A recent poll for a TV special saw more than 50,000 people in Japan vote for their favorite retired baseball players. 20 players emerged from a pool of 9,000. Yes, they could only vote for players who are no longer active, so you won’t see Shohei Ohtani or other current stars on this list. Which is probably smart because I’m sure Ohtani would win by default. There are, however, players who were beloved but not necessarily brilliant, and foreign stars who found success after coming to NPB. Unsurprisingly, the list leans heavily towards the past 30 years, with a few legends thrown in for good measure.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling each of these players. Some of these players I know only a little about, so this will be as much a journey for me as, hopefully, it will be for you. It’ll be a mix of history, stats, and whatever interesting stories I can dig up.
For now, have a look at the list below and see how the public ranked them. I’ve included the years they played in NPB in parentheses.
It just might be something far less glamorous: showing up, every day, with the same seriousness, for a very long time.
Takashi Toritani did that better than almost anyone who ever played the game in the history of Japanese professional baseball.
From 2004 to 2019, Toritani was the Hanshin Tigers’ shortstop (and later third baseman and second baseman) in the way a metronome keeps time. He didn’t announce himself. He didn’t demand attention. He was simply there—day after day, inning after inning, season after season—until the routine itself became historic.
If you were trying to explain his career in one sentence (and that is never a fair thing to do) it might sound something like this: he was always there. Not occasionally. Not usually. Always.
He was there for 1,939 consecutive NPB games.
He was there for 13 straight seasons without missing a single game.
He was there through position changes, through declining numbers, through pain that would have sent many others quietly to the bench.
And because he was always there, his career slowly accumulated into something enormous.
That sentence, though, suggests inevitability. It suggests iron. The truth was far more messy.
Toritani grew up in western Tokyo and learned balance before he learned baseball, excelling in judo as a boy. He was naturally left-handed, corrected to the right by a father who believed reliance was weakness, then nudged back toward the left by a coach who noticed what wouldn’t go away. Even early, his life in sports was shaped not by insistence, but by adjustment.
In junior high school, severe knee pain nearly ended everything. He planned to quit. He didn’t. He watched practice before he joined in again. He learned to wait.
What’s often missed is that this intensity was not always there. Toritani has said that he didn’t truly decide to become a professional until he reached university. Before that, baseball was something he loved among many things. He played because it was fun.
Then the goal became clear.
From that point on, he stripped his life down. When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he thought about baseball. Not because anyone demanded it, but because he chose it. Reliability, for Toritani, was not a gift. It was a decision he made and kept honoring.
At Seibo Gakuen High School the climb was steady, not spectacular.
At Waseda University it became unmistakable. He started immediately. He never left the lineup. He won a Triple Crown early, struggled later, recalibrated. He stripped his dorm room of distractions, trained obsessively, and studied movement with near-scientific devotion. Coaches trusted him because he removed anxiety: he would be there tomorrow.
When the Hanshin Tigers drafted him in 2003, other teams wanted him. Toritani chose dirt infields over money and certainty over glamour. The choice fit.
His rookie year was uneven—starts, demotions, survival. By 2005, survival turned into permanence. He played every game, became the everyday shortstop, and helped Hanshin win the league pennant. Rhythm took over.
Shortstop is baseball’s truth serum. It exposes everything—range, hands, footwork, instincts, concentration. And it is merciless with age. Most shortstops don’t leave the position on their own terms. The position leaves them.
Toritani resisted longer than almost anyone.
Managers trusted him. Pitchers relied on him. Advanced metrics agreed.
Calm, it turns out, is a measurable skill.
At the plate, Toritani’s greatness came from something even rarer than power: refusal.
He did not chase pitches. He did not guess. Most importantly, he did not negotiate with pitches he didn’t believe in. That stubbornness was trained deliberately. Even in practice, he would not swing at a pitch he judged to be a ball, even if the batting-practice pitcher threw it, even if an umpire might have called it a strike. He trusted his own definition more than authority.
A thousand walks came from that belief.
When Toritani reached 1,000 career walks, he did so without the usual resume of power. Few home runs. Very few intentional walks. Pitchers weren’t avoiding him. They were pitching to him and losing the battle.
In 2011, during an era when offense collapsed across the league, Toritani led the Central League in on-base percentage. Hits were scarce. He simply found another way to help his team win.
That was another gift of his: adaptation.
And yes, sometimes he drove in runs.
In 2010, as a shortstop, he drove in 104 of them—a number that still feels slightly unreal for baseball in Japan. Shortstops are supposed to connect lineups, not carry them. Toritani didn’t chase power or reinvent himself. He used bat control, favored the left side, and let situations dictate his swings. The runs accumulated quietly.
In Nishinomiya, for a franchise defined by noise and emotion, Toritani was the stabilizer.
When Toritani reached 2,000 hits, it did not come quietly. On September 8, 2017, at Koshien Stadium, he lined a pitch into the right-center gap, stopped at second base, removed his helmet, and stood there while the crowd applauded. A former college teammate, Hiroyasu Tanaka, crossed the field to hand him flowers. Toritani smiled.
Later, he said the hit he remembered most wasn’t that one.
It was the first.
Two thousand hits were not a destination. They were the result of showing up every day and letting time do the work.
Earlier that season, a fastball had broken his nose. He returned the next night wearing a face guard and swung anyway. He made outs. He fouled pitches off. He stayed in the game.
People called him an Iron Man, and the streak justified the name. But “Iron Man” suggests invincibility, and Toritani was never that.
They also called him the Indomitable Man, which comes closer to the truth.
He played through broken bones—back, ribs, face. He returned without ceremony. The streak survived not because he was never hurt, but because he kept playing anyway.
Asked why, Toritani didn’t talk about records. He talked about responsibility. About fans who might only come to the ballpark that day. About the real fear that missing time could cost him his position. Over time, the streak itself became a reason to keep going.
When the streak finally stopped, it did so without ceremony. He began the game on the bench, never entered, watched a 1-0 loss pass quietly, and afterward said only that consecutive games always end someday, offering thanks not for the record itself, but for the managers who had kept writing his name into the lineup.
He knew that, eventually, time would demand compromise.
The range faded. The metrics dipped. Positions changed. Shortstop gave way to third base, then second, and finally the bench.
Toritani accepted all of it.
But when he became a part-time player, something unfamiliar happened. For the first time in his baseball life, he admitted he didn’t know how to prepare. He had always been a player whose value emerged over days, weeks, seasons. Reduce him to one at-bat, one moment, and the map disappeared.
And yet, the instinct never left.
Toritani once said that when he first turned professional, he set a simple, stubborn goal: to be ready to play shortstop at 40. Not to start. Not to be promised anything. Just to be ready.
“I’m not someone who gets lost thinking about life,” he said. “I deal with what’s in front of me.”
When Hanshin moved on, it wasn’t cruel. It was baseball. He finished the season anyway. He played shortstop one last time. He left with more than 2,000 hits, more than 1,000 walks, and a legacy defined not by moments, but by continuity.
Then came winter. Silence. And finally, a call from the Chiba Lotte Marines.
The role was small. The salary was modest. The number 00. He ran as a pinch runner, slid headfirst to score a walk-off run, played every infield position (including first base for the first time) and quietly set a national record* for games played at shortstop in a uniform few associated with him.
*A record since broken by Hayato Sakamoto.
At nearly 40, he was an Opening Day shortstop again. He returned to Koshien as a visitor and lined a pinch-hit RBI, drawing applause from both sides. Eventually even judgment and pain tolerance yielded. He retired. At the press conference, he didn’t linger on numbers. He said thank you.
Looking back, Toritani said the most dangerous moment in a career is the instant a player believes a dream has already been fulfilled. His own great ambition had once been the major leagues, and when that passed, he replaced it with new goals guided by a phrase he had carried since childhood: don’t see a crisis as a pinch, see it as a chance.
The day after his 2,000th hit, Toritani recorded his 2,001st.
It was a walk-off home run.
But that hit was never the point.
The point was everything that came before it: the pitches not swung at, the ground balls converted into outs, the days answered with a quiet yes.
He was always there.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
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 Rob Fitts focuses on the Brooklyn Dodgers 1956 tour of Japan where Jackie Robinson played his final game.
The Brooklyn Dodgers straggled into Idlewild Airport in Jamaica, Queens, on the morning of October 11, 1956. It had been a long, grueling season, ending the day before with a 9-0 shellacking by the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. Now, less than 18 hours later, the Dodgers were leaving for a four- week goodwill tour of Japan.
The subdued party of 60 consisted of club officials, players, family members, and an umpire. Although participation was voluntary, most of the team’s top players had decided to take advantage of the $3,000 bonus that came with the all-expenses-paid trip.1 Noticeably absent were Sandy Koufax, who was sharpening his game in Puerto Rico; Sandy Amoros, who was playing in Cuba; and World War II vet Carl Furillo who proclaimed, “I want no part of it. I’ve seen Japan once and there’s nothing there I want to see again.”2
As they readied to board the private flight to Los Angeles, Don Newcombe and his wife were missing. The Dodgers ace had won 27 games during the season and would win both the National League Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Awards. But he had failed spectacularly in the World Series, getting knocked out in the second inning of Game Two, and in the fourth inning of Game Seven. When asked about the up-coming trip after the Game Seven loss, Newcombe snapped, “Nuts to the trip to Japan!” “There’ll be trouble if he’s not on that plane!” countered Dodgers General Manager Buzzie Bavasi.3
Just after 11 A.M. the big pitcher arrived at the airport without wife or luggage. “The Tiger is here!” he announced as he boarded. He had spent the morning at the Brooklyn Courthouse to answer a summons on an assault charge for punching a parking attendant who had made a wisecrack about his Game Two performance. The plane left on time and after a stop in Los Angeles arrived in Honolulu at 5:30 P.M. on October 12.4
The Dodgers spent five days in Hawaii, attending banquets, sightseeing, sunbathing on Waikiki Beach, and playing three games against local semipro teams. As expected, Brooklyn won the first two contests comfortably, beating the Maui All-Stars, 6-0, behind 20-year-old Don Drysdale’s seven perfect innings on October 13 and the Hawaii Milwaukee All-Stars, 19-0, the next day. On the 15th, Don Newcombe took the mound against the Hawaii Red Sox. Spectators serenaded him with boos and jeers as the Red Sox scored three times in the second inning and chased him from the game in the fourth. “I can’t believe that I am still the target for abuse after getting 5,000 miles away from Brooklyn. I never want to come back here again! I didn’t want to make this trip in the first place,” he complained after Brooklyn pulled out a 7-3 win in the 10th inning. “This abuse thing has me worried,” he added. “I am afraid the emotional effect might continue to grow and become a detriment to my future career.”5 After a day of sightseeing, the Dodgers left for Japan on a 10 P.M. overnight flight.
The plane touched down at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport at 3:25 P.M. the following day, five hours behind schedule after mechanical trouble forced a seemingly endless stopover on Wake Island. A light rain fell from the gray sky. The weary players trudged off the plane and down the metal stairs to the tarmac where they were greeted by the first group of dignitaries and reporters. “Man, we’re beat,” Jackie Robinson complained as he left the plane. “We are all very tired,” Duke Snider added, “but we’re glad to be here. If we have a chance to shower and clean up, we’ll feel much better.”6
Japanese dignitaries and 40 kimono-clad actresses, bearing bouquets of flowers, welcomed the Dodgers as a crowd of fans waved from the airport’s spectator ramp. During a brief press conference, team owner Walter O’Malley proclaimed that “his players would play their best … and hoped that the visit would contribute to Japanese-American friendship.” “We hope to give the Japanese fans some thrills,” said Robinson.7
Despite the delay and relentless drizzle, thousands of flag-waving fans lined the 12-mile route from Haneda Airport to downtown Tokyo. Although many of the players longed for a shower, a warm meal, and a soft bed, they would not see their hotel for hours. After a brief stop at the Yomiuri newspaper’s headquarters, the team went straight to a reception at the famous Chinzanso restaurant. As they arrived, the hosts presented each visitor with a happi coat made to resemble a Dodgers warmup jacket and a hachimaki (traditional headband). Dressed in their new garb, the Dodgers mingled with baseball officials, diplomats, and Japanese ballplayers for several hours. Exhausted, the Dodgers finally checked into the Imperial Hotel around 9 P.M. Some of the younger players, however, went back out, attending “a giddy round of parties” before staggering back to the hotel in the wee hours of the morning.8
Fred Kipp, Gil Hodges, Wally Yonamine, Vin Scully, Roy Campanella and Don Demeter at the October 18 reception at Chinzanso, Tokyo. (Rob Fitts Collection)
Weary from the trip and the late night, the players struggled to get out of bed the next morning for the opening game against the Yomiuri Giants at Korakuen Stadium. Ceremonies began at 1 P.M. with the two teams parading onto the field in parallel lines behind a pair of young women clad in fashionable business suits. Each woman held a large sign topped with balloons, bearing the team’s name in Japanese. As the Giants marched on the field, some of the Dodgers gaped in surprise. “We went over there with typical American misconceptions,” Vin Scully later wrote. “We expected the local teams to be stocked with little yellow, bucktooth men wearing thick eyeglasses. When they first walked onto the field in Tokyo, I heard one of our players yell, ‘Hey fellas, we’ve been mousetrapped!’ One of the first ballplayers out of the dugout was a pitcher who was six feet four. … They averaged five feet ten or so, and they were all built like athletes.”9
Like the Dodgers, the Yomiuri Giants had just finished an exhausting season topped with a defeat in the Japan Series two days earlier. The Japan Timesnoted, “The Giants, battered and worn in their losing bid for the Japan championship …, are regarded as a pushover for the Bums. The Brooklyn club is expected to win their opener by a margin of over ten runs.”10 But that is not what happened.
The Giants jumped out to a quick 3-0 lead off Don Drysdale. At 6-feet-5 he towered over most of his Japanese opponents and expected to dominate them with his overpowering side-arm fastball. But as Scully noted, “Another misconception we had was that our big pitchers would be able to blow them down with fastballs. We were dead wrong. They murdered fastball pitching. Our guys would rear back and fire one through here and invariably the ball would come back even harder than it was thrown. They hit bullets.”11
Brooklyn battled back to take a 4-3 lead in the fourth on five hits, including homers by Robinson and Gil Hodges. But that would be all for Brooklyn as relief pitcher Takumi Otomo, who had beaten the New York Giants in 1953, stifled the Dodgers for 5 2/3 innings. Homers by Kazuhiko Sakazaki and Tetsuharu Kawakami in the eighth gave Yomiuri a 5-4 upset victory. “The fans,” wrote Leslie Nakashima of the Honolulu Advertiser, “could hardly believe the Dodgers had been beaten.”12 Otomo had struck out 10 in his second win over a major-league team.
Since the major-league tours began in 1908, the game was just the fifth victory by a Japanese team against 124 loses.13 After the loss, manager Walt Alston made no excuses, “They just beat us. They hit and we didn’t.” Duke Snider had a particularly bad day, striking out three times and being caught off base for an out. “We’re pretty tired,” he explained. “But that’s no excuse. We’re all in good physical shape and should have won. A good night’s sleep tonight and we’ll roll.” “We’ll snap out of it,” predicted Robinson. Pee Wee Reese agreed: “We don’t expect to lose any more. But,” he added, “we didn’t expect to lose this one either.”14
As predicted, the Dodgers bounced back the next day. Masaichi Kaneda, recognized by most experts as Japan’s all-time greatest pitcher, began the game for the Central League All-Stars by loading the bases on two walks and a single before being removed from the game with a sore elbow. Roy Campanella greeted relief pitcher Noboru Akiyama with a towering drive into the last row of the left-field bleachers to put the Dodgers up, 4-0. Campy added another home run in the third inning to pace Brooklyn to an easy 7-1 victory as Clem Labine pitched a four-hit complete game.15
On Sunday, October 21, approximately 45,000 fans packed Korakuen Stadium to watch Don Newcombe face the All-Japan team—a conglomeration of the top Japanese professionals. Newcombe’s outing lasted just 17 pitches. He began by walking Hawaiian Wally Yonamine, then surrendered a home run and three consecutive singles before Alston took the ball.16 The former ace “stormed from the hill” and stumbled into the clubhouse “like a sleepwalker … jerkily, almost aimlessly. He wore the frozen expression of a kid who’s just seen his puppy run over. Wonder, shock, disbelief, hurt. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. … Slowly he picked up his shower shoes, detoured a sportswriter to get to his jacket. Then out the back door, back to the hotel.”17
After the eventual 6-1 loss, manager Walter Alston noted, “Newk wasn’t right again today. … He’s not throwing natural.”18 Reese explained, “He’s still got it (the World Series) on his mind. It’s getting to be a terrible thing. Not only does he feel he’s letting himself down, he feels he’s letting the club down. … Don doesn’t say much, but it’s building up and building up inside him. It could run him out of baseball.”19
Unfortunately, Reese’s assessment was prophetic. The next day, Newcombe announced that he had injured his elbow in the final game of the regular season. It hurt to throw curveballs. He had kept the injury to himself, hoping that rest would cure the ailment. Although his arm may have healed, Newcombe never fully recovered from the psychological injury of the blown 1956 World Series. He had begun drinking heavily in the early 1950s and his alcohol abuse intensified after the loss. After a mediocre 1957 season, he was traded to Cincinnati in 1958 and would be out of the major leagues after the 1960 season. He played his final season with the Chunichi Dragons of Japan in 1962—coached by Wally Yonamine, who had begun the onslaught on that fateful day in Tokyo.
