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Category: Japan

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 5, Hideo Nomo

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 5, Hideo Nomo

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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 Yes, they could only vote for players who are no longer active, so you won’t see Shohei Ohtani or other current stars on this list.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

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

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

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

    The pitcher who refused to change, crossed an ocean, and altered baseball forever

    On the night of September 17, 1996, Hideo Nomo did something that almost certainly will never be done again. He walked out to the mound at Coors Field in Denver—the most hitter-friendly ballpark in the history of of Major League Baseball, a place so absurdly hostile to pitchers that the team eventually had to store baseballs in a humidor just to keep fly balls from becoming souvenirs—and threw a no-hitter.

    The Rockies that year were dangerous. They scored nearly 1000 runs. They hit 221 home runs. Three of their players hit 40 or more, including Ellis Burks, who led the league in runs scored and slugging percentage. They also led the league in attendance. The mile-high altitude thinned the air, making breaking balls misbehave and fastballs sail. Nomo himself had an 11.17 ERA in the park going into that game. He had never won there.

    He threw nine innings. He walked four. He struck out eight. He won, 9-0.

    No other pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter at Coors Field. No one probably ever will. And that was just one night in the career of Hideo Nomo.

    There is a version of Nomo’s story that starts with the statistics, and those statistics are genuinely remarkable: 201 wins across two leagues and nearly two decades, 3,122 strikeouts, two no-hitters, a Rookie of the Year award on each side of the Pacific. But the numbers don’t quite capture what Nomo was, or what he meant, or what it cost him to become what he became.

    The better place to start is with a young man from Osaka who was told, at the age of 14, by the head coach of the top baseball high school in his city: “With that tornado windup, you’ll never make it.”

    Nomo had invented the windup himself, as a kid trying to impress his father. He figured that twisting his body and coiling away from the batter until his back faced home plate, pausing there for a suspended, theatrical moment before releasing the ball allowed him to throw harder. He was correct. He was also never going to change it, no matter who told him to. When asked about the delivery later in his career, he would say that no one had taught it to him, though he did admit that one piece of it, the hip-first drive toward the plate, came from watching Masaji Hiramatsu* of the Taiyo Whales as a boy and wanting to move like him. Buried inside the most spectacular pitching motion in baseball was a child’s act of imitation. That stubbornness, that absolute certainty about who he was and how he pitched, is as important to understanding Nomo as anything that happened between the chalk lines.

    *Hiramatsu won 201 games in his career, but his nickname was “The Glass Ace” because he missed so many games due to injuries and frequently catching colds.

    He enrolled instead at a lesser-known high school, dominated the local competition, and pitched a perfect game. One year ahead of him in the Osaka baseball scene was Kazuhiro Kiyohara, already a legend at PL Gakuen High School, already being called the greatest hitter in the country. Kiyohara later said he had never even heard of Nomo. That is how anonymous Nomo was, invisible to the very generation he would come to dominate.

    He joined a company team where he perfected his forkball with the kind of obsessive dedication that tends to separate the greats from mere mortals. The story goes that he taped a tennis ball between his index and middle fingers before bed each night, conditioning his grip while he slept.

    In 1989, eight teams selected Nomo in the first round of the NPB draft. Eight. That had never happened before. The Kintetsu Buffaloes won the lottery and signed him, with one condition written into the contract at Nomo’s insistence: they would not try to change his pitching form.

    The scouts and commentators who watched him in spring training of 1990 were not impressed. Even after the Tornado name was bestowed, the skeptics kept coming. Would he ever have real control? Could he hold up for a full season? Wouldn’t he break down eventually? In a rookie-year interview Nomo smiled faintly and said people had told him everything about his delivery was wrong. But, he added, once they actually watched him throw in a bullpen session, they tended to go quiet. After two early losses, he later recalled that stretch as the loneliest of his career; the dormitory felt like the only place he belonged. He said nothing publicly. He also changed nothing.

    His first win came on April 29 against the Orix Braves, when he struck out 17 batters, tying the Japanese single-game record, while allowing only two runs in a complete game. Afterward, rather than celebrate, he deflected entirely: because his teammates had scored so many runs, it had given him a sort of rhythm. That was the version of Nomo the public would come to know, one who was private and guarded, but also generous toward others.

    What followed was one of the greatest rookie seasons in Japanese baseball history. Nomo went 18-8 with a 2.91 ERA and 287 strikeouts, winning the Rookie of the Year, the MVP, and the Sawamura Award (the Japanese equivalent to the Cy Young) in the same breath. Oh, and he won the pitching Triple Crown. He was 21 years old. He led the Pacific League in wins and strikeouts for each of his first four seasons, a feat without precedent. The Tornado name was officially bestowed in late May, chosen by public contest from thousands of entries, arriving right in the middle of the season when he was still proving the critics wrong.

    He also led the league in walks during his first four years, and in wild pitches two times. Tornado was an apt nickname in more ways than one.

    The best part? He did nearly all of it with two pitches. A fastball and a forkball. That was essentially the entire arsenal. Shinichi Sato, who faced Nomo as a member of the Hawks, said there is simply no other starter who has ever gotten away with two pitches at that level.

    What made the two pitches so devastating was the delivery that preceded them. Orestes Destrade, the Cuban-born slugger who played for the Seibu Lions, described the experience of standing in the batter’s box against Nomo this way: because Nomo turned his back to the plate and paused—that eerie, still moment where everything stopped, just like in the eye of a storm—timing him was nearly impossible. You couldn’t sync up with it. The ball came from nowhere and went somewhere unexpected. When reporters kept asking Nomo about strikeouts, he waved them off every time: “Strikeouts are just a result. What matters is the team winning.” It wasn’t false modesty. It was the same principle he had lived by since he was a boy twisting his body in a schoolyard. “If I change my own way,” he once said, “it’s over.”

    His teammates from that era remember something else too: Nomo finished what he started. Eiji Kiyokawa, a reliever, said bluntly that Nomo was the kind of ace who pitched nine innings and left nothing for the bullpen. It wasn’t arrogance. It was a starter’s code, a sense of personal responsibility for the game he was given. He pitched 22 complete games in 1991—still the most by any pitcher in Japan since the end of the Showa era—and threw 3,996 pitches that season. Nearly four thousand pitches in a single year. Manager Akira Ohgi, an easygoing man who trusted his players and left them alone, simply kept handing Nomo the ball, start after start, around 145-150 pitches a time. Nomo, for his part, kept taking it. What else was an ace pitcher to do?

    In 1991, Nomo set the all-time Japanese record by striking out ten or more batters in six consecutive starts. What makes the streak stranger, and more revealing, is his record during it: 2-4. He struck out at least ten batters in every one of those six games, threw complete games in five of them, and lost four times. He was unhittable and yet, the Buffaloes team kept losing anyway. That same year the All-Star Game offered a rare glimpse of a different Nomo entirely. In the second game, played in Hiroshima, the Pacific League ran out of position players in extra innings and had to send Nomo up as an emergency pinch-hitter. He borrowed an Orix helmet (remember, he played for Kintetsu*) put it on, and walked to the plate grinning. He never swung the bat. Three pitches later he took a called third strike and walked back to the dugout to a roaring ovation from the full stadium. It was the most cheerful strikeout anyone had ever seen. The crowd loved it. Nomo seemed to as well.

    *Of course, Orix and Kintetsu would merge following the 2004 season to form the Orix Buffaloes. Foreshadowing, anyone?

    He later said that his loyalty to Ohgi ran so deep precisely because Ohgi trusted him completely, never meddled, never second-guessed. Ohgi gave Nomo the ball and got out of the way. That relationship, more than anything else, is what made what came next so difficult. After two consecutive second place finishes, Ohgi resigned. His replacement was franchise legend and 300-game winner Keishi Suzuki. Suzuki’s management style was the complete opposite of Ohgi’s.

    No game illustrated Nomo’s resilience more strangely than the one on July 1, 1994, against the Seibu Lions. Nomo walked 16 batters, a Japanese baseball record that stands to this day, with at least one walk in every single inning. The home plate umpire called a ball 105 times. Kazuhiro Kiyohara, who drew three of those walks, the same man who had never heard of Nomo growing up, shrugged afterward and said you couldn’t sit on any particular pitch when a pitcher was that wild; the wildness itself became a kind of weapon. The color commentator on the broadcast, former manager Senichi Hoshino, said simply that he was exhausted by the end of it. If he’d been managing, he would have pulled Nomo long ago. The patience on display, Hoshino noted with a laugh, belonged not to Nomo but to Suzuki. Nomo threw 191 pitches and finished with a complete-game win, allowing three runs. Afterward he was unapologetic but unsatisfied: “I wasn’t able to pitch my game at all.” That was Nomo. He stayed out there for 191 pitches in a game he considered a failure, and won.

    Then the relationship with Suzuki soured entirely. The manager wanted Nomo to run more, throw more, and alter his mechanics. “Throw until you die” was, by one account, Suzuki’s actual philosophy of pitcher conditioning. He told a radio audience that Nomo’s form would never hold up. Meanwhile, the front office treated its franchise pitcher with a remarkable combination of condescension and indifference, offering no salary increase after four consecutive win and strikeout titles, trying to force him into voluntary retirement rather than grant him free agency, and telling him, flatly, that he was not considered the team’s ace.

    Nomo would later say that he didn’t originally dream of playing in America. He just couldn’t play for Suzuki anymore. But the dream, it turned out, had been there all along. His locker at Fujiidera Stadium, the Buffaloes home, was covered wall to wall with baseball cards of Ken Griffey Jr., Roger Clemens, and other great American stars of the era. The training room down the hall looked the same. He had been staring at those faces for years, imagining what it would feel like to face them. When a reporter caught him in the summer of 1994, mid-rehabilitation, and Nomo told him quietly that he wanted to try the major leagues next year, he was smiling as he said it.

    The loophole his agent Don Nomura found was elegant in its simplicity. The NPB’s voluntary retirement clause said nothing about foreign leagues. If Nomo retired from Japanese baseball, he could sign anywhere in the world. The clause had never been used this way before. It was a loophole that only existed because no one had ever thought to use it and because no Japanese star had ever wanted to leave badly enough, or been brave enough, to try.

    The media was not kind about it. The conventional wisdom was that Nomo was running away, or chasing money, or both. He arrived in America with his reputation in Japan in tatters and his salary reduced from roughly $1.4 million to a minor-league contract worth $100,000. The Dodgers’ GM told him that a major league contract was not given but earned. Nomo nodded and said nothing. The strike was still ongoing when he arrived; if it dragged on, he faced the possibility of earning as little as $60,000 pitching in the minors. And this was for a man with a wife, children, and a salary back home that had been roughly 25 times that. He didn’t flinch. “It’ll start eventually,” he said. “Starting in the minors would be fine.”

    Meanwhile, American baseball in the spring of 1995 was not in a great mood. The previous season had ended in a players’ strike that wiped out the World Series. Fans were furious. Attendance was cratering. The sport had spent years building goodwill and watched it drain away in a dispute that looked, to most observers, like very rich people arguing with slightly less rich people about money.

    Into this particular moment stepped a 26-year-old pitcher from Osaka with a motion unlike anything American fans had ever seen, throwing a forkball that dropped off the table and a fastball that arrived from an angle that made no logical sense. He made his major league debut on May 2 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, retiring Barry Bonds and Matt Williams along the way and pitching five shutout innings. Millions of people in Japan watched live on television, where the first pitch came at 5:33 in the morning. Only about 16,000 people were in the stadium.

    By June, the stadiums were full. Nomo went 6-0 that month with a 0.89 ERA. He pitched at least eight innings in each of his six starts. He threw back-to-back complete-game shutouts with 13 strikeouts each, a feat no Dodger pitcher had ever accomplished. He was the starting pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game, the first NL rookie to start since another Dodger sensation, Fernando Valenzuela, in 1981. His boyhood idol, Nolan Ryan, threw out the ceremonial first pitch. The term “Nomomania” entered the languages on both sides of the Pacific.

    Before the season, someone had asked Nomo what he felt he owed to Japanese baseball. His answer was not what anyone expected. “I have to do this,” he said. “If I fail, it will brand all Japanese players who come after me as failures.” He was twenty-six years old, pitching on a continent where almost no one knew his name, and he had already accepted responsibility for an entire generation that hadn’t arrived yet.

    Nomo finished the season 13-6 with a 2.54 ERA and a league-leading 236 strikeouts. He won the Rookie of the Year Award, edging out Chipper Jones. He finished 4th in Cy Young voting.

    The years that followed were the full, complicated arc of a pitcher’s life, the brilliant stretches and the injured ones, the reinventions and the setbacks. He pitched an unfathomable game in Colorado. He had elbow surgery. He was traded. He was released. He became the first Japanese-born player to hit a home run in MLB*. He bounced from the Mets to the Brewers to the Tigers to the Red Sox, and then, in 2001, he did something that almost no pitcher in history has done: he threw a second no-hitter, this one in his Boston debut, against the Baltimore Orioles. Nomo became only the fourth pitcher ever to throw a no-hitter in both leagues. He was, briefly, a star again.

    *The second was Dave Roberts. The third was Nomo’s former Kintetsu teammate Masato Yoshii, who was a big influence on his desire to join MLB. The two would be reunited on the Mets in 1998.

    He returned to the Dodgers and had two more solid seasons before the body finally gave out. His tornado windup, that beautiful, impractical, singular motion he had invented as a child and refused to surrender his entire career, was diagnosed as the source of damage to his shoulder. Without it, he wasn’t Nomo anymore. He pitched a few more years, trying, and retired in 2008 at 39.

    His place in history depends on where you’re standing. He received six votes for the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Six. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame the same year, in his first year of eligibility, becoming the youngest inductee in history.

    Make of that what you will.

    What Nomo really did, beyond the wins and the strikeouts and the two no-hitters, was open a door that had not existed before him. Since his arrival in 1995, more than 50 Japanese-born players have come to the major leagues. Ichiro. Matsui. Daisuke. Tanaka. Ohtani. None of it happens, or at least none of it happens when it did, without Nomo going first.

    Ichiro recognized how important Nomo was. “Before Hideo came over here, everyone had an image of Major League Baseball and people looked at players over here as monsters because they were so big. We were able to watch more MLB games and were able to get an image of, ‘Maybe I can play in the big leagues.’”

    Tommy Lasorda, who managed the Dodgers for two decades and knew a pioneer when he saw one, put it plainly: if Nomo had not succeeded, nowhere near as many Japanese players would be in the major leagues today. He had the talent for it, Lasorda said, and he had the character for it. Both were required.

    When Ichiro announced in the fall of 2000 that he was coming to the major leagues, a reporter asked Nomo for his reaction. “Ichiro has to do this,” he said. The same words, the same logic, passed forward to the next man through the door that Nomo had opened.

    He invented his delivery as a boy, was told it would ruin him, and refused to change it. He found a loophole in the rules, crossed an ocean under a cloud of criticism, and proceeded to help save baseball’s relationship with its own fans at one of the most fragile moments in the sport’s history. He threw a no-hitter at Coors Field. He is, by any honest accounting, one of the most important figures the game has produced in the last hundred years, and one of the most underappreciated.

    During Ichiro’s Hall of Fame speech in Cooperstown, he thanked Nomo in Japanese, and pointed out his courage for challenging the majors.

    But before all of that, before Dodger Stadium and the All-Star Game and Coors Field, there was a final night at Fujiidera Stadium. October 18, 1990. A meaningless late-season game, already out of the standings, and yet 16,000 fans showed up just to see him. Ohgi sent him out for one batter in the ninth, a one-run lead to protect. Nomo threw five pitches, all fastballs. The last one was clocked at 148 kilometers per hour (92 mph). Strike three. The crowd erupted: cheering, clapping, beating megaphones, confetti falling from the stands. Nomo wiped the sweat from his face, stepped off the mound, and turned to bow to the crowd. Then he walked back to the press room, answered questions in his characteristically flat, unhurried way, and as he was leaving, turned back one more time. “I hope for your continued support next year!” He smiled and added playfully, “Please keep things quiet during the off-season.”

    The tornado touched down in 1990. The world of baseball was never the same.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • A Near Escape: the 1981 Kansas City Royals Tour of Japan

    A Near Escape: the 1981 Kansas City Royals Tour of Japan

    by Chris Hicks

    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 Chris Hicks tells us about the 1981 Kansas City Royals visit to Japan.

    For decades it had been the hope of Matsutaro Shoriki, the owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun Group, a conglomerate that produces the Yomiuri Shimbunnewspaper and owns the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, that there would one day be a “true world series” played between the champions of the World Series and the Japan Series. After Matsutaro’s death in 1969, his son Toru continued the dream. The concept gained traction in 1971 when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn accompanied the Baltimore Orioles on their Japanese tour. When he returned to the States, Kuhn announced that he and the baseball commissioner of Japan, Nobumoto Ohama, had agreed to a “‘joint feasibility study’ of an international World Series.” Although no agreement emerged from the study, Shoriki continued to invite championship-caliber major-league teams to face off against the Japanese champion. Arrangements for the postseason tours, however, had to begin before the start of each season so Shoriki needed to guess which club would win the World Series. In 1974 he invited the New York Mets, a season after they had won the National League pennant, and in 1978 the Cincinnati Reds, but neither came to Japan as the reigning World Series champion.

    Early in 1981, Shoriki invited the Kansas City Royals, the defending American League champions, gambling on their continued success. Should the Royals win the 1981 World Series and the Yomiuri Giants win the Japan Series, then the eight scheduled games between the teams would fulfill the dream of a “true world series.” The Royals’ full schedule in Japan consisted of 17 games played in 14 cities between October 28 and November 24,1981.

    But the 1981 season was filled with frustration for the Royals. The team struggled in the first half of the season with a 20-30 record before the players union went on strike on June 12. The strike ended 50 days later. As the players returned to the field for the All-Star Game in Cleveland on August 9, the owners hammered out the logistics of the interrupted season. The division leaders when the strike began would face the division winners (based on records after the strike) of the post-strike season in the playoffs.

    Not long after the season resumed, the Royals fired manager Jim Frey and replaced him with Dick Howser. The team went on to win 30 of its last 53 games and finish at the top of the AL West Division in the season’s second half. The season’s arbitrary break into unequal halves shut some teams with overall winning records out of the playoffs. In the AL West, the Royals, with an overall 50-53 season record, went to the postseason while the Texas Rangers (57-48) and Chicago White Sox (54-52) stayed home. Royals third baseman George Brett, commenting on the Royals’ inclusion in the playoffs, said, “We don’t belong. We know it.” Oakland swept the Royals to advance to the second round of the playoffs.

