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  • Tommy Lasorda: Baseball’s Global Ambassador and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 1993 Friendship Tour of Japan

    Tommy Lasorda: Baseball’s Global Ambassador and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 1993 Friendship Tour of Japan

    by Mark Langill

    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 Langill highlights the Dodgers 1993 trip to Japan .

    What felt like a nostalgia trip unexpectedly served as a dress rehearsal for the next frontier of professional baseball when the 1993 Los Angeles Dodgers staged a modest five-game “Friendship Series” in Taiwan and Japan.

    Nobody could’ve predicted a “Tornado” on the horizon, one of the nicknames bestowed upon Kintetsu Buffaloes pitcher Hideo Nomo, who in 1993 was a four-time All-Star and former Pacific League MVP. His contract issues with Kintetsu led to his retirement from Japanese baseball after the 1994 season, an exit strategy discovered by agent Don Nomura when analyzing the sport’s seemingly ironclad working agreements covering the United States and Japan. Nomo became only the second player from a Japanese professional league – and the first in 30 years – to play in the majors during his National League Rookie of the Year campaign with the Dodgers in 1995.

    “There was no business reason for the 1993 Japan trip, other than growing baseball at the international level,” said Fred Claire, a 30-year Dodger executive who was the team’s general manager from 1987 to 1998. “[Brooklyn Dodgers team President] Walter O’Malley’s global vision of the game was continued by his son, Peter. But when you go back in time, the thought of a player from Japan playing in the majors seemed like an impossible reach. There were no major-league teams scouting in Japan. There was no reason to use those scouting resources because there were players from Latin America, Mexico, and other parts of the world.”

    Manager Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers became the first major-league team to play in Taiwan, posting a 1-2 record in Taipei against all-stars from the Chinese Professional League. Los Angeles then traveled to Fukuoka, Japan, for a pair of games against a combination of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks of the Pacific League and the Yomiuri Giants of the Central League.

    Nomo wasn’t part of the exhibition at the newly opened Fukuoka Dome in 1993. Claire didn’t stick around for the Japan portion of the trip, flying from Taiwan to Los Angeles and continuing to Naples, Florida, for a meeting of major-league general managers.

    Instead of a stealth scouting mission, the 1993 trip represented another chance for Peter O’Malley to promote international baseball. He was 18 years old in 1956 when the Brooklyn Dodgers spent nearly five weeks in Japan after the World Series. His roommate was broadcaster Vin Scully, who reported on the 19-game exhibition for Sport magazine.

    During their ownership of the franchise between 1950 and 1998, the O’Malley family used Dodgertown, the spring-training facility in Vero Beach, Florida, along with Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles after its 1962 opening, to host international events.

    After selling the Dodgers to Fox Group in 1998, O’Malley kept his ties to the Vero Beach area, at one point operating a lease at “Historic Dodgertown” in a partnership with his sister Terry Seidler, Nomo, and former Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho Park, who in 1994 became the first player from Korea to appear in the majors. The Vero Beach complex was taken over by Major League Baseball in 2019 and renamed after Dodgers Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson.

    The O’Malleys and Lasorda were also close to Rod Dedeaux, the University of Southern California baseball coach who won 11 NCAA titles during his 45-year tenure. Dedeaux played two games at shortstop for the 1935 Dodgers and was a longtime champion of international baseball. He coached Team USA in a baseball exhibition during the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and in the 1984 Olympics baseball tournament at Dodger Stadium. (Japan defeated Team USA in the Gold Medal game.)

    In a 1991 interview with the Mainichi Daily News, Peter O’Malley outlined his hopes for a true global baseball series. Dodger Stadium played host to the 1991 International Baseball Association World All-Star Game with top amateur players representing 28 countries.

    I’m an advocate of such competition. And I think my colleagues in the majors are quickly becoming receptive to such an idea, too. I don’t think major-league baseball feels threatened at all. On the contrary, I get the feeling baseball’s leaders think the timing is just about right. Logistics – travel, etc. – are no longer a problem. Baseball is extremely popular and profitable outside the U.S. in many countries like Japan and Korea. The competitiveness is there. I think they feel now’s the time to capitalize on it and move on it.

    It will be the best two teams going at it in a seven-game World Series. Say, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chunichi Dragons. But the international playoff would involve more than just the U.S. and Japan. After all, there are some strong Latin American leagues and the Korean pro league is coming on fast. It’s only been in existence for 10 years and look at how many competitive players there are. And pro ball is catching on in Taiwan. Plus, who knows where else the sport might also grow rapidly. The possibilities are endless and exciting.

    As publicity director of the Dodgers in the early 1970s, Claire accompanied Dodgers Alan Foster and Von Joshua along with a dozen other major-league players on a trip to Japan sponsored by the Nichiren-Shoshu Buddhist sect. As vice president of marketing in 1980, Claire, along with O’Malley, traveled to Japan to negotiate with Mitsubishi officials as the Dodgers became the first team with a color video scoreboard, debuting “Diamond Vision” at the 1980 All-Star Game.

    Lasorda, who died in 2021 at 93, spent 71 years in the Dodgers organization. The former left-handed pitcher, bumped from Brooklyn’s 1955 roster to make room for rookie Sandy Koufax, first arrived in Japan in the spring of 1965 for a series of clinics with fellow scout Kenny Myers. Lasorda had also worked with members of the Tokyo Giants during the first of their five trips to Vero Beach between 1961 and 1980.

    Lasorda’s 1965 arrival at the airport in Tokyo was fitting for a man still a decade away from international celebrity. Nobody met Lasorda and Myers at the airport because the baseball officials had the wrong date. The scouts went to the Hilton Hotel and rested after their nine-hour flight.

    During their three-week trip, Lasorda and Myers toured various landmarks and baseball facilities, including the Imperial Palace and the Olympic Village. Working with the Yomiuri Giants prior to their spring training, Lasorda gave tips to the pitchers. Myers, who converted Los Angeles prep track star Willie Davis into a left-handed-hitting center fielder, worked with Yomiuri hitters.

    In his diary, Lasorda made notes on everything from his dinner reviews – “the most tender steak I ever ate” – to the training methods and facilities of his Japanese hosts. The lineup for manager Tetsuhara Kawakami’s 1965 Giants included outfielder Sadaharu Oh, third baseman Shigeo Nagashima, and lefty pitcher Masaichi Kaneda. All four Giants later had their uniforms retired, the same honor eventually bestowed to Lasorda by the Dodgers.

    Our second day of training was just about the same as our last. The Japanese coaches believe in a lot of calisthenics and they spent about 2 hrs. a day on it. We work out from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. with no breaks in between. We had a meeting of the manager and the coaches. They asked our opinion of the day’s work and we gave it to them – they must concentrate more on the fundamentals. These people are anxious to learn – they want to surpass the Americans in baseball.

    The pitchers here in Japan have no idea how to throw a curveball and no conception of throwing a changeup. I will have to concentrate on these two factors very much. The stars of the team, Nagashima, 3B, ‘O’, 1B and Kaneda, P – are really nice guys and they have accepted us. I have pitchers hollering around camp and Mgr. said he never heard so much life.

    Spring training in 1965 became significant for both Lasorda and US-Japan baseball relations. Because the major leagues were implementing an amateur draft in June, Lasorda as a scout could no longer use his charm and negotiation tactics to sign top prospects, as he did the previous summer with Los Angeles prep star outfielder Willie Crawford. Lasorda drove Crawford to his high-school prom and delivered a stirring eulogy at the funeral of Crawford’s grandfather, a man whom Lasorda had never met.

    At the time of the Lasorda-Myers trip, the status of Japanese pitcher Masanori Murakami remained in limbo after the San Francisco Giants had promoted the lefty from Class A Fresno in September 1964. The Nankai Hawks had sent the 20-year-old Murakami to the United States for minor-league experience in the summer, but his success at Fresno led the Giants to promote him to the majors. San Francisco wanted to keep Murakami, who signed a major-league contract, and the Hawks demanded the return of their prospect. A compromise was finally reached: Murakami would spend one more season in San Francisco and return to Japan in 1966.

    After Lasorda’s 1965 Japan trip, which concluded with side trips to Bangkok, New Delhi, Iran, and Tel Aviv, it was back to Dodger Stadium for his next assignment. Scouting director Al Campanis decided Lasorda should become a minor-league manager. His first team produced a 33-33 record at Pocatello, Idaho, of the rookie-level Pioneer League. Lasorda worked his way up the ladder in the Dodger farm system and eventually replaced Walter Alston as Dodgers manager in September 1976.

    Life in Southern California would never be the same as Lasorda hugged his players – a stark contrast to Alston’s “Quiet Man” persona – and claimed to “bleed Dodger blue.” Frank Sinatra sang the National Anthem for Lasorda’s first Opening Day in 1977. With a big lead in September, Lasorda sent comedian Don Rickles – wearing a Dodgers uniform and number 40 – to the mound to visit with a suddenly confused reliever, Elias Sosa.

