseball’s introduction to Japan in 1872, the Japanese game has evolved from being primarily an amateur sport with large fan bases for high-school and collegiate competitions to its teams being ranked tops in the world. Throughout the last 150 years, there have been varying opinions – from baseball authorities to casual fans – about Japanese players’ abilities to perform well in America’s pastime.
Cy Young, the major leagues’ all-time wins leader with 511, had disparaging remarks about Japanese players’ ability to pitch and hit, saying that they “will never become great players.”
“Take the Japanese athlete. He can’t hit worth a hurrah,” Young said in 1910, one year before he pitched his last big-league game at the age of 44. “Every good pitcher has it on him. … A Jap can’t pitch. There is one reason for this, of course. That reason is that they can’t grip the ball. The hands of the Japs are very small. So small, in fact, that for one of them to grip the ball as the pitchers in this country grip it is impossible.”
Newspapermen the following year echoed Young’s sentiment when the independent professional team known as the Japanese Base Ball Association barnstormed in the Midwest. In his 2020 book Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers, Robert Fitts documents the struggles and triumphs of Japanese immigrants who were dedicated to playing America’s pastime despite encountering financial hardships and intense discrimination throughout their travels across the United States. Although the press and spectators alike sometimes warmly received the Japanese teams, the criticism could be biting and downright racist. Fitts quotes a writer for the Hutchinson (Kansas) Daily Gazette as saying, “If the delegation of Japanese representing the baseball team in Hutchinson yesterday are considered high class Japanese baseball players, the Americans need to have no fear that the Orientals will rob us of the glory and excitement of our national pastime. … Owing to their small stature they are unable to cover as much ground as the Yankee, can’t throw nor can they think fast enough.” Three days later, a reporter from the Leavenworth (Kansas) Times wrote, “The game yesterday showed that baseball is a game which belongs to Americans.”
Japanese professional baseball has made many strides since those early days of taking trains through the heartland of the United States, playing “America’s game” against any opponent who would face them. Masanori “Mashi” Murakami eventually pitched for the San Francisco Giants in 1964, becoming the first Japanese-born player in major-league history. There was a 30-year gap between Murakami and the next Japanese player, Hideo Nomo, but since then several of their countrymen have transitioned from NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) to the major leagues to throw no-hitters (Nomo twice, in 1996 and 2001, and Hisashi Iwakuma in 2015), earn AL MVPs (Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani), and win World Series (most notably Tadahito Iguchi, the first Japanese-born position player to do so; Hideki Matsui, who also earned World Series MVP honors as a New York Yankee in 2009; and pitchers Daisuke Matsuzaka, Hideki Okajima, and Koji Uehara, who won championships with the Boston Red Sox).
But for every Nomo and Ichiro and Matsui, there were the Kei Igawas, the Kazuo Fukumoris, and the Kenshin Kawakamis whose major-league careers were less than stellar. Many compared NPB to American baseball’s minor-league system, saying that NPB pitchers would have more of a chance to strike out Triple-A batters than the bigger, stronger major leaguers.
The wider baseball world started to realize the amount of considerable talent in the Far East when Japan won the first two installments of the World Baseball Classic, in 2006 and 2009. After collecting the Bronze Medal in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Samurai Japan captured Gold when Tokyo hosted the 2020 Summer Olympics, which was delayed until 2021 by the global COVID-19 pandemic. As of 2022, Japan was ranked the number-one baseball country in the world, according to the World Baseball Softball Confederation, the governing body for the sports of baseball, softball, and baseball5.
Major leaguers have played exhibition games in Japan since 1908, and the major-league-Japan All-Star Series began in 1986. Historically, the major leaguers had no trouble winning almost all of those contests handily. The series took an eight-year break after 2006, since “the advent of the World Baseball Classic made the series in Japan somewhat redundant.”
The friendly competition resumed in 2014, but with a slight change on the Japan side. Wanting to expose players to the best competition, NPB Commissioner Katsuhiko Kumazaki decided that rather than a team made up of NPB all-stars, Samurai Japan, the national team that represents the country in international contests like the Asian Baseball Championship, the World Baseball Classic, and the Olympics, would play the major leaguers. While there is overlap between a typical NPB all-star team and Samurai Japan, the members of the national team were carefully and thoughtfully chosen because their skills, experience, and – most important – their leadership deemed them “irreplaceable.”
“We have been going after players, starting with camp scouting in February and watching games this season. In previous games with the US, players wore their respective pro team uniforms, but this time, they will be wearing the Japan uniform when competing with the MLB,” Samurai Japan manager Hiroki Kokubo explained during a press conference in July 2014. “We may have performed well in previous friendly games, but this game will be more of a true exhibition game. Focusing only on winning, playing a serious game.”
The strategy worked against the MLB All-Stars; Samurai Japan won the 2014 series, 3 games to 2. This determination to build the perfect team that embodied Kokubo’s “Focus Only on Winning” mantra reverberated throughout NPB. Commissioner Kumazaki, who is considered to have played a major role in bringing baseball back to Olympic competition, wanted to continue to strengthen Samurai Japan after the team’s successful campaign in 2014. “We aspire to have our best team,” he said in August 2016, after baseball and softball were reinstated for the 2020 Games in Tokyo. “Our first priority is assembling a team that can win.”
To Kumazaki, meaningful international competition was the ideal way to prepare Samurai Japan for the Olympics. His successor as commissioner, Atsushi Saito, shared his desire to turn Samurai Japan into Gold Medal winners. When MLB announced that an all-star team would return to Japan in 2018, Saito expressed gratitude for continuing the bilateral relationship between the two countries but made clear his primary objective in playing the major leaguers. “It has been four years since Samurai Japan and MLB last met. With our goal of winning a Gold Medal in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, this gives our players experience in high-level games against MLB players,” Saito said.
With the 2018 MLB All-Star tour in Japan, Saito got the meaningful international competition he and Kumazaki wanted. Samurai Japan bested New York Yankees legend and Miami Marlins manager Don Mattingly’s MLB All-Star team, led by veteran Yadier Molina and featuring a host of young stars including Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto, in a six-game series held in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagoya in November of that year.
Managing the Japanese national team was Atsunori Inaba, who had a 20-year playing career in NPB – a decade each with the Yakult Swallows and the Nippon-Ham Fighters – and was the MVP of the 2006 Japan Series and a member of the 2008 Olympic team that lost the Bronze Medal to the United States. He was also part of the 2009 WBC championship team as well as the 2013 team, which finished third. Retiring as a player in 2014, Inaba was on the coaching staff of Hiroki Kokubo’s 2017 Samurai Japan team that had another third-place finish in the WBC. He took over as manager of Samurai Japan in the summer of that year.
For the 2018 series against the MLB All-Stars, Inaba was fortunate to have a deep roster packed with players who perhaps were not household names to American fans but had accomplished careers in NPB. Among them were Rakuten Golden Eagles pitcher Takayuki Kishi, a four-time all-star who led the Pacific League with a 2.72 ERA in 2018; Shogo Akiyama, NPB’s all-time single-season hits leader (216 in 2015), who also earned multiple Golden Gloves while patrolling the outfield for the Seibu Lions; and Yuki Yanagita, who had just won another Japan Series championship with the SoftBank Hawks and earned Outstanding Player accolades less than a week before the series with MLB began.
Similarly, the MLB team was ready to compete with a lineup composed of highly respected talent. Along with the aforementioned Molina, Acuña Jr., and Soto, Mattingly had Reds standout Eugenio Suárez, AL stolen-base leader Whit Merrifield of the Royals, and 2017 World Series champion Collin McHugh of Houston to fortify his roster. There was even a Japanese native on the team.
Right-hander Kenta Maeda, who had a sparkling career for the Hiroshima Carp, compiling a 97-67 record with a 2.39 ERA and earning two Sawamura Awards (2010 and 2015), represented the MLB team as a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He became the 11th overall Japanese-born player to participate in the all-star tours as a member of the MLB team and the third since Samurai Japan was designated the opponent, following pitchers Hisashi Iwakuma and Tsuyoshi Wada, who both competed in 2014.
Another Japanese-born defector to team MLB was Hideki Matsui. Beloved in Japan as one of the most popular players to don a Yomiuri Giants uniform, Matsui served as the MLB team’s first-base coach, wearing his familiar number-55 jersey, but with the interlocking NY logo. “It’s such a great thing that I’m back in Japan with this Yankees uniform on,” Matsui said in an article by Alyson Footer on MLB.com. “Even though I’ve never been a first-base coach before, which makes me overanxious, I’ll try not to hurt the team. I’ll try to contribute.”
One of Matsui’s fellow MLB All-Stars coaches was Hensley Meulens, a Curaçao native who played for the Chiba Lotte Marines in 1994 and the Yakult Swallows in 1995 and 1996, winning the Japan Series in 1995. Another NPB connection on the MLB side was Chris Martin. The Texas Rangers pitcher spent two seasons as a reliever with the Nippon-Ham Fighters and a teammate of Shohei Ohtani. As a member of the 2016 Japan Series championship team, Martin had a 1.07 ERA and 21 saves and was named a Pacific League All-Star. The following season, he made 40 appearances and had a 1.19 ERA. “It would’ve been really, really cool to get to go back to Sapporo and play in Sapporo Dome,” Martin said of the 2018 tour. “I loved the fans there. Being here, though, is amazing, it’s a really cool experience.”
Before the MLB All-Stars and Samurai Japan faced each other, they each played one friendly as a warm-up. First, on November 7, Samurai Japan lost to the Chinese Taipei National Team (referred to as Taiwan in Japanese newspapers), 6-5, in the Fukuoka Yafuoku! Dome. Chinese Taipei’s starter, Chiang Chen-Yen, and four relievers held Samurai Japan scoreless through eight innings. Then Samurai Japan mounted a furious comeback, scoring all five of its runs in the bottom of the ninth.
Infielder Kosuke Tanaka led off the inning with a double and scored on Tetsuto Yamada’s RBI single. A single by designated hitter Yuki Yanagita and a walk to Kazuma Okamoto loaded the bases with one out. After pinch-hitter Takuya Kai struck out, Seiji Uebayashi reached on an error that scored a run. A third run crossed the plate on Kazuki Tanaka’s bases-loaded walk. Shuta Tonosaki had a two-run single to make the score 6-5, but the rally fell short as Kosuke Tanaka, who got the ball rolling with his leadoff double, struck out to end the game with two runners on base.
Inaba thought the fact that his team scored five runs at the end of the game was a good sign moving forward, even though its efforts did not result in a victory. The momentum should carry over into the next game, he said. And it did.
But he would have to wait because the MLB team’s exhibition was the next night. The major leaguers fared better in their friendly, handing the hometown Yomiuri Giants a 9-6 loss in Tokyo Dome. Tatsunori Hara, the former Giants great who led the Japanese national team to the 2009 World Baseball Classic title, was back for his third stint as Yomiuri’s manager. He was rehired one month before the friendly with the MLB All-Stars. As a player, he spent his entire 15-year career with the Giants, winning the Central League Rookie of the Year award in 1981, the Central League MVP Award two years later, and three Japan Series championships. He also led the Giants to three Japan Series championships as their manager: 2002, 2009, and 2012.