    Looking for a better 1982 season, Howser used the games in Japan to test staff changes and prepare his team. Immediately after the season, the Royals had hired Cloyd Boyer as the pitching coach and Joe Nossek as the third-base coach so that these integral members of the coaching staff could use the trip to get to know the team’s players. Coach Jim Schaffer and minor-league instructor Gary Blaylock also accompanied the team.

    The Royals took nearly all of their regular players to Japan, including stars Brett, Frank White, Willie Wilson, Dennis Leonard, and Dan Quisenberry. The only regular not making the trip was center fielder Amos Otis, who had just signed a new two-year contract and declined to go, stating that his priority was healing a leg injury and preparing for the 1982 season. Howser brought along a handful of young players who spent most of the 1981 season with Triple-A Omaha. The tour offered an ideal opportunity to evaluate Onix Concepcion, Tim Ireland, Pat Sheridan, Daryl Motley, and Atlee Hammaker.

    For Hammaker, the Japan tour was not just about baseball. In 1954, after serving in the Korean War, his father, Col. Charles A. Hammaker, was stationed in Kyoto, where he met his future wife, Saeko. As a child, Atlee lived in Japan for a year with his grandparents, an aunt, and his mother while his father served in the Vietnam War. Hammaker’s grandmother was at the airport to greet her grandson and the rest of the Royals team when they arrived on October 28.

    The team spent two days resting and practicing before beginning the 17-game series on Saturday, October 31. The first two games were against the Central League champion Yomiuri Giants in what the organizers had hoped would be the opening games of the unofficial international world series.

    A crowd of 32,000 came to Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo to watch Jim Wright face Giants ace Suguru Egawa, who captured the 1981 Central League MVP honors with a 20-6 record and a 2.28 ERA. Despite giving up two hits in the first inning and six hits overall, Egawa pitched well, blanking the Royals though four innings. “[He] had good control today,” said Wilson. “He can make it in the majors.” By the fifth inning, however, Wilson noticed something. “He was running the same pattern on me, fastball, curveball, fastball, curveball. … [H]e threw the fastball, so I waited for the curve.” Wilson guessed right and sent the next pitch into the right-field stands to give the Royals a 2-0 lead. The Royals added another run in the seventh when Wilson singled to score Clint Hurdle. Meanwhile, Wright held the Giants to three hits before Hammaker entered the game in relief in the fifth inning. With his Japanese relatives in the stands watching, Hammaker pitched three one-hit, shutout innings to earn the 3-0 victory before Quisenberry closed out the game. Howser praised his pitchers’ performances: “Our pitchers were too good for the Giants.”

    In the third inning Hal McRae collided with Giants second baseman Kazunori “Toshio” Shinozuka while breaking up a double play, injuring his calf. McRae was removed from the field on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. He missed the next four games and was not at full strength when he returned.

    The second game between the Royals and Giants at Korakuen was an extra-inning nailbiter. The Royals scored in the fourth inning as Frank White doubled off Giants starter Takashi Nishimoto and later scored on a balk. The Giants came back with a vengeance in the bottom of the inning when Yasutomo Suzuki hit a two-run double and Takashi Yoshida hit a pitch from Rich Gale over the outfield wall to score three more runs, making it a 5-1 ballgame. The Royals responded with two in the fifth on a two-run home run by Onix Concepcion but missed an opportunity for a third run when Frank White was unable to knock in Willie Wilson, who tripled with two outs. Home runs by George Brett in the sixth and Jamie Quirk in the seventh tied the game, 5-5. The Giants had opportunities in the sixth and eighth innings but failed to score. Yomiuri reliever Mitsuo Sumi struck out seven Royals in a row in the eighth and ninth and the beginning of the 10th before Concepcion doubled, stole third, and scored on a single by Wilson. Renie Martin held the Giants scoreless in the bottom of the 10th for the thrilling 6-5 victory.

    The Royals enjoyed the Japanese fans and their cheering sections with their rhythmic chants accompanied by horns, drums, and whistles. Quisenberry and Martin made up songs to the beat. “We kinda hot dog for them during batting practice and make them laugh,” said Quisenberry. They’re so much nicer than American fans. No fights in the stands, always polite, quick to laugh.”

    The third game of the series had the Royals taking on a new opponent, the Japanese All-Stars, at Korakuen Stadium on Tuesday, November 3. Six future members of the Japanese baseball Hall of Fame appeared in the game: Yutaka Fukumoto, Tatsunori Hara, Choji Murata, Hiromitsu Ochiai, Tsutomu Wakamatsu, and Koji Yamamoto. The scoring got underway in the first on a two-run homer by Willie Aikens. But in the bottom of the first, Tomohisa Shoji began with a double off Larry Gura. Gura then walked Hiromichi Ishige and threw a wild pitch, allowing the runners to move up a base. Yamamoto singled Shoji home and Ochiai singled to score Ishige. Hara followed with a three-run inside-the-park home run to give the All-Stars a 5-2 lead. Shoji added another run with a solo homer in the second. Neither team scored again until the top of the seventh inning, when Brett hit a solo home run off reliever Tatsuo Komtasu. In the bottom of the inning, Ishige put the final nail in the Royals’ coffin with a solo homer of his own, handing the Royals their first defeat of the series. Japanese Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko witnessed the 7-3 victory.

    The Royals saw new surroundings but a familiar opponent when they played in Sendai’s Miyagi Baseball Stadium against the Yomiuri Giants on November 5. Yomiuri began with a run in the first inning as Yasuyuki Nakai doubled off Atlee Hammaker and came home on Kazunori Shinozuka’s single. The Giants scored three more in the third. Starting pitcher Shoji Sadaoka singled, Tadashi Matsumoto tripled, and Nakai hit another double before scoring on a fly out by Shinozuka. Yomiuri struck for three more runs off relief pitcher Jim Wright in the seventh inning to make the final score 7-0. Sadaoka gave up just one hit in six innings and reliever Hisao Niura pitched three innings of two-hit shutout ball to draw the series even at two wins and two losses. Yomiuri manager Motoshi Fujita noted, “Sadaoka succeeded in keeping the balls low and his balls were quite well controlled today.”

    In the fifth game the Royals played southwest of Tokyo at Yokohama Stadium against a combined team of Taiyo Whales and Yomiuri Giants. The Royals had no trouble getting runners on base but struggled to get them across home plate in a 9-1 drubbing. In a sloppy first inning, the Japanese scored three runs on two walks, two errors by Brett, a sacrifice fly and a passed ball. The Royals pushed a run across in the second inning on Pat Sheridan’s sacrifice fly with the bases loaded but the Japanese added runs in the third and sixth innings to lead 5-1 before Tomio Tashiro sealed the game with a three-run homer in the seventh. The Giants-Whales added a final run in the eighth. The Royals offense left 13 runners on base. Howser noted, “Our boys are hitting well … but the ground is slippery resulting in many errors. We will try to win three straight games from Sunday.” While their husbands were playing, the wives did a little sightseeing. They visited Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park and the Great Buddha, a 37-foot bronze statue dating from the thirteenth century, in Kamakura.

    The series returned to Korakuen Stadium as the Royals took on the Giants in the sixth game on Sunday, November 8. Kansas City jumped out to an early lead as Brett hit a solo home run (his third of the series) in the first off Yomiuri starter Hajime Kato, but the lead was fleeting as starter Dennis Leonard gave up a grand slam to Kenji Awaguchi in the third inning. Willie Aikens and Yasutomo Suzuki also hit solo home runs as Yomiuri won, 6-2. The loss was the Royals’ fourth straight and the visitors had a dismal 2-4 record.

    In Game 7 on Tuesday, November 10, at Seibu Stadium, a combined Yomiuri Giants-Seibu Lions team looked to hand the Royals their fifth straight loss. George Brett started things off with a two-run home run in the first inning off starter Masayuki Matsunuma. But the lead was lost in the second inning when the Japanese scored four against starter Paul Splittorff, highlighted by a two-run double by Hiromichi Ishige and a solo home run by Tatsunori Hara. Brett struck back with a solo homer in the third to narrow the score to 4-3. The Japanese however, solidified their lead in the next inning as Ishige doubled in two runs after a successful double steal by Yoshiie Tachibana and Takanori Okamura. Hara knocked in the final run in the fifth inning on a sacrifice fly to hand the Royals a 7-3 loss. With the loss, the Royals had dropped five straight, setting the record for the most consecutive losses by a major-league team in a postseason tour of Japan. After the game, Howser said he “regretted” being the first American pro manager to lose five straight in Japan. He noted that his pitching staff “was in poor condition” and that except for Brett the Royals “couldn’t buy a hit.”

    The Giants and Royals left the Tokyo area the next day. The fans at Kusanagi Ballpark in Shizuoka were treated to a pitchers’ duel between the Royals’ Mike Jones and the Giants’ Hisao Niura in the eighth game. Over the first five innings, Jones blanked the Giants on one hit and Niura nearly matched him with two hits surrendered. Kazuaki Fujishiro replaced Niura in the top of the sixth and gave up a leadoff double to U.L. Washington. Washington moved to third on a fly out and scored on John Wathan’s single. Relievers Renie Martin and Dan Quisenberry locked down the game with four innings of one-hit shutout ball as the Royals won, 1-0. “I’m relieved,” said Howser after the win. “Our pitching has shaped up and [I] think we could play better in the remaining games.”

    The next day, November 12, the teams traveled west to Nagoya, where Kansas City played a combined Yomiuri and Chunichi Dragons team in the ninth game of the series. Brett continued hitting the ball well, belting a solo homer off starter Tatsuo Komatsu in the first inning. From there on, however, the only scoring came from the Japanese squad. Royals starter Larry Gura struggled, giving up a two-run homer to Yasunori Oshima and two solo home runs to Masaru Uno. After the 5-1 loss, Howser noted, “A homer by George Brett isn’t enough to win a ballgame.”

    Games 10 through 12 occurred in the area around Kyoto and Osaka. The schedule also allowed time for the Royals to do some sightseeing. The group shot the rapids on the Hozu River in traditional flat-bottomed boats steered with oars and powered by the current and bamboo poles. They also went to Nijo Castle in Kyoto, a home of the Shogun from the early 1600s, that was later named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The touring party not only enjoyed the cultural sites but also shopping and eating. “The Royals are eating plenty of things they can’t spell and … some things they’d rather not have identified,” wrote Mike McKenzie of the Kansas City Star. “We’re eating like kings,” said Quisenberry. “Some guys are gaining weight. Not getting like Sumo wrestlers, but gaining.” During his brief time in Japan, Quisenberry became a Sumo fan. “They’re better than our pro wrestling. They psych each other out, and they’re for real. I can’t understand anything they’re saying, but it’s fun to watch.”

    On Saturday, November 14, the Royals played a Yomiuri and Hankyu Braves combined team at Nishinomiya Stadium. The teams stayed locked in a pitching duel with the score tied 1-1 until the eighth inning. Royals starter Dennis Leonard surrendered just the one run and three hits in seven innings, while the Japanese used four pitchers to hold the Royals. In the top of the eighth, designated hitter Hal McRae clocked a two-run homer off reliever Tomoyuki Sekiguchi to take the lead. In the bottom half of the inning, Quisenberry relieved Leonard and gave up a two-run home run to Kenji Awaguchi that tied the game at 3-3. The game remained scoreless through the 10th inning and then was declared a tie.

    With the 3-6-1 record, the Japanese media claimed the Royals were either not taking the tour seriously or were just not that good. After the 10 games, the Japanese had outhit them .238 (78-for-328) to .217 (74-for-341) and outscored them 49 to 23. Fans complained that they paid $22 to $25 a ticket to see “a feeble American team.”

    “We are trying,” said Dennis Leonard. “They are just embarrassing us. We’ve been outhit, outpitched, outplayed. I think when we came over here, we thought it was going to be a cakewalk. Instead, we’re struggling.” George Brett said, “Nobody likes to lose. We’re professionals. We go out and try to win every game. We just can’t seem to get the big hit when we need it.”

    “The team is mad,” said Quisenberry. “It’s depressing. A lot of guys 5-feet-6 and 150 pounds are hitting home runs against us. Their pitchers are throwing straight fastballs, letter high, and we’re popping up and striking out. The game is over, and we’re beaten 7-1, and we can’t figure out why or how. … Players come back to the bench after striking out or giving up a key hit, and they’re mad at the world. Not quite like the regular season, but almost. We don’t like to get embarrassed.”

    Howser and some players blamed the losses on the lengthy layoff between the end of the Royals’ season and the start of the games in Japan, noting that the Japanese had ended their playoffs only days before the start of the tour. “Not working out before we came hurt us more than I thought it would,” noted McRae. “Personally, I’m not in good shape,” Leonard admitted. “In previous years, we probably could have overcome [the layoff],” said Frank White. “But the Japanese players have improved, especially their pitching.” Quisenberry agreed: “About 50 percent of the pitchers I’ve seen could play in the major leagues. They are much more surehanded than we are in the field. … Their hitters are very disciplined, hardly ever striking out with their short, compact swings.”

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    A Near Escape: the 1981 Kansas City Royals Tour of Japan
  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 6, Hiromitsu Ochiai

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 6, Hiromitsu Ochiai

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The three-time Triple Crown winner who did everything his own way

    There is a word, oreryu, that you need to know before any of this makes sense. It means, roughly, “my way.” Not a better way. Not the accepted way. Just: my way. The word exists because one man lived it so completely, so defiantly, across so many years and so many people who told him he was doing it wrong, that the language simply had to make room for it.

    His name was Hiromitsu Ochiai. He was the greatest right-handed hitter in the history of Nippon Professional Baseball. He was also, for much of his career, the most inconvenient man in the room.

    He would have taken both as compliments.

    Let’s start at the beginning, because the beginning is almost too good.

    Ochiai was born in 1953 in a small town in Akita Prefecture, in northern Japan, the youngest of seven children in a family that ran a Japanese sweets shop. He played baseball as a kid, hitting crumpled up newspapers with a stick in the yard, and joining the local team in fourth grade because his older brother did, but he was never, precisely, a baseball obsessive. His childhood idol, like nearly every other boy from his generation, was Shigeo Nagashima, but what he really loved were movies. By high school, he was going to the cinema roughly a hundred times a year, sneaking into theaters in his school uniform while other kids were at practice. His attendance record was so poor he nearly failed to advance each of his three years.

    Robert Whiting noted that as a boy he saw My Fair Lady seven times and could recite whole lines from it in English, which is pretty remarkable for a man who later admitted his English test papers in junior high were left completely blank, and who failed the English section of his high school entrance exam the same way. The movies were not about English. The movies were about being somewhere that wasn’t practice.

    He was good enough at baseball that every top high school program in Akita wanted him, but he chose a technical school specifically because he’d heard they didn’t push their players around too much. When the upperclassmen still pushed him around, he simply stopped showing up. He quit and rejoined the team eight separate times during high school but was always called back before tournaments because he was, inconveniently, the best player they had.

    Toyo University came next, on a recommendation after he hit a mammoth home run at a tryout. He quit after less than a year. The freshman players were traditionally required to wash the underwear of the upperclassmen, give them massages, and light their cigarettes. Ochiai found it to be ridiculous.

    He went back to Akita, worked part-time at his brother’s bowling alley, became a serious competitive bowler, and might have turned professional except that he forgot to put his new driver’s license sticker on his brother’s car, got pulled over, paid a fine, and no longer had the entry fee for the qualifying exam. Baseball it was, then. He joined an industrial league team, working days assembling transistor radio circuit boards and playing in the evenings. He hit 70 home runs in five official seasons, and in 1978 was selected as Japan’s starting first baseman for the Amateur World Series. He hit .265/.413/.519 in the tournament, drew nine walks in ten games, and led the entire Japanese squad with 13 RBI. That autumn, the Lotte Orions drafted him in the third round. He was 25 years old. The scout’s only stated reason: he could handle breaking balls and he was the kind of hitter pitchers found annoying.

    In the minors the following year, he set an Eastern League record by homering in five consecutive games. No one had any idea what was coming.

    What was coming started almost immediately with a problem. Lotte’s manager was Kazuhiro Yamauchi*, and he took one look at Ochiai’s stance—bat aimed toward the first base dugout, stepping firmly away from the plate when he swung—and said flatly: “That guy will never make it as a pro.” The other coaches agreed. Ochiai remained in the minor league system, his talent visible to almost no one in a position to act on it.

    *Yamauchi had been a star for the Orions in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was the first player in NPB to reach 300 career home runs.

    Almost no one. A batting coach named Michihiro Takabatake had been watching Ochiai in the farm system and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t on the first team. One morning in 1980, he pulled aside a veteran who had just joined the Lotte organization and brought him down to Kawasaki Stadium to watch. The veteran was Isao Harimoto, one of the greatest hitters in the history of Japanese baseball, a man who had spent his career in title races against Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima, who had hit .319 over 23 professional seasons and finished with 3,085 career hits. If Harimoto said a hitter was good, the hitter was good.

    Harimoto watched Ochiai for a while. Then he went to find Yamauchi.

    “Why aren’t you using him?” he asked.

    But getting Ochiai onto the field was only the first problem. Ochiai was slow, and his defense was unremarkable, and when he struggled early in games, Yamauchi moved quickly to pull him. Every time Harimoto would get up from the bench, walk to where Yamauchi was moving toward the field to make a substitution, grab the manager’s belt, and say: “One more chance.” He did this two or three times. Each time, Yamauchi stopped.

    Eventually Ochiai started hitting. Once he started, he didn’t stop. In 1981, his first full season, he hit .326/.423/.629 and won the batting title. He came to Harimoto’s locker afterward.

    “I got it,” he said. “Thank you.”

    In 1982, at 28, Ochiai won the Triple Crown, the fourth player in NPB history to do so, and at the time the youngest ever. In 1983, he won his third consecutive batting title, joining an exclusive list alongside Nagashima himself. He was not done.

    In 1984, Boomer Wells was making a serious run at the Triple Crown. Ochiai, who had spent years fighting Japanese baseball’s rigid culture on his own terms, now revealed something else entirely: a fiercely Japanese competitive pride about who should win the game’s highest individual honor. He declared publicly that a foreigner should not win the Triple Crown. He chased Wells all season in the home run race. Wells even alleged his teammates grooved pitches to help Ochiai. It wasn’t enough. Wells hit 37. Ochiai hit 33. He fell four home runs short.