    After becoming the first National League skipper to win pennants in his first two years since Gabby Street of the 1930-31 Cardinals, Lasorda was invited to manage a team of National League all-stars against a team of American League stars on a postseason trip to Japan in 1979. In true Lasorda fashion, he motivated his team by privately telling each individual that the Most Valuable Player of the series was going to receive a new automobile. When Cincinnati’s George Foster won MVP honors, he received a bouquet of flowers and a shoulder shrug from his manager. “That’s what I heard,” Lasorda claimed with a straight face.

    Lasorda, though, was disappointed with American League manager Earl Weaver of the Baltimore Orioles. During a controversial play, Weaver argued with umpires and used language the otherwise feisty Lasorda didn’t think appropriate in a goodwill exhibition setting.

    The 1993 trip to Japan was extra-special because Dodgers All-Star catcher Mike Piazza happened to be Lasorda’s godson; his father, Vince Piazza, was a longtime friend from Tommy’s hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania. A 62nd-round draft choice in 1988, Piazza rewrote the Los Angeles rookie record book in 1993 with 35 home runs, 112 RBIs, and a .318 batting average.

    Piazza played a key role in returning the Dodgers to a respectable 81-81 record in 1993 after a 99-loss disaster in 1992 in which the team finished in last place for the first time since 1905. The Dodgers enjoyed knocking the 103-win San Francisco Giants out of the pre-wild-card format postseason with a 12-1 victory on the final day of the regular season as Piazza clubbed two home runs.

    Piazza and former World Series pitching star Orel Hershiser were the Dodgers marquee names on the tour. Two other rookies became future stars – pitcher Pedro Martinez, traded by the Dodgers to Montreal weeks after the Japan tour, and Yomiuri Giants outfielder Hideki Matsui.

    In addition to baseball, the Dodgers took a tour of Dazaifu, an ancient Japanese regional center, and the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine. Lasorda and several Dodger players visited a children’s hospital and passed out Dodger souvenirs and commemorative pins.

    Lasorda provided the photo-op of the tour during batting practice on November 2 by throwing his arms around American sumo star Chad Rowan, who wrestled in Japan under the name Akebono Taro. Earlier in 1993, the 360-pound Rowan made history by becoming the first non-Japanese wrestler to reach Yokozuna status, the highest rank in sumo. Rowan, in town for a wrestling tournament, threw out the ceremonial first pitch.

    “The Fukuoka Dome was out of this world,” said first baseman Eric Karros, the 1992 NL Rookie of the Year. “We took a tour before the first game and saw the large training facility and practice areas. There were large mirrors where the Fukuoka players practiced their swings.

    The Dodgers wore a small black patch with “IKE” in white letters on their uniforms in memory of Akihiro “Ike” Ikuhara, the longtime assistant to Peter O’Malley, who died in October 1992.

    Ikuhara joined the Dodgers organization in the spring of 1965 after asking Japanese sportswriter Sotaro Suzuki for an introduction to O’Malley in order to study American baseball. He joined the Dodgers’ Spokane team in the Triple-A Pacific Coast League, where O’Malley was general manager. Ikuhara moved to the Dodgers in 1967. He supervised visits to the United States by the Yomiuri Giants in 1967, 1971, 1975, and 1981, along with the visits of the Samsung Lions of South Korea in 1985 and the Chunichi Dragons of Nagoya, Japan, in 1988. Ikuhara teamed with Nagashima in broadcasting the World Series back to Japan from 1981 to 1986. He was named to the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002.

    In the series opener, the Dodgers staked Hershiser to a 3-0 lead in the first inning against pitcher Kenichi Wakatabe of the Hawks. Brett Butler reached first on an error. Jose Offerman and Piazza hit consecutive RBI doubles and Tim Wallach drove home Piazza. The Japanese scored twice in the sixth on three hits, including a double over the head of Darryl Strawberry in right field. Chihiro Hamana’s RBI single in the seventh tied the game.

    In the bottom of the 11th inning, number-9 hitter Hiroshi Yugamidani greeted reliever Jim Gott with a line drive to center. Butler tried a shoestring catch, but the ball went past him. A relay throw from shortstop Offerman to backup catcher Jerry Brooks made the play at home plate close, but Yugamidani was ruled safe and gave Japan a 4-3 victory. Yugamidani batted .203 with one home run during the regular season.

    Although many Dodgers thought the runner was out at home, Lasorda didn’t protest the call. In the clubhouse, Hershiser took the umpire’s decision in stride because it was an exhibition. Someone asked Lasorda what would have happened if that call was made during a regular-season game. He simply smiled.

    In the second game, on November 3, Dodgers pitching yearned for the airport shuttle while struggling in a 16-1 loss. Were it a spring-training game, the umpires might have offered the teams an early exit. Instead, the capacity crowd of 42,000 watched the combined Fukuoka-Yomiuri squad score nine runs in the fifth inning on four hits and five walks. Overall, the Dodgers pitchers allowed 15 walks and three wild pitches. A leadoff double in the fifth inning by Chihiro Hamana off starter Ramon Martinez triggered the landslide. Relievers Felix Rodriguez and Jonathan Hurst followed Martinez to the mound as five of the fifth-inning walks were with the bases loaded. The Japanese added five runs in the eighth off reliever Jim Gott.

    Hurst, who pitched for the Dodgers’ Triple-A Albuquerque affiliate in 1993 after being claimed on waivers from the Montreal Expos, had been a late addition to the Asia tour roster for bullpen insurance. With veteran Dodgers pitchers Kevin Gross, Tom Candiotti, and Todd Worrell not making the trip, the Dodgers also brought along Rodriguez, who in 1993 converted from catcher to pitcher at Class-A affiliate Vero Beach.

    The Dodgers left Asia with a dismal 1-4 record. “I’m disappointed. I’d be lying if I said anything else,” said Lasorda. “When you go a month and then you just throw batting practice, [and] you don’t play in game situations, then it makes a difference.” But “We made these people happy anyway. We made the folks in Taiwan happy and we made the people of Japan happy.” “It’s all in fun anyway,” added Darryl Strawberry.

    Lasorda remained the Dodgers manager until the summer of 1996, when a mild heart attack in June led to his retirement. His last full season in the Los Angeles dugout coincided with Nomo’s 1995 arrival – via a minor-league contract because a strike by the Players Association had led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series and had frozen 40-man rosters during the winter. Nomo attended spring training with Dodgers minor leaguers and was promoted after the strike ended.

    Lasorda’s trademark as a manager was providing postgame food in his office, a way to keep communication lines open with his players. Lasorda, who often served Japanese cuisine in Nomo’s honor, recalled his 1965 Japan trip in which Kaneda cooked a four-course dinner for a visiting Dodgers scout.

    “Just when baseball had its problems, here comes this young man from Japan with a unique delivery and great ability,” Lasorda said in 1995 as Nomo started the All-Star Game in Texas. “All of a sudden, he’s got the world chasing him and wanting to see him pitch.” Among those watching was Murakami, who became a baseball commentator for NHK after an 18-year pitching career in Japan. Murakami worked many of Nomo’s games at Dodger Stadium and on the road.

    Lasorda was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997. He came out of retirement at age 72 to coach Team USA in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. With O’Malley and Dedeaux in attendance, Lasorda’s team – a collection of minor-league players and veteran major-league catcher Pat Borders – stunned Cuba, 4-0, in the Gold Medal game.

    In 2006 Commissioner Bud Selig named Lasorda baseball’s official ambassador for the inaugural World Baseball Classic and did so again in 2009 when the Classic was played at Dodger Stadium. In 2008 Lasorda was honored with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, by the Emperor of Japan for his contributions to Japanese baseball. He made countless trips to Japan, serving as a key liaison between the Dodgers and the Orix Buffaloes in their “friendship” agreement.

    “It’s amazing to watch Tommy Lasorda go through an airport in Japan,” said Acey Kohrogi, the Dodgers’ director of Asian operations from 1995 to 2013. “Everyone else gets their identification and passport ready to go through security. Tommy just keeps on walking, smiling and waving.”

    Overall, Lasorda visited 28 countries in his lifetime, including Colombia, Denmark, Monaco, Norway, Bermuda, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan. He continued to travel during the next two decades, attending his final game at the 2020 World Series in Arlington, Texas, when Los Angeles defeated Tampa Bay at Globe Life Field, a neutral site necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    “I don’t know if there was a better ambassador to the game than Tommy,” Fred Claire said. “Not because he was a Dodger, but because who he was. The primary reason was his absolute love of the game. It didn’t matter what country Tommy was in. In his own way, Tommy spoke every language. Obviously, he was always good with Spanish. But Tommy had that way of breaking through all barriers to teach, to promote, and talk about the game.”

    Tommy Lasorda: Baseball’s Global Ambassador and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 1993 Friendship Tour of Japan
  • The First Baseball Game & Home Run at Meiji Jingu Stadium, October 23, 1926

    The First Baseball Game & Home Run at Meiji Jingu Stadium, October 23, 1926

    by Bill Staples Jr.

    As Meiji Jingu Stadium approaches its centennial under the shadow of demolition, a surprising piece of history is potentially rewriting the ballpark’s record books, and sparking a fascinating debate for baseball purists.

