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Category: Nichibei Yakyu

  • 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)
  • 1966: The Dodgers Return to Japan

    1966: The Dodgers Return to Japan

    by Andy McCue

    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 Andy McCue focuses on the 1966 Los Angeles Dodgers tour of Japan.

    By 1966, the bloom was coming off the chrysanthemum of Japan tours by major-league teams. Rebuilding US-Japan relations was less worrisome as the Japanese economy surged and Tokyo proved a stout ally for American fears about Russian and Chinese policies in Asia. Concerns about whether the tour would make money thrust themselves into the picture. The strain of major-league pennant races made more players reluctant to travel, and the lure of “exotic” Japan had dimmed.

    The changes showed up between the lines for the first time as an American team barely outlasted its Japanese rivals. Still, the 1966 tour provided the venue to regularize the official relationship between American and Japanese professional baseball.

    It had been a decade since the last Dodgers’ tour of Japan. That had been a Brooklyn Dodgers team that had just dropped a seven-game World Series to the New York Yankees after defeating them the previous year. This time it was a Los Angeles Dodgers team, which had just been swept in the World Series by the Baltimore Orioles a year after winning it all. The hoped-for match between the American and Japanese champions, a consistent hope of the Tokyo promoters, was thwarted yet again.

    The tour followed in the wake of a contentious battle between the San Francisco Giants and the Japanese Pacific League’s Nankai Hawks over pitcher Masanori Murakami. Murakami, whom Nankai lent to the Giants for American-style training, proved such a sensation that the Giants called him up late in the 1964 season. He pitched so well that they refused to return him to Nankai and kept him for the 1965 season. The Japanese team thought the two clubs had a gentleman’s agreement, the Giants thought they had a binding contract for Murakami’s services. After much negotiation and bitterness, he had returned to Nankai for 1966

    The bad feelings over Murakami hovered in June 1965 as the Yomiuri Shimbun withdrew its offer to sponsor a tour that fall by the Pittsburgh Pirates. For the Japanese newspaper, sponsoring a tour was a commercial venture and “[t]he Pirates are unknown in Japan and we did not want to risk going into the red,” said Kanzo Hashimoto, head of the company’s promotions department.

    Commissioner Ford Frick was holding to the contract he had worked out with the Japanese in 1955. Under that agreement, a major-league team could visit every two years, with the selection alternating between the National and American Leagues. The Pirates had been the first team to volunteer for the 1965 trip, Frick said, so they were chosen. The last team to visit Japan had been the Detroit Tigers in 1962, and the 1964 trip had been postponed because Tokyo was hosting the summer Olympics that year.

    Yomiuri, which also owned the Yomiuri Giants, Japanese professional baseball’s dominant team, turned to the Dodgers. Walter O’Malley had been steadily building a relationship with Japanese professional baseball in the years since his team’s 1956 visit. Japanese players and coaches had been hosted at spring training in Vero Beach as well as in Los Angeles. Dodger instructors, including Al Campanis and Tommy Lasorda, had made spring-training visits to conduct clinics in Japan. The newspaper executives knew the Dodgers would be a strong draw.

    Frick was annoyed at Yomiuri’s end run to the Dodgers and The Sporting News editorialized that it would not work. But by the spring of 1966, O’Malley and Toru Shoriki, president of the Yomiuri Group and its Giants, were negotiating terms for the trip. In a little over a month, the formal invitation was announced. A few weeks later, baseball owners approved the tour, rubber-stamping Yomiuri’s end run. Both the Dodgers and Shoriki’s Giants had been champions in 1965, and the matchup offered promising opportunities for promotion and to see how much Japanese professional baseball was progressing.

    Clouds appeared on the tour’s horizon even before the formal invitation. Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills, the prime offensive engine of a team that did not score well, was planning a career as an entertainer when his baseball career ended. The 33-year-old had permission to arrive a week late at 1965 spring training while he toured Japan playing his banjo and singing. But, general manager Buzzie Bavasi claimed he had revoked that permission during salary negotiations. Hard things were said on both sides before an agreement was reached for a $35,000 raise to $80,000 for 1966.

    Wills’s negotiations were overshadowed that spring by the revolutionary holdout of Dodgers aces Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Drysdale’s appreciation of his value had been sparked by an offer from Japan of a $500,000 multiyear pact in late 1965. Frick threatened both Drysdale and the Japanese for a move he said would break Drysdale’s contract and jeopardize both the pitcher’s future and Japanese baseball’s relationship with the major leagues. The offer’s detail and whether it was real were never revealed as Drysdale chose to try to increase his salary and stay in the United States.

    In two innovations anathema to baseball owners, and especially Walter O’Malley, Drysdale and Koufax held out together and hired an agent. They asked for three years, with $200,000 annually for Koufax and $150,000 for Drysdale. Drysdale had earned a reported $75,000 in 1965, with Koufax slightly less. At first, Bavasi and O’Malley scoffed. But the hurlers hired an entertainment industry agent and began to work on deals for their own Japan tour and for movie studio and television contracts. The first movie opportunity fizzled, but Drysdale and Koufax ultimately appeared as actors. The leverage had its effect. Eventually, Koufax signed for $125,000 and Drysdale for $110,000.

    But the ripples went further. New Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director Marvin Miller watched the holdout closely and pointed to the inequities of the process and the value of agents as he educated the board of the Players Association to the problems and the opportunities of negotiations. Within the Dodger organization, it gave Koufax and Drysdale much more freedom from management dictates. They would use that power to decline to accompany the team to Japan that fall.

    As the season progressed, there were increasing signs that other Dodgers were not enamored of the trip. The 1966 season was a grueling pennant race. The 1965 World Series winners led the league for only one day before gaining first place permanently on September 11. Their lead was never bigger than 3½ games. The season came to a close in a rain-splattered East Coast trip that included multiple doubleheaders. The Pittsburgh Pirates were not out of it until they lost the second game of a twin bill on October 1. The San Francisco Giants were eliminated only when Koufax won the second game of the Dodgers’ doubleheader in Philadelphia on October 2, the last day of the season. “Thank God it’s over,” said Koufax, echoing the sentiments of his teammates.

    The team’s exhaustion was clearly exhibited in the four-game World Series sweep at the hands of the Baltimore Orioles. The Dodgers’ offense managed only four runs in the four games.

    All this played into existing disenchantment with the Japan trip. As early as June, Phil Collier of the San Diego Union was reporting that Koufax, Drysdale, catcher John Roseboro, and outfielder Ron Fairly, the team’s player representative, were balking. “All we know is what we’ve read in the newspaper. The club hasn’t told us a thing,” Fairly told Collier. O’Malley had done all the negotiations with Shoriki without consulting the players. By August, Maury Wills’s name was added to the reluctants’ list.

    The front office brought pressure and most players fell into line. Ron Fairly said it was made clear to him that he would have to go. Wills tried to beg off with a sore knee. He’d twisted it beating out a bunt in July but had played on what was feared to be torn cartilage for the rest of the season. On the day he twisted his knee, he had 30 stolen bases. He would steal only eight the remainder of the season and had to be hypnotized to be willing to endure the pain from the knee and the raw patches on his legs from sliding. He too was told he had to go, but was promised he would play minimal amounts. Wes Parker told Walter O’Malley he had been to Japan before and wasn’t interested in seeing it again. Besides, he was sore and tired after the season. Parker was allowed to join Koufax and Drysdale with the stay-at-homes. Don Sutton, who had arm trouble surface in September, was held back on medical advice.

    The pitching situation was a severe blow as the Dodgers left California. Koufax, Drysdale, Claude Osteen, and Sutton had started 154 of the team’s 162 games. Only Osteen was on the trip, and manager Walter Alston suggested he was tired as well.Pitching had carried them to the pennant, giving up three runs a game, more than a run lower than the league average. Meanwhile, the offense was scoring 3.7 runs a game, third worst in the league. The Dodgers would face Japanese teams with the same anemic offense but a heavy sprinkling of arms from the bullpen and their minor-league system.

    The players who did go each received $3,000 and the equivalent of another $750 in yen from Yomiuri. The players talked of buying cameras and other electronics.

    The team left on the trip under a cloud of skepticism in the wake of the World Series. Typical was the Los Angeles Times’s Frank Finch’s story previewing the trip: “Having endeared themselves forevermore in the hearts of Marylanders with their peaceful visit to Baltimore last weekend, the Dodgers depart today for a goodwill tour of Japan.” Snide references to the World Series would populate headlines and stories throughout the trip.

    The team stopped in Honolulu for two exhibition games against teams of local major and minor leaguers with Bo Belinsky and Don Larsen brought in to provide the pitching. The Dodgers won both handily.

    While with the Dodger party in Honolulu, Commissioner William Eckert discussed a deal with his Japanese counterpart, Toshiyoshi Miyazawa, to cover future trips to Japan and, he hoped, avoid the disagreements that had clouded the Pirates’ proposed visit and the Dodgers’ eventual trip. They tentatively agreed that no team could visit Japan more than once in a six-year period and “no two teams from the same league can visit Japan more than two years in succession.”

    In Japan, expectations were high. “United States-Japan Battle of Champions” headlined the Yomiuri newspaper amid talk of a “real World Series.” The American military’s Far East Network announced it would broadcast most of the games. The 80-person Dodger delegation arrived in Tokyo on October 20 to the expected lavish greeting and a full slate of social events as well as ballgames. O’Malley blamed Koufax’s absence on a sore arm and said Drysdale had to attend to “business interests.” Asked by reporters if he foresaw a Japan-US International Series, O’Malley said, “I don’t see how you can prevent it. Japanese baseball is progressing admirably and the ballplayers are skillful. The public will demand it.” And, asked if the Dodgers would make a special effort to beat the Japanese champion Yomiuri Giants, O’Malley said, “definitely so.” Added Alston, “We’re on a four-game losing streak and want to win here.”

    The next day, Eckert presented Shoriki with a bronze plaque bearing an engraved message and signature from President Lyndon Johnson. After handing the message to Shoriki, Eckert also presented him with a World Series championship ring. It was the first World Series ring ever presented to a person not connected with a team participating in a World Series. “I myself and other Japanese concerned would like to further continue to promote Japan-U.S. friendly ties and contribution to peace, through baseball,” Shoriki said. The Dodgers worked out at Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium in anticipation of the next day’s opener.

    Game 1: October 22, Tokyo

    The Dodgers started the tour with a bang, 21 hits including six homers in a 16-5 drubbing of the Yomiuri Giants. Willie Davis and Jim Lefebvre hit two homers apiece while Tommy Hutton and Osteen each hit one before 40,000 people at Korakuen. Yomiuri provided a 7,000 yen ($19.44 in those days) reward for each home run. The game story noted that the 21 hits were four more than the Dodgers had managed in the entire World Series. Outfielders Toshimitsu Suetsugu and Akira Kunimatsu each had two hits to lead the Giants. The Giants had wrapped up a Japan Series championship over the Nankai Hawks on Wednesday October 19, while the Dodgers had not played a serious game since October 9.

    Claude Osteen, Walt Alston and Willie Davis during the 1966 tour of Japan (Robert Fitts Collection)

    Game 2: October 23, Tokyo

    The Giants evened up the series as left-hander Akio Masuda shut out the visitors, 5-0, allowing just three singles. Another crowd of 40,000 saw Suetsugu provide the key hit with a triple. “We were just no good today,” said Alston. “The boys just couldn’t touch the Japanese southpaw. He had a sneaky fastball plus a good assortment of other pitches.”

    The defeat echoed loudly in the United States the following Saturday (October 29). ABC had sent Red Barber to Tokyo for its weekly Wide World of Sports. The segment reported on the Dodgers’ tour and focused on Masuda’s gem. He “made the Dodgers look like sleepwalkers, groping blindly and mechanically on the road to nowhere,” wrote Arthur Daley in the New York Times.

    Game 3: October 25, Sapporo

    The Dodgers returned to the victory column with a 3-1 win over the Giants at Maruyama Stadium in Japan’s northernmost major city. Despite a steady rain, a crowd of 30,000 watched left-hander Kazumi Takahashi, who was chosen to start because of his similarity to Masuda, give up run-scoring hits to Maury Wills, Lou Johnson, and Willie Davis. Davis’s RBI was aided by Sadaharu Oh’s error. Katsutoyo Yoshida drove in the Giants’ run. In an incident that would echo for several years, Wills sprained his injured knee rounding third base when a rain-soaked patch of grass gave way. He was immediately replaced by pinch-runner Tommy Dean.

    Game 4: October 26, Sendai

    The Giants evened up the series yet again, mowing down the Dodgers 13-6 at Miyagi Stadium before 32,000 fans. The 13 runs set a record for the most tallies by a Japanese team against an American professional club. Jim Barbieri gave the Dodgers an optimistic start with a leadoff home run, but Yukinobu Kuroe matched him in the bottom of the first. The Dodgers’ second featured four runs on a parade of singles, but it was the bottom of the second that proved decisive. The Giants pounded Osteen and young Joe Moeller for six runs on five hits and two walks with two outs. Dodger minor leaguer Leon Everitt gave up another four runs in the seventh inning.

    October 27 was a travel day and the Dodgers stopped in Tokyo on their way to Osaka. While there, Wills asked Walter O’Malley’s permission to return to the United States for medical treatment on his knee. O’Malley, already missing Koufax and Drysdale, refused. Wills said he had been promised he would only have to play a couple of innings a game but had played almost full games early in the series. He decided he needed to go and jumped on a flight to the United States.

    O’Malley was incensed. “As the captain of the team, a higher degree of devotion to duty was expected of Maury,” the owner said. Then, adding a subtle threat about Wills’s post-playing future, O’Malley added: “I thought this particular boy showed evidence of having executive ability, and so did others.” The Wills story would come to dominate US coverage of the trip.

    Game 5: October 28, Osaka

    After a travel day, the Dodgers faced off with a team of players chosen from the Giants and the Nankai Hawks, champions of Japan’s Pacific League. (The Giants were champions of the rival Central League.) Alan Foster, who had spent the 1966 season with the Dodgers’ Albuquerque farm club, shut out the Japanese team 5-0 in front of 19,000 fans at Osaka Stadium. Utility infielder John Kennedy contributed two home runs. (He had hit three during the regular season.) The game featured the Dodgers’ first meeting with Murakami in Japan. In his two years in the National League, Murakami had pitched 13 innings against the Dodgers, giving up only one earned run. For Nankai in 1966, Murakami had gone 6-4 with a 3.08 ERA. That day in Osaka, he gave up three runs in 1⅔ innings, including one of Kennedy’s blasts and another by Barbieri.

    Game 6: October 29, Nishinomiya

    The Dodgers’ bats livened up in a second game against an all-star squad, winning 7-1 in this Osaka suburb. Jim Brewer, Bob Miller, and Phil Regan stifled the Japanese team, while Lou Johnson and Tommy Davis contributed their first home runs of the tour. The crowd of 30,000 at Nishinomiya Stadium saw the Dodgers frustrate the All-Stars by turning four double plays.

    Game 7: October 30, Osaka

    The Dodgers got a measure of revenge against Masuda, their nemesis in the second game, as Dick Stuart and Nate Oliver reached him for home runs to key a five-run ninth inning and a 9-7 Dodgers victory at historic Koshien Stadium, home to Japan’s annual high-school tournament. Murakami started the game and pitched 3⅓ shutout innings, but the bullpen could not hold the lead. The All-Stars had taken the lead by beating up on Joe Moeller and Ron Perranoski for four runs in the seventh inning. Phil Regan and Nick Willhite restored order and shut out the Japanese team for the rest of the day. John Kennedy also homered for the Dodgers, while Teruyuki Takakura of the Nishitetsu Lions hit one for the All-Stars before 43,000 people.

    Game 8: November 1, Toyama

    The Giants rejoined the campaign in this seaside resort city and the Dodgers prevailed with a 5-2 victory. The score was tied 2-2 in the top of the eighth inning. Akio Masuda was brought in yet again, but pinch-hitter Dick Stuart drove in a run and Al Ferrara singled to drive in two more. Phil Regan shut down the Giants in the eighth and ninth for the win at Toyama Stadium before 23,000 fans.

    November 2 was a travel day and the Wills story was thickening. In Tokyo, an “embarrassed” O’Malley said he would be meeting Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato on Friday and “try to explain and apologize for Wills.” O’Malley sought to frame it as a larger issue: “The United States is more or less involved in this loss of face caused by Wills’ defection.” O’Malley felt his long commitment to developing baseball as an international sport and building close ties with Japanese baseball was being undermined by Wills. The US government had not officially sponsored the trip but President Lyndon Johnson had sent a message of encouragement to the team.

    Wills, meanwhile, was proving elusive. He had gotten off his US-bound flight at a refueling stop in Honolulu. The Dodgers’ team physician, Dr. Robert Kerlan, said he had not heard from Wills. The shortstop/musician was soon spotted playing his banjo with Don Ho at Duke’s, a Honolulu night club, and at other spots around the city.

    In Japan, four groups of Dodgers visited four US military hospitals in the Tokyo area. The cultural and social obligations of the tour demanded time nearly every day with receptions, cocktail parties, golf outings, visits to tourist sites, and other diversions taking up the Dodgers’ between-games time. It was not a restful vacation.

    Game 9: November 3, Tokyo

    It was a Dodger homer barrage in an 8-5 victory over the Japan All-Stars as a crowd of 39,000 celebrated the Culture Day holiday at Korakuen Stadium. Ron Fairly hit bases-empty and three-run homers while Jeff Torborg and Jim Lefebvre slugged two-run shots. It would prove the high point of the trip, with the Americans now 7-2.

    Game 10: November 5, Tokyo

    After a day to reflect, the Japan All-Stars regrouped for an 8-2 win before 34,000 at Korakuen Stadium. Shinichi Eto of the Chunichi Dragons started the parade with a two-run homer in the first. The Giants’ Sadaharu Oh, who had led the Central League with 48 homers, contributed two more round-trippers. Jim Lefebvre’s bases-empty homer was the only protest by the Dodgers. “Too much Eto and too much Oh,” said Alston. “The barnstorming major leaguers never looked more listless,” wrote Pacific Stars and Stripes sports editor Lee Kavetski.

    Game 11: November 6, Tokyo

    The next day the Dodgers played at Korakuen Stadium before 34,000 people including Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako. The team was not up to royal scrutiny, losing 11-3 to the Japan All-Stars. Alan Foster’s first pitch was deposited in the left-field stands by the Giants’ Shigeo Nagashima. Yukinobu Kuroe of the Giants and pitcher Tetsuya Yoneda of the Hankyu Braves also homered. Ron Fairly and John Roseboro homered for the Dodgers. After the game, the Dodgers emerged from their dugout to tip their caps and wave to the royal couple, who had never seen a visiting American team before and had not been to a Japanese professional league game since 1959.

    Eckert and O’Malley made their visit to Prime Minister Sato. During a five-minute meeting at Sato’s official residence, the Americans presented a baseball with O’Malley’s signature and a pass good for all major-league games for the 1967 season. They also presented O’Malley’s apologies for Wills’s absence.

    “The Dodgers may have drawn blanks elsewhere, but they are diplomatic successes in Japan,” reported the Los Angeles Times’s Frank Finch. “No matter where they go, to a shrine, a restaurant or a ball park, they are besieged by the friendly grins of red-hot baseball fans. The official badge issued by Walter O’Malley to the touring troupe is like an open sesame. People who can’t read English instantly recognize the familiar ‘Dodgers’ name in its script form. ‘Doh-jars,’ with the accent on the second syllable, is one of the most popular words in Tokyo, Sapporo, Osaka, Sendai, Nagoya and other cities where the team has appeared.”

    Wills was still in Honolulu, although Bavasi, who was also in Hawaii on a cruise, said he thought the shortstop was in California. Wills was reported at a Democratic fundraiser starring Sammy Davis Jr. but brushed aside any questions about the situation. Kerlan said he still had not heard from Wills. Bavasi said there would be no discipline until all the facts were known. He said a post-World Series examination had found there was no need for an operation, but that if something had happened subsequently, Wills should be seeing Kerlan. “If he’s off playing the banjo somewhere, he must think the banjo is more important than baseball,” Bavasi said.

    Maury Wills attempts to turn a double play against the Yomiuri Giants (Robert Fitts Collection)

    Game 12: November 8, Okayama

    The combined Yomiuri-Nankai team returned as the Dodgers’ opponents and fell 10-2. Ron Fairly and Nate Oliver hit home runs, but the Dodgers’ biggest contributor was John Roseboro with a double, two singles, and four RBIs. The 20,000 fans in Okayama Stadium saw the Dodgers score six runs, including Oliver’s home run, in the ninth inning to blow the contest open.

    Game 13: November 9, Hiroshima

    The Japanese opposition was now a team combining the Giants and members of the hometown Hiroshima Carp. The teams played to a 10-inning 10-10 tie before 18,000 at Hiroshima Municipal Stadium. Earlier in the day, a 25-person Dodger delegation had placed a wreath on the site of the atomic bomb’s impact. The game was called because of the need to meet the travel schedule. The Dodgers built an early lead, 10-4 after seven innings, but the home team rallied with six runs in the eighth and ninth innings off Claude Osteen, Phil Regan, and Ron Perranoski. “Something is wrong with Osteen,” said Alston. “He just can’t seem to hit his stride on this tour. With 10 runs, we shouldn’t have had any trouble.” Dick Stuart, with two, John Kennedy, and Jim Lefebvre hit home runs to build the Dodgers’ early lead.

    Game 14: November 11, Kumamoto

    The series moved to the island of Kyushu, the Dodgers’ first move off the main island of Honshu. The opponent at Fujisaki Stadium was a team combined from the Giants and the Nishitetsu Lions, based in the nearby city of Fukuoka. Alan Foster and Ron Perranoski held down the locals while Jim Lefebvre produced two run-scoring doubles to propel the offense. Foster limited the Japanese to one hit until he tired in the eighth inning. With the 6-3 win, the Dodgers’ record stood at 9-4-1. They would not win another game.

    Game 15: November 12, Fukuoka

    The teams moved to Fukuoka’s Heiwadai Ball Park and the Japanese shut down the Dodgers, 4-0. Joe Moeller gave up all the runs in the first four innings. It was the National League champions’ fifth loss of the tour, the most by any visiting American professional club.

    Game 16: November 14, Kokura

    Moving to the northern tip of Kyushu, the Dodgers dropped a 3-1 game to the Yomiuri Giants, moving their record to 9-6-1. Eighteen-year-old Tsuneo Horiuchi of the Giants held the Dodgers to six hits before 20,000 at Kokura Stadium. In the third inning, Dodgers starter Nick Willhite walked two batters before Sadaharu Oh came to the plate. Oh blasted one over the fence, but then was called out for passing the runner who had started at first base, limiting the benefit to two runs. The Giants’ final run scored three innings later when Akira Kunimatsu doubled in Oh. The defeat left the Dodgers’ record against the Giants at 3-3.

    Game 17: November 15, Nagoya

    Now facing a combined team from the Giants and the Chunichi Dragons, the Dodgers dropped their third in a row before 28,000 at Chunichi Stadium. Home runs by Sadaharu Oh and Toshimitsu Suetsugu powered the Japanese team. The Dodgers’ third loss in a row marked the first time an American team had suffered such a streak.

    Also that day, the Japanese government awarded O’Malley its highest honor for a non-Japanese – the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, recognizing his efforts to foster Japan-United States friendship through professional baseball.

    The Dodger wives felt rewarded as well. The spouses of Tommy Dean, Bob Miller, Ron Perranoski, John Roseboro, Dick Stuart, and Jeff Torborg had made the trip and seen the sights and the cultural performances. And done some shopping. “I must have visited and bought out every department store in Japan,” said Sue Ellen Perranoski. “I bought a pearl ring, Christmas cards, kimonos, toys and a truckload of other things.”

    Game 18: November 16, Shizuoka

    The tour, the worst by an American club in the history of the exchange, wound up with a 7-3 loss to the Yomiuri Giants, a game mercifully ended after seven innings because of darkness at Kusanagi Ball Park. It was the Dodgers’ eighth loss (9-8-1 overall) and their fourth straight defeat. Both were records for futility by an American team. For those viewing the tour as an international World Series, it meant the Giants had prevailed 4-3. The Giants jumped on Joe Moeller for four runs in the first inning and never looked back. The 21,000 in attendance saw Sadaharu Oh hit a grand slam, which would have been his third game in a row with a homer (and sixth for the series) except for his baserunning blunder in the 16th game. Al Ferrara homered in the Dodgers’ three-run sixth. Akio Masuda started and closed out his work with 3⅔ shutout innings.