After the victory Mattingly said his team used the exhibition game to shake off a month’s worth of rust. The Giants seemed to be a bit rusty themselves, especially on defense. They helped the All-Stars score with shortstop Hayato Sakamoto’s throwing error, which plated two runs in the top of the first inning.
Marlins slugger J.T. Realmuto powered the MLB All-Stars with an RBI double in the third and a solo home run in the fifth. Amed Rosario delivered a two-run single and Yadier Molina, who was the DH with Realmuto catching, added an RBI double to round out the major leaguers’ five-run third inning. Juan Soto, the Washington Nationals slugger who placed second in the 2018 National League Rookie of the Year voting to his All-Stars teammate Ronald Acuña Jr., drove in a run with an infield double off Tokyo Dome’s puffy white ceiling.
While Soto’s hit evoked images of fly balls clanking in the catwalk at Tropicana Field, the highlight of the game did not come from the MLB All-Stars.Instead, it came from an NPB player who hadn’t even had an NPB plate appearance. Seiya Matsubara was an ikusei, or nonroster developmental player, with Yomiuri until July 31, 2018. (In NPB, ikusei participate in minor-league games and wear jerseys with triple digits on their backs.) The Giants included him on their roster for the MLB friendly, five months before his first NPB season officially started. The 25-year-old came into the game in the fourth inning as a pinch-hitter and drove the first pitch he saw into the outfield, splitting Acuña Jr. and Soto. When all was said and done, Matsubara had a three-run, inside-the-park home run.
“It was my first ichi-gun (top team) at-bat, so of course I was nervous,” Matsubara, who also added a single in the sixth, said. “Since I joined the team last year, I was determined to make sure I would enjoy my first at-bat. That’s the way I approached it. I’m happy that [it] led to a good result.”
The outcomes of MLB’s and Samurai Japan’s respective exhibition games did not indicate how the tour itself would go, as Samurai Japan won the six-game series 5 games to 1. By no means was this a beatdown; the games were competitive, some even requiring dramatic comebacks. And it started in Game 1.
With Samurai Japan trailing 6-4 with one out in the bottom of the ninth, Seiji Uebayashi singled, stole second base, and scored on a two-out single by Tsubasa Aizawa. Then SoftBank’s star center fielder, Yuki Yanagita, hammered a two-run, sayonara home run off MLB closer Kirby Yates to win the game 7-6 and give Samurai Japan a 1-0 lead in the series. “That’s what I’d like to emphasize to all my hitters,” Inaba said of the team’s perseverance in the final frame. “That we should be able to maintain a good situation from one hitter to another so that we will be able to score runs.”
A solo home run by Amed Rosario in the third, a three-run shot by Carlos Santana in the fifth, and Juan Soto’s two-run blast in the sixth accounted for the All-Stars’ six runs. Shogo Akiyama, who had a bases-clearing double in the bottom of the fifth to tie the score at 4-4, said, “We never felt like we were out of it and knew if we stayed close, we’d have a chance to win.”
Of his walk-off, Yanagita, who had a walk-off in Game Five of the Japan Series a week earlier, said, “It was a perfect shot.” He later added, “Hopefully I’ll be able to hit more.”
Yanagita didn’t have to wait long: He was also the hero of Game 2, although late-inning theatrics were not required for this one. He and his teammates scored the first nine runs en route to a 12-6 drubbing of the MLB team at Tokyo Dome. With Samurai Japan the visiting team, Yanagita started the scoring with an RBI single in the top of the first off starter Erasmo Ramirez. In the bottom of the inning, the MLB All-Stars had runners on the corners but failed to score.
Yanagita hit a two-run home run in the third, also off Ramirez, and added another RBI single off Brian Johnson in Samurai Japan’s four-run fifth. Akiyama added three hits, including a triple, and three RBI. Starting for Samurai Japan, Naoyuki Uwasawa allowed one run – a solo shot by Juan Soto – on four hits with no walks and seven strikeouts over five innings.
For the MLB All-Stars, J.T. Realmuto continued his hot hitting with a double and a three-run home run, while Kiké Hernández and Kevin Pillar each drove in a run. But it was not enough.
“The entire lineup was able to string together hits,” Inaba said. “I think we are on the right track now, and I would like to see us continue to do the same in the game tomorrow.”
They didn’t. The MLB All-Stars were finally able to hold off Samurai Japan to come away with a 7-3 Game 3 victory. Both teams were scoreless until the fourth inning. MLB struck first with a solo shot by Realmuto, who flipped DH/catcher duties with Yadier Molina. Molina caught the game and had a monster night at the plate, going 3-for-5 with a three-run homer. Rounding the bases, the veteran All-Star soaked in the atmosphere of Tokyo Dome. “It was a good feeling to experience that here in front of the Japanese fans,” Molina said. “There is a great crowd here tonight.”
The crowd of 45,147, as well as the 40,000-plus at each of the first two games, impressed the MLB All-Stars, who were not accustomed to the heightened energy and specific chants for each Japanese player. Whit Merrifield of the Kansas City Royals said, “I was just enjoying it. Because it’s different than it is in the States. So, I was trying to learn the chants for the different guys.” Despite the roar of the crowd, Molina executed a defensive gem in the bottom of the fourth. Samurai Japan had runners on first and second with two outs, but Molina picked off Seiji Uebayashi at first base to end the inning. “We saw a big shift in the momentum in the game tonight in the fourth inning,” Inaba said. “Molina made a really good pickoff move to first base. We should’ve been much more careful.”
There were no home runs for Yuki Yanagita on this night, just RBI doubles by Shuta Tonosaki, Hotaka Yamakawa, and Ryosuke Kikuchi to account for Samurai Japan’s three runs. Starter Scott Barlow earned the win for the MLB All-Stars after going 4⅓ innings with one run on five hits. Shinsaburo Tawata also went 4⅓ innings, giving up five runs – four earned – on seven hits for the loss.
The Series traveled to Hiroshima for the fourth game and a matchup of two Carp, one current and one former. The current Carp was Daichi Ohsera, who pitched five innings of two-hit, one-run ball. The only blemish on his ledger was a solo home run by Rhys Hoskins in the second inning. The former Carp was Kenta Maeda, who was a five-time NPB All-Star during his eight years in Hiroshima. The current Dodgers pitcher threw two scoreless innings to start the game against his countrymen, some of whom were his former Carp teammates.
Once again, Samurai Japan found itself in comeback mode in the ninth inning, but this time, according to the Kyodo News, was “the purest expression of Japan’s game.” The Japanese were the visitors and down two runs. Kazuki Tanaka led off the top of the ninth with a walk issued by Kirby Yates, stole second, and scored on a single by Seiji Uebayashi, who eventually scored after a sacrifice by catcher Tsubasa Aizawa and a base hit by Kosuke Tanaka, tying the game, 3-3. Kosuke Tanaka also stole second base and went to third on a throwing error by J.T. Realmuto. An intentional walk to Shogo Akiyama, who had hit an inside-the-park home run in the eighth, brought Ryosuke Kikuchi to the plate to face John Brebbia, on in relief of Yates. A safety squeeze by Kikuchi brought home Kosuke Tanaka, the go-ahead run. A passed ball moved Kikuchi to second and Akiyama to third, and Yuki Yanagita drove Akiyama home with a groundout. Now with a 5-3 lead, Yasuaki Yamasaki gave up one hit but otherwise shut down the MLB All-Stars for the save.
With a 3-1 lead in the Series, Samurai Japan would move on to host the MLB All-Stars at the Nagoya Dome for Game 5. Another game, another come-from-behind victory for Samurai Japan, and this one clinched the series, 4 victories to 1. Rhys Hoskins, who had hit a home run the previous night in Hiroshima, started the scoring with a two-run blast off starter Nao Higashihama in the top of the second. Ronald Acuña Jr. doubled and scored on Juan Soto’s single in the third, and Yadier Molina made it 4-1 in the next inning when he doubled home Amed Rosario. The speedy Rosario made it 5-1 in the sixth. He singled and stole second, and Carlos Santana drove him home with a two-out RBI single.
MLB’s pitching was stellar through six innings. Junior Guerra of the Brewers gave up one run on one hit – a solo home run by Kazuma Okamoto – and struck out seven through five innings before handing the ball over to Hector Velazquez, who pitched a perfect sixth.
Samurai Japan staged its comeback in the seventh, taking advantage of a costly error by Velazquez. Okamoto scored on an RBI single by Takuya Kai, making the score 5-2. In an attempt to start what should have been an easy double play, Velazquez threw a comebacker from Kazuki Tanaka into center field, scoring Seiji Uebayashi. With Kai on second and Tanaka on first, pinch-hitter Hotaka Yamakawa tied the game, 5-5, with a two-run double. The next inning, Kai again came through with an RBI double that Acuña Jr. bobbled, allowing Uebayashi to race home from first.
Another botched double-play chance ended the game in a strange way. Mitch Haniger grounded the ball to shortstop Sosuke Genda, who tossed it to second baseman Tetsuto Yamada to retire Kevin Pillar. Yamada’s throw to first was wide and wild. Catcher Takuya Kai backed up the throw in foul territory and fired it back to Yamada, who tagged out Haniger to end the game. Samurai Japan won another wild one, 6-5, and the series. Even with the series in hand, Samurai Japan needed to face the MLB All-Stars the next night for the sixth and final game.
Twenty-three-year-old Chunichi Dragons pitcher Shotaro Kasahara started Game 6 in his home ballpark, the Nagoya Dome. He retired the first six batters he faced and threw 4⅔ innings of four-hit, no-run baseball to earn the 4-1 victory. Samurai Japan scored all the runs it needed in the top of the second.
MLB starter Brian Johnson walked Hotaka Yamakawa to lead off the inning and then loaded the bases by allowing singles to catcher Tomoya Mori and left fielder Shuta Tonosaki. A triple by shortstop Sosuke Genda cleared the bases and brought Johnson’s night to an early end. His replacement, Erasmo Ramirez, gave up a sacrifice fly to second baseman Ryosuke Kikuchi that scored Genda.
Acuña Jr. scored the MLB All-Stars’ lone run, an eighth-inning home run off Kasahara’s Dragons teammate Yu Satoh. Satoh was in a bases-loaded, one-out jam but struck out Robinson Chirinos and Chris Taylor to end the inning and prevent further damage. Yasuaki Yamasaki pitched a one-two-three ninth inning for the save.
Since 1986 there have been 12 All-Star series, and t he five wins in 2018 are the most for a Japanese team. It was the second consecutive time that the Japanese national team, rather than a team of NPB all-stars, faced the MLB All-Stars, and Samurai Japan won both meetings. Prior to that, the MLB All-Stars had a 9-1 series lead. Perhaps more significant, Saito’s and Kumazaki’s dreams of Olympic Gold came true three years later in Tokyo, as Samurai Japan fittingly defeated the US team, 2-0. Several stars from the 2018 series contributed to Samurai Japan’s success in 2021, including Tetsuto Yamada and Yuki Yanagita.