    For decades, historians credited either Keio University’s Saburo Miyatake or Negro Leagues legend Biz Mackey with hitting the first home run at the historic Tokyo stadium in April 1927. But SABR member Bill Staples, Jr., seeking to learn more about the first game played at Jingu, stumbled upon a forgotten milestone from opening weekend in October 1926.

    During the stadium’s inaugural game on October 23, 1926, Meiji University center fielder Fukashi Kumagai launched a towering fly ball into the left-field bleachers for a home run. The catch? The ball technically bounced into the stands. Under 1926 rules, hits like that were celebrated and recorded as a round-tripper everywhere baseball was played. By modern standards, however, it would be a ground-rule double.

    So, who deserves the crown? Does Kumagai’s opening-day blast count as the stadium’s true first home run, or does the honor belong to the traditional over-the-fence power hitters of 1927?

    Head over to Staples’ blog, International Pastime, to explore the evidence, dive into the era’s unique rule modifications and decide for yourself where history stands.

    Click to read the full article

  • 1956 NY Yankees Tour of Japan Footage

    1956 NY Yankees Tour of Japan Footage

    Here some great colorized footage from the Yankees tour. Note the cheerleaders on top of the dugouts–the forerunners to oendan.

    https://youtu.be/YyhVD6bNdG0?si=D4Sd3RoG1uNXAfoU

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 1, Ichiro Suzuki

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 1, Ichiro Suzuki

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The greatest hit-maker in the history of professional baseball started as a fourth-round draft pick

    Let’s start with the father. Nobuyuki bought his son a glove and played catch with him when the boy was three years old. From then on, he began teaching him baseball every day. The boy’s name was Ichiro.

    Nobuyuki built something like a baseball cathedral out of their ordinary life. One of his first decisions: teach the boy to bat left-handed. Not because the boy was naturally left-handed (he wasn’t) but because left-handed hitters reach first base faster. That was the reasoning. Practical, precise, and long-term. The father of Ichiro Suzuki was already thinking about the extra step.

    By the time the boy, then just Ichiro Suzuki, was in third grade, they were going to the local batting cages six days a week, sometimes seven. The machines weren’t fast enough for him. So they ordered a special spring for the pitching machine. A spring made just for this boy. The staff would swap it in when he arrived.

    Nobuyuki would later say that those years were fun for both of them. Ichiro’s recollection was just a little different. “It might have been fun for him,” he said. “But for me, it bordered on hazing and I suffered a lot. But I couldn’t say no to him. He was doing his utmost to help me.” Gratitude and pain were inseparable from the beginning.

    He grew up with the understanding that the game was not a hobby but a calling. When he was twelve years old, he wrote an essay about his future. “My dream when I grow up is to be a first-class professional baseball player. I have the confidence to do the necessary practice to reach that goal. I only had five or six hours per year to play with my friends. That’s how much I practiced. So I think I can become a pro.”

    Not a wish. Not a hope. A statement of fact, written by a child who had already done the math.

    His high school batting average in local tournament play exceeded .700. His coach called him an alien. More specifically, he called him the most famous alien: E.T. He meant it as the highest compliment.

    Once he turned professional, it really did seem like he came from another planet.

    When Ichiro arrived in the major leagues in 2001, he was twenty-seven years old and he had already won seven batting titles in Japan, a record that ties the great Isao Harimoto, NPB’s hit king, and has never been surpassed. Oh, and he did it seven years in a row. He had already had 210 hits in a season, breaking a record that had stood for 44 years. He had already been named MVP three consecutive years. He had already, with the Orix BlueWave, helped a broken city heal.

    In January of 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake struck the Hanshin region and the city of Kobe. The city that had become Ichiro’s adopted home, the city he would later say made him who he was, the city that was his second hometown, was devastated. The BlueWave played that year under the rallying cry Ganbarou Kobe—Stay Strong, Kobe. Ichiro won the batting title, the RBI crown, the stolen base title, the on-base percentage title, and the hits title that season. All five offensive crowns. Part of what drove it was the sting of 1994: the team had failed to win the pennant, and he had arrived after the off-season determined to do more. That year he hit 25 home runs. The league leader hit 28. Three home runs separated Ichiro from six batting crowns in a single season, a feat that has never been accomplished in Japanese baseball history. He was the symbol of a city’s refusal to stay down.

    “I cannot explain who I am as a player,” he said later, “without Kobe.”

    The BlueWave won their first pennant and that autumn, the team played the Yakult Swallows in the Japan Series. They lost four games to one. Ichiro went 5-for-19 against Yakult’s relentless pitching. He said it was tough in a way that the regular season never was.

    In 1996, he put it right. In August, he hit an otherworldly .475 for the month with a record 48 hits. The team trailed by four games in late July and ended August in first place, and it was Ichiro’s bat that had done most of the hauling. The pennant came down to the final days of September in Kobe. On the night of the clincher, Orix trailed late, then tied it, then pushed into extra innings. In the tenth, with a runner on first, Ichiro came up against a pitch that was clearly outside, high and away, and nowhere near the zone. He swung anyway. The ball found the left field line, the runner scored, the game ended. “The greatest joy of my 22 years on earth,” he said. “Beyond anything I’d ever felt before.”

    A reporter asked about failing to win the Japan Series the year before. Ichiro stopped and corrected himself. He had not, he said, failed to win—he had not won. In Japanese, the distinction is between something beyond your control and something that was in your hands. He placed it entirely in his own hands.

    The BlueWave went on to win the Japan Series, beating the Giants in five games. When the final out was recorded, Ichiro did not immediately run to join the celebration on the mound. He turned instead toward the right field stands and raised both arms toward the crowd. 

    “It feels incredibly good,” Ichiro said afterward, expressing his joy in his characteristic style. “Like a top-tier feeling.”*

    *He actually used the term 特A or Special A, the highest rating for rice quality.

    There was also this, from the 1996 All-Star Game at the Tokyo Dome, home of the Yomiuri Giants. The Pacific League led 7-3 in the ninth inning, two outs, and the game nearly over. Hideki Matsui, Yomiuri’s and the Central League’s young star, stepped toward the plate. And then Akira Ohgi walked out of the dugout and made a pitching change. The pitcher he called in from right field, trotting toward the mound to a roar from the crowd, was Ichiro. Katsuya Nomura, managing on the other side, was furious. He walked slowly out of his dugout, pulled Matsui back, and sent up his closer, Shingo Takatsu, in protest. The crowd booed. Takatsu grounded out to short. Game over. Afterward, Nomura called the move an affront to the dignity of the All-Star Game. Ohgi said he wanted fans to see what Ichiro could do on the mound. Ichiro, asked how he felt about the whole thing, said: “I’m not a pitcher by profession. I feel various things, both good and bad.”

    It was either, depending on your point of view, a wonderful piece of entertainment or a desecration of serious competition.

    That winter, in the Japan All-Star series against major league players, Ichiro appeared in one game, got two hits off major leaguers including Hideo Nomo, stole a base that Ivan Rodriguez (the best-throwing catcher in the league) could not prevent, and then missed several games after a chair collapsed beneath him in the dugout and a spray can pierced his backside. Really.

    He returned for the final game. Batting third, he went 3-for-4, hitting the ball to three different parts of the field. Cal Ripken watched and said the Japanese players had developed freer, more individual swings than they’d had a decade earlier. “You could see that clearly watching Ichiro.”

    What Ichiro saw while watching the major leaguers was different. He said later that 1996 was when he first seriously started thinking about America. “They had a lightness,” he said. “Like children enjoying themselves. Everyone around them had that atmosphere. I wanted to be part of that.”

    By 1997, the standard to which he was held had become so extraordinary that failure itself was news. On June 25 that year, in the fourth inning of a game against the Nippon-Ham Fighters at Tokyo Dome, a left-handed pitcher named Tsuyoshi Shimoyanagi struck him out. It was his first strikeout in 216 consecutive plate appearances, a Japanese record he had just set the day before and extended by seven more before it ended. The following morning, all major sports newspapers ran the same front-page headline: Ichiro Finally Strikes Out.

    Shimoyanagi, for his part, earned the nickname “Ichiro Killer.”

    That August, his batting average dipped to .296 for the month. This was treated as a crisis. A slump. He was asked about it repeatedly. Finally he said: “Give me a break. I’m not playing for numbers. It’s not like I should just rack up hits in meaningless situations to pad my average.” The man who would later say he valued hits over batting average was making a subtler point that even the hits had to mean something. That accumulation without purpose was just static on television.

    He finished the season hitting .345, his fourth consecutive batting title. The next season, in 1998, he hit .358 to capture his fifth batting title in a row.

    The most unbelievable part? He played in every single game over those five seasons.

    But before all of that, before the five batting crowns in 1995, before the three consecutive MVPs, before all the record-breaking seasons, there was the question of what to call him. In the fall of 1993, working with coach Kenichiro Kawamura, he had built a new swing. The pendulum swing, they called it—the right leg lifting and swaying gently before the stride, unhurried, rhythmic, unlike anything anyone in Japanese baseball had taught or seen.