With the loss, the Dodgers became the first professional American club to lose two games on a Japanese tour. Criticism came from both sides of Pacific. “The touring Flatbushers once again were disemboweled by a band of local samurai,” wrote Bob Bowie of the Japan Times.20 “The Dodgers are known for their fighting spirit,” noted radio quiz-show host Ko Fujiwara, “but they have shown little spirit in the games here thus far.”21 The Associated Press reported that “most Japanese fans have been disappointed in the caliber of ball played so far by the Brooklyns,” but Yoshio Yuasa, the former manager of the Mainichi Orions, offered the harshest criticisms.22 “I can sympathize that the Dodgers are in bad condition from fatigue after a hectic pennant race, the World Series and travel to Japan and that they are in a terrific slump, but they are even weaker than was rumored at bat against low, outside pitches and we are very disappointed to say the least. … It would not be an overstatement to say that we no longer have anything to learn from the Dodgers.”23
Roy Campanella, Jakie Robinson, and Duke Snider signing autographs for Japanese fans. Cappy Harada is in the dugout. (Rob Fitts Collection)
The US media picked up these criticisms, reprinting the stories in large and small newspapers across the country. “Japanese Baseball Expert Hints Brooks Are Bums,” screamed a headline in the New York Daily News on October 23.24 Three days later, a Daily News headline noted, “Bums ‘Too Dignified,’ Say Japanese Hosts.” The accompanying article explained that some Japanese experts believed that the Dodgers were “too quiet and dignified on the playing field … and … were acting like they were all trying to win good conduct medals” rather than playing hard-nosed baseball.25
After a day of rest, the Dodgers flew to Sapporo in northern Japan for a rematch against the Yomiuri Giants. Before the game, Walter O’Malley addressed the team. Starting pitcher Carl Erskine recalled, “Mr. O’Malley was very upset. He thought it was a scar on the name of the Dodgers to have gone to Japan and lost two games.”26 “He was embarrassed. He held a team meeting and read the riot act. He said, ‘I know this is a goodwill tour and I want you to be gentlemen. Sign autographs and be cordial. However, when you put on that Dodger uniform, I want you to remember Pearl Harbor!’”27
Erskine was near perfect, giving up three hits and a walk but never allowing a runner to reach second base as he faced just 27 batters. But the Dodgers continued to struggle at the plate, failing to score until Duke Snider led off the ninth inning with a 380-foot homer over the right-center-field wall to give Brooklyn a 1-0 victory.28
Despite the win, many Japanese were not pleased with the Dodgers’ performance. An Associated Press article noted that Tokuro Konishi, a broadcaster and former manager, “and other experts agreed that most Japanese fans have been disappointed in the caliber of ball played so far by the Brooklyns. … Konishi said he believed the two losses could be chalked up to the fatigue from the grueling National League pennant race and seven game World Series.”29 “The Dodgers’ ‘old men’ are tired,” noted Bob Bowie of the Pacific Stars and Stripes. “Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella are so weary it’s an effort for them to put one foot before another. It’s been a long season and they are anxious to get back home and relax before heading for spring training in February.”30
Indeed, the “Boys of Summer” were aging. The core of the team had been together nearly a decade. The starting lineup averaged 32 years old with Robinson and Reese both at 37. Their weariness showed on the playing field. After four games, the team was hitting just .227 against Japanese pitching. Both management and fans knew it was time to change, and the team had plenty of young talent. At the top of the list were power hitters Don Demeter, who hit 41 home runs in 1956 for the Texas League Fort Worth Cats, and his teammate, first baseman Jim Gentile, who hit 40. Outfielder Gino Cimoli had ridden Brooklyn’s bench in 1956 and was now ready for a more substantial role. Smooth-fielding Bob Lillis from the Triple-A affiliate in St. Paul seemed to be the heir of Pee Wee Reese at shortstop while his teammate Bert Hamric would fight for a role in team’s crowded outfield. On the mound, knuckleballer Fred Kipp hadjust won 20 games for the Montreal Royals and looked ready to join Brooklyn’s rotation. The tour of Japan was an ideal chance try out these players. As the tour progressed, Alston moved more prospects into the starting lineup.
In the fifth game, held in Sendai, Alston gave Kipp the start and backed him up with Gentile at first, Demeter in center and Cimoli in left. For seven innings Kipp baffled the All-Kanto All-Stars, a squad drawn from the Tokyo-area teams, with his knuckleball—a pitch rarely used in the Japanese leagues, while the hurler’s fellow rookies racked up five hits during an easy 8-0 win.31
Don Drysdale started game six in Mita, a small city about 60 miles northeast of Tokyo. For seven innings the promising young pitcher dominated the Japanese. Then, the Japanese erupted for three runs in the bottom of the eighth inning, breaking a streak of 29 straight shutout innings by Dodger pitching. With the scored tied, 3-3, after nine innings, the Dodgers requested that they end the game so that the team could catch their scheduled train back to Tokyo.32 Although it was not a win, an Associated Press writer called the result “a moral victory for Japanese baseball.”33 After six contests, the National League champions were 3-2-1—the worst record of any visiting American professional squad.
Despite the Dodgers’ poor start, the Japanese fans adored the team packed with household names. About 150,000 spectators attended the first five games while hundreds of thousands more, if not millions, watched the games on television or listened to them on the radio.34 “There is widespread interest in the Dodgers and their style of play,” an Associated Press article noted. All of the sports dailies and many of the mainstream newspapers covered each game in detail—often including exclusive interviews and pictorial spreads of the players. Many dailies ran “sequence shots of various Dodgers in action.”35
Although the Dodgers were winning over the Japanese fans, their opponents on the diamond were unimpressed. Ace pitcher Masaichi Kaneda noted, “The pitchers this time were not as good as [on the previous major-league tours]. … On the bench, I was looking forward to hitting. I had never had that feeling before.”36 Shortstop Yasumitsu Toyoda agreed: “Even their fastballs didn’t look fast enough.”37 Kazuhiro Yamauchi, the star outfielder for the Mainichi Orions who hit .313 in 48 at-bats during the tour, complained that the Dodgers lacked hustle. “The Yankees [during the 1955 tour] would always try for an extra base on a hit, while some Dodger runners stopped dead.”38 Yamauchi also noted that the Dodgers had trouble with low, outside pitches. “All our pitches have been aiming for the outside comer.” Yomiuri right-hander Takehiko Bessho added, “Most of them were not good at hitting curveballs. …I wasn’t [even] scared of Campanella. He looked huge, but only he could hit in one spot … the high inside corner. … If an umpire called [a low outside pitch] a strike, he complained. He was just desperate.”39
During a November 11 round-table interview moderated by Masanori Ochi, several Japanese players bristled when asked about a training session run by Dodgers coach Al Campanis. Campanis was actively promoting his book, The Dodgers’ Way to Play Baseball, which had been translated into Japanese. “We attended it, but we already knew ‘how to throw a slider,’” Tetsuharu Kawakami snidely told Ochi. “They only told us what we already knew. I think we practice small tactics more than they do.” “Al Campanis only talked about general things,” Takehiko Bessho added, “and nothing was new.”40
Oblivious to the Japanese players’ feelings, after the tour Campanis told Dan Daniels of The Sporting News, “For the good of Japanese ball, it would be well to send several American coaching staffs there for the purpose of staging clinics rather than having a different team visit each year. Of course, that wouldn’t be the sort of spectacle the fans would want, but it would be more helpful to the progress of Japanese ball. We held one clinic while we were over there, and I never had a more attentive audience. They want to learn our methods and a few clinics would help them tremendously.”41
Underwhelmed by the Dodgers, some of the Japanese players began to jeer their opponents. The Dodgers were undoubtedly unaware as the “rudeness” consisted mainly of addressing the visitors by their first names—an offensive act in Japan, especially in the mid-1950s. The players confessed during the November 11 round table interview:
Yasumitsu Toyoda: (Looking at Kaneda,) Remember you jeered at him [Newcombe] in Mito, something like ‘Come on, Don!’ He was offended by that.
Masaichi Kaneda: We became good at jeering. Our pronunciation became better.
Takehiko Bessho: You [Kaneda] were best at it. You called the first baseman [Gino] Cimoli, ‘Gino, Gino,’ and he turned and smiled at you. When the game is over, you were like ‘Goodbye Gino.’
Masaichi Kaneda: ‘Come on, Don’ was a good one!
Masanori Ochi: Did you jeer at the other major leaguers like the Yankees?
Masaichi Kaneda: No, we just did it this year.
Takehiko Bessho: That was because we were winning.
Masaichi Kaneda: Alright, I will say ‘Hey Don!’ to his face. If he gets angry, I will hide quickly!42
Undoubtedly sensing the players’ distain, Fujio Nakazawa, a commentator and future member of the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame, cautioned his countrymen. “The two victories over the Dodgers should be no reason for jubilation among the players here. They should by no means become conceited. Japanese ballplayers have much to learn from the Dodgers, who have not complained about their busy schedule which started the day after their arrival. The Dodger players are always cheerful and play hard. A defeat does not discourage them.”43
Perhaps sparked by the ongoing criticism, perhaps finally rested, the Dodgers began winning in late October as the rookies led the way. On October 27 in Kofu, Gentile hit two home runs and Demeter and Cimoli each hit one during a 12-1 romp over an allstar squad of players drawn from the Tokyo-area professional teams. The next day, Gentile went 5-for-5 with another home run as the Dodgers beat All-Japan, 6-3, in Utsunomiya.44 On October 31 Kipp pitched two-hit ball and Gentile and Demeter each homered to pace Brooklyn to a 4-2 win over All-Japan. During these games the players began showing a little fighting spirit. Somehow, they learned the Japanese word “mekura,” meaning “blind,” and began shouting it at the umpire after questionable calls.45
“Some of those ballparks were small, [holding] 20,000 or 25,000,” Carl Erskine remembers. “There were acres of bicycles in the parking lots. After the games were over, the men were all lined up along the ditch by the side of the road relieving themselves. I guess they had a couple of beers. So, it was a little unusual leaving the ballpark and passing rows and rows of men. That was a strange sight!”46
On the evening of October 31, the team arrived in Hiroshima and checked into the Hotel New Hiroshima, an ultra-modem structure near the Peace Park and ballpark. Local officials warned the players not to leave the hotel unescorted at night as gang-related crime made the area unsafe for tourists. The following morning the team visited the Peace Park and posed with their hats in their hands in front of the Memorial Cenotaph, the saddle-shaped concrete arch that bears the name of each person killed in the atomic bomb blast.
In a solemn ceremony before the start of the 2 P.M. game, the Dodgers presented city officials with a bronze plaque reading: “We dedicate this visit in memory of those baseball fans and others who died by atomic action on Aug. 6, 1945. May their souls rest in peace and with God’s help and man’s resolution peace will prevail forever, amen.”47
Walter O’Malley, Walt Alston, and Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara. (Rob Fitts Collection)
Walter O’Malley, Walt Alston, and Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara. (Rob Fitts Collection)
The emotion from the morning boiled over during the game against the Kansai All-Stars. In the bottom of the third inning with the Japanese already up 1-0 and one out and a runner on second, future Hall of Fame umpire Jocko Conlon called Kohei Sugiyama safe at first on what looked to be a groundout. Incensed, Jackie Robinson walked over to first to protest the call. “Everybody knew Jocko had missed the play because he was in back of the plate and couldn’t see clearly,” Robinson explained.48 Conlon, of course, did not reverse his decision so Robinson persisted, eventually arguing “so loud and so long” that Conlon tossed him from the game. “I never told him how to play ball,” Conlon said after the game, “and he, or anybody else, can’t tell me how to run a ball game.”49
Kansai padded its lead to 4-1 before Brooklyn tied the game in the sixth on Roy Campanella’s three-run homer. The Dodgers went ahead in the seventh in a bizarre inning. After recording an out, reliever Yukio Shimabara walked Jim Gilliam, who stole second base and then moved to third on a passed ball. Shimabara then walked both Reese and Snider. With the bases loaded, Campanella fouled out to the catcher. Gilliam decided to take matters into his own hands. With two outs and the bases still jammed, he stole home to give the Dodgers the 5-4 lead. Rattled, Shimabara then made a mistake to Jim Gentile, who pounded the ball into the stands for a three-run homer. Brooklyn tacked on another two in the ninth for a 10-6 victory.50
After the Dodgers won 14-0 on November 2, the Japanese squads rebounded. On the 3rd the Dodgers and the All-Japan team entered the eighth inning knotted 7-7 before Brooklyn erupted for another seven to win 14-7. The following day, Japanese aces Takehiko Bessho and Masaichi Kaneda held the Dodgers to just one run for eight innings as the hosts entered the ninth leading 2-1. The Dodgers rallied in the ninth as Snider led off with a 480-foot home run to tie the game. Two outs later with the bases loaded, Robinson tried to steal the lead with a surprise two-out squeeze play. But Jackie missed the bunt and Demeter was tagged out on his way to the plate. In the bottom of the inning, Tetsuharu Kawakami, the hero of the opening game, came through again with a bases-loaded single to win the game.51
On the 7th the Dodgers squeaked out a 3-2 win over the All-Japan squad in Nagoya. Gil Hodges, however, stole the headlines. Alston started the normally staid first baseman in left field and to keep himself amused Hodges “pantomimed the action after almost every play for five innings. He mimicked the pitcher and the ball’s flight through the air, the catcher and the umpire. When a Dodger errored, Hodges glowered and pointed his finger. He made his legs quiver, shook his fist, stamped on the ground, swung his arms, frowned and smiled in the fleeting instant between pitches.” The fans loved it, cheering him so loudly as he left the game in the eighth inning that “[y]ou’d have thought it was Babe Ruth leaving.”52
Vin Scully recalled how Hodges’s antics eased a tense moment. “During a game before an overflow crowd, one of our players was called out on strikes and, in a childish display of petulance, dropped his bat on the plate, took off his helmet and hurled it to the ground with such force that it bounced up on top of the Dodger dugout. The crowd was shocked. The Japanese had never seen an umpire held up to such humiliation and it was an embarrassing moment for us in the Brooklyn party. Gil saved the day. While the crowd still sat in stunned silence, Gil suddenly appeared, jumped up on the dugout roof and approached the helmet as if it was a dangerous snake. He circled it warily, made a couple of tentative stabs at it, and quickly pounced on it, tossed it back on the field and then it did a swan dive off the top of the dugout. The fans beat their palms and shouted until they were hoarse.”53
The Dodgers and All-Japan met again the next day at Shizuoka, a small town at the foot of Mt. Fuji, where 22 years earlier the All-Nippon behind 17-year-old Eiji Sawamura nearly beat Babe Ruth’s All-Americans. Once again the Japanese team thrilled the fans of Shizuoka as pinch-hitter Kohei Sugiyama of the All-Japan squad broke a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off single.54 With their fourth loss, criticism of the Dodgers’ performance continued. An International News Service article headlined, “Fans Debate Reasons for Dodger Losses” asked, “Are Japanese baseball teams improving, major leaguers getting careless or the Brooklyn Dodgers just getting old?”55
On November 9 the Dodgers returned to Tokyo for a rematch with their hosts the Yomiuri Giants. Once again, the game was tight. Home runs by Jim Gentile and Herb Olson as well as an inside-the-park homer by Giants catcher Shigeru Fujio left the score tied up after nine innings. Jim Gilliam led off the top of the 11th with a single and two outs later stood on second base as Jackie Robinson strode to the plate. Yomiuri manager Shigeru Mizuhara called for an intentional walk but Giants ace Takehiko Bessho refused. After some discussion, Mizuhara allowed Bessho to challenge Robinson. Jackie jumped on the first pitch, pounding it foul “far over the left-field stands.” On the next offering, he “drove a hot grounder through the pitcher’s box,” bringing Gilliam home to win the game.56
The win seemed to energize both the Dodgers and Robinson. They won the next two games easily, 8-2 and 10-2, as Jackie went 2-for-5 with two runs and two RBIs. After the game in Tokyo on November 12, the Dodgers flew to the southern city of Fukuoka to make up a game that had been rained out on October 30.
Fittingly, the final meeting of the 19-game series was tight. Nineteen-year-old phenom Kazuhisa Inao and Kipp dueled for eight innings, each surrendering one run. The score remained tied as Duke Snider led off the top of the ninth with a groundball to first, which the usually sure-handed Tokuji Iida muffed, allowing Snider to advance to third base. Robinson strode to the plate—unknowingly for the last time in his professional career—and grounded a single between third and short to score Snider and give the Dodgers the lead. After two outs and a walk, Don Demeter singled and Robinson crossed home plate for the final time. Immediately after the 3-1 victory, the Dodgers flew back to Tokyo and after a day of rest, returned to the United States.
Brooklyn’s tour of Japan marked the end of an era. Robinson retired soon after returning to the United States. The team’s troubles on the diamond continued in 1957 as they finished in a distant third place. It was time to rebuild. The games in Japan allowed many of the younger players to display their skills. Jim Gentile, for example, led the team with a .471 batting average, 8 home runs, and 19 RBIs, while Fred Kipp won three games and posted a 1.26 ERA in 43 innings.