While the series are competitive and help both sides prepare for other international contests like the World Baseball Classic or the Olympics, a key component of the tours is the cultural exchange and fostering of goodwill and understanding between the two countries. When the 2018 series moved to Hiroshima, Don Mattingly, Kenta Maeda, and Mitch Haniger visited Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Mattingly laid a wreath at the Cenotaph for the Victims of the Atomic Bomb in memory of the lives lost to the atomic bombing of the city during World War II.
“Personally, it’s humbling to stand in front of the memorial and also an honor to be here as part of MLB to represent our game and bring our two countries and two leagues together to be able play in this great city,” Mattingly said.
On a lighter note, the MLB delegation was happy to interact with fans, signing autographs and giving away bats, shoes, hats, and T-shirts. Some players, such as Rhys Hoskins and Whit Merrifield, took it a step further and immersed themselves in the culture, documenting their off-field experiences on social media as they visited tourist attractions, sampled food, and dressed in kimonos. Hoskins tweeted, “Confirmed: the Tokyo Fish Market has the best tuna you will ever have.”
Lighthearted moments and serious competition have become hallmarks of the MLB-Japan series. It’s become increasingly clear that baseball isn’t simply America’s game; it’s the international pastime.
Before dawn on December 2nd, 1944, the USS Sea Devil, a U.S. Navy Balao-class submarine, quietly stalked a Japanese convoy near Kyushu, the southern-most part of the Japanese islands. Radar showed at least 11 escorted targets, and the Sea Devil surfaced in the pre-dawn darkness to track the convoy by sight.
A sudden wave nearly swamped the surfaced sub — a sailor was washed off the bridge and onto the deck below, and water poured into the open hatch, flooding the crew’s mess, radio room, and both of its dual engine rooms. Fortunately, the damage was repairable, and in one of the engine rooms, Motor Machinist Mate 3rd Class Ray Ebbets worked hard alongside the rest of the black gang to get their station back online.
To those of the crew who were baseball fans, the Motor Machinist Mate’s last name must have rung a bell, for Ray Ebbets’ grandfather was Charlie Ebbets, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the man for whom Ebbets Field was named.
But all that didn’t matter at that moment. The Sea Devil was on a trajectory to intercept a Japanese convoy, and as the rest of the crew hastened to repair their stations, the men in the extreme fore and aft of the sub armed and loaded their torpedo tubes. The captain of the USS Sea Devil, Commander Ralph Styles, ordered the watch below decks, the hatches shut, and all preparations to submerge. Lingering just below the surface, the skipper watched the convoy through the periscope, maneuvering his sub closer and closer to the convoy, trying to gain the best angle of attack.
Satisfied with his position, Captain Styles launched four torpedoes at a freighter and, after missing, quickly ordered two more fired at another one. This time, the torpedoes hit, and within minutes, the freighter began slipping beneath the sea. Captain Styles swung his vulnerable sub out of the path of a destroyer escort and fired four more torpedoes at a troop ship. The Sea Devil was now almost directly in the path of the convoy.
The skipper sounded the dive alarm, and the sub headed for the safety of the deep sea. On the way down, everyone on board, from Captain Styles to Motor Machinist Mate Ebbets, could hear the massive explosion as the Sea Devil’s torpedoes ripped into the hull of the troop ship and ignited the stores of ammunition carried in her second hold. Although they couldn’t see it, the Hawaii Maru disintegrated in the massive explosion, killing every last man aboard her.
Among the 1,843 soldiers of the Japanese 23rd Division who perished that morning on the Hawaii Maru was Lieutenant Eiji Sawamura. Besides being recently promoted from the ranks before shipping out on what was supposed to be his third combat deployment, Eiji Sawamura also happened to be Japan’s greatest baseball pitcher and its first sports superstar. To Ray Ebbets and even the most dedicated baseball fans amongst the crew of the Sea Devil, the name Sawamura probably wouldn’t have rung a bell. But, if you added that he was the Japanese schoolboy who struck out Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, and Charlie Gehringer, you then might have gotten more than a few to exclaim: “Oh yeah!”
JUST OVER 10 YEARS earlier, in what must have seemed like another world, Eiji Sawamura was a 17-year-old high school student with a blazing fastball and tantalizing curve who was hand-picked to represent his country against an American all-star team led by Babe Ruth.
Born in Mie Prefecture on February 1, 1917, Eiji Sawamura was raised to be a ballplayer. His father Kenji had played years earlier when the game was first introduced to the island by American schoolteachers and visiting sailors, and he passed his love of the game down to his firstborn son. After years of practice with his father, Sawamura developed sharp control, lightning speed (for his age), and a baffling curve.
Sawamura became his elementary school’s baseball team’s starting pitcher in the 4th grade. The following year, he pitched the school to victory in the Mie Prefecture tournament. In the national tournament, Sawamura’s team was defeated in the third round, but his fifteen strikeouts per game average raised eyebrows.
In 1933, Sawamura entered Kyoto Commercial High School. Because the school had only just started a baseball program, none of its players could match Sawamura’s experience and skill. When Sawamura single-handedly pitched the school into the quarterfinals of the national tournament, Kyoto Commercial became known as a “one-man team.”
In the 1934 spring season, Kyoto Commercial was eliminated in the second round of the national tournament but advanced to the quarterfinals in the summer tournament. In one round, Sawamura struck out 23 of the 27 batters he faced. His fastball was so overpowering that one team prepared to face him by having their pitcher throw batting practice one meter closer to the plate to replicate Sawamura’s velocity. He would strike out 97 batters over 48 innings before Kyoto Commercial was eliminated in the quarterfinals.
In a regular-season game that fall, Sawamura made headlines when he whiffed 36 in a 16-inning game. By now, Eiji Sawamura was by far the best high school pitcher on the island. All of Japan’s “Big 6” universities were vying with one another to recruit Sawamura after graduation. Unfortunately, according to the article “Strikes, Sacrifice, and Glory: The Life of Eiji Sawamura” by James Hoadley, “Sawamura left Kyoto Commercial after a disciplinary incident involving a teammate, which prevented him from further participating in student baseball.”
FOR A WHILE, it looked like Eiji Sawamura’s baseball career was stopped just as it was starting. At the time, there wasn’t a professional baseball league in Japan, and college competition was the highest level a ballplayer could aspire to. If Sawamura wanted to continue playing baseball, it would be strictly on a recreational level.
However, Matsutaro Shoriki, president of the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s leading newspaper, was setting a plan in motion to create his country’s first professional baseball league. The first step was to generate nationwide interest in the game. To accomplish this, Shoriki arranged for Philadelphia Athletics owner and manager Connie Mack to bring a Major League all-star team headed by Babe Ruth to tour the island. The tour would take place in the fall and winter, following the end of the 1934 major league season. And since this would be the most high-profile assembly of American ballplayers ever to tour the island, Shoriki needed a Japanese team that could challenge the professionals and whip up interest and pride in his fellow countrymen.
When American teams had toured Japan in the past, their competition was usually college and recreational clubs. For this grand tour, Shoriki aimed to assemble an all-island all-star team, “Dai Nippon” (All-Japan), comprising the best ballplayers in the country. If the tour was a success, as he believed it would be, this all-star team would then form the nucleus of Japan’s first professional league.
After his impressive performance in the high school championships, Eiji Sawamura was a shoo-in for Shoriki’s team that would challenge the Americans. Tadao Ichioka, the head of the Yomiuri Shimbun’ssports department, traveled to Kyoto to recruit the young pitcher. According to baseball historian Robert Fitts, the newspaper offered to pay him 120 yen ($36) per month, a nice sum in Japan at the time. Sawamura’s father Kenji encouraged his son to accept the offer.
After mulling it over, and, according to a 2021 Yomiuri Shimbun article, Matsutaro Shoriki promising him he would “take care of him for life,” Sawamura decided it was a gamble he was willing to take. If Shoriki’s league was a success, he could potentially make a good enough living to send his younger siblings to college. Of course, there was also the honor of representing his country against the world’s best ballplayers and seeing how he would personally perform when pitted against them.
DAI NIPPON would be the best aggregation of native baseball talent ever assembled in the country. Besides 17-year-old Eiji Sawamura, the roster was carefully curated from current and former collegiate stars, including Jiro Kuji, Naotaka Makino, Osamu Mihara, Shigeru Mizuhara, and Minoru Yamashita, all of whom would become future members of the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame. Also recruited to Dai Nippon was another teenage high school pitcher, Russian emigre Victor Starffin.
The tour unfolded as expected; the Americans beat Dai Nippon in seven straight contests. In his first two appearances against the Americans, Sawamura was hit hard. It wasn’t something to be ashamed of; the Americans won every game by a large margin, outscoring Dai Nippon 77 to 13 runs. No Japanese pitcher had been able to handle the seasoned professionals. It was his third try in which Eiji Sawamura made history and became an instant legend.
The November 20, 1934 game took place at Kusanagi Stadium in Shizuoka, a city about 80 miles south of Yokohama at the foot of Mt. Fuji. With the midday sun at his back, the 17-year-old took the mound before 30,000 fans and proceeded to put the Americans down without giving up a hit.
In the bottom of the fourth inning, Sawamura faced lead-off batter Eric McNair, shortstop of the Athletics, who hit a harmless pop fly for the first out. Future Hall of Famer and 6-time all-star Charlie Gehringer was up next. One of the toughest men in the majors to strike out, Sawamura did just that, with a bit of help from the glaring sun behind him. Next, the great Babe Ruth took his place at the plate. Although the big man was at the end of his storied career, he could still pound the ball. The local teams he faced on the tour presented no real obstacle to him, and he hit one home run after another, captivating the appreciative Japanese fans.
Although he hadn’t performed all that well against the Americans, Sawamura had fanned the Bambino 10 days earlier and went into his windup knowing that the Babe was indeed fallible. Two fastballs and one curve later, he struck the big fella out again to end the inning.
In the bottom of the fifth, Sawamura took the mound to face Lou Gehrig. With his big leg kick, sizzling fastball, and that midday sun, Gehrig went down swinging. The Japanese crowd, who had routinely rooted for the American stars thus far, now began to sense that something magical was happening. Ever since the turn of the century, American teams had come to Japan and thoroughly defeated the local competition. In most games, it wasn’t even a close contest, but here and now, a home-grown ballplayer was striking out the greatest baseball players in the world.
The giant Philadelphia Athletics first baseman Jimmie Foxx was up next. His muscular physique had intimidated even the best pitchers in the American League, but here in far-off Japan, an unknown 17-year-old high school kid struck out the 9-time all-star. That Earl Averill broke the strikeout streak by getting thrown out on a grounder didn’t matter, nor did it that the Americans would win the game 1-0 on a Lou Gehrig home run — Eiji Sawamura was an instant national hero.
After the game, Connie Mack reportedly offered to take the pitcher back to America with him. “If you train him thoroughly on a farm team for three years at the age of 18” Mack said, “he would surely be useful in the major leagues.” Sawamura declined; he didn’t know English and didn’t want to leave Japan. American newspapers picked up the story, and while many baseball fans might not have known the kid’s name, they sure knew the story of the Japanese schoolboy who struck out Ruth, Gehrig, Gehringer, and Foxx.