    The previous coaching staff had spent two years trying to get him to abandon it. The new manager, Akira Ohgi, took one look and decided the only correct response was to build a lineup around it.

    Ohgi also decided the young man needed a new name. The idea had originated with his hitting coach, Hiromasa Arai: change the registered name from Ichiro Suzuki to simply Ichiro. No family name, just the given name, standing alone, because there were too many Suzukis in the league as it was. At the same time, a teammate named Kazuhiro Satoh was being given the nickname Punch. Ichiro, when first told about his own new name, assumed it was a joke. Then on March 26, in a spring training game against Chunichi, he hit a grand slam. Ohgi leaned over with a grin: “Well, I guess we really have to do it now.” Ichiro understood then that it was serious. “When I first heard it,” he said, “I thought, oh no. It’s fine now, but being called Ichiro past 30 would be embarrassing.”

    He’s in his 50s now and is still called Ichiro*.

    *Punch is still known as such but sadly the nickname didn’t quite have the same impact on his playing ability. He retired after that season at the age of 30.

    Ohgi was right to push for the change. In that 1994 season, Ichiro hit .385 and won the batting title. He became the first player in the history of Japanese professional baseball to collect 200 hits in a single season. By midsummer, opposing managers were so desperate they tried shifting the entire infield to the right side against him and Ichiro responded by bouncing a single over the pitcher’s head. He was named the league’s Most Valuable Player, the youngest position player ever to win that award in NPB history. He was twenty years and eleven months old. The legend had a name now, and the name fit. He said later that a letter addressed simply to “Ichiro, Japan” would reach him. That was how famous he had become.

    Many years later, at his retirement press conference, he said something about that season that surprised people. His first two years, the years of going up and down between the first and second teams, never quite sticking at the top, had been fun. “But from 1994, when Manager Ohgi made me a regular, that’s where the fun ended,” he said. “Being suddenly elevated beyond your actual ability is painful.”

    The greatest hitter of his generation, describing the moment his greatness was recognized, called it the end of joy. But what may have been painful for Ichiro was a great joy to anyone who saw him play.

    Before that final season, there was 1999. Ichiro had been playing in consecutive games since Opening Day in 1994: 763 straight, the longest streak of his career, the first unbroken run of his career. On August 24, in the 103rd game of the season, a pitch from a Shimoyanagi struck him on the wrist. He left the game. He missed the next day. It was the first time since he had become Ichiro that his name had simply vanished from the scoreboard for a full game. He never returned that season. At 21 home runs, he had been on pace for a career-high (he hit 25 in ‘95). That, too, disappeared with the wrist.

    In 2000, his last year with Orix before crossing the Pacific, Ichiro batted fourth in the lineup and hit everything in sight. On June 10, his average climbed to exactly .400. Ohgi, whose team had been badly beaten that day, could not help himself. “Honestly,” he said with a grin, “watching that was the only thing I was enjoying out there.” Ichiro, asked how he felt about it, said: “My feeling? Normal.”

    An alien.

    He kept it at .400 or above through 79 games, .398 through 97, and was at .392 through 102. Then in late August he tore a muscle in his right side and missed the rest of the season. He finished at .387, the highest single-season average in Pacific League history, in only 105 games.

    Would he have made it back to .400? I think so. He was an alien.

    None of this was known in America when he crossed over. The conventional wisdom—if you could call it that, since most Americans had no wisdom at all on the subject—was skepticism. He was small. He hit singles. Japan wasn’t really the major leagues. Pitchers could find success, sure, but could a Japanese hitter?

    Then in just the eighth game of his rookie season stateside, Ichiro threw out a runner at third base from right field. Terrence Long tried to go from first to third on a slowly hit ground ball to right field. The ball arrived at third base well before Long did, before Long had even begun to slow down. The announcer Rick Rizzs screamed: A laser beam strike from Ichiro!

    The alien had landed in America.

    His new teammates with the Seattle Mariners tried to describe what he did with a bat. John Olerud, who had been in the major leagues since before Ichiro had played a professional game in Japan, counted five distinct swings. Five. The running one-hander. The leaner. The fistcuff. The chip shot. The power swing.

    That first season Ichiro hit .350, led the American League in hitting, led the league in stolen bases, won the Gold Glove, won the Silver Slugger, won Rookie of the Year, and won the Most Valuable Player Award. He was the first player from Asia ever to win an MVP. He was the first player since Fred Lynn in 1975 to win MVP and Rookie of the Year in the same season. He set the record for hits by a rookie: 242.

    He was 27 years old and he was just getting started in Major League Baseball.

    The record he is most famous for came in 2004. George Sisler had set the major league mark for hits in a season in 1920 with 257. It had stood for 84 years, through the careers of Ted Williams and Stan Musial and Pete Rose and Tony Gwynn, through the entirety of the television era, through everything the game had thrown at it. Ichiro broke it on October 1, 2004, in the last week of the season, finishing with 262. The commissioner of baseball gave him a special award.

    The New York Times wrote that season that it was more realistic to imagine Ichiro breaking Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak than batting .400. Ichiro himself, when asked which was harder, chose the streak.

    “Hits can be accumulated,” he once said. “That’s why I value them over batting average.”

    His batting average could fluctuate. A hit was permanent. He knew because he flirted with .400 before he left Japan.

    There was a philosophy behind everything he did, and it went all the way down. He used the same model of bat from the day he entered professional baseball, with an extremely thin barrel, 60.5 millimeters in diameter, demanding of the user a precision that most hitters could not sustain for an afternoon, let alone a career.

    “I treat my bat,” he said, “not as a tool, but as part of my body.”

    After an early game in his career with the BlueWave, he once threw his bat in frustration. Just tossed it, casually, the way young players do. He said afterward that he regretted it immediately, that the regret never fully went away, that the incident deepened his feeling for his equipment in ways he couldn’t fully articulate. From then on, he always set the bat down gently, no matter what happened at the plate.

    His glove strings, at his insistence, were left partially untied. He wanted to feel the ball all the way to the tips of the leather. He wanted the glove to be an extension of his hand, not a mitt clamped to the end of his wrist. When his longtime gloveman Nobuyoshi Tsubota handed the work off to his apprentice Kosaku Kishimoto, Ichiro won the Gold Glove that year. In the interview afterward, he said: “If I hadn’t won the Gold Glove with Kishimoto’s glove, he probably would have blamed himself. I was determined not to let that happen.”

    There is a reason that after Ichiro arrived in Seattle, the number of children in Japan who wanted to play right field increased dramatically. Right field had always been the position you gave the weakest outfielder in little league. Ichiro made it the place everyone wanted to be.

    His range in right field was so extraordinary that his teammates called it Area 51: the restricted zone, the classified territory, where things happened that couldn’t be explained and shouldn’t be questioned. His arm, thanks to Rizzs, they called the laser beam and not because it was simply powerful, like Vladimir Guerrero’s bazooka, but because it was accurate. In a poll of 415 major league players in 2006, 48 percent named Ichiro as the outfielder with the best arm. Nearly half of all the players in baseball named the same player. Nearly half.

    In 2003, in a survey of all 30 major league managers published in Baseball America, Ichiro was named best hitter, best bunter, best baserunner, fastest baserunner, best defensive outfielder, best outfield arm, and most exciting player. He was the best at everything.

    He was drafted by Orix in 1991, in the fourth round, after eleven other teams passed on him. Part of the reason was Koshien. In the spring of that year, playing in the national high school tournament as his team’s cleanup hitter and ace pitcher, he went 0-for-5 in a first-round loss. His Koshien career totals: 1-for-9. For a player who would one day be the greatest hit-maker in the history of the game, it is nearly impossible to comprehend.

    What happened, by the account of people close to the team, was this: the night before the game, Ichiro could not sleep. He started his warmup alone at 2 a.m., two full hours before his teammates were scheduled to wake up. By 4 a.m., when the rest of the team rose, he was already at peak condition. And then he stood in the batter’s box and his right shoulder kept flying open. He had wanted it too much. The responsibility had overwhelmed him. He had prepared for everything except his own nerves.

    He had wanted to be selected by his hometown team, the Chunichi Dragons, the team he had grown up rooting for, the team with the hitters he most admired. They didn’t take him. A scout from the Hiroshima Carp who had watched that game said later: “With pitchers you can tell from a game. But with position players, you have to watch practice.” The man who did watch practice was a scout named Katsutoshi Miwada at Orix, who had tracked Ichiro through workouts and regional games and seen something the Koshien box score could not contain. He pushed hard for a fourth-round pick. He died years later. Ichiro, by the account of Miwada’s family, visited his grave every single year without exception.

    When he was finally drafted, the news was covered in one line in the local sports paper. A single line, buried near the bottom of the page, for the kid who would become one of the great ballplayers in the world.

    The 3,000th MLB hit came on August 7, 2016, in Denver, against the Rockies. On that night he was in the starting lineup for the first time in a week, batting sixth, and playing center field. He went 0-for-3. Then in the seventh inning, facing a left-hander on a 2-0 count, he hit a high fly ball to right field that bounced off the wall. He coasted into third. The 30th player in major league history to reach 3,000 hits. His teammates poured out of the dugout. The Rockies players applauded from their side. He took off his helmet to the standing crowd.