    He noted the result and filed it away. And then came 1985.

    Before the season, Ochiai made his intentions plain: he was going to win the Triple Crown, and he was really going to win all three parts of it. But this was not simply another prediction. When he had won his first Triple Crown in 1982 (.325, 32 home runs, 99 RBI) some critics had called the numbers unimpressive, unworthy of the title. Not a real Triple Crown, they implied. Ochiai had heard every word. Now, three years later, he wanted to win it in a way that made argument impossible. He wanted numbers that would sit boldly on the page and be beyond any criticism.

    He also told his batting coaches he didn’t want to swing a bat during spring camp. Not during practice. Not during exhibition games. He wanted to run and do fielding drills only so he could preserve his swing, keep it fresh and uncontaminated. His manager Kazuhisa Inao simply said yes. His teammates watched, bewildered. Ochiai ran and fielded and waited.

    He was otherworldly that year. In August, he hit .411 with 10 home runs and 24 RBI. In September, .409 with 10 more home runs and 27 RBI. The final four days of the season were his exclamation mark. On October 18, against the Nippon-Ham Fighters, he went 4-for-4 with four RBI, hitting two home runs in a game for the eleventh time that season. The next day, another home run, three more RBI. The day after that, a run-scoring hit in the first inning, a double in the fifth, a three-run home run in the ninth; five RBI in a single game. On October 21, in the season’s final game, two hits, two RBI, and his 52nd home run, tying Katsuya Nomura’s Pacific League record.

    The final line: .367 batting average — beating second place by 24 points. 52 home runs — beating second place by 12. 146 RBI — beating second place by 24. He had won the Triple Crown before. This time he had won it so that no one would ever say the wrong thing about it again. With runners in scoring position, he hit .492 across 122 at-bats, with 16 home runs and 98 RBI in those situations alone. The 146 RBI is still the Pacific League record. The .487 on-base percentage from 1986 is still the NPB record. The .492 average with runners in scoring position is still the Japanese record.

    In 1986 he did it again: .360, 50 home runs, 116 RBI. He played through severe back pain. He became the only player in the history of Japanese professional baseball to win three Triple Crowns. He had predicted all three.

    Here is what people who faced Ochiai remember most: he was almost impossible to fool, and not in the way you expected.

    Harimoto, whose eye for hitting mechanics was as sharp as anyone’s in the game, described Ochiai’s essential nature this way: he was fundamentally a gap hitter who had developed the technique to pull the ball into Kawasaki’s short right field porch when the situation called for it. When he saw a pitcher tiring or losing his stuff, Ochiai could shift his contact point forward and turn on the ball like a true pull hitter, completely transforming his approach within a single at-bat. Harimoto said he could think of almost no one else in the long history of the game who could do this.

    Of his 510 career home runs, 176 went to right field. Sportswriters gushed about his ability to take outside pitches the other way. A Yomiuri Giants catcher once asked him directly: “Are you aiming for right field on those?” Ochiai’s answer stopped him cold: “Don’t be ridiculous. Those are late swings. My swing path is just better than yours, so they still go out.”

    Pitchers didn’t like facing him for another reason: he was aggressively patient. He led the league in walks nine times, including eight consecutive seasons from 1984 to 1991. He led the league in on-base percentage seven times in his career. He set a record with 6 walks in one game in 1991. His career total of 1,475 walks is second only to Oh all-time, and first among all right-handed hitters in NPB history. 

    The great pitcher Hisashi Yamada of the Hankyu Braves, after a young Ochiai went 2-for-4 against him in 1980, pulled aside some younger pitchers afterward: “A great hitter just arrived. He might win a Triple Crown one day.” Then, two years later, Ochiai came to Yamada directly and asked him how to hit his signature sinker. Yamada told him: aim for center field. Ochiai thanked him. On April 29, 1982, the day Yamada was chasing his 200th career win, Ochiai hit three home runs off him. All three were sinkers. Yamada still won the game, though.

    There’s also the story about a batting cage.

    When Ochiai joined the Chunichi Dragons before the 1987 season, the club had hastily converted a gymnasium into an indoor batting center. The ceiling was covered with nets. Balls kept getting stuck up there. Players tried throwing bats to knock them down. Nothing worked.

    Ochiai watched this for a moment, then said: “I’ll get them.” Did he grab a ladder? No, he stepped into the cage, queued up a pitching machine, and began hitting balls precisely into the ceiling netting, each one landing with just enough angle and force to dislodge the stuck balls and knock them down, one after another. The Central League’s chief umpire was watching and said afterward it was like watching magic or a circus act.

    Whiting described Ochiai as someone who “hardly ever practiced, laughed at the term fighting spirit, and said he played baseball only for the money.” That is a fair description, and Ochiai would not have disputed a word of it.

    During the season, while teammates went through long pregame workouts that left them soaked with sweat, Ochiai would lounge on the sidelines. “Ten swings is all I need,” he would say. “Then a good massage and I’m ready to play.” He refused voluntary training in January after his first Triple Crown. He skipped practices he found useless. He did not see the point of exhausting yourself before the game you were supposed to win.

    This, of course, was at odds with the dominant philosophy of Japanese baseball and with its greatest exemplar. Sadaharu Oh was famous for the crippling hours he put in on the training ground, even in his final seasons. When the two appeared in a magazine interview together, Oh said he was afraid Ochiai’s example would mislead the youth of the nation. Ochiai responded, as Whiting recorded it, that he had practiced hard in his semipro days, had built his body and developed his technique but that was then, and this was now. Americans did things their own way. Why couldn’t he?

    If Oh’s motto was doryoku (effort) Ochiai said his own would be: “Enjoy yourself and get rich.”

    Leron Lee, who played alongside him at Lotte, put it plainly: “He had trouble with the media because he told people exactly what he thought, and Japanese aren’t supposed to do that.” His American teammate Alonzo Powell called him simply “an American in a Japanese body.”

    Whiting noted that writers at the time called Ochiai “The Gaijin Who Spoke Japanese.”* In a country where stardom came with expectations of humility, collective sacrifice, and visible suffering, Ochiai was bewildering. He was immodest. He talked about money. He predicted his own Triple Crowns. He won them.

    *Gaijin, shortened from gaikokujin, is the word for foreigners.

    One relationship was different from all the others.

    Kazuhisa Inao managed Lotte from 1984 to 1986, and Ochiai came to regard him as something close to a father figure in baseball. He would later say he was one of only two managers from whom he actually learned the game. The first night Inao took over, Ochiai followed the coaches out for drinks, sat down across from his new manager, and asked directly: “Are you going to run a controlled operation, or are you going to trust the players?” Inao answered simply: he had grown up in the old Nishitetsu Lions, where no one had ever been managed tightly, and he wasn’t going to start now. That was enough.

    When Ochiai was hitting barely .200 in the first half of the season and coaches were urging Inao to drop him from the cleanup spot, Inao refused. Ochiai hit over .400 after the All-Star break. There was a night when Ochiai practiced so long in the indoor cage that his fingers went numb and locked around the bat handle. From the shadows, a figure appeared, gently pried the fingers loose, and slipped away. It was Inao. Ochiai said afterward that was the moment he understood what kind of man his manager was.

    The day Ochiai won the Shoriki Award in November 2007 (for leading Chunichi to the Japan Series championship for the first time in 53 years as manager) was also the day of Inao’s death. At the press conference, Ochiai spoke about his old manager: that they had talked about baseball as equals, beyond the boundaries of their roles, and that what Inao had taught him about the pitcher’s mindset—what a pitcher fears, what a pitcher hides—had become one of his most treasured possessions.

    After the 1986 season ended, Inao was let go. The new Lotte manager was a former Orions infielder with a very different philosophy, and everyone understood that Ochiai’s days in the organization were numbered. On November 4, at a fan appreciation event in Fukuoka, Inao himself lit the fuse, revealing publicly that the Giants had approached Lotte the previous year offering anyone on their roster except Tatsunori Hara in exchange for Ochiai, a deal Lotte had turned down. Ochiai, standing nearby, went further. He said that without Inao, he saw no reason to stay at Lotte. If any team wanted to hire him and Inao as a package, he would follow wherever that led.

    The next day, before a Japan-America All-Star game at Heiwadai Stadium, he was even more blunt: he wanted to sign with whichever team valued him most highly.

    The sports papers erupted. Lotte summoned Ochiai for a meeting. Afterward, the club’s representative held a press conference and read a prepared statement: Ochiai had reflected on his remarks, recognized they lacked consideration, and regretted them. The matter was closed.

    Ochiai stood beside him throughout, wearing a thin smile. When the statement was finished, he said only: “Well, something like that.”

    Then he went home and told reporters the memo had been written before the meeting even started.

    The Giants assumed they would get him. They had been circling for a year, and they calculated that Ochiai would fall into their laps. After all, a player with a high salary, at odds with his own organization, with a new manager coming in who had no patience for him, was essentially already gone. They made offers and they waited.

    Chunichi’s new manager Senichi Hoshino had decided he would rather bleed than watch Ochiai put on a Giants uniform. Chunichi offered a package that included their young closer Kazuhiko Ushijima, still only 25, along with several other players, a package that Lotte valued more than Yomiuri’s counteroffer. On December 21, the Giants’ owner finally said he was ready to move seriously. He was two days too late. On December 23, the trade was announced: Ochiai to Chunichi. The century’s great trade, the papers called it. And so Hoshino got his man, and the Giants got to spend the next several years wondering what might have been. Ochiai would finally join Yomiuri in 1994.

    Can you imagine a player coming off two consecutive Triple Crowns being traded?

    Now in the Central League for the first time, facing unfamiliar pitchers, playing through an injured wrist for much of the year, and hitting in a pitcher’s park for home games, Ochiai saw his power numbers drop to 28 home runs. He still hit .331/.435/.602. He still led the league in doubles, runs, and walks. And then, that winter, he did something that seemed to contradict everything anyone thought they knew about him.

    He went to Chunichi’s fall camp in Hamamatsu. Out in a forest clearing, baseball’s leading nonconformist ran sprints and fielded grounders like a fresh rookie, in rigorous sessions that lasted until the beginning of winter.

    “It’s the least I can do,” he said, “after the kind of season that I had.”

    This was the man who said effort was a word he couldn’t stand.

    Oreryu didn’t mean laziness. It meant that the work he chose to do was his to choose and that no one else would decide for him what mattered and what didn’t.

    He played his last game on October 7, 1998. He was 44 years old. His manager offered him a starting spot that day; Ochiai declined, asking instead to pinch hit, the same role as his very first professional at-bat. He grounded out to first against the Lotte Orions, the team where it all began.

    The career numbers: a .311/.422/.564 line. 510 home runs, sixth all-time in NPB history. 1,564 RBI. 1,475 walks, second all-time behind only Oh. Ten Best Nine selections across three different positions—twice at second base, four times each at first and third base. Fifteen All-Star appearances, with a career All-Star batting average of .365. His 1,000th hit, 1,500th hit, and his 2,000th hit? All of them home runs. His milestone at 1,000 career games? A home run. At 2,000 career games? A home run. He was the first Japanese player to earn 100 million yen in a season, then 200 million, then 300 million, then 400 million.

    The three Triple Crowns remain his alone. No one else in NPB history has ever won three. He also took home MVP in two of those Triple Crown years.

    And yet, in 2009 and again in 2010, Ochiai fell one vote short of the 75 percent threshold required for the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One vote. Both years. The man who had done everything his own way, who had been an inconvenience and a provocation and an embarrassment to the baseball establishment for twenty years, needed one more voter to come around. In 2011, they finally did.

    There is a question worth sitting with: what would have happened if his batting coach hadn’t spotted Ochiai in the Lotte farm system, or if Harimoto hadn’t been willing to go to bat for a player he had watched for one morning at Kawasaki Stadium? What if Harimoto hadn’t grabbed Yamauchi’s belt those two or three times when the manager was ready to pull Ochiai from games before he’d had a fair chance to prove himself?

    And beyond that, what would have happened if Ochiai had simply listened?

    If, in 1979, he had flattened out his swing on command, adopted the level stroke, made himself into something the Lotte coaches could recognize and approve of. If he had conformed to the seniority culture in high school and university and never developed that fierce, private certainty that he knew better than the people telling him he was wrong. If he had stopped trusting himself at any of the dozen moments when it would have been easier and more convenient to do so.

    The answer, probably, is that we would never have heard of him.

    Instead, somewhere in Akita, a young man kept hitting wooden utility poles with a bat until the electricity went out and the neighbors complained. He watched a hundred movies a year instead of going to school. He quit baseball programs and returned to them and eventually built a swing that no coach had ever designed or sanctioned, out of pieces of other people’s technique filtered entirely through his own judgment, until it was the most feared swing in Japanese baseball.

    He said he played for money. He said spirit and effort were words he couldn’t stand. He said ten swings was all he needed.

    Then he went out to the autumn forest and ran until winter came, because he felt he hadn’t earned his salary.

    Oreryu. My way.

    It was the only way he ever knew.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 7, Tsuyoshi Shinjo

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 7, Tsuyoshi Shinjo

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The player who turned the diamond into a stage and never forgot whom he was performing for

    Drafted fifth round in 1989, no Koshien tournament appearances to his name, Tsuyoshi Shinjo walked into his introductory press conference with the Hanshin Tigers sporting a shaved-sides flat-top haircut and the demeanor of a man with somewhere else to be. Someone asked him about his feelings joining one of Japan’s most storied franchises, the team that played at the great cathedral of Koshien, in front of the most passionate fan base in the country. Shinjo considered the question.

    “I was more into soccer,” he said, “so I wasn’t that interested in professional baseball.”

    The room erupted in laughter—the Kyushu accent, the artless delivery, the complete absence of the expected reverence. Nobody quite knew what to make of him.

    That was, it would turn out, a feeling they would need to get used to.

    His first year in the minors he batted .074. His arm, however, was something else entirely. During a fall camp that year, Yoshio Yoshida, the legendary shortstop and former manager who had become one of the most respected baseball minds in Japan, watched the teenager throw from the outfield and told the coaching staff: that athleticism belongs at shortstop. Shinjo converted. In his first call-up to the big league club the following year, he positioned himself at an almost comically deep shortstop, far deeper than anyone played the position, specifically and deliberately, so that the throws he made to retire runners would be long enough to make people notice his arm. He was nineteen years old and already managing his own image.

    He had arrived. It just took him a little while to let everyone know.

    Here is something worth understanding about Tsuyoshi Shinjo’s career. By the counting stats, he was good but not exceptional. Across thirteen NPB seasons, he batted .254 with 205 home runs, won ten Golden Gloves (tied for 4th all-time) after moving to centerfield, and made the Best Nine three times. In three seasons in MLB, he batted .245 with 20 home runs across 303 games. These are the numbers of a capable player, a fan favorite, a glove-first center fielder who could make your jaw drop and your heart sink in roughly equal measure.

    And yet Tsuyoshi Shinjo is one of the most famous baseball players Japan has ever produced. He is famous in the way that certain athletes (think Jose Canseco, Dennis Rodman, or Deion Sanders) achieve a kind of celebrity that floats entirely free of their statistics. He is famous because he understood that a ballgame is a performance, and a performer’s first obligation is to the audience.

    His manager towards the end of his tenure with Hanshin, the great Katsuya Nomura looked at Shinjo and arrived at a memorable conclusion. “I never thought of him as a student,” Nomura wrote. “Rather than teaching him anything, I used the feeling of flattering a pig into climbing a tree.” Nomura’s method with Shinjo was simple: ask him what batting order position he wanted, put him there, and watch him perform. Ask him what position he most wanted to play, then let him try it. “Leave him alone and he motivates himself,” Nomura concluded. “He was, for a manager, an easy player to handle.”

    Nomura meant this as mild condescension. But there is another way to read it. Here was one of the most manipulative managers in baseball history, a man who turned psychology into an art form, and his technique with Shinjo was simply: give him a stage. That was the whole point of Shinjo.

    Born in Nagasaki Prefecture on January 28, 1972, Shinjo grew up in Fukuoka, the son of a landscape gardener who had dreamed of his own baseball career and poured that dream into his son with an intensity that bordered on terrifying. By the time young Tsuyoshi was six years old, his father had already established that the boy could throw a stone farther than any adult in the neighborhood. Their daily training ritual involved Shinjo standing at the top of a hill while his father threw the ball up from the bottom, hard as he could and if the boy let it roll back down, he was ordered to chase it before it stopped. He chased it, crying, every time. But he never quit.

    The competitive fury expressed itself early. In a town softball tournament at the age of eleven, Shinjo was so incensed by what he believed was a bad call that he argued with the umpire alone, weeping, long after his coaches had tried to pull him away. The coach was so struck by the sight that he made Shinjo an offer: if you feel that strongly, I’ll become your manager. Let’s start a baseball team and turn that frustration into something. Shinjo assembled enough players within two days, took charge of designing the uniforms, and within six weeks they had finished third in the Fukuoka prefectural tournament out of 64 teams. He was captain, ace pitcher, and cleanup hitter. He was eleven years old. He was already producing and directing his own story.

    The team, by the way, was called the Nagaoka Fighters which, if you believe in that sort of thing, is either a coincidence or something else.

    There is a moment from September 16, 1992, at Koshien Stadium, that the Hanshin faithful still remember.

    The Tigers, coming off two last place finishes in a row, are improbably in the pennant race. The game against Hiroshima is scoreless going into the eighth inning. With two out and the bases loaded, Hiroshima’s Ryuzo Yamasaki hits a liner to right-center, a ball that looks like it is going to possibly end the season. No longer a shortstop, Shinjo, who has been a regular for less than three months, is already running. He runs a long way. He dives. He catches it.

    Then, in the bottom of the ninth, with the score still 0-0, Shinjo steps in against future Hall of Famer Yutaka Ohno, and hits a walk-off home run.

    In the hero’s interview afterward, Shinjo grabbed the microphone and announced: “We’re going to win the pennant!”

    They did not win the pennant. They finished second, one game out, in what became another in a long list of heartbreaking near-misses in franchise history. But for one evening, standing in the lights at Koshien, Tsuyoshi Shinjo made everyone believe it was possible.

    That year’s Tigers resurgence had two faces: center fielder Shinjo and left fielder Tsutomu Kameyama, whose names combined to give the phenomenon its name, Kame-Shin Fever. The city of Osaka lost its mind. Fan letters for Shinjo arrived at the team dormitory at the rate of one cardboard box per day. Young women, dubbed Shinjo Girlsby the press, gathered in such numbers outside the dormitory gates that getting home from the stadium became impossible, and the dormitory manager eventually put Shinjo in a hotel to relieve the congestion. His salary that offseason rose 323 percent, the largest single-season raise in Tigers history at the time.