By the time the tour left Japan, Sawamura had struck out every big leaguer on the team except Bing Miller at least once. The American all-stars spoke highly of the young pitcher, telling reporters that with a few more years of seasoning, he could make the major leagues.
MEANWHILE, Matsutaro Shoriki and Tadao Ichioka retained most of the specially assembled team to form the nucleus of the Dai Nippon Tokyo Yakyu Club (Great Japan Tokyo Baseball Club). The plan was to send the team on an exhibition tour of North America the following spring with the goal of improving their baseball skills by playing against professional players.
“Schoolboy Sawamura” was already known to American sports fans due to his strikeout performance against Ruth and company and would be the key to the success of the tour.
However, the teenage pitcher remained on the fence. He had planned on attending Keio University and pitching for the school’s formidable baseball team. Foregoing college and joining the new professional league would be a considerable risk. However, Sawamura’s father, Kenji, encouraged his son to accept the opportunity. Besides the honor of being among the first members of Japan’s first professional baseball league, the money would be a big help to his family.
The team, mercifully renamed the “Tokyo Giants,” played from Canada to Mexico and as far east as Cincinnati. Along with fellow pitcher Victor Starffin, Eiji Sawamura was the toast of the American media. Sawamura had mediocre success pitching against minor league Pacific Coast League teams but did exceptionally well against mid-level semi-pro competition. His fastball was estimated to be in the low 90s, and observers judged his curve to be of major league quality.
While in Milwaukee, a man approached Eiji Sawamura before a game. Thrusting a piece of paper at him, the young pitcher, who didn’t speak or read English, thought he was signing yet another autograph for a grateful fan. It was only after that same man confronted the Tokyo Giants’ manager to inquire when Sawamura would report to the Pittsburgh Pirates, that it finally became clear that the “fan” was actually a major league scout! According to the Giants’ business manager, Sotaro Suzuki, it took a small payoff to convince the scout to tear up the contract.
It was fortunate that the contract was voided, because by the time the tour ended, Sawamura had come to dislike North America. According to newspaper accounts, the pitcher couldn’t adjust to the lack of rice at mealtime and blamed it for what he perceived to be his poor performance on the tour. He didn’t like the arrogance of North American women, and the Western culture differed too much from what he was used to back in Japan. Although it may have been tempting to join a professional American baseball team, Eiji Sawamura was destined to return to Japan and become a founding member of that country’s first professional baseball league.
FROM THE START of its first season in 1936, Eiji Sawamura was the undisputed star. Tokyo Giants’ teammate Victor Starffin was Sawamura’s equal in talent, but he was a foreigner of Russian parentage. Sawamura was pure Japanese, and the fans loved and regarded him almost as a God. But despite the level of talent on the Tokyo Giants, the team performed poorly in the first half of the season, winning only two of their seven games. Despite Sawamura’s ERA of 2.18, the lack of his teammates’ effort led to his disappointing one-win and one-loss record.
The young pitcher must have been having second thoughts about ditching a college education for this new league. Sawamura loathed his teammates for not taking the game seriously, laughing off losses and partying late into the night. Before the second half of the 1936 season, the Tokyo Giants initiated a rigorous training program to whip the team into shape. At first, the dejected pitcher watched the workouts with disinterest. However, inspired by rookie Katsumi Shiraishi’s tireless work ethic and iron discipline rekindled Sawamura’s enthusiasm. The training paid off, and the Giants began playing like real professionals.
The highlight of the season came when Eiji Sawamura pitched the first no-hitter in Japanese professional baseball. The Friday, September 25 game at Koshien Stadium against the Osaka Tigers was immortalized not just for Sawamura’s pitching, but also for the extraordinary odds he overcame to accomplish it.
By the sixth inning, it became clear that Sawamura was on his way to a possible no-hitter. Giants catcher, Takeshi Nakayama, was told by some of the Tigers players that a no-hitter would be embarrassing to their team. Understanding the weight embarrassment carried in Japanese culture, Nakayama began signaling to the Osaka batters which pitch was coming. This was a dangerous strategy as the Giants had scored only a single run thus far, and a couple of well-placed hits could not only cost Sawamura a no-hitter but also the game. However, even with Nakayama giving away the pitches, the Tigers could not overcome Sawamura’s complete dominance that day. The 19-year-old continued to mow down the Tigers and won the game, 1-0.
The Tokyo Giants finished in second place behind the Osaka Tigers. Eiji Sawamura was the league’s best pitcher with a 13-2 record and 1.04 ERA. In the three-game championship series against Osaka, Sawamura won two games to give the Tokyo Giants their first title.
Eiji Sawamura was even better in the first half of the 1937 season. On May 1, he no-hit the Osaka Tigers a second time and then set a record for the new league with five consecutive wins. All spring, Tokyo and Osaka were locked in an exciting pennant race. Going into the final two games of the season, Osaka was up by a game and a half in the standings. Despite suffering from an eye injury, Sawamura took the mound and beat the Tigers in the first game, then came back the following day to beat them again, clinching the pennant for the Giants.
His 24 wins, 0.81 ERA and 196 strikeouts earned him the first pitcher’s Triple Crown in Japanese history and he received the very first Most Valuable Player Award.
Sawamura won another nine games in the Fall season, bringing his 1937 record to 33-10 with a 1.38 ERA. His complete dominance over the competition can be seen in his ten shutouts and 325 strikeouts.
AT THE HEIGHT of his fame, Eiji Sawamura was asked to represent his country once again, this time in the Japanese Imperial Army. At his induction physical, the pitcher was singled out as the ultimate specimen of Japanese manhood. The press that eagerly covered his induction quoted army officers crediting baseball and sports in general as the ideal way for the country’s youth to prepare for battle. Sawamura trained as an infantryman and, in April 1938, was sent off to war.
Japan had been skirmishing with China off and on since 1931, and beginning in 1937, had been waging full-on war, trying to conquer the entire country.
As he battled across China with the 33rd Infantry Regiment, the Japanese newspapers following the ballplayer wrote fanciful stories of how his great pitching arm was now put to use lobbing grenades so accurately that he saved his comrades time and again from certain death. Sawamura was shot in his left arm in the fall of 1938, but recovered quickly and rejoined his unit in the field.
When out of the front lines, he gave morale-boosting exhibitions, throwing the heavy hand grenades in distance competitions for the benefit of grateful troops and newsreel cameras. The Japanese press ate it up, and baseball fans back home devoured news of their great hero.
HAVING COMPLETED his military service, the pitcher returned to the Giants in 1940. Now 24 years old, Sawamura had contracted malaria in China and suffered from insomnia. The two years of fighting and hand grenade exhibitions had done severe damage to his arm. His control was still as sharp as it ever was, but the famed fastball was left somewhere back in China. Now, he had to rely on outsmarting the opposition with his brains instead of speed.
Though he tossed his third no-hitter that season, Sawamura wasn’t the pitcher he had once been. His record of seven wins and one loss appear impressive on the surface, but the Japanese Professional Baseball League was a shadow of its former self, with many of its better players serving in the military. Even with the lesser-quality opposition, he slipped to a 9-5 record the following season.
Victor Starffin replaced him as the Giants’ number one starter, something the competitive Sawamura bitterly resented. “I’m not going to lose to him yet,” Sawamura told his teammate Shigeru Mizuhara, “I’ll throw a faster ball than him.”
Eiji Sawamura’s effectiveness might have slipped, but he was still the idol of baseball fans nationwide, and his mere presence on the mound pulled in the crowds. He married his long-time sweetheart, Sakai Yuko, in May 1941, and not long after, he was recalled to active duty.
WHEN THE JAPANESE ARMY invaded the Philippines in December 1941, Eiji Sawamura was with them. Where he once challenged the Americans on the baseball field, he now fought them on the field of battle. Brought up in the way of the modern warrior where surrender is not an option, Sawamura could not hide his disdain for the Americans when they put down their rifles and surrendered.
Because of his great fame, Eiji Sawamura became a valuable propaganda tool. Newspapers one again carried stories about how his legendary accuracy in throwing hand grenades was put to use saving himself and his comrades from certain doom at the hands of the Americans. When interviewed by visiting newspaper correspondents, Sawamura repeated false rumors of American atrocities against Japanese civilians that enraged the people back home. Most importantly, Eiji Sawamura’s example of sacrifice and duty inspired many who aspired to emulate their hero.
SAWAMURA WAS DISCHARGED in the spring of 1943, and he rejoined the Tokyo Giants once again. In 1940, he was able to rely on his famed control to stay competitive when his speed left him, but a year in the Philippine jungles robbed him of even that last remaining talent. Sawamura was forced to alter his delivery from an overhand to a sidearm motion.
Working through shoulder pain and debilitating bouts of malaria, Sawamura was only able to appear in eleven innings over four games for the Giants. He was 0-3, giving up 17 runs on 17 hits, walking 12, and striking out just 2 batters. Unable to contribute as a pitcher, Sawamura took on the role of mentor to the younger players and assistant to rookie manager Haruyasu Nakajima.
When Eiji Sawamura had not received a contract for the 1944 season, he visited the offices of the Tokyo Giants in person. A team official bluntly notified him that he had been fired. Undaunted, the pitcher considered offers from several other teams, but the owner of the Giants, Sotaro Suzuki, convinced him to retire. He reasoned that it would be useless to try to cling to past glory, as it would do nothing except cheapen his memory. He was a hero to millions of his countrymen, and as such, he should go out with grace and honor. Eiji Sawamura reluctantly agreed.
Sawamura took a job as a clerk in a defense plant. With only a high school education, he was not qualified for high-paying jobs and struggled to pay bills. He had a hard time adjusting to life outside of the spotlight and resented having to live under his in-laws’ roof. He stubbornly insisted to his wife that there was still a place for him with the Giants.
The world did get a little brighter when he and Sakai Yuko welcomed a daughter. Sawamura gradually came to peace with being fired from the Giants and bore no grudge towards the management. He told his family he was looking forward to this new era of his life.
BUT THEN, with the Japanese Navy all but destroyed and the Imperial Army being wiped out island by island, Sawamura found himself recalled into the service a third time. Sawamura’s father, Kenji, believed it was he who was responsible for his son repeatedly being sent off to war. If only he had encouraged his son to pursue college instead of a professional baseball career, his higher education would have spared him from being sent to the front.
Eiji Sawamura and his unit shipped out for the Philippines on November 27th. Gone were the cheering fans that saw him off at the dock the two previous times he left for the war. Only his father watched as the ship steamed out of Yokohama harbor and disappeared over the horizon.
Five days later, the ship would cross paths with the USS Sea Devil, and Lieutenant Eiji Sawamura would be among the 1,843 soldiers of the Japanese 23rd Division who perished that morning.
AFTER THE WAR, baseball played a crucial role in restoring normalcy and pride to a devastated Japan. Eiji Sawamura, in part due to the timely retirement that preserved his legacy, was held up as Japan’s greatest ballplayer. His death in the war also helped promote an anti-militarist feeling amongst the Japanese people.
In 1947, the Japanese magazine Nekkyu established the Eiji Sawamura Award, given annually to the best pitcher in the Nippon Professional Baseball League. That same year, the Tokyo Giants retired the number 14 he wore during his tenure with the team. And when the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame was founded in 1959, Eiji Sawamura was among the first nine inductees. To this day, Eiji Sawamura remains a legend, often referred to simply as “Japan’s Number One.”