    Reaching 3,000 in his 16th major league season tied Pete Rose for the fastest ever, from the age of debut. He had arrived in the major leagues at 27, older than most stars when they reach such milestones, and still he got there as fast as anyone.

    He had 1,278 hits in NPB. Just two months prior to getting his 3,000th hit in America, he knocked a double for his 4,257th professional hit, passing Pete Rose for the most all-time.

    When Ichiro passed Rose’s record, he was asked to reflect on what it all meant. He said: “Since I was a child, I have always achieved things people laughed at me for. When I was in elementary school, practicing baseball every day, the neighbors would say ‘does that kid think he’s going to become a professional?’ and laugh. It hurt. But I became a professional. In Japan I won the batting title, and when I said I wanted to win the batting title in America, people laughed at that too. But I achieved that twice. I have a history of painful moments of being laughed at, and I want to keep clearing those hurdles.”

    Pride, hurt, and defiance, braided together. A whole career defined in just a few sentences.

    He also said, more than once, that none of it would have started without Ohgi. In the autumn of 2000, in Kobe, Ichiro took his manager out for drinks and used the occasion to lobby him to support his posting to the major leagues. “Without that decision by Ohgi,” he said, “nothing would have begun.” The man who named him, believed in him, and finally let him go.

    By the time he retired, the Emperor had mentioned him twice in his annual press conference. Tony Gwynn said Ichiro reminded the world of the value of the contact hitter. Wade Boggs sent his regards. Roberto Alomar said he would be waiting for him at Cooperstown.

    Even Fidel Castro had chimed in and called him the best hitter in the world.

    In January 2025, Ichiro was elected to both the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The same month, in his first year of eligibility for each. He was the first Japanese player, the first Asian-born player, ever inducted into Cooperstown.

    In Japan, he appeared on 323 of 349 ballots, the sixth-highest vote share in the hall’s history.

    Hall of Fame voting in Japan is stricter than it is in America. But in the hearts of every Japanese person, he’s a unanimous Hall of Famer. Ichiro proved that Japanese hitters belonged in the major leagues. Like Nomo, Ichiro helped change everything. Without Ichiro, there would be no Shohei Ohtani. I do not want to imagine baseball without Ohtani, and I do not want to imagine baseball without Ichiro.

    In America, he received 393 votes out of a possible 394, tying Derek Jeter for the second-highest percentage ever recorded. One voter left him off. Somewhere, one person looked at everything Ichiro Suzuki had done across 28 professional seasons in two countries, looked at 4,367 hits and 10 Gold Gloves and a .322 career average and a single-season record that had stood since 1920, and decided: not quite. The other 393 disagreed.

    Unbelievable.

    And one final thing. Yes, this was a list of Japan’s favorite players. But Ichiro would have to rank at the top of America’s favorite players, too.

    In right field at Safeco Field, for years and years, a woman named Amy Franz sat in the front row with a handmade scoreboard she called the Ichi-Meter. She counted every hit. She had started in 2004, the year of the single-season record. She followed him when he moved. When he was closing in on 3,000, she traveled to watch, flying city to city, spending down her savings, and when the money ran out she put up a fundraiser online and kept going. She was in Denver when the high fly ball left his bat and bounced off the right field wall and he coasted into third. She was there the night he got number 3,000.

    Ichiro, somehow, in the middle of everything, the record-chasing and the Gold Gloves and the laser beams and the five different swings, knew her birthday. In 2014, when he was with the Yankees, he signed a ball for her. He wrote: Happy BD, Amy.

    That’s the whole story of Ichiro, really. That’s all of it.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • ‘There’s No Joy in Tokyo’: The 1990 Super Major Series

    ‘There’s No Joy in Tokyo’: The 1990 Super Major Series

    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 1990 Super Major Series– the first time Japan captured the series against an MLB visit team.

    In the mid- to late 1980s, tensions between the United States and Japan rose to a level not seen since World War II. Americans were frightened at the rising strength of the Japanese economy.

    Japanese imports, especially automobiles and electronics, seemed to be taking over the American market. At the same time, Japanese investors began purchasing American real estate, companies, and institutions such as the Pebble Beach golf club and CBS Records. Both politicians and the public feared that Japan would soon surpass the United States economically, marking the end of “the American century.” Japan-bashing – verbal attacks on Japan and physical attacks on Japanese goods – became widespread and talk of “economic war” was endemic.

    As the Japanese economy rose, so did the nation’s prowess at baseball. The Nippon Professional League had been gradually improving since World War II. Touring major-league squads, which had beaten their hosts so handily in the 1950s, now faced stiffer competition. The 1974 Mets (9-7-2), 1981 Royals (9-7-1), and 1984 Orioles (8-5-1) had all struggled in Japan. In 1986 the first Nichibei All-Star Series was held, won by the major leaguers six games to one, but in 1988 the Americans escaped with a 3-2-2 record. The time was ripe for the Japanese to defeat America at its national pastime.

    On October 31, 1990, a 26-man US all-star team arrived in Tokyo for the eight-game Super Major Series. Leading the Americans was Chicago Cubs manager Don Zimmer, who had played for the Toei Flyers of the Pacific League in 1966. Zimmer did not do particularly well in Japan, on or off the field. He hit just .182 in 203 at-bats and had trouble adapting to the culture. “I don’t eat all that raw fish. I couldn’t stand the smell. I lived on a diet of Campbell’s tomato soup and flounder.” Arriving in Japan for the second time, he told reporters, “It’s a great honor for me to be named manager of the all-star team of the major leagues. At the same time, my heart is filled with expectations. We formed the strongest team ever and will play a showdown with a Japan all-star team. I hope Japanese fans will enjoy each of the games.”

    Observers noted right away that the visitors were hardly “the strongest team ever.” Dave Wiggins of the Japan Times wrote, “Sorry to say, but that upcoming all-star baseball series here pitting the Major Leagues against the Japan League will not be a ‘very best vs. very best’ type match-up. The host Japanese contingent does consist of the best available talent at each position. However, some of the major leaguers on hand, though they are solid players, are not the best in the majors at their spots. … The Hallmark Greeting-Card Company has a famous advertising slogan: ‘If you care to send the very best, send Hallmark.’ Somehow I don’t think Hallmark and Major League Baseball do much business together.”

    Headlining the American roster were National League MVP Barry Bonds, Oakland A’s ace Dave Stewart, Cincinnati Reds “Nasty Boy” Rob Dibble, and father and son teammates Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. Also on the roster were two up-and-coming young players who were eventually enshrined at Cooperstown: Randy Johnson and Robert Alomar.

    The real star, however, was American League home run and RBI champ Cecil Fielder. After signing professionally in 1982, Fielder spent eight years trying to break into a major-league lineup with little success. In late 1988 the Toronto Blue Jays sold his contract to the Hanshin Tigers of the Central League. Fielder blossomed in Japan, batting .302 with 38 home runs and a 1.031 OPS. With his mammoth production and physical size, he became a favorite among the rabid Hanshin fans. His success in Japan allowed Fielder to sign with the Detroit Tigers as a free agent after the 1989 season. Probably no one expected Fielder to surpass his NPB numbers in the majors, but he nearly did – leading the American League with 51 home runs and 133 RBIs along with a .277 batting average and a .969 OPS. For most Japanese fans it was a validation of the strength of Nippon Professional Baseball, showing that the leagues were not that far apart.

    “In most cases, foreign players have been at the end of their careers when they come here,” explained Peter Miller, a consultant to the Major League Baseball Players Association who lived in Tokyo at the time. “But Cecil, he learned patience at the plate and how to hit home runs here. Then he went back. Now, he’s considered a hometown boy.” Everywhere Fielder went he was mobbed by Japanese media and fans. “Fielder’s every move provoked a commotion. Dozens of photographers, standing at ease most of the time, would spring into action with each Cecil sighting.”

    Opposing Fielder and his major-league teammates was a strong Japanese squad. Built around a rotating roster, the squad contained nearly every star in the league. The Japan All-Stars consisted of a core 20-man roster that included future Hall of Famers Hideo Nomo, Koji Akiyama, and Hiromitsu Ochiai. This core roster was supplemented by six additional players for each of the eight games. The team’s manager and coaching staff also rotated. Motoshi Fujita managed the first two games, Masaaki Mori the third, Koichi Tabuchi the fourth, Katsuhiro Nakamura the fifth, Masaichi Kaneda the sixth, and Sadao Kondo the final two. In all, 62 of the eligible 64 men played on the Japanese squad.

    The series opened at Tokyo Dome on Friday evening, November 2. Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd started for the major leaguers against a 22-year-old rookie named Hideo Nomo. Known as “The Tornado” due to his corkscrew windup, Nomo was not drafted after high school by any professional team. Instead, he honed his skills in Japan’s industrial leagues in 1988 and pitched for Japan’s Olympic team. The Kintetsu Buffaloes drafted Nomo in 1989 and he made his professional debut the following season. He was an instant success, leading the Pacific League with 18 wins, 287 strikeouts, 235 innings pitched, and a 2.91 ERA. He won the league’s MVP and Rookie of the Year Awards.