Although Alston and others claimed that fatigue had led to the Dodgers’ poor showing on the diamond, they also conceded that the greatly improved Japanese had put up stiff competition. National League President Warren Giles, who accompanied the Dodgers to Japan, noted, “[T]he quality of baseball in that country is improving steadily and the day may come when the ablest players of Japan will compete on even terms with the best the United States has to offer.”57 Walter O’Malley concurred, telling reporters that the Japanese clubs would be nearly even with US ballclubs in the not-too-distant future. “Their pitchers have uncanny accuracy. They rarely walk anyone. In fielding, particularly in the infield, the Japanese teams are really excellent. Some Japanese players could play on teams in contention in pennant races here, or at least on the better minor league clubs.”58
When asked if any of the Japanese players were ready for the majors, Al Campanis responded:
There’s one fellow who must have been really good in his prime. He’s 38 years old now [actually 36] and they tell me he hasn’t hit under .300 for 18 straight years [actually eight]. I would have liked to [have] got a crack at him a few years back. His name is Kawakami. … High in my book were three others. A shortstop named Toyoda … was the best hitter in his league. His arm might have been a little short, but he had everything else. Then there was a catcher, Fujio, in his first year of pro ball. Never saw anyone with a better arm. Man, he had a rifle. Good receiver, too, and a fair hitter. But the number one prospect in my judgment was a pitcher named Sho Horiuchi, a 21-year-old right hander with the Yomiuri Giants.59
The following spring, the Dodgers invited Fujio and Horiuchi along with their manager Shigeru Mizuhara, to spring training at Dodgertown to help them mature as players. The invitation began a long friendship between the two clubs. The Giants would be the Dodgers’ guests at Vero Beach in 1961, 1967, 1971, and 1975 and the two clubs would maintain close relations for over 65 years.
NOTES
1 “All Dodgers’ O’Malley Gets Is Ride,” New York Daily News, October 13, 1956: 36.
2 “Dodgers Invited to Tour Japan in Fall; Most Favor Trip, but Furillo Votes No,” New York Times, May 2, 1956: S36.
3 Ed Wilks, Newcombe ‘Gets Lost’ After Humiliation,” Monroe (Louisiana) News-Star, October 11, 1956: 12.
4 United Press, “Dodgers Arrive at 5:30 P.M. Today,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 12, 1956: 14; Carl Lundquist, “Flatbushers Full of Frolic as They Leave For Japan,” The Sporting News, October 17, 1956: 13.
5 Tom Hopkins, “Sportraitures,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 18, 1956: 38; Red McQueen, “Dodgers Outdraw Yankees,” Honolulu Advertiser,October 16, 1956: 14.
6 Associated Press, “Bums Arrive in Tokyo,” Passaic (New Jersey) Herald-News, October 18, 1956: 46.
7 United Press, “Japanese Fans Defy Rain to Hail Dodgers,” New York Daily News, October 19, 1956: 155.
8 Vin Scully, “The Dodgers in Japan,” Sport, April 1957: 92; Bob Bowie, “Actresses, Flowers, Cheers Welcome Tourists to Tokyo,” The Sporting News,October 24, 1956: 9.
12 Leslie Nakashima, “Dodgers Beaten 5-4 by Yomiuri Giants in Japan,” Honolulu Advertiser October 20, 1956: 14.
13 >Other victories came in 1922, 1951, 1953 against the Eddie Lopat All-Stars, and 1953 against the New York Giants. The Royal Giants’ tours are excluded from these figures as not all of their results are known.
14 Mel Derrick, “Alston Explains: ‘They Hit, and We Didn’t,’” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 20, 1956: 23.
15 Bob Bowie, “Dodgers Belt Central Loop Stars 7-1,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 21, 1956: 24.
16 Mel Derrick, “Newcombe a Study in Dejection After Loss,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 22, 1956: 24.
17 Bob Bowie, “All-Stars Rout Brooks 6-1,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 22, 1956: 24; Derrick, “Newcombe a Study,” 24.
49 “Jackie Drops Verbal Bomb at Hiroshima—Gets Thumb,” The Sporting News, November 14, 1956: 4.
50Hochi Sports, November 2, 1956: 2; “Dodgers vs. Kansai,” United Press, “Dodgers Top Kansai, 10-6; Robby Chased,” New York Daily News,November 2, 1956: 175.
51 Associated Press, “Bums Win 14-7 Before 60,000,” Honolulu StarBulletin, November 3, 1956: 11; Associated Press, “Labine of Dodgers Loses in Japan, 3-2,” New York Times, November 5, 1956: 44.
52 Associated Press, “Hodges Delights Fans with Baseball Performance,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, November 8, 1956: 22.
On January 28, 2026, Tatsu Shinke, the CEO of Mint Sports Cards, joined SABR’s Asian Baseball and Baseball Card Research Committees to talk about the sports card industry in Japan. You can now watch the talk on Youtube.
Mr. Shinke is the CEO of Mint Sports Cards and Games, Japan’s largest chain of sports card shops. He has previously worked for Upper Deck and Japan’s largest sports card producer, Baseball Magazine.
A recent poll for a TV special saw more than 50,000 people in Japan vote for their favorite retired baseball players. 20 players emerged from a pool of 9,000. Yes, they could only vote for players who are no longer active, so you won’t see Shohei Ohtani or other current stars on this list. Which is probably smart because I’m sure Ohtani would win by default. There are, however, players who were beloved but not necessarily brilliant, and foreign stars who found success after coming to NPB. Unsurprisingly, the list leans heavily towards the past 30 years, with a few legends thrown in for good measure.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling each of these players. Some of these players I know only a little about, so this will be as much a journey for me as, hopefully, it will be for you. It’ll be a mix of history, stats, and whatever interesting stories I can dig up.
For now, have a look at the list below and see how the public ranked them. I’ve included the years they played in NPB in parentheses.
By 1989, Japanese baseball was louder than ever. The consumption tax had just arrived, ticket prices rose across the league, and the Yomiuri Giants—charging more than any team in the country—still packed the Tokyo Dome nightly. Nearly every Giants game aired live in prime time. And at the center of all of it stood Warren Cromartie.
This was not where he had expected to be. He had come to Japan planning to stay a few years, then leave baseball behind to become a professional drummer. He said this every spring. Yet each year, he stayed.
In the season when he was most convinced he was finished, he played as if baseball were refusing to let him go.
By August of 1989, Warren Cromartie was hitting .400, and everyone knew exactly what that meant. Nobody had ever hit .400 in Japanese baseball.
They told him to sit down. Even his manager, Motoshi Fujita, offered to keep him out of the lineup.
He had already reached the required plate appearances. If he stepped away now, the .400 would belong to him forever.
Cromartie did not stop.
He kept his name in the lineup for the Yomiuri Giants because the Giants were winning, because the season was still alive, and because baseball players are trained—almost against their own interest—to believe that the game comes before the number. The average slipped. .399. .395. .390. With every decimal, the tension grew. Japan had never seen a .400 hitter. It wanted one badly.
By the end of the season, the number settled at .378.
Cromartie won the batting title. He led the league in on-base percentage. He was named Central League MVP on a championship team. His .378 remains the highest batting average in the long, decorated history of the Yomiuri Giants.
He recorded season batting averages of .360 or higher twice (1986 and 1989), a feat achieved by only two other players: Ichiro (1994, 2000) and Hiromitsu Ochiai* (1985, 1986).
*Ochiai won the Triple Crown (leading the league in batting average, home runs, and RBIs) both seasons (and also in 1982) but was traded by Lotte to Chunichi due to his unhappiness with the direction Lotte’s management was taking.
This was not a story that began in 1989, or even in Japan. But it was a story that only makes sense there: inside the Tokyo Dome, under the weight of expectation, with a season that dared him to choose between baseball immortality and the game itself.
He chose the game.
Warren Cromartie was never a baseball nobody. If anything, he arrived in Japan because he had been almost somebody for a very long time.
In Montreal in the late 1970s, the Expos unveiled an outfield that felt like the future: Andre Dawson in center, Ellis Valentine in right, and Cromartie drifting between them. They were young, fast, and talented enough to make the Expos relevant for the first time. Cromartie hit close to .300, scored runs, played every day, and helped push Montreal into repeated pennant races that ended just short.
That became the pattern. Cromartie was productive but unsettled, as he was shifted between left field, right field, and first base, good enough to keep his job, never quite secure enough to own it. He played on winning teams, reached the postseason once, and even stood in the on-deck circle when the Expos’ season ended in the 1981 NLCS.
By 1983, with injuries mounting and his role shrinking, Cromartie became a free agent. He was thirty years old, far too young to be finished.
He expected to sign with the highest bidder. He did not expect the San Francisco Giants to be outbid at the last minute by the ones from Tokyo.
Cromartie did not arrive in Tokyo as a curiosity. He arrived as a declaration. At the time, foreign players in Japan were often veterans at the end of their careers. Cromartie was different. He was still in his prime. The Giants signed him not as a stopgap but as a centerpiece, and Sadaharu Oh, baseball’s Home Run King, became his manager.
Oh noticed something immediately. There was a hitch in Cromartie’s swing. During batting practice, Oh made him hit with a book tucked under his elbow to smooth it out. Cromartie listened.
He hit, and hit, and hit some more.
Thirty-five home runs in his first season. Game-winning RBIs. A broad, infectious joy that spread throughout Korakuen Stadium and, later, the Tokyo Dome. Cromartie chewed gum constantly, blew bubbles, and celebrated big hits with a now-famous banzai salute toward the outfield stands. Years later, he explained that it wasn’t choreographed or taught but was simply something he saw on TV and in Japanese celebrations and loved. It looked fun so he made it his.
That joy mattered. Cromartie later said his success in Japan came not from changing who he was as a hitter, but from learning how to live there. Veteran foreign players, like Reggie Smith and the Lee brothers, taught him how to ride trains, eat the food, respect the routines, and understand the culture.
Even his bond with Oh went beyond baseball. When Cromartie’s second son was born, he named him Cody Oh Cromartie.
Cromartie’s Japanese career was not smooth. He was emotional, proud, sometimes combustible. He fought pitchers who he believed disrespected him. One infamous punch thrown in 1987 became a permanent part of his highlight reel and, later, a permanent regret.
The drama began when Chunichi’s Masami Miyashita hit Cromartie with a pitch in the back. Enraged, Cromartie charged the mound, gesturing for Miyashita to take off his hat and apologize, as is customary in Japan. When Miyashita refused, Cromartie landed a powerful right hook to Miyashita’s left jaw, sparking a wild brawl that saw both teams involved in a chaotic fight.
The altercation became the talk of the sports world, overshadowing a historic achievement that same day by Hiroshima’s Sachio Kinugasa. Kinugasa had tied Lou Gehrig’s record for 2,130 consecutive games played, but the next day’s newspapers were dominated by the brawl, relegating Kinugasa’s feat to an afterthought*.
*The incident was so famous that when he started working after his retirement, Miyashita included a photo of him being punched by Cromartie on his business card.
After the incident, Cromartie’s mother, who was in Japan for the first time to watch him play, was furious after seeing the scene on TV, and for a week, she wouldn’t speak to him.
Years later, Cromartie and Miyashita crossed paths at the Tokyo Dome. Miyashita approached Cromartie, who immediately apologized for the punch. The two began to rebuild their relationship, with Miyashita insisting that it was he who should be apologizing.
The defining moment, though, came a year earlier, with the Giants locked in a fierce pennant race.
A pitch struck Cromartie in the head. He collapsed. He was taken to the hospital. The season—and perhaps something worse—felt like it might be over.
The next day, Cromartie escaped the hospital and went to the ballpark.
He did not start. He waited. When he was called upon as a pinch hitter, the bases were loaded. The stadium held its breath.
He hit a grand slam.
When he crossed the plate, he wept and embraced Sadaharu Oh. It was not bravery. It was stubbornness, belief, and love for the game colliding all at once. The Giants would not win the title that year, but the image lasted. Some moments do not require championships to become permanent memories.
Which brings everything back to 1989.
Cromartie announced, before the season began, that it would be his last. He had a music career to get to, after all. That season, he changed the way he hit. He stopped trying to force power, spread the ball across the field, and accepted fewer home runs in exchange for constant pressure.
Then he started hitting like a man unwilling to leave. .470 in May. .396 deep into June. Over .400 even after qualifying for the batting title.
People begged him to sit. If he stopped playing, .400 would stand.
Cromartie remembered that conversation clearly. “If it had been the final couple of weeks, maybe I would have,” he said later. “But it was still August. I couldn’t say I wanted to sit just for my own record. I was playing for the Giants.”
There was also history layered quietly beneath the numbers. Cromartie became the first Central League MVP of the Heisei era, and in a coincidence that felt like a signal, both leagues named foreign players as MVPs that year—Cromartie in the Central League, Ralph Bryant of the Kintetsu Buffaloes in the Pacific. It was the first time that had ever happened, a subtle acknowledgment that maybe Japanese baseball was changing, and that its biggest moments were no longer reserved only for its native sons*.
*Although the treatment of Randy Bass during the same time frame would suggest otherwise.
The average fell. The number slipped away. The season became legendary anyway.
MVP. Batting champion. Highest average in Giants history. A Japan Series title, sealed with a home run in the deciding game against Bryant’s Buffaloes.
By the time Cromartie left the Giants, the record was unmistakable. In 779 games, he hit .321 with 171 home runs and 558 RBIs. Fans had adored him. Among foreign players in franchise history, no one has surpassed him in average, power, production, or longevity.
But Warren Cromartie matters because baseball is not built only on the players who set records. It is built on the ones who stand at the edge of history and keep playing anyway.
Years later, when asked if he had regrets beyond that single punch thrown in anger, Cromartie didn’t hesitate. He said he would sign the same Giants contract again. He would make the same choice again.
Many foreign players have passed through Japanese baseball, but Warren Cromartie was absorbed into it.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
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 Roberta Newman highlights the New York Yankees 1955 tour of Japan.
On Thursday, October 20, 1955, the New York Yankees and their entourage landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to begin a three-week, 16-game goodwill tour of Japan. There, they were mobbed by kimono-clad young women bearing bouquets, an eager press corps, and a thousand devoted fans. The result was chaos, as children, autograph seekers,joumalists, businessmen, and advertisers of all stripes besieged the Yankees party. But the airport crowd was tiny compared with the throng lining the streets of Tokyo. An estimated 100,000 turned out to shower the motorcade—23 vehicles carrying the players and coaching staff, team co-owner Del Webb, general manager George Weiss, Commissioner Ford Frick, and accompanying wives—with confetti and ticker tape. They were also showered with rain from Typhoon Opal, but the weather, which caused significant damage and loss of life elsewhere in Japan, did little to dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm.
The Yankees were not the only American visitors to arrive in Japan on that day. Former New York Governor and failed presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey also landed in Tokyo on the Japanese leg of his world tour, with the stated aim of learning about Japan’s recent economic advances. In reality, Dewey’s aim was to spread pro-American Cold War propaganda to a new democracy still finding its political direction, a nation he called “one of the keystones to any sound system of freedom.” Dewey stayed but four days, his visit gamering little coverage in the English- language press. In contrast, the Yankees remained in the spotlight and on the pages of newspapers for the entirety of their visit. If influence can be measured by column inches, the Yankees’ impact on Japanese attitudes toward America far outweighed that of the political power broker.
Ten years before the Yankees arrived, Japan was thoroughly beaten, exhausted from fighting the “Emperor’s holy war.” Of the early postwar period, historian John W. Dower writes:
Virtually all that would take place in the several years that followed unfolded against this background of crushing defeat. Despair took root and flourished in such a milieu; so did cynicism and opportunism—as well as marvelous expressions of resilience, creativity, and idealism of a sort possible only among people who have seen an old world destroyed and are being forced to imagine a new one.
For the Japan that greeted the Yankees, this new world had just begun to become a reality. The year 1955—Showa 30 or the 30th year of Emperor Hirohito’s reign by the Japanese dating system—marked the beginning of what would be called the Japanese Miracle, a period of unprecedented economic growth that lasted more than three decades. Ironically, war was the engine that drove the Japanese Miracle—the Cold War. In 1945, Japanese industry was crippled—almost one-third of its capacity had been demolished. With staggering unemployment rates among an educated labor force, combined with the country’s advantageous geographic location near Korea, China, and the USSR, Japan became an ideal place to establish new war-related industries and revive old ones. In a very real sense, Japanese manufacturers played an active part of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would come to call the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell speech. Nevertheless, in 1955, relations between the United States and Japan were occasionally tense, the United States fearing that Japan, like India, would take a neutral position in the power struggle between it and the Soviet Union. It did not. Instead, it became one of the United States’s strongest allies. But the strength of that alliance was still wobbly as the two nations negotiated an ultimately successful trade deal, one that would see Japan’s entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and become a player in the global economy.
Though clearly not as delicate as treaty talks with international implications, negotiations to bring the Yankees to Japan were handled with care. In a very broad sense, these negotiations were a microcosm of the larger, far more complicated economic and political talks. In June, during the broadcast of a “good will talk” for the Voice of America, Yankees manager Casey Stengel, who had toured Japan in 1922 as part of an all-star outfit, let it slip that he might be returning. An anonymous source within the Yankees intimated that the team had, in fact, been discussing the possibility of a tour, as had several other clubs. Although there may have been other teams under consideration, it had to be the Yankees. As New York World Telegram and Sunsports columnist and Sporting News contributor Dan Daniel observed, “Information from U.S. Army sources says that baseball enthusiasm over there (in Japan) and rooting support for the pennant effort of the Yankees have achieved unprecedented heights.” Daniel, who covered the New York team, became the primary source of information regarding tour negotiations, though he did not cover the tour itself. But he was not the only sportswriter to weigh in. Writing in the Nippon Times, F.N. Mike concurred, noting, “The Yankees is a magic name here, where every household not only follows baseball doings in Japan, but also that in America. The Yankees, of all others epitomizes big-time baseball in the States, just as Babe Ruth, who helped to build up its name and who led the great 1934 All-Americans to Japan, represented baseball in America individually.” And not only were the Yankees the most recognizable and most popular American team in Japan, but their very brand meant “American baseball” and, by extension, America, to the Japanese, in the most positive sense.