    He was twenty years old. He was driving a Lamborghini and receiving a cardboard box of love letters every day and playing center field for the most passionate fan base in Japanese baseball. The reasonable response to this situation would have been to become completely insufferable. Instead, Shinjo seems to have concluded that all of it—the letters, the fans, the noise, the love—was not something that was for keeps, but something he owed back. The fans gave him their passion. He would spend the rest of his career figuring out how to return it.

    He dyed his hair. He began wearing the bright red wristbands that would become synonymous with his name. He developed his signature habit of adding a small hop to routine fly ball catches, a theatrical touch he had developed in high school by training himself to catch eggs dropped from the second floor without breaking them. The hop, it turned out, had genuine logic behind it, stilling his eye line at the moment of catch, absorbing the ball’s momentum, and loading him instantly for the throw. He explained all of this with complete seriousness when asked. No one ever quite knew what to do with the fact that his most flamboyant habit was also one of his most technically sophisticated.

    He drove a Lamborghini Countach to contract negotiations in 1993. A Porsche in 1994. A Lamborghini Cheetah in 1995. Car reporters began staking out the parking lot of the Tigers front office because Shinjo’s arrival was better automotive content than anything else they were covering. He wore Versace. He sprayed perfume on his wristbands and towels because he couldn’t tolerate the smell of the dugout. He recorded a love song in 1994 that sold 8,000 copies. He married one of Japan’s top models. He was Tsuyoshi Shinjo, and he wanted everyone in the stadium to know it.

    On June 12, 1999, in the twelfth inning of a tie game against Yomiuri at Koshien, the Giants decided to intentionally walk Shinjo to set up the force play.

    Three days earlier, against the same Giants, Shinjo had been walked intentionally and let it go. But he had spent that time in the batting cage with his hitting coach, practicing swings at pitches thrown well outside the strike zone. He had arranged a signal with Nomura so that in the right situation, he would receive permission to swing. When the signal came, he repositioned himself to the far edge of the batter’s box, noted that the shortstop was shading toward second base, leaving a gap on the left side of the infield, and waited.

    The second pitch was perhaps slightly less outside than the first. Shinjo swung and drove a single through the gap and sending home the winning run. The Giants protested that his foot had left the batter’s box. The home plate umpire ruled that his heel had remained on the chalk line. Shinjo walked off the hero of the game. He had pre-planned and pre-practiced a play that no rational person would have attempted, gotten managerial approval in advance, studied the defensive alignment, found the gap, and executed. A spaceman, Nomura had called him. It turned out that being a spaceman was occasionally a tactical advantage

    He then announced, with a grin, that he would never do it again. The following day, before the same opponents, he took more batting practice on outside pitches, just in case.

    In the winter of 2000, Shinjo made the most Shinjo decision of his career.

    He had just completed his best NPB season: .278 average, 28 home runs, 85 RBIs, a team-best in virtually every offensive category, a Best Nine selection, a Golden Glove. The Tigers offered him a five-year contract extension worth approximately 1.2 billion yen. This was an extraordinary sum, security for life, in the city where he had become a star.

    Shinjo turned it down to sign with the New York Mets for the major league minimum. At the press conference announcing the deal, he stepped to the microphone with the calm of a man who had been rehearsing this moment for years: “I’ve finally found a place where I can play the kind of baseball I envision. That team is the New York Mets.”

    The reaction in Japan was divided along a single line. That same offseason, Ichiro Suzuki had finalized his move to the Seattle Mariners through the posting system. Ichiro’s move made sense. Shinjo’s move prompted something closer to seriously? He was not Ichiro. He had one excellent season and eight largely difficult ones. He was a defensive specialist with intermittent power and a .254 career average. The Mets’ offer was less than what Hanshin, Yokohama, and Yakult were each prepared to pay him, making the gamble look even stranger from the outside.

    He only played in the majors for three seasons, with the Mets, San Francisco Giants, and then back with the Mets. But he did become the first Japanese player to appear in the World Series. The bat he used to record the first hit by a Japanese player in World Series history, a first-inning single off Jarrod Washburn in Game 1, sits in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. It is engraved TSU No. 5, in Shinjo’s own handwriting.

    When Shinjo returned to Japan to play for the Nippon-Ham Fighters, the performances grew more elaborate.. In the first inning of the 2004 All-Star Game, Shinjo stepped to the plate, pointed dramatically toward left-center field—a called shot, straight out of Babe Ruth—and then dropped a surprise bunt on the first pitch. It failed. He returned to the dugout having accomplished nothing except making everyone in the stands laugh.

    In the third inning, he doubled to left-center off the same pitcher, moved to third on a ground ball, and then, with the the catcher returning the ball to the pitcher, Shinjo broke from third base. He slid headfirst into home plate and was called safe on the closest of plays. He pounded the ground with both hands and feet, a grown man overcome with pure joy.

    It was the first solo steal of home in All-Star Game history. The only one ever, to this day.

    After collecting the MVP award, Shinjo was asked about the play. His answer was precise and, once you understood who he was, completely unsurprising: “If I weren’t in the Pacific League I wouldn’t have done it. I want to brighten things up. If players like this appear and get media coverage, fans will want to come to the ballpark.”

    On Opening Day 2006, rather than jogging to his position in center field like a normal human being, Shinjo drove a Harley-Davidson trike across the playing surface of Sapporo Dome, circled the warning track, and parked at his position, while his fellow starters rode in the sidecars. The stadium held 43,000 people. It was sold out. He had promised it would be when he signed.

    That same season, he appeared at a game wearing, under his Fighters uniform, his old Hanshin Tigers jersey. He had worn it to honor his former team during an interleague matchup. The Pacific League umpires ruled it a violation. He was warned. He removed the jersey. He did not particularly seem to regret it.

    In April, after hitting a home run against Orix, he named the blast by announcing it had been hit with a special technique: “I enjoyed baseball fully for 28 years. This year I’ll take off my uniform” home run technique. He was announcing his retirement, mid-game, in a home run naming ceremony, while still playing the game. The press called it the Shinjo Theater. It was.

    In June, before a game against the Tigers at the Sapporo Dome, he descended from the ceiling in a small gondola with a disco ball attached to it. In the All-Star game that year, he used a rainbow bat and wore an LED belt with the message “Never mind whatever I do, fan is my treasure.”

    He wore a collared undershirt beneath his uniform in a game against the SoftBank Hawks. SoftBank’s manager Sadaharu Oh complained. The league ruled against it. The debate occupied sports media for days. Shinjo said he had thought the look was nice.

    He declined to steal bases because, he said, he had no interest in it and because, more specifically, he didn’t want his legs to become too muscular, because muscular legs did not look attractive in jeans.

    On September 27, 2006, in the final regular season game at the Sapporo Dome, Shinjo played in the number he had worn as an eighteen-year-old rookie: 63, the first number the Tigers had given him, the number stitched in black thread into the thumb of the glove he had used his entire career, the glove he had bought with his first paycheck, repaired four times, and refused to let anyone else touch. Before the retirement ceremony, the stadium went dark. A video of his baseball life played on the scoreboard. He watched it from center field, standing in his customary posture, his glove resting on top of his cap.

    Then he removed his uniform and placed it on the ground, along with the glove and the wristbands. His undershirt had a message printed across the back: “Today, this day, this moment, I’m going to engrave it in the album of my heart, and from here on, I’ll keep doing things my way!”

    He walked off the field without speaking. The scoreboard displayed a handwritten message he had prepared in advance: “With what little baseball life I have left, I promise everyone today that I’ll keep chasing the white ball with brightness and joy.”

    Six weeks later, after the Fighters had won the Japan Series (the first championship for the franchise in 44 years) and after Shinjo had gone six for seventeen in the Series itself, his teammates did not toss manager Trey Hillman into the air first. They tossed Shinjo. He wept so completely that he could barely walk.

    He had told them when he arrived in Hokkaido that he would fill the stadium and win the championship. He had done both.

    In 2022, the Fighters hired Shinjo as their manager. He asked to be called Big Boss. He arrived at his first home game in a manner resembling professional wrestling. He designed alternate uniforms in black, red, and gold, with a V on the chest, labeled “New Age Games produced by SHINJO”. He banned the sacrifice bunt, in a league that treats the sacrifice bunt as something close to sacred. His first season the Fighters finished last. He gave 23 different hitters regular playing time. He developed young pitching. He built from nothing.

    By his third year the Fighters were back in contention, and by his fourth they were among the Pacific League’s genuine powers. The critics who had spent thirty years saying Shinjo was all show and no substance looked at what he had built and found they had run out of things to say. He had always been serious. He had always been paying attention. He had just declined, then and now, to perform seriousness in the way that made other people comfortable.

    There is a woman, a devoted Tigers fan, as so many people in Osaka were and are, who in 1992 listened to every Tigers game on the radio with her sister, because in those days almost nothing except Giants games made it to television. For two sisters who had grown up through the Tigers’ long dark years, Shinjo was one of the dazzling stars they had finally found. One evening, Shinjo was called to the hero’s interview platform. The sisters turned up the volume and leaned close. There was a pause. Then his voice:

    “I smashed that white ball!”

    The two sisters burst into applause, there in their living room, clapping for a radio.

    The image they held in their minds was Shinjo’s smile, white teeth flashing.

    He never met those two women. He never knew they existed. But he had spent his entire career performing for them and for every person in every living room who couldn’t make it to Koshien, who pressed their ear to a speaker and listened for something worth believing in. The disco ball and the wristbands and the LED belt buckle were the version of that smile scaled up for stadiums. The principle was always the same.

    “Fan is my treasure.” He meant it.

  • The First Japanese Professional Game, An Update

    The First Japanese Professional Game, An Update

    by Robert Fitts

    April 15, 2026, marks the 120th anniversary of the first professional game in Japanese baseball history. Thirty years before the formation of a professional league in Japan, Guy W. Green, the owner of the Nebraska Indians Baseball Team, gathered a dozen immigrants from Japan to form an all-Japanese baseball squad to barnstorm across the Midwest of the United States. Like Green’s Nebraska Indians players, the Japanese players signed contracts and were paid to play, making them the first known professional Japanese team on either side of the Pacific. Guy Green’s Japanese Base Ball Team played their first game on April 15, 1906, in Frankfort, a small town in Northeastern Kansas. In 2020, I published an article on this game, but after five years of further research it is time to update the story. The following article is the first in a series focusing on these Issei baseball pioneers. It includes sections from my previous article with updates and changes when necessary.

     

     

     

     

     

    The early twentieth century was the heyday of barnstorming baseball. Independent teams crisscrossed the country playing in one-horse towns and large cities. There were all female teams, squads of only fat men, clubs of men sporting beards, and teams consisting of “exotic” ethnicities. These independent squads were often called “semi-professional” to differentiate them from teams in Organized Baseball (clubs formally associated with Major League Baseball), but they were professional enterprises. The teams signed players to contracts, paid salaries during the season, provided transportation and housing on the road, charged admission to games, and were intent on turning a profit.

     

    In 1906 much of United States was enthralled by Japan and all things Japanese. Japan had just emerged as the improbable victor in the Russo-Japanese War and the year before the Waseda University baseball club had toured the West Coast. Guy W. Green decided to capitalize on the fad by creating an all-Japanese baseball team to barnstorm across the Midwest.

     

    Although Green would claim that he had “scour[ed] the [Japanese] empire for the best players obtainable,” he did nothing of the sort. In early 1906 Green instructed Dan Tobey, captain of the Nebraska Indians, to form a team from Japanese immigrants living in California. Players congregated on March 15 in Havelock, Nebraska to practice.

     

    1906 Advertising Card, Ken Kitsuse Collection, National Baseball Hall of Fame

    The team contained some extraordinary men.  At first base was Ichiro Fujisaku, who played under the name Toyo Fujita. Fujisaku would become a movie star, appearing in about a dozen Hollywood and Japanese films. Playing second base was Tetsusuburo Uyeda, the third son of a Japan Diet member. During World War II, Uyeda would be jailed as a spy but afterwards his daughter would marry an heir to the Anheisier-Busch fortune. The shortstop was Ken Kitsuse, considered to be the best Issei player of the time. His father was also a member of the Japan Diet. The outfield consisted of Junjiro Uyeda, Tetsusuburo’s brother; Umekichi “Kitty” Kawashima; and Koji Naito, a graduate of Keio University. Acting as an umpire when needed was Tozan Masko, who would become a journalist, sports promoter, and eventually a swindler.

     

    As some of the Issei players lacked the skills to play on a professional independent squad, Green and Tobey decided to bolster his roster with Native Americans —hoping that most spectators would not be able to tell the difference. Manager Dan Tobey, who would eventually be inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame as an announcer, and Nebraska Indian veteran Sandy Kissell shared the pitching duties and played outfield on their off days. Seguin, another member of the Nebraska Indians, was the catcher, while Roy Dean Whitcomb, an 18-year-old Caucasian from Lincoln, usually played third base under the name Noisy. A man known only as Doctor filled in as necessary.

     

     

     

    Manger and pitcher Dan Tobey

     

     

    During the lunch break on the second or third day of practice, Tobey handed out the club rules.  With Masuko interpreting, he laid out the fines for undesirable behavior:  $2 for being late for a game; $2 for lazy playing; $3 for refusing to follow the manager’s orders; $3 for refusing to travel to the ballpark with the team; $3 for gambling; and $5 for drinking alcohol.  He then produced a stack of contracts for the players to sign.  “Of course, we happily signed immediately,” one player remembered.  “We had been worried that Mr. Green might not be satisfied with our techniques and would send us home, so we were so happy to be offered contracts that we didn’t even think about reading it.”

     

    After practicing for about a month in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 13 Guy Green’s Japanese Base Ball Team headed south to begin a twenty-five-week tour that would cover over twenty-five hundred miles through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Their first stop was Frankfort, a small town of about 1,400 people in northeastern Kansas, where they would play the town’s high school squad.

     

    Prior to the game, Guy Green sent out promotional material and flooded local newspapers with advertising and press releases. At the time, there were so few Japanese living in the Midwest that many rural farmers had never seen a Japanese person. So, Green’s advertisements emphasized the players’ foreignness and the uniqueness of the team. A typical announcement read, “Green’s [team] are the most novel baseball organization the world has ever known. Every player is a genuine Japanese. Not one of them can speak a word of English. They do all their coaching in Japanese and is certainly the most Japanesy Japanese you have ever listened to.”

     

     

    An advertising poster for Guy Green’s Japanese Team

     

     

    Playing on the public’s fascination with the Russo-Japanese War, Green also concocted fictional backgrounds for his players. An April 13, 1906, article in the Frankfort Review noted, “One of the most interesting members of Green’s Japanese baseball team is Kitsuse, who left school in Japan to serve during the last great war with Japan. He was wounded in the left leg at Mukden so severely that he was compelled to go home and even yet he limps slightly. He is one of the best me on the team, however, and always a great favorite with the crowds.” Kitsuse, however, immigrated to California on June 8, 1903, almost two years before the 1905 Battle of Mukden.

     

    Shortstop Ken Kitsuse

     

    On Sunday, April 15, Frankfort welcomed the visiting team in style with a parade to Sportsman’s Park led by a thirty-piece cornet band. According to the Nebraska State Journal, “both teams, together with city officials, were in the procession.” The exact location of the ballpark is currently unknown, but evidence suggests that it was on the western edge of town.

     

    The high schoolers took the field in brand-new grey uniforms which just arrived a couple of days before. They had F.H.S. stitched across their jerseys in red and wore red caps and stockings. The Marshall County Indexnoted that “the boys look very striking in their new toggery.” The Japanese squad wore white pants reaching just below the knees, wide leather belts, maroon stockings, maroon undershirts, and a winged-collared maroon jersey with “Greens Japs” stitched in white block letters across the chest. The caps were white with maroon bills.

     

    A parade in Frankfort, Kansas circa 1906

     

     

    As the high school contained just 41 students, the match should have been an easy victory for Green’s professional team, so Tobey started a mostly Japanese lineup. But Tobey had underestimated the skinny, 15-year-old redhead on the mound. The teenage ace, Fairfield “Jack” Walker would go on to pitch for the University of Kansas in 1911-12 and professionally in the Class D Nebraska State League and the Eastern Kansas League. Although a quiet kid, the Horton Headlight noted “when playing Walker wears a perpetual grin that makes a lot of batters mad because they think he is laughing at them.”

     

    No box score for the game survives, just a notation of the pitchers and catchers, but based on the lineups used by the high school just two days earlier and in the following weeks, we can infer that pitcher Fairfield Walker was backed up by George Moss behind the plate; a boy identified only as Russell at first; Harold Haskins at second; Willis Cook at third; Leo Holthoefer at short; and Robert Barrett, John McNamara and Walker (unknown first name but perhaps Isaac B.) in the outfield.

     

    The schoolboys jumped out to an early 4-1 lead after three innings, forcing Tobey to bring in what the Marshall County Index called “five professional American players.” The visitors battled back, scoring in every inning after the second, to eventually win 11-8. The Frankfort Review reported, “A large number of people witnessed the game, and they pronounced it one of the best games ever played here.”

     

    Nonetheless, the game irked some local residents. Later that week, the Frankfort Review reported, “The protest against the Sunday ball playing, made by the ministers of this city last Saturday, met with approval of nearly everybody. There is no denying the fact that Sunday ball playing in a town the size of Frankfort is not good for the morals of the town. In a large city ball playing is alright, in fact beneficial for it amuses a class of people who would probably spend their time at worse places, and the noise does not disturb anyone. The usual small town game is annoying to many people. However, last Sunday’s game at Sportsman’s Park was not noisy. Our people are interested in baseball, and always patronized the games well but we know they would prefer to have the games played on other than Sundays.”

     

    After the Sunday game, the next day Green’s team traveled 14 miles to the west to play the Blue Rapids town team at Riverside Park, which still exists. The report on the 7-6 Japanese victory in the Blue Rapid Times provides insights on the barnstorming team’s economics. “The business houses pretty generally closed up or dismissed their clerks and there was a fine turnout. There were 356 paid admissions and the school children who were admitted free swelled the attendance to close to 500. The receipts were $85.30, of which the home team got one-fourth.”