    The post-mortems started immediately. Giants manager Tetsuharu Kawakami said the series clearly showed that the gap between Japanese and American professional baseball had narrowed.

    Comparing the 1966 tour to the one a decade earlier, he said, “We have learned a lot since then. Our baseball is at least 50 percent improved. Our bunting is better, the base runners are smarter now, and we play more inside baseball like the Americans.” Others were not so encouraged. Tokumi Matsumoto, a columnist for the Mainichi Daily News, quoted a fellow Japanese baseball writer: “It is obviously dangerous for the Japanese to believe the 9 win-8 loss-1 tie result indicates the Japanese pro ball standard is almost equal with that of the major leagues.”

    Dodgers manager Walter Alston said he was sorry over his team’s performance and offered specific praise for Oh, Masuda, and Horiuchi. He said he felt Japanese hitters, especially for power, had improved more than their pitchers since the Dodgers’ 1956 trip. Both managers noted that the absence of Koufax and Drysdale had had a big impact on the tour.

    After a day of relaxation and shopping on the 19th, the Dodgers’ charter plane left for Los Angeles on the 20th.

    For the Dodgers, the consequences were coming. Some came directly from the tour. Others had been pending over the season.

    The Dodgers party was still in Tokyo when the biggest blow fell. On November 18, Sandy Koufax announced that he was retiring. He knew he could keep competing and winning, but he also knew he risked permanent damage from an excruciatingly painful elbow that required extensive treatment before and after each start. O’Malley, still in Tokyo, wished him well.

    As baseball’s Winter Meeting started on November 28, Bavasi started other planned changes. Former batting champion Tommy Davis, who had been on the trip, was traded to the New York Mets for the second baseman the Dodgers thought they needed – Ron Hunt. Three days later, the inevitable consequence of the Japan trip fell into place. Wills was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Bob Bailey and Gene Michael. Wills eventually had left Hawaii and visited Kerlan in Los Angeles. Kerlan said the knee was no worse than it had been at the end of the season. He prescribed extended rest, which had been the basis of Wills’s request to miss the Japan trip. Bavasi said this was the only time Walter O’Malley had forced his hand on a baseball decision. Wills, evidently forgiven, returned to the Dodgers in 1969.

    The remake of the Dodgers’ roster would not work well. The team fell into the second division for two years and wouldn’t win another pennant for eight years, or another World Series until 1981.

    Walter, and later Peter, O’Malley worked hard to improve and deepen relations with Japanese baseball. Yomiuri sent the Giants (and 21 Japanese reporters) to Vero Beach for joint spring training with the Dodgers in 1967. The Giants, or individual players, returned many times in the future and other Japanese professional and college teams would come for spring training. The Dodgers did not return to Japan until 1993, but these decades-long contacts were instrumental in the Dodgers’ ability to sign Hideo Nomo when he became the first major Japanese star to join an American major-league team in 1995.

    The agreement between the two commissioners had sparked Japanese dreams that they were evolving toward parity with the US major leagues. The relationships the O’Malleys and the Dodgers forged with Japanese baseball were instrumental in giving them the opportunity to sign Nomo, and effectively confirm Japanese baseball as a second-tier operation as its major stars could dream of better salaries and the satisfaction of competing successfully at the highest levels of professional baseball.

    ANDY McCUE, a former Board President of SABR, won the Seymour Medal for Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers, and Baseball’s Westward Expansion. He is also the author of Baseball by the Books: A History and Complete Bibliography of Baseball Fiction and Stumbling Around the Bases: The American League’s Mismanagement in the Expansion Eras (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). He holds a master’s degree in Chinese history.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    1966: The Dodgers Return to Japan
  • No Alibis: The Detroit Tigers’ 1962 Tour of Japan

    No Alibis: The Detroit Tigers’ 1962 Tour of Japan

    by Andrew Forbes

    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 Andrew Forbes focuses on the Detroit Tigers 1962 visit to Japan.

    For the Detroit Tigers 1962 was a year to forget. They finished the season in fourth place, 10½ games behind the pennant-winning Yankees, with 16 fewer wins than the second-place 1961 Detroit club. The best the Tigers could muster in 1962 was second spot in the United Press International baseball experts’ poll of the season’s “No. 1 disappointment,” a single vote behind Roger Maris, who followed up his historic Babe-besting homer total with “only” 33 in 1962.

    As the Yankees and Giants were renewing hostilities in a rain-soaked World Series, the tired and disappointed Tigers limped off to Asia for a monthlong goodwill tour. As foul weather blanketed the Pacific, a coterie of Tigers trainers, wives, the traveling secretary, and team owner and President John E. Fetzer accompanied a scaled-back squad (just three outfielders and a nine-man pitching staff), first to Hawaii, where they squeezed in two games, and then on to Japan. The schedule called for excursions to Seoul and Okinawa before 17 matches against the best competition Japan could offer. Commissioner Ford C. Frick had planned to join the traveling party in Honolulu, but was held up stateside while inclement weather and stingy pitching stretched the World Series out to seven games over two weeks.

    The Tigers touched down in Tokyo on October 18 and participated in a press conference before heading off to the Imperial Hotel. On October 20 the players, executives, and wives were the guests of Japanese Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ohira at a cocktail party thrown in their honor. The Americans were formally introduced by Yetsuo Higa, the Hawaiian businessman who, along with the Mainichi newspaper corporation, was instrumental in planning the tour. Tigers President Fetzer gifted Ohira a set of silver cufflinks fittingly adorned with the heads of tigers.

    Commissioner Frick, having finally joined the group in Tokyo, revealed to the press the secondary – or perhaps even primary – reason for his presence, telling the Associated Press that he would meet with Japanese baseball officials to codify regulations surrounding the movement of players between the United States and Japan. “Before I leave we hope to agree on a definite set of rules under which American players can come to Japan,” Frick said, perhaps unintentionally signaling his belief that no Japanese player would ever be skilled enough to play pro ball in America.

    After successful tune-ups in Okinawa (where they “whipped a servicemen’s team,” 9-0, largely on the strength of Jim Bunning’s five no-hit innings) and Seoul (beating up on an all-star team, 8-0, thanks to a three-run shot by Bubba Morton), the Tigers returned to Tokyo and prepared to begin competition against Japanese squads.

    But the Detroiters would not be at full strength. Much of the Tigers’ trouble during the regular season could be chalked up to injuries, with starter Frank Lary (sore arm), outfielders Al Kaline (broken collarbone) and Billy Bruton (sore leg; broken jaw), and first baseman Norm Cash (broken finger) all missing significant time. By the time the team landed in Japan, Bruton was still unable to play, and Kaline was touch-and-go due to torn ligaments in his foot suffered during one of the games at Honolulu. The injury “definitely has slowed me up,” said Kaline. “It’s a real tough problem. But I’ll play with it taped up and do the best I can.” Given the injuries, and the fact that only three regular outfielders made the trans-Pacific journey (with Rocky Colavito remaining stateside to be by his wife’s side as she battled illness), manager Bob Scheffing would be doing a lot of juggling.

    On the eve of the slate’s first game, the Tigers made their first public appearance, taking in a night of entertainment at the Nichigeki Theater in downtown Tokyo. The players and their wives enjoyed a two-hour show by the Nichigeki’s dancers before the boys donned happi coats and took the stage. Scheffing introduced his players to the crowd, and each was presented with a bouquet of flowers. The appearance concluded with the athletes tossing rubber balls into the crowd; those who caught select balls adorned with a Tigers logo would be admitted to the next day’s game free of charge.

    The next afternoon Jim Bunning took the Tokyo Stadium mound for the Tigers in front of 27,000 spectators, including Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko. After the ceremonial first pitch was handled by Japanese Foreign Minister Ohira to US Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, the Tigers wasted no time providing their starter some run support. Detroit’s hitters roughed up Daimai Orions starter Tomoo Wako, who did not make it out of the first. The Tigers put up eight runs in the opening frame, including a three-run homer by Jake Wood, to cruise to a 12-1 victory. Bunning contributed 5⅓ perfect innings before giving up four hits and giving way to reliever Terry Fox.

    Neither the Tigers nor the Orions came away unscathed, however. In the sixth inning, Detroit first baseman Norm Cash was struck behind the ear by Daimai lefty Shoichi Ono’s errant pitch, necessitating a hospital visit for X-rays, which showed no lasting damage. “I hope to play tomorrow,” said Cash. And Kaline reaggravated his foot injury in the first inning, toughing it out until the sixth when he was replaced by Bobo Osborne. Meanwhile, in the other clubhouse, Orions manager Mitsuo Uno was relieved of his duties by club President Masaichi Nagata. In his two years as manager, Uno had led Daimai to a 132-136-4 record and a pair of fourth-place finishes, so his employers may simply have seen the lopsided loss as the final straw.

    Scheduled games on Sunday against the Yomiuri Giants and Monday versus a combined team containing members of the Orions, the Kokutetsu Swallows, and the Taiyo Whales were washed out by rain, but the layoff allowed Frick and his officers to hammer out an agreement with their Japanese counterparts. Meeting at the Imperial Hotel, Frick, Tigers owner Fetzer, and AL President Joe Cronin sat down with Japanese Commissioner Yushi Uchimura, Pacific League President Fujio Nakazawa, and Central League President Ryuji Suzuki to formalize a deal that would “prohibit direct trades between Japanese clubs and American players, and vice versa by American major league clubs and Japanese players, without the commissioners’ approval.” In Frick’s view, the pact promised “smooth relations” across the Pacific, though it would take only two years for the commissioner to be proved wrong. The 1964 dispute between the San Francisco Giants and Nankai Hawks over the contract status of lefty reliever Masanori Murakami led Frick to write Uchimura decreeing that “all agreements, all understandings and all dealings and negotiations between Japanese and American baseball are cancelled.”

    The Tigers players also kept busy during the rainy days, as pitcher Phil Regan gave a Bible reading at Kawasaki Baptist Church, while Bunning, Cash, Scheffing, Kaline, and Dick McAuliffe, along with Hanshin Tigers pitcher (and Central League MVP) Minoru Murayama, appeared on the NHK-TV program My Secret.

    The Tigers – including Cash, recovered from his beaning, and Kaline – returned to the field after the two rainouts to face the recently crowned Japanese champion Toei Flyers at Korakuen Stadium. The Flyers outhit and outpitched Detroit, and played sharper defense. Knotted, 3-3, after nine innings, the game was declared a tie in keeping with an agreement struck at the tour’s commencement that forbade extra-inning games. Scheffing, however, complained that he would “prefer to let these exhibition games go into extra innings to settle it one way or another.”

    Things got worse the next day as the Tigers met the Yomiuri Giants in a makeup of their washed-out game, and the Giants “took a liking to the slow curves of right-hander Phil Regan,” and held on for a 3-2 win behind starter Minoru Nakamura, who tossed a complete game. “We have no alibis,” said Scheffing, whose squad now had only one win to show for their first three games in Japan. “We weren’t hitting and their pitcher had good control.”

    It was likely with some relief, then, that the Tigers greeted the opportunity to escape Tokyo and begin the road leg of their excursion, alighting first in Sapporo, where they handled a team consisting of Orions and Giants, 6-2, behind the bat of Bubba Morton and the pitching of Don Mossi. Thence to Osaka did the Tigers fly, where their game against the Hanshin Tigers at Koshien Stadium was rained out. But the visit did allow John Fetzer to invite their namesake club to their 1963 spring-training camp at Lakeland, Florida, with the American Tigers picking up all expenses accrued in the United States.

    Scheffing’s distaste for tie games might have been a factor in the decision to enter extra innings the next day, a Sunday afternoon at Nishinomiya Stadium. The Tigers and a mixed team of Japanese all-stars were tied, 3-3, after nine, but Detroit exploded for four runs in the 10th, with Flyers rookie hurler Yukio Ozaki the victim.

    Events in Nagoya on November 5, though, might have had the Tigers wishing they’d banked a couple of those runs, as Chunichi Dragons outfielder Shinichi Eto slugged two homers, added a pair of singles, and reached on an error, and the All-Stars (composed of Dragons, Giants, Orions, and Kintetsu Buffaloes) downed Detroit 6-4. Hank Aguirre surrendered five of the All-Stars’ runs, including Eto’s homer on the first pitch of the afternoon. If there was good news for the Americans it was that Billy Bruton’s jaw had healed to the point that he was able to pinch-hit – just in time to strike out to end the game.

    Said Scheffing, “Japanese baseball is a lot better than we were led to believe before we came over here.”

    Blasts by Cash, Kaline, and McAuliffe helped matters on November 6, when improving weather allowed Detroit to play Hanshin in Osaka after the earlier postponement. The American Tigers cruised, 11-4, with Cash contributing four RBIs. Chico Fernandez and Mike Roarke chipped in homers to help the Tigers blank the Nankai Hawks 3-0 on November 7. It appeared the Tigers were beginning to recall that they had led all of big-league baseball in home runs in 1962 with 209. The pleasing trend continued in Tokyo, as Detroit added four more homers – including another apiece for Cash and Kaline – to best a Swallows/Orions/Whales squad, 13-8, in a contest called in the top of the ninth due to darkness. At Hiroshima, homers from Cash, Kaline, and McAuliffe were more than enough to overcome the amassed strength of a Hiroshima Carp/Hankyu Braves/ Hanshin Tigers/Daimai Orions team, 8-1, with Jim Bunning going the distance for Detroit.

    For all their power, the Tigers had not yet hit a grand slam on Japanese soil. Norm Cash fixed that on November 10 at Fukuoka, against a side made up of Orions and Nishitetsu Lions. The clout helped Detroit come from behind to win, 6-4, improving the visitors’ record to 8-2 with a tie.35 The fireworks continued at Shimonoseki against the Taiyo Whales, as Detroit strolled to a 10-0 win that featured homers by Morton, McAuliffe, Cash (his sixth in seven games), and catcher Dick Brown.

    The big hits kept on coming after the Tigers landed in Shizuoka to face a team of Giants and Orions. Kaline notched another homer, and Bobo Osborne’s grand slam in the top of the ninth put the game away for Detroit, 12-7, with the last half-frame called due to darkness. Osborne’s shot was the Tigers’ 27th homer in 13 games on the Japanese tour. The ball left a mark on more than just the scoreboard; spectator Saku Masuda was gifted an autographed ball to go along with a bruise on her shoulder.

    Kaline homered yet again in Utsunomiya against the amalgamated might of the Giants and Orions, but it proved just about all the offense the Tigers could summon in a 6-3 loss, dropping their record to 10-3 with a tie – not shabby, but not the walk in the park they might have expected. Jim Bunning went seven innings but gave up four earned runs in the first and took the loss. Kaline homered again – his seventh – the ensuing afternoon at Miyagi Stadium in Sendai, and it was just enough to beat an all-star agglomeration of Flyers, Giants, and Orions, 4-3.

    An offday preceded the final games of the tour in Tokyo, but it apparently did Detroit little good. On an autumn Saturday afternoon at Korakuen Stadium, Hanshin Tigers ace Minoru Murayama, hurling for the All-Stars, turned in what Japanese baseball officials called “the greatest pitching performance by a Japanese since the late Eiji Sawamura lost a [one-run game] to Connie Mack’s All-Stars back in 1934,” a legendary outing that saw Sawamura strike out Charlie Gehringer, Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx in a row. Surrendering just two hits, Murayama became the first Japanese pitcher to shut out a visiting American big-league team over a full nine innings. The Tigers’ first hit didn’t come until there were two out in the eighth, when Mike Roarke collected a cheap single to left. “We have no alibis for losing,” said Scheffing. “We just couldn’t hit that fella Murayama.” With the loss, the Tigers joined the 1956 Dodgers and the 1960 Giants as the only major-league squads to lose four games in Japan.

    “We gotta be tired,” said Scheffing. “It’s been a tiring trip after a long regular season.”

    The next day brought only moderately better results. Once again facing an All-Japan team, the Tigers registered a 3-3 tie in a game called after 10 innings due to darkness. McAuliffe homered for Detroit; Sadaharu Oh and the Orions’ Takao Katsuragi cleared the fence for the All-Stars. When play ceased, “a band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to close the series,” as the game marked the end of the scheduled exhibition itinerary. But officials announced one additional game between the Tigers and Japan’s All-Stars, to be played two days later, “a parting gesture of goodwill.” All proceeds of the bonus game were to be “donated to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics fund,” an “unparalleled” move, according to Japan’s Olympic Committee.

    Billy Bruton homered in the finale, and the Tigers rolled to a 7-2 win. For the purposes of the record books, however, the tour was officially over two days earlier, after the tie game, meaning that Detroit’s 11 wins, four losses, and two ties earned them “the worst record ever for a major league club coming to Japan.” The Tigers – “the big flops this year in the American League” – couldn’t even catch a break at the turnstiles; Detroit’s “total attendance of 383,370 for 17 games in Japan didn’t measure up to the 16-game attendance of the San Francisco Giants’ [441,000] and St. Louis Cardinals’ [430,000] tours in 1960 and 1958 respectively,” though in all fairness it should be noted that the Tigers battled soggy weather just about every step of the way.

    Before departing, Joe Cronin summed up what the American baseball emissaries had discovered in Japan in 1962. “The Japanese might be able to challenge American major league baseball in the next generation of players,” he told the press. “They are really something to see.

    Having been in Japan for over a month, the Tigers had seen enough. The schedule concluded, they flew home to lick their wounds, rest up, and prepare for the 1963 season.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    No Alibis: The Detroit Tigers’ 1962 Tour of Japan

  • Excerpt: In the Japanese Ballpark: Behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball

    Excerpt: In the Japanese Ballpark: Behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball

    Chapter 26: Bobby Valentine, Manager.

    from Off Base with Howard Cole, originally posted February6, 2026

    Because of their rich history in Los Angeles, the Dodgers (and their fans) know something about Japanese baseball. And so does the Robert K. Fitts, the author of several books on the subject. We excerpted his “Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer” ahead of Shohei Ohtani’s L.A. debut in 2024, and are happy to tell you about his latest work now. It is “In the Japanese Ballpark: Behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball,” University of Nebraska Press, November 1, 2025, $21.99 Hardcover, $20.89 Kindle.

    Fitts devoted chapters about his interview subjects from every aspect of Japanese baseball under the sun. Twenty-six of them, including a player, umpire, manager, fan, cheerleader, beer girl, data analyst, general manager, assistant general manager, commissioner, agent and team owner.

    In fact, chapters regarding two managers, both with Dodgers connections, are included in the work: Trey Hillman, who was Don Mattingly’s bench coach from 2011 to 2013, and Bobby Valentine, a Dodgers minor and major leaguer from1968 through 1972, when he was included in a blockbuster trade which also sent Billy Grabarkewitz, Frank Robinson, Bill Singer and Mike Strahler to Anaheim for Andy Messersmith and Ken McMullen.

    Chapter 26: Bobby Valentine, Manager

    Former Major League player Bobby Valentine managed the Texas Rangers, New York Mets, and Boston Red Sox as well as the Chiba Lotte Marines in 1995 and 2005–2009. He led the Marines to the championship in 2005.

    I went to Japan for the first time in the early 1980s. I was invited by Mizuno Sporting Goods because at that time I was thought to be the first player to use a Mizuno glove in the Major Leagues. In 1978 Mizuno’s master glove maker, Nobuyoshi Tsubota, came to spring training in Florida and set up a little workshop in a Winnebago he parked on the street right outside the players’ parking lot. I was riding by on my bike, and I stopped in, and Tsubota-san made me a glove. I used it from that day on. Later that season, I was going to be in the starting lineup for some reason and the game was going to be on national television. Joe Torre was our manager, and his brother Frank was the vice president of Rawlings. The game was on a Saturday, and Frank came to the stadium on Friday night. When I arrived on Saturday morning to get ready for the game, the Mizuno label was ripped off my glove! But I used it, and it was the first time a Mizuno glove was used in the Majors— or so I thought. Later, we found out that Lou Gehrig had his glove stolen during the 1934 tour, and Mizuno made him a replacement that he used when he returned to the States.

    Then in 1986 I went over as a coach on the postseason All- Star tour. My first impression was that the players looked better than I thought they would. Then in 1989 I went over as part of the Japan- U.S. baseball summit that Tatsuro Hirooka put together. I got to meet a lot of the baseball hierarchy, including Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura, and Hirooka-san. Once again, I was impressed, especially by a young player named Hiromitsu Ochiai. So, by the time I got there in 1995 to manage the Chiba Lotte Marines, I already had a good impression of Japanese baseball. Then in that first year, I got to work with Hirooka-san. I was amazed at his knowledge and his understanding of the game. He was as spectacular a baseball man as I had ever been around. And I had been around a lot of the older baseball guys in America. I had played baseball and been a young coach on the same staff as Frank Howard and George Bamberger, and I was really close to Tommy Lasorda and Al Campanis and then later Bobby Bragan.

    In the early 1990s most Americans’ understanding of Japanese baseball was totally misconceived. It was based on Tom Selleck and Mr. Baseball— almost totally based on that and the stories that guys told from their experiences. Most of the guys were bad storytellers, and most of them had an ugly American’s perspective. I think that some of the guys who could have told the story properly were never asked, or it never got into the mainstream media, which was presenting a very opinionated and uneducated view of Japanese baseball, in my opinion. 

    There was a lot of resistance to acknowledging the baseball culture of Japan. There was still prejudice, probably hangover effects from the war. I knew some Americans who had actually experienced World War II and had a preconceived prejudice of the Japanese being the enemy. It wasn’t acceptable by my standards, but I thought it to be natural. They were very comfortable having a predetermined opinion of what the culture was and what the baseball culture was in Japan. When I went over with the Major League All-Star team in 1986, to a man they played and respected the Japanese players. They said, “Hey man, that pitcher is pretty good. Hey, this guy can hit. Hey, they’re throwing from the outfield just like we are.” There was a reckoning from those who were seeing without blinders on. 

    When I got there in ’95, Japanese baseball culture had an inferiority complex. Nearly everyone believed that it was a lesser league, a lesser brand of baseball. A lot of that was based on a size and speed comparison. There wasn’t that really fast guy, and there wasn’t that really big guy who was born from Japanese parents. So, there was that physical inferiority, but there was also just the idea of watching a championship game from the United States on TV and having it called the World Championship and then watching your championship on TV and having it called the Japan Championship that lends itself to an inherent inferiority situation. 

    The same year that I first managed the Marines, Hideo Nomo came over to the States. I always thought of that as an exchange, basically the first player coming over here and the first manager going over there. We did a crossover. What I was expecting when I got to Japan was an enthusiastic fandom for Nomo, a superhero trying to do something that no one had ever done before. But instead, he was treated like an outsider, and the fans and the baseball community, mainly the older baseball community, were pulling against him at the beginning and saying he would fail. I remember having conversations with Hirooka-san and others, and they thought he was going to fall on his face, and they weren’t really rooting for him, which I found really amazing. Or maybe, in their hearts they were pulling for him, but they were embarrassed to come out and say it in case he failed. So, I’m not sure what the true mentality of the baseball hierarchy in Japan was at the beginning of Nomomania. I know what I heard, and I know what they said, but it’s such a different culture that sometimes you have to get an interpreter to understand what’s really meant. 

    After managing in Japan, I had an even greater appreciation of the Japanese game. I always thought it was real baseball, and then I got to experience it and I was like, “Holy cow!” When I brought the Marines to Arizona to practice in the spring of 1995, I had Nolan Ryan and Tom House come out to watch Hideki Irabu throw. He wasn’t like Nomo with the whirlwind windup and the split finger that confused everyone. He was actually someone who stood out there and had a fastball better than everyone else. And he was from Japan! 

    When I was the Mets manager in 1997, I went to Shigeo Nagashima’s spring camp, which started two weeks before we did, and I asked him if he could give me a pitcher who was not going to make the Yomiuri Giants ichi-gun (main team) so that I could take him to spring training and have him pitch for the Mets. He was like, “Why would you want to do that?” And I said because I want to show the Japanese community, as well as the U.S. community, that a guy who can’t pitch for your team can pitch for mine. So, I brought over Takashi Kashiwada, and he actually pitched for the Mets and did a decent job. 