Before the Yankees front office would consent to the visit, it required assurance that both governments were on board. More importantly, even after they were invited to tour by sponsor Mainichi Shimbun, the second largest newspaper in Japan, the organization would not begin to plan a tour without a formal invitation from the Japanese. The Japanese government laid down certain conditions, most specifically, that the visiting team would not be compensated. According to Daniel, “the proposition offers no financial gain to the club. Nor would any of the players receive anything beyond an all-expense trip for themselves and their wives.” In fact, it was absolutely essential that the team agree to forgo any type of payment. Writing in Pacific Stars and Stripes, columnist Lee Kavetski observed, “Each Yankee player is likely to be asked to sign an acceptance of non-profit conditions before making the trip.” Kavetski continued, “It is recalled an amount of unpleasantness developed from the Giants’ 1953 tour. Upon completion of the tour, some of Leo Durocher’s players complained that they had been misled and jobbed about financial remuneration. There was absolutely no basis for the complaint. And the beef unjustly placed Japanese hosts in a bad light.” This was hardly goodwill. Indeed, it was a public-relations disaster that extended into the realm of foreign relations. Kavetski noted, “As Joe DiMaggio, who has been to Japan twice, said to New York sports writer Dan Daniel, ‘Stengel’s players can perform a great service to baseball and to international friendship if they sign up for the trip even though there is no prospect for personal financial gain.’”
Why did the bad behavior of a few American baseball players border on an international incident? On April 28, 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed by 49 nations, including the United States and Japan, officially ended World War II. It also ended the Allied Occupation. As such, the Giants were guests in a newly sovereign nation trying to find its way and to establish its identity on a global stage. Tour sponsor Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, promised to pay each player 60 percent of the gate of their final two games in Osaka in return for their participation. Unfortunately, the resulting figure was smaller than the players expected. Only 5,000 of the 24,000 who attended the first of those games actually bought tickets. As a result, each player was to be paid $331, in addition to “walking around money.” While this was no small amount—it translates to approximately $3,550 in 2021 dollars—it was nowhere near the $3,000 they believed they would net. Writing in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Cpl. Perry Smith noted, “The individual players did not appreciate the ‘giving away of the remaining 19,000 tickets and six team members refused to dress for the final contest.” Although they were eventually persuaded to take the field, they were not happy. This represented a significant cut in revenue for players accustomed to making good money during the offseason.
Although the players thought they had a legitimate beef, their complaints did not play well in the press. To demand more was a public insult. Conditions in Japan had certainly improved by 1953, when the Giants toured, but they were far from ideal. Poverty and unemployment were still an issue, as was Japan’s huge national debt. That representatives of a wealthy nation demanded payment from the representatives of a newly emerging nation looked especially bad. That the players themselves were no doubt viewed as wealthy by individual Japanese could not have helped, either. It was essential that the Yankees not make the same mistake, treating their hosts as inferior and not worthy of due respect.
In 1955, US-Japanese relations were still a work in progress. While arrangements for the tour were being discussed, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu visited the United States for talks with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. At a press conference, Shigemitsu, who simultaneously served as Japan’s foreign minister, “emphasized the desire of his government for a more independent partnership with the United States.” For Japan to make what Shigemitsu called “a fresh start,” he said, “we must talk things over frankly with the United States and see that the two governments understand each other.” Of course, Shigemitsu’s conference with Dulles had nothing directly to do with the goodwill baseball tour. But as he suggested, conditions laid down by a government seeking recognition of its independence had to be given their due. And given the timing, it would have been terrible optics were the insult to be repeated.
Ultimately, the Yankee players agreed and the tour was organized, but not before another major wrinkle had to be ironed out. Once Mainichi Shimbunoffered its sponsorship, its chief competitor, Yomiuri Shimbun, countered with an offer to another team. Commissioner Frick was not having any of it. He responded negatively, announcing that simultaneous Japanese tours by two major-league clubs was out of the question—it would be one or none. Following their own delicate negotiation, competitors Mainichi and Yomiuri came to their own agreement. The two papers would sponsor tours by American clubs in alternating years.
On August 23 George Weiss announced that the visit would proceed. Beginning with five games in Hawaii and ending with several more in Okinawa and Manila, the Yankees would leave New York shortly after the World Series on October 8 and planned to return on November 18. Included in the group of 64 travelers were many of the players’ wives, though some planned to stay behind in Hawaii. Among these wives were those of Andy Carey, Eddie Robinson, and Johnny Kucks, all of whom were on their honeymoons.
The schedule, which included games in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyushu, Sendai, Sapporo, Nagoya, and Hiroshima, was announced on September 24. Tickets, which went on sale on October 1 for the Tokyo games to be played at Korakuen Stadium, ranged in price from 1,200 yen (approximately $3.33) for special reserved seats, to 300 yen (approximately 83 cents) for bleacher seating. Games at other stadiums would top out at 1,000 yen (approximately $2.77). According to Japan’s National Tax Agency, in 1955 private sector workers earned an average annual salary of 185,000 yen (approximately $513). This was a great improvement from the poverty of the early postwar years. Indeed, it was approaching twice the annual salary that private sector workers earned in 1950. But even a ticket to the bleachers would have been a considerable reach for the average worker. As a result, it is safe to assume that the live spectatorship for the Yankees games would have consisted primarily of well-off Japanese as well as American servicemen. Other Japanese fans had to make do with newspaper coverage, radio and, in many cases, television. Realistically speaking, television receivers were extremely expensive, making individual ownership rare—in 1953, for example, even the least expensive receivers cost more than a year’s wages for the average Japanese consumer. But this didn’t mean that television was only for the wealthy. As in the United States, sets were placed strategically in front of retail establishments in order to draw customers. Far more common, however, was the institution of gaito terebi, plaza televisions, sets situated in accessible public spaces, which gave rise to the practice of communal viewing. This would have enabled many Japanese fans to watch the games.
Cover of the 1955 Yankees’ Japan tour program featuring Mickey Mantle. (Rob Fitts Collection)
A Japanese poster promoting the series announced, “Unprecedented—the marvelous terrific team of our time—Champion of the Baseball World—New York Yankees—coming! Sixteen games in the whole country.” While not entirely accurate—the Yankees went on to lose the World Series to the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games after the poster was printed—it did not matter to Japanese fans. Given the public response to the team’s arrival in Tokyo, the Yankees were, in fact, the “marvelous terrific team” of l955.
That the series had a purpose beyond “goodwill” was publicly stated by Vice President Nixon, speaking on behalf of President Eisenhower, on October 12. Eisenhower had, in fact, been involved with the planning, according to Del Webb. Prior to arranging the tour, Webb had discussed its potential benefits with the president, Secretary Dulles, and General Douglas MacArthur, former commander of the Allied powers in Japan. “I asked the president last summer if he thought a trip by the Yankees might help bring the American and Japanese people closer to each other,” said Webb. “He said it would.” So it was no surprise that Nixon made a statement, addressing Commissioner Frick, expressing the president’s best wishes. Nixon wrote, “Appearances in Japan by an American major league baseball team will contribute a great deal to increased mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of Japan, and thus to the cause of a just and lasting peace, which demands the continued friendship and cooperation of the nations of the Free World.” It was up to the Yankees, Nixon implied, to help cement the US-Japanese alliance, assuring that Japan would come down on the side of “freedom” rather than neutrality in the ongoing struggle against the unfree Soviet bloc. Of course, the vice president’s statement was a clear example of the inflated rhetoric of Cold War propaganda. But the message was unavoidable. Public relations played an essential role in geopolitics, and this tour was, above all else, an exercise in public relations.
Having fared well on their Hawaiian stop, winning all five games against a mixture of local teams and armed forces all-stars, and having survived their mobbing at the airport, the Yankees began their hectic schedule. The sodden but jubilant welcome was followed by a series of events, receptions, and press conferences. The next day, the team worked out while Stengel, who would serve as the face of the club, and Weiss attended a luncheon at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Lest it be thought that the tour consisted only of propaganda, the proceedings included their fair share of frivolous fun, which was also covered in the press. At the club, Stengel was presented with a gift—a large box, labeled “For 01’ Case.” According to the Nippon Times,“Stengel stood patiently by while bearers deposited the box at his feet. Then, lo and behold, a pretty girl in a kimono crashed through the wrapping pounding her fist into a baseball glove in the best tradition of the game.” Sensing an opportunity to get in on the act, Weiss “went through the motions of putting the girl’s name to a contract.” In what might, in twenty-first-century terms, be considered in very bad taste, Weiss asked her how much she wanted. But under the circumstances, Weiss’s actions were just part of the fun. Nevertheless, Stengel took a moment to emphasize the true nature of the tour. The Yankees were in Japan “on a serious mission of good will.”
It would be nice to say that the first game, held on Saturday, October 22, went off without a hitch. But rarely does this happen when there are so many moving parts. This time, Opal did more than just soak a parade. The typhoon caused a postponement of Game Five of the Japanese championship series between the Nankai Hawks and the Yomiuri Giants, which was scheduled to be played at Korakuen Stadium on Friday. As a result, the Yankees contest had to be moved to the evening to accommodate both games. A smaller crowd than expected—35,000, about 5,000 shy of a capacity crowd—turned out to see the Yankees make quick work of the Mainichi Orions, beating the Japanese team 10-2. After Kaoru Hatoyama, the wife of the prime minister, threw out the first pitch—the very first wife of a head of state to do so at a major-league game, exhibition or otherwise—fans and dignitaries were treated to a 10-hit barrage by the Yankees, including two home runs and a triple by rookie catcher Elston Howard. The Orions countered with seven hits, but committed a costly first-inning error in their loss. The crowd, which included Thomas E. Dewey and his wife, was not disappointed.
Baseball, however, never completely supplanted diplomacy, as Prime Minister Hatoyama greeted the Yankees, Frick, and their entourage at a reception. Among the many photo ops, one stood out. Hatoyama, having been presented with a Yankees hat by Stengel, became the first Japanese prime minister to wear a baseball cap.
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
This great introduction to current Japanese baseball cards was published on SABR’s Baseball Card Research Committee’s Blog earlier this week,. We have decided to repost it here as background for our zoom chat with Tatsuo Shinke the CEO of Mint Sport Cards to be held on Wednesday, January 28 at 8:30 pm EST. Please see the Asian Baseball blog for more information.
Baseball has been played in Japan for over 150 years and professionally for the past 90. There are known to be baseball cards depicting the sport in Japan as early as 1900 although little is known about many of the pre-World War II cards simply because few of them survived the war. The post-war era featured an explosion in baseball card production that has continued to this day.
Doing a search for “Japanese Baseball Cards” on Ebay will give you a huge number of results and it can be kind of overwhelming trying to make some sense of what you’re looking at. How many card companies are there? How many different sets are there? Are Yomiuri and Hanshin places in Japan? This post will attempt to answer some of these questions by giving an overview of the current state of the Japanese card market.
Baseball In Japan
Let’s start by giving a little bit of background information about professional baseball in Japan. Generally when people talk about baseball in Japan, they are talking about Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the Japanese equivalent of MLB. NPB consists of 12 teams in all that are split into two separate six team leagues – the Central League and the Pacific League. The Central League teams are the Yomiuri Giants, the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, the Yokohama DeNA Baystars, the Chunichi Dragons, the Hanshin Tigers and the Hiroshima Toyo Carp. The Pacific League teams are the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, the Chiba Lotte Marines, the Saitama Seibu Lions, the Orix Buffaloes and the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. The team names may seem a little confusing but the thing to remember is that all the team names contain the name of the company that owns the team (Yomiuri, Yakult, DeNA, Chunchi, etc) and several of the team names also feature either the city, prefecture (more or less the equivalent of a state) or region (think something like the “mid-Atlantic” but with a formal definition) that the team plays in (Chiba, Tokyo, Saitama, Tohoku, etc)..
Each team has a “70 man” roster which usually has fewer than 70 players on it. 28 of those players are on the top team’s roster (also known as ichi-gun which literally means “first troop”) Of the 28, only 25 are active for any particular game. The remaining players are on the farm team (also known as ni-gun or “second troop”). Each team has only one farm team.
Most teams also have a handful of players who are not on the “70 man” roster. These players are called “development” or “ikusei” players. You can identify these players by the fact that they have three digit uniform numbers. These players are allowed to play in farm team games but must be signed to the “70 man” roster to play at the top level. A couple teams have enough development players to field an unofficial third team (“san-gun”) which will play corporate or independent league teams. Every year there are a handful of players who “graduate” from being development players – the most famous one is probably Kodai Senga.
Each fall NPB holds a draft for eligible players graduating from high school or college. Players from the corporate and independent leagues can also be drafted if they haven’t previously been drafted in NPB. There are two parts of the draft – a “regular” phase for players who will end up on their team’s “70 man” roster and an “ikusei” draft for development players.
Some Japanese Baseball Card Conventions
Before we get too far down the road, we should mention a couple conventions of Japanese baseball cards.
There is usually the same number of “regular” player cards for each team in each flagship set (one major exception is BBM’s Fusion set). So if a set has 216 cards with no subsets, you’ll know that each team has 18 cards in the set. If the subset is not for the previous year’s statistical leaders or award winners or the All Star lineup, it will also be evenly divided between the 12 teams. Same for insert cards. It’s kind of a nice change of pace from MLB sets with 30 Yankees and 5 Royals.
For baseball card purposes, the players who are taken in a given year’s draft are referred to as rookies the following year. For example all the players who have the “rookie” icon on their 2024 baseball cards were taken in the 2023 draft. This is NOT the same as how NPB treats rookie status which is whether a player has exceeded a certain amount of playing time. This is why the rookie cards for both 2023 “Rookie Of The Year” award winners were in 2021 (since both players were drafted in 2020).
It is extremely rare for there to be baseball cards of college players and unheard of there to be any for high school players. Any card you see of a high school player (or, more likely, a star player from their high school days) on Ebay is likely a “collector’s issue” and not an official card. There are cards for corporate league and independent league players so it IS possible to find “pre-rookie” cards for certain players, but it’s not common.
Because NPB teams treat their farm teams as an extension of the top teams, there are no separate “minor league” team sets for the NPB farm teams or the equivalent of the Topps Pro Debut set.
One major way that NPB card sets differ from MLB sets is that it is extremely rare for a player to be depicted on a team other than the one he is on when the set goes to press. It helps that players move much less frequently in NPB than they do in MLB but I have seen Japanese card companies pull cards from production when a player has been traded.
Japanese Baseball Card Makers
There are currently four companies with a license to produce NPB baseball cards. We’re going to run them down in order of how long they’ve been making cards.
One quick note before we get started. I’m going to mention the sets that each manufacturer typically releases each year but take that with a grain of salt. Sometimes the companies will abruptly change what their releases are. BBM, for example, published boxed sets for the All Star games and the Nippon Series annually for over 20 years before suddenly stopping in 2013.
Calbee
2024 Calbee Series One #018 (Tomoyuki Sugano)
Calbee is a Japanese snack company that has been distributing baseball cards with bags of potato chips since 1973. There was a lot of variety in the size of Calbee’s sets in the early years (and even what constituted a “set”) but things settled down somewhat in the late 90’s where Calbee would issue their “flagship” set in two or three series each year.
Calbee’s sets are generally fairly small, and seem to be shrinking in recent years. Their sets have been in the neighborhood of 160 cards in the past three years. As a result, their sets feature most of the top players in NPB but not as many of the lesser players. Whether or not the set includes many rookie players is very hit or miss as well.
Calbee doesn’t offer any autograph or memorabilia cards with their sets. “Hits” are the “Star” insert cards, especially the parallel versions that feature gold facsimile signatures. It’s also possible to pull a “Lucky Card” which can be mailed to Calbee and exchanged for something. There have been times when the prize has been a special baseball card or cards but frequently it’s simply a card album.
It’s somewhat expensive to get unopened boxes of Calbee cards shipped overseas for the simple reason that the packs of cards are still attached to bags of potato chips! While a typical box including 24 bags of chips that each have a pack of two cards doesn’t weigh a whole lot, it’s larger than you’d think. And it’s very questionable if the expense is worth getting only 48 cards.
BBM
2024 BBM 1st Version #193
BBM stands for “Baseball Magazine”. BBM’s parent company is Baseball Magazine Sha which has been publishing sports magazines and books since the 1940’s but they didn’t start publishing baseball cards until 1991. They were the first Japanese baseball cards that resembled American cards, with packs containing ten cards and issuing a factory set for their flagship set. There are fewer cards to a pack these days and they haven’t issued a factory set for their flagship set since 1993 but they are unquestionably the largest card company in Japan.
BBM issues a myriad of sets each year but I’m only going to highlight a small subset of them. Their draft pick set – Rookie Edition – usually comes out in late-February and features all the players taken in the previous fall’s draft, both the regular and “ikusei” phases. This is typically where a Japanese player will have his first ever baseball card. The size of the base set is driven by the number of players drafted but is usually around 130. Hits in this set are mostly facsimile signature parallels, some of which are numbered. There are autographed cards available although I think they are mostly redemption cards which may be difficult to exchange from overseas.