     

    Green’s Japanese squad would stay on the road until October 10, playing about 170 games against small town teams and a few semi-pro squads throughout the Midwest. They won 122 of the 142 games for which results are known.

     

    Despite the lengthy tour and the uniqueness of the club, The Sporting News, as well as big market newspapers in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, did not cover or even mention Green’s Japanese team. As a result, the first professional Japanese players had little impact on the national or international baseball scene and were soon forgotten. But the tour marked the true beginnings of Japanese American baseball. After the season, the players headed back to the West Coast to form amateur Japanese ball clubs. These teams’ success helped spawn numerous Nikkei clubs as baseball became an integral part of the Japanese American community and culture.

     

    You can read more about the Guy Green’s Japanese Base Ball Team and the early pioneers of Japanese American baseball in my book Issei baseball: The First Japanese American Ballplayers (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 8, Daisuke Matsuzaka

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 8, Daisuke Matsuzaka

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

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

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

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

    The pitcher who turned Koshien into theater and emerged as the Monster of the Heisei Era

    Every baseball country has its sacred ground.

    In America, it might be Yankee Stadium. Or the old one, at least. In the Dominican Republic, it might be Estadio Quisqueya. In Japan it is a ballpark called Koshien.

    Generations of high school players have stood on that field dreaming of becoming legends. Most leave in tears, collecting a small bag of dirt from the infield as a souvenir.

    On August 19, 1998, a seventeen-year-old pitcher threw 250 pitches at Koshien Stadium.

    The game lasted seventeen innings. It started in the morning and stretched into lunchtime. By the end of it the pitcher could barely lift his arm.

    The next day he came back and helped his team win one of the most famous comeback games in the history of Japanese high school baseball.

    The day after that, he threw a no-hitter in the championship game.

    That pitcher was Daisuke Matsuzaka. He became known as Heisei no Kaibutsu—the Monster of the Heisei Era.

    Matsuzaka was born in Aomori Prefecture in 1980 but grew up in Tokyo’s Koto ward. His parents named him after another famous pitcher, Daisuke Araki, who had been a star at Waseda Jitsugyo High School.

    Before baseball, Matsuzaka trained in kendo, starting at age five. The training was harsh. His instructor was known for pushing young students relentlessly, but it built strength in his back and wrists. Years later, when a child asked him how to throw faster, Matsuzaka answered simply: try kendo.

    But at first, Matsuzaka was not quite the legend people remember. At Yokohama High he was known as “Sabori no Matsu,” roughly “Matsu the Slacker,” because he did not like to practice. Then, during a 1997 regional tournament, he lost a game on a wild pitch.

    The loss changed him. He began training obsessively.

    By his third year, he could throw over 150 kilometers per hour (93 mph), a rare velocity for a high school pitcher at the time. His slider was devastating. His stamina seemed limitless.

    In 1998, he helped lead his team to the spring championship. But it was during the summer tournament that he became something larger than life.

    Koshien is not simply a stadium. For Japanese high school baseball, it is something closer to a shrine. The tournament fills the stands every summer and attracts enormous television audiences. Families sometimes move so their sons can attend schools strong enough to reach it. High school kids become household names overnight.

    Even before the tournament began, opposing coaches knew what they were facing. Shiro Mabuchi of Meitoku Gijuku watched him pitch earlier that year and shook his head.

    “That kid,” he said, “is a monster.”

    Matsuzaka laughed when people repeated the nickname.

    “Monster? I don’t really look like one.”

    He didn’t. He looked like a skinny teenager with the face of an angel but the arm of a devil. And once he stepped onto the mound, his expression changed. The fastball exploded from his hand. The slider seemed to snap downward at the last instant.

    Yokohama’s path to the championship unfolded like a drama that kept growing more intense. In the quarterfinals, Matsuzaka threw 250 pitches over 17 innings against PL Gakuen in one of the longest games in tournament history.

    It began earlier than he liked. The first pitch came at 8:30 in the morning. For Matsuzaka, that meant waking around 4:30 a.m. after barely sleeping. Pitchers often struggle to sleep after throwing because their bodies remain wired with adrenaline, and that night he lay awake until nearly two in the morning.

    Later he joked that the biggest reason he struggled early in the game was simple.

    “It was too early.”

    Matsuzaka had another unusual pregame habit. On the bus to games he liked to eat potato chips and drink Coca-Cola. It was his way of relaxing before pitching.

    The game itself quickly turned into a test of endurance.

    PL Gakuen jumped ahead early, scoring three runs. For several innings Matsuzaka struggled to find his rhythm. Later he said that in those first innings he felt as if his body hadn’t quite woken up yet.

    Yokohama fought back. In the fourth inning, catcher and captain Yoshio Koyama hit a two-run home run. By the middle innings, the game had become a back-and-forth struggle.

    And gradually, Matsuzaka began to feel the change.

    By the late innings the ball started to come out of his hand with more life. The longer the game continued, the stronger he felt.

    Which was good because the game stretched into extra innings.

    At one point, Yokohama took a one-run lead in the eleventh inning. Matsuzaka himself reached base with a hard ground ball and eventually scored the go-ahead run.

    Yet even then he didn’t believe the game was over.

    Later he said that the strangest feeling during that game was the sense that it would never end. Even when Yokohama moved ahead, he somehow felt that the game would continue.

    Perhaps part of him didn’t want it to end. 

    There was also a moment of frustration. In the eleventh inning, Matsuzaka allowed a game-tying hit to Hiroaki Onishi on a curveball he had not wanted to throw. Catcher Koyama had called for it, and Matsuzaka followed the sign.

    Afterward he told him quietly, “We shouldn’t throw a curve to Onishi.”

    Koyama’s answer was simple.

    “Then shake me off.”

    But Matsuzaka rarely shook off his catcher. He preferred to trust the call and find a way to execute it.

    The game kept going. After sixteen innings of play, the game was tied at 7 apiece.

    At some point, teammate Ryota Tokiwa walked over and tapped Matsuzaka on the shoulder.

    “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll hit one.”

    In the seventeenth inning, Tokiwa did exactly that. Yokohama won 9-7.

    The next day brought an even stranger scene.

    After throwing 250 pitches against PL Gakuen, Matsuzaka did not start the semifinal against Meitoku Gijuku. Instead he appeared in the lineup as the cleanup hitter and left fielder, his pitching arm wrapped in tape.

    Meitoku dominated early. By the middle of the eighth inning, Yokohama trailed 6-0 and the game seemed finished. But Yokohama scored four runs in the bottom half to close the gap.

    Then Matsuzaka began throwing in the bullpen.

    Years later he admitted that no coach had told him to warm up. He had gone there on his own, hoping the staff would see him and realize he was ready to pitch.

    Even from the stands the change in atmosphere was obvious.

    When he tore the tape from his arm and walked to the mound in the ninth inning, the noise swelled into something closer to a roar. Matsuzaka later admitted he had noticed the television camera beside him before ripping off the tape. Even at seventeen, he understood the theater of the moment.

    Matsuzaka retired the side. In the bottom of the inning, Yokohama scored three runs and completed one of the most improbable come-from-behind victories in the history of the tournament.

    People often say that monsters live at Koshien. The phrase refers to the strange magic of the tournament—the sudden comebacks, the impossible reversals, the games that twist in ways nobody expects.

    But in the summer of 1998 it felt as if Yokohama had somehow learned how to tame those monsters.

    The team itself was unusually unified. Players such as Takeshi Goto and Masaaki Koike later said the atmosphere inside the team mattered as much as Matsuzaka’s pitching.

    During the tournament Goto struggled badly at the plate. One night he returned to the hotel discouraged. The phone rang. It was Matsuzaka calling from the next room.

    “Don’t worry about today,” he told him. “We’re counting on you tomorrow.”

    The next day Goto delivered key hits in Yokohama’s comeback victory.

    And then came the championship game against Kyoto Seisho. The final pitch of the tournament was a sweeping slider. Kyoto Seisho’s Yugo Tanaka swung through it.

    Matsuzaka turned toward the scoreboard and raised both arms into the air.

    Later he admitted he had partly turned for the cameras. This was his final stage, after all.

    The scoreboard still showed zeros in the column for hits.

    It was the first no-hitter in a championship game in nearly sixty years. Yokohama completed a season that included four national titles—Meiji Jingu, the spring and summer Koshien tournaments, and the National Sports Festival—and finished 44-0 in official games.

    Watching the tournament unfold, Kyoto Seisho’s manager later said simply:

    “It was Matsuzaka’s tournament.”

    The Monster of the Heisei Era had arrived.

    Yet Matsuzaka’s story was not only about domination. When he was in junior high school, his father’s company went bankrupt. The family sold their car so they could afford tuition at Yokohama High School. His mother worked part-time to support the household. His younger brother eventually attended a public school rather than a private one to reduce expenses.

    For Matsuzaka, success in baseball meant more than fame. He said openly that he wanted to turn professional and earn money.

    The 1998 draft quickly became the Daisuke Matsuzaka draft. Three teams selected him in the first round: the Saitama Seibu Lions, the Yokohama BayStars, and the Nippon-Ham Fighters.

    Matsuzaka himself hoped to join Yokohama and even suggested he might play corporate baseball if another team drafted him.

    Instead, Seibu manager Osamu Higashio drew the winning lottery ticket.

    “It’s not that easy,” Matsuzaka said afterward. “Out of courtesy I’ll talk with them, but my feelings haven’t changed.”

    Eventually he agreed to sign after Higashio presented him with the game ball from his own 200th career win. He took the traditional ace number: 18.

    Almost immediately the country experienced what newspapers called “Daisuke Fever.”

    Restaurants created dishes named after him. Fans packed spring training. The crowds became so overwhelming that the team once dressed pitcher Shinji Taninaka in Matsuzaka’s number 18 uniform as a decoy.

    His first professional start came on April 7, 1999 against the Fighters.

    The first pitch of his career was a fastball. 149 kilometers per hour.

    Strike one.

    After that, he struck out veteran slugger Atsushi Kataoka with a 155 km/h fastball. At one point during the game, veteran pitcher Tetsuya Shiozaki told him he was throwing too hard to last nine innings.

    Matsuzaka answered calmly: he had only thrown one pitch at full effort.

    He won the game.

    From there, the season only grew more spectacular.

    He faced Ichiro Suzuki and struck him out three times. He dominated the All-Star Game with five strikeouts. He declared after one outing that his confidence had changed “from belief to certainty.”

    By the end of the year he had 16 wins, the league lead, and became Rookie of the Year.

    A high school pitcher had entered professional baseball and immediately become one of its best players.

    For several years he became the dominant pitcher in Nippon Professional Baseball. Matsuzaka led the Pacific League in wins three straight years from 1999 through 2001. He piled up strikeouts and innings with astonishing durability, often pitching on short rest. He won the Sawamura Award in 2001*. He helped lead the Lions to a Japan Series victory in 2004.

    *He went 15-15 that year but led the league in games started, complete games, wins (and losses), innings pitched, and strikeouts.

    He threw from a three-quarter arm slot, pausing briefly in his windup before exploding toward the plate. His fastball averaged around 147 km/h and could climb into the mid-150s, paired with a devastating slider and a deep mix of secondary pitches. His quick delivery made it difficult for runners to steal.

    He loved pitching. He loved throwing deep into games. And sometimes he threw a lot: well over 150 pitches. He pitched 38 complete games across three seasons from 2004-2006.

    Command was not always perfect. Matsuzaka sometimes struggled with walks, partly because his release point could move and his lower body sometimes lost stability. But when his pitches were right, hitters described the ball as exploding.

    Some said his fastball moved like that of a left-handed pitcher.

    If Japan had a must-win game in those years, the ball usually went to Matsuzaka.

    At the 2000 Sydney Olympics. he pitched brilliantly despite Japan narrowly missing a medal. At the 2004 Athens Olympics. he helped secure bronze.

    Then came the World Baseball Classic.

    In 2006, Matsuzaka won all three of his starts—including the championship game against Cuba—and was named tournament MVP. When Japan repeated as champion in 2009, he won the award again.

    Across eight seasons with Seibu, he captured three Best Nine selections, seven Golden Gloves, four strikeout titles, and two ERA championships.

    After the 2006 season, the Boston Red Sox paid $51.1 million just for the right to negotiate with him.

    In Boston, he became known as Dice-K*.

    *My least favorite nickname of all time.

    In 2007, he struck out 201 batters and helped the Red Sox win the World Series. In Game 3, he became the first Japanese pitcher to start a World Series game and even drove in two runs with a hit. In 2008 he went 18-3, the most wins ever by a Japanese pitcher in a major-league season.

    Scouts marveled at the movement on his pitches, and for a time rumors circulated that he threw a mysterious gyroball. Matsuzaka himself seemed amused by the myth. He said he wasn’t sure what people meant by it.

    Injuries later reshaped his career. But he returned to Japan and even won Comeback Player of the Year for the Chunichi Dragons in 2018 before retiring in 2021.

    His final appearance came at Seibu’s home park. He faced one batter, Yokohama High alumnus Kensuke Kondoh, and threw five pitches. The fastest reached 118 kilometers per hour.

    Afterward, he walked slowly around the field while fans applauded.

    Then Ichiro Suzuki stepped onto the field and handed him flowers.

    Matsuzaka began to cry.

    He finished his career with 170 wins and more than two thousand strikeouts across Japan and Major League Baseball. He remains the only player to have won all four: the Summer Koshien, the Japan Series, the World Baseball Classic, and the World Series.

    But numbers alone do not explain why fans loved him.

    They loved him because he loved pitching and because he never seemed afraid of the moment. And because for a generation of fans, the story of modern Japanese baseball begins with one unforgettable image:

    A seventeen-year-old pitcher at Koshien, turning toward the scoreboard and raising his arms.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • ‘We Are Trying to Close the Gap, but It Is Very Wide Yet’: The Baltimore Orioles’ 1971 Tour of Japan

    ‘We Are Trying to Close the Gap, but It Is Very Wide Yet’: The Baltimore Orioles’ 1971 Tour of Japan

    by Dennis Snelling

    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 DENNIS SNELLING tells us about what was supposed to be a true World Series: the 1971 Baltimore Orioles visit to Japan

    Matsutaro Shoriki spent four decades dreaming of an international World Series matching the champion team of American baseball and that of the Japanese. He created Japan’s greatest team, sponsored by his newspaper and known over the years as either the Tokyo or Yomiuri Giants, as a means to fulfilling that dream.

    Beginning in the 1950s, serious attempts were made to bring a World Series champion to Japan, but it never quite worked out. Because of the lead time necessary for planning such an event, guesses as to a potential World Series champion had to be made. These proved wrong every time, almost as if a curse. The New York Giants seemed a good possibility in 1953, but Brooklyn instead captured the National League pennant. Two years later, the New York Yankees – a sure bet during the 1950s – accepted an invitation. That turned out to be the year they finally lost to the Dodgers in the fall classic. So Brooklyn was chosen the next year and, of course, lost the 1956 World Series to the Yankees.

    The Los Angeles Dodgers, champions twice in three years, were invited after the 1966 season – and lost the World Series, once again dashing the hopes of those wanting to see two champions play in Japan. Two years later the St. Louis Cardinals, winners of the 1967 World Series, were invited to tour in October 1968, and they too lost the subsequent fall classic, to the Detroit Tigers.

    Shoriki died in October 1969, and his son took up the cause. Six months after Shoriki’s death, the San Francisco Giants visited Japan for spring training and lost six of nine games against Japanese competition. Despite not facing a World Series champion, the Japanese were gaining confidence that they measured up – 3½ years earlier they had won eight of 18 games against the Dodgers.

    The Yomiuri Giants were invited to Florida in the spring of 1971 to play six exhibition games against major-league competition. They were the best Japan had to offer – the 1970 season marked the sixth consecutive championship the Giants had captured, with three more still to come.

    The roster was impressive, featuring three of the biggest names in Japanese baseball. Foremost was Sadaharu Oh, the legendary left-handed slugger and by far the most famous Japanese player among American fans. He was widely known for his distinctive batting style, highlighted by balancing on his back leg while swinging, a style that drew comparisons to Mel Ott. It reminded others of a flamingo. Oh had hit 40 or more home runs eight straight years through 1970, including 55 in 1964, despite seasons 20 games shorter than in the United States. Through the 1971 season, the 31-year-old Oh had hit 486 career home runs and would play nine more years, ultimately slugging at least 30 home runs for an incredible 19 consecutive years, and 868 home runs for his career.

    The most famous and popular player among Japanese fans was charismatic 34-year-old third baseman Shigeo Nagashima. A hero thanks to his dramatic game-winning walk-off, or “Sayonara,” home run in the first game Emperor Hirohito ever attended, Nagashima was exceptional both at bat and in the field, hitting 444 career home runs with a .305 batting average.

    The manager of the Giants, Tetsuharu Kawakami, was known as the “God of Batting.” The winner of five batting titles and the first Japanese player to reach 2,000 hits, he took over as manager in 1961, three years after his retirement as a player, and never suffered a losing season at the helm. After winning pennants in 1961 and 1963 but losing the Japan Series both times, Kawakami had captured Japan Series wins in six straight seasons. It was time to measure Japanese baseball against the best – the mighty Baltimore Orioles, American League standard-bearers two years running and defending World Series champions. They were favorites to repeat in 1971 and finally bring the late Matsutaro Shoriki’s dream one step closer to reality.

    The Orioles, fresh off a fall classic victory over the Cincinnati Reds, accepted an invitation in January 1971 for a monthlong tour after the next World Series. The schedule included 18 games, 11 of them against the Yomiuri Giants.

    A couple of weeks after the invitation was accepted, the Japanese sports newspaper Hochi Shimbun commissioned a computer simulation of a theoretical seven-game series between the Orioles and the Giants. The computer results had the Orioles winning four of the seven games, with the Giants winning two and one game ending in a 12-inning tie.

    The Giants and Orioles previewed their postseason matchup during spring training in Miami on March 11, one of the half-dozen exhibition games Yomiuri played in Florida. Players mingled before the game, seven Giants surrounding Brooks Robinson behind the batting cage, including 5-foot-7, 140-pound pitcher Akira Tanaka, who could not resist measuring his hand against that of the Orioles third baseman in comparison.

    The Japanese were particularly impressed by the sight of 6-foot-4 Boog Powell, who was introduced to Sadaharu Oh. During their conversation, Powell leaned his massive frame against Oh and whispered, “Fella, you make more money than I do.” Oh replied, “47 home runs,” his total for the 1970 season.