Visit Gary Cieradkowski’s website to read more fascinating baseball stories, purchase his books and award-winning baseball cards, including one of Eiji Sawamura.
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week CARTER CROMWELL focuses on the 2014 Suzuki All-Star Series when team Samurai Japan shocked the visiting MLB All-Stars.
On June 10, 2014, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association announced that the Nichibei Yakyu All-Star Series would be held in the fall after an eight-year hiatus. In 2006 the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association had voted not to participate in the event after 2006 as the World Baseball Classic had made MLB-Japan all-star exhibition series meaningless. “The majority of the players felt the series, an exhibition, placed a great burden on the players in an environment in which meaningful competitions, including the World Baseball Classic, existed, and that the historic role of the regular All-Star Series had run its course,” explained Takuya Yamazaki, an attorney for the players union.
Although Jim Small, president of Major League Baseball Japan, worked to restart the series, the players union maintained its stance until early 2014, when it agreed that resuming the series would be mutually beneficial. Japan had won the World Baseball Classic in both 2006 and 2009 but had finished third in 2013. The squad needed an edge to regain the championship. Instead of bringing together a group of all-stars to face the major leaguers as they had done in the past, the Japanese decided to pit their national team, Samurai Japan, against the MLB All-Stars.
“Samurai Japan is about winning the WBC and this is part of that buildup and the players are behind it,” said Toru Matsubara, the secretary general of the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association. “We don’t see these games as exhibitions,” added Kenjiro Kato, a national team senior staff member. “We are treating them as meaningful competitions.”
Led by Samurai Japan manager Hiroki Kokubo, the Japanese squad consisted of the national team players not under contract to major-league teams. Masahiro Tanaka and Ichiro Suzuki of the New York Yankees and Yu Darvish of the Texas Rangers, for example, were ineligible. But the squad contained plenty of top players including Tetsuto Yamada of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, Yuki Yanigata of the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, Ryosuke Kikuchi of the Hiroshima Carp, and 20-year-old two-way player Shohei Ohtani of the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.
To face Samurai Japan, MLB would once again send a team of all-stars. Commissioner Bud Selig announced, “Major League Baseball is delighted that many of our finest players will represent our sport during the 2014 Japan All-Star Tour.” But there were questions from some about whether the US team was truly all-star caliber. After the roster was announced, Jon Heyman of CBS tweeted, “appreciate their service, but of the mlb ‘all-stars’ playing in Japan, 21 of 29 players were never all-stars.” This is not to say that the MLB club was a bad one – not at all. It included Jose Altuve, Robinson Canó, Yasiel Puig, Evan Longoria, and Justin Morneau. But there were others who were solid major leaguers but could not be considered all-stars – for example, Erik Kratz, Drew Butera, Tommy Hunter, Jeremy Guthrie, Jerry Blevins, and Jeff Beliveau.
The team also included two Japanese-born players. Hisashi Iwakuma had played in Nippon Professional Baseball for 11 seasons, winning the 2008 Eiji Sawamura Award and two Best Nine Awards, before signing with the Seattle Mariners in 2012. He became the team’s best starter in 2013 with a 14-6 record and 2.66 ERA as he finished third in the American League Cy Young Award voting. This was Iwakuma fourth Nichibei All-Star series. He played for the Japanese team in 2002 and 2004 and for the major leaguers in 2012 and 2014. Tsuyoshi Wada, a former star with the Softbank Hawks who struggled with injuries after signing with the Baltimore Orioles in late 2011, had a breakthrough season with the Cubs in 2014, earning him a spot on the MLB team. “It’s an honor, even though I feel a little weird being on the American side,” Wada said. “But it’s going to be something I treasure for all of my baseball life.”
The MLB All-Stars congregated in Los Angeles on November 7 and spent two days working out before arriving in Osaka, Japan, on Sunday, November 9. The team practiced the next day in preparation for an exhibition game against a team made up of players from the Hanshin Tigers and Yomiuri Giants.
The opening exhibition took place on November 11 before a crowd of 26,946 at Koshien Stadium, home of the Hanshin Tigers. The game celebrated the 80th year of professional baseball in Japan, and the Japanese players wore uniforms identical to those worn by the All Nippon team during the famous 1934 All-American tour led by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx.
The MLB All-Stars took a 2-0 lead in the fourth inning when Alcides Escobar scored on a double-play grounder by Carlos Santana, and Yasiel Puig later drove in Robinson Canó with a single. Then the major leaguers displayed their power – a fifth-inning grand slam by Evan Longoria off reliever Yuki Egarashi of Yomiuri and solo homers by Salvador Perez in the sixth and Dexter Fowler in the seventh gave them an 8-1 lead.
MLB starter Chris Capuano of the New York Yankees pitched four scoreless innings, giving up only one hit, walking one batter, and striking out three. “Overall, I pitched pretty well,” Capuano said. “It wasn’t cold out there. Actually, it was perfect for pitching.”
After scoring their first run in the bottom of the sixth on Hiroki Uemoto’s RBI double, the Japanese then scored five times in the seventh, highlighted by a two-run triple from Yomiuri’s Taishi Ohta off reliever Franklin Morales. The Japanese got another run in the eighth inning on a fielding error by Jose Altuve, who was making a rare appearance at shortstop, to narrow the score to 8-7, but they could get no closer. “Tonight was more than we could have asked for,” MLB manager John Farrell said. “We were able to get every position player on the field [and] were able to go to our bullpen, but their competitiveness forced us to make some plays.” Rob Wooten, a pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers, was impressed with historic Koshien Stadium. “When Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and that team went over in 1934, that’s where they played. So it’s kind of like their Fenway. It’s a really old ballpark, but it’s pretty neat. … I hadn’t played on an all-dirt infield since Little League, so it was different in that aspect. Even from the mound to home plate, it looked very different, being all dirt.”
Game 1 of the five-game series, the first against the Japan national team, took place the next day at the Kyocera Dome in Osaka. Samurai Japan took a 2-0 victory behind five strong innings by starter Kenta Maeda of the Hiroshima Carp. A series of relievers, highlighted by Shohei Ohtani’s one-two-three eighth inning, maintained the shutout. The major leaguers got only three hits.
The Japanese scored two runs off starter Matt Shoemaker of the Los Angeles Angels, who had just completed a fine rookie season with a 16-4 mark, and those proved to be enough. Nobuhiro Matsuda of the Softbank Hawks hit a sacrifice fly in the second to score Softbank teammate Seiichi Uchikawa. In the fourth inning, Matsuda reached on an errant throw by second baseman Canó and scored on an RBI single by Tetsuto Yamada. “[B]eing able to score early was big,” Japan’s manager Kokubo said. “I was really proud of our pitching staff tonight.”
Maeda, rumored to be a candidate to jump to the majors (though that did not happen until 2016), allowed a one-out single to Canó and then walked Longoria in the first inning before settling down and getting out of the inning. He gave up two hits and two walks and threw 71 pitches in five innings. “I am happy to finish my outing with a good result, especially in the first official game of the series,” Maeda said. “They made me throw a few more pitches than I wanted in the first inning, but I got my rhythm after that.” Farrell added, “Very good pitching on their part tonight. We got an opportunity in the first inning … but Maeda really settled in with an assortment of pitches for strikes.”
Ohtani, then 3½ years away from his major-league debut, thrilled the crowd and impressed the major leaguers with a fastball that reached 98.8 mph. “To see a guy who’s his age [20] throw nearly 100 miles an hour, that’s an impressive-looking young pitcher,” Farrell said. “It seemed like he had very good poise [and] … a long, loose body that’s got tremendous arm speed.” Morneau added, “He’s young, but he didn’t look scared at all. He was attacking. I think at his age, to be able to throw that hard and throw the ball over the plate is the most important thing. If you can locate and throw that hard, you can be as dominant a pitcher as anybody. He’s young, so he’ll be here for a long time.” Fowler concurred: “He’s good. Great arm. He’s aggressive, which is awesome. You don’t see that often from a young kid.”
The teams had a day off before playing November 14, 15, and 16 at the Tokyo Dome. In Game 2 the Japanese pounded out 14 hits in an 8-4 victory. All but two of Japan’s runs were scored after two batters were out. “They did a very good job of not giving in to record that third out,” Farrell acknowledged. Center fielder Yuki Yanagita of Softbank led the attack with a single, double, and triple and four RBIs. For good measure, he also stole a base. Ryosuke Kikuchi of Hiroshima went 3-for-5 and drove in two runs; Nobuhiro Matsuda of Softbank had three hits, including a solo home run; and Hikaru Itoh of the Orix Buffaloes had two hits and an RBI.
Both of the Japanese-born players on the MLB team had disappointing performances. Starter Iwakuma gave up five runs in four innings, and relief pitcher Tsuyoshi Wada allowed two runs in 1⅔ innings. “I was so nervous out there,” Iwakuma said. “I couldn’t really have a good performance, but I’d been looking forward to pitching back at home and I had a lot of fun.”
Reliever Rob Wooten, who relieved Iwakuma in the fifth inning, noted that the bullpens at Tokyo Dome were not behind the outfield walls but underneath the field, near the clubhouses. Their isolation led to a shock when he entered the game. He said:
The first time you’re exposed to the [game’s] atmosphere is when you’re on the mound. You’re in the bullpen and it’s dead quiet and you’re watching the game on TV … and then all of a sudden you’re in mayhem – horns, drums and all kinds of stuff. You really have to calm your emotions down real quick. If you let your emotions get to you, you’re going to be pretty jumpy out there. I did a pretty decent job of that and got right to work. … [T]he first pitch I threw was a strike, so that calmed me down.
They have very good fans with a high baseball IQ. I noticed most of the time it was really, really loud when they were hitting but pretty quiet when they were pitching. For instance, I noticed when it was two strikes and two outs and all they had to do was get one out to win the game andthe series, nobody was standing. Nobody was clapping. It was extremely quiet – here in the States, your closer is on the mound and there are two outs, 40,000 people are standing and cheering to get that last out – but then once the out was made, everyone started standing up and clapping. But when they are hitting, it’s a whole different world. There’s cheering, people jumping around … horns … drums. … It’s just, wow.
Samurai starter Chihiro Kaneko recorded the win, surrendering three hits and three runs while striking out five in five innings. Justin Morneau hit a two-run homer off Kaneko in the second inning, scoring Longoria ahead of him, but the Americans could do no more damage. “[Kaneko] made pitches when he needed to,” Morneau said. “We never really got anything going. We never really got any rallies going or situations where we could put a lot of pressure on him. He was able to get ahead and then … throw his split and get us to chase [it].”
Asked if the results of the first two games indicated that the gap between the level of play in Japan and the major leagues was closing, Yanagita joked, “I don’t think they’re really playing seriously, are they? I don’t know, though. Today, I was lucky that I was able to make good contact.”