BBM issues their flagship set in three parts – 1st Version comes out in April, 2nd Version comes out in August and Fusion comes out in November. It’s not quite like Topps’ Series One, Two and Update. The design of the “regular” player cards is different between 1st and 2nd Version (although 2nd Version has a “1st Version Update” subset using the same design as the 1st Version cards) while the Fusion set uses yet another card design and is kind of a review of the regular season (although it also has a “1st Version Update” subset). The total size of the base set for the flagship set is around 600 cards although many players have multiple cards. Because of that though, BBM’s flagship sets usually include not just the top stars but most of the regular players for each team. The 1st Version set will also contain cards for all the rookies (i.e. the previous year’s draft picks) from all the team’s “70 man” rosters (so none of the ikusei players). Hits for all three sets include the ubiquitous variety of facsimile signature parallels (including numbered ones) as well as a fair number of autographed cards and a handful of memorabilia cards.
BBM also issues a “comprehensive” team set for each of the 12 teams. What I mean by that is a set that will contain a card for every player on the team’s “70 man” roster or essentially everyone in the organization except the development players. The base sets for these sets contain 81 cards – generally there’s 60-ish “regular” cards for the team’s manager and the players and then 12-15 subset cards to fill out the set. The sets are typically issued between March and July. Hits for the team sets are mostly some special serially numbered insert cards along with autograph and/or memorabilia cards possibly – it depends on the team. For example, the Yomiuri Giants don’t allow their players to do autographs in card sets so the Giants team sets don’t have autographs.
BBM issues a “high end” set called “Genesis” every September. The base set for this set contains 120 cards but no one is interested in this set for the base set. This is the set that BBM has the most autograph and memorabilia cards associated with. Besides the autograph and memorabilia cards, Genesis also has a plethora of numbered parallel cards.
Epoch
2024 Epoch NPB #101
Epoch is a Japanese toy company that was founded in the 1950’s but didn’t do their first card set until 2000. That might be stretching things a bit as it was actually a set of stickers that could be pasted into albums. It would be another nine years before they issued their next set which was done in conjunction with what was then called the All Japan Baseball Foundation and is now the National Baseball Promotion Association or OB Club. For the next few years, Epoch would release a handful of sets, usually in partnership with the OB Club and featuring retired (OB) players.
Starting in 2015, Epoch started issuing sets with active players and in 2018 they got serious about competing with BBM, debuting a flagship set along with “comprehensive” team sets for a subset of the teams. They’ve tweaked their offerings somewhat since then though. And as was the case with BBM, I”m only going to highlight a couple of their sets here.
Their flagship set is called NPB and is generally released in May or June. The set had included 432 active players every year between 2018 and 2023, sometimes accompanied by 12 cards of retired players which may or may not have been short-printed. The set has shrunk in size over the past two years, however, with the 2024 set dropping to 336 cards of active players plus the 12 retired players and the 2025 edition further shrinking to 240 cards. Like BBM’s flagship sets, Epoch’s set is large enough to include both the star players and the more average ones. The NPB set will also include cards of all the non-ikusei rookies. Hits from the set include numbered parallels and inserts along with autographed cards.
Epoch issued “comprehensive” team sets in 2018 and 2019 but in 2020 they shifted to team sets that only had 30 or 40 players in them. Originally their team sets were dubbed “Rookies & Stars” but since 2022 they’ve been called “Premier Edition”. Epoch only does these sets for a subset of the teams, although they appear to be adding more teams each year. The sets will contain most of the starters for the team (including the stars obviously) along with (again) the team’s rookie class which may include “ikusei” players depending on the team. The hits in the boxes include a variety of serially numbered parallels and inserts along with autograph cards.
Topps
2024 Topps NPB #49
While Topps has been publishing baseball cards in the US for over 70 years, they are relatively new to the NPB market. They announced their NPB license at the beginning of October of 2021 and put their first set out two months later. Because they’re so new it’s difficult to say for sure what their usual sets are.
They’ve issued a 216 card flagship set each year that uses a similar (but not necessarily identical) design as their MLB flagship set. The set has more rookie cards than Calbee generally does but has never contained the year’s entire rookie class. Hits have generally been a plethora of different parallels but they’ve recently started adding autographs. For a while, the autographed cards were not for current NPB players but instead for both current and retired Japanese MLB players such as Ichiro, Hideki Matsui and Shohei Ohtani (although the players are depicted in their NPB uniforms). They have started adding current NPB players more recently.
Topps has also issued a Chrome set each year. The first two iterations of this set were essentially a “Chrome” parallel of the flagship set although since then the set’s been different – a new checklist containing some different players and all new photos. Hits again are parallels and autograph cards.
Topps also issued NPB versions of their Bowman set in 2022 and 2023; their 206 set in 2023 and 2024; their Stadium Club set in 2024 and 2025; and their Finest set in 2025. They’ve issued four sets a year since 2022 with only two in their initial year.
So far, Topps has issued all of their NPB sets via packs.
Both Epoch and Topps offer on demand cards for NPB. Epoch’s are called Epoch One while Topps uses the Topps Now moniker for their Japanese cards as well. It is extremely difficult to get these from overseas as neither company will ship these cards outside the country.
What I’ve listed here aren’t all the sets that these manufacturers put out but they’re most of the perennial ones and probably the most straightforward sets. There are cards besides the ones from these companies but they are much more difficult to find from overseas. Most if not all of the teams issue cards through their fan clubs and often give cards away with meals at the ballpark. Like in the US, there may be cards given away with food products at stores and sometimes those cards are done in conjunction with BBM or Epoch.
There’s also usually some collectible card game (CCG) set available although the manufacturer seems to change every few years. Bushiroad issued a CCG called DreamOrder in 2024 and 2025 but I’m not sure if they’re continuing this year. Bandai is apparently issuing a CCG soon called “Fanstars League”. Bandai had previously issued a CCG called “Owners League” in the 2010’s and both Takara and Konami have issued ones in the past.
As a player I had kind of an up and down career. I played a year and a half, two years, in the big leagues, off and on, and it just didn’t look as though that [an MLB career] was going to happen. I played for Charlie Manuel, who managed the Phillies in the World Series and had played in Japan as well. He was managing Cleveland Indians AAA team, and he wanted me on his team. I ended up being kind of a utility player. I went to him and said, “Hey man, I would love to play in Japan.” I was really not the prototypical player to go to Japan because they wanted a Jessie Barfield or Lloyd Mosby, those type of guys. But Hiroshima is a smaller market, and they had an interest. When their scout came over to see me, I performed very well, and he signed me.
When I went over, I really went into it wholeheartedly. I wanted to make a good impression. I did all their practice stuff. I was doing everything. Man, at the end of the year I was tuckered out! It was just their workload, what they did, plus we practice differently. Americans here practice full tilt, like in a game, whereas Japanese sometimes back off. They get a lot out of 70%. That’s just how they practice. You hear about some of the ridiculous things that they do, like they’ll go take 1000 swings, right? Well, there’s nobody that can do that full tilt. One of the examples on the pitching side, is Hiroki Kuroda, who pitched for me when I was managing. He just had a chip removed from his elbow and on his first day back, he said, “I want to throw a 100-pitch bullpen.” I said, “Why would you want to do that?” “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll throw probably 15 full tilt. I’ll back off on everything else.” He just wanted to show the press that he was healthy. That was very important to him.
I didn’t know a lot about Japanese baseball before I went over. I knew Mr. Baseball and I had friends who had gone over; some were successful, some weren’t. The guys who were really successful in the States were not always so successful in Japan. There was a different mindset when it came to Japanese baseball, as opposed to American baseball. I think the speed of the game in the United States is obviously faster. Players can adapt to the speed of the game, whereas in Japan they have a way of being successful that works for them and that’s what they want to do. They don’t deviate from that very much. It’s a kind of old school like mid 1940s. They still practice a lot that way.
[When I joined the Carp in 1992] everybody was upbeat about how the team had done the year before. [They had won the Central League pennant]. I had some really good teammates, like Tomonori Maeda and Kenjiro Nomura. Akira Etoh was there. He led the league in home runs, and I hit behind him normally. 1992 was a pretty satisfying year for me individually. I had a pretty good season. There were a lot of really good players, but we had aging pitching staff. Manabu Kitabeppu was getting older. It was unfortunate that we just kind of ran out of pitching, because we had such a good nucleus of position players. We just didn’t have enough bullpen [arms] to really take care of the bigger-tier teams. The Giants were difficult, and the Swallows were really a good team at that time with Atsuya Furuta and their manager [Katsuya] Nomura-san. So, it was a really challenging season, but we played well. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed Hiroshima, especially the fans and the atmosphere. That was pretty cool. The following year [1993], we had some issues with injuries, myself included. That was difficult.
I was always an aggressive player. It’s just the way I’ve always played. I think a lot of players on the Japanese teams were surprised because it was not the norm. I can remember, [early in the season] scoring from first base on a double. As I came into home, the ball was getting there just as I came to the plate and I knocked the catcher over. The ball popped out and I scored, and we ended up winning by a run. People didn’t like the fact that I knocked the catcher over. But as I got up, I tried to see if I could help because I think I broke his collar bone. Everybody could see that I was trying to help him because it was a televised game against the Giants. So, everybody saw me as being hardnosed and they just knew how I played. They were pretty accepting. I think some of the fans in Hiroshima actually enjoyed it.
When I was a player, there was a veteran locker room in Hiroshima, and there was a rookies locker room. The rookies didn’t stay with the veterans unless the rookie had a friend who was a veteran. I was in the veteran locker room. It was very small and all of my teammates smoked like fish! [As a foreign player] you can feel isolated sometimes, and you have to learn how to live with it. I didn’t speak the language very well at all. Also, I was by myself. Louis Medina got hurt his first year, so I didn’t have a teammate. Robinson Checo, a young Latin kid came over, but he didn’t know any English. They called me in to interpret for him, but I didn’t know Spanish! So, I went in and said, “Que pasa?” That’s about all I knew. There were a lot of really quirky things like that that happened over there.
After I stopped playing, I managed in the Minor Leagues. As a AAA manager in Buffalo, we had some good teams. In 2004 we won a championship and in 2005, we had another good team, but we ended up losing in the playoffs. A good friend of mine, Erik Schullstrom was a scout for Hiroshima, and he said, “How would you feel about managing for the Carp?” I said, “Oh, man, that that would be a great opportunity. I’d love to do that.” He went back and introduced the idea to the owner (I had played for his father). He came to Charlotte, and we had an interview, and they said “Yeah, let’s do this.” That’s kind of how it went down. It was a little difficult at first.
I think I was kind of a stopgap until they got a Japanese manager in there after I was gone. I don’t think it was ever intended for me to win as a manager. I think in their mind they just wanted to try to get somebody else ready and then when they were ready, they could go ahead and kick me loose, which that was fine with me. Didn’t have a problem with that. It was what it was. I thought we did a lot of really good things and I enjoyed my time there as a manager and a player.
Koji Yamamoto was my manger when I played for the Carp and also managed just before I was hired in 2006. Yamamoto is just a super guy. The two nicest people I was around in baseball would be Sadaharu Oh, who I managed against, and Yamamoto-san. He really wanted me to help [the Carp], and he was very positive about me coming over there. That was pretty cool. As an American managing in Japan, some guys get paranoid because they think somebody’s going to do something to sabotage [the changes] they’re trying to get through. I didn’t have that. Some of my coaching staff were former teammates of mine and they wanted to see change. The Carp hadn’t won in a while and so they wanted to see an American way of doing things and then get back to Japanese style at some point refreshed.
The way Yamamoto would work the bullpen, it was about complete games. For example, he would leave Hiroki Kuroda in to complete a game because Kuroda at 60% was better than everybody else in the bullpen. Yamamoto-san wouldn’t even go down and ask Kuroda if he was okay. He would just leave him in there. And Kuroda wasn’t going to say anything. He just kept doing it. I got to manage Kuroda for a while, and said, “Would you rather go through and face these guys, the meat of the order, for the fourth time in the ninth inning when you’re dead tired, or would you rather hand it over to the bullpen when you’ve done your job for that day with a certain amount of pitches? That keeps you healthier.” We even tried him on four days rest. We didn’t really have to, but we tried it just because he wanted to show people in the States that he could do it. And he did okay. He was just not used to it. He was used to pitching every Sunday. That’s another thing that’s different over there, the rotation and how they worked it. Star players were always going to pitch on Sunday, and they announced their pitchers. There were never any flip flops or any of that. As a manager I didn’t understand that. The ownership was like, “Well, [the fans] want to know when they’re going to pitch.” And I said, “Well, they will come [to the ballpark] anyway.” We went through this one time, when Kuroda, pitching on short rest, pitched on a Saturday. It’s just a different mindset. I did it a little more of the American way when I was there, but I [ultimately] did what the owner wanted to do. It was his team.
When I played, [most Japanese pitchers threw a] four-seamed fastball and a slider, sometimes a breaking ball like a curveball, and some guys would throw a change up. That’s kind of how everything was when I was a player, but as I started to manage, it was different. The players wanted to experiment with the split finger. They wanted to take their repertoire up a notch. Kenta Maeda, Masahiro Tanaka, Hisashi Iwakuma, and Kuroda, I managed all those guys, were the top line pitchers in Japan, and they always wanted to experiment with new pitches. That was really never brought up back when I was playing. So, it was good to see how it evolved like that. I think it was good for them and a lot of those players were motivated to get to the States and play. All four of those guys did.
Takahiro Arai was one of my favorite players in Hiroshima. The year before I managed, Arai had won a home run title. The first year I managed, Jeff Livesey was the head coach. Jeff had just showed up to spring camp at Nichinan, so we dressed up one of our interns in Arai’s uniform. He was really skinny, and Arai was a big guy. We got it all set up and I told Jeff, “This guy is the home run king, and he wants to take batting practice strictly for you because you’re going to be the hitting coach and you haven’t seen him hit.” Jeff saw the intern and he went, “Man, he’s not a real big guy, is he?” I just said, “No, no, he’s not that big.” The intern got in there and he swung at the first three pitches and missed them. He was slamming his bat and doing stuff that the Japanese players just wouldn’t do. He was great. He was a good actor. Finally, he popped one up and he pretended like it was going to be a home run but it didn’t get out of the infield. Jeff [was looking worried]. Finally, Arai came out and introduced himself, and then Jeff realized that the guys have tricked him. That was a really funny moment. We tried to lighten things up because Japanese don’t normally do stuff like that. We tried to have a lot of fun, but we worked really hard too.
I named some co-captains the first year when I was manager. I named Tomonori Maeda and Hiroki Kuroda captains because they didn’t get along. Maeda didn’t really want to do any of that. Whereas Kuroda took charge, and he would say, “Hey, we need to do this” and would come into my office and talk to me about stuff. Those two guys really were good. Maeda and I were actually teammates when I played. He was an outstanding center fielder. He could play. When he was only 17 years old, 18 years old, he was a stud. He had all five tools. He could run, could throw, could hit, could hit for power. He was really a top tier player, but he didn’t say anything because he was a young player. He wouldn’t say anything out of the ordinary to ruffle any feathers back then. When he was young, he was an MLB caliber player. If he went over [to the States], he would have had to get adjusted, and that would be the only fear I would have had, that he couldn’t adjust to the American type of playing. He had to do things his own way and that didn’t fly in the United States back then like it does today. He could still play at times [when I managed him], but he couldn’t play in the field anymore. He got to the point where he was kind of just a pinch hitter. The Hiroshima people loved him. He was a mainstay there.
Tomoaki Kanemoto was also a teammate of mine and then I managed against him. When Kanemoto became free agent after the 2002 season, the front office had to make a decision between resigning Maeda or Kanemoto. That was a difficult thing. The owner chose Maeda, whereas Kanemoto went on to be the next Cal Ripken with Hanshin. A lot of people really wanted to see Kanemoto stay. I would have loved to have had him on my team because he was a good friend of mine. He had tools and he was strong. You could see that he was going to be a good player.
Having a small budget has always been a challenge for Hiroshima. I played for Kohei Matsuda, the father of the current owner, before he passed. He would go out and get a player if he thought a foreign player could help them win. He wouldn’t care about spending money to get him. It whereas the ownership now is more constrained. So, I never had the opportunity to pick out an American player when I was the manager. You might think that was kind of weird. I had some good players, but we didn’t get that frontline American player that I thought would take us over the top.
I never managed at the Major League level in the United States. I spent a lot of time in AAA and AAA is more of a development type situation. I always showed up every day to win but I never sacrificed development for winning. If we weren’t winning, I was not going to take the number one, two, or three prospect out of the game. I might give him a day off, but I was not going to take him out of the lineup. I think that’s just an understanding of everybody who is in development in the United States. That’s what they truly believe. Development was a big thing for me, and I knew we had to do that in Hiroshima as well. I just had to figure out a different way to do it. So it was different in that respect. I think the players did have a bit of a challenge, me being American and wanting to do things a little bit differently at times, but I didn’t do it all the time. I tried to make adjustments.