    Brooks Robinson told reporters that Lee Walls, a former All-Star outfielder who played in Japan in 1965, thought Oh to be one of the five best hitters he had ever seen. Scout Gordon Windhorn, recently retired as a player after six seasons with the Hankyu Braves, recalled his advice to American pitchers facing Oh after they saw his stance and curious one-legged pause during his swing. “You think you can change speeds on him, but you can’t. He’ll just stand there and wait and keep that right leg balanced.”

    For his part, Oh said he enjoyed playing against Americans. “Friendships are very important to me,” he declared. “I also benefit from the spirit of the American players – the way they slide, the way they make double plays. The Japanese are much more conservative.”

    The game played that day was competitive. Both teams scored in the first inning, with the Orioles adding runs in the fourth and sixth to take a 3-1 lead. After some back-and-forth, Baltimore was ahead, 6-3, going into the last frame.

    Sadaharu Oh slapped a run-scoring single in the ninth, his second of the day. Then, with two out and one on, Shigeo Nagashima hit a long fly ball down the line that appeared to have tied the game. “I thought it was a home run,” said Nagashima “But the wind helped it go foul.” He was then retired and Baltimore won, 6-4.

    The Giants took heart that they had held their own, although several of Baltimore’s stars, including Frank and Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell, played only portions of the game. Tetsuharu Kawakami said of the Orioles, “Their physical superiority seemed indeed overwhelming before the game, but I found later they were not as powerful as I thought.” The Giants came away confident that they belonged on the same field, and looked forward to October.

    Relations between Japan and the United States grew tense in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Japan’s sensitivity always surfaced when the United States courted the attention of a rival. In July 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had completed a secret trip to the People’s Republic of China that resulted in Nixon being invited to meet with Mao Zedong. The invitation was accepted, with the meeting to take place within a year. This sent shock waves through Japan, which feared being abandoned by the United States. A month earlier, it was thought that all differences had been resolved through a negotiation aimed at returning Japanese territories seized during World War II, with Okinawa reverting to Japanese control in 1972.

    But the Japanese government was embarrassed by Nixon’s actions, the lack of forewarning about an earthshaking shift in American foreign policy considered a lack of respect, especially with Japan openly entrenched in a policy – thought to be shared by the United States – banning relations with China.

    Then, a month after announcing he was going to Beijing, Nixon announced a 10 percent import surcharge as part of an economic recovery package, further straining relations with Japan. Japanese students, unhappy with a continued military presence of the United States on Okinawa beyond 1972, began rallying against the US and the agreement, which delayed Japanese ratification of the deal until late November, after the Orioles had left the country.

    That fall, Emperor Hirohito, in his 45th year on the throne, became the first reigning emperor to travel abroad, returning from Europe a week prior to the arrival of the Orioles. He visited briefly with President Nixon during his first stop, in Anchorage, Alaska, as the Northern Lights danced overhead, punctuating Nixon’s attempt to mend fences.

    1971 Baltimore Orioles Goodwill Tour ticket (Robert Fitts Collection)

    While the 1966 Dodgers visited without Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the Orioles brought everyone. Frank and Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell were the offensive stars and Baltimore boasted a pitching staff featuring 20-game winners Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson. Of course, the curse continued, with the Orioles dropping the 1971 World Series to Pittsburgh in seven games. So once again, the Japanese were frustrated in their attempt to stage an informal world championship series. The 72-person traveling party also included Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, American League President Joe Cronin, and umpire Jim Honochick. Pitching coach George Bamberger remained home, having suffered a recent heart attack.

    The Orioles arrived in Japan on October 21, greeted by several hundred fans and dozens of newspaper photographers. The next day they headed out to Korakuen Stadium for their first workout and were surprised by 5,000 rabid Japanese fans, digesting their every move. They seemed most in awe of the 260-pound Powell.

    Each Orioles player received $4,000 plus another $1,000 in spending money; meal tabs at the hotel were picked up by their Japanese hosts. Earl Weaver, legendary for his intensity, relaxed many of the rules for the trip. Players were allowed to grow mustaches, banned during the regular season, and to drink at the hotel bar, a domain traditionally restricted to the manager and coaching staff. Brooks Robinson grew a mustache. So did Mark Belanger, Mike Cuellar, Curt Motton, and Andy Etchebarren. By the end of the tour, reliever Eddie Watt sported a full beard. Frank Robinson opted for a Fu Manchu.

    Weaver also relaxed his strictly enforced dress code of coats and ties, and surprised many by drinking and playing cards with his men. “I told the players I would relax the rules … as long as they did not abuse the privileges. I also told them once we put the uniforms on, I expect the same performance and effort as in the regular season.”

    Two days after the team arrived in Japan, 15 of the Orioles wives held a shopping party where outfielder Curt Motton and his wife were staying, Room 1208 at the New Otani Hotel, which became an impromptu store thanks to George Speccks, who billed himself as George the Silk Man. He had been passing out his business card in the lobby, and Motton’s wife, Jackie, took him up on his offer, inviting the other wives to sift through a collection of silks, kimonos, watches, and cameras.

    “You can imagine the bedlam in my room with all these girls crowded in,” said Jackie Motton, shaking her head. “We went through thirty bottles of (Coca-Cola) and by the time it was over, I felt like I had thrown some kind of wild party.” She spent more than $250, buying 19 kimonos and happi coats. The nonstop hard-sell of George the Silk Man ultimately broke down just about everyone at some point during the tour. If you wanted it, George and his associates would sell it to you.

    Korakuen Stadium was the second largest in Japan and home of the Yomiuri Giants, who had played before more than 2.3 million paying customers in 1971, their ninth straight year topping two million, and more than twice the number drawn in Baltimore. The facility had its challenges. The outfield distances were short (295 feet down the lines, 380 to center) and the clubhouse was tiny, with no toilets or showers, so players dressed at the hotel. Catered meals were provided before games, served by tuxedo-clad waiters.

    Before the first game, Bowie Kuhn met with Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, while Earl Weaver told reporters he hoped to win six to seven of the 11 games against the Giants. Kuhn threw out the first ball and read a message from President Nixon, and the Orioles appeared wearing uniforms bearing their names in both English and Japanese.

    Baltimore easily won the first two games, knocking Japanese baseball experts back on their heels a bit. Jim Palmer won the opener, 8-4, despite allowing home runs to Yukinobu Kuroe and Koji Ano in the sixth inning. The Giants seemed shaky, committing five errors leading to four unearned runs. Brooks Robinson homered to spark a five-run second inning for Baltimore. Neither Oh nor Nagashima managed to get a hit, while Boog Powell slugged one over the fence for the Orioles.

    The second game matched Orioles veteran southpaw Mike Cuellar against Giants ace Tsuneo Horiuchi. Don Buford robbed Sadaharu Oh of a home run, keeping the Japanese star hitless in the first two contests. Frank Robinson, battling a strained Achilles tendon, homered on a Horiuchi changeup, one of three Baltimore round-trippers during an easy 8-2 win. Robinson praised the umpiring while noting that the strike zone was a bit high. He also suggested that Horiuchi, who allowed six runs in six innings, should rely more on his fastball.

    The Orioles were amused, but at the same time honored by the ceremonial atmosphere surrounding the contests. Before every game, a group of young women in kimonos presented Earl Weaver with a bouquet. During games, tuxedo-clad waiters served coffee and tea in the dugout. Even writers were treated well, provided with hot towels after the fourth inning.

    Read the rest of the article on SABR.org

    ‘We Are Trying to Close the Gap, but It Is Very Wide Yet’: The Baltimore Orioles’ 1971 Tour of Japan
  • Nippon Professional Baseball Teams: A Primer

    Nippon Professional Baseball Teams: A Primer

    T-Ray (Trevor Raichura) & Thomas Love Seagull talked on March 7 about all twelve NPB teams, their appeal and history, in this podcast.

    What makes these teams unique? Why should you want to cheer for them? If you’re new to NPB, this is the episode for you! If you already know the league, this is still a good primer to help you remember what got you here in the first place!

    Listen here:

    https://trevorraichura.substack.com/p/nippon-professional-baseball-teams?utm_source=podcastemail%2Csubstack&publication_id=2412463&post_id=191839981&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=play_card_play_button&r=3yqqjp&triedRedirect=true

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 9, Randy Bass

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 9, Randy Bass

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The quiet slugger from Oklahoma who became a Kansai folk hero

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

    It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a chant.

    Kamisama. Hotokesama. Baasu-sama.

    God. Buddha. Bass.

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

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

    They meant it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Nine.

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

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

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

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

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

    “Hanshin Bus Stalls.”

    Or if he had a slump.

    “Hanshin Bus Breaks.”

    It was too easy.

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

    And then he started playing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Two outs. Runners on first and second.

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

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

    He had been waiting for that pitch for two years.

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

    It rose toward center field.

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

    The ball disappeared into it.

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

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

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

    Three consecutive home runs to center field.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He finished at 54.

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

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

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

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

    Triple Crown.

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

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

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

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

    It sounds absurd. It was perfectly Kansai.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Yet still, he hit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Even then, he sounded surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Think about that arc.

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

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

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

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

    He left abruptly. He returned gently.

    And through it all, the chant remained.

    Kamisama. Hotokesama. Baasu-sama.

    God.

    Buddha.

    Bass.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 10, Atsuya Furuta

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 10, Atsuya Furuta

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The four-eyed catcher who changed Japanese baseball

    For a long time in Japanese baseball, there was an unwritten rule about catchers. They were supposed to look a certain way: broad-shouldered, rugged, unmistakably athletic. The catcher was the field general, the toughest player on the diamond, the one who absorbed punishment without complaint. Above all, he was not supposed to wear glasses.

    Scouts repeated it often enough that it became a sort of conventional wisdom.

    Atsuya Furuta was a catcher. And he wore them anyway.

    Scouts worried openly about whether a four-eyed catcher could handle night games, whether his vision would hold under stadium lights, whether runners would exploit him.

    In fairness, he did not look like a future star. He did not come from a powerhouse program. He never played at Koshien. As a child in Hyogo Prefecture, he joined a local team and became a catcher largely because no one else wanted to and because, as he later joked, he was a little overweight*. Catching suited him immediately. It allowed him to think, to organize, and to control the flow of the game.

    *I also wore glasses as a child and was more than a little overweight. Maybe I should have been a catcher.

    He remained largely unknown through high school and chose a nearby public school rather than a prestigious baseball program. Only at Ritsumeikan University did his ability begin to emerge. He became a four-time Best Nine selection in the Kansai collegiate league, captained the team, and earned selection to Japan’s university national squad. By his senior year in 1987, teams were expected to draft him.

    Nippon-Ham promised to draft him out of university and then quietly passed, the explanation whispered afterward: a catcher with glasses could not succeed. Furuta sat through draft day surrounded by cameras and celebration prepared in advance, waiting for his name to be called. It never came. His teammate, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, remembered Furuta’s face as something he had never seen before. Not one of anger, not disbelief, just exhaustion.

    Instead of turning professional, he joined Toyota, working in the personnel department while playing industrial-league baseball. He handled employee disputes, organized company events, and lived the routine of an ordinary working adult. Later he would say those years gave him a normal sense of money and responsibility, something many professional athletes never experience.

    He understood that visibility was his only path back to professional baseball. The 1988 Seoul Olympics became his opportunity. Determined to make the national team, he researched the coaching staff and deliberately adjusted how he presented himself during tryouts, playing with visible energy and constant communication. He earned a roster spot and helped Japan win a silver medal, proving he belonged at the highest level.

    The Yakult Swallows selected him in the second round of the 1989 draft.

    He had finally made it.

    But acceptance was not immediate. Yakult’s new manager, Katsuya Nomura, the greatest catcher in Japanese baseball history, initially doubted the idea of drafting an industrial-league catcher with glasses. The team needed pitching, and Nomura believed amateur success rarely translated cleanly to professional baseball. Early evaluations were blunt: a first-rate arm, second-rate bat, third-rate game-calling.

    What changed everything was the moment pitchers began throwing to him.

    From the first spring training camp in Yuma, Arizona, teammates noticed something unusual. His throwing motion was impossibly quick. His catching was quiet and stable. His hips were extraordinarily flexible, allowing him to sink low without losing balance, presenting a steady target that calmed pitchers instinctively. Coaches timed his release to second base and watched him win throwing contests against veterans. Nomura, observing quietly, realized the fundamentals were already elite.

    “All he needs,” the manager later thought, “is to learn how to think.”

    Furuta learned quickly because thinking was already his instinct.

    He read constantly on road trips, unusual enough that Nomura once remarked he had rarely seen a player reading serious books instead of magazines. The praise embarrassed Furuta but also changed him; afterward, he joked, he felt unable to return to comics.

    As a 24-year-old in 1990, he earned the starting job quickly. A veteran pitcher told him bluntly that rookie catchers were not allowed to call games; Furuta’s job was to signal inside or outside and catch whatever came. It stung his pride, but he treated the moment as a puzzle rather than an insult. He talked constantly with the pitcher, asked questions, blocked everything in the dirt, and threw relentlessly behind runners. Around their fifth start together, the pitcher finally told him, “From today, I’ll leave it to you.”

    Trust, Furuta learned, was earned one pitch at a time.

    He would later explain that young catchers misunderstood the position. Strategy came later. What came first was proof that nothing would get past you, that runners would be controlled, that pitchers could throw without fear. Only when a pitcher felt reassured could he accept guidance. He encouraged pitchers to shake off signs, believing responsibility sharpened their execution. The exchange of signals, he said, was a conversation conducted with fingers rather than words. Catching, he believed, was less about toughness than about understanding people.

    To understand teammates better, he spent time with them away from the field. Sometimes they played video games. Often they played shogi, which he loved deeply enough to earn formal certificates from the Japan Shogi Association. Shogi revealed personality and how a person performed under pressure. Pitchers brought those same habits to the mound.

    Nomura berated him constantly, sometimes during games, demanding explanations for every pitch sequence. “The catcher decides whether a pitcher lives or dies,” he would shout. Furuta endured the criticism by moving closer on the bench rather than retreating. If knowledge was hidden in those lectures, he was going to find it.

    By his second season, his transformation stunned the league.

    In 1991 he hit .340 and won the Central League batting title. During the All-Star Game he threw out three runners attempting to steal and earned MVP honors. Catchers were not supposed to dominate offensively; Furuta ignored the rule. Over his career he would hit .300 eight times, the most by any catcher in Japanese professional baseball history.

    The following year he added power, hitting 30 home runs. In 1993 he led the league in hits and produced one of the most astonishing defensive seasons ever recorded: a .644 caught-stealing rate, still a Japanese professional baseball record. Runners stopped trying.

    His defensive brilliance was subtle. He framed pitches with his lower body rather than his hands, shifting his hips so borderline pitches appeared centered. He rejected traditional mechanics when experience suggested better solutions, even persuading Nomura to reconsider long-held catching techniques. Teammates later said defensive positioning across the entire field flowed from Furuta’s decisions behind the plate.

    Yakult transformed alongside him. Under Nomura’s data-driven “ID Baseball,” the Swallows rose from perennial underperformers to champions. Furuta became the center of it all, winning league MVP awards in 1993 and 1997 while guiding the team to multiple Japan Series titles. In 1997 he delivered the decisive home run of the Japan Series and became the first Central League catcher to win both regular-season MVP and Japan Series MVP. In 2001, returning from a serious knee injury, he batted .500 in the championship series while neutralizing the feared offense of the Kintetsu Buffaloes, led by Tuffy Rhodes and Norihiro Nakamura*.

    *The pair combined for 101 home runs that season.

    Through it all, he remained approachable, smiling behind familiar glasses that earned him the early nickname”“Nobita,” after the main character from Doraemon. Fans embraced the contrast: a cerebral catcher who looked more like a student than a warrior.

    And because Furuta was Furuta, even exhibitions became opportunities to make history.

    In the 1992 All-Star Game at Chiba Marine Stadium, managers searching for ways to energize the exhibition made an unexpected decision*: a catcher would bat leadoff. Furuta’s name appeared at the top of the Central League lineup, an almost absurd choice in a sport that traditionally hid catchers deep in the order.

    *Masumi Kuwata was on the mound for the Central League. Leading off for the Pacific League? None other than his former high school teammate and the other half of the KK Combo, Kazuhiro Kiyohara.

    He responded by turning the game into a personal highlight reel. In his first at-bat he drove a ball to center for a triple. Later came a single, then a home run to right field. By the middle innings he stood one hit away from something never before accomplished in an All-Star Game: the cycle.

    His final chance arrived in the ninth inning. Already behind in the count, he shortened his swing and focused on contact, sending a drive over the center fielder’s head for a double. The cycle was complete. Furuta later admitted he had been aware of the stakes, joking that another player, Yomiuri’s Kaoru Okazaki, was also close and that whoever finished first might win the MVP. When the ball skipped past the outfielder, he felt relief as much as triumph. Asked why he stopped at second instead of stretching for third, he laughed and said his legs had gotten tangled up beneath him.

    Another improbable moment came toward the end of his career. On June 28, 2003, against Hiroshima, aged 37, Furuta hit four consecutive home runs in a single game, tying one of the rarest records in professional baseball. Even as teammates urged him to chase history, he reportedly asked manager Tsutomu Wakamatsu with a laugh whether it was acceptable to match Sadaharu Oh. After the fourth homer, a young fan retrieved the ball and tried to return it; Furuta told the boy to keep it and posed for a photograph instead.

    By then, the idea that a catcher wearing glasses could not succeed had become laughable.

    He leaned into the identity instead. When laser eye surgery became popular years later, Furuta refused it. The glasses, he decided, were part of who he was. If anything, succeeding while wearing them made the accomplishment more meaningful. Young players with poor eyesight began telling him they continued playing because they had seen him play. That, he would later say, mattered more than any record.

    In 1998, Furuta became chairman of the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association. At the time, it did not seem like a role destined to define his legacy. That changed in 2004.

    When news broke that the Kintetsu Buffaloes and Orix BlueWave planned to merge, the announcement triggered fears that Japanese baseball would contract into a single league with fewer teams. Owners framed the decision as financial necessity. Players saw something else: disappearing jobs and shrinking opportunity.

    Furuta immediately demanded explanations from league officials. At first, the requests were ignored. Decisions, owners implied, belonged to management. Players were expected to accept them.

    He refused.

    The issue escalated quickly. Rumors spread of further mergers and a potential ten-team or even eight-team league. Furuta argued publicly that contraction would shrink the sport’s market rather than save it. Baseball, he said, needed expansion and innovation, not retreat.