    Measuring change is one of the hardest things in the world to do. You look back twenty years, and you realize that things have really changed, right? When I came back to manage the Marines in the mid-2000s, it seemed that the decade between my two stints was like the 1975 to 1985 decade in the States when times were changing. There had been a kind of cultural swing. I think that Nomo going to the States allowed a freedom of spirit to be attached to baseball in Japan.

    In 1995 I misunderstood why I was there. I thought I was there to teach the Japanese how to play the game, because that’s what I was told when I was being interviewed for the job. They said that Hirooka knew how to play the game, but the Japanese players really didn’t. As it turned out, they knew how to play the game. They just needed someone to let them know that they knew how to play the game. Ten years later when I went back, that was my mission, not teaching them how to play the game, but letting them understand that they knew it well enough to compete at any level. But by that time, Ichiro was doing his thing, and Matsui was on the Yankees, and that inferiority complex that I thought they had was no longer there. 

    There have been several noticeable changes since 1995, both on and off the field. One of the most challenging times of my life was getting the Japanese hierarchy to understand one thing that I thought they needed to change. They thought that a hitter should always swing down on the ball and hit ground balls because they weren’t big enough and strong enough to hit home runs. I argued, “How could you say that when the guy who hit more home runs than anybody on earth was a Japanese and my size?” You don’t have to be a big guy to hit it over the fence. What you need is a good swing. 

    But even Sadaharu Oh thought you should swing down at the ball. In 1995 I had weekly debates with Hirooka-san, who was on the same team with Oh and saw how Oh developed the swing that made him hit more home runs than anybody else who ever lived. And it was a downswing. So one time, after showing me videos in slow motion and stop action, Hirooka-san brought in a wonderfully fine-tuned samurai sword and a bundle of sticks bounded by a rope. In one of the great training exercises that Oh did with the sword, they hang this bundle of sticks, and you swing the sword, and if you swing properly, at the right angle with the right velocity, you go through that bundle as though it was a piece of paper. And if you don’t, then the sword ricochets back and it might hit you in the forehead and cut your head open! They had me try it. And they were right. If you went in at the right angle, and it was a bit of a downswing with the sword, it would go through. It went through on my first attempt. Then they had me swing up at it, and it bounced off, and the ricochet almost stabbed me in my backside!

    Bobby Valentine with former MLB pitcher Masato Yoshii. Courtesy of Jim Allen.

    That was all cool, but then I needed another two months to explain to Hirooka how a sword has no weight at the end of it, and a bat has a weight at the end of it. These interpretive conversations were multiple and always the same. I said the same thing, and he would always agree that he understood what I was saying, but that he didn’t agree with what I was saying. Then finally at the end of the year, and it was one of the most satisfying moments, he said to me, “I understand what you’re saying, and I understand that you are right, but I just don’t want the players to know that.” There was so much time and effort invested into this philosophy of hitting in Japan that they didn’t want to reverse it, so they just let it be. Luckily, some of the players kind of got the message. Today, many of the hitters in Japan, and in Korea for that matter, definitely have an upswing.

    The other major change is on the field. The Japanese now have incorporated the backhand as a standard way of fielding. In 1995 there was a rite of passage for those who entered the professional ranks of baseball in Japan. You had to field one thousand ground balls at one time without leaving the field, and while fielding them if you went to your right, you had to go so hard that you got in front of the ball. That was the way you fielded. When you went to your right, you always got in front of the ball, so the ball hit you in the chest if it didn’t go into the glove. But from about 1995, some of the infielders started to incorporate the backhand, and that made a big difference in their range factor and in their ability to throw the ball across the diamond more efficiently. 

    Those are the two technical things that changed from the first time I got there. The hitting one is rather large and the fielding one is a little more subtle. By incorporating those two changes, the players now look very similar to the professional players in the States. 

    Another thing that’s changed— Japanese baseball now leans toward recovery, not only toward effort. The idea that doing more, and more was better, has changed just a little. When I got to Japan in 1995, to miss a minute of practice while your teammates were practicing, even if you had to go to the bathroom, would be frowned upon. Everyone played all the time, and there was no pitch limit. I instituted a 15 pitch-per- inning goal and a 135-per- game maximum. You would have thought that I was asking families to give away their first-born child! Suggesting that a pitcher should have a limitation on his pitches per inning and per game was unheard of in Japan. 

    While I was managing there, Masahiro Tanaka pitched twelve innings in the 2006 Koshien final that ended in a tie and then came back the next day and pitched seven innings. I mean, are you kidding me? It was some of the greatest stuff I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a badge of honor to leave it all out on the field. The idea that you had to come back and do it again the next day wasn’t necessarily part of the equation.

    A crazy example of this happened in my first year. After a game we lost, I got showered and dressed and then came out, and Hirooka, the general manager, was standing behind the batting cage, and my third baseman was taking batting practice. It’s about 11:30 at night. Sweat is pouring off of his chin, and he had just played nine innings. And the pitcher is throwing curveballs. I watched for a while because I figured, well, he needed practice hitting curveballs. And I watched for a little longer. I guess he needed a little more practice hitting curveballs. Then, I went over to Hirooka-san and asked, “So how long is he going to be hitting here tonight?” 

    And he said, “Until he can hit the curveball.” 

    Of course! I thought. There was no consideration that the next day was a day game, and it was going to be 93 degrees, and this guy had to go home, come back, and then play nine more innings. 

    That has changed. The players are not wearing themselves down as much, and that’s why I think the athletes now are bigger and stronger. They have time to recover and build rather than just breaking their bodies down through constant work.

    I have to touch on this. Somewhere it should be said, or maybe it shouldn’t be said, but it took Japan about twenty years to discourage players from smoking cigarettes. In traditional Japanese baseball culture, that was what you were supposed to do. If you looked at the back of a magazine, all the stars in the ads were smoking. And if they were smoking, you had to smoke. When I first got there in 1995, right behind the dugout there was something like a table with a grid on the top where you put your cigarette out and then just dropped it into this long ashtray. The guys would come in from the field and line up like it was buffet line, eight or nine of them smoking cigarettes. It was crazy! But that has changed as well. 

    You know that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity, but businesswise the Japanese teams had a way of doing the same thing over and over again and being very satisfied with the same result. So, when I came back in 2005, I was hired to do more than the managing. I was also there to help them transition into more of a Major League–type business, to help them run the club as a standalone business instead of an advertising vehicle for the international company that lends its name to the team.

    Akio Shigemitsu, who ran the club, was the son of the owner of Lotte, and he was only part Japanese, so he was seen as an outsider. I think that’s what gave him the idea to give Hirooka-san the go ahead to find a foreign manager. Shigemitsu-san wasn’t getting the weekly memo from Watanabe-san (the president of the Yomiuri Giants) that everything in Japanese baseball is great and don’t try to change a thing until I call and give you the go-ahead. He didn’t totally follow the marching orders. All of the interaction we ever had was at these very formal geisha dinners: private room, sitting on the floor, geisha gals pouring your sake, talking about the weather and all the other really important things that we could definitely agree on to make sure there wasn’t going to be any confrontation at this social event. But we would also talk about doing things a little differently to make the Marines a better team and business. 

    When Shigemitsu-san gave me the go-ahead to talk with people about marketing, it was marketing the mascot and the team brand. It was never marketing the players. Japanese baseball, just like Japanese culture, in my opinion, is such a closed culture. They treated baseball as an entertainment vehicle that was closed to the public. There was an idea that players should not interact with the fans. It was as if it would lower your image if you didn’t keep a barrier between the players and those who paid to see them play. I think what they wanted was the secretive, aloof, no-contact kind of superstar, the Joe DiMaggio type. But, marketing the player and promoting the player and letting the fans have contact with the player have changed for the better over the years. It’s now part of the business side that they’re trying to sell, not only the brand but also the talent. 

    Between-inning entertainment has also become part of the business. The teams always had the mascots, but now there are mascots, cheerleaders, plus other events between innings to entertain fans. Japanese teams have become more cognizant that they need the fans to have the game. At one time, the fans needed the game, so they provided the game. The mentality changed a little so that now the game needs the fans. I think they’re getting it now. It’s a different ownership situation. 

    But it was tough to change the marketing. Marketing is one of those weird concepts in Japan. People are supposed to want to buy your product, right? Having to persuade consumers is a newer concept, and baseball is one of the older and more conservative businesses there. For example, I almost needed an act of Congress to allow kids to come on the field after Sunday games and run around the bases.

    I’m concerned that NPH will become like the Negro Leagues. I tried to tell players that the good players should stay there and that the medium players should go to the States and make more money. But don’t take the stars away from their teams because that’s what MLB did to the Negro Leagues. The Negro Leagues were great leagues for their fans. The last Negro World Series was in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson came to the Dodgers. That’s a whole story for another day, right? But that’s always my fear, that MLB is going to do that to another great league.

    I think a lot has been taken away from NPB because the players want to go where the grass is greener. They need to plant a few new lawns, and the beginning is to get new venues. You can then charge more money for suites and generate revenue from within the business itself rather than from the parent company. Then that money can be reinvested in R&D (research and development) and the minor leagues and in major league salaries and talent. 

    It looks like NPB is actually moving to do it with the Hokkaido new dome and the plans to renovate Jingu and make that into a spectacular downtown venue. The Giants are going to be forced to do something. Chiba, I hear, is going to spend over a billion dollars to build a new stadium along with Lotte and ZoZo in partnership. 

    One solution for NPB would be to increase their minor league system and their R&D. The problem with their system has been that they have eighty players in each organization. Thirty of them are basically on the ichi-gun (top team), and fifty of them are in the single ni-gun (minor league) team. The ni-gun manager has to keep sharp the guys who might come up to the big leagues as temporary replacements. Since there’s only one team, there is no room to develop young players. Sometimes, players are in the minor leagues for years without playing in a game. But they go to practice every day, five and six hours a day of practice. That’s the mentality: keep practicing, and you’ll get better. Well, I kept trying to tell them that they need to play to get better. It’s a game of playing, not just a game of hitting and throwing. Three of the organizations now have more than one minor league team, so that’s a start. 

    NPB also has to improve their feeder system. When you have four thousand high schools and eighty colleges playing baseball and then you draft only seventy or eighty kids a year, that is not forward thinking. They’ve got to spend more on developing players because there are a lot of players who fall through the cracks. Japanese kids develop physically later, and basically when they’re seventeen, they’re being judged whether or not they’re going to be a professional player. The feeder system has changed a little bit. It used to be Koshien to contract. Star in high school Koshien, and you get a contract. You’re one of the eighty players selected by a team. But now, teams are giving more opportunities for college and even industrial and independent league players to play professionally.

    Still, Japan needs to embrace the independent leagues. We have Minor League teams in the States that allow fans who aren’t close to a Major League franchise to go out and watch a professional baseball game. In Japan, there are independent league teams in all these little country towns. As in America, these should be seen as the place to go in the community. One could go to a baseball game with your kid and enjoy it and then go home without worrying about catching the last train out of Tokyo to get home. But the independent leagues haven’t built up a strong fan base. I was trying to expand the independent leagues when I was there because a stronger independent league system would produce more players for NPB. In 2006 when I was managing the Marines, I scouted independent teams, and I took a kid named Katsuya Kakunaka from an independent team in the draft. After I left, he wound up leading the league in hitting in 2012. 

    So anyway, that’s what I think NPB needs to do. They need to improve their facilities, create more minor league teams and more independent teams, and then they need to get together on what they’re doing. I think what they need to do eventually is change the baseball hierarchy. 

    And I think that’s already starting to change. And I think they should at least explore the possibility of having a division of Major League Baseball in Asia— not where teams are traveling back and forth between Asia and the United States, but where the winner of an Asian division enters the playoffs for a true world championship. Now, of course, that would change the model in Japan, and I don’t know that change is what they would really like to do. But I think that if baseball wants to expand and continue to grow worldwide, it would be better to merge and grow rather than just have MLB handpick talent and eliminate the competition.

    Of course, we have the WBC. But it interrupts the season. I don’t think that you’re ever going to get the best brand of baseball being played before the season. If it’s a true all-star situation, then I think it should be played midseason with everyone taking a break. Or it should be an Olympic sport played during the Winter Olympics. I always thought that would be the sensible thing to do, play the tournament in a dome during the Winter Olympics because it’s the off-season. 

    But you know, after winning the first one, and winning it often, I feel that Japan should get a bigger cut of the pie. I thought that they should have negotiated that from day one, but they didn’t. I felt and feel that it could be a big boost economically for the players. Also with the WBC, people will continue to say, “Oh, yeah, Japan only won because they take it more seriously. Japan only won because they practiced more before it started.” Well, if they’re going to practice more and use better players and be better prepared, which makes it a better event, then they should be rewarded economically for that. 

    My advice to American fans seeing their first Japanese game? Well, they should understand that the food is going to be better than they’ve ever had at a baseball park, so order properly: that the kegs are on legs and you’re going to get a very cold and foam-filled glass of beer that you absolutely have to have, and that you should pay attention to the game just like everyone else around you, because they won’t miss a pitch or an inning regardless of the score or who’s at the plate. The Japanese give the game that respect when they’re in the stands. There’s a better understanding of the game from the fans. It’s not necessarily vocalized or transmitted through action. If someone thinks something is good here in the States, they stand up in front of the person behind them and start yelling and waving their hands, regardless of whether the guy behind them can see. It’s a little different in Japan. But if you turn to the seventy-year- old woman to your left and ask what the count is, she’ll probably know. That should be appreciated. 

    The Japanese players will look and act in a very similar way, and they do that out of respect for the game. They feel that there’s a certain way to dress, a certain way to act when they’re on the field, a certain way to swing and miss in a very dramatic fashion. There are little moments of drama in a Japanese game that are kind of unique, but you have to know what you’re looking at to actually see them. There’s a little bit of Kabuki theater when they have a collision or get hit by a pitch or swing violently and miss or dive for a ball. Also, the idea of the count going full is respected a little more in Japan, that the battle has taken place and now it comes to this crescendo and the outcome will be on the next pitch. That’s Japanese baseball in its truest, purest form. The game is built around those moments. That’s why they love it.

    Off Base with Howard Cole is available on Substack

  • Baseball at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

    Baseball at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

    by Dave McNeely

    The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were the fifth time that baseball was included as a demonstration sport, following the 1912, 1936, 1952 and 1956 Olympiads.  The 1964 games, however, were different than the games before them in that more than one game would be played.

    Until recently, most English-language accounts of the 1964 Olympic baseball events described it as a single game played between a US team made up of college players against “a Japanese amateur all-star team”.  The game was played at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo on October 11th,1964 in front of 50,000 fans and was won by the US team by a score of 6-2.  One of the US players, Shaun Fitzmaurice, hit a home run on the first pitch of the game.

    As it turns out, this account is not entirely accurate.  There were actually TWO games that Team USA played in at Jingu Stadium that day – one against a team of Japanese collegiate players and one against a team of Japanese corporate league players.  Neither Japanese team should really be considered an “all-star” team.  The collegiate team was essentially the Komazawa University team (which had just won the All-Japan University Baseball Championship four months earlier) which was fortified with seven players from other colleges in Tokyo.  Similarly, the corporate league team was the Nippon Express team (which had won the Intercity Baseball Tournament – essentially the corporate league championship – two and a half months earlier) that was bolstered by seven players from other corporate league teams.

    Rod Dedeaux, the legendary USC baseball coach, was the manager of the US team.  He’d put together an all-star team of collegiate players for a 14-game tour of Japan and South Korea that included these two games in Tokyo.  The tour was organized to drum up interest in having baseball added to future Olympics.  The team would include eight players who would go on to play in the major leagues – Mike Epstein, Gary Sutherland, Chuck Dobson, Alan Closter, Dick Joyce, Jim Hibbs, Ken Suarez and the previously mentioned Shaun Fitzmaurice.  

    The baseball team was not considered part of the official US Olympic team and was not quartered in the Olympic Village.  Neither were they allowed to participate in the Opening Ceremony.  On the plus side, however, they were not subject to the curfew that the other athletes had and were able to enjoy the Tokyo nightlife deeper into the evening.  Similarly, the Japanese teams were not considered part of the official Japanese team and also did not take part in the Opening Ceremony.  

    The Japanese collegiate team (seen above with Team USA) was managed by Akihito Kobayashi, the head coach of the Komazawa University team.  Eleven of the eighteen players on the roster were from Komazawa with another two players coming from one of the University’s Tohto League rivals, Chou University.  The other five players came from Tokyo Big Six league schools – two from Hosei, two from Keio and one from Rikkio.  All the players wore Komazawa uniforms.

    Twelve members of this team would go on to have professional careers in NPB.  Tokuji “Atsushi” Nagaike of Hosei University was the biggest name here – he won two Pacific League MVP awards (1969 & 1971) and led the league in home runs and RBIs three times each.  Shozo Doi (Rikkio) and Toshimitsu Suetsugu (Chuo) were key members of the Yomiuri Giants team that won nine straight Nippon Series between 1965 and 1973 (known as the V9 Giants).  Doi managed the Orix BlueWave in the early 1990s and is most famous (infamous?) for saying that Ichiro Suzuki would never be able to hit with that batting stance.  Taisuke Watanabe (Keio) had thrown the first perfect game in Tokyo Big Six history five months before these games.

    The corporate league team (seen above with Team USA) was managed by Seiji Inaba, the head coach of Nippon Express.  Like the collegiate team, the corporate league team’s eighteen player roster featured eleven players from their manager’s team.  The other seven players consisted of two players each from Nippon Oil and Nippon Steel Pipe and one each from Sumitomo Metal, Nippon Columbia and Kanekalon Kaneka.  All the members of the team wore Nippon Express uniforms.

    Only three of these players would have professional careers.  The most interesting story of any of these players is Shigeo Kondo of Nippon Columbia who, after an eleven-year corporate league career, was taken by the Lotte Orions in the 1971 NPB draft.  At 29 years and one month, he was the oldest player drafted, a record he would hold for eleven years until 30-year and five-month-old Norio Ichimura was drafted by the Dragons in 1982.

    With the smoke of the Olympic cauldron (which had been lit during the Opening Ceremony the previous evening) at the National Stadium visible just beyond the left field stands of Jingu Stadium, the teams held their own “opening ceremony” before the two collegiate teams faced off in the first game.  While there’s no record of whether Fitzmaurice did indeed hit a home run on the first pitch of the game, the US team did score a run in the top of the first inning.  Japan matched that run in the bottom of the inning and went ahead 2-1 with a single run in the fifth inning.  Team USA tied the score in the top of the ninth and that’s how the game ended – a 2-2 tie.  The corporate league team proved no match for Team USA in the nightcap with Dedeaux’s squad shutting out Inaba’s by a score of 3-0.

    Team USA’s tour of Japan would conclude two weeks later with a doubleheader in Urawa.  Their first game against “a selected team from Saitama Prefecture” ended in a 3-3 tie while Nippon Express got their revenge by winning the second game 3-2.  The collegiate team would finish the Japanese portion of their tour with a record of 5-2-2. 

    Baseball would not return to the Olympics for twenty years when it was again a demonstration sport for the 1984 Los Angeles games.  Unlike the previous instances, the 1984 games featured an eight-team tournament rather than a single day event.  The only connection to the 1964 games was Rod Dedeaux, who would again manage Team USA.  The Japanese team took the “unofficial” gold medal with Team USA taking silver.  The two nations would swap spots at the 1988 Seoul games, the last that baseball would be played in as a demonstration sport.  It would become an official sport at the 1992 Barcelona games.

    Note – the photos for this post were taken from the “Japan National Team Uniform Catalog”, a book/magazine published by Baseball Magazine She in April of 2020.  The baseball cards are from the author’s personal collection.

    Dave McNeely has been collecting Japanese Baseball cards for more than 25 years and has been blogging about them since 2007.  His blog can be found at Japanese Baseball Cards.

  • San Francisco Baseball Returns to Japan: The 1960 Giants Goodwill Tour

    San Francisco Baseball Returns to Japan: The 1960 Giants Goodwill Tour

    by Robert Garratt

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Rob Garratt tells us about Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants 1960 visit to Japan.

    The San Francisco Giants enjoyed a banner year in 1960. After almost five years of planning by the city’s mayor and Board of Supervisors and two years of problem-plagued construction, the Giants’ new ballpark, Candlestick Park, opened in time for the 1960 season. It was a dream come true for Giants owner Horace Stoneham and it justified his move from New York at the end of the 1957 season. The Giants, with a new identity as a West Coast team, now had a permanent location in a new ballpark. The team drew well in its first year at Candlestick, and Stoneham was pleased. And while the Giants would miss out on the National League pennant in 1960, they did manage an exciting postseason, nonetheless. In October 1960, the San Francisco Giants traveled to Japan on a goodwill tour, carrying on a tradition of the city’s connection with Japanese baseball.

    San Francisco baseball was known to the Japanese public first through the energy of Frank “Lefty” O’Doul, a San Francisco native who visited Japan in the 1930s with American baseball teams, fell in love with the country and its people, and saw the potential there for good baseball.  O’Doul, who is enshrined in Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame for his contribution to the Japanese game, took his San Francisco Seals Pacific Coast League team to Japan in 1949 (O’Doul was the Seals manager), the first time after World War II that an American team toured Japan. The team’s visit was endorsed by General Douglas MacArthur, the American administrator of Occupied Japan, who felt that the game would lift the spirits of the Japanese people and do wonders for diplomacy between two former foes. The Seals’ visit was a resounding success, with the team greeted by some of the largest crowds that had assembled publicly in Japan since the end of the war. By all accounts it was a successful diplomatic venture with the added bonus that it increased the popularity of the game in Japan.

    The Giants’ 1960 tour was the second postwar visit for a San Francisco ballclub and the second for Horace Stoneham as well. Stoneham took his New York Giants to Japan for an exhibition tour in 1953, the first single major-league team to do so. The Giants dominated the 1953 series with Japan, drubbing the Yomiuri Giants 11-1 in the opening game and going on to win nine straight games, finishing the series with 12 victories against one loss and one tie. The Japanese players may have lost on the field, but the Japanese people won their way into Stoneham’s heart. The tour itself made a great impression on the Giants’ boss, who was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the Japanese fans, and by the gracious hospitality of the Japanese officials. Treated as an international celebrity, he was moved by the attention and honor paid to the Giants as foreign guests and he was charmed by the country itself – its sights, its food, and its ceremonies and rituals that reflected a deep sense of culture. Stoneham was quoted as recognizing the goodwill gesture of the tour, especially its importance in strengthening the ties between the two countries.

    Those 1953 memories were dancing in Stoneham’s head in late 1959 when he received an invitation from Japanese officials for the Giants to return to Japan in the fall of 1960. The proposal was backed by Matsutaro Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the leading newspaper conglomerates in Japan, and brokered by Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada, a Nisei Japanese American who was helping develop Japanese baseball in the 1950s. Stoneham was so enthusiastic about the invitation that he sent Lefty O’Doul to Japan in the winter of 1959-60 to work with Harada and Shoriki to firm up the plans; O’Doul had been working for the Giants as a consultant since their arrival in San Francisco and Stoneham wanted to take full advantage of O’Doul’s ties with Japanese baseball. The initial discussions went well and by the summer of 1960, Shoriki and Harada presented the Giants with a formal plan for a tour of Japan.

    The proposed invitation called for the Giants to play a 16-game exhibition schedule in 10 Japanese cities, under Japanese rules and officiated by Japanese umpires, with participation by San Francisco’s “star players.” Shoriki was careful to insist on Giants star power, knowing that the likes of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Orlando Cepeda would appeal to Japanese fans eager to see great hitting. Stoneham was more than happy to accept and returned the signed agreement in late August 1960. Twenty-two players agreed to travel to Japan, including Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, and a young Juan Marichal, all of them future Hall of Famers. Most of the Giants starters joined the tour as well, among them Felipe Alou, Jim Davenport, and pitchers Jack Sanford and Sam Jones. Included were club officials, headed by Stoneham and his wife, Valleda, acting manager Tom Sheehan, club secretary Eddie Brannick, team publicist Garry Schumacher, and O’Doul.