For example, in Japan all of the teams take infield [practice] the same way. They never vary from that, and they take infield every day. Very seldom at the Major League level do teams take infield anymore. If guys want to get in some early work and take some ground balls, or maybe some fly balls if they are an outfielder, they’ll get those in before practice even starts. Even as a Minor League manager I didn’t have my guys take infield every day, but I had them do it often because they were developing. I tried to introduce American-style infield drills to the Carp. We an American style infield [drill] one day and then we would go back and do the Japanese style infield. They didn’t like the American infield. It wasn’t the same. But they could do it and never miss a ball. It was pretty amazing how they could do it, but they just liked it their way. I just finally gave up and said, “Yeah, let’s do it your way. You guys look clean with it.”
When I started, the team was not in good working condition. They had walked over 500 people the year before I got there, and when you play in a little stadium, like Hiroshima, that makes things very difficult. You can’t walk that many. It leads to giving up three-run homers every other inning. That was their demise. But we got them back on track by making sure we pitched ahead in the count. We cut our walks down to just under 400. When our pitchers had a 2-2 or 3-2 count, they were always looking for a swing and a miss, but we really didn’t have strikeout type pitchers. We had contact type guys, but they didn’t really understand that. They thought they needed a swing and miss to not give up a hit, and that wasn’t the case. Working on that improved us tremendously during the first year when I started managing.
I also wanted to get rid of the hogwash. Like we would practice for six hours a day, finish up, and guys would be dead tired, and somebody would tell them that they needed to go to the parking lot and keep swinging the bat for another hour. I thought that was a waste of time. Get your rest, get something good to eat, and get ready to work hard the next day. So, I started taking them to the pool and making them swing a bat in the pool after they got done with practice. Some guys liked that, some guys didn’t. The point was they were not getting anything out of sitting in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and swinging a bat. That was not really what we needed. If you’re going to do something, do it with purpose. I think I brought some of that to the table. It wasn’t as though I was trying to change everything. I just didn’t understand how come there wasn’t any change. But when it came down to it, it was a Japanese team and I was an American manager so I would just try to introduce ideas.
Some of the Japanese managers would do things that you would never see in the U.S. For example, one of the Dragons better hitters was a two-hole hitter. When he would get on base with one out, the Dragons manager Hiromitsu Ochiai would bunt his three-hole hitter and then let the four-hole hitter come up with two outs. I was like “Hell, yeah, that’s perfect for us!” With two outs all we had to do was get that guy out and the inning was over, or don’t pitch to him at all, and go for the next guy. [But my pitchers would insist on pitching to him] and that four-hole hitter would get a hit. It never failed. I would ask my pitchers, “Why are you doing that?” It was almost like an unwritten rule that they couldn’t put him on and couldn’t pitch around him. They had to make him swing at their pitch and get him out. That was very discouraging to me. Ochiai just kept doing it. I was like, “God Dang it. What are you doing here?” It was so different.
The way they would line up defensively was also different from in the U.S. You would see a third baseman playing even with the bag, right next to the bag, and there would be nobody out with a leadoff hitter up or the seven or eight-hole hitter up. Why would you do that? [Well] they were actually looking for a ball to be hit off the end of the bat. They just wanted to cover everything. But you have got to give something up to get something. You want to double play ball? Then, you have to cheat and get to double-play depth. That’s just the way we treat the game over here. To them, it’s not an option. They were going to cover every possibility. If there was a swinging bunt, they were going to cover it.
They would try to take away a double by staying on the line but that would leave a huge gap on the left side of the infield. I was like, “Guys were kind of kicking ourselves in the throat here. What are we doing?” A few little things like that I would change around, but it was very difficult to get them to understand it, especially the veteran players. They had a way to position that they were used to. They would want to play at a certain place on the field, and I’d be like, “Well, that doesn’t make sense. You’re giving up too much.” That was a little frustrating, but I got through it. It was not a big deal.
Here’s one thing that I had never seen happen before [I went to Japan]. When I managed, there were some players who if they had a few bad outings or maybe they weren’t hitting really great would come into my office and say, “Hey, think I need to go down to the minor leagues for ten days and then I’ll come back.” They might not pick up a ball [down there] but when they came back, they were just kind of regrouped and refreshed and they went out and did what they used to do. That’s way different from what we do in the States. I never imagined that that would happen.
My closer did that to me one time. He had already blown two saves, and he blew another lead, but we ended up coming back to win the game. He came into my office and said, “I think I need to go to the minor leagues.” And I said, “Do you want me to tell the media, or do you want to tell them? He said, “I’d rather you tell them.” So, he threw me under the bus. I told management about it, and they didn’t think anything about it. They were just fine with it. They said, “He’s not been very good. Maybe he needs a little rest.” So, I think it was probably normal for a Japanese player to do that if he’s had some failure. Can you imagine somebody doing that here? I was blown away.
Overall, I got along great with the umpires in Japan, but we all have situations in which you get heated on the field and if you don’t then something’s wrong. [As a manager] you’ve got to show your team and your players that you are willing to fight for them and it’s us against them. And if they’re not going to make a proper call, then you have a right to say what you need to say. There was a particular umpire, I won’t mention his name, who had trouble seeing. He’d make a really bad call, and I’d ask him in so many words, “Are you ***ing blind!?” And he would look at me and, I almost felt sorry for him, say, “Yeah, I can’t see very well.” I was like, what the hell? I’ve never had an umpire say that before!
I would go to the umpiring group and ask them the rulings on something or what they saw in a certain situation. I got along with them fine. I would go over and talk to the guys who had thrown me out of games. It was no big deal. Japanese managers didn’t really do that. They would go out and bump them and hit them, and then they would stay in the game, whereas I would just talk to them and get thrown out. I think my interpreter got me into more trouble than what I really did. He would get fired up more than I would, and he’d say stuff and it looked like I was saying it, and I wasn’t really saying it!
[Editor’s note: Marty became famous throughout Japan on May 7, 2006, for throwing first base during a dispute with the umpires].
Well, I had an American pitcher, Mike Romano, on the mound and there was a close play at first base and the umpire called the runner safe. He was one of my favorite umpires over there. His name was Katsumi Manabe. I didn’t know if he was safe or not, it was a tough call. Manabe didn’t know English that well, and I think Mike said, “Well, that was a fucking horseshit call!” Well, Manabe thought that Mike was calling him that. It was just the third inning and Manabe threw my starter out of the game. I went out there, and I’m like, “Oh, God, I’ve got to waste some time here so we can get somebody warmed up enough to get them in the game.” So, I started arguing with the umpires, and as I was arguing with the umpires, I noticed they all had stopwatches. I didn’t know what the hell they had those stopwatches for. Anyway, I was talking, and I was getting heated up, but I still was going to have to waste some more time because we were not going to have anybody ready soon.
Finally, the umps said, “That’s enough. You need to go back to the dugout.” I was like, “What?” And they said, “Yeah, your time is up. You can’t go over the amount of time to argue this call.” So, I was like, “Oh, you’re not going to throw me out after all the hell I put you through here?” They just looked at me, and said, “You’re done.” And they started walking away. I had to figure out a way to waste more time, so I just picked up first base and threw it out into right field. All four of them threw me out at once! All four! That was the first time that had ever happened.
The Carp’s owner made red T-shirts that said, “Danger! My manager throws bases.” He put that out there and they sold them as souvenirs. Pretty good marketing idea. That didn’t bother me any. What did bother me is that first time I got tossed, they finned me 1000 bucks. And the next time I got tossed, it was going to be 2000. My coaching staff thought it was great when I got tossed and the team really liked it. It showed some energy because none of the other Japanese managers really did that. I went to the coaching staff, and I said, “Listen, I can’t do this anymore.” So the coaching staff got together and they paid my fine. I thought that was pretty amazing. They didn’t say anything to the players. The coaches leaked it out that I didn’t feel that I could get tossed because management was not going to help pay the fines. Well, management ended up coming back and said, “If we feel that it’s a worthy cause and you can get tossed, we’ll pay your fine.”
With the history of the city, and the bombing, the culture of Hiroshima is about rebuilding and fighting. “We’re not giving up!” I think that really stands out in Hiroshima and with the fans there. The fans make trips to Tokyo, and they have their own cheering section. They’re just great. If I had to compare them to a team in the States as far as fan base, I’d say the Cardinals. The reason I say that is the Cardinals do very little during the course of the winter to get better, but it always seems to work out because their fan base is behind them all the time and a lot of guys just need that little extra jump. So yeah, Hiroshima is just a special place. I think it’s more about the people there. I think the rebuilding of the team and putting the money back into the team now has really helped them as far as competing in the league. Hiroshima’s new stadium is off the wall great. It’s awesome. Nippon Ham’s new stadium is also really good. With Japan’s culture, loving baseball the way they do, making all these new stadiums and places for the fans to go has been pretty amazing.
My time in Japan was a really enjoyable experience, both as a manager and as a player. I really did love it. Also, I met my wife there, so I brought the best part of Japan home with me!
He never dreamed of being a professional, but ended up giving it his all
by Thomas Love Seagull
A recent poll for a TV special saw more than 50,000 people in Japan vote for their favorite retired baseball players. 20 players emerged from a pool of 9,000. Yes, they could only vote for players who are no longer active, so you won’t see Shohei Ohtani or other current stars on this list. Which is probably smart because I’m sure Ohtani would win by default. There are, however, players who were beloved but not necessarily brilliant, and foreign stars who found success after coming to NPB. Unsurprisingly, the list leans heavily towards the past 30 years, with a few legends thrown in for good measure.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling each of these players. Some of these players I know only a little about, so this will be as much a journey for me as, hopefully, it will be for you. It’ll be a mix of history, stats, and whatever interesting stories I can dig up.
For now, have a look at the list below and see how the public ranked them. I’ve included the years they played in NPB in parentheses.
Yoshinobu Takahashi never really wanted to be a baseball player.
Even as a kid in Chiba—already stronger and more skilled than the boys around him—baseball felt like something he did well, not something that belonged to him. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he might say “baseball player,” but without conviction. It felt like a hypothetical. He thought his parents felt the same way.
He grew up the youngest of three brothers in a household where baseball was practiced daily. His father, who had played through high school, coached him relentlessly, yet tried to make sure baseball never crowded out education or life. He didn’t even have any idols when he was young. When Yoshinobu cried on the way to practice and declared he wanted to quit, his older brothers resorted to physical means to force him to go.
He tried to quit more than once. He never succeeded.
By middle school, Takahashi was dominant, pitching and hitting cleanup for a Pony League team that won national championships. Still, he believed baseball would end someday. His mother insisted he attend Toin Gakuen High School in Kanagawa as a boarding student. Takahashi resisted. His father resisted, too.
Years later, he would say that living away from home taught him independence and gratitude at the same time.
At Toin Gakuen, Takahashi stood out immediately. He hoped to remain a pitcher. His coach watched him hit once and moved him into the lineup. He played in two Summer Koshien tournaments, became team captain, and finished his high school career with 30 home runs. His final summer ended in disappointment, without a Koshien appearance.
If high school shaped his independence, Keio University shaped his worldview. He chose Keio not because it was a pipeline to professional baseball, but because of the Tokyo Big6 League and the desire to compete in the Waseda-Keio rivalry.
Takahashi enrolled in the law school, studying political science, and thrived in the Tokyo Big6 League. He won a Triple Crown, broke Koichi Tabuchi’s 30-year-old home run record*, and played every inning of every game for four years. Yet what he remembered most about Keio was not dominance, but diversity—older players, late starters, students who treated baseball as only one part of a larger life. Coaches respected individuality. Players were treated like adults.
*Tabuchi was drafted by the Hanshin Tigers and was named Rookie of the Year in 1969.
In 1997, before he played a professional game, Takahashi starred for Japan in the Intercontinental Cup. He hit .419, drove in 16 runs in nine games, played flawless right field, and helped Japan rout Cuba in the gold medal game by homering and driving in 5 runs, snapping a 151 game winning streak in international games for Cuba.
Drafted by the Yomiuri Giants, he hit .300 as a rookie, won a Gold Glove (the first rookie outfielder to do so), and made the All-Star team. He finished second in Rookie of the Year voting*. In 1999, he delivered what might have been the best season of his career: .315, 34 home runs, 98 RBIs, elite defense, Best Nine honors. The season ended early when he broke his collarbone crashing into the outfield wall.
*Kenshin Kawakami won the award by going 14-6 with a 2.57 ERA. I always thought he should have gotten more chances in MLB.
At the time, it seemed dramatic. Later, it felt like foreshadowing.
Takahashi played the outfield without caution. Diving catches, full-speed collisions, fearless throws, he did them all. He was told to stop diving. He understood the instruction, but he couldn’t follow it.
The legendary Shigeo Nagashima had taught him that a professional’s duty was to move the hearts of the fans, that someone in the stands might be seeing him play for the only time in their life. Takahashi took that literally. “The moment I think I can catch it,” he once said, “my head goes blank.”
The early 2000s were defined by excellence and accumulation: Gold Gloves, All-Star selections, steady power, international success with the national team. He starred in the 2001 Baseball World Cup, the 2003 Asian Championship, and the 2004 Olympics. He tied and set league records for consecutive hits and plate appearances reaching base. He helped the Giants win championships.
After 2004, his career changed shape. Injuries arrived in spades: shoulder surgery, ankle surgery, back pain, broken ribs, muscle strains. From 2005 onward, Takahashi played more than 100 games in a season only three times. He moved across the outfield, then to first base, always adjusting, always in pain.
In 2007, healthy again, he reinvented himself as a leadoff hitter and produced one of the finest seasons in the Central League: .308/.404/.579, 35 home runs, league-leading slugging, Gold Glove, Best Nine. He set an NPB record with 9 first-inning leadoff home runs. It was his last great, uninterrupted year.
Late in his career, the Giants cut his salary by more than half—the largest reduction in team history to that point. Takahashi smiled and signed immediately. “Of course it went down,” he said. “They still want me.”
That was enough.
He played 17 seasons with the Giants, appeared in four Japan Series, won three of them, reached 300 home runs, and never once seemed concerned with whether the numbers told the whole story. Even back in college, his coach remarked that while he was very particular about the outcome of games, he didn’t seem to care at all when it came to his own records or awards.
In 2014, his father died. The day after the funeral, Takahashi played and homered. He looked briefly toward the sky as he rounded the bases. That was all.
At the end of the 2015 season, with his body finally finished, the Giants offered him their managerial job. He accepted. He would say that managing allowed him to see baseball in a new light.
Takahashi never reached 2,000 hits. His body wouldn’t allow it. But he battled all the same. Even diminished, he reached base. Even injured, he delivered. He never stopped playing like someone might be seeing him for the first and only time.
And that, more than any career numbers or award totals, is how he earned the love and admiration of fans across the country.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
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 C. Paul Rogers III tells us about the 1953 Major League All-Stars visit to Japan.
Eddie Lopat was a fine, soft-tossing southpaw during a 12-year baseball career with the Chicago White Sox and most famously the New York Yankees. Called the Junkman because of his assortment of off-speed pitches, Lopat was also something of a baseball entrepreneur. He not only ran a winter baseball school in Florida, but, after barnstorming in Japan with Lefty O’Doul’s All-Stars following the 1951 major-league season, was very receptive to Frank Scott’s plan to put together a star-studded assemblage of major leaguers to again tour Japan after the 1953 season. Scott, a former traveling secretary of the Yankees who had since become a promoter, proposed calling the team the Eddie Lopat All-Stars. By 1953, after O’Doul’s 1949 breakthrough overseas trip to Japan with his San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, postseason tours to the Land of the Rising Sun had become more common. In fact, in 1953 the New York Giants also barnstormed in Japan at the same time as did Lopat’s team. For the Lopat tour, Scott secured the Mainichi Newspapers, owners of the Mainichi Orions of Japan’s Pacific League, as the official tour sponsor.
Lopat and Scott spent much of the 1953 regular season recruiting players for the tour, including a somewhat reluctant Yogi Berra. Unbeknownst to Yogi, he was already a legend among Japanese baseball fans. At the All-Star Game in Cincinnati, a Japanese sportswriter who was helping Lopat and Scott with their recruiting was aware of Berra’s reputation as a chowhound and told Yogi about the exotic foods he would be able to consume in Japan. Yogi was skeptical, however, and wondered if bread was available in Japan. When the writer and Lopat both assured Yogi that Japan did indeed have bread, he signed on for the tour.
Under the prevailing major-league rules, barnstorming “all-star teams” were limited to three players from any one team. With that constraint, a stellar lineup of major leaguers signed on for the tour including, in addition to Berra, future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Robin Roberts, Eddie Mathews, Bob Lemon, Nellie Fox, and Enos Slaughter. All-Star-caliber players like Eddie Robinson, Curt Simmons, Mike Garcia, Harvey Kuenn (the 1953 American League Rookie of the Year), Jackie Jensen, and Hank Sauer committed as well, as did Gus Niarhos, who was added to serve as a second catcher behind Berra. Whether a slight exaggeration or not, they were billed as “the greatest array of major league stars ever to visit Japan.”
Lopat and his Yankees teammates Mantle and Berra were fresh off a tense six-game World Series win over the Brooklyn Dodgers in which all had played pivotal roles. Lopat had won Game Two thanks to a two-run eighth-inning homer by Mantle, while Berra had batted .429 for the Series. A casualty to the tour because of the long season and World Series, however, was the 21-year-old Mantle, who, after battling injuries to both knees during the year, needed surgery and was a late scratch. Lopat quickly added Yankees teammate Billy Martin, who had hit .500 with 12 hits and eight runs batted in in the Series to win the Baseball Writers’ MVP Award.