    Negotiations dragged on through summer. Fans, initially confused, began paying attention, especially after prominent owner Tsuneo Watanabe of the Yomiuri Giants dismissed the dispute with the phrase “mere players.” Public sympathy shifted dramatically. Furuta appeared repeatedly on television explaining the stakes calmly and methodically, apologizing to fans even while defending the players’ position.

    In September 2004, for the first time in seventy years of Japanese professional baseball, players went on strike.

    Games stopped for two days.

    Players held autograph sessions to thank fans for their patience. Furuta appeared on television again, visibly emotional as he apologized while explaining why the decision had become unavoidable. The strike was not about salaries, he insisted, but about preserving the structure of the sport itself.

    Negotiations reopened. Owners softened their stance and the creation of the Rakuten Golden Eagles preserved the twelve-team, two-league system that continues today. One franchise still disappeared—the Orix BlueWave and Kintetsu Buffaloes merged to become the Orix Buffaloes—but the broader collapse many feared never came.

    For many fans, Furuta’s leadership during the crisis mattered as much as anything he accomplished between the foul lines. He had protected not just players but the continuity of Japanese professional baseball itself.

    In 2006, the Yakult Swallows named him player-manager, the first in Japanese baseball in nearly three decades since Nomura himself.

    Furuta accepted without hesitation. To him, the role resembled what many forty-year-old professionals already did: balancing individual performance with organizational responsibility. Still, the reality proved exhausting. Managing required long-term planning, media responsibility, and constant decision-making layered atop the physical demands of catching.

    True to his analytical instincts, he challenged tradition. Japanese baseball had long treated the sacrifice bunt as sacred, especially for the second hitter. Furuta disagreed. Outs, he believed, were too valuable to surrender easily. He preferred aggressive offense, prioritizing hits and baserunners over automatic strategy, a philosophy that sometimes puzzled reporters expecting conservative tactics. Critics described his baseball as overly bold, but Furuta insisted he was just adapting to the roster he had: when pitching depth was limited, winning required scoring runs.

    The experiment produced mixed results. Yakult finished respectably at first, but injuries and roster imbalance caught up with the team. By 2007, he knew the end had arrived.

    After the Swallows were eliminated from postseason contention, he announced through tears that he would retire as both player and manager.

    His final game at Meiji Jingu Stadium felt less like a goodbye than a celebration of an era. Tickets sold out immediately and more than 33,000 fans filled the ballpark, holding green placards bearing his number 27. In his final at-bat, he faced longtime rival Shinji Sasaoka, who had held his own retirement ceremony only a day earlier. As chants of “Fu-ru-ta!” echoed from both fan bases, the at-bat ended with a routine ground ball. He embraced teammate Shingo Takatsu on the mound. The farewell ceremony ended with simple words: “Thank you for eighteen years. Let’s meet again.”

    After retirement, Furuta did something that surprised even those who thought they understood him. Three days after cleaning out his locker, he flew alone to New York.

    There was no baseball reason. He simply wanted to go because he had never been and people told him he should. He ran laps through Central Park, read on benches, watched theater at night, and wandered the city trying to understand what people meant when they called it stimulating. After about ten days, satisfied that he had experienced it for himself, he went home.

    In 2015, he was elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame with overwhelming support.

    He finished with 2,097 hits, becoming only the second catcher in NPB history to reach 2,000. He won two Central League MVP awards, two Japan Series MVPs, nine Best Nine selections, and ten Gold Gloves. He appeared in seventeen All-Star Games. He slugged 217 home. His career batting average of .294 remains extraordinary for a catcher who carried such defensive responsibility. His career caught-stealing rate of .462 remains a Japanese record.

    Oh, and he also threw out Barry Bonds trying to steal second during the 2000 MLB Japan All-Star Series.

    When asked during the induction what record made him proudest, he talked about his glasses.

    Nomura’s influence never disappeared. Their relationship was not sentimental but demanding, forged through criticism and relentless expectation. Nomura pushed him harder than anyone else, often publicly, believing that elite players required pressure rather than praise. Furuta responded not with obedience but with thought, absorbing ideas while shaping them into something uniquely his own.

    Over time, he became what Nomura valued most: not a copy, but a successor capable of independent judgment.

    Late in Nomura’s life, the two appeared together again at Jingu Stadium during an old-timers’ game. The aging manager, unsteady on his feet, stepped into the batter’s box supported by former players. Furuta stood nearby, watching the man who had once scolded him endlessly now swing slowly at a ceremonial pitch. The crowd roared anyway.

    Nomura often said that leaving money behind made a man third-rate, leaving fame made him second-rate, but leaving people behind made him first-rate.

    If that is true, then Atsuya Furuta’s greatest achievement cannot be measured in hits or championships. It lives in the catchers who learned to think differently, the players who gained a stronger voice, and the fans who watched Japanese baseball survive a moment when it nearly changed forever.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • Cardinals Take Care of Business in the Land of the Rising Sun (1968)

    Cardinals Take Care of Business in the Land of the Rising Sun (1968)

    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 Mark Kanter writes about the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals visit to Japan.

    During 1968, with the United States and much of the world in turmoil, the National League champion St. Louis Cardinals traveled to Japan to play baseball and sightsee. Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun, they played 18 games over 33 days from October 22 to November 24. The Cardinals had participated in a previous goodwill tour to Japan, in 1958, when they won 14 out of 16 games. Since that time, the Japanese had become more competitive against major-league competition, and held the visiting Los Angeles Dodgers to a 9-8-1 record in 1966.

    On Tuesday, October 22, a dozen days after the Cardinals lost the World Series to the Detroit Tigers in seven games, they traveled from Los Angeles to Tokyo on a Japan Airlines chartered plane. President Lyndon Baines Johnson promoted the tour by stating that the two countries had more in common than just baseball, but that baseball does bring them together.

    While on the plane during a fog delay at Los Angeles, Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst, Commissioner William D. Eckert, and future Hall of Famer Lou Brock were photographed discussing the 33-day tour. Schoendienst was asked which pitchers he would start in the first few games of the tour. He implied that the two-week layoff after the World Series might hamper the pitchers’ conditioning and that he was still figuring out the rotation.

    Each of the Cardinals players who participated in the series received $3,000 and an additional $750 from the Yomiuri Shimbun. The latter sum was provided in yen, which had to be spent in Japan. The $3,000 would be worth about $23,000 in 2022, and the $750 in yen would be worth about $2,455. The players’ wives were very happy to be included in the trip even if each player had to pay an extra $1,500 to bring them along.

    Before their departure, players Mike Shannon and Tim McCarver said they were interested in doing some hunting while in Japan. Bob Gibson, however, was ambivalent about participating in the tour. Immediately after the end of the World Series, he received a vaccination in his arm and was complaining about having to continue pitching after the long season and seven-game World Series. His pitching arm had ached since the second half of the season and he worried that his arm might get damaged with the extra games.

    The 1968 expansion draft was held between the World Series and the beginning of the tour. As a result, some of the players participating in the tour were actually no longer on the Cardinals roster. Pitcher Larry Jaster, whom the Cardinals had lost in the draft to the Montreal Expos, was nonetheless asked to go along. The Cardinals also took Bobby Tolan and Wayne Granger to Japan even though they had been traded to the Cincinnati Reds for Vada Pinson. The trade relieved the Cardinals from having to protect both Tolan and Granger in the expansion draft. The Cardinals traded Johnny Edwards to Houston, as well, in preparation for the draft. Edwards also made the trip.

    Though they lost the 1968 World Series to the Tigers, the Cardinals had won the Series in 1964 and 1967, and were one of the premier teams in the major leagues. Nevertheless, the Japanese felt that the series between the Cardinals and Yomiuri Giants would be very competitive. An anonymous Giants player suggested that the Cardinals did not seem that formidable. The Giants did seem to have an advantage because the Cardinals had played the tough seven-game World Series but then had a two-week layoff before starting play in Japan.

    A sportswriter from the Hochi sports newspaper wrote, “I think Japanese teams can win five, maybe six, in this tour. I saw all 20 American major league teams this summer, and frankly, I was disappointed by American baseball. Many of our techniques are equal or superior – like pitching control, bunting and umpiring accuracy.” But, the writer went on to say, “[T]he Japanese game lacks the professional attitude one finds in America. … There is no sense of adventure in our game. An American runner might try to go from first to second base if he thinks he has a chance. A Japanese wouldn’t even consider the possibility. Too much chance of losing face. In a word, what we need is more ‘hassuru’ [hustle].” Daryl Spencer, the former major leaguer then playing in Japan, agreed. “The base running is terrible, and so is the coaching,” he said. He noted that players did not run out groundballs if they felt certain that they were going to be out, and that many Japanese baserunners were thrown out because they kept their heads down not knowing the situation.

    As the games began, the Cardinals started poorly, losing two of the first five. They looked lethargic. Their pitching and hitting were somewhat mediocre, probably due to having just played the seven-game World Series, not practicing much during the two-week layoff, and jet lag. The first three games were played at Korakuen Stadium, in Tokyo, on Friday, October 25; Saturday, October 26; and Sunday, October 27.

    The Cardinals beat the Yomiuri Giants by a score of 9-8 in the first game. The Giants, the Japanese champions since 1965, pushed the Cardinals to the limit. Gibson, coming off one of the greatest seasons any pitcher had in the twentieth century, gave up five hits, two walks, and four runs, all earned, in just two innings. He was nursing his arthritic pitching elbow, having taken pills just before the game to dull the pain. Wayne Granger, who was no longer in the organization, came on in relief and was the Cardinals’ best pitcher for the game. His line was three innings pitched, one hit, three strikeouts, five bases on balls, and one run, which was earned. Steve Carlton took the mound in the sixth inning. Although Carlton struck out eight batters, he allowed five hits and was wowed by a 420-foot home run that Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh pulled into the right-field bleachers.

    Carlton later credited Oh’s home run and the trip to Japan for the development of his signature slider. He told Steve Wulf of Sports Illustrated in 1994, “I knew how effective Bob Gibson’s slider was but Bob had elbow problems, so I had been looking for a way to throw the slider and minimize the wrist turn that causes elbow injuries. I had been fooling with a pitch, but in Japan, after Sadaharu Oh hit two home runs off me, I figured, what the heck. I threw Oh, a left-handed hitter, the slider. When he backed away and the ball was a strike, I knew I had something.” Exactly when this event occurred is unknown as Oh hit only a single home run off Carlton during the tour. In fact, after the opening-game home run, Oh did not get a hit off Carlton.

    Neither Gibson nor Carlton was a fan of the low mound at Korakuen Stadium. Nor would Gibson be a fan of the lower mound in the US major leagues for the 1969 season onward. Carlton complained that the mound was “almost flat compared to what I’m used to. I couldn’t get behind the ball.” After the opening game, manager Schoendienst suggested that Gibson was out of condition after not pitching since the end of the World Series.Tetsuharu Kawakami, the Giants’ manager, complained that the Cardinals were out of shape after Gibson was knocked out. Soon enough manager Kawakami would regret his complaint.

    The Giants beat the Cardinals 3-2 in the second game of the series. The Giants were led by outfielder Shigeru Takada, who had two hits and a stolen base. Takada, the 1968 Japan Central League Rookie of the Year, scored the first run of the game in the first inning when he scampered home as Akira Kunimatsu grounded into a double play started by shortstop Dal Maxvill. Giants pitchers Kunio Jonouchi and Yoshiyasu Tanebe held the Cardinals to two runs and five hits. The Giants were able to cobble together enough hits off Briles, Jaster, and Mike Torrez to win the game. Tanebe was the winner. Torrez took the loss when he gave up a game-winning single (today, it would be called a walk-off single) to second baseman Shozo Doi, with one out in the bottom of the ninth. Relief pitcher Tanebe scored the winning run. He made it on base after an unsuccessful sacrifice attempt to move Yasuharu Taki to second base. Tanebe went to second base when Torrez walked Takada. Tolan hit the only home run in the game.

    The Cardinals lost to the Japan All-Stars, 6-0, on October 27, again at Korakuen Stadium. Oh was the batting star of the game when he hit a grand slam in the eighth to put the game away for the All-Stars. Shortstop Kazuhide Funada of the Nishitetsu Lions hit a solo shot in the fifth inning, tallying the first run of the game. Pitchers Joe Hoerner, Mel Nelson, and Dick Hughes of the Cardinals were the victims of the All-Stars’ offensive barrage. Four Japanese pitchers, Mutsuo Minagawa of the Nankai Hawks, Yutaka Enatsu of the Hanshin Tigers, Minoru Murayama of the Tigers, and Fumio Narita of the Tokyo Orions, pitched for the All-Stars. Enatsu struck out seven Cardinals in three innings. He became a standout during the tour.

    The Japanese didn’t seem overly impressed with the Cardinals early in the tour. Some writers noted that the Giants would be even better once they got back third baseman Shigeo Nagashima (the 1968 Central League MVP) and center fielder Isao Shibata, who were both sidelined with health issues. “[A] Tokyo sportswriter spoke for many when he said: ‘I am disappointed in the Cardinals. There is no show, no excitement about them.’”

    On Tuesday, October 29, at Maruyama Stadium in Sapporo, the Cardinals defeated the Giants, 6-3. Joe Hague, a Cardinal prospect, hit a home run. Carlton and Granger pitched for the Cardinals. Granger was the winner of the game. Tsuneo Horiuchi was the one pitcher who pitched well for the Giants. He gave up one hit in two innings.

    After each game, the players and the coaching staff were showered with gifts like electric shavers, happi coats, photo albums, electronic equipment, and yen if they were the winning pitcher, manager, or best player. Their entourage was sometimes taken aback when presented with foods such as sushi, raw salmon, jellyfish, bean curd, and rice confections at Japanese restaurants. Sometimes, the players didn’t have a clue as to what they were eating. There were times when they could order up “American” food at their hotels. The Cardinals even met up with a number of interesting items in their dugouts, including charcoal pits and tea kettles.

    The Cardinals met the Giants again on October 30 at Miyagi Prefecture Stadium in Sendai, about 230 miles north of Tokyo. Gibson, who won the game, 8-1, was described as a “speedballer” in the Japan Times. He pitched five innings, giving up one hit, striking out six, and walking one. Jaster gave up three hits and three walks in four innings of mop-up work. Gibson appeared to be over his jet lag and inaction. Brock led off the game with a bunt single. Center fielder Curt Flood followed up with a single that moved Brock to third base with one out. Then catcher Tim McCarver hit a grounder to the pitcher, Kunio Jonouchi, who threw the ball away trying to get Flood at second. Brock scored and the floodgates opened, allowing the Cardinals to score four more runs in the frame when Orlando Cepeda, Hague, Shannon, and Phil Gagliano all followed with singles.

    The Cardinals hit a barrage of home runs in the rest of the series. For instance, in the sixth game of the tour, at Osaka Stadium, they beat the combined forces of the Giants and the Nankai Hawks, 7-1. Masanori “Mashi” Murakami started the game and pitched three no-hit innings. Murakami was the first Japanese to pitch in the major leagues. He had pitched for the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and 1965, with good results – 89⅓ innings with a 5-1 record, a 3.43 ERA, and 9 saves. He had a WAR of 1.6 for those two seasons. In 1968, pitching for the Nankai Hawks, he won 18 and lost 4 with an ERA of 2.38 and a WHIP of 1.019. Hague hit a home run for the Cardinals, while Oh hit his third home run of the series. In the 10th game, on November 7 at Toyano Stadium in Niigata, the Cardinals hit four home runs en route to an 8-1 win as Carlton and Torrez combined for a two-hitter. The only run scored by the Giants was on a home run by catcher Makoto Tsuchida. Flood (two home runs), Shannon, and Brock were the long-ball hitters for the Cardinals.

    The Cardinals became a buzzsaw from games 9 through 18 – whether they were facing the Giants, an all-star team, a combined Giants/Nishitetsu Lions team, a combined Giants/Chunichi Dragons team, or a combined Giants/Hiroshima Toyo Carp team. The Cardinals won eight and lost two games. They hit a total of 23 home runs in those 10 games and scored 69 runs to 48 by the Japanese.

    On November 8, a day off from games, some of the Cardinals players including, Brock, Cepeda, Ray Washburn, and Gibson, and coach Dick Sisler visited with Vietnam war wounded at various US military hospitals in Japan. Brock visited and signed autographs for wounded at the US Army Hospital at Camp Zama. Gibson, Cepeda, Washburn, and Sisler visited with the servicemen at Kishine Hospital while others visited Camp Oji and Camp Drake The servicemen discussed pitching with Washburn. Some Marines explained to the players that they were celebrating the anniversary of the start of the Marines. Gibson started to ask the other players and Sisler when and where the Marines had been formed. Sisler provided the date of 1775 and Washburn and Cepeda provided Philadelphia as the location. Gibson added that the Marines were started in a bar in that colonial city. Gibson suggested that his arm was hurting during the visit. After that, one of the Marines asked Gibson how his leg was feeling after being broken by a batted ball hit by Roberto Clemente in 1967. He said it was feeling good until he was asked about it.

    On Saturday, November 16, ABC’s Wide World of Sports televised the taped-delayed November 9 game against the Japan All-Stars at Tokyo Stadium. Gibson pitched five innings, struck out seven batters, walked six, and gave up three runs, all earned. He contributed offensively, too, with a single, a double, and a steal of second base. Gibson even struck out Oh twice. He did give up a three-run homer to Shinichi Eto in the first inning. Catcher Katsuya Nomura, who was the next batter, was the all-time Japan leader in career home runs at that point. Gibson got Nomura to fly out to right field.

    The Cardinals beat a combined Giants-Carp team in Hiroshima, 5-3, on November 12. Torrez pitched a complete-game seven hitter. Yoshiro Sotokoba of the Carp, who won the Central League ERA title, pitched three innings, giving up six hits, four walks, and four runs, all unearned. After the game, the Cardinals and their entourage went on a sightseeing trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. While many of the players were too young to remember the 1945 bombings, they quickly understood the devastation that that holocaust created. Commissioner Eckert (a former Air Force lieutenant general), Schoendienst, and Musial laid wreaths at the memorial.

    In Nagoya, at Nagoya Stadium, on November 19, the Cardinals defeated a combination of Yomiuri Giants and Chunichi Dragons, 3-2. Torrez and Brock hit home runs. Torrez is forever remembered by legions of baseball fans for giving up Bucky Dent’s home run in the 163rd and final tiebreaker game of the 1978 AL East regular season, which propelled the Yankees into the ALCS. The Japanese team did score once in the fourth inning off Torrez.