    The organizing Japanese committee pulled out all the stops. The schedule of events upon arrival was nothing short of breathtaking, with almost no hour unaccounted for in the daily routines. Everything was meticulously planned from a television press conference at the airport to a celebrity parade from the airport to the city. Crowds lined the 10-mile parade route and packed the rain-soaked streets in downtown Tokyo as the Giants made their way to the hotel. That evening a welcoming dinner reception was held at the Imperial Hotel and Stoneham read a message from San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, a special greeting to “[our] ‘sister city,’ expressing best wishes to the Japanese people on the 100th anniversary of US-Japan diplomatic relations.” On the second day more ceremonial activities took place as the Giants toured Yomiuri’s headquarters, visited the Nihon Television Studios, where the players were interviewed and introduced to Japan’s national TV audience, practiced for 1½ hours at Korakuen Stadium, and attended a reception in their honor at the US Embassy, hosted by Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the nephew of General MacArthur. Japanese planners had thought of every probability, working in “alternatives” for events and sightseeing, in case of changes due to bad weather. In what must have seemed a whirlwind pace of parades, receptions, and ceremonial lunches and dinners, the Giants, with very little time for themselves, might have thought that a game of baseball was almost anticlimactic.

    The 1960 San Francisco Giants arrive in Japan (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York)

    On the third day, the time finally came for the Giants to face the Yomiuri Giants in the inaugural game of the tour. But the visiting players would wait again as the game provided the Japanese with yet another opportunity for pregame pageantry, described by one source as part parade, part theater spectacle, as “shapely Japanese models and the Tokyo police band led the Japanese and American Giants around Korakuen Stadium as fireworks exploded, and balloons and pigeons soared skyward.”  Once the teams had finished the procession and the air had cleared, Ambassador MacArthur read a greeting from President Dwight Eisenhower that recalled the long history of exchanges between Japanese and American baseball players, noting the important role of the national pastime in both countries. The president’s message stressed the importance of this year’s exhibition series as a promotion of “the spirit of international understanding and co-operation essential to the peace of the world.” Then Matsutaro Shoriki threw out the traditional first ball and the game officially began, at last.

    Initially things did not fare well for the visitors, who were perhaps weary from international travel and overwhelmed by welcoming ceremonies. In the first two games of the scheduled 16-game tour, the Japanese beat San Francisco, much to the surprise and chagrin of some of the local sportswriters, who expressed a tinge of disappointment over the Japanese success. Writing for the Japan Times, Katsundo Mizuno labeled the Giants’ start as the “worst of any major league outfit” that ever visited Japan, and he wondered what was wrong with them. The headlines in the local coverage of the opening game reflected a mixture of shock with a dash of hyperbole: “Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants Bomb San Francisco, 1-0” although the Japanese managed only two hits against Giants pitching.

    The first game was the only one in which San Francisco faced players from a single team. For the rest of the exhibition tour, the Giants played squads of all-stars drawn from the two Nippon Professional Baseball leagues. The Giants lost the second game, but managed a win in Game 3, prompting the Japanese journalists to collect their breath, astonished by the Americans’ poor start. “By squeaking past the Japan All-Stars 1-0 at Tokyo’s Korakuen stadium yesterday, the Giants have averted unheard of catastrophe for major league baseball. No visiting U.S. big league team has ever lost three games in a row in Japan.”  Hisanori Karita, a veteran Japanese baseball commentator, was quoted as demanding more “major-style action” from the visitors.

    When questioned by the Japanese press about their slow start, Giants players and team officials responded politely and diplomatically, although privately they must have wondered what the fuss was about, given that they were adjusting to international travel, a frenetic welcome schedule, and a foreign cultural environment. Interim Giants manager Tom Sheehan tried some American tongue-in-cheek humor, “I understand we’ve set a new record for major leaguers by losing two games in a row. We may lose all the remaining games, too, you know.” “We’ll play better tomorrow,” he added.

    The folksy Sheehan proved a truthful prognosticator. Games 4 and 5 were on the road, in Sapporo and Sendai, and the San Franciscans won them both, with plenty of offense including four home runs, three of them by Willie McCovey. The Giants then returned to Tokyo for two more games at Korakuen Stadium, which they split with the host team, giving them a 4-3 record for the series as they prepared to play the rest of the tour “on the road.” One highlight for the American squad was the attendance of Japanese royalty in Game 6 at Korakuen. Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko, guests of Matsutaro Shoriki, watched the Japanese all-stars erupt for 10 runs – the most they would score in any game of the tour – and beat the Giants, 10-7, before 32,000 fans. The crown prince and princess saw Willie Mays homer in the game, and then watched All-Star Isao Harimoto answer with a two-run blast of his own.

    For the remainder of the exhibition tour, the Giants played outside of Tokyo, on a swing throughout southern Japan taking them to seven cities: Toyama; a three-game series in Osaka; Fukuoka; Shimonoseki; Hiroshima; Nagoya; and finishing in Shizuoka. It was on this road trip that the Giants found their mojo, winning seven straight games. But it was the manner in which they won that was impressive. Unlike the games played in Tokyo, which were usually low-scoring and tight, most of the road games were one-sided, with the Giants’ bats coming alive, much to the delight of the Japanese fans, who expected to see home run fireworks from the likes of Mays, McCovey, and Cepeda.

    After an unusual game in Toyama in which the Giants banged out three home runs in the first inning to take a seven-run lead, only to see the All-Stars claw their way back, highlighted by a three-run homer by Kenjiro Tamiya off Mike McCormick – the game ended in 10 innings in a 7-7 tie – it was on to Osaka. The Giants found this stop to their liking, sweeping the three-game series in front of enthusiastic Osaka fans (the three games drew 90,000). During the Osaka series, they also enjoyed a day off touring the historic city of Kyoto.

    Then it was on to Fukuoka, where the Giants won decisively, 8-4, and then to Shimonoseki, where they beat the all-star team, 11-5, in a demonstration of offensive fire, hitting four home runs. In an example of the goodwill that underscored and permeated the entire baseball tour, there was a somber and emotional moment when the Giants arrived in Hiroshima. Prior to the game, which the Giants won, 4-1, Stoneham led the players and team officials to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, where both Stoneham and Sheehan placed bouquets of flowers by the Memorial Cenotaph in a solemn ceremony honoring the memory of those Hiroshima citizens who died in the final days of World War II. After Hiroshima, the Giants traveled to Nagoya and put up big numbers once again in a 14-2 win. The last game of the tour was played at Shizuoka’s Kusanagi Stadium on November 13, won by the Japanese All-Stars, 3-2. The Giants totals for the series were 11 wins, 4 losses and 1 tie. After the game, the Giants boarded a train to Tokyo for three days of sightseeing before they flew home on Friday, November 18.

    *****

    Despite their slow start, the Giants finished their exhibition goodwill tour of Japan with a flurry and put up impressive numbers for the series, hitting 31 homers over 16 games, much to the delight of the Japanese fans; McCovey hit eight home runs, Mays seven, and Cepeda five. Mays hit .393 for the tour and was named by the all-star and Giants managers as the series’ Most Valuable Player. Giants pitching was strong as well, with an overall 2.41 ERA and 92 strikeouts in 142 innings. Sam Jones had a 3-0 record with an amazing 0.82 ERA; Juan Marichal posted a 1.55 ERA with a 2-0 record and a complete game; Mike McCormick had 22 strikeouts in 23 ⅔ innings.  In a memorable and significant moment for Japanese fans, Jones displayed his own version of goodwill when he went over to first base after hitting a batter and apologized to the hitter. There were other friendly exchanges between the Giants players and the all-stars throughout the tour, some of which involved discussions of techniques for hitting and pitching. Overall, the relations between the two teams were positive and gracious, with a healthy sense of mutual respect. The Japanese fans were also captivated by the tour and turned out in all the cities to welcome the Giants and attend the games. The fans’ enthusiasm was evident in the exhibition tour’s great success at the turnstiles. The Giants drew 441,000 for the 16 games, according to the Japan Baseball Commission and the Yomiuri Shimbun.

    *****

    For all the goodwill that came of the Giants’ visit, the tour was not without its controversy, however. Buoyed by the games and the enthusiastic Japanese response – both the total attendance and the ticker-tape parades in various cities that drew huge crowds – and heady about the future of cooperation between the United States and Japan, Ambassador MacArthur spoke at a farewell reception at the US Embassy of more baseball competition between the two countries. MacArthur was specific in his proposal; he envisioned a future world series between the American champion and the Japanese champion and even had a date in mind. He thought an initial exhibition series could be played in 1964, in concert with the Tokyo Olympic Games, which could lead to a more established series a few years later.

    His idea was immediately supported by Nobori Inouye, the commissioner of Japanese baseball. Both Lefty O’Doul and Cappy Harada also favored the idea and thought that with reasonable planning an international world series could take place perhaps in five or six years. Both men felt that Japanese baseball was improving rapidly and would offer good competition. So did Stoneham. In a press conference upon his return to San Francisco, the Giants boss remarked that he was “amazed” at the improvement of the Japanese players in the seven years since he first visited Japan. Moreover, Stoneham wanted a continued connection with Japanese baseball.

    But when Harada, who was working as a consultant to the Giants, brought the idea to Commissioner Ford Frick in New York, it was dead-on-arrival. Perhaps it was an idea that was too embryonic, requiring planning, research, and co-operation between organizations. Possibly Frick accepted the prevailing view of Japanese baseball as inferior to the American game. Or it might have been the process by which the idea took flight that Frick objected to, coming out of the blue from an American ambassador in Japan. What was certain, however, was that Frick wanted to assert his authority about such matters. He fired off an official statement indicating that no decision can be made about any international baseball series without input from the commissioner’s office, and suggested that he had no immediate plans to entertain such a proposal.

    Another controversy emerged during the tour involving the Giants’ interest in Japanese players. Upon Stoneham’s arrival in Japan, in an uncharacteristic slip of the tongue – Stoneham usually was tight-lipped about personnel matters, especially when it came to player acquisitions – the Giants’ owner commented that there were “several Japanese players we have heard about and are anxious to see.” Explaining that he would like to reach some formal agreement with a few Japanese clubs, he hoped to invite some players to the Giants’ spring training. These were just casual remarks folded into his words of appreciation of the Japanese invitation and nothing much was spoken about any plans or arrangements for the first 10 days of the tour. By the end of the second week, however, word had leaked to some in the press that Stoneham was interested in signing some Japanese players, or at least having them affiliate in some fashion with his organization, including a spring-training visit.

    While the newspapers were speculating, Stoneham was working quietly behind the scenes. When the Giants arrived in Osaka on November 3 for the three-game series, Stoneham extended an invitation to the Nankai Hawks, to have pitcher Tadashi Sugiura attend their 1961 spring training in Arizona. The Japanese responded almost immediately to the offer. Makoto Tachibana, the president of the Nankai Hawks, issued a statement to the local press rejecting Stoneham’s invitation and made it clear he was suspicious of the Giants’ motives.

    “I feel it isn’t only a case of having [Sugiura] attend the camp, but an underlying intention to hire him,” Tachibana said. “Even if this isn’t true, it can be considered that they may want to learn something from him, to – I hate to say it – steal his techniques.” Tachibana’s paranoia tended somewhat to the bizarre – “there is a possibility they want to use Sugiura for experiments” – but the Nankai owner’s root cause for worry was evident in his closing remarks to the press. He feared that Sugiura would be “separated from his team,” that is, playing for the Giants, “and we cannot permit a man as valuable to Japanese baseball to be used to his disadvantage.” The concern that Japanese baseball might lose some of its best players to American clubs was clear. There was also an invitation extended to a position player, Takeshi Kuwata, a third baseman for the Taiyo Whales, but that, too, came to nothing. The invitations and their subsequent refusals were minor incidents in the larger story of the tour, the games, the associations between players and the Japanese fans’ excitement over the competition, but they provided an interesting subplot to the 1960 Giants’ visit.

    Once home from Japan, Stoneham more or less confirmed Tachibana’s suspicions. In remarks to a local sportswriter at a post-tour press conference, the Giants boss praised the Japanese players, taking care to emphasize the improvements in the quality of play, the skill, and the athleticism of many Japanese players since his 1953 visit with his New York Giants team. He implied that a few of the Japanese players, chiefly pitchers, might be able to have good results immediately in the major leagues, something that Tom Sheehan had noticed on the tour. That Stoneham saw the potential of Japanese players is not surprising; he had become a keen observer of major-league talent over the years. What is surprising is how prescient his notions were in the fall of 1960. The thinking behind those public remarks would take shape quickly, much to the surprise of both the major leagues and Nippon Professional Baseball. Just three years later, Stoneham’s musings on Japanese players would materialize with a radical move that would change baseball history.

    In the fall of 1963, Cappy Harada, working for Stoneham as a scout and on the payroll with the Nankai Hawks as a consultant, came up with a proposal for cooperation between the two clubs. With Stoneham’s blessing, Harada arranged for three Hawks players – third baseman Tatsuhiko Tanaka, catcher Hiroshi Takahashi, and pitcher Masanori Murakami – to come to the United States for 1964 spring training and a chance to develop within the Giants’ minor-league system. According to the agreement, the Japanese players would participate in general spring training and then be assigned to minor-league teams for the rest of the season, Murakami at single A, and Tanaka and Takahashi at lower levels. Once the minor-league season was finished, the Giants sent the position players home to Japan, but kept Murakami, who had progressed so well in Fresno that he was called up to the big club in September. On Tuesday evening, September 1, 1964, in Shea Stadium, New York, Murakami made history as a baseball pioneer, pitching one inning of scoreless relief, the first Japanese national to play in the majors. He would pitch through the month of September and would return to the Giants for the 1965 season.

    Horace Stoneham has many achievements on his résumé as a baseball owner. After Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Stoneham was soon to follow with the signing of African American players. He led the way in breaking a second barrier in the signing of Latino players. Along with Bill Veeck, he was responsible for founding the Cactus League in 1948. With his signing of Murakami, he broke another barrier in baseball, making the game global. It is tempting to think that this last achievement germinated in the stands at Japanese ballparks in 1960, as the Giants boss watched the Japanese players, especially the pitchers. He was certainly impressed enough with the players’ abilities to extend an invitation for two of them to come to spring training, even though the gesture did not bear fruit. Nonetheless, he sensed the latent talent in Japanese baseball. And perhaps on that 1960 tour, he saw the immediate future: a Japanese national wearing the uniform of the San Francisco Giants and playing in the major leagues.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    San Francisco Baseball Returns to Japan: The 1960 Giants Goodwill Tour
  • Crossroads: The 1958 St. Louis Cardinals Tour of Japan

    Crossroads: The 1958 St. Louis Cardinals Tour of Japan

    by Adam Berenbak

    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 Adam Berenbak focuses on Stan Musial, Shigeo Nagashima, and the Cardinals 1958 visit to Japan.

    Game Seven of the 1958 Japan Series featured a winner-take-all finish to a classic contest between two storied franchises.

    In the bottom of the ninth, with a six-run lead, 21-year-old Kazuhisa Inao stared down at Shigeo Nagashima, ready to wrap up one the most famous pitching feats in Japan Series history. He had earned the win in the previous three games for the Nishitetsu Lions and was prepared to win his fourth in a row, and with it the championship. With such a comfortable lead, Inao had little to worry about, even though he faced Nagashima, the star rookie of the Yomiuri Giants. The Rookie of the Year hit a high fly ball deep into Korakuen Stadium that the Lions center fielder couldn’t make a play on. Nagashima displayed his blazing speed and sailed around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. Inao then finished off the remaining Giants and took the crown.

    Though Nagashima’s home run had little effect on the outcome of the game, the matchup represented the best of baseball in Japan and the future of the sport. At the same moment, roughly 680 miles (1,100 kilometers) away in Seoul, the St. Louis Cardinals were playing a Korean all-star team in preparation for a 16-game tour against Japan’s best. A few days later, they would face an all-star team built around Nagashima and Inao, assembled by tour sponsor Mainichi Shimbun and tour organizer Yetsuo Higa, to showcase the young talent that would be the future of Japanese baseball.

    THE TOUR STARTS

    To quote Jim Brosnan, who was splitting duties by pitching for the Cardinals and covering the tour for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “From one of the longest runways in the world, San Francisco, we took off on the longest trip of this or any other year. By sunrise on the tenth we gained four hours changing time zones and explaining to the stomach wha’ hoppen [sic] in our 28-hour day.” The tour began in earnest the next day in front of a mere 3,000 fans at the Maui County Fairgrounds in Kahului, on the island of Maui. They faced a team that featured Bob Turley, Lew Burdette, and Eddie Mathews bolstering a collection of local ballplayers that Higa put together.

    Two years before, Commissioner Ford Frick had helped arrange for the two major Japanese papers, Yomiuri Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, to host US tours, after each paper had tried to host teams in 1955. The solution was to alternate responsibility every other year, beginning with the 1956 Dodgers tour. Yomiuri had hosted first and it was no surprise that the Giants had played a big role. This time Higa, a Nisei businessman representing Mainichi, had arranged the tour to be unlike previous tours, pitting a Japanese all-star team against the Cardinals.

    Although formidable, St. Louis was a team in transition. The Cardinals in 1958 had finished fifth in the National League. The only real highlights of the season were Stan Musial’s 3,000th hit and the debut of Curt Flood, who eventually helped the team to three pennants. Most of the team’s regulars made the trip, including Musial, Don Blasingame, Ken Boyer, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Wally Moon, Hal Smith, and Gene Green. However, last-minute substitutions, even after the vaccination shots had been administered, gave rise to a team that much more resembled the 1959 Cardinals. Gene Freese, Billy Muffett, and Hobie Landrith had already received their shots and clearances when they received trade notices just days before the team left. The 1958 coaching staff was set to go, too, but they were let go at the end of the season, two weeks after manager Fred Hutchinson received his pink slip.

    Instead, newly minted Cardinals Alex Grammas, Bob Blaylock, and Ernie Broglio, along with brand- new manager Solly Hemus, made the trip. The pitching corps included Sam Jones, Mizell, Larry Jackson, and newcomers Blaylock and Broglio, the latter a promising rookie who was later (infamously) traded for Lou Brock. After tours by the San Francisco Seals in 1949 and all-star teams in 1951 and 1953, Japan had been visited by all three teams from New York. It was not shocking that the Cardinals were the third choice for 1958, behind the AL and NL pennant winners. Higa had made his play, but when major stars on both the Yanks and Braves decided against making the trip overseas, Higa was forced to reassess and offer the tour to St. Louis. His relationship with Cardinals, and the involvement of J.G. Taylor Spink, drove the decision, as well as an ability to exploit Musial’s stardom against an all-star team designed to showcase Japan’s youth.

    Also along on the tour was Cardinals broadcaster Joe Garagiola. He was at the mike to broadcast a select number of games aired via tape-delay over KMOX Radio in St. Louis. The Sporting News claimed it was the first time a domestic radio station had broadcast baseball from overseas.

    After the Kahului game, which the Cardinals took, 4 1, on Larry Jackson’s strong arm and his third-inning home run off Burdette, the two teams met twice in Honolulu. The Cardinals won the first game in a 9-1 rout, collecting six runs in five innings off Bob Turley, fresh off his historic Game Seven World Series win. St. Louis tacked on three more runs off Len Kasparovitch. The sole run for the Hawaiian All-Stars came when Ken Kimura drove in Wally Dupont, who had reached third when his base hit skipped past center fielder Bobby Gene Smith and rolled to the fence. In the final game, St. Louis edged the Hawaiian All-Stars, 5-4. Mathews tied the game, 4-4, with a home run off Broglio in the fourth, but two consecutive Hawaiian errors in the fifth allowed the Cardinals to regain the lead. The true star of the game was former Dartmouth pitcher Jimmy Doole, a schoolteacher who held the Cardinals to one hit during the final three innings. Strong seasonal rain forced the cancellation of a game in Guam, but otherwise the Cardinals soundly defeated the opposition in games at Manila and the Air Force Base in Kadena, Okinawa, before boarding the plane to Japan.

    JAPAN

    The touring group arrived in Tokyo on October 20 to a 1,500-person welcome party at Tokyo International Airport. In 13 open-topped cars, the team then paraded through streets packed with fans before arriving at the Imperial Hotel. They caught Game Six of the Japan Series and then set out on a two-day trip to South Korea to play before 25,000 fans in Seoul, including President Syngman Rhee. After they returned to Japan, there was a workout in Tokyo attended by nearly as many fans, before the real contests against the Japan All-Stars began on October 24 in a sold-out Korakuen Stadium, where the 1,200-yen seats were going for 10,000 yen on the side.

    The Cardinals faced a formidable foe. The Mainichi newspaper distributed a supplement to advertise the tour that listed a Japanese roster that averaged just 24 years old—a whole generation of players coming into their own. Nankai Hawks ace Matsuo Minagawa was described as “specializing in terrific shoots,” an ode to his side-arm screwball, which, along with his slider, baffled hitters into the late 1960s. He was one of the 23 future Japanese Hall of Famers on the squad,joining several players not bom in Japan, like the Cuban Roberto “Chico” Barbon and Bill Nishida, a Nisei born in Hawaii. But it was Shigeo Nagashima who was the real sensation of Nippon Professional Baseball and would be “the most watched player in the coming series against the Cardinals.” He was already a “national hero,” even before joining the Giants due to his turning Rikkyo University into champions. Nagashima signed the largest contract for a rookie in Japanese history (to that date) and came through with a spectacular performance, leading the Central League in home runs and winning the Rookie of the Year Award. As the series got under way, Nagashima was praised by both Japanese and touring Cardinals as being a “major-league third baseman.” Besides Nagashima, the young All-Stars included Futoshi Nakanishi, Tatsuro Hirooka, and Katsuya Nomura, as well as aces Inao, Tadashi Sugiura, Takao Kajimoto, Motoshi Fujita, and 20-year-old Tetsuya Yoneda. Added to that core was one of the best pitchers in the history of the game, Japan’s only 400-game winner, Masaichi Kaneda, who was already well known to US fans as the man who had struck out Mickey Mantle three times in the second game of the Yankees’ 1955 tour. These players formed the core of Japanese baseball for the next decade as the sport moved into its own, with Nagashima at its center, epitomizing both youth and progress.

    With the stadium full and the cameras broadcasting across Japan, the tour was underway. The Cardinals took the game, 5-2, but the star of the day was Nagashima, who hit a home run in a game that saw no homers from the Americans. Stan Musial went hitless. The two All-Star runs came on home runs by Nagashima and Chunichi Dragons sure-hitting second baseman Noboru Inoue. Mizell got the win thanks to Don Blasingame, who notched three hits off Tetsuya Yoneda and Masaaki Koyama.

    The next day’s game featured a start by Kazuhisa Inao, who did not pitch in the first game, possibly because he needed rest after his recent performance in the Japan Series. Inao, in his third full season, had attained a superhuman veneer after capturing all four of the Lions’ wins in the Japan Series. The press referred to him as the “Iron Man” and “Superman.”The sellout crowd, including Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama, who threw out the first pitch, appeared thin due to a steady rain that eventually led to the game’s premature end. Nonetheless, countless fans cheered on the All-Star team from home on television.

    The rain started falling in the second inning, which saw Inao, along with Nishita and future Hall of Famer Takao Kajimoto, give up 13 hits over six innings to lose 8-2. The Cardinals broke out in the fourth, knocking in four runs, all off Inao, who gave up seven hits. Larry Jackson pitched six innings, giving up four hits—though one was a 390-foot homer off Nakanishi’s bat. The driving rain eventually forced the umpires to call the game at the end of six innings.

    About 185 miles (300 kilometers) away in Sendai on October 27, the All-Stars won their first game, as Kazuhisa Inao showed off his ironman stuff. Coming back on only two days’ rest, Inao pitched three innings in a relief to grab the win after southpaw Atsushi Aramaki had allowed the Cardinals to knot the game, 2-2, in the top of the seventh. In the bottom of the seventh, the Japanese surged ahead on “three walks, a wild pitch, a sacrifice bunt and two costly errors for four runs” to win, 6-3.