The series went from bad to worse for the visitors. The next night in game 3 as four Samurai pitchers – starter Takahiro Norimoto (Rakuten) and relievers Yuki Nishi (Orix), Kazuhisa Makita (Seibu), and Yuji Nishino (Chiba Lotte) – combined to no-hit the Americans en route to a 4-0 victory. It was the first time in history that Japanese pitchers had no-hit a visiting American professional team.
Norimoto, who struck out six batters and retired all 15 he faced, said, “I did more than I thought I was capable of. It felt so great. This is a big stage we’re playing on, so I’d say it was the best pitching I’ve ever done.” Farrell commented, added, “He attacked the strike zone. … [W]hen you have that power of 94-96 (mph) with some late action … [you are a] very difficult pitcher to face. Even in some fastball counts, he did an outstanding job of locating his fastball down at the bottom of the strike zone. … On a night like tonight, you tip your hat to a very good pitcher.”
Hayato Sakamoto of the Yomiuri Giants and Sho Nakata of the Nippon Ham Fighters hit two-run homers in the second and third innings respectively to account for Japan’s runs. The no-hitter was nearly spoiled with one out in top of the ninth when Carlos Santana hit a sharp grounder to the right of second baseman Ryosuke Kikuchi, but the gold-glover made a sliding stop, spun completely around, and easily threw out Santana at first. As if being no-hit was not bad enough, the MLB squad also lost star second baseman, Robinson Canó, who was hit on the right foot by a pitch in the seventh inning. X-rays revealed that he had a fractured toe, ending his participation in the series.
The victory also clinched the five-game series for Samurai Japan. “It was our goal to win the series, so I’m happy we’ve achieved that. Especially in a game that made history with the first no-hitter by Japanese pitchers,” manager Hiroki Kukubo said. “I’m so happy that we were able to win the series,” added Nakata. “I wasn’t really able to contribute to the team in the first two games, and finally I was able to contribute to win in the game that clinched the series.”
“Obviously, they’re the best in Japan,” said MLB all-star Lucas Duda when asked about the Samurai’s success. “I really didn’t have an original notion of what they would be. I knew they would be good. I didn’t know how good. I didn’t think they were going to be this good.”
A day later, the MLB All-Stars finally got going, rapping 10 hits, including home runs by Morneau and Longoria and 3-for-4 performances by Altuve and Puig, to win 6-1. The Americans got a run in the first inning, three in the third, and one each in the sixth and eighth. Farrell moved Puig from the sixth spot in the lineup to second, ahead of Morneau, and he felt that made a difference. “We had to make some adjustments. … [T]hey were attacking Yasiel in the first three games and not really giving him too much to hit. To put him in front of Morneau … was an opportunity for him to see some pitches and it worked out. They threw the ball in the strike zone and he responded.”
Meanwhile, starter Chris Capuano gave a five-inning, one-run performance to get the victory. The only Samurai run came off Capuano in the second inning when Yoshitomo “Yoshi” Tsutsugo of the Yokohama DeNA Baystars hit an RBI double to drive in Matsuda. “It was helpful being able to watch the Samurai team for a few games before I had to pitch against them,” Capuano said. “I was trying to watch what our pitchers, especially our left-handed pitchers, were throwing, and I think that helped me.” “The top third of our lineup [Altuve, Puig and Morneau] did an amazing job,” Farrell concluded, “and with Chris, his ability to pitch in with his fastball and use his changeup effectively, it kept them off balance.”
No game was scheduled for November 17. Players used this, and other free days, to sightsee, shop, and experience Japanese culture. After the first game in Osaka, for example, the players visited Kyoto, stopping at many of the famous sites. Jeremy Guthrie visited Kiyomizudera Temple and drank water from the Otowa Waterfall at the fountain of wisdom. Guthrie, whose great-grandfather was a Japanese immigrant to Hawaii, also met Japanese cousins for the first time and visited his great-uncle’s gravesite. Rob Wooten and his wife, Katie, toured a few temples before having a traditional lunch and geisha show. “I’ll remember most the Japanese temples and shrines we visited,” Chris Capuano told reporters. “The natural beauty of that place, and the peace and serenity that came with being in those places was something that I’ll definitely take with me.”
“I came here for baseball,” said Hector Santiago, “but I said I was going to try and do everything single thing that I could. I tasted the tea. I was a little nervous about it at first … but it wasn’t too bad. … You’re only here for about 10 days but you try to go every day and do and see something new. … It’s pretty cool.”
The teams then traveled to Sapporo to play the final game of the series on November 20 before a crowd of 30,159 at the Sapporo Dome. Shohei Ohtani started for Samurai Japan in front of his home crowd and struck out seven batters in four innings, but allowed two walks, four hits, and two runs while hitting one batter and throwing one “hard-to-catch pitch” that resulted in a run-scoring passed ball as the MLB All-Stars won, 3-1.
Lucas Duda of the New York Mets came home on the passed ball in the third inning to start the scoring. Later in the inning, Jose Altuve’s groundout scored Alcides Escobar from third base for a 2-0 MLB lead. The All-Stars scored their third run in the sixth inning, and the Japanese got their only run in the seventh. The major leaguers banged out 12 hits to Samurai Japan’s four. Altuve went 3-for-5, and Puig, Escobar, and Eduardo Nunez each had two hits.
“They hit me when I tried to get ahead in counts, and I need to look at that,” Ohtani said. “I also should have paid more attention to the leadoff batters [who reached base in three of his four innings]. The good thing was that I was able to get strikeouts when I needed them.” Despite his uneven performance, Ohtani nonetheless again impressed the major leaguers. “He was the best,” Escobar said. “He’s throwing 95 (miles an hour) and down in the zone. That’s tough.”
Starter Matt Shoemaker gained the victory, surrendering just two hits in five innings. “It was definitely a great game for us,” he said. “We had a lot of fun out there. This is a great team, a great group of guys.” Shoemaker added that the Japanese “put the ball in play. They foul off a lot of pitches, with very good speed. … These hitters are very good.” He also praised Ohtani. “He’s what, 20 years old? That’s impressive enough. Let alone that he has that kind of an arm, maybe he can be a two-way player.”
After the five-game series, the teams traveled to Okinawa to play an exhibition game on November 20. The MLB All-Stars got a first-inning run on a sacrifice fly by Morneau, but the Americans failed to take advantage of a bases-loaded, two-out situation, and scored only the one run. The Japanese tied the game in their half of the first when Softbank’s Kenta Imamiya singled off Hector Santiago to score Seichi Uchikawa. Excellent defensive stops by shortstop Imamiya and center fielder Yuki Yanagita in the third inning kept the All-Stars from scoring, before throwing errors by Longoria and Fowler in the fourth gave the Samurai a 2-1 lead.
Japan added a run in the fifth inning when Yoshio Itoi of Orix tripled off Tsuyoshi Wada to score Ryosuke Kikuchi, but the All-Stars responded with a run of their own in the bottom of the inning to keep it a one-run game. The Samurai broke the game open in the top of the eighth as Nobuhiro Matsuda led off with a double and reliever Jose Veras then walked Ginji Akaminai. After an unsuccessful and a successful sacrifice bunt, Yanagita singled home both runners off Randy Choate to stretch Japan’s lead to 6-2. Kikuchi then tripled, scoring Yanagita. Although the MLB All-Stars scored single runs in the eighth and ninth innings, the Samurai took home a 6-4 victory.
Throughout the tour, the Japanese fans impressed the major leaguers. Rob Wooten recalled:
The people over there were so polite. They welcomed us with open arms. Not one time did I feel uncomfortable. It’s crazy how much knowledge they have of the game and us. I’ve only been in the big leagues for parts of two seasons, and everyone knew who I was. I’d be walking out of the hotel and there would be people everywhere asking for autographs. I signed pictures I had never seen before of myself. It was pretty wild. And I know with [Robinson] Cano and [Evan] Longoria, they got even more [attention] than I did. … Interacting with the fans over there was something I’ll never forget. It was kind of difficult to carry on a conversation, but just the one-on-one, even for two seconds, you could see that we were making a difference in their lives and they in ours. We don’t go over there often, and they were so excited for us to come and they rolled out the red carpet everywhere we went. The fans and the people over there were unbelievable.
The MLB All-Stars left Japan with a 3-4 record, losing the series three games to two and splitting the two exhibition games. At the time, it was just the second time a Japanese team had captured a postseason series against a visiting major-league squad (In 1970 the San Francisco Giants posted a 3-6 record during a spring-training tour.). The Samurai batted .253 as a team, while the All-Stars club hit an anemic .197 in the five-game series. Japan outscored the visitors 16-13 over the five official games. Yanagita, who led Samurai Japan with four RBIs and went 6-for-20 at the plate, was named the series Most Valuable Player. Tsutsugo and Altuve led their respective clubs with identical .429 batting averages, while Morneau led both clubs with two home runs and six RBIs.
Although at least one American-based writer noted, “[T]here may be questions asked of the roster sent to face Japan’s titans, and fans may well ponder whether a higher-quality cast could have secured greater success on foreign soil” many observers agreed that the Japanese talent had improved greatly since the beginning of the all-star series in 1986 and that Japan’s victory was no fluke. “[W]hen the series returned to Japan this year, there was a different feel,” wrote Samuel Chi of The Diplomat. “[T]he Japanese team put together a great performance with a roster full of young and hungry professionals. Even in defeat in the series finale Tuesday night in Sapporo, there was much promise on display.” Jason Coskrey of the Japan Timesconcluded that “[p]layers such as free-swinging Yuki Yanagita, human-highlight-reel second baseman Ryosuke Kikuchi and pitcher Takahiro Norimoto emphatically announced their presence to MLB teams and fans … as well as to casual NPB followers. Also impressive were the pitching corps … mainly Kenta Maeda, Norimoto, Yuji Nishino and Kazuhisa Makita, while Chihiro Kaneko and Shohei Ohtani were shaky but didn’t lessen pre-existing opinions about them.”
But the Japanese victory was not due solely to the increase in talented players. John Gibson noted on his One World Sports Blog, “The truth is, the landscape has changed. The MLB stars are using the same approach, but Japan is using the stage to get its national team valuable experience against some of the best talent in the world.” The core of the Samurai Japan roster had played together for years, winning the World Baseball Classic in 2006 and 2009 and finishing third in 2013. The squad played together as a team; it wasn’t a collection of all-stars thrown together for the first time. The MLB All-Stars’ “talent alone isn’t enough [for them] to win,” said Gibson. “It’s not that the Japanese players are more talented, it’s more about preparation and organization.”
“While MLB still possesses most of the best baseball talent in the world, the rest of the professional leagues are catching up,” Samuel Chi concluded. “[W]hat’s not in dispute is that the U.S. – the birthplace of baseball – is nowhere near being the top country in terms of producing talent. The San Francisco Giants might have won the ‘World Series’ but the rise of competition worldwide is making the series winner’s claim as the ‘world champion’ more dubious by the year. Perhaps someday there will be a true World Series matching the best professional teams from not just North America, but around the globe.”
Yuri Karasawa has produced this informative video on how to follow Japanese baseball in English. Learn how to follow the current season, learn about the leagues’ history, and delve into the stats.
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Susan Miyagi McCormac writes about the 2012 Opening Series between the Marines featuring Ichiro and the A’s.