The Lopat All-Stars were to first play four exhibition games in Colorado and began gathering at the famous Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs on October 6. Baseball had a no-fraternizing rule then and many of the players looked forward to getting to know ballplayers from other teams and from the other league. The Phillies’ Robin Roberts, who was known for his great control on the mound, remembered spotting fellow hurler Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians in the bar at the Broadmoor and going over to introduce himself. Lemon asked Roberts what he wanted to drink and Roberts said, “I’ll have a 7-Up.”
Lemon didn’t say anything but pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered Roberts one. Roberts said, “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”
Lemon chuckled and said, “No wonder you don’t walk anyone.”
The Lopat team’s opposition in Colorado was a squad of major leaguers put together by White Sox manager Paul Richards and highlighted by pitchers Billy Pierce and Mel Parnell, infielders Pete Runnels and Randy Jackson, and outfielders Dave Philley and Dale Mitchell.
The big-league sluggers quickly took to the rarefied Colorado air as the teams combined for nine home runs in the first contest, a 13-8 victory for the Lopat All-Stars over the Richards group on October 8 in Pueblo. The 21-year-old Mathews, coming off a gargantuan 47-homer, 135-RBI season with the Braves, slugged two circuit shots (including one that traveled 500 feet), as did the Cubs’ 36-year-old Hank Sauer, the Cardinals’ 37-year-old Enos Slaughter, and, for the Richards team, Detroit catcher Matt Batts. Two days later, the Lopats blasted the Richards team 18-7 in Colorado Springs before the four-game series shifted to Bears Stadium in Denver for the final two contests. The results were the same, however, as the Lopat team won in the Mile-High City 8-4 and 14-8, the latter before a record crowd of 13,852, as fourtime American League All-Star Eddie Robinson of the Philadelphia A’s and Mathews both homered off Billy Pierce and drove in four runs apiece.
Mathews went 7-for-8 in the two Denver contests and posted Little League-like numbers for the whole Colorado series, driving in 17 runs in the four games, while the veteran Slaughter had 12 hits, including two homers, two triples, and three doubles.
The Lopat All-Stars then flew to Honolulu for more exhibition games after a brief stopover in San Francisco. On October 12 and 13 they played a pair of games in Honolulu against a local team called the Rural Red Sox and it did not take long for disaster to strike. In the first inning of the first game before a jammed-in crowd of 10,500, Mike Garcia of the Indians was struck in the ankle by a line drive after delivering a pitch. Garcia, who had won 20, 22, and 18 games the previous three seasons, was unable to push off from the mound after the injury and had to leave the game. Although Garcia stayed with the team for most of the tour, he was able to pitch only sparingly in Japan.
Despite the loss of Garcia, the major leaguers clobbered the locals 10-2 and 15-0. After the second game, first baseman Robinson, who had homered in the rout, was stricken with a kidney-stone attack and was briefly hospitalized. He quickly recovered and resumed the tour for the All-Stars, who had brought along only 11 position players.
On October 14 the Lopat squad flew to Kauai, where they pounded out 22 hits and defeated the Kauai All-Stars, 12-3, on a makeshift diamond fashioned from a football field. World Series MVP Martin was honored before the game and given a number of gifts, including an aloha shirt and a calabash bowl. He celebrated by smashing a long home run in his first time at bat and later adding a double and a single. The homer sailed through goalposts situated beyond left field, leading Robin Roberts to quip that it should have counted for three runs.
The big leaguers next flew to Hilo on the Big Island, where on October 17, 5,000 saw them defeat a local all-star-team, 8-3, in a game benefiting the local Little League. But much more serious opposition awaited them back in Honolulu in the form of a three- game series against the Roy Campanella All-Stars, a team of African American major leaguers headed by Campanella, the reigning National League MVP, and including stellar players like Larry Doby, Don Newcombe, Billy Bruton, Joe Black, Junior Gilliam, George Crowe, Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, Bob Boyd, Dave Hoskins, Connie Johnson, and Jim Pendleton.
The Lopats won the first game, 7-1, on the afternoon of October 18 over an obviously weary Campanella team that had flown in from Atlanta the previous day, with a plane change in Los Angeles. Jackie Jensen, then with the Washington Senators, was the hitting star with two home runs, while the Phillies’ Curt Simmons allowed only a single run in eight innings of mound work. By the next night, Campy’s squad was in much better shape and defeated the Lopat team 4-3 in 10 innings behind Joe Black.
Roberts pitched the first nine innings for the Lopats with Yogi Berra behind the plate. In one at-bat, Campanella hit a towering foul ball behind the plate. Campy actually knocked the glove off Yogi’s hand on the follow-through of his swing. Berra looked down at his glove on the ground and then went back and caught the foul ball barehanded.
Roberts picked up Yogi’s glove and handed it to him, asking him if he was okay. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell.”
Over the years Roberts wondered if he had somehow made that story up, since he never again saw a bat knock the glove off a catcher’s hand. Over 30 years later, he saw Berra at an Old-Timers game in Wrigley Field in Chicago and asked him about it. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell,” the exact thing he had said in 1953.
On October 20 Campanella’s squad won the rubber game, 7-1, behind the three-hit pitching of Don Newcombe. Nellie Fox displayed rare power by homering for the Lopats’ only run, while George Crowe hit two homers and Junior Gilliam one for the Campanellas.
The Lopat team stayed at the famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach and had such a great time in Hawaii that many didn’t want to leave. Many of the players had brought their wives but some like Eddie Mathews, Billy Martin, and Eddie Robinson were single and so enjoyed the Honolulu nightlife. Not surprisingly given his before and after history, Martin got into a dispute with a guard at a performance of hula dancers attended by the entire team and sucker-punched him. Fortunately for Martin, no charges appear to have been brought.
The Lopat squad did have a schedule to keep and flew on a Pan American Stratocruiser to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, arriving at 1:05 P.M. on October 22. They could scarcely have anticipated the frenzied reception they received. Although the New York Giants had been in the country for a week and had played five games, thousands of Japanese greeted the plane. After being officially greeted by executives from the trip sponsor, Mainichi, and receiving gifts from beautiful young Japanese women, the ballplayers climbed into convertibles, one player per car, to travel to the Nikkatsu Hotel, which would be their headquarters. The trip, which would normally take about 30 minutes, took almost three hours because of the throngs of fans lining the route and pressing against the cars as Japanese mounted and foot police were overwhelmed. Eddie Mathews likened it to the pope in a motorcade without police or security while it reminded Robin Roberts of a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
That evening the Americans were guests at a gigantic pep rally in their honor at the Nichigeki Theater, where Hawaiian-born Japanese crooner Katsuhiko Haida introduced each player. American Ambassador John M. Allison also hosted a reception at the US Embassy for both the Lopats and the New York Giants, who had just returned to Tokyo from Sendai.
Eddie Lopat All-Stars vs. Mainichi Orions, October 23, 1953 (Rob Fitts Collection
The Lopat squad’s first game was the following afternoon, October 23, against the Mainichi Orions in Korakuen Stadium before 27,000. The Orions, who had finished fifth out of seven teams in Japan’s Pacific League, had the honor of playing the initial game due to its ownership by the Mainichi newspapers. Jackie Jensen won a home-run-hitting contest before the game by smacking six out of the yard, followed by Futoshi Nakanishi of the Nishitetsu Lions with three and then Berra, Mathews, and Hank Sauer with two each. Bobby Brown, stationed in Tokyo as a US Army doctor, was seen visiting in the dugout with his Yankee teammates Lopat, Berra, and Martin before the contest.
The US and Japanese Army bands played after the home-run-hitting contest, followed by helicopters dropping bouquets of flowers to both managers. Another helicopter hovered low over the field and dropped the first ball but stirred up so much dust from the all-dirt infield that the start of the game was delayed.
The game finally began with Curt Simmons on the mound for the Americans against southpaw Atsushi Aramaki. The visitors plated a run in the top of the second on a single by Sauer, a double by Robinson, and an error, but the Orions immediately rallied for three runs in the bottom half on three bunt singles and Kazuhiro Yamauchi’s double. The Orions led 4-1 heading into the top of the ninth but the Lopats staged a thrilling rally to tie the score behind a walk to Mathews, a two-run homer by Sauer, and Robinson’s game-tying circuit clout.
Garcia, who had relieved Simmons in the seventh inning, was still pitching in the 10th but after allowing a single, reaggravated the leg injury suffered in Hawaii. He was forced to leave the game with the count of 1 and 1 against the Orions’ Charlie Hood, who was a minor-league player in the Phillies organization. (Hood was in the military stationed in Japan and had played 25 games for Mainichi during the season.) When Garcia had to depart, Lopat asked for volunteers to pitch. Roberts, sitting in the dugout, said he would and went out to the mound to warm up.
During the game Roberts had told Bob Lemon next to him that he was familiar with Hood from Phillies spring training and that he was a really good low-ball hitter. Then, on his first pitch, Roberts threw Hood a low fastball which he ripped down the right-field line for a game-winning double. Lemon ribbed Roberts for the rest of the trip about his throwing a low fastball to a low-fastball hitter. In one of baseball’s little coincidences, Roberts and Lemon would both be elected to the Hall of Fame on the same day in 1976, 23 years later.
The Lopat squad’s loss in the opener was only the third ever suffered by an American team of major leaguers in a postseason tour of Japan. The All-Stars were certainly embarrassed by losing to a mediocre team and afterward Roberts told the Japanese press, “Look, it’s a goodwill trip and so this was some of our goodwill. You won the first game, but you won’t win anymore.”
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
How 50,000 fans ranked Japan’s most beloved retired stars
by Thomas Love Seagull
A recent poll for a TV special saw more than 50,000 people in Japan vote for their favorite retired baseball players. 20 players emerged from a pool of 9,000. Yes, they could only vote for players who are no longer active, so you won’t see Shohei Ohtani or other current stars on this list. Which is probably smart because I’m sure Ohtani would win by default. There are, however, players who were beloved but not necessarily brilliant, and foreign stars who found success after coming to NPB. Unsurprisingly, the list leans heavily towards the past 30 years, with a few legends thrown in for good measure.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling each of these players. Some of these players I know only a little about, so this will be as much a journey for me as, hopefully, it will be for you. It’ll be a mix of history, stats, and whatever interesting stories I can dig up.
For now, have a look at the list below and see how the public ranked them. I’ve included the years they played in NPB in parentheses.
The only foreign player to record 2,000 hits in NPB
Charlie Manuel used to tell him stories.
That’s how this whole thing begins—not with a contract or a scout or a dream, but with the manager of the Cleveland Indians, a man with a thick country accent and a Yakult Swallows heart, leaning against a batting cage and talking about Japan.
Manuel was one of the few Americans who had thrived in NPB. He won the Japan Series as a member of the Swallows in 1978. He signed with the Kintetsu Buffaloes and took home the Pacific League MVP in 1979. His nickname in Japan? The Red Demon. He knew the language of the league, the rhythm of its days, the fierce courtesy, the relentless work, the joy buried under the discipline.
Alex Ramirez listened because he respected Manuel.
But he did not yet understand him.
“Charlie told me baseball equals Japanese culture,” Ramirez recalled years later. “Back then, I didn’t understand how baseball and culture could be linked. Now I understand it completely.”
At the time, it had sounded like one of those mysterious lines you hear from someone wiser than you. It was meaningful, but maybe only in retrospect.
Besides, the other players Ramirez talked to painted very different pictures of Japan.
Most had struggled.
Most had returned home with bad stories and worse statistics.
Their message was: Good luck. You won’t last.
Manuel’s message was: If you open yourself to Japan, Japan will open itself to you.
And Ramirez, wonderfully and stubbornly, did not believe either one completely.
He prepared for his trip to Japan the way any sensible ballplayer would: he watched Mr. Baseball a dozen or so times.
In the movie, translators famously shrink long speeches into short summaries, sometimes to comedic effect. Ramirez took this as documentary realism.
“I thought the interpreters were going to lie to me,” he said. “Like in the movie, the player talks for a minute, and the translator says two words.”
So when he arrived in Tokyo in 2001, he was prepared for deception, confusion, and culture clash.
He was not prepared for loneliness.
“The players would talk to me,” he said, “but I couldn’t understand. And I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. It became pressure.”
The language barrier hit harder than the pitching. And the pitching, with its forkballs and cutters and relentless precision, hit pretty hard.
In the clubhouse, the food consisted of onigiri and ramen. He felt there was nothing to eat.
For a while, Japan felt like a puzzle whose pieces didn’t quite fit together.
But fortunately, there was Tsutomu Wakamatsu.
Wakamatsu, the Yakult manager, had a way of making the world slow down. He did not try to turn Ramirez into a Japanese hitter. He simply gave him space and structure and trust.
Wakamatsu, of course, is a Yakult legend. His nickname is Mr. Swallows and his uniform number, 1, is honored* by the team.
“If I hadn’t started with Wakamatsu,” Ramirez said, “I wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame today.”
And slowly, day by day, Ramirez began to see what Manuel had meant.
The long practices were not punishment, they were pride.
The silence wasn’t coldness, it was concentration.
The discipline wasn’t rigidity, it was devotion.
Baseball wasn’t separate from life.
It was woven into the fabric of everything.
Once he understood that, he didn’t just adjust: he blossomed.
What happened next is one of the most beautiful second acts in baseball history.
Eight All-Star selections.
Four Best Nine awards.
Four RBI titles.
A batting title.
Two home-run crowns.
Two MVP awards.
Two Japan Series championships, with two different teams.
He hit .301 over thirteen seasons.
He averaged 29 homers a year.
He collected 2,000 hits, the first foreign player ever to do so.
And the fans called him “Rami-chan.”
The affectionate “chan,” the nickname given to children, pets, and beloved personalities.
He had come to Japan expecting to “teach the game.”
Japan had ended up teaching him something far larger, that baseball equals Japanese culture.
In 2019, Ramirez became a Japanese citizen. He had absorbed it, and became a part of it.
He was voted into the Japanese baseball Hall of Fame, along with Randy Bass, in 2023.
On induction day, he stepped to the microphone and did something that explained everything.
He thanked his interpreters and assistants.
He said their names. All of them.
He honored the people who had helped him find his way in Japan.
Charlie Manuel had been right: baseball and culture were inseparable.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
We have moved the Nichibei Yakyu series to Mondays to make room for a new series of articles by Thomas Love Seagull debuting this Wednesday, January 14.
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 Steven Wisensale tells us about the New York Giants trip toJapan in 1953.
On the morning of June 29, 1953, readers of the Globe Gazette in Mason City, Iowa, were greeted by a headline on page 13: “New York Giants Invited to Tour Japan This Fall.”
The Associated Press in Tokyo reported that Shoji Yasuda, president of the Yomiuri Shimbun, had formally invited Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants, to bring his team to Japan for a goodwill tour after the season. The tour was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853, when he forced the isolated nation’s ports to open to the world.
An excited Stoneham quickly sought and was given approval for the trip from the US State Department, the Defense Department, and the US Embassy in Tokyo. The tour was also endorsed by Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick. However, two hurdles remained for Stoneham: He needed his fellow owners to suspend the rule that prohibited more than three members of a major-league team from playing in postseason exhibition games. And at least 15 Giants on the major-league roster had to vote yes for the tour.
With respect to the first hurdle, previous postseason tours had consisted primarily of major-league allstars, not complete teams. The 1953 Giants, however, became trailblazers as the first squad to tour Japan as a complete major-league team. The second rule was a requirement set forth by the Japanese sponsors of the tour. They wanted their Japanese players to compete against top-quality major leaguers.
WAIVER IS GRANTED
The waiver Stoneham sought was granted by team owners on July 12 when they gathered in Cincinnati for the All-Star Game “We will now proceed with our plans for the goodwill tour,” said an upbeat Stoneham.
Another person who was extremely happy with the owners’ decision to support the Giants’ tour of Japan was Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada. Harada was a US Army officer serving with the American occupation force in postwar Japan and an adviser to the Yomiuri Giants. One of his tasks was to restore morale among the Japanese people through sports, particularly baseball. It was Harada who suggested to General Douglas MacArthur that the San Francisco Seals be invited to Japan for a goodwill tour in 1949. Working closely with Lefty O’Doul, Harada coordinated the tour, which MacArthur later declared was “the greatest piece of diplomacy ever,” adding, “all the diplomats put together would not have been able to do this.” O’Doul would play a central role in 1953 by assisting Harada in coordinating the Giants’ tour.
After the owners granted approval, Harada flew to Honolulu, where he met with city officials and baseball executives to share the news that Hawaii would host two exhibition games during the team’s layover on their journey to Japan.
At a press conference on July 18 in Honolulu, Harada explained why the Giants were chosen for the tour: They were the oldest team in major-league baseball, and they had Black players. A Honolulu sports- writer observed: “The presence of colored stars on the team will help show the people of Japan democracy at work and point out to them that all the people in the United States are treated equally.”
Harada’s statement was not exactly accurate. First, while the Giants were one of the oldest professional teams, they were not the oldest. Five other teams preceded them: the Braves, Cubs, Cardinals, Pirates, and Reds. And Harada’s statements regarding racial diversity and “equality for all” were misleading. By the end of the 1953 season only eight of the 16 major-league clubs were integrated. Jim Crow laws were firmly in place in at least 17 states and the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregated schooling, was a year away. However, Harada was correct in emphasizing the visual impact an integrated baseball team on the field could have on fans, and society as a whole, as Jackie Robinson taught America in 1947.