    The tour then moved to Sapporo, where on October 28, before 30,000 fans, the Cardinals won 9-1. Blaylock pitched a brilliant seven-inning stretch, giving up only an inside-the-park homer to Nagashima along with one other hit. Two days later, the Cardinals won another behind Bobby Smith’s two doubles, a single, and a homer, just barely missing the cycle. However, Smith didn’t leave the stadium without claiming one—he was awarded a motorcycle as MVP of the game, and then proceeded to drive around the infield as the crowd cheered him on. The Cardinals won again, 7-2, in Nagoya before another game scheduled for November 1 in Osaka was rained out. On November 2 the Cardinals faced Aramaki in Nishinomiya. Aramaki held the Americans to one run in five innings before being removed for a pinch-hitter. Inao came in but the Cardinals scored three in the seventh and won handily 6-1.

    According to The Sporting News, the “Cardinals were in formal dress more than baseball flannels” as they moved from party to party, highlighted by an audience with Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II (the general’s nephew).

    The tour’s largest crowd showed up at Koshien Stadium on November 3. Each August, Koshien is home to the National High School Championship, which, along with the spring invitational, showcases the future of Japanese baseball. The 1957 tournament had featured a legendary performance by Sadaharu Oh, and the August 1958 tournament had seen the first team from Okinawa to participate—a great step forward in the relationship between the occupied island and mainland Japan. Before the game, a home run contest was held. Shigeo Nagashima paced the All-Stars with seven home runs, matched only by Musial. In the end, the All-Stars eked out a 15-14 victory, though the crowd cheered each and every dinger, proving the old adage “you can’t boo a home run.” Before roughly 50,000 energized fans at Koshien, Masaaki Koyama pitched brilliantly over eight innings holding the Cardinals to two runs. Ken Boyer proved to be the heavy hitter, tying the game in the ninth with a home run and then winning it in the 10th by driving in Blasingame.

    Sitting in the crowd that day was Haruki Murakami. The future award-winning writer recalled:

    When I was nine, in the fall, the St. Louis Cardinals played a goodwill game against an All-Star Japanese team. The great Stan Musial was at his peak then, and he faced two top Japanese pitchers, Kazuhisa Inao and Tadashi Sugiura, in an amazing showdown. My father and I went to Koshien Stadium to see the game. We were in the infield seats along first base, near the front. Before the game began, the Cardinals’ players made a circuit of the whole stadium, tossing signed soft rubber tennis balls to the crowd. People leapt to their feet, shouting, vying to grab the balls. But I just sat in my seat, vacantly watching all of this happen. I figured that a little kid like me had no chance of getting one of those signed balls. The next instant, however, I suddenly found one of them in my lap. By total chance, it just happened to land there. Plop—like some divine revelation.

    “Good for you,” my father told me. He sounded half shocked, half admiring. Come to think of it, when I became a novelist at age thirty, he said almost the same thing to me. Half shock, half admiration. That was probably the greatest, most memorable thing that happened to me when I was a boy. Maybe the most blessed event I ever experienced. Could it be that my love for baseball stadiums sprang from this incident? I took that treasured white ball back home, of course, but that’s all I remember about it. What ever happened to that ball? Where could it have possibly gone?

    The second game in Osaka saw half the crowd but provided twice the thrill as the Japanese All-Stars punished the Cardinals for their second win of the series. Futoshi Nakanishi, whom the Cardinals nicknamed “Big Buffalo,” hit a grand slam after Blaylock loaded the bases in the fourth inning, and added a two-run double in the sixth off Brosnan, driving in six of the All-Stars’ nine runs. “Too much Buffalo,” quipped Cardinals manager Solly Hemus after the game. Tadashi Sugiura allowed two runs over nine innings to earn the victory.

    The home-run derby wasn’t the only exhibition that Mainichi had planned for the tour’s stop in Osaka. At their broadcast studio, the paper arranged for four members of each team, including Nakanishi and Brosnan, to participate in a singing contest live on- air.Joe Garagiola taped the contest for future broadcast and referred to it as “the highlight of the whole tour.” Brosnan noted that the real entertainment was the lack of musical talent among professional ballplayers, and there was a general sense of teasing and self-deprecation.

    While the broadcast ended up a fun goodwill gesture, in the vein of so many vaudeville appearances by pro ballplayers dating back nearly a century, an undercurrent of racial insensitivity by poking fun at cross-cultural differences persisted in other aspects of the tour. The American press often contained racially insensitive terms, images, and innuendos. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch mocked stereotypical Japanese English with the headline “So-Sorry Cards Make Sad Sam at Home in Japan, Boot Game.” The Sporting News ran cartoons featuring buck-toothed and squinty- eyed Japanese fans—a style now called yellowface that was commonly used in American propaganda during World War II. Even Garagiola at times expressed a giddy fondness for poking fun at cultural differences, such as insensitive quips about how bowing was just a way for businessmen to check the size of your bankroll.

    National League Secretary-Treasurer Fred Fleig proclaimed that the Japanese All-Stars were the equivalent of Triple-A players and that they lacked “quick judgment and alertness for unexpected situations.” He praised Koshien Stadium as ranking with Yankee Stadium and Municipal Stadium. His comments reflected the patronizing and racially insensitive viewpoints of many in the US traveling party and press in postwar Japan. These evolving racial and national identities exemplify both countries at a crossroads, as the prejudices of the Second World War era evolved into the coming challenges of the 1960s. Though toned down from the racist rhetoric of previous times, it was still problematic. This in turn was juxtaposed with the team’s solemn visit to Hiroshima.

    On November 6 the teams went to Hiroshima and were greeted by Mayor Tadao Watanabe and a flower-throwing crowd in front of the Hotel New Hiroshima. Before the game, Musial and Hemus held a baseball clinic at the American Cultural Center for 250 Japanese players and fans.  Before 20,000 excited fans, Atsushi Aramaki faced Ernie Broglio, who pitched a complete game despite two first-inning wild pitches that led to a run. The Cardinals hit Aramaki hard, going ahead 6-1 in the top of the sixth inning. Once again it was the rookie Nagashima who provided the punch for the All-Stars. After Kenjiro Tamiya reached base in the bottom of the ninth, Nagashima patiently waited for his pitch before hitting a 3-and-2 meatball over the left-field stands. However, it wasn’t enough, and the All-Stars fell, 6-3.

    Earlier in the day, the American visitors had visited the Memorial Monument for Hiroshima and placed floral bouquets at the base of the arch. Then the club physician, Dr. L.C. Middleman, trainer Bob Bauman, coach Johnny Keane, and players Don Blasingame and Alex Grammas visited the 72 patients at the Hiroshima Atomic-Bomb Survivors Hospital signing autographs and offering kind words.  Solly Hemus kept a video diary of the trip to Hiroshima, but his camera was stolen from the dugout during pregame ceremonies. Before he returned home, local fan Tsutomu Hayashi presented Hemus with a gift of over 150 feet of footage taken in Hiroshima, “in the interest of better US-Japan relations.”

    The next day an earthquake hit while the team was waiting for a train to Fukuoka, but the players did not feel the tremors. At Heiwadai Stadium on November 8, Bishop Seiemon Fukahori of the Fukuoka Catholic Church, presented the Cardinals with a silk pennant embroidered with the team’s logo. This was a thank-you from leprosy patients at the Biwasaki Leprosarium, who were expressing their gratitude for Christmas gifts the Cardinals sent to the hospital in 1941. Attendance up to this point was 338,000 in addition to the millions who tuned in at home. Stan Musial had knocked out 12 hits for a .324 average—however, he had yet to smack a home run. (Some of the Cardinals players complained that the Japanese balls used during the tour were dead.) Meanwhile Nagashima had three, in addition to his seven from the home-run contest. Fukuoka fans came out to Heiwadai Stadium 30,000 strong on November 8, cheering Cardinals starter Phil Paine, who had pitched for the Nishitetsu Lions for a few games in 1953 while he served with the US Fifth Infantry Division stationed at Camp Drake in Fukuoka. The crowd saw him pitch out of a jam in the first by striking out Nakanishi, and then witnessed Musial finally slam his first home run, as the Cardinals won 5-1.

    After a 7-1 St. Louis victory in Shimonoseki, Broglio then nearly no-hit the All-Stars the next game, played three days later in Shizuoka. Supported by home runs from Wally Moon and Gene Green and 15 hits off Sugiura, Zenjiro Tadokoro, and Hiroomi Oyane, Broglio held the All-Stars hitless for 6⅔ innings. With two outs in the seventh, Kenjiro Tamiya eked out a single for Japan’s only hit of the afternoon. Sam Jones finished it off with two hitless innings to hand the All-Stars their only shutout of the tour.

    HOME

    The last game before heading back to Tokyo was played in Mito on November 13. Masayuki Dobashi started for All-Japan but was relieved in the fifth by Bill Nishita, the Nisei who had played on and off in Japan since joining Yomiuri in 1952. Nishita pitched in the International League, the American Association, and the Pacific Coast League, as well as in the Central and Pacific Leagues in Japan, and with UC Berkeley—a true journeyman. The Cardinals won 5-1, thanks to Blasingame, who repeated his four-hit day from November 9, and also Gene Green, who homered twice. Green’s good fortune continued into the trip home and December, when he married St. Louis model Mari-Frances Rosenthal, a match The Sporting News dubbed a “wedding of blond and blond.”

    It was back to Tokyo on the next to last day of the tour, in front of 20,000 shivering fans at Korakuen Stadium. Though they were treated to a 400-foot, two-run homer off the bat of Nakanishi, the Cardinals eventually walked away with the game, 9-2, as they racked up 16 hits. Blasingame nearly hit for the cycle: After hitting a single and triple, he homered to deep center off Tetsuya Yoneda.

    November 16 marked the final day of the tour. A doubleheader at Korakuen Stadium attracted 80,000 fans. In the morning Takashi Suzuki faced off against Sam Jones. A pair of solo home runs by Green highlighted the 8-2 victory for the Cardinals.  In the second game Japan was up 2-0 in the sixth when Boyer homered off Inao to cut the lead in half. The Cardinals took the lead in the seventh behind Lee Tate’s two-run double and another Boyer RBI. This brought the tour to a close with 14 wins for the Cardinals against only two wins for the Japan All-Stars, bucking the prediction by “Japanese baseball experts” that the Cardinals would match the 1956 Dodgers and lose four or five games. Yet each game was a display of the young talent in the Japanese game, and an affirmation that the Japanese were becoming strong enough to complete with talent from the major leagues. Nagashima lived up to the hype and was awarded the trophy as MVP of the Japanese team, which was donated by J.G. Taylor Spink. In the eyes of many Giants fans, Nagashima would be the heart of a Yomiuri team that announced during the tour that it would no longer sign foreign players, stating, “Japanese baseball should be played by Japanese players.”

    Stan Musial hung on for a few more seasons, but it was a new generation of players who would take St. Louis to heights in the 1960s. And despite Yomiuri’s announcement that it would no longer recruit foreign players, other teams leapt at the chance. During the trip, three Cardinals pitchers—Phil Paine, Bill Wight, and Jim Brosnan—were even offered contracts to pitch in Japan during the 1959 season. All three declined, though only Brosnan was still officially a Cardinal after Wight was released and Paine demoted in the middle of the tour. Don Blasingame’s performance over the course of the tour cemented his visage in the minds of Japanese fans, and was the start of a long-lasting relationship between him and Japan. He would spend a decade and a half playing, coaching, and managing in Japan after a long major-league career.

    Though the Cardinals seemed to represent the end of an era, the young talent represented in the Japanese All-Star team signaled a new beginning. The 1958 tour was at the crossroads of postwar bridge-building, straddling the end of the American occupation with the 1960s and beyond. Wally Yonamine made way for Sadaharu Oh, who joined the Giants in 1959, creating the “Oh-Nagashima Cannon” that drove the golden era of baseball in Japan. Sugiura, another rookie in 1958, won both Pacific League MVP and Japan Series MVP honors in 1959 on his way to a Hall of Fame career. And though Inao would not win another MVP after his back-to-back awards in 1957 and 1958, he won 30 games in 1959 and continued to dominate batters in Japan for the next decade. The tours of Japan that followed continued to strengthen the relationship between the two countries and their baseball leagues. When Ichiro is inducted into Cooperstown, he will have players like Nagashima and Blasingame in his baseball DNA, as well as the strong bonds engendered by 1958’s new direction.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    Crossroads: The 1958 St. Louis Cardinals Tour of Japan
  • The Bums in the Land of the Rising Sun: How the 1956 Dodgers’ Tour of Japan Marked the End of a Dynasty

    The Bums in the Land of the Rising Sun: How the 1956 Dodgers’ Tour of Japan Marked the End of a Dynasty

    by Robert Fitts

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Rob Fitts focuses on the Brooklyn Dodgers 1956 tour of Japan where Jackie Robinson played his final game.

    The Brooklyn Dodgers straggled into Idlewild Airport in Jamaica, Queens, on the morning of October 11, 1956. It had been a long, grueling season, ending the day before with a 9-0 shellacking by the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. Now, less than 18 hours later, the Dodgers were leaving for a four- week goodwill tour of Japan.

    The subdued party of 60 consisted of club officials, players, family members, and an umpire. Although participation was voluntary, most of the team’s top players had decided to take advantage of the $3,000 bonus that came with the all-expenses-paid trip.1 Noticeably absent were Sandy Koufax, who was sharpening his game in Puerto Rico; Sandy Amoros, who was playing in Cuba; and World War II vet Carl Furillo who proclaimed, “I want no part of it. I’ve seen Japan once and there’s nothing there I want to see again.”2

    As they readied to board the private flight to Los Angeles, Don Newcombe and his wife were missing. The Dodgers ace had won 27 games during the season and would win both the National League Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Awards. But he had failed spectacularly in the World Series, getting knocked out in the second inning of Game Two, and in the fourth inning of Game Seven. When asked about the up-coming trip after the Game Seven loss, Newcombe snapped, “Nuts to the trip to Japan!” “There’ll be trouble if he’s not on that plane!” countered Dodgers General Manager Buzzie Bavasi.3

    Just after 11 A.M. the big pitcher arrived at the airport without wife or luggage. “The Tiger is here!” he announced as he boarded. He had spent the morning at the Brooklyn Courthouse to answer a summons on an assault charge for punching a parking attendant who had made a wisecrack about his Game Two performance. The plane left on time and after a stop in Los Angeles arrived in Honolulu at 5:30 P.M. on October 12.4

    The Dodgers spent five days in Hawaii, attending banquets, sightseeing, sunbathing on Waikiki Beach, and playing three games against local semipro teams. As expected, Brooklyn won the first two contests comfortably, beating the Maui All-Stars, 6-0, behind 20-year-old Don Drysdale’s seven perfect innings on October 13 and the Hawaii Milwaukee All-Stars, 19-0, the next day. On the 15th, Don Newcombe took the mound against the Hawaii Red Sox. Spectators serenaded him with boos and jeers as the Red Sox scored three times in the second inning and chased him from the game in the fourth. “I can’t believe that I am still the target for abuse after getting 5,000 miles away from Brooklyn. I never want to come back here again! I didn’t want to make this trip in the first place,” he complained after Brooklyn pulled out a 7-3 win in the 10th inning. “This abuse thing has me worried,” he added. “I am afraid the emotional effect might continue to grow and become a detriment to my future career.”5 After a day of sightseeing, the Dodgers left for Japan on a 10 P.M. overnight flight.

    The plane touched down at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport at 3:25 P.M. the following day, five hours behind schedule after mechanical trouble forced a seemingly endless stopover on Wake Island. A light rain fell from the gray sky. The weary players trudged off the plane and down the metal stairs to the tarmac where they were greeted by the first group of dignitaries and reporters. “Man, we’re beat,” Jackie Robinson complained as he left the plane. “We are all very tired,” Duke Snider added, “but we’re glad to be here. If we have a chance to shower and clean up, we’ll feel much better.”6

    Japanese dignitaries and 40 kimono-clad actresses, bearing bouquets of flowers, welcomed the Dodgers as a crowd of fans waved from the airport’s spectator ramp. During a brief press conference, team owner Walter O’Malley proclaimed that “his players would play their best … and hoped that the visit would contribute to Japanese-American friendship.” “We hope to give the Japanese fans some thrills,” said Robinson.7

    Despite the delay and relentless drizzle, thousands of flag-waving fans lined the 12-mile route from Haneda Airport to downtown Tokyo. Although many of the players longed for a shower, a warm meal, and a soft bed, they would not see their hotel for hours. After a brief stop at the Yomiuri newspaper’s headquarters, the team went straight to a reception at the famous Chinzanso restaurant. As they arrived, the hosts presented each visitor with a happi coat made to resemble a Dodgers warmup jacket and a hachimaki (traditional headband). Dressed in their new garb, the Dodgers mingled with baseball officials, diplomats, and Japanese ballplayers for several hours. Exhausted, the Dodgers finally checked into the Imperial Hotel around 9 P.M. Some of the younger players, however, went back out, attending “a giddy round of parties” before staggering back to the hotel in the wee hours of the morning.8

    Fred Kipp, Gil Hodges, Wally Yonamine, Vin Scully, Roy Campanella and Don Demeter at the October 18 reception at Chinzanso, Tokyo. (Rob Fitts Collection)

    Weary from the trip and the late night, the players struggled to get out of bed the next morning for the opening game against the Yomiuri Giants at Korakuen Stadium. Ceremonies began at 1 P.M. with the two teams parading onto the field in parallel lines behind a pair of young women clad in fashionable business suits. Each woman held a large sign topped with balloons, bearing the team’s name in Japanese. As the Giants marched on the field, some of the Dodgers gaped in surprise. “We went over there with typical American misconceptions,” Vin Scully later wrote. “We expected the local teams to be stocked with little yellow, bucktooth men wearing thick eyeglasses. When they first walked onto the field in Tokyo, I heard one of our players yell, ‘Hey fellas, we’ve been mousetrapped!’ One of the first ballplayers out of the dugout was a pitcher who was six feet four. … They averaged five feet ten or so, and they were all built like athletes.”9

    Like the Dodgers, the Yomiuri Giants had just finished an exhausting season topped with a defeat in the Japan Series two days earlier. The Japan Timesnoted, “The Giants, battered and worn in their losing bid for the Japan championship …, are regarded as a pushover for the Bums. The Brooklyn club is expected to win their opener by a margin of over ten runs.”10 But that is not what happened.

    The Giants jumped out to a quick 3-0 lead off Don Drysdale. At 6-feet-5 he towered over most of his Japanese opponents and expected to dominate them with his overpowering side-arm fastball. But as Scully noted, “Another misconception we had was that our big pitchers would be able to blow them down with fastballs. We were dead wrong. They murdered fastball pitching. Our guys would rear back and fire one through here and invariably the ball would come back even harder than it was thrown. They hit bullets.”11

    Brooklyn battled back to take a 4-3 lead in the fourth on five hits, including homers by Robinson and Gil Hodges. But that would be all for Brooklyn as relief pitcher Takumi Otomo, who had beaten the New York Giants in 1953, stifled the Dodgers for 5 2/3 innings. Homers by Kazuhiko Sakazaki and Tetsuharu Kawakami in the eighth gave Yomiuri a 5-4 upset victory. “The fans,” wrote Leslie Nakashima of the Honolulu Advertiser, “could hardly believe the Dodgers had been beaten.”12 Otomo had struck out 10 in his second win over a major-league team.

    Since the major-league tours began in 1908, the game was just the fifth victory by a Japanese team against 124 loses.13 After the loss, manager Walt Alston made no excuses, “They just beat us. They hit and we didn’t.” Duke Snider had a particularly bad day, striking out three times and being caught off base for an out. “We’re pretty tired,” he explained. “But that’s no excuse. We’re all in good physical shape and should have won. A good night’s sleep tonight and we’ll roll.” “We’ll snap out of it,” predicted Robinson. Pee Wee Reese agreed: “We don’t expect to lose any more. But,” he added, “we didn’t expect to lose this one either.”14

    As predicted, the Dodgers bounced back the next day. Masaichi Kaneda, recognized by most experts as Japan’s all-time greatest pitcher, began the game for the Central League All-Stars by loading the bases on two walks and a single before being removed from the game with a sore elbow. Roy Campanella greeted relief pitcher Noboru Akiyama with a towering drive into the last row of the left-field bleachers to put the Dodgers up, 4-0. Campy added another home run in the third inning to pace Brooklyn to an easy 7-1 victory as Clem Labine pitched a four-hit complete game.15

    On Sunday, October 21, approximately 45,000 fans packed Korakuen Stadium to watch Don Newcombe face the All-Japan team—a conglomeration of the top Japanese professionals. Newcombe’s outing lasted just 17 pitches. He began by walking Hawaiian Wally Yonamine, then surrendered a home run and three consecutive singles before Alston took the ball.16 The former ace “stormed from the hill” and stumbled into the clubhouse “like a sleepwalker … jerkily, almost aimlessly. He wore the frozen expression of a kid who’s just seen his puppy run over. Wonder, shock, disbelief, hurt. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. … Slowly he picked up his shower shoes, detoured a sportswriter to get to his jacket. Then out the back door, back to the hotel.”17

    After the eventual 6-1 loss, manager Walter Alston noted, “Newk wasn’t right again today. … He’s not throwing natural.”18 Reese explained, “He’s still got it (the World Series) on his mind. It’s getting to be a terrible thing. Not only does he feel he’s letting himself down, he feels he’s letting the club down. … Don doesn’t say much, but it’s building up and building up inside him. It could run him out of baseball.”19

    Unfortunately, Reese’s assessment was prophetic. The next day, Newcombe announced that he had injured his elbow in the final game of the regular season. It hurt to throw curveballs. He had kept the injury to himself, hoping that rest would cure the ailment. Although his arm may have healed, Newcombe never fully recovered from the psychological injury of the blown 1956 World Series. He had begun drinking heavily in the early 1950s and his alcohol abuse intensified after the loss. After a mediocre 1957 season, he was traded to Cincinnati in 1958 and would be out of the major leagues after the 1960 season. He played his final season with the Chunichi Dragons of Japan in 1962—coached by Wally Yonamine, who had begun the onslaught on that fateful day in Tokyo.

    With the loss, the Dodgers became the first professional American club to lose two games on a Japanese tour. Criticism came from both sides of Pacific. “The touring Flatbushers once again were disemboweled by a band of local samurai,” wrote Bob Bowie of the Japan Times.20 “The Dodgers are known for their fighting spirit,” noted radio quiz-show host Ko Fujiwara, “but they have shown little spirit in the games here thus far.”21 The Associated Press reported that “most Japanese fans have been disappointed in the caliber of ball played so far by the Brooklyns,” but Yoshio Yuasa, the former manager of the Mainichi Orions, offered the harshest criticisms.22 “I can sympathize that the Dodgers are in bad condition from fatigue after a hectic pennant race, the World Series and travel to Japan and that they are in a terrific slump, but they are even weaker than was rumored at bat against low, outside pitches and we are very disappointed to say the least. … It would not be an overstatement to say that we no longer have anything to learn from the Dodgers.”23

    Roy Campanella, Jakie Robinson, and Duke Snider signing autographs for Japanese fans. Cappy Harada is in the dugout. (Rob Fitts Collection)

    The US media picked up these criticisms, reprinting the stories in large and small newspapers across the country. “Japanese Baseball Expert Hints Brooks Are Bums,” screamed a headline in the New York Daily News on October 23.24 Three days later, a Daily News headline noted, “Bums ‘Too Dignified,’ Say Japanese Hosts.” The accompanying article explained that some Japanese experts believed that the Dodgers were “too quiet and dignified on the playing field … and … were acting like they were all trying to win good conduct medals” rather than playing hard-nosed baseball.25

    After a day of rest, the Dodgers flew to Sapporo in northern Japan for a rematch against the Yomiuri Giants. Before the game, Walter O’Malley addressed the team. Starting pitcher Carl Erskine recalled, “Mr. O’Malley was very upset. He thought it was a scar on the name of the Dodgers to have gone to Japan and lost two games.”26 “He was embarrassed. He held a team meeting and read the riot act. He said, ‘I know this is a goodwill tour and I want you to be gentlemen. Sign autographs and be cordial. However, when you put on that Dodger uniform, I want you to remember Pearl Harbor!’”27

    Erskine was near perfect, giving up three hits and a walk but never allowing a runner to reach second base as he faced just 27 batters. But the Dodgers continued to struggle at the plate, failing to score until Duke Snider led off the ninth inning with a 380-foot homer over the right-center-field wall to give Brooklyn a 1-0 victory.28

    Despite the win, many Japanese were not pleased with the Dodgers’ performance. An Associated Press article noted that Tokuro Konishi, a broadcaster and former manager, “and other experts agreed that most Japanese fans have been disappointed in the caliber of ball played so far by the Brooklyns. … Konishi said he believed the two losses could be chalked up to the fatigue from the grueling National League pennant race and seven game World Series.”29 “The Dodgers’ ‘old men’ are tired,” noted Bob Bowie of the Pacific Stars and Stripes. “Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella are so weary it’s an effort for them to put one foot before another. It’s been a long season and they are anxious to get back home and relax before heading for spring training in February.”30

    Indeed, the “Boys of Summer” were aging. The core of the team had been together nearly a decade. The starting lineup averaged 32 years old with Robinson and Reese both at 37. Their weariness showed on the playing field. After four games, the team was hitting just .227 against Japanese pitching. Both management and fans knew it was time to change, and the team had plenty of young talent. At the top of the list were power hitters Don Demeter, who hit 41 home runs in 1956 for the Texas League Fort Worth Cats, and his teammate, first baseman Jim Gentile, who hit 40. Outfielder Gino Cimoli had ridden Brooklyn’s bench in 1956 and was now ready for a more substantial role. Smooth-fielding Bob Lillis from the Triple-A affiliate in St. Paul seemed to be the heir of Pee Wee Reese at shortstop while his teammate Bert Hamric would fight for a role in team’s crowded outfield. On the mound, knuckleballer Fred Kipp hadjust won 20 games for the Montreal Royals and looked ready to join Brooklyn’s rotation. The tour of Japan was an ideal chance try out these players. As the tour progressed, Alston moved more prospects into the starting lineup.