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9.1 earthquake struck off the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu, near a region known as Tohoku. The quake triggered a tsunami, and the world watched in horror as the black waves – some as high as 130 feet – crashed over floodwalls and raced inland, eating the shoreline, and destroying buildings, cars, and lives. The resulting meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, located 43 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, forced mass evacuations and caused more loss, devastation, and uncertainty. The death toll from the Great East Japan Earthquake stood at 19,747 precious lives, and 2,556 were still missing a decade later.
One year after the triple disaster, two major-league teams, the Seattle Mariners and the Oakland Athletics, began the season in Tokyo. It was the fourth season-opening series in Japan and the first since 2008, when the Athletics faced the Boston Red Sox. (The others were the Yankees and the then-Devil Rays in 2004 and the Mets-Cubs series in 2000.) When Major League Baseball announced the Opening Day plan six months earlier, in late September 2011, Commissioner Bud Selig said the decision to begin in Tokyo was largely for humanitarian reasons.
“Opening Series 2012 will be an excellent opportunity to bring the game of baseball to fans across the globe and to celebrate the many contributions to the game by Japanese players,” Selig said in a statement. “Most importantly, with the shared love of baseball between our nations, I believe that we can use this event to further assist the ongoing relief efforts throughout Japan.”
That charitable sentiment seemed to be lost on West Coast fans once the games were played on March 28 and 29, 2012.
“Why Are the A’s and Mariners Playing Baseball in Japan?” asked an agitated Wendy Thurm on SB Nation. She complained that A’s fans couldn’t watch the games for two reasons: First pitch (3:05 A.M. Pacific Time) happened before anyone on the West Coast was awake, and even if fans dragged themselves out of bed in the middle of the night, there was nothing to see but a blank screen because MLB’s blackout restrictions rendered the game unavailable in the Athletics’ and Mariners’ home viewing territories. (The MLB Network showed both games on tape delay at 6:00 A.M. and 7:00 P.M.Pacific Time each day.)
John Swol, a Minnesota Twins fan who runs the blog Twins Trivia, denounced the two-game series in Tokyo in his blog post “Season Opener in Tokyo? Just Plain Wrong.” Like Thurm, Swol thought it was unfair to Athletics and Mariners fans – and baseball fans in general – to stage games in a time zone that’s 16 hours ahead of the West Coast.
“Baseball is America’s pastime and opening the season after the long winter away from baseball in a foreign country is just plain wrong,” the blogger bellyached. He wondered aloud if someone was receiving financial benefit from this venture, then asked, “Why in Japan, why not in the Dominican, Puerto Rico, Australia, or even Cuba. Is MLB looking to put a big league team in Tokyo?”
Perhaps Mr. Swol didn’t realize that, while baseball may be America’s pastime, it was first introduced to Japan in 1872. And the answer to his last question is “No,” of course. The answer to his question about who benefits is, well, Major League Baseball. “Almost 70 percent of MLB’s international revenues are derived from the Japanese market,” Tom Verducci wrote in Sports Illustrated, describing starting the season in Japan as “a smart move by MLB.”
“Playing regular season games in Japan for a fifth time in the past 14 years has helped drive such interest,” Verducci continued. “Last year [2011] MLB opened an official MLB of Japan online shop, and for years it has sold virtual signage to Japanese companies to insert into the MLB International broadcasts of All-Star, LCS, and World Series games.”
Verducci made the case for what’s in it for the Japanese fans. And, at the time of his article, there was a slim chance that NPB legend and former Yankee Hideki Matsui would re-sign with Oakland and play in the 2012 opening series. (He didn’t.) “[I]t is fitting that Japanese fans get a chance to watch [Ichiro] Suzuki, one of their most beloved stars, play in his homeland in a major league uniform for the first time,” Verducci wrote. “Japanese baseball fans have been watching Mariners games on television for years, and the opportunity to welcome him back as an active major leaguer is in itself worth the trip.”
Despite the feelings of annoyed writers like Thurm and bloggers like Swol, the players, as well as the coaches and staff, agreed with Verducci and seemed happy to participate. “The fans over there love the game,” A’s left fielder Coco Crisp told MLB.com ahead of the series, saying he was looking forward to the experience after playing in Japan during the 2008 opener as a member of the Boston Red Sox. “You’ve got people hanging fishing rods over the wall with cards to sign, balls attached to all sorts of different things. They really get into it.”
“This is a great opportunity,” A’s general manager Billy Beane said. “We want to thank everybody in Japan who have welcomed us again. We came here in 2008, and we were more than happy to come back again.” “It’s an honor and a privilege to be here,” Mariners manager Eric Wedge said. “I know all the players are excited to be in Japan. Baseball has truly become an international sport, and I think the opportunity to come over here and play Oakland and open this year’s major league season is quite an opportunity.”
Mariners shortstop Brendan Ryan proposed to his girlfriend, Sharon, while in Tokyo. He learned how to ask her in Japanese because she had spent time in Japan as an English and dance teacher. It was a surprise he’d been planning since the trip was announced.
Ryan’s teammate Tom Wilhelmsen, a reliever, toured Tsukiji Fish Market and then watched his team’s American League West rivals play an exhibition game against the Hanshin Tigers while wearing Tigers gear. “It was a lot of fun,” Wilhelmsen said of the game. “They have a different song for every player and every situation. It was pretty good. Once they scored a run, they turned around to me and I was able to knock ThunderStix with them. That was pretty darn cool. You can’t beat that.”
Before the major-league season officially started, each team played exhibition games against the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers, including the one Wilhelmsen attended as a fan. Those games began with a day-night doubleheader on Sunday, March 25, 2012.
More than 42,000 people attended the matchup between the Hanshin Tigers and the Seattle Mariners, partly because the Osaka-based Tigers have a rowdy and loyal fan base that travels well, but also because Japanese fans were eager to see Ichiro Suzuki. Although he had represented the Japanese national team in the World Baseball Classic and participated in major-league tours of Japan, this would be his first time to play a game in Japan as a major leaguer since he became a Mariner in 2001.
With every Ichiro at-bat, flashbulbs lit up the Tokyo Dome as if it were the Fourth of July. The superstar, who spent nine years with the Orix Blue Wave before becoming the first Japanese-born everyday position player in major-league baseball, went 1-for-4 against Hanshin as the Tigers won 5-1. In the bottom of the second, Hanshin got a little help from former Mariners catcher Kenji Johjima, whose infield single scored Tigers third baseman Takahiro Arai from third. Seattle starter Hector Noesi then gave up a two-run homer to Tomoaki Kanemoto en route to the loss. His final line was three runs and six hits in five innings. A Kohei Shibata double and a single by Takashi Toritani gave the Tigers two more runs in the seventh.
The nightcap between the Oakland Athletics and the Yomiuri Giants was somewhat more subdued, despite being on the Giants’ home turf. Ichiro may have received the most attention at the Tokyo Dome, but on this day another Suzuki made more noise. Oakland catcher and Hawaii native Kurt Suzuki cracked a two-run home run in the seventh inning, and Oakland’s pitchers stifled Yomiuri’s bats, holding the “Yankees of Japan” to two hits in a 5-0 shutout.
The next day saw another day-night doubleheader exhibition, with the teams switching opponents. The early contest pitted Oakland against the Hanshin Tigers. Unlike Hanshin’s exhibition against Ichiro and the Mariners the previous day, the Tigers’ generally large and boisterous oendan (fan club) was sparse. It could’ve been the noon start on a Monday, but it’s most likely attributed to the Tigers’ opponent being the Ichiro-less A’s.
The lack of cheering in the Tokyo Dome didn’t faze the Tigers, as they jumped all over Oakland starter Tyson Ross early, scoring seven runs in the first three innings. Takahiro Arai started the scoring with a two-run home run in the bottom of the first, and the Tigers rolled to a 12-6 win over the major-league team. Once again, the “other” Suzuki visiting Japan hit a home run, this one a three-run shot off former Seattle Mariners pitcher Randy Messenger, cutting Hanshin’s lead to 7-4. With Oakland GM Billy Beane watching from the stands, the rally fell short.
The day’s second game was what everyone in Japan wanted to see. A crowd of 43,759 – just shy of the Tokyo Dome’s capacity of 45,600 – politely waited in orderly lines outside the ballpark for their chance to get a glimpse of Ichiro as the Yomiuri Giants hosted the Seattle Mariners. Seattle manager Eric Wedge put three Japanese players in the lineup: Ichiro; shortstop Munenori Kawasaki, a former SoftBank Hawks all-star who signed a minor-league contract with the Mariners; and starting pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma.
Iwakuma signed a one-year deal to pitch for the Mariners in January 2012 after a successful 11-year NPB career. He spent seven seasons with the Rakuten Golden Eagles, culminating in 2011. The March 11 tragedy delayed the start of the 2011 NPB season by three weeks. When the season officially began on April 12, one month and one day after the disaster, Iwakuma toed the rubber for the visiting Eagles at QVC Marine Stadium in a start against the host Chiba Lotte Marines. Many Rakuten fans attended the game, some driving eight hours from the battered Tohoku region, to witness Iwakuma earn the win on his 30th birthday. He went 8⅓ innings, giving up three earned runs while walking two and striking out four as the Eagles defeated the Marines 6-4. “This is a victory for all of us, including the people trying their best in Tohoku,” Iwakuma said after the game.
The Eagles are based in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, a mere 80 miles from the epicenter of the March 11 earthquake. The damage that the Eagles’ ballpark sustained as a result – cracked walls, flooded suites, collapsed ceilings in offices – forced Iwakuma and his teammates to play six “home” games in ballparks in the Kansai region of Japan, more than 500 miles away. From April 15 through April 17, 2011, the Eagles played three games at Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, the home of the Hanshin Tigers and the famed high-school baseball tournament. Then they hosted the Nippon-Ham Fighters from April 22 through April 24 at Hotto Motto Field in Kobe, one of two home parks of the Orix Buffaloes. Repairs to Kleenex Miyagi Stadium finished quickly, and the Eagles could return to familiar turf on April 29 against the Buffaloes, a complete-game, 3-1 win by future Yankee Masahiro Tanaka. Iwakuma would finish his final NPB season with a 6-7 record and a 2.42 ERA.
One year later, as a newly minted US major leaguer, Iwakuma started the Mariners’ exhibition game against the Yomiuri Giants. It did not go well for him. A crowd of 43,759 packed Tokyo Dome to witness a 9-3 beatdown of the Japanese star. The Giants were held to two hits in their 5-0 loss to Oakland on Sunday, but their bats came to life against Iwakuma and Seattle’s relievers. Former San Francisco-turned-Yomiuri Giant John Bowker started the 14-hit barrage with a solo home run in the first inning, and in each subsequent inning, his teammates followed suit: Kenji Yano (RBI double in the second), Shuichi Murata (two-run single in the third), and Hayato Sakamoto (two-run single in the fourth). In Iwakuma’s disappointing outing, he lasted only four innings, surrendering six runs on 10 hits. “I felt like he threw the ball OK,” Wedge said of Iwakuma, the 2008 Sawamura winner. “He just had trouble putting hitters away. He was ahead multiple times and had opportunities to work through innings and just wasn’t able to make that pitch to finish off hitters. If he does that, it’s a different ballgame.”