    Nomo’s debut against major-league hitters, however, did not start well. He began by walking leadoff hitter Ken Griffey Jr. and then plunked his father. Following Japanese baseball etiquette, the young pitcher removed his cap and bowed to Griffey Sr. to show that the errant pitch was unintentional. The son then stole third base as Nomo retired Julio Franco, putting runners at the corners with one out and Cecil Fielder coming to the plate. Perhaps overawed by Fielder’s reputation, Nomo walked the Tiger intentionally and would now have to face Barry Bonds with the bases loaded. Bonds responded with a sharp single to center, scoring Griffey Jr. It looked as though it would be a long night for the Japanese team and its fans, but then the American bats went silent. Nomo pitched out of the inning by retiring Kelly Gruber and Jesse Barfield. Nomo and relievers Hiromi Makihara, Yukihiro Nishizaki, Masumi Kuwata, and Masao Kida surrendered just one more hit (an infield single by Sandy Alomar Jr. in the seventh) and no runs over the next eight innings. Zimmer noted that the Japanese kept the major leaguers off balance by pitching “backwards.” “Every time [they] got behind a hitter, they never threw a fastball. They’d throw curves, fork balls and we didn’t hit them.”

    Overall, Boyd and relievers Randy Johnson and Rob Dibble pitched well, allowing only four hits and striking out 12, but the Japanese bundled their hits. In the third inning, Takahiro Ikeyama doubled off the left-center-field wall with runners on first and third to put his team on top, 2-1. Tatsunori Hara then singled in Ikeyama to increase the lead to 3-1. The NPB All-Stars scored again in the seventh to seal the victory as Kaoru Okazaki scored on Akinobu Okada’s sacrifice fly.

    One of the game’s highlights came from Dibble. “The fans were … in awe of the speed of the Nasty Boy’s pitches as the radar readings were flashed across the scoreboard. The murmurs grew louder and louder as pitch after pitch exceeded 150 kilometers per hour (93 mph). Yomiuri shortstop Masahiro Kawai, aware of Dibble’s ability to heave the horsehide more than 100 mph, drew laughter and applause for doffing his cap after he grounded out to second. He was ecstatic, he had hit the ball.”

    The loss did not seem to concern Zimmer or his players. Since 1951 visiting major-league squads had lost nine of the 19 opening games. The Americans usually arrived jet-lagged and out of practice. “For most of the guys, it’s been a month since they faced live pitching,” noted Fielder. “It’s going to take a couple of days to get our timing back. Once we get our mechanics back, we’re going to show a good brand of baseball.”

    The visitors’ slump continued the following day as a sellout crowd of 56,000 packed Tokyo Dome for the second game. In the second inning, Koji Akiyama doubled off starter Chuck Finley and scored on an attempted steal of third as catcher Mike Scioscia’s throw went into left field. In the bottom half of the inning, the Americans grabbed the lead as Fielder singled and scored on Glenn Davis’s two-run homer. But then the Japanese pitchers took over and retired 20 of the next 21 batters. Meanwhile, the NPB All-Stars retook the lead in the third inning on a two-run single by Kazuhiko Ishimine and added an insurance run in the top of the ninth to lead 4-2.

    Chunichi Dragons rookie closer Tsuyoshi Yoda, “usually noted for his pinpoint control,” began the bottom of the ninth by walking Chris Sabo and Barry Bonds. The excited fans rose to their feet as Cecil Fielder strode to the plate with the tying runs on base. But those expecting the fairy-tale ending were disappointed as Fielder grounded into a 6-4-3 double play. With two outs and Sabo on third, Davis picked up his third RBI of the evening with a single, but Ozzie Guillen flied out to end the game and give the Major League stars their second straight defeat. To quell the major-league bats, manager Motoshi Fujita had used five pitchers: starter Masaki Saito (three hits in two innings), Kazutomo Miyamoto (no hits, one walk in three innings), Tomio Watanabe (perfect for two innings), Hiroaki Nakayama (one perfect inning), and Yoda. Zimmer noted that it was difficult for his batters because “the Japanese ‘might only use a pitcher for two innings and then he’s gone and then you have to start over again’ learning the next pitcher.”

    After a rainout on Sunday, November 4, the series continued the following day at Seibu Stadium in Tokorozawa, a suburb of Tokyo. Lions manager Masaaki Mori took over the helm for the Japanese squad. Before the game, Mori warned the media and fans not to underestimate the visitors after the two losses, noting that the players had been away from the game for a month. “It is wrong to consider that the major leaguers’ strength has diminished,” he concluded.

    Dave Stewart, the intimidating ace of the Oakland Athletics, took the mound for the Americans against Hisanobu Watanabe of the Seibu Lions. The major leaguers struck early as Ken Griffey Jr. doubled and scored on a single by Barry Bonds with one out in the first. Stewart battled the NPB All-Stars, holding them scoreless until the fifth, when they pushed the tying run across on doubles by Tsutomu Ito and Hatsuhiko Tsuji.

    The major leaguers had plenty of chances to score as they racked up 11 hits, worked out three walks, and had two hit batsmen off a succession of six pitchers. In the sixth, they left the bases loaded as Glenn Davis struck out looking to end the inning. Julio Franco and R.J. Reynolds began the seventh with back-to-back singles, but Franco was out trying to advance to third on Ozzie Guillen’s fly out to center field and Greg Olson struck out to retire the side. In the top of the eighth the Americans threatened again, placing runners at the corners with two outs but Hideo Nomo, on in relief, induced Davis to ground back to the mound for the third out.

    The Japanese broke the tie in the bottom of the eighth as Kenichi Yamazaki singled off Rob Dibble. Mori brought in speedster Norifumi Nishimura to pinch-run and he stole second before scoring on Makoto Sasaki’s single.

    Once again Yoda came on to close the game, and once again the rookie nearly fell apart. After allowing hits to Franco and Reynolds, Yoda retired Guillen but walked pinch-hitter Mike Scioscia to load the bases. Bearing down, the closer retired Chris Sabo on a shallow fly ball and Griffey Jr. on a groundout to end the game. “I’m trying everything to win,” proclaimed Zimmer. “We want to win. We all want to win. But they’ve outplayed us. They’ve won three in a row. All we can do is to come out tomorrow and try to win.”

    Only 23,000 came to watch the fourth game, at Heiwadai Stadium in Fukuoka. To top the skid, Zimmer turned to Blue Jays ace Dave Steib, who had just finished a strong season with 18 wins, a 2.93 ERA and a no-hitter against Cleveland on September 2. The game remained close for three innings as the Japanese scored one in the first and the Americans tied it on Jesse Barfield’s home run in the second. But in the top of the fourth, the roof collapsed on Steib and his teammates as the Japanese took a 3-1 lead on a two-run single by Koji Akiyama. They added three more runs the next inning, another three in the sixth, highlighted by Hiroo Ishii’s two-run homer, and capped it off with a two-run seventh. In all, the NPB All-Stars scored 11 times on 20 hits, four walks, and four American errors. Makoto Sasaki led the onslaught by going 5-for-6 while Ishii went 3-for-3 in the 11-6 victory.

    With the fourth consecutive Japanese victory, the media on both sides of the Pacific began paying more attention to the series. Newspapers across the United States ran an Associated Press article that began, “First it was cameras, cars and electronics. And now, horror of horrors, is baseball to be the next U.S. industry to find itself outgunned by the Japanese juggernaut? The question, which would have evoked laughs last week, seems suddenly pertinent after the showing of a major league all-star team touring Japan for an eight-game series.”

    Some in the Japanese media began to crow. One Nippon Television national newscaster proclaimed that “the major leaguers have received a lesson since coming to Japan.” Another NTV announcer during the nightly sports highlights on November 6 pontificated “about the strong Japanese yen and the weak American dollar and strong Japan league pro baseball players and weak American major leaguers. And then for good measure, he add[ed] the Americans have lost face.”

    According to Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid,

    Sportscasters here have put together a hilarious bloopers tape made up of bonehead plays made by the visiting Americans. As the tape unfolds, we see Cleveland catcher Sandy Alomar Jr., the American League’s rookie of the year, drilling a pick-off throw so far into right field that the runner he is trying to nail manages to score from first. Montreal pitcher Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd is seen talking to himself after walking in a run; three U.S. fielders bump into one another while a pop fly drops in short right; and American manager Don Zimmer of the Chicago Cubs looks sorrier and sorrier in the forlorn U.S. dugout.

    Other Japanese, however, were angry with their team’s success. “We would rather see the Americans play very well and have the Japanese lose,” said Takeyuki Hayashi, a baseball writer for Nikkan Gendai. “We want to see what we cannot watch from our own players. We want to see power and speed. … It’s not a matter of winning or losing. We just want to watch good baseball.”