    In the fifth game, held in Sendai, Alston gave Kipp the start and backed him up with Gentile at first, Demeter in center and Cimoli in left. For seven innings Kipp baffled the All-Kanto All-Stars, a squad drawn from the Tokyo-area teams, with his knuckleball—a pitch rarely used in the Japanese leagues, while the hurler’s fellow rookies racked up five hits during an easy 8-0 win.31

    Don Drysdale started game six in Mita, a small city about 60 miles northeast of Tokyo. For seven innings the promising young pitcher dominated the Japanese. Then, the Japanese erupted for three runs in the bottom of the eighth inning, breaking a streak of 29 straight shutout innings by Dodger pitching. With the scored tied, 3-3, after nine innings, the Dodgers requested that they end the game so that the team could catch their scheduled train back to Tokyo.32 Although it was not a win, an Associated Press writer called the result “a moral victory for Japanese baseball.”33 After six contests, the National League champions were 3-2-1—the worst record of any visiting American professional squad.

    Despite the Dodgers’ poor start, the Japanese fans adored the team packed with household names. About 150,000 spectators attended the first five games while hundreds of thousands more, if not millions, watched the games on television or listened to them on the radio.34 “There is widespread interest in the Dodgers and their style of play,” an Associated Press article noted. All of the sports dailies and many of the mainstream newspapers covered each game in detail—often including exclusive interviews and pictorial spreads of the players. Many dailies ran “sequence shots of various Dodgers in action.”35

    Although the Dodgers were winning over the Japanese fans, their opponents on the diamond were unimpressed. Ace pitcher Masaichi Kaneda noted, “The pitchers this time were not as good as [on the previous major-league tours]. … On the bench, I was looking forward to hitting. I had never had that feeling before.”36 Shortstop Yasumitsu Toyoda agreed: “Even their fastballs didn’t look fast enough.”37 Kazuhiro Yamauchi, the star outfielder for the Mainichi Orions who hit .313 in 48 at-bats during the tour, complained that the Dodgers lacked hustle. “The Yankees [during the 1955 tour] would always try for an extra base on a hit, while some Dodger runners stopped dead.”38 Yamauchi also noted that the Dodgers had trouble with low, outside pitches. “All our pitches have been aiming for the outside comer.” Yomiuri right-hander Takehiko Bessho added, “Most of them were not good at hitting curveballs. …I wasn’t [even] scared of Campanella. He looked huge, but only he could hit in one spot … the high inside corner. … If an umpire called [a low outside pitch] a strike, he complained. He was just desperate.”39

    During a November 11 round-table interview moderated by Masanori Ochi, several Japanese players bristled when asked about a training session run by Dodgers coach Al Campanis. Campanis was actively promoting his book, The Dodgers’ Way to Play Baseball, which had been translated into Japanese. “We attended it, but we already knew ‘how to throw a slider,’” Tetsuharu Kawakami snidely told Ochi. “They only told us what we already knew. I think we practice small tactics more than they do.” “Al Campanis only talked about general things,” Takehiko Bessho added, “and nothing was new.”40

    Oblivious to the Japanese players’ feelings, after the tour Campanis told Dan Daniels of The Sporting News, “For the good of Japanese ball, it would be well to send several American coaching staffs there for the purpose of staging clinics rather than having a different team visit each year. Of course, that wouldn’t be the sort of spectacle the fans would want, but it would be more helpful to the progress of Japanese ball. We held one clinic while we were over there, and I never had a more attentive audience. They want to learn our methods and a few clinics would help them tremendously.”41

    Underwhelmed by the Dodgers, some of the Japanese players began to jeer their opponents. The Dodgers were undoubtedly unaware as the “rudeness” consisted mainly of addressing the visitors by their first names—an offensive act in Japan, especially in the mid-1950s. The players confessed during the November 11 round table interview:

    Yasumitsu Toyoda: (Looking at Kaneda,) Remember you jeered at him [Newcombe] in Mito, something like ‘Come on, Don!’ He was offended by that.

    Masaichi Kaneda: We became good at jeering. Our pronunciation became better.

    Takehiko Bessho: You [Kaneda] were best at it. You called the first baseman [Gino] Cimoli, ‘Gino, Gino,’ and he turned and smiled at you. When the game is over, you were like ‘Goodbye Gino.’

    Masaichi Kaneda: ‘Come on, Don’ was a good one!

    Masanori Ochi: Did you jeer at the other major leaguers like the Yankees?

    Masaichi Kaneda: No, we just did it this year.

    Takehiko Bessho: That was because we were winning.

    Masaichi Kaneda: Alright, I will say ‘Hey Don!’ to his face. If he gets angry, I will hide quickly!42

    Undoubtedly sensing the players’ distain, Fujio Nakazawa, a commentator and future member of the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame, cautioned his countrymen. “The two victories over the Dodgers should be no reason for jubilation among the players here. They should by no means become conceited. Japanese ballplayers have much to learn from the Dodgers, who have not complained about their busy schedule which started the day after their arrival. The Dodger players are always cheerful and play hard. A defeat does not discourage them.”43

    Perhaps sparked by the ongoing criticism, perhaps finally rested, the Dodgers began winning in late October as the rookies led the way. On October 27 in Kofu, Gentile hit two home runs and Demeter and Cimoli each hit one during a 12-1 romp over an allstar squad of players drawn from the Tokyo-area professional teams. The next day, Gentile went 5-for-5 with another home run as the Dodgers beat All-Japan, 6-3, in Utsunomiya.44 On October 31 Kipp pitched two-hit ball and Gentile and Demeter each homered to pace Brooklyn to a 4-2 win over All-Japan. During these games the players began showing a little fighting spirit. Somehow, they learned the Japanese word “mekura,” meaning “blind,” and began shouting it at the umpire after questionable calls.45

    “Some of those ballparks were small, [holding] 20,000 or 25,000,” Carl Erskine remembers. “There were acres of bicycles in the parking lots. After the games were over, the men were all lined up along the ditch by the side of the road relieving themselves. I guess they had a couple of beers. So, it was a little unusual leaving the ballpark and passing rows and rows of men. That was a strange sight!”46

    On the evening of October 31, the team arrived in Hiroshima and checked into the Hotel New Hiroshima, an ultra-modem structure near the Peace Park and ballpark. Local officials warned the players not to leave the hotel unescorted at night as gang-related crime made the area unsafe for tourists. The following morning the team visited the Peace Park and posed with their hats in their hands in front of the Memorial Cenotaph, the saddle-shaped concrete arch that bears the name of each person killed in the atomic bomb blast.

    In a solemn ceremony before the start of the 2 P.M. game, the Dodgers presented city officials with a bronze plaque reading: “We dedicate this visit in memory of those baseball fans and others who died by atomic action on Aug. 6, 1945. May their souls rest in peace and with God’s help and man’s resolution peace will prevail forever, amen.”47

    Walter O’Malley, Walt Alston, and Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara. (Rob Fitts Collection)

    Walter O’Malley, Walt Alston, and Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara. (Rob Fitts Collection)

    The emotion from the morning boiled over during the game against the Kansai All-Stars. In the bottom of the third inning with the Japanese already up 1-0 and one out and a runner on second, future Hall of Fame umpire Jocko Conlon called Kohei Sugiyama safe at first on what looked to be a groundout. Incensed, Jackie Robinson walked over to first to protest the call. “Everybody knew Jocko had missed the play because he was in back of the plate and couldn’t see clearly,” Robinson explained.48 Conlon, of course, did not reverse his decision so Robinson persisted, eventually arguing “so loud and so long” that Conlon tossed him from the game. “I never told him how to play ball,” Conlon said after the game, “and he, or anybody else, can’t tell me how to run a ball game.”49

    Kansai padded its lead to 4-1 before Brooklyn tied the game in the sixth on Roy Campanella’s three-run homer. The Dodgers went ahead in the seventh in a bizarre inning. After recording an out, reliever Yukio Shimabara walked Jim Gilliam, who stole second base and then moved to third on a passed ball. Shimabara then walked both Reese and Snider. With the bases loaded, Campanella fouled out to the catcher. Gilliam decided to take matters into his own hands. With two outs and the bases still jammed, he stole home to give the Dodgers the 5-4 lead. Rattled, Shimabara then made a mistake to Jim Gentile, who pounded the ball into the stands for a three-run homer. Brooklyn tacked on another two in the ninth for a 10-6 victory.50

    After the Dodgers won 14-0 on November 2, the Japanese squads rebounded. On the 3rd the Dodgers and the All-Japan team entered the eighth inning knotted 7-7 before Brooklyn erupted for another seven to win 14-7. The following day, Japanese aces Takehiko Bessho and Masaichi Kaneda held the Dodgers to just one run for eight innings as the hosts entered the ninth leading 2-1. The Dodgers rallied in the ninth as Snider led off with a 480-foot home run to tie the game. Two outs later with the bases loaded, Robinson tried to steal the lead with a surprise two-out squeeze play. But Jackie missed the bunt and Demeter was tagged out on his way to the plate. In the bottom of the inning, Tetsuharu Kawakami, the hero of the opening game, came through again with a bases-loaded single to win the game.51

    On the 7th the Dodgers squeaked out a 3-2 win over the All-Japan squad in Nagoya. Gil Hodges, however, stole the headlines. Alston started the normally staid first baseman in left field and to keep himself amused Hodges “pantomimed the action after almost every play for five innings. He mimicked the pitcher and the ball’s flight through the air, the catcher and the umpire. When a Dodger errored, Hodges glowered and pointed his finger. He made his legs quiver, shook his fist, stamped on the ground, swung his arms, frowned and smiled in the fleeting instant between pitches.” The fans loved it, cheering him so loudly as he left the game in the eighth inning that “[y]ou’d have thought it was Babe Ruth leaving.”52

    Vin Scully recalled how Hodges’s antics eased a tense moment. “During a game before an overflow crowd, one of our players was called out on strikes and, in a childish display of petulance, dropped his bat on the plate, took off his helmet and hurled it to the ground with such force that it bounced up on top of the Dodger dugout. The crowd was shocked. The Japanese had never seen an umpire held up to such humiliation and it was an embarrassing moment for us in the Brooklyn party. Gil saved the day. While the crowd still sat in stunned silence, Gil suddenly appeared, jumped up on the dugout roof and approached the helmet as if it was a dangerous snake. He circled it warily, made a couple of tentative stabs at it, and quickly pounced on it, tossed it back on the field and then it did a swan dive off the top of the dugout. The fans beat their palms and shouted until they were hoarse.”53

    The Dodgers and All-Japan met again the next day at Shizuoka, a small town at the foot of Mt. Fuji, where 22 years earlier the All-Nippon behind 17-year-old Eiji Sawamura nearly beat Babe Ruth’s All-Americans. Once again the Japanese team thrilled the fans of Shizuoka as pinch-hitter Kohei Sugiyama of the All-Japan squad broke a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off single.54 With their fourth loss, criticism of the Dodgers’ performance continued. An International News Service article headlined, “Fans Debate Reasons for Dodger Losses” asked, “Are Japanese baseball teams improving, major leaguers getting careless or the Brooklyn Dodgers just getting old?”55

    On November 9 the Dodgers returned to Tokyo for a rematch with their hosts the Yomiuri Giants. Once again, the game was tight. Home runs by Jim Gentile and Herb Olson as well as an inside-the-park homer by Giants catcher Shigeru Fujio left the score tied up after nine innings. Jim Gilliam led off the top of the 11th with a single and two outs later stood on second base as Jackie Robinson strode to the plate. Yomiuri manager Shigeru Mizuhara called for an intentional walk but Giants ace Takehiko Bessho refused. After some discussion, Mizuhara allowed Bessho to challenge Robinson. Jackie jumped on the first pitch, pounding it foul “far over the left-field stands.” On the next offering, he “drove a hot grounder through the pitcher’s box,” bringing Gilliam home to win the game.56

    The win seemed to energize both the Dodgers and Robinson. They won the next two games easily, 8-2 and 10-2, as Jackie went 2-for-5 with two runs and two RBIs. After the game in Tokyo on November 12, the Dodgers flew to the southern city of Fukuoka to make up a game that had been rained out on October 30.

    Fittingly, the final meeting of the 19-game series was tight. Nineteen-year-old phenom Kazuhisa Inao and Kipp dueled for eight innings, each surrendering one run. The score remained tied as Duke Snider led off the top of the ninth with a groundball to first, which the usually sure-handed Tokuji Iida muffed, allowing Snider to advance to third base. Robinson strode to the plate—unknowingly for the last time in his professional career—and grounded a single between third and short to score Snider and give the Dodgers the lead. After two outs and a walk, Don Demeter singled and Robinson crossed home plate for the final time. Immediately after the 3-1 victory, the Dodgers flew back to Tokyo and after a day of rest, returned to the United States.

    Brooklyn’s tour of Japan marked the end of an era. Robinson retired soon after returning to the United States. The team’s troubles on the diamond continued in 1957 as they finished in a distant third place. It was time to rebuild. The games in Japan allowed many of the younger players to display their skills. Jim Gentile, for example, led the team with a .471 batting average, 8 home runs, and 19 RBIs, while Fred Kipp won three games and posted a 1.26 ERA in 43 innings.

    Although Alston and others claimed that fatigue had led to the Dodgers’ poor showing on the diamond, they also conceded that the greatly improved Japanese had put up stiff competition. National League President Warren Giles, who accompanied the Dodgers to Japan, noted, “[T]he quality of baseball in that country is improving steadily and the day may come when the ablest players of Japan will compete on even terms with the best the United States has to offer.”57 Walter O’Malley concurred, telling reporters that the Japanese clubs would be nearly even with US ballclubs in the not-too-distant future. “Their pitchers have uncanny accuracy. They rarely walk anyone. In fielding, particularly in the infield, the Japanese teams are really excellent. Some Japanese players could play on teams in contention in pennant races here, or at least on the better minor league clubs.”58

    When asked if any of the Japanese players were ready for the majors, Al Campanis responded:

    There’s one fellow who must have been really good in his prime. He’s 38 years old now [actually 36] and they tell me he hasn’t hit under .300 for 18 straight years [actually eight]. I would have liked to [have] got a crack at him a few years back. His name is Kawakami. … High in my book were three others. A shortstop named Toyoda … was the best hitter in his league. His arm might have been a little short, but he had everything else. Then there was a catcher, Fujio, in his first year of pro ball. Never saw anyone with a better arm. Man, he had a rifle. Good receiver, too, and a fair hitter. But the number one prospect in my judgment was a pitcher named Sho Horiuchi, a 21-year-old right hander with the Yomiuri Giants.59

    The following spring, the Dodgers invited Fujio and Horiuchi along with their manager Shigeru Mizuhara, to spring training at Dodgertown to help them mature as players. The invitation began a long friendship between the two clubs. The Giants would be the Dodgers’ guests at Vero Beach in 1961, 1967, 1971, and 1975 and the two clubs would maintain close relations for over 65 years.

    NOTES

    1 “All Dodgers’ O’Malley Gets Is Ride,” New York Daily News, October 13, 1956: 36.

    2 “Dodgers Invited to Tour Japan in Fall; Most Favor Trip, but Furillo Votes No,” New York Times, May 2, 1956: S36.

    3 Ed Wilks, Newcombe ‘Gets Lost’ After Humiliation,” Monroe (Louisiana) News-Star, October 11, 1956: 12.

    4 United Press, “Dodgers Arrive at 5:30 P.M. Today,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 12, 1956: 14; Carl Lundquist, “Flatbushers Full of Frolic as They Leave For Japan,” The Sporting News, October 17, 1956: 13.

    5 Tom Hopkins, “Sportraitures,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 18, 1956: 38; Red McQueen, “Dodgers Outdraw Yankees,” Honolulu Advertiser,October 16, 1956: 14.

    6 Associated Press, “Bums Arrive in Tokyo,” Passaic (New Jersey) Herald-News, October 18, 1956: 46.

    7 United Press, “Japanese Fans Defy Rain to Hail Dodgers,” New York Daily News, October 19, 1956: 155.

    8 Vin Scully, “The Dodgers in Japan,” Sport, April 1957: 92; Bob Bowie, “Actresses, Flowers, Cheers Welcome Tourists to Tokyo,” The Sporting News,October 24, 1956: 9.

    9 Scully.

    10 “Bums Open Game with Giants Today,” Japan Times, October 19, 1956: 5.

    11 Scully.

    12 Leslie Nakashima, “Dodgers Beaten 5-4 by Yomiuri Giants in Japan,” Honolulu Advertiser October 20, 1956: 14.

    13 >Other victories came in 1922, 1951, 1953 against the Eddie Lopat All-Stars, and 1953 against the New York Giants. The Royal Giants’ tours are excluded from these figures as not all of their results are known.

    14 Mel Derrick, “Alston Explains: ‘They Hit, and We Didn’t,’” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 20, 1956: 23.

    15 Bob Bowie, “Dodgers Belt Central Loop Stars 7-1,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 21, 1956: 24.

    16 Mel Derrick, “Newcombe a Study in Dejection After Loss,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 22, 1956: 24.

    17 Bob Bowie, “All-Stars Rout Brooks 6-1,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 22, 1956: 24; Derrick, “Newcombe a Study,” 24.

    18 Derrick.

    19 Derrick.

    20 Bowie, “All-Stars Rout Brooks 6-1.”

    21 United Press, “Dodgers’ Good Behavior Mystifies Japanese Fan,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 26, 1956: 14.

    22 Associated Press, “Japanese Can Learn from Bums,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald (Hilo, Hawaii), October 23, 1956: 7.

    23 United Press, “Banzais Changed to Brickbats for Dodgers on Japanese Tour,” New York Times, October 23, 1956: 42.

    24 United Press, “Japanese Baseball Expert Hints Brooks Are Bums,” New York Daily News, October 23, 1956: 124.

    25 United Press, “Bums ‘Too Dignified,’ Say Japanese Hosts,” New York Daily News, October 26, 1956: 125.

    26 Carl Erskine, telephone interview with author, February 10, 2020.

    27 Carl Erskine, Tales from the Dodger Dugout (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing, 2000), 65.

    28 United Press, “Brooks Nip Giants 1-0 on Snider’s Home Run,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 24, 1956: 24.

    29 Associated Press, “Japanese Can Learn from Bums,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, October 23, 1956: 7.

    30 Bob Bowie, “Newk’s Tribulations,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 24, 1956: 22.

    31 “Brooks Whitewash All-Kanto Nine, 8-0,” Japan Times, October 25, 1956: 8.

    32 Associated Press, “Kanto All-Stars Tie Dodgers 3-3,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 27, 1956: 24.

    33 Associated Press, “Kanto All-Stars Tie Dodgers 3-3.”

    34 Bob Bowie, “Gates Spin as Bums Battle for Wins in Japan,” Sporting News, October 31, 1956: 7.

    35 Associated Press, “Japanese Can Learn from Bums.”

    36 “A Round Table Talk,” Baseball Magazine, 11, no. 12 (December 1956): 76-83.

    37 “A Round Table Talk.”

    38 Associated Press, “Yankees Showed More Hustle Than Dodgers,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, November 14, 1956: 44.

    39 “A Round Table Talk.”

    40 “A Round Table Talk.”

    41 Dan Daniel, “Over the Fence,” The Sporting News, November 28, 1956: 12.

    42 “A Round Table Talk.”

    43 United Press, “Japanese Warned against ‘Conceit,’” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 28, 1956: 20.

    44 Although English-language sources list Gentile going 4 for 4, official Japanese sources have him at 5 for 5.

    45 >Associated Press, “Japan’s Pitchers Surprise Brooks,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 30, 1956: 19.

    46 Erskine, telephone interview.

    47 Associated Press, “Dodgers to Dedicate Game to Bomb Victims,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 29, 1956: 24.

    48 “Dodgersvs. Kansai All Stars at Hiroshima Stadium, Hiroshima—November 1, 1956,” walteromalley.com. https://www.walteromalley.com/en/dodger-history/international-relations/1956-Summary_November-1-1956. Retrieved October 25, 2020.

    49 “Jackie Drops Verbal Bomb at Hiroshima—Gets Thumb,” The Sporting News, November 14, 1956: 4.

    50 Hochi Sports, November 2, 1956: 2; “Dodgers vs. Kansai,” United Press, “Dodgers Top Kansai, 10-6; Robby Chased,” New York Daily News,November 2, 1956: 175.

    51 Associated Press, “Bums Win 14-7 Before 60,000,” Honolulu StarBulletin, November 3, 1956: 11; Associated Press, “Labine of Dodgers Loses in Japan, 3-2,” New York Times, November 5, 1956: 44.

    52 Associated Press, “Hodges Delights Fans with Baseball Performance,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, November 8, 1956: 22.

    53 Scully.

    54 United Press, “Dodgers Downed by Japanese, 3-2,” New York Times, November 9, 1956: 37.

    55 International News Service, “Fans Debate Reasons for Dodger Losses,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, November 8, 1956: 19.

    56 United Press, “Dodgers Edge Tokyo Giants 5-4,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, November 10, 1956: 24.

    57 Tom Swope, “‘Japanese Players Gaining Major Status Fast’—Giles,” The Sporting News, November 21, 1956: 2.

    58 United Press, “O’Malley Praises Japanese Baseball,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, November 30, 1956: 24.

    59 Daniel.

    60 Yoshikazu Matsubayashi, Baseball Game History: Japan vs, U.S.A. (Tokyo: Baseball Magazine, 2004), 92; Nippon Professional Baseball Records, https://www.2689web.com/nb.html; “Dodgers Individual Batting Results,” Baseball Magazine, 11, no. 12 (December 1956): 64.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-bums-in-the-land-of-the-rising-sun-how-the-1956-dodgers-tour-of-japan-marked-the-end-of-a-dynasty/

  • Good Optics: The 1955 Yankees Tour of Japan

    Good Optics: The 1955 Yankees Tour of Japan

    by Roberta Newman

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week  Roberta Newman highlights the New York Yankees 1955 tour of Japan.

    On Thursday, October 20, 1955, the New York Yankees and their entourage landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to begin a three-week, 16-game goodwill tour of Japan. There, they were mobbed by kimono-clad young women bearing bouquets, an eager press corps, and a thousand devoted fans. The result was chaos, as children, autograph seekers,joumalists, businessmen, and advertisers of all stripes besieged the Yankees party. But the airport crowd was tiny compared with the throng lining the streets of Tokyo. An estimated 100,000 turned out to shower the motorcade—23 vehicles carrying the players and coaching staff, team co-owner Del Webb, general manager George Weiss, Commissioner Ford Frick, and accompanying wives—with confetti and ticker tape. They were also showered with rain from Typhoon Opal, but the weather, which caused significant damage and loss of life elsewhere in Japan, did little to dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm.