While the fans were cheering on the Giants, they were also watching Ichiro’s every move. He was held hitless but had an RBI groundout that scored Dustin Ackley, who also contributed a solo home run and a triple. D.J. Houlton, in his first season with the Giants after four seasons and a Japan Series championship with the SoftBank Hawks, was the winning pitcher. These ballgames showed how global baseball has become: The NPB teams won both contests in the Tokyo Dome that day with American pitchers on the mound, while Seattle lost with a Japanese starter.
As Selig intended when making the choice to begin the season in Japan, MLB did use the Opening Series as an opportunity to help in the 3/11 recovery efforts. On March 27, 2012, a group of players – including Iwakuma – and MLB staff visited Ishinomaki, a town in Miyagi Prefecture that was ravaged by the earthquake and tsunami. They conducted a baseball clinic for young players and met with other residents. “Because I was in that area, I really want to give something back to the local community,” said Iwakuma of his participation. The next day, US Ambassador John Roos hosted a ceremony with Japanese government officials at his residence “to celebrate the shared love of baseball that unites our two countries.”
The visit and ceremony were part of a collaboration between MLB, the MLB Players Association, and the TOMODACHI Initiative, a public-private partnership started in response to the March 11 disaster and led by the US government and the U.S.-Japan Council with support from the Japanese government. The diplomatic alliance was launched during Cal Ripken Jr.’s visit to Japan in November 2011, when the Hall of Famer, appointed a sports diplomat by the US State Department, toured Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture, on a nine-day mission. He and former Oriole teammate Brady Anderson conducted a baseball clinic for around 70 junior high school students from the area.
Farther south, Mariners Dustin Ackley, Justin Smoak, and George Sherrill had a high-flying time during a visit to Camp Zama, a US Army base in Kanagawa Prefecture, 25 miles from Tokyo. The trio flew to the base in Blackhawk helicopters, an exhilarating ride that showed off the vast expanse of the Japanese capital. Once at Camp Zama, the players took a tour and met soldiers and their families.
With the exhibition games and humanitarian tours completed, it was time for the 2012 major-league regular season to begin. The first game, on March 28, began with a solemn memorial at the Tokyo Dome. The pregame ceremony was a moving tribute to the victims and survivors of March 11, 2011. A video with Derek Jeter, Bobby Valentine, and Ripken Jr. profiled three people connected to the devastated region: Shinji Takai, a farmer in Kesennuma who restored photographs that were damaged by the tsunami; Naho Hozumi, a housewife and stay-at-home mom who became the program manager of the volunteer organization Hands on Tokyo; and Taylor Anderson, a native of Midlothian, Virginia, and a teacher in the JET Program who was one of the more than 19,000 people to perish in the disaster. Anderson’s parents, along with Takai and Hozumi, threw out the ceremonial first pitches. Members of the 296th Army Band based at Camp Zama performed on the field, and Spc. Amanda Tetreault of the 296th sang the US National Anthem. Japanese actor and singer Ryotaro Sugi performed the Japanese National Anthem.
Ichiro made up for his 0-for-exhibition series in the first game that counted. He didn’t disappoint fans on either side of the globe, going 4-for-5 with an RBI as the Mariners won the first game, 3-1, in a briskly played 11-inning game that lasted just over three hours. “I’ve never been that nervous before,” Ichiro said in a postgame interview. “The warmth of the fans almost made me want to cry. … I felt the significance of the occasion. I knew it would only happen once in my life. I wanted to share a special moment and give something back to them.” Seattle second baseman Dustin Ackley had a 2-for-5 night with a solo home run in the fourth inning and the game-winning RBI in the top of 11th. He scored an insurance run in the same inning on Ichiro’s RBI single.
Oakland starter Brandon McCarthy and Mariners ace Felix Hernandez practically matched each other pitch for pitch. McCarthy went seven innings, giving up six hits and one run, walking no one and striking out three; Hernandez threw eight innings, allowing a run on five hits with no walks and six strikeouts. Tom Wilhelmsen scouted the A’s well during the exhibition game he attended, as he recorded the win for the Mariners with two perfect innings. Brandon League, a yonsei (fourth generation Japanese American), earned the save.
While Ichiro stroked four hits in the first game, the entire Mariners team could manage only three hits the next day against A’s starter Bartolo Colon. It was a pitchers’ duel between Colon and Jason Vargas; the game was scoreless until Mariners first baseman Justin Smoak led off the seventh inning with a home run. The A’s followed suit with three home runs of their own, including a two-run blast off the bat of Cuban defector Yoenis Cespedes, the first of his young major-league career. Josh Reddick and Jonny Gomes added solo shots, giving Oakland a cushion for its 4-1 victory.
On that night Ichiro went 0-for-4, but he was still a delight for the Japanese fans, who were grateful to see the superstar play in Tokyo. “More than the four hits, it was the atmosphere,” Ichiro said. “Being able to enjoy the atmosphere with the fans. Being there with the same feeling? That was special for me. That’s what will stay with me. Seeing the fans and how they react and welcomed the players. They’re very warm-hearted. It makes you proud.”
With the backdrop of the March 11 tragedy, the games had a level of poignancy generally not present in baseball (the Braves-Mets first game after 9/11 notwithstanding). The Opening Series in Tokyo humanized the sport and maximized the connections between the United States and Japan through the two countries’ shared love of baseball. Despite the complaints about the time difference between the two countries, it was nothing short of remarkable for Tokyo to host the major leagues’ opening series soon after the one-year anniversary of the strongest earthquake to strike Japan in its recorded history.
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Bill Nowlin tells us about the 2008 Opening Series between the Red Sox and A’s.
The third in a series of five Major League Baseball visits to Japan opening the regular season featured the Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics in March 2008. Earlier series had been in 2000 with the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs playing each other and both teams facing off against the Seibu Lions and Yomiuri Giants, and in 2004 with the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Devil Rays visiting Japan and playing the Hanshin Tigers and Yomiuri Giants. Both the later visits, in 2012 and 2019, featured the same visiting teams from the West Coast of the United States – the Oakland Athletics and the Seattle Mariners.
Preparing for the Opening Series
The 2008 visit was the first to Japan for both Oakland and Boston. The two scheduled games in Tokyo were deemed home games for Oakland. Oakland had finished the 2007 season with a record of 76-86, in third place in the American League West Division. The Red Sox had won the AL East, swept the Division Series, battled Cleveland to a seventh-game win in the ALCS, and then swept the Colorado Rockies in the World Series. Oakland owner Lew Wolff joked, “It’s very hard to get a ticket to the Boston games, so that’s one of the reasons we came out.”
The A’s had spring training in the Cactus League, and flew out of Phoenix, a 12-hour flight. A’s equipment manager Steve Vucinich said, “I heard they don’t have sunflower seeds there, so we’re bringing our own.” The Red Sox had a 19-hour flight from Florida via Chicago on a chartered Japan Air Lines 747.
In order not to disadvantage the visiting teams, as they prepared for the bulk of the championship season while wedging in the trans-Pacific visit, both teams scheduled three more spring-training games after the Japan Opening Series and before resuming the regular season.
The trip was nearly called off at the last minute. Not long before they were due to make the flight to Japan, Red Sox players raised an issue that had come to their attention. Represented by the Players Association in negotiations with Major League Baseball, the players had been promised a $40,000 per person incentive for the trip, but not all of the coaches had been. The Red Sox players voted to boycott the trip and not board the plane unless the coaches were paid the same. The Oakland players heard of this and held their own meetings, but their discussions never came to a vote because matters were worked out. MLB came up with $20,000 per coach, and Red Sox owners matched that for the Red Sox coaches. Other team personnel in the traveling party were promised additional pay as well.
For Red Sox shortstop Julio Lugo, it was his second trip to Japan. He had been with Tampa Bay on the 2004 tour, playing the Yankees. He said it was far more difficult to adjust after returning home than on arriving in Japan. “It took me a month and a half to get readjusted,” Lugo said. “I felt it when I was playing. I played good during that period of time, but I felt it a lot. I couldn’t fall asleep, and my appetite wasn’t good. You adjust for a week (in Japan), and then you’ve got to turn around.”
A’s second baseman Mark Ellis wasn’t sure which would be more difficult, but he wasn’t as worried as Lugo about feeling fatigue once back in the States. After arriving in Japan, he said, “I’ve heard both. I’ve heard it’s harder going (to Japan), and that it’s harder coming back. It’ll be fine. We have four or five days before we play Boston. We’ll be all right. I got less sleep than I thought I was going to, but I feel pretty good.”
As the Games Got Underway
There was some extra excitement in Japan for the games, and not only because the Red Sox were the reigning World Series champions but also because two members of the team were returning to play in their native land – starting pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka and reliever Hideki Okajima. Matsuzaka had starred in Japan since high-school days and had played eight seasons, through 2006, with the Seibu Lions. Okajima had played parts of 11 seasons for the Yomiuri Giants, from 1995 through 2005. He had joined the Red Sox and become the first Japanese-born pitcher to appear in a World Series game, throwing 2⅓ perfect innings in Game Two of the 2007 World Series against the Colorado Rockies. With a win in Game Three, Matsuzaka was the first Japanese native to win a World Series game.
The A’s received some attention with Kurt Suzuki, a Hawaiian native but with Japanese ancestry. His grandparents were from Nagoya, and he even spoke a little Japanese.
Prior to the Opening Series, both major-league clubs warmed up by playing a game each against the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers. The umpires for these exhibition games were two from MLB and two from NPB.
There were differences that visiting Americans noticed immediately, before the games at the Tokyo Dome, home ballpark for the Yomiuri Giants. When Japanese batters took batting practice, they did so from two adjacent cages, permitting them to get in twice as much practice in the same period of time, though those in the field had to keep a sharper eye.
Because slightly different baseballs were used by Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, it was decided – so as not to disadvantage either team – that each team could use the baseball with which they were familiar when they were in the field. The Japanese baseball was slightly smaller, and its surface was a little “tackier” – the Japanese pitchers thus could get their accustomed grip on the ball, and the fielders would likewise find handling the ball familiar.
Announcements before and during the game were in both Japanese and English. Radar-gun readings were in kilometers per hour, not miles per hour. Red Sox reliever Jonathan Papelbon’s fastball hit 151.
And then there were the fans. Particularly for the four games involving the Japanese ballclubs, the ways fans showed their support for their team were very different. Team supporters sat in their own team’s “cheering section” where an organized band (with drums and trumpets) would perform while orchestrated by leaders (perhaps wearing white gloves and standing on a small platform) who would use whistles and hand motions to get fans to cheer and sing songs from distributed lyric sheets. Noisemakers and megaphones helped amplify the synchronized rooting.
Music between innings ranged from the Beach Boys to American country music to hip-hop to a Japanese version of “YMCA.”
Returning to Japan as a member of the Boston Red Sox, Hideki Okajima addresses young Japanese players (Courtesy of Bill Nowlin)
The Games in Tokyo
The first two exhibition games were both one-run games. The next day, both American teams perhaps had settled in a bit better and won with ease, by very similar one-sided scores of 10-2 and 9-2.