    Many concluded that the major leaguers were not taking the games seriously. A columnist for Shukan Gendai “contended that the U.S. players have been spending too much time at soapland,” the Japanese term for erotic wet massage parlors usually run by prostitutes. Most critics, however, believed that the visitors just lacked focus and the desire to win. Mikio Takeda, of the tour’s sponsor Mainichi Newspapers, noted that the “Japanese [are] very disappointed. I really felt like the Japanese players can never beat these guys. But look at the result. After the Americans lost the first game, maybe they’re sleepy. Then second loss, third, fourth. I figured maybe [the] Americans [are] weak.”Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the Japanese first baseman, added, “I really know Americans play better; I’ve gone over there. … I know Japanese can’t play with the Americans. But the American players maybe lost their concentration.”When asked if he felt the major leaguers were trying, Hideo Nomo said, “I don’t know. I’m sure I want to win, but I don’t know about them.”

    The defeats led to a rift in the major-league squad. “This is supposed to be our all-star team,” said coach Don Baylor. “We haven’t executed. We’ve played poor baseball. Some guys are here on vacation and maybe some guys came here to take the money and go home.” Ken Griffey Sr. noted the lack of intensity among some of the younger players: “There’s a difference and I think it started with the guys who came up after 1985. They want to win. [But] Sometimes you wonder if they know how all the time.” Griffey Sr. felt the need to have some discussions on attitude with his son. One “centered on young Griffey’s casual stroll off the field after making an out.”

    Twenty-six-year-old Rob Dibble said, “Our guys are just doing this for fun and a little more baseball. There’s not a lot riding on these games and nobody’s going to go out and get hurt, either. The pitchers aren’t throwing 100 percent and just throwing strikes and getting them out as best you can. But when you come down to it, your livelihood is in the States. That’s what it’s all about.”

    But veterans like Dave Stewart disagreed, “We came over here to win; this isn’t a joke. Maybe we should refocus on what we should be doing. They’re trying to beat us. Why shouldn’t we be trying to beat them? … I didn’t come 8,000 miles to lose. Losing ruins your whole day.”

    On November 7 fans came out to Koshien Stadium, home of the Hanshin Tigers, to welcome Cecil Fielder back to Osaka. Journalist Harry F. Thompson observed, “While all 58,000 seats are not sold out for Wednesday’s game (strange, considering how the Japanese have taken to public gloating in recent days over their surprising lead in the fall exhibition tour), crowds have formed outside ticket windows since sunrise in hopes of buying a cheap ($23) bleacher seat.”

    Randy Johnson took the mound for the Americans. The 6-foot-10 left-hander had just finished his second full season in the big leagues and showed promise with a 14-11 record and a 3.65 ERA, and was named to the American League All-Star team. His league-leading 120 walks, however, were worrisome. At the time, few would have predicted that he would mature into a Hall of Fame pitcher. The Japanese All-Stars pounced on Johnson as Hiromitsu Ochiai hit a two-run homer in the first and Katsumi Hirosawa hit a two-run home run in the fourth. The Japanese scored another in the fifth on a botched pickoff to enter the eighth inning with a 5-2 lead.

    Chris Sabo began the inning with a single to left off southpaw Shinji Imanaka and an out later Barry Bonds followed with a single to center. Then hometown hero Cecil Fielder came to the plate. Fielder had had a disappointing series, going 2-for-17 without an extra-base hit. But on his special day, the big slugger came through, blasting a curveball deep into the left-field bleachers to tie the game, 5-5. “They were laughing at us after the fourth loss,” said Fielder. “They were having a great old time in the other dugout. But they sure got quiet in a hurry, didn’t they? This one felt real good.”

    Surprisingly, Japanese manager Katsuhiro Nakamura left Imanaka on the mound. He retired Glenn Davis but Julio Franco singled and stole second, bringing up right-handed batter Jesse Barfield with two outs. Rather than bring in a righty to face Barfield, Nakamura stayed with Imanaka. Barfield punished them by smashing a home run to deep left to capture the lead. In the ninth, with a battered Imanaka still pitching, the Americans added to their lead with a two-run homer from Griffey Jr. and a solo home run from Bonds. The night ended with a 10-5 major-league victory. The suffering Imanaka got the loss, having surrendered eight hits and eight runs in two innings. “We were getting tired of losing,” noted Griffey Jr. “We finally won one, and it felt good. Now, maybe, we can go out and win the next three.”

    But it was not to be. On November 9 at Chiba Lotte Marine Stadium, the Japanese All-Stars went out to a 4-0 lead in the second inning and added two more in the fourth against starter Dennis Boyd. Although the Americans got three back, including a run off 21-year-old Hideki Irabu, they entered the seventh inning down 6-3. Reliever Hisao Niura immediately ran into trouble, giving up a hit and two walks to load the bases with one out. Game 6 Japanese manager Masaichi Kaneda brought in Yoshihisa Shiratake but to no avail as Kelly Gruber hit a two-run single and Jesse Barfield followed with a game-tying single past shortstop Takahiro Ikeyama.

    Tsuyoshi Yoda shut down the major leaguers in the bottom of the eighth and the teams entered the ninth knotted, 6-6. Zimmer gave the ball to Bobby Thigpen, the White Sox closer, who had a 1.83 ERA and 57 saves during the 1990 season.

    Katsumi Hirosawa led off by slicing a line drive down the right-field line. Barfield sprinted to his left and made a sliding catch to save an extra-base hit, ripping his pants in the process. “Earlier in the game, Barry Bonds and Griffey and I got together and decided to take the line away from those guys,” said Barfield. “The left-handed guys were hooking the ball down the line and the righties were slicing the ball. So I just moved over a couple of steps. I had a good jump on the ball. Had I been straight up, I never would have gotten to the ball. … That’s one of my favorite plays – running to my left and sliding after the ball.” Thigpen then walked the next two batters. With the game on the line, he settled down and got consecutive groundouts to end the inning.

    Yoda pitched a scoreless bottom of the ninth. As the Americans collected their items off the bench and headed to the locker room, one of their teammates asked,

    “Where’s everybody going?”

    “It’s over. In Japan, games end in a tie,” he was told.

    “A tie? What do you mean a tie game? We don’t play to ties!” the player asked incredulously.

    “I haven’t been in a tie since Little League” … Rob Dibble said with disgust.

    “It’s the first time in my life and I don’t like it,” Jesse Barfield added.

    At least, “It’s better than losing,” said Don Zimmer, shrugging his shoulders.

    With the tie, the Japanese All-Stars clinched the eight-game series. Not counting the San Francisco Giants’ 3-6 record during their 1970 spring-training games in Japan, it was the first time a professional American team would leave Japan with a losing record.

    After playing strong baseball for six games, the Japanese squad seemed to relax after clinching the series. Game 7 at Tokyo Dome was sloppy with the hosts “committing three errors, two wild pitches, a passed ball and a hit batsman.” Even with these gaffes, the major leaguers had difficulty scoring off the five pitchers used by the Japanese. The Americans’ first run came in the fourth when Fielder walked and moved to second on a passed ball. Glenn Davis grounded to short and Fielder got hung up between second and third. Shortstop Takahiro Ikeyama “ranged far to his right to make the stop and tried to pick Fielder off second with an off-balance throw. The ball sailed wide of the base and into shallow right field, allowing Fielder to lumber around third and barely beat the throw to the plate.” Lenny Dykstra put the Americans up 2-0 the following inning with a home run down the right-field line.

    Meanwhile, starter Dave Stewart dominated the NPB All-Stars, throwing six shutout innings, until the seventh. The inning began with a double by Norihiro Komada. After a spectacular diving catch by shortstop Ozzie Guillen, Atsuya Furuta singled home Komada. Koji Akiyama then tripled off the right-field wall to score Furuta and tie the game, 2-2. In the top of the eighth, the numerous Japanese misplays caught up with them. Ken Griffey Jr. led off with a single, advanced to second on a wild pitch by Kazuhiko Daimon, and kept running, just beating the throw as he slid safely into third base. After Dykstra popped out, Daimon uncorked a second wild pitch, allowing Griffey to score. Now up 3-2, Zimmer brought in Dibble, who closed the game with two scoreless innings to seal the 3-2 victory.

    Chuck Finley took the mound at Tokyo Dome on November 11 for the final game of the series. Finley had not pitched well in his first start, losing Game 2. And he looked shaky in this final outing as he walked Hiromitsu Ochiai and Hiroo Ishii in the second but was saved by inducing Mokoto Sasaki to ground into a double play to end the inning. As the game went on, Finley settled down and looked stronger, keeping “the Japanese hitters off balance by changing speeds and working the corners with his forkball.” At the end of three innings, he had a no-hit shutout.

    The first two Japanese batters reached base in the fourth on consecutive errors by Ozzie Guillen and Kelly Gruber, but Finley retired the heart of the opponents’ order – Ochiai, Katsumi Hirosawa, and Ishii – to keep the shutout and no-hitter alive. As Finley thwarted the Japanese, his teammates put up five runs. Three came in the second inning off Hideo Nomo when Greg Olson “drilled a waist-high fastball deep into the left-field bleachers.” “I played in six of the eight games, mostly as a late inning defensive replacement,” said Olson. “It was great to make my only hit such a big one.” The Americans picked up two more runs in the third on RBI doubles by Griffey Jr. and Gruber.