    The Yankees were not the only American visitors to arrive in Japan on that day. Former New York Governor and failed presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey also landed in Tokyo on the Japanese leg of his world tour, with the stated aim of learning about Japan’s recent economic advances. In reality, Dewey’s aim was to spread pro-American Cold War propaganda to a new democracy still finding its political direction, a nation he called “one of the keystones to any sound system of freedom.” Dewey stayed but four days, his visit gamering little coverage in the English- language press. In contrast, the Yankees remained in the spotlight and on the pages of newspapers for the entirety of their visit. If influence can be measured by column inches, the Yankees’ impact on Japanese attitudes toward America far outweighed that of the political power broker.

    Ten years before the Yankees arrived, Japan was thoroughly beaten, exhausted from fighting the “Emperor’s holy war.” Of the early postwar period, historian John W. Dower writes:

    Virtually all that would take place in the several years that followed unfolded against this background of crushing defeat. Despair took root and flourished in such a milieu; so did cynicism and opportunism—as well as marvelous expressions of resilience, creativity, and idealism of a sort possible only among people who have seen an old world destroyed and are being forced to imagine a new one.

    For the Japan that greeted the Yankees, this new world had just begun to become a reality. The year 1955—Showa 30 or the 30th year of Emperor Hirohito’s reign by the Japanese dating system—marked the beginning of what would be called the Japanese Miracle, a period of unprecedented economic growth that lasted more than three decades. Ironically, war was the engine that drove the Japanese Miracle—the Cold War. In 1945, Japanese industry was crippled—almost one-third of its capacity had been demolished. With staggering unemployment rates among an educated labor force, combined with the country’s advantageous geographic location near Korea, China, and the USSR, Japan became an ideal place to establish new war-related industries and revive old ones. In a very real sense, Japanese manufacturers played an active part of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would come to call the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell speech. Nevertheless, in 1955, relations between the United States and Japan were occasionally tense, the United States fearing that Japan, like India, would take a neutral position in the power struggle between it and the Soviet Union. It did not. Instead, it became one of the United States’s strongest allies. But the strength of that alliance was still wobbly as the two nations negotiated an ultimately successful trade deal, one that would see Japan’s entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and become a player in the global economy.

    Though clearly not as delicate as treaty talks with international implications, negotiations to bring the Yankees to Japan were handled with care. In a very broad sense, these negotiations were a microcosm of the larger, far more complicated economic and political talks. In June, during the broadcast of a “good will talk” for the Voice of America, Yankees manager Casey Stengel, who had toured Japan in 1922 as part of an all-star outfit, let it slip that he might be returning. An anonymous source within the Yankees intimated that the team had, in fact, been discussing the possibility of a tour, as had several other clubs. Although there may have been other teams under consideration, it had to be the Yankees. As New York World Telegram and Sunsports columnist and Sporting News contributor Dan Daniel observed, “Information from U.S. Army sources says that baseball enthusiasm over there (in Japan) and rooting support for the pennant effort of the Yankees have achieved unprecedented heights.” Daniel, who covered the New York team, became the primary source of information regarding tour negotiations, though he did not cover the tour itself. But he was not the only sportswriter to weigh in. Writing in the Nippon Times, F.N. Mike concurred, noting, “The Yankees is a magic name here, where every household not only follows baseball doings in Japan, but also that in America. The Yankees, of all others epitomizes big-time baseball in the States, just as Babe Ruth, who helped to build up its name and who led the great 1934 All-Americans to Japan, represented baseball in America individually.” And not only were the Yankees the most recognizable and most popular American team in Japan, but their very brand meant “American baseball” and, by extension, America, to the Japanese, in the most positive sense.

    Before the Yankees front office would consent to the visit, it required assurance that both governments were on board. More importantly, even after they were invited to tour by sponsor Mainichi Shimbun, the second largest newspaper in Japan, the organization would not begin to plan a tour without a formal invitation from the Japanese. The Japanese government laid down certain conditions, most specifically, that the visiting team would not be compensated. According to Daniel, “the proposition offers no financial gain to the club. Nor would any of the players receive anything beyond an all-expense trip for themselves and their wives.” In fact, it was absolutely essential that the team agree to forgo any type of payment. Writing in Pacific Stars and Stripes, columnist Lee Kavetski observed, “Each Yankee player is likely to be asked to sign an acceptance of non-profit conditions before making the trip.” Kavetski continued, “It is recalled an amount of unpleasantness developed from the Giants’ 1953 tour. Upon completion of the tour, some of Leo Durocher’s players complained that they had been misled and jobbed about financial remuneration. There was absolutely no basis for the complaint. And the beef unjustly placed Japanese hosts in a bad light.” This was hardly goodwill. Indeed, it was a public-relations disaster that extended into the realm of foreign relations. Kavetski noted, “As Joe DiMaggio, who has been to Japan twice, said to New York sports writer Dan Daniel, ‘Stengel’s players can perform a great service to baseball and to international friendship if they sign up for the trip even though there is no prospect for personal financial gain.’”

    Why did the bad behavior of a few American baseball players border on an international incident? On April 28, 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed by 49 nations, including the United States and Japan, officially ended World War II. It also ended the Allied Occupation. As such, the Giants were guests in a newly sovereign nation trying to find its way and to establish its identity on a global stage. Tour sponsor Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, promised to pay each player 60 percent of the gate of their final two games in Osaka in return for their participation. Unfortunately, the resulting figure was smaller than the players expected. Only 5,000 of the 24,000 who attended the first of those games actually bought tickets. As a result, each player was to be paid $331, in addition to “walking around money.” While this was no small amount—it translates to approximately $3,550 in 2021 dollars—it was nowhere near the $3,000 they believed they would net. Writing in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Cpl. Perry Smith noted, “The individual players did not appreciate the ‘giving away of the remaining 19,000 tickets and six team members refused to dress for the final contest.” Although they were eventually persuaded to take the field, they were not happy. This represented a significant cut in revenue for players accustomed to making good money during the offseason.

    Although the players thought they had a legitimate beef, their complaints did not play well in the press. To demand more was a public insult. Conditions in Japan had certainly improved by 1953, when the Giants toured, but they were far from ideal. Poverty and unemployment were still an issue, as was Japan’s huge national debt. That representatives of a wealthy nation demanded payment from the representatives of a newly emerging nation looked especially bad. That the players themselves were no doubt viewed as wealthy by individual Japanese could not have helped, either. It was essential that the Yankees not make the same mistake, treating their hosts as inferior and not worthy of due respect.

    In 1955, US-Japanese relations were still a work in progress. While arrangements for the tour were being discussed, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu visited the United States for talks with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. At a press conference, Shigemitsu, who simultaneously served as Japan’s foreign minister, “emphasized the desire of his government for a more independent partnership with the United States.” For Japan to make what Shigemitsu called “a fresh start,” he said, “we must talk things over frankly with the United States and see that the two governments understand each other.” Of course, Shigemitsu’s conference with Dulles had nothing directly to do with the goodwill baseball tour. But as he suggested, conditions laid down by a government seeking recognition of its independence had to be given their due. And given the timing, it would have been terrible optics were the insult to be repeated.

    Ultimately, the Yankee players agreed and the tour was organized, but not before another major wrinkle had to be ironed out. Once Mainichi Shimbunoffered its sponsorship, its chief competitor, Yomiuri Shimbun, countered with an offer to another team. Commissioner Frick was not having any of it. He responded negatively, announcing that simultaneous Japanese tours by two major-league clubs was out of the question—it would be one or none. Following their own delicate negotiation, competitors Mainichi and Yomiuri came to their own agreement. The two papers would sponsor tours by American clubs in alternating years.

    On August 23 George Weiss announced that the visit would proceed. Beginning with five games in Hawaii and ending with several more in Okinawa and Manila, the Yankees would leave New York shortly after the World Series on October 8 and planned to return on November 18. Included in the group of 64 travelers were many of the players’ wives, though some planned to stay behind in Hawaii. Among these wives were those of Andy Carey, Eddie Robinson, and Johnny Kucks, all of whom were on their honeymoons.

    The schedule, which included games in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyushu, Sendai, Sapporo, Nagoya, and Hiroshima, was announced on September 24. Tickets, which went on sale on October 1 for the Tokyo games to be played at Korakuen Stadium, ranged in price from 1,200 yen (approximately $3.33) for special reserved seats, to 300 yen (approximately 83 cents) for bleacher seating. Games at other stadiums would top out at 1,000 yen (approximately $2.77). According to Japan’s National Tax Agency, in 1955 private sector workers earned an average annual salary of 185,000 yen (approximately $513). This was a great improvement from the poverty of the early postwar years. Indeed, it was approaching twice the annual salary that private sector workers earned in 1950. But even a ticket to the bleachers would have been a considerable reach for the average worker. As a result, it is safe to assume that the live spectatorship for the Yankees games would have consisted primarily of well-off Japanese as well as American servicemen. Other Japanese fans had to make do with newspaper coverage, radio and, in many cases, television. Realistically speaking, television receivers were extremely expensive, making individual ownership rare—in 1953, for example, even the least expensive receivers cost more than a year’s wages for the average Japanese consumer. But this didn’t mean that television was only for the wealthy. As in the United States, sets were placed strategically in front of retail establishments in order to draw customers. Far more common, however, was the institution of gaito terebi, plaza televisions, sets situated in accessible public spaces, which gave rise to the practice of communal viewing. This would have enabled many Japanese fans to watch the games.

    Cover of the 1955 Yankees’ Japan tour program featuring Mickey Mantle. (Rob Fitts Collection)

    A Japanese poster promoting the series announced, “Unprecedented—the marvelous terrific team of our time—Champion of the Baseball World—New York Yankees—coming! Sixteen games in the whole country.” While not entirely accurate—the Yankees went on to lose the World Series to the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games after the poster was printed—it did not matter to Japanese fans. Given the public response to the team’s arrival in Tokyo, the Yankees were, in fact, the “marvelous terrific team” of l955.

    That the series had a purpose beyond “goodwill” was publicly stated by Vice President Nixon, speaking on behalf of President Eisenhower, on October 12. Eisenhower had, in fact, been involved with the planning, according to Del Webb. Prior to arranging the tour, Webb had discussed its potential benefits with the president, Secretary Dulles, and General Douglas MacArthur, former commander of the Allied powers in Japan. “I asked the president last summer if he thought a trip by the Yankees might help bring the American and Japanese people closer to each other,” said Webb. “He said it would.” So it was no surprise that Nixon made a statement, addressing Commissioner Frick, expressing the president’s best wishes. Nixon wrote, “Appearances in Japan by an American major league baseball team will contribute a great deal to increased mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of Japan, and thus to the cause of a just and lasting peace, which demands the continued friendship and cooperation of the nations of the Free World.” It was up to the Yankees, Nixon implied, to help cement the US-Japanese alliance, assuring that Japan would come down on the side of “freedom” rather than neutrality in the ongoing struggle against the unfree Soviet bloc. Of course, the vice president’s statement was a clear example of the inflated rhetoric of Cold War propaganda. But the message was unavoidable. Public relations played an essential role in geopolitics, and this tour was, above all else, an exercise in public relations.

    Having fared well on their Hawaiian stop, winning all five games against a mixture of local teams and armed forces all-stars, and having survived their mobbing at the airport, the Yankees began their hectic schedule. The sodden but jubilant welcome was followed by a series of events, receptions, and press conferences. The next day, the team worked out while Stengel, who would serve as the face of the club, and Weiss attended a luncheon at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Lest it be thought that the tour consisted only of propaganda, the proceedings included their fair share of frivolous fun, which was also covered in the press. At the club, Stengel was presented with a gift—a large box, labeled “For 01’ Case.” According to the Nippon Times,“Stengel stood patiently by while bearers deposited the box at his feet. Then, lo and behold, a pretty girl in a kimono crashed through the wrapping pounding her fist into a baseball glove in the best tradition of the game.” Sensing an opportunity to get in on the act, Weiss “went through the motions of putting the girl’s name to a contract.” In what might, in twenty-first-century terms, be considered in very bad taste, Weiss asked her how much she wanted. But under the circumstances, Weiss’s actions were just part of the fun. Nevertheless, Stengel took a moment to emphasize the true nature of the tour. The Yankees were in Japan “on a serious mission of good will.”

    It would be nice to say that the first game, held on Saturday, October 22, went off without a hitch. But rarely does this happen when there are so many moving parts. This time, Opal did more than just soak a parade. The typhoon caused a postponement of Game Five of the Japanese championship series between the Nankai Hawks and the Yomiuri Giants, which was scheduled to be played at Korakuen Stadium on Friday. As a result, the Yankees contest had to be moved to the evening to accommodate both games. A smaller crowd than expected—35,000, about 5,000 shy of a capacity crowd—turned out to see the Yankees make quick work of the Mainichi Orions, beating the Japanese team 10-2. After Kaoru Hatoyama, the wife of the prime minister, threw out the first pitch—the very first wife of a head of state to do so at a major-league game, exhibition or otherwise—fans and dignitaries were treated to a 10-hit barrage by the Yankees, including two home runs and a triple by rookie catcher Elston Howard. The Orions countered with seven hits, but committed a costly first-inning error in their loss. The crowd, which included Thomas E. Dewey and his wife, was not disappointed.

    Baseball, however, never completely supplanted diplomacy, as Prime Minister Hatoyama greeted the Yankees, Frick, and their entourage at a reception. Among the many photo ops, one stood out. Hatoyama, having been presented with a Yankees hat by Stengel, became the first Japanese prime minister to wear a baseball cap.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    Good Optics: The 1955 Yankees Tour of Japan
  • The 1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars’ Tour of Japan

    The 1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars’ Tour of Japan

    by C. Paul Rogers III

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week  C. Paul Rogers III tells us about the 1953 Major League All-Stars visit to Japan.

    Eddie Lopat was a fine, soft-tossing southpaw during a 12-year baseball career with the Chicago White Sox and most famously the New York Yankees. Called the Junkman because of his assortment of off-speed pitches, Lopat was also something of a baseball entrepreneur. He not only ran a winter baseball school in Florida, but, after barnstorming in Japan with Lefty O’Doul’s All-Stars following the 1951 major-league season, was very receptive to Frank Scott’s plan to put together a star-studded assemblage of major leaguers to again tour Japan after the 1953 season. Scott, a former traveling secretary of the Yankees who had since become a promoter, proposed calling the team the Eddie Lopat All-Stars. By 1953, after O’Doul’s 1949 breakthrough overseas trip to Japan with his San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, postseason tours to the Land of the Rising Sun had become more common. In fact, in 1953 the New York Giants also barnstormed in Japan at the same time as did Lopat’s team. For the Lopat tour, Scott secured the Mainichi Newspapers, owners of the Mainichi Orions of Japan’s Pacific League, as the official tour sponsor.

    Lopat and Scott spent much of the 1953 regular season recruiting players for the tour, including a somewhat reluctant Yogi Berra. Unbeknownst to Yogi, he was already a legend among Japanese baseball fans. At the All-Star Game in Cincinnati, a Japanese sportswriter who was helping Lopat and Scott with their recruiting was aware of Berra’s reputation as a chowhound and told Yogi about the exotic foods he would be able to consume in Japan. Yogi was skeptical, however, and wondered if bread was available in Japan. When the writer and Lopat both assured Yogi that Japan did indeed have bread, he signed on for the tour.

    Under the prevailing major-league rules, barnstorming “all-star teams” were limited to three players from any one team. With that constraint, a stellar lineup of major leaguers signed on for the tour including, in addition to Berra, future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Robin Roberts, Eddie Mathews, Bob Lemon, Nellie Fox, and Enos Slaughter. All-Star-caliber players like Eddie Robinson, Curt Simmons, Mike Garcia, Harvey Kuenn (the 1953 American League Rookie of the Year), Jackie Jensen, and Hank Sauer committed as well, as did Gus Niarhos, who was added to serve as a second catcher behind Berra. Whether a slight exaggeration or not, they were billed as “the greatest array of major league stars ever to visit Japan.”

    Lopat and his Yankees teammates Mantle and Berra were fresh off a tense six-game World Series win over the Brooklyn Dodgers in which all had played pivotal roles. Lopat had won Game Two thanks to a two-run eighth-inning homer by Mantle, while Berra had batted .429 for the Series. A casualty to the tour because of the long season and World Series, however, was the 21-year-old Mantle, who, after battling injuries to both knees during the year, needed surgery and was a late scratch. Lopat quickly added Yankees teammate Billy Martin, who had hit .500 with 12 hits and eight runs batted in in the Series to win the Baseball Writers’ MVP Award.

    The Lopat All-Stars were to first play four exhibition games in Colorado and began gathering at the famous Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs on October 6. Baseball had a no-fraternizing rule then and many of the players looked forward to getting to know ballplayers from other teams and from the other league. The Phillies’ Robin Roberts, who was known for his great control on the mound, remembered spotting fellow hurler Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians in the bar at the Broadmoor and going over to introduce himself. Lemon asked Roberts what he wanted to drink and Roberts said, “I’ll have a 7-Up.”

    Lemon didn’t say anything but pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered Roberts one. Roberts said, “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”

    Lemon chuckled and said, “No wonder you don’t walk anyone.”

    The Lopat team’s opposition in Colorado was a squad of major leaguers put together by White Sox manager Paul Richards and highlighted by pitchers Billy Pierce and Mel Parnell, infielders Pete Runnels and Randy Jackson, and outfielders Dave Philley and Dale Mitchell.

    The big-league sluggers quickly took to the rarefied Colorado air as the teams combined for nine home runs in the first contest, a 13-8 victory for the Lopat All-Stars over the Richards group on October 8 in Pueblo. The 21-year-old Mathews, coming off a gargantuan 47-homer, 135-RBI season with the Braves, slugged two circuit shots (including one that traveled 500 feet), as did the Cubs’ 36-year-old Hank Sauer, the Cardinals’ 37-year-old Enos Slaughter, and, for the Richards team, Detroit catcher Matt Batts. Two days later, the Lopats blasted the Richards team 18-7 in Colorado Springs before the four-game series shifted to Bears Stadium in Denver for the final two contests. The results were the same, however, as the Lopat team won in the Mile-High City 8-4 and 14-8, the latter before a record crowd of 13,852, as fourtime American League All-Star Eddie Robinson of the Philadelphia A’s and Mathews both homered off Billy Pierce and drove in four runs apiece.

    Mathews went 7-for-8 in the two Denver contests and posted Little League-like numbers for the whole Colorado series, driving in 17 runs in the four games, while the veteran Slaughter had 12 hits, including two homers, two triples, and three doubles.

    The Lopat All-Stars then flew to Honolulu for more exhibition games after a brief stopover in San Francisco. On October 12 and 13 they played a pair of games in Honolulu against a local team called the Rural Red Sox and it did not take long for disaster to strike. In the first inning of the first game before a jammed-in crowd of 10,500, Mike Garcia of the Indians was struck in the ankle by a line drive after delivering a pitch. Garcia, who had won 20, 22, and 18 games the previous three seasons, was unable to push off from the mound after the injury and had to leave the game. Although Garcia stayed with the team for most of the tour, he was able to pitch only sparingly in Japan.

    Despite the loss of Garcia, the major leaguers clobbered the locals 10-2 and 15-0. After the second game, first baseman Robinson, who had homered in the rout, was stricken with a kidney-stone attack and was briefly hospitalized. He quickly recovered and resumed the tour for the All-Stars, who had brought along only 11 position players.

    On October 14 the Lopat squad flew to Kauai, where they pounded out 22 hits and defeated the Kauai All-Stars, 12-3, on a makeshift diamond fashioned from a football field. World Series MVP Martin was honored before the game and given a number of gifts, including an aloha shirt and a calabash bowl. He celebrated by smashing a long home run in his first time at bat and later adding a double and a single. The homer sailed through goalposts situated beyond left field, leading Robin Roberts to quip that it should have counted for three runs.

    The big leaguers next flew to Hilo on the Big Island, where on October 17, 5,000 saw them defeat a local all-star-team, 8-3, in a game benefiting the local Little League. But much more serious opposition awaited them back in Honolulu in the form of a three- game series against the Roy Campanella All-Stars, a team of African American major leaguers headed by Campanella, the reigning National League MVP, and including stellar players like Larry Doby, Don Newcombe, Billy Bruton, Joe Black, Junior Gilliam, George Crowe, Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, Bob Boyd, Dave Hoskins, Connie Johnson, and Jim Pendleton.

    The Lopats won the first game, 7-1, on the afternoon of October 18 over an obviously weary Campanella team that had flown in from Atlanta the previous day, with a plane change in Los Angeles. Jackie Jensen, then with the Washington Senators, was the hitting star with two home runs, while the Phillies’ Curt Simmons allowed only a single run in eight innings of mound work. By the next night, Campy’s squad was in much better shape and defeated the Lopat team 4-3 in 10 innings behind Joe Black.

    Roberts pitched the first nine innings for the Lopats with Yogi Berra behind the plate. In one at-bat, Campanella hit a towering foul ball behind the plate. Campy actually knocked the glove off Yogi’s hand on the follow-through of his swing. Berra looked down at his glove on the ground and then went back and caught the foul ball barehanded.

    Roberts picked up Yogi’s glove and handed it to him, asking him if he was okay. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell.”

    Over the years Roberts wondered if he had somehow made that story up, since he never again saw a bat knock the glove off a catcher’s hand. Over 30 years later, he saw Berra at an Old-Timers game in Wrigley Field in Chicago and asked him about it. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell,” the exact thing he had said in 1953.

    On October 20 Campanella’s squad won the rubber game, 7-1, behind the three-hit pitching of Don Newcombe. Nellie Fox displayed rare power by homering for the Lopats’ only run, while George Crowe hit two homers and Junior Gilliam one for the Campanellas.

    The Lopat team stayed at the famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach and had such a great time in Hawaii that many didn’t want to leave. Many of the players had brought their wives but some like Eddie Mathews, Billy Martin, and Eddie Robinson were single and so enjoyed the Honolulu nightlife. Not surprisingly given his before and after history, Martin got into a dispute with a guard at a performance of hula dancers attended by the entire team and sucker-punched him. Fortunately for Martin, no charges appear to have been brought.

    The Lopat squad did have a schedule to keep and flew on a Pan American Stratocruiser to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, arriving at 1:05 P.M. on October 22. They could scarcely have anticipated the frenzied reception they received. Although the New York Giants had been in the country for a week and had played five games, thousands of Japanese greeted the plane. After being officially greeted by executives from the trip sponsor, Mainichi, and receiving gifts from beautiful young Japanese women, the ballplayers climbed into convertibles, one player per car, to travel to the Nikkatsu Hotel, which would be their headquarters. The trip, which would normally take about 30 minutes, took almost three hours because of the throngs of fans lining the route and pressing against the cars as Japanese mounted and foot police were overwhelmed. Eddie Mathews likened it to the pope in a motorcade without police or security while it reminded Robin Roberts of a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

    That evening the Americans were guests at a gigantic pep rally in their honor at the Nichigeki Theater, where Hawaiian-born Japanese crooner Katsuhiko Haida introduced each player. American Ambassador John M. Allison also hosted a reception at the US Embassy for both the Lopats and the New York Giants, who had just returned to Tokyo from Sendai.

    Eddie Lopat All-Stars vs. Mainichi Orions, October 23, 1953 (Rob Fitts Collection

    The Lopat squad’s first game was the following afternoon, October 23, against the Mainichi Orions in Korakuen Stadium before 27,000. The Orions, who had finished fifth out of seven teams in Japan’s Pacific League, had the honor of playing the initial game due to its ownership by the Mainichi newspapers. Jackie Jensen won a home-run-hitting contest before the game by smacking six out of the yard, followed by Futoshi Nakanishi of the Nishitetsu Lions with three and then Berra, Mathews, and Hank Sauer with two each. Bobby Brown, stationed in Tokyo as a US Army doctor, was seen visiting in the dugout with his Yankee teammates Lopat, Berra, and Martin before the contest.