    Every once in a while the Japanese team would come up with a pitching gem to defeat the Cardinals. The 16th game of the tour showcased Akira Takahashi, who pitched a two-hit shutout for the Giants. Brock and McCarver got the only hits in the game for the Cardinals. Takahashi didn’t record a strikeout. He had had an up-and down career until 1968. He became the Giants’ third starter from 1963 through 1965 with middling results. In 1963 he won 14 and lost 13 with a 2.80 ERA, which was third best for the Giants rotation. After 1965 he was moved to the bullpen. However, he had a renaissance year in 1968 when he became a part-time starter. He won nine and lost eight for the Giants in 1968 with an ERA of 2.90 and a WHIP of 1.026. Interestingly, he pitched only seven shutouts in his career: three in 1963, two in 1965, and two in 1971.

    The final game of the tour encapsulated the dominance of the Cardinals hitters over the Japanese. The game was played in Shizuoka, about 90 milessouthwest of Tokyo, on November 20. Exactly 34 years earlier, on November 20, 1934, in the same ballpark, Eiji Sawamura held Babe Ruth’s All-Americans to just one run as he fanned Charlie Gehringer, Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx in succession. Although Sawamura lost the game, 1-0, the outing had made him a national hero. But the 1968 game was different. The Cardinals won, 16-9, with 14 hits compared with the Giants’ 12. The Cardinals hit seven home runs – two by Cepeda, two by Ed Spiezio, and one each by Hague (a grand slam), Brock and Shannon. The Giants hit four home runs with Shigeru Takada and Isao Shibata hitting one apiece and Oh hitting his final two homers of the series. Jaster and Granger were the Cardinals pitchers. Granger ended up with the win.

    At the end of the final game, each of the Cardinals players gave a bat to a Giants player. They swapped caps and said sayonara. This may have been when Oh gave Brock one of his compressed bats. Oh had been using this kind of bat since the 1964 season. He started to use a hand-made bat made by Jun Ishii. Ishii was looking for a harder wood and started to make his bats using the wood from a male yachidamo tree. The water and air had to be removed from the wood to ensure that it was as hard as possible. The sound of the bat hitting the ball provided Oh with a sound like no other. Bowie Kuhn, who became commissioner in 1969, barred Brock from using the compressed bat. In Japan the use of a compressed bat was disallowed after Oh retired in 1980. The bat was thought to give an advantage to the hitter because the wood is condensed. However, the research is not definitive.

    Despite the Japanese media’s pre-tour belief that their countrymen would challenge the Cardinals, the Japanese did not fare as well as they had anticipated. St. Louis won the series, 13 games to 5. The Giants, winners of four consecutive Japanese titles on their way to nine in a row, as well as the Japanese all-star teams, were thoroughly dominated by the Cardinals’ hitting – even though they were not considered a great hitting team during the 1968 National League campaign.

    The Cardinals, who hit 73 home runs in the 162-game regular season, hit 30 in the 18-game series. Mike Shannon suggested that the Cardinals would hit 300 home runs in a season playing in the smaller parks and against Japanese pitching. Up-and-coming young pitcher Torrez, who won three and lost one on the tour, hit .571. He stated that the Japanese hitters would choke up after two strikes. They didn’t go for the long ball, except perhaps for Oh. His opinion was that US major-league hitters were more often looking for the long ball.

    Oh led all of the players with six home runs. He had hit 58 in the Japanese regular season. Brock, Cepeda, and Shannon each hit five home runs and Hague pitched in with four. Oh had the most hits, 21 (he hit .356). Brock had 20 hits. Cepeda led the tour with 17 RBIs; Oh and Hague were tied with 15. Granger had four wins along with a 2.21 ERA. Torrez had a 2.13 ERA and three wins. Gibson had 20 strikeouts, followed by Carlton with 17, Granger with 16, and Hanshin’s Yutaka Enatsu with 15. Enatsu pitched great against the Cardinals. He won two games while giving up only four hits and striking out 15 in nine innings, and had a 0.00 ERA. Gibson and Carlton were relatively mediocre on the tour. Gibson won two games while posting a 3.94 ERA in 16 innings. Carlton, who won one game, had a 5.40 ERA in 15 innings.

    At the end of the tour, the Cardinals entourage felt that Oh and Enatsu were ready to play in the US major leagues. Schoendienst was effusive in his praise for both players and suggested that Enatsu was one of the best left-handed pitchers he had ever seen. He noted that Oh probably wouldn’t come to the United States because of salary demands. Oh made about $97,000 and Enatsu made about $50,000. Both had lucrative product endorsement contracts as well.

    The major leagues have had a number of Japanese players who have done very well since 1968. They players include Hideo Nomo, Hideki Matsui, Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and Shohei Ohtani. Moreover, Japanese ballplayers won the first two World Baseball Classics, in 2006 and 2009. However, in 1968, the Cardinals were the Kings in Japan. Interestingly, the Cardinals had to wait another 14 years to win a pennant and participate in a World Series.

    read the rest of the article on SABR.org

    Cardinals Take Care of Business in the Land of the Rising Sun (1968)
  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 11, Masumi Kuwata

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 11, Masumi Kuwata

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The thinking pitcher who survived by understanding the game

    Baseball has always loved its certainties: the tall pitcher, the overpowering fastball, the obvious prodigy. Masumi Kuwata was none of those things. He was small for a professional pitcher, barely 174 centimeters tall when he debuted, reserved where others were loud, thoughtful about his craft where others relied on instinct. Even as a teenager surrounded by giants, he looked ordinary enough to be overlooked.

    And yet, from almost the beginning, baseball seemed to bend toward him.

    He was born on April 1, 1968, in Yao City, Osaka, the youngest student in his class because of his birthday*. That detail followed him everywhere. He was always smaller, always younger, always forced to compete against boys who seemed physically ahead. Instead of discouraging him, it shaped him. Kuwata learned early that survival in baseball would not come from strength but from understanding.

    *In Japan, children start school in April after turning six. Those born on April 1 begin that same April, while those born on or after April 2 start the following year.

    He began playing in elementary school. Exactly when he joined is unclear, but one moment remained vivid to Kuwata: he quit. Bullied by older players, he walked away from organized baseball for a time and spent months throwing a ball alone against a wall. His father, Taiji, devised unusual training methods built on creativity rather than repetition, such as removing all the cotton from his son’s baseball gloves so that it would hurt if he caught the ball poorly. By fifth grade, Masumi was already a primary pitcher. Teammates remembered not just velocity but control and the uncanny sense that the ball went exactly where he wanted it to.

    By middle school, opponents spoke about him with disbelief. Catcher Shuji Nishiyama, his childhood friend and teammate and future two-time Best Nine award winner, later said Kuwata threw around 140 kilometers per hour (about 87 mph) even then, but what stunned hitters was precision. The ball arrived only where the mitt was set. Years later Nishiyama would say that among every pitcher he had ever seen, Kuwata remained the greatest in total ability.

    When he entered PL Gakuen High School in 1983, he arrived alongside a player who embodied certainty itself: Kazuhiro Kiyohara, already famous for prodigious power. Compared to towering teammates and fearsome sluggers, the quiet right-hander barely stood out. Coaches initially did not expect much from him as a hitter, and he was not immediately a regular. He even told his mother he was thinking of leaving the team. Her response was simple: even as a backup, remain a pitcher for three years and finish what you started.

    What changed everything was a simple throwing drill. While other players lobbed high, arcing throws to gain distance, Kuwata fired low, direct throws nearly eighty meters. When upperclassmen told him to throw higher, he simply replied, “I’m a pitcher,” and continued the same way. Coach Junji Nakamura decided at that moment to develop him as one.

    Opportunity arrived when other pitchers faltered. As a first-year student wearing number 17, he took the mound in the Osaka tournament and dominated. Soon he was leading PL Gakuen to Koshien, Japanese high school baseball’s grandest stage.

    At fifteen years old, Kuwata became the ace of a national champion.

    The partnership between Kuwata and Kiyohara, the KK Combo, became a social phenomenon. Together they carried PL Gakuen to five consecutive Koshien appearances, winning twice and finishing runner-up twice. Kuwata compiled 20 Koshien victories, a postwar record, and struck out 150 batters while also hitting six home runs. He pitched, fielded, and hit with startling completeness, once describing batting as feeling like playing catch: move the glove, or bat, precisely to the ball’s center.

    There were moments that already hinted at the player he would become. Facing elite competition, he sometimes sensed outcomes before they happened. On one famous home run, he later said he knew the ball would leave the park the instant it left the pitcher’s hand, as if guided by something beyond calculation, what he called an unseen force rather than his own power.

    Even then, Kuwata approached baseball differently. At the time, there existed a widely discussed belief in Japanese baseball that summer Koshien championship pitchers rarely succeeded as professionals. Many arrived famous and left injured. Kuwata, undersized and already heavily used, heard those doubts clearly. Rather than resist them emotionally, he treated them as a problem to solve. If Koshien heroes burned out early, how could he last longer? He began studying training methods, nutrition, recovery, and mechanics while still a teenager, determined to build a pitcher who could survive years into the future rather than dominate briefly in the present.

    He also believed baseball contained something spiritual, but never mystical without effort. He prayed not for success but to be guided toward “the best path,” convinced that hard work allowed the baseball gods to notice you.

    The path turned complicated in 1985.

    The professional draft that year centered on Kiyohara, who openly desired to join the Yomiuri Giants. Kuwata publicly declared he would attend Waseda University instead. Most teams respected that decision and avoided drafting him.

    Then the Giants selected him first overall.

    The moment detonated into controversy. Kiyohara, watching the draft, wept openly. Rumors spread that Kuwata and the Giants had arranged a secret agreement. Protest calls flooded his family home. The episode became known as the “KK Draft Incident,” one of Japanese baseball’s most bitter controversies since the Egawa affair. The Giants seem to be involved in a lot of those.

    Kuwata denied any secret deal. He had merely decided privately that if the Giants selected him first, he would turn professional; otherwise he would attend Waseda. The decision had not been deception so much as the hesitation and confusion of a seventeen-year-old caught between dreams. Giants manager Sadaharu Oh insisted the selection had long been planned, praising Kuwata’s situational intelligence and recalling a triple play he had executed at Koshien as evidence of extraordinary baseball instinct. Still, at seventeen years old, he entered professional baseball already cast, unfairly, as a villain.

    The burden followed him into his rookie season. He was given number 18, the number of ace pitchers. But while Kiyohara starred immediately for Seibu and won Rookie of the Year, Kuwata struggled, finishing 2-1 with a 5.14 ERA. Fans doubted him and critics mocked him. He later admitted fearing he might be released within a few years if nothing changed.

    Instead of retreating, he doubled down on study. He experimented with nutrition, recovery, and conditioning when few players did, icing his arm when coaches discouraged it and expanding his repertoire one deliberate step at a time.

    In high school he had limited himself to a fastball and curveball as a personal challenge. As a professional he added a slider, then began refining a split-finger fastball he continually modified throughout his career. He even gave it a name: the Thunderball. Kuwata approached pitching like a craftsman refining tools. He studied anatomy and sports science, arguing that some commonly feared pitches were misunderstood, and insisted that understanding the body mattered as much as throwing harder.

    The results arrived quickly. In 1987, his second season, Kuwata transformed into one of the league’s best pitchers, posting a 15-6 record with a 2.17 ERA, winning the Eiji Sawamura Award and the Central League ERA title while still a teenager, helping the Giants capture the pennant. He became the youngest Opening Day starter in Giants history the following year. He won a Gold Glove, made the Best Nine, and began a run of excellence that established him as one of the Central League’s defining pitchers.

    Kuwata could throw in the low 90s in his younger days. But his success came not only from overpowering hitters but through precision and imagination. Former Hiroshima Carp catcher Mitsuo Tatsukawa later said Kuwata could do everything—pitch, field, and hit better than many position players—recalling a moment when a coach suggested intentionally walking a batter to face Kuwata, only to be told Kuwata was the more dangerous hitter. He fielded brilliantly, won eight Gold Gloves (tied for the most ever by a pitcher) and later joked that defense was his greatest skill, batting second, pitching third.

    His curveball became legendary as a pitch that seemed to rise before dropping sharply, later complemented by a slow looping version that American observers would call a “rainbow curve.” Timing, not speed, became his weapon. He manipulated rhythm the way a musician manipulates tempo, sometimes choosing to fall behind in counts to exploit a hitter’s expectations.

    By the late 1980s, the Giants’ rotation revolved around three pitchers: Masaki Saito, Hiromi Makihara, and Kuwata*. They became known as the “Three Pillars,” and each represented a different philosophy. Saito, a sidearm power pitcher who would collect three Sawamura Awards and an MVP, imposed himself on hitters. Makihara, the 1983 Rookie of the Year and future author of a perfect game, relied on rare physical gifts. Kuwata won through strategy and control. Teammates later said no single ace existed among them; the strength of the staff came from the certainty that if one failed, another would win the next day.

    In 1989 Kuwata won a career-high seventeen games and helped lead Yomiuri to a Japan Series title. Yet controversy returned in 1990 when reports linked him to improper financial relationships through acquaintances, including leaking his scheduled pitching dates, sparking media outrage and even discussion in the Diet. Though cleared of gambling involvement, he received a one month suspension and heavy fine. The incident deepened a strange divide in his public image: respected within baseball for professionalism yet viewed by many fans through lingering suspicion.

    He responded the only way he knew: by pitching. After serving his suspension, he returned with consecutive shutouts and finished second behind Saito in wins and ERA. In 1994, everything came together. Kuwata went 14-11 with a 2.52 ERA, led the league with 185 strikeouts, and won the Central League MVP award. That year culminated in one of the most famous games in Japanese baseball history: the October 8 showdown between the Yomiuri Giants and Chunichi Dragons, winner take all for the pennant.

    The atmosphere felt national in scale. Early chances slipped away amid nerves. Defensive plays and baserunning mistakes hinted at the pressure both teams felt. Manager Shigeo Nagashima committed completely, deploying his three pillars in succession: Makihara, then Saito on short rest, and finally Kuwata.

    Dragons players later admitted their greatest fear was not whether Kuwata would pitch, but when. Late innings against him felt different; the game slowed to his rhythm.

    When Kuwata entered in the seventh inning, he was exhausted. He had prepared specifically for this game, even cutting short a previous start to preserve strength, yet fatigue weighed heavily. He later admitted he felt afraid. Not of failure, but of the magnitude of the moment.

    In the eighth inning, Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, Kuwata’s former teammate and roommate at PL Gakuen, reached base with a desperate head-first slide that dislocated his shoulder, symbolizing the Dragons’ final push. The tying run loomed. Kuwata escaped without allowing a run.

    In the ninth, with two outs remaining, he delivered a high curveball. The batter, Tetsuya Komori, swung through it for strike three. The Giants were pennant winners, and Kuwata stood at the center of one of Japanese baseball’s defining moments. For many fans, the image that remained was not the celebration but Kuwata’s fist, clenched in quiet triumph after surviving the most pressurized innings of his career. The Giants would go on to defeat the Seibu Lions in the Japan Series, with Kuwata finally overcoming Kiyohara on baseball’s biggest stage.

    By then, public perception had changed. The player once booed for entering the league, once suspected of gambling on baseball, was now indispensable.

    Then came the injury.

    In 1995, chasing a pop-up, Kuwata tore ligaments in his right elbow and underwent Tommy John surgery. The damage cost him nearly two seasons and altered his career permanently. He returned in 1997 after surgery, no longer overpowering but determined to survive through intellect.

    Adaptation defined him. In 1998 he won 16 games and captured the league’s highest winning percentage. In 2002, at age thirty-four, he achieved one of baseball’s most improbable resurgences, posting a 2.22 ERA to win the title again, fifteen years after his first, the longest gap between ERA titles in NPB history.

    That season captured Kuwata at his purest. In one complete-game shutout, he signaled to his fielders where the final out would land before throwing the pitch that produced exactly that result, a routine fly ball to right. Teammates laughed, but it revealed how he pitched: not reacting to outcomes, but imagining them first.

    Kuwata also challenged traditions throughout his career. He opposed corporal punishment in amateur baseball, criticized excessive training culture, advocated scientific conditioning, and insisted professionalism meant preparation as much as endurance. Teammates admired his discipline; younger players called him demanding but fair. At violent, hierarchical PL Gakuen, he became known as “an angel” for refusing to participate in hazing while still holding teammates to rigorous standards. He argued that violence reflected laziness in coaching.

    Despite his excellence, he finished his Japanese career with 173 victories, short of the symbolic 200-win milestone revered in Japan. Statistics alone never fully explained him. He hit .216 with seven home runs, fielded like an infielder, and won admiration for professionalism that extended beyond the field. A lifelong non-smoker, he even pushed for smoke-free locker rooms.

    Near the end of his career, as performance declined, he pursued one final dream. In 2007, at age thirty-nine, he signed a minor league contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates, aided by pitching coach Jim Colborn, who understood Japanese baseball. A freak collision with an umpire during spring training tore ankle ligaments and nearly ended the attempt before it began. Kuwata rehabbed, reached Triple-A, and soon received a call to the majors.

    On June 10, 2007, at Yankee Stadium, Masumi Kuwata became the third-oldest post-war rookie in MLB history after Satchel Paige and Diomedes Olivo. He allowed a home run to Alex Rodriguez but later struck out Ichiro Suzuki and recorded several scoreless outings. Struggles followed, and after nineteen appearances he was released. He finished with no victories and a 9.43 ERA, but by then numbers were beside the point.

    “I have no regrets,” he said afterward. How could he? He went from being the youngest kid in his class to one of the oldest kids in the majors.

    Kuwata often said, “Baseball is of the heart.” The phrase did not mean emotion alone. For Kuwata, heart meant preparation, curiosity, discipline, and respect for the game as something larger than results. Even in retirement he continued training, occasionally surprising observers by throwing sharp fastballs well into his fifties.

    He showed that baseball could be studied, shaped, and reimagined. That intelligence could compete with size. That resilience could matter as much as brilliance. That a career could contain both suspicion and redemption, injury and renewal, doubt and quiet mastery. Kuwata compared pitching to rock-paper-scissors. Control the timing of the reveal, and victory follows.

    He once said that success was not luck but effort witnessed by the baseball gods.

    Masumi Kuwata spent his career trying to become someone those gods would notice.

    And in the end, they did.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com