The Giants also were selected because of Harada’s close relationship with Lefty O’Doul and O’Doul’s strong connection to Horace Stoneham, which began in 1928 when Lefty played for the Giants. At one point Stoneham even considered hiring O’Doul as his manager. Harada, who was bilingual, lived in Santa Maria, California, where, in the spring of 1953, he arranged for the Yomiuri Giants to hold their spring-training camp. Working closely together, Harada and O’Doul (with Stoneham’s approval) scheduled an exhibition game in Santa Maria between the New York Giants and their Tokyo namesake. O’Doul introduced Harada to Stoneham, and the seeds for the Japan tour were planted.
A CLUBHOUSE VOTE
The one remaining hurdle was a positive vote by at least 15 Giants. Prior to voting, they were told that the tour would take place from mid-October to mid-November. They would play two games in Hawaii on their way to Japan, 14 games in Japan, and a few games in Okinawa, the Philippines, and Guam before returning home. They understood that all expenses would be covered by the Japanese, and they should expect to make about $3,000, depending on paid attendance at the games. On July 25, when the Giants lost, 7-5, to the Cincinnati Reds on a Saturday afternoon before 8,454 fans at the Polo Grounds, the team voted 18 to 7 to go to Japan.
Two players who voted yes were Sal Maglie and Hoyt Wilhelm. Several weeks later Maglie backed out, citing his ailing back, which needed to heal during the offseason. Ronnie Samford, an infielder and the only minor leaguer to make the trip, replaced Maglie. Hoyt Wilhelm faced a dilemma: His wife was pregnant. But his brother was serving in Korea. He chose to make the trip when he learned he could visit his brother during the tour.
Only two players’ wives opted to make the trip and at least one dropped out prior to departure. One obvious absentee was the Giants’ sensational center fielder who was the Rookie of the Year in 1951: Willie Mays. Serving in an Army transport unit in Virginia, he would not be discharged until after the tour ended, but in time for Opening Day in 1954.
Players who voted no provided a variety of reasons for their decisions. Alvin Dark and Whitey Lockman cited business commitments made before the invitation arrived; Rubén Gómez was committed to playing another season of winter ball in his native Puerto Rico; Bobby Thomson’s wife was pregnant; Larry Jansen preferred to stay home with his large family in Oregon; and Dave Koslo wanted to rest his aging arm. Tookie Gilbert also voted no but offered no reason for his decision.
Nonplayers in the traveling party included owner Stoneham and his son, Peter; manager Leo Durocher and his wife, Hollywood actress Laraine Day; Commissioner Frick and his wife; Mr. and Mrs. Lefty O’Doul; equipment manager Eddie Logan; publicist Billy Goodrich; team secretary Eddie Brannick and his wife; and coach Fred Fitzsimmons and his wife. Also making the trip was National League umpire Larry Goetz, who was appointed by National League President Warren Giles and Commissioner Frick.
The traveling party’s itinerary was straightforward. Most members left New York on October 8 and, after meeting the rest of the group in San Francisco, flew to Hawaii on October 9 and played two exhibition games. They left Honolulu on October 12 and arrived in Tokyo on October 14. After completing their 14-game schedule against Japanese teams, they left Tokyo on November 10 for Okinawa, the Philippines, and Guam before returning to the United States.
Another team of major leaguers was touring Japan at the same time. Eddie Lopat’s All-Stars, including future Hall of Famers Yogi Berra, Enos Slaughter, Eddie Mathews, Nellie Fox, Robin Roberts, and Bob Lemon, and recent World Series hero Billy Martin, were sponsored by the Mainichinewspaper, one of Yomiuri Shimbun’s major competitors. Lopat’s team won 11 of 12 games and earned more money than the New York Giants.
THE TOUR IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
When Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed the US presidency on January 20, 1953, he inherited a Cold War abroad that was intertwined with the nation’s second Red Scare at home. The Soviet Union engulfed Eastern Europe with what Winston Churchill referred to as an iron curtain; and China, which witnessed a Communist revolution in 1949, became a major threat in Asia. On June 25, 1950, nearly 100,000 North Korean troops invaded US-backed South Korea, commencing the Korean War, which lasted until 1953.
The invasion had a major impact on Japan-US relations. In particular, the United States had to reevaluate how to address the rise of communism in Asia as well as quell the growing opposition to US military bases in Japan. On September 8, 1951, representatives of both countries met in San Francisco to sign the Treaty of Peace that officially ended World War II and the seven-year Allied occupation of Japan, which would take effect in the spring of 1952. Japan would be a sovereign nation again, but the United States would still maintain military bases there for security reasons that would benefit both countries. In short, “it was during the Korean War that US-Japan relations changed dramatically from occupation status to one of a security partnership in Asia,” opined an American journalist. And such an arrangement needed to be nurtured by soft-power diplomacy in the form of educational exchanges, visits by entertainers, and tours by major-league baseball clubs. In 1953 the New York Giants served as exemplars of soft power under the new partnership between the United States and Japan.
A CELEBRATORY ARRIVAL AND A SUCCESSFUL TOUR
The Giants easily won their two games in Hawaii. The first was a 7-2 win against a team of service allstars, and the second was a 10-1 victory over the Rural Red Sox, the Hawaii League champions in 1953. Also present in Honolulu was Cappy Harada, who talked of his dream of seeing a “real World Series” between the US and Japanese champions, while emphasizing that the quality of Japanese baseball was getting closer to the level of play of American teams. He noted that the Yomiuri Giants and the New York Giants had split two games during spring training. “We beat the Americans in California and they beat us in Arizona,” he said. Then, almost in the form of a warning to the traveling party that was about to depart for Japan, Harada reminded reporters that Yomiuri was a powerhouse, having led its league by 16 games.
When the Pan American Stratocruiser carrying the Giants landed at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport at 1:00 P.M. on October 14, it was swarmed by Japanese officials, reporters, photographers, and fans. Consequently, the traveling party could not move off the tarmac for more than an hour before boarding cars for a motorcade that wound its way through Tokyo streets lined with thousands of cheering fans waving flags, hoping to get a glimpse of the American ballplayers.
That evening in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel, Leo Durocher boldly stated that he expected his Giants to win every game on the tour. He also expected a home-run barrage by his club because the Japanese ballparks were so small. “We shouldn’t drop a game to any of these teams while we’re over here,” he boasted. Perhaps realizing that his comment was not the most diplomatic way to open the tour, Durocher quickly put a positive spin on his view of the Yomiuri Giants in particular. “They are the best-looking Japanese ball team I’ve seen,” he said. “They showed a great deal of improvement during their spring workouts in the States.” Yomiuri would win their third straight Japanese championship two days later.
Over the next two days, the visiting Giants attended a large welcoming luncheon, participated in a motorcade parade through Tokyo, and held workouts at Korakuen Stadium. “Giants Drill, Leo’s Antics Delight Fans” read a headline in Pacific Stars and Stripes on October 16, the day before the series opened. Each day Durocher and several of his players conducted a one-hour clinic on the “fundamentals of American baseball.” A photo captured the Giants demonstrating a rundown play between third base and home.
Before the Giants’ arrival, the US Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes published a two-page spread profiling the players on both teams. For the Japanese people, a Fan’s Guide was distributed widely. Gracing the cover was a color photograph of Leo Durocher with his arm around Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara, a World War II veteran who had spent five years in a Soviet prison. Inside the guide were ads linked to baseball and numerous photos and profiles of players from both the New York Giants and Eddie Lopat’s All-Stars. Near the back of the guide, however, was an error: a photo of Mickey Mantle. Mantle had backed out of the trip with Eddie Lopat to undergo knee surgery in Missouri.
THE GAMES
The team’s 14-game schedule was broken down into five games with the Yomiuri Giants, five games against the Central League All-Stars, two games with the All-Japan All-Stars, and single contests with the Chunichi Dragons and the Hanshin Tigers. The first three games were played in Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium, which held 45,000 fans.
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
About a month ago I stumbled across a very useful website for Japanese baseball stats, ProEyeKyuu. Among other things, this English-language site lets you sort all NPB stats by many different categories, contains boxscores of EVERY NPB game and play-by-play results for all NPB games since 2016 as well as broadcast schedules for NPB games. Check out the site HERE. I recently spoke to the site’s creator Michael Meyer to ask him about his creation.
Q: How did you get interested first in Japanese baseball and then what eventually led to this website?
ProEyeKyuu creator Michael and wife hanging out with Reds mascot
A: I went to college at the University of Colorado and was a Chinese major. I spent a bit of time in China but was never great at the language. So, when I got back to the States, I wanted to try Japanese since I’d at least have a base of Kanji to start with.
This took me to a study abroad in Osaka, and I later spent the summer in Kobe. I lived very close to Hotto Motto Field at that time and my wife, at the time girlfriend, bought us tickets to a game. So, the first team I ever saw was the Buffaloes playing one of their few games of the season in Kobe. Technically I’m a Rockies fan but they’re not the most fun team to watch. Conversely, Japanese baseball was very lively and fun, and got me hooked pretty quickly. Naturally living in Kansai I feel it’s inevitable that you wind up following the Tigers and that’s exactly what happened, though I do still have a soft spot for the Buffaloes.
Q: So, what led to the site?
A: I work in data at a law firm and back around 2019 we started to use a visualization software, Microsoft Power BI to present data better with graphics. I needed to wrap my head around it and the easiest way for me to do that was using baseball. I felt like everyone knows and does things with MLB, and so I really wanted to do something with NPB instead and use some of my Japanese skills as well. It started with me scraping data from the main NPB site and pulling it into Power BI. The first reports I built were super simple, not very graphically pleasing, but it helped me make sense of the software. Over time I built more of these reports, and they eventually started to get more useful and presentable.
Then Covid hit and the world collectively decided that we’d all bake bread, but I didn’t get the memo and decided to try and turn what I created into a website. It started to take shape a lot more over 2020 and I wound up adding little things that were originally just helpful to me. For example, there’s a very simple page with scheduled broadcasts. I added that solely because I got tired of trying to find the right channel that a game was on. And the site just continued to take shape from there.
Q: When did you make it public like it is today?
I believe it was during Covid, and the site looked terrible. Like one of those old internet sites. I was learning how to build a website while it was live and so it took a few different forms over 2020 and the few years after. It took a while to nail down as I really wanted the site to be bilingual, and you’ll see that especially in all the interactive reports where it’s always showing you Japanese and English side-by-side.
Q: So, what features do you have when a viewer comes to your site. What are the main features and things they can learn right away?
So, the first thing you probably look for if you’re new to the site is just the Standings. Just super quick way to get a glimpse of the league. Very simple thing that you could get from Google or other places, but I think it’s the easiest way to see sort of how the reports work. By default it’ll show you the latest or ongoing season, so you’ll of course see the standard table standings, and then also some charts beneath that showing wins and losses of the teams over the course of the season. We’re in the off-season right now of course so nothing’s changed since the last game.
The main thing is that you can interact with all these reports. So, with standings you’re not limited to just the current season but can click through and quickly see the same for other seasons or click a button beneath those line charts to flip them to show the wins and losses not by the game they’re on but by date. Not too exciting but gives an idea of how to navigate things.
After Standings the next thing you’d probably be interested in is what happened last. So, we have Game Results. Same idea that it’ll default to the latest games that occurred, but you can change that and see the results for all games back to 1936. You can get a play by play of each plate appearance for anything since 2016, which is when those play by plays started to appear on the main NPB site.
The standings page on ProEyeKyuu
Q: And you have the box scores going all the way back to the beginning?
A: Box scores, batting, and pitching I’ve got all the way back to 1936. Unfortunately play by plays and the actual breakdown of what happened at each at bat is from 2016 on which I really wish wasn’t the case. I did make some design decisions which are probably a bit confusing like the box scores being shown vertically rather than left to right. That’s primarily because of when games went over 12 innings. The Chunichi Dragons had a double header back in 1942 where the first game went, I want to say 18 innings, then the second a record 24 or somewhere in there, so the vertical box scores are purely so if someone jumps back in time the box scores are not going to run off screen.
Q: What else do we have?
A: From there we have three different styles of reports that are all structured relatively similarly. The first is the player lookup, and it’s basically only going to tell you details on one specific player that you choose. It’s set to randomly default to a new person each day, so it also acts as a sort of “player of the day” thing as well. Right now, we’re in off-season mode so you’ll get some older players that have long since retired, but during the season it’s going to only show someone currently on a team. So, if you’re learning Japanese or just want to learn a new player then you could jump into that report once a day and see someone new.
A player page on ProEyeKyuu
Next we have the team lookup which is similar to the player lookup except we’re looking at one team as a whole, so you can quickly see how they compare to the rest of the league and how they’ve performed over time. If you first jump in there, you’ll see a line chart with some randomly chosen stat and it’ll plot how the team performed with that stat compared to the rest of the league over their entire history. Since they’re interactive, you’ll see that you can click on the stat and change it to something else like ERA, OPS, or what have you, and the chart will adjust.
And then there’s the multi report which is probably the most fun and useful. If you jump in there it’ll show you a scatterplot showing the teams and you can physically click on the X, Y, and Z axes to pick and choose stats to compare the teams by. Those stats are also randomized and change once a day by default and sometimes the comparisons don’t make much sense, but it’s just showing what you can do in the report. So, you can change the X-axis to for example pitching runs, Y-axis set to batting runs, and Z-axis make it something like plate appearances. That’d give you your more high-offense teams in the upper quadrants, and further left you go the stronger the pitching. That sort of thing.
A multi report showing qualified batters sorted by OBP, SLG, and HR
Q: So how do you navigate them and what can you do in them?
A: Yeah, the player, team, and multi-reports are structured very similarly and so there’s probably three things to recognize in each.
First, if you look at the bottom of any of the reports, you’ll see some colorful little ovals that are telling you what the report is currently filtered to. Just a reminder that I wanted the reports multi-lingual so Japanese is on the left and English on the right. If you jump into the multi report today you’ll see that there are two filters applied by default, ‘2025’ and ‘Reg Season.’ So that’s telling you that any data you’re visualizing is currently limited to the year 2025 and to the regular season, and it’s not going to show you anything outside of that. Those can be changed, made stricter, or removed entirely. But basic idea, bottom of the screen will tell you what limits you currently have set on the data.
Next is how you add and remove those filters. Those will always fall along the top of the screen. So keeping to the multi report example you’ll see ‘Specific Players,’ which is where you’d go if you want to locate specific people from a giant list, ‘Types of Players’ where you can say things like, “only show me left-handed hitters,” and ‘Teams,’ ‘Year,’ and ‘Game Type’ which are all hopefully obvious on what you can do there. They’re all point-and-click and as you add and remove what qualifications you want, you’ll see at the bottom of the screen that it updates to let you know that the data is now being filtered in that way.
Third is the ‘Reports.’ By default, I show a line graph if you’re in the player and team reports, and a scatterplot of teams in the multi report. But that’s just one of the visuals you can show. In the upper-right of all these reports you’ll see a button also called ‘Reports’ which I probably should have termed differently, that allows you to visualize the data in all sorts of different ways. For example, you can view a bunch of tables broken out in different ways. Using the multi report example again you can for instance remove the 2025 filter to show all years in NPB history, but then add an ‘active player’ filter from the ‘Types of Player’ section to remove retired players from the data, and then you could select the ‘Player Batting Stats – Cumulative’ report from the dropdown to see all active players’ career stats basically as one line-item each. If you wanted that broken out by year you could use ‘Player Batting Stats – By Year’ and then you’ll see one row for every year for every player. The visual report I like to play with most is probably the ‘Player Scatterplot – By Year’ one as it’ll literally add a dot for every player and you can quickly plot them by things like OPS to see how everyone is performing, and you can color code it by team or their position. So, lots of ways to visualize things.
Those are the three basic layout features you need to keep in mind. Beyond that the last thing to keep in mind is granularity. I don’t want to go into that too much here as I actually have a page explaining it in context on the site. Very briefly though, season level only lets you break down data by year, game level lets you break down and filter down to individual games, so performance against certain teams, performance by month, performance in a particular prefecture, and so on. And then the plate appearance level lets you filter the data down to in-game events like when runners are in scoring position, or when X batter is up against Y pitcher. There are some unfortunate data limitations at the deeper levels that I’d love to eventually find a source to resolve them and again I go into that on the site, but it allows you to do some very cool comparisons and get really into the weeds if you want.
Q: Any plans to create some videos to show how to use the reports?
A: I really should but I haven’t gotten around to it. I did setup a YouTube profile for the site but haven’t added anything to it. I will someday I promise. On the main page of the site, I do have some pictures showing some quick navigation around some of the reports that hopefully helps, but in general I’ve tried to be consistent in how you are supposed to navigate the reports so that if you learn one you should be able to just apply that same logic to the others. What is filtered is shown at the bottom, how you filter is set at the top, and how you visualize is set at the top right. Just try and keep those three things in mind.
Q: What do you want to tell viewers about your site?
A: Just that it’s a place to go and hopefully have fun and learn something. I do get a decent number of people asking me how to download things and although it’s unfortunately not possible in those interactive reports themselves, I have added to the site downloadable tables and CSVs and the like so you can export the top home run hitters, or all batting stats this year and the like. I’ve heard some interesting and fun reasons why people want the data and I’m just happy that I can provide an easy place to come and get it. I’m open to suggestions and requests so to anyone, feel free to reach out!
SABR Asian Baseball Research Committee Blog 