    The US and Japanese Army bands played after the home-run-hitting contest, followed by helicopters dropping bouquets of flowers to both managers. Another helicopter hovered low over the field and dropped the first ball but stirred up so much dust from the all-dirt infield that the start of the game was delayed.

    The game finally began with Curt Simmons on the mound for the Americans against southpaw Atsushi Aramaki. The visitors plated a run in the top of the second on a single by Sauer, a double by Robinson, and an error, but the Orions immediately rallied for three runs in the bottom half on three bunt singles and Kazuhiro Yamauchi’s double. The Orions led 4-1 heading into the top of the ninth but the Lopats staged a thrilling rally to tie the score behind a walk to Mathews, a two-run homer by Sauer, and Robinson’s game-tying circuit clout.

    Garcia, who had relieved Simmons in the seventh inning, was still pitching in the 10th but after allowing a single, reaggravated the leg injury suffered in Hawaii. He was forced to leave the game with the count of 1 and 1 against the Orions’ Charlie Hood, who was a minor-league player in the Phillies organization. (Hood was in the military stationed in Japan and had played 25 games for Mainichi during the season.) When Garcia had to depart, Lopat asked for volunteers to pitch. Roberts, sitting in the dugout, said he would and went out to the mound to warm up.

    During the game Roberts had told Bob Lemon next to him that he was familiar with Hood from Phillies spring training and that he was a really good low-ball hitter. Then, on his first pitch, Roberts threw Hood a low fastball which he ripped down the right-field line for a game-winning double. Lemon ribbed Roberts for the rest of the trip about his throwing a low fastball to a low-fastball hitter. In one of baseball’s little coincidences, Roberts and Lemon would both be elected to the Hall of Fame on the same day in 1976, 23 years later.

    The Lopat squad’s loss in the opener was only the third ever suffered by an American team of major leaguers in a postseason tour of Japan. The All-Stars were certainly embarrassed by losing to a mediocre team and afterward Roberts told the Japanese press, “Look, it’s a goodwill trip and so this was some of our goodwill. You won the first game, but you won’t win anymore.”

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    The 1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars’ Tour of Japan
  • The Cold War, a Red Scare, and the New York Giants’ Historic Tour of Japan in 1953

    The Cold War, a Red Scare, and the New York Giants’ Historic Tour of Japan in 1953

    by Steven Wisensale

    We have moved the Nichibei Yakyu series to Mondays to make room for a new series of articles by Thomas Love Seagull debuting this Wednesday, January 14.

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Steven Wisensale tells us about the New York Giants trip toJapan in 1953.


    On the morning of June 29, 1953, readers of the Globe Gazette in Mason City, Iowa, were greeted by a headline on page 13: “New York Giants Invited to Tour Japan This Fall.”

    The Associated Press in Tokyo reported that Shoji Yasuda, president of the Yomiuri Shimbun, had formally invited Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants, to bring his team to Japan for a goodwill tour after the season. The tour was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853, when he forced the isolated nation’s ports to open to the world.

    An excited Stoneham quickly sought and was given approval for the trip from the US State Department, the Defense Department, and the US Embassy in Tokyo. The tour was also endorsed by Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick. However, two hurdles remained for Stoneham: He needed his fellow owners to suspend the rule that prohibited more than three members of a major-league team from playing in postseason exhibition games. And at least 15 Giants on the major-league roster had to vote yes for the tour.

    With respect to the first hurdle, previous postseason tours had consisted primarily of major-league allstars, not complete teams. The 1953 Giants, however, became trailblazers as the first squad to tour Japan as a complete major-league team. The second rule was a requirement set forth by the Japanese sponsors of the tour. They wanted their Japanese players to compete against top-quality major leaguers.

    WAIVER IS GRANTED

    The waiver Stoneham sought was granted by team owners on July 12 when they gathered in Cincinnati for the All-Star Game “We will now proceed with our plans for the goodwill tour,” said an upbeat Stoneham.

    Another person who was extremely happy with the owners’ decision to support the Giants’ tour of Japan was Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada. Harada was a US Army officer serving with the American occupation force in postwar Japan and an adviser to the Yomiuri Giants. One of his tasks was to restore morale among the Japanese people through sports, particularly baseball. It was Harada who suggested to General Douglas MacArthur that the San Francisco Seals be invited to Japan for a goodwill tour in 1949. Working closely with Lefty O’Doul, Harada coordinated the tour, which MacArthur later declared was “the greatest piece of diplomacy ever,” adding, “all the diplomats put together would not have been able to do this.” O’Doul would play a central role in 1953 by assisting Harada in coordinating the Giants’ tour.

    After the owners granted approval, Harada flew to Honolulu, where he met with city officials and baseball executives to share the news that Hawaii would host two exhibition games during the team’s layover on their journey to Japan.

    At a press conference on July 18 in Honolulu, Harada explained why the Giants were chosen for the tour: They were the oldest team in major-league baseball, and they had Black players. A Honolulu sports- writer observed: “The presence of colored stars on the team will help show the people of Japan democracy at work and point out to them that all the people in the United States are treated equally.”

    Harada’s statement was not exactly accurate. First, while the Giants were one of the oldest professional teams, they were not the oldest. Five other teams preceded them: the Braves, Cubs, Cardinals, Pirates, and Reds. And Harada’s statements regarding racial diversity and “equality for all” were misleading. By the end of the 1953 season only eight of the 16 major-league clubs were integrated. Jim Crow laws were firmly in place in at least 17 states and the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregated schooling, was a year away. However, Harada was correct in emphasizing the visual impact an integrated baseball team on the field could have on fans, and society as a whole, as Jackie Robinson taught America in 1947.

    The Giants also were selected because of Harada’s close relationship with Lefty O’Doul and O’Doul’s strong connection to Horace Stoneham, which began in 1928 when Lefty played for the Giants. At one point Stoneham even considered hiring O’Doul as his manager. Harada, who was bilingual, lived in Santa Maria, California, where, in the spring of 1953, he arranged for the Yomiuri Giants to hold their spring-training camp. Working closely together, Harada and O’Doul (with Stoneham’s approval) scheduled an exhibition game in Santa Maria between the New York Giants and their Tokyo namesake. O’Doul introduced Harada to Stoneham, and the seeds for the Japan tour were planted.

    A CLUBHOUSE VOTE

    The one remaining hurdle was a positive vote by at least 15 Giants. Prior to voting, they were told that the tour would take place from mid-October to mid-November. They would play two games in Hawaii on their way to Japan, 14 games in Japan, and a few games in Okinawa, the Philippines, and Guam before returning home. They understood that all expenses would be covered by the Japanese, and they should expect to make about $3,000, depending on paid attendance at the games. On July 25, when the Giants lost, 7-5, to the Cincinnati Reds on a Saturday afternoon before 8,454 fans at the Polo Grounds, the team voted 18 to 7 to go to Japan.

    Two players who voted yes were Sal Maglie and Hoyt Wilhelm. Several weeks later Maglie backed out, citing his ailing back, which needed to heal during the offseason. Ronnie Samford, an infielder and the only minor leaguer to make the trip, replaced Maglie. Hoyt Wilhelm faced a dilemma: His wife was pregnant. But his brother was serving in Korea. He chose to make the trip when he learned he could visit his brother during the tour.

    Only two players’ wives opted to make the trip and at least one dropped out prior to departure. One obvious absentee was the Giants’ sensational center fielder who was the Rookie of the Year in 1951: Willie Mays. Serving in an Army transport unit in Virginia, he would not be discharged until after the tour ended, but in time for Opening Day in 1954.

    Players who voted no provided a variety of reasons for their decisions. Alvin Dark and Whitey Lockman cited business commitments made before the invitation arrived; Rubén Gómez was committed to playing another season of winter ball in his native Puerto Rico; Bobby Thomson’s wife was pregnant; Larry Jansen preferred to stay home with his large family in Oregon; and Dave Koslo wanted to rest his aging arm. Tookie Gilbert also voted no but offered no reason for his decision.

    Nonplayers in the traveling party included owner Stoneham and his son, Peter; manager Leo Durocher and his wife, Hollywood actress Laraine Day; Commissioner Frick and his wife; Mr. and Mrs. Lefty O’Doul; equipment manager Eddie Logan; publicist Billy Goodrich; team secretary Eddie Brannick and his wife; and coach Fred Fitzsimmons and his wife. Also making the trip was National League umpire Larry Goetz, who was appointed by National League President Warren Giles and Commissioner Frick.

    The traveling party’s itinerary was straightforward. Most members left New York on October 8 and, after meeting the rest of the group in San Francisco, flew to Hawaii on October 9 and played two exhibition games. They left Honolulu on October 12 and arrived in Tokyo on October 14. After completing their 14-game schedule against Japanese teams, they left Tokyo on November 10 for Okinawa, the Philippines, and Guam before returning to the United States.

    Another team of major leaguers was touring Japan at the same time. Eddie Lopat’s All-Stars, including future Hall of Famers Yogi Berra, Enos Slaughter, Eddie Mathews, Nellie Fox, Robin Roberts, and Bob Lemon, and recent World Series hero Billy Martin, were sponsored by the Mainichinewspaper, one of Yomiuri Shimbun’s major competitors. Lopat’s team won 11 of 12 games and earned more money than the New York Giants.

    THE TOUR IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

    When Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed the US presidency on January 20, 1953, he inherited a Cold War abroad that was intertwined with the nation’s second Red Scare at home. The Soviet Union engulfed Eastern Europe with what Winston Churchill referred to as an iron curtain; and China, which witnessed a Communist revolution in 1949, became a major threat in Asia. On June 25, 1950, nearly 100,000 North Korean troops invaded US-backed South Korea, commencing the Korean War, which lasted until 1953.

    The invasion had a major impact on Japan-US relations. In particular, the United States had to reevaluate how to address the rise of communism in Asia as well as quell the growing opposition to US military bases in Japan. On September 8, 1951, representatives of both countries met in San Francisco to sign the Treaty of Peace that officially ended World War II and the seven-year Allied occupation of Japan, which would take effect in the spring of 1952. Japan would be a sovereign nation again, but the United States would still maintain military bases there for security reasons that would benefit both countries. In short, “it was during the Korean War that US-Japan relations changed dramatically from occupation status to one of a security partnership in Asia,” opined an American journalist. And such an arrangement needed to be nurtured by soft-power diplomacy in the form of educational exchanges, visits by entertainers, and tours by major-league baseball clubs. In 1953 the New York Giants served as exemplars of soft power under the new partnership between the United States and Japan.

    A CELEBRATORY ARRIVAL AND A SUCCESSFUL TOUR

    The Giants easily won their two games in Hawaii. The first was a 7-2 win against a team of service allstars, and the second was a 10-1 victory over the Rural Red Sox, the Hawaii League champions in 1953. Also present in Honolulu was Cappy Harada, who talked of his dream of seeing a “real World Series” between the US and Japanese champions, while emphasizing that the quality of Japanese baseball was getting closer to the level of play of American teams. He noted that the Yomiuri Giants and the New York Giants had split two games during spring training. “We beat the Americans in California and they beat us in Arizona,” he said. Then, almost in the form of a warning to the traveling party that was about to depart for Japan, Harada reminded reporters that Yomiuri was a powerhouse, having led its league by 16 games.

    When the Pan American Stratocruiser carrying the Giants landed at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport at 1:00 P.M. on October 14, it was swarmed by Japanese officials, reporters, photographers, and fans. Consequently, the traveling party could not move off the tarmac for more than an hour before boarding cars for a motorcade that wound its way through Tokyo streets lined with thousands of cheering fans waving flags, hoping to get a glimpse of the American ballplayers.

    That evening in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel, Leo Durocher boldly stated that he expected his Giants to win every game on the tour. He also expected a home-run barrage by his club because the Japanese ballparks were so small. “We shouldn’t drop a game to any of these teams while we’re over here,” he boasted. Perhaps realizing that his comment was not the most diplomatic way to open the tour, Durocher quickly put a positive spin on his view of the Yomiuri Giants in particular. “They are the best-looking Japanese ball team I’ve seen,” he said. “They showed a great deal of improvement during their spring workouts in the States.”  Yomiuri would win their third straight Japanese championship two days later.

    Over the next two days, the visiting Giants attended a large welcoming luncheon, participated in a motorcade parade through Tokyo, and held workouts at Korakuen Stadium. “Giants Drill, Leo’s Antics Delight Fans” read a headline in Pacific Stars and Stripes on October 16, the day before the series opened. Each day Durocher and several of his players conducted a one-hour clinic on the “fundamentals of American baseball.” A photo captured the Giants demonstrating a rundown play between third base and home.

    Before the Giants’ arrival, the US Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes published a two-page spread profiling the players on both teams.  For the Japanese people, a Fan’s Guide was distributed widely. Gracing the cover was a color photograph of Leo Durocher with his arm around Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara, a World War II veteran who had spent five years in a Soviet prison. Inside the guide were ads linked to baseball and numerous photos and profiles of players from both the New York Giants and Eddie Lopat’s All-Stars. Near the back of the guide, however, was an error: a photo of Mickey Mantle. Mantle had backed out of the trip with Eddie Lopat to undergo knee surgery in Missouri.

    THE GAMES

    The team’s 14-game schedule was broken down into five games with the Yomiuri Giants, five games against the Central League All-Stars, two games with the All-Japan All-Stars, and single contests with the Chunichi Dragons and the Hanshin Tigers. The first three games were played in Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium, which held 45,000 fans.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    The Cold War, a Red Scare, and the New York Giants’ Historic Tour of Japan in 1953
  • Joe DiMaggio’s Last Hurrah: The 1951 Lefty O’Doul All-Star Tour

    Joe DiMaggio’s Last Hurrah: The 1951 Lefty O’Doul All-Star Tour

    by Robert K. Fitts

    Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Rob Fitts writes about how Lefty O’Doul brought a MLB all-star team, featuring Joe DiMaggio, to Japan in 1951.

    In 1951 American troops still occupied Japan, but their mission had shifted. Rather than seeing the country as a former enemy to be subjugated, Japan was now viewed as an ally in the fight against communism. As the war in Korea raged, Japan became a strategic center for United Nations troops, providing a supply base, command center, and behind-the-lines support that included hospitals. It became vital to US policy that democracy flourish in Japan and that ties between the two nations remain strong.

    Since the end of World War II, US forces had consciously used the shared love of baseball to help bind the two nations together. To this end, Maj. Gen. William F. Marquat, the occupation forces’ Chief of Economic and Scientific Section, had restarted Japanese professional and amateur baseball immediately after the war. He also worked closely with Frank “Lefty” O’Doul to organize baseball exchanges. O’Doul made three trips to Japan between 1946 and 1950, bringing over the San Francisco Seals in 1949 and Joe DiMaggio in 1950. In August 1951, O’Doul announced that after the season he would return to Japan for the fourth time; this time taking an all-star team of major leaguers and Pacific Coast League stars on a goodwill tour to bolster ties between the two countries.

    Sponsored by the Yomiuri newspaper, and organized by Sotaro Suzuki, the team was to play 16 games during a four-week trip starting in mid-October. The roster included American League batting champ Ferris Fain, Bobby Shantz, and Joe Tipton of the Athletics; Joe DiMaggio, Billy Martin, and Eddie Lopat of the Yankees; Dom DiMaggio and Mel Parnell of the Red Sox; Pirates Bill Werle and George Strickland; and PCL standouts Ed Cereghino, Al Lyons, Ray Perry, Dino Restelli, Lou Stringer, Chuck Stevens, and Tony “Nini” Tornay. To accommodate the All-Stars’ schedule, Japanese baseball Commissioner Seita (also known as Morita) Fukui canceled the final games of the Nippon Professional Baseball League so that the Japan Series could be concluded before the all-stars arrived.

    As the all-star squad was about to depart, Joe DiMaggio made a stunning announcement. He was considering hanging up his spikes. In a meeting in New York, Yankees President Dan Topping supposedly told his star, “You are going to Japan. … You will have a lot of time for thought. So, think it over, and when you get back to New York, call me up and we will go over this matter again.”

    O’Doul’s team gathered in San Francisco on October 15 and the next day boarded a Boeing 307 Stratoliner for the long flight to Hawaii. After an hour’s delay before takeoff, the plane finally departed. Thirty minutes later, an engine began to sputter and then died. “Boy, was I scared,” recalled Bobby Shantz. “It’s no fun to have a motor conk out and see nothing below you but Pacific Ocean!” The Stratoliner returned safely to San Francisco and after three hours of repairs tried again. As the plane neared Hawaii, O’Doul told his players to change into their uniforms. The team was scheduled to play a 7:30 P.M. game in Honolulu and although they would be late, Lefty planned to keep the engagement.

    Once they touched down at 9:45 P.M., a police escort whisked the ballplayers to Honolulu Stadium, where 15,000 fans were still waiting for the visitors to arrive. By 10:30 they were playing ball. The exhausted All-Stars put in a poor performance against the local semipros. The Hawaiians scored six off Shantz and Lopat as starting pitcher Don Ferrarese (who had played minor-league ball and eventually had an eight- year major-league career) held the visitors to a single run in four innings before the All-Stars erupted for five in the fifth inning to tie the score. Reliever Ed Correa, however, stymied the All-Stars for the remainder of the contest, striking out eight, as the Hawaiians pushed across two more runs to win 8-6. To the great disappointment of the crowd, Joe DiMaggio did not start and only appeared as a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning -Correa fanned him on three pitches. One irate fan later wrote to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

    Do you honestly think that the way you let 15,000 people down the other night is true sportsmanship? Folks came piling into the Honolulu stadium at7:00 PM and waited for six hours. … They came in droves, young and old. Old women carrying babies, dads with their kids, who should have been in bed in order to be ready for school the next day. And for what? … they all came for the one purpose of seeing one man in action, Joe DiMaggio. All through the game an old grandmother sat holding her grandson, who kept asking, ‘Where’s DiMaggio, Gramma, where’s DiMaggio? And when he finally did appear for an instant in the 8th, I looked over at them, and they were still waiting there, sound asleep! Yep, Lefty, you sure let us down.

    After the game ended at 12:55 A.M., the All-Stars trudged back to the airport and boarded a flight to Tokyo.

    General Marquat met the team when it arrived at Haneda Airport at 4:30 P.M. After a brief press conference, Marquat ushered the players into 15 convertibles for a parade through downtown Tokyo.

    As dark fell, nearly a million fans lined the streets of Tokyo to welcome the team. “I never saw so many people in my life,” recalled Shantz. “Baseball worshipping Japanese fans choked midtown Tokyo traffic for an hour and rocked the city with screams of ‘Banzai DiMaggio!’ … in a tumultuous welcome,” the United Press reported.“Magnesium flares flashed through the sky as the motorcade inched through the mob. DiMaggio and O’Doul were in the lead convertible, just behind a Military Police jeep that used its hood to push back the mob to clear a path. ‘Banzai DiMaggio! Banzai O’Doul!’the mob shouted. Scraps of paper rained from the windows of office buildings.”

    Yets Higa, a Honolulu businessman who accompanied the team to Japan, said, “The cars finally slowed down to almost a snail’s pace as thousands of Japanese baseball fans walked right up to the cars to touch the celebrities from America. The crowd intensified its enthusiasm as an American band played Stars and Stripes [Forever]. The whole thing was so fantastic that I couldn’t believe my eyes. Never in my life have I seen such a tremendous welcome given to any team.” The “surging crowds gave the ball players one of the greatest receptions ever accorded any visitors to Japan,” added the Nippon Times}

    The next afternoon, Thursday, October 18, 5,000 spectators showed up at Meiji Jingu Stadium (renamed Stateside Park by the occupation forces) to watch the visiting ballplayers practice. O’Doul and DiMaggio remained the center of attention. “When O’Doul walks off or on the field, going to his car, walking to the locker room or any other time he appears in public, people seemed to spring right out of the ground. Baseball fans of all ages press in on him and beg for an autograph or just mill around, trying to catch a glimpse of ‘Refty.’ Joe DiMaggio is the same way. … It becomes almost impossible for him to move from one place to another for the people who want him to sign cards, baseballs, scraps of paper, old notebook covers or anything they happen to have handy.”

    That evening more than 3,000 fans jammed the Nippon Gekijo, Asia’s largest movie theatre, to see the ballplayers. Thousands more waited outside after being turned away from the sold-out event. During the brief ceremony, Sotaro Suzuki introduced the players as each stepped forward and bowed to the audience. After the introductions, O’Doul spoke: “The long war with cannons and machine-guns is ended. Let’s promote Japanese-American friendship by means of balls and gloves. There is no sport like baseball to promote friendship between two countries. Oyasuminasai [goodnight].”

    On October 19, after 10,000 fans came to watch them practice, the ballplayers met with Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the United Nations forces in Korea and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan. The general told the team that he was “very happy the major leaguers had come to Japan and felt sure their visit would promote good relations between the United States and Japan.” Ridgway also asked if the squad could travel to Korea to entertain the troops.

    The gates of Korakuen Stadium opened at 8 A.M. the following day to accommodate the expected throng for the opening game against the Yomiuri Giants. The players themselves arrived for practice at 11:40. By 1:30, 50,000 fans packed the stands as baseball comedian Johnny Price began his show. Often known as Jackie, Price had been a longtime semipro and minor-league player (with 13 major-league at-bats for the Cleveland Indians in 1946), who had turned to comedy. During the 1940s and ‘50s, he performed at minor- and major-league parks across the United States. His act included accurately pitching two baseballs at the same time, blindfolded pitching, bunting between his legs, catching pop flies down his pants, and both playing catch and batting while hanging upside down by his ankles from a swing set. His signature act featured shooting baseballs hundreds of feet in the air with an air-powered “bazooka” and then catching them from a moving jeep. The Japanese fans adored the show, having never seen anything like it in their serious games.

    At 1:45, an announcer introduced the two teams and numerous dignitaries as they lined up on the field. Just as the pregame ceremonies and long-winded speeches seemed endless, General Marquai yelled, “Let’s get on with the ball game!” and a few minutes later the teams took the field.

    The Yomiuri Giants had just completed one of their most successful seasons, running away with the Central League pennant by 18 games and then topping the Nankai Hawks in the Japan Series, four games to one. Their star-studded roster included seven future members of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. Nevertheless, “manager Shigeru Mizuhara readily admitted that his championship team didn’t have a chance, but he promised his ball players will be hustling all the way to put up a good fight.”

    It did not take long for the All-Stars to grab the lead. After starter Takehiko Bessho retired leadoff batter Dom DiMaggio on a fly to right field, Billy Martin beat out a grounder to the shortstop. Ferris Fain then stroked a line-drive single into center field, sending Martin to third. Joe DiMaggio stepped to the plate and on a 2-2 count, “answering the fervent pleas of the fans” slammed a sharp single by the third baseman to score Martin. But a nifty double play turned by second baseman Shigeru Chiba ended the inning.

    Leading off the bottom of the first for Yomiuri was Lefty O’Doul’s protégé Wally Yonamine. Yonamine was the first American star to play in the Japanese leagues after World War II. Frustrated by not reaching the inaugural Japan Series in 1950, Yomiuri executives wanted to import an American player to strengthen their lineup and teach the latest baseball techniques.

    They reasoned that hiring a Caucasian player so soon after the end of the war would lead to difficulties, so instead they searched for the best available Japanese American player. They soon settled on Hawaiian-born Yonamine, who had not only just finished a stellar year with the Salt Lake City Bees of the Pioneer League but had also become the first man of Japanese descent to play professional football when he joined the San Francisco 49ers in 1947. In his first season with Yomiuri, Yonamine became an instant star, batting .354 with 26 stolen bases. He went on to have a 12-year Hall of Fame career in Japan.

    Yonamine battled starter Mel Parnell before drawing a walk. With a one-out single by Noboru Aota, the Giants threatened to even the score, but Parnell got out of the jam and proceeded to shut down Yomiuri for the next five innings. In the meantime, Bessho retired the next 10 All-Stars and the fifth inning began with the score still 1-0. Two errors, a walk, and a single in the fifth, however, increased the All-Stars’ lead to 4-0. The Americans tacked on another three runs and Bill Werle came on in relief of Parnell, holding Yomiuri scoreless for the 7-0 victory.

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    Joe DiMaggio’s Last Hurrah: The 1951 Lefty O’Doul All-Star Tour