    At the end of the fifth inning, Zimmer, following a game plan designed to protect his starter’s arm, took Finley out despite the no-hitter. “After throwing 240-plus [sic] innings [during the 1990 season] you don’t know how your arm’s going to react after you shut it down for a month and then crank it back up,” Finley explained. “I could’ve gone one more inning but I wasn’t going to push it.” While Finley had been primarily using off-speed pitches, reliever Randy Johnson threw hard. “I don’t think these guys [the Japanese] have seen many fastballs over 90 miles an hour,” Johnson noted. The contrast helped baffle his opponents. Johnson cruised through the remaining four innings, striking out four and walking two. “The crowd was into it,” said Johnson.

    “Every time Randy threw a strike in the last inning you could see him grip his glove a little harder,” said the catcher, Olson. “It was the same for me. I didn’t want to make any mistakes in the last inning so I said let’s go with his best pitch, so he went fastball the whole last inning. We didn’t even mess around with anything else.”

    “I started getting pumped up in the last inning and threw a lot of strikes,” said Johnson. “Maybe I had a little more adrenaline today because there was a no-hitter on the line. Maybe it was because the reputation of American baseball was on the line.”

    “It was a good way to close for us,” said Cecil Fielder after the 5-0 win. “I just came to have some fun.” But Japan Times writer Greg Hardesty summed it up best: “Any lingering snickers among critics of the Major League’s lackluster performance in the Super Major League Series’ early games were silenced forever when catcher Tsutomu Ito of the Seibu Lions flew out to right fielder Jesse Barfield to end the history-making game.”

    Although the Americans had redeemed themselves in the final games, their losing record received national attention. Critics often related the Japanese success on the diamond with their economic success and the ongoing US-Japan trade issues. “Made in Japan: Better Baseball” read a headline in Newsweek. Jim Impoco of U.S. News & World Report wrote, “Future historians attempting to pinpoint the end of the American Century may want to look no further than a short-porched ballyard near the heart of this teaming capital where a major-league-baseball all-star team from the States came, saw – and was conquered. … At a time when U.S. industry is under mounting pressure from hard-charging Japanese competitors, it’s hard to resist comparisons.”An exasperated American banker working in Tokyo exclaimed, “We’re not even No. 1 in baseball anymore. … What’s left?”

    Japan Times columnist Dave Wiggins, however, disagreed. “The reality of the situation is that this recent ‘goodwill’ series is, or at least should be, all about baseball – nothing else. Not economics and certainly not a country’s worth.” There were, Wiggins argued, several reasons for the Japanese victory.

    As pointed out before the games began, the major-league roster consisted of talented players willing to make the postseason trip to Japan – not the best players in the league. Of the 30 top batters in the 1990 major-league season, according to Wins Above Replacement (WAR), only six came to Japan. None of the top 10 pitchers, according to WAR, and just three of the top 30 made the trip. In contrast, the 64-man Japanese roster included nearly every top Japanese player. It was a true all-star squad. Furthermore, most of the Japanese managers took advantage of the large roster to limit their pitchers to just two innings per game. During the eight-game series, the Japanese used 35 different pitchers. As a result, the Americans rarely faced the same pitcher twice, denying them the opportunity to see all of their opponents’ pitches or determine pitching patterns.

    The monthlong layoff between the end of the major-league season and the trip to Japan with only one day of recovery and practice after arrival undoubtedly hurt the American players. Bodies became sore and stiff; the hitters had lost their timing and the pitchers lost the feel of the ball. “If you lay off for about a month, you might as well be off for the whole winter. You lose your edge very quickly. It’s taken us a little time, but as the series progressed I think we played a little better baseball,” reflected Mike Scioscia. Nearly all the players complained about the layoff and difficulty of playing at full intensity. But other visiting American teams had suffered similar layoffs and still returned home with winning records.

    The biggest factor in the American defeat was the strength of the Japanese players. Not only did they play with intensity but the gap between the major leagues and Nippon Pro Baseball was narrowing. “I frankly don’t think there’s much difference anymore,” said Cecil Fielder. “The Japanese have come a long way, and you can’t really say they’re far behind now.” In the first all-star series, held in 1986, the Americans comfortably won six of the seven games as the Japanese team ERA was a lofty 6.71. “When I played there in 1986, the pitching wasn’t that good,” recalled Jesse Barfield. “The difference is [now] they’re getting their breaking balls over anytime in the count. They didn’t do that in 1986. They had to rely on fastballs and they weren’t blowing them by us. Now they have some pretty decent cheese to set up that off-speed stuff anytime they want to throw it.” Two years later, the Japanese staff held the visitors to 3.98 earned runs per game, as the major-league team escaped with a 3-2-2 record. In 1990 the Japanese ERA was nearly identical, 4.06, but their teammates raised their batting average more than 30 points, from .212 to .245. (The Americans hit .250 during the series.)

    “Their hitters are getting bigger and stronger,” explained Zimmer, “and their pitching is terrific. They have good stuff, change speeds well and most of all, have outstanding control.” “Maybe in the past, the U.S. could just show up and win easily, but no more. In the future the Major Leaguers will have to take these games more seriously and prepare better if they hope to win. The Japanese have become that good. We should have learned an important lesson.”

    Commissioner Fay Vincent agreed. “We’ve clearly got to do a better job starting with the process because you don’t want to come over here and be embarrassed. And everyone involved has got to be embarrassed, starting with me and going down to the players.” “When this is over,” he added, “we’ll sit down and think about what we can do to improve the caliber of play.”

    And indeed, when the major-league all-stars returned in 1992, they were prepared for revenge.

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    ‘There’s No Joy in Tokyo’: The 1990 Super Major Series
  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 2, Sadaharu Oh

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 2, Sadaharu Oh

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The man standing on one leg who became the greatest power hitter in the history of the sport

    Katsuya Nomura was drinking in the Ginza district of Tokyo when Sadaharu Oh walked in.

    Nomura was the best catcher in the Pacific League, a future Hall of Famer, a man who would eventually hit 657 home runs and manage four pennant winners. He was also, at this moment, the home run king of Japanese baseball, the man who had broken the record the previous season with 52. He invited Oh to join him.

    They drank and laughed and talked baseball. Then, around nine o’clock, Oh set down his glass and stood up.

    “Nomura-san,” he said, “I’m sorry to leave early. But Arakawa-san is waiting for me.”

    Nomura couldn’t believe it. He tried to pull Oh back. Come on, stay, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Oh shook his head. Hiroshi Arakawa, his hitting coach, was waiting. There was practice to be done.

    Oh left.

    Nomura sat there for a long moment after the door closed. “Ah,” he thought. “Someday he’s going to pass me.”

    He was right. He was more than right. By the time it was all over, Oh hadn’t merely passed Nomura. He had passed Babe Ruth. He had passed Hank Aaron. He had hit 868 home runs in a professional career, more than any player in the history of the sport. He had won fifteen home run titles, nine MVP awards, two Triple Crowns. He had anchored nine consecutive Japan Series championships. He had become the most decorated player in the history of Japanese baseball, and perhaps, depending on how you weigh these things, the greatest power hitter who ever lived.

    To understand how it all began, you need to understand what happened on the night of June 30, 1962.

    Oh was twenty-two years old and somewhat of a disappointment. He had come to the Yomiuri Giants as one of the most celebrated high school pitchers in Japan. As a left-handed flamethrower from Waseda Jitsugyo, he led his team to a national championship, once threw a no-hitter in extra innings at the sacred Koshien tournament, and had been pursued by every team in the country. There were reports he was signing with the Hanshin Tigers but the Giants, after learning he wasn’t planning on going to university, signed him for a figure that was extraordinary for a high school player.

    At his first training camp, the coaching staff realized he didn’t have the skills to be a professional pitcher so he was made a first baseman. But there was one problem: he couldn’t hit.

    Not at first. He had a few memorable moments. His first professional hit came on April 26, 1959 and was a home run. He said afterward that rounding the bases felt like running on clouds. He would hit 867 more. None of them, probably, felt quite like that one.

    He also homered in front of the emperor along with Shigeo Nagashima. But he batted a paltry .161 in his rookie season. He struck out 72 times in 193 at-bats, which works out to roughly one strikeout every three times up. The fans at Korakuen Stadium, the Giants home ballpark in central Tokyo, began a chant every time he came to the plate: Oh! Oh! Sanshin Oh!—King! King! Strikeout King! The “Oh” they were mocking was his surname, which means “king.” The irony was not exactly subtle.

    Off the field, the young Oh was less a serious professional than a teenager with money and time. He stayed out past curfew. He drank in Ginza. He slept until noon. He shared a room briefly with Nagashima, who later recalled the experience with obvious amusement: “No matter how much I shook him and said ‘Hey, Wan-chan!’ he would say ‘Sorry, just five more minutes please’ and go right back to sleep.”

    “Wan-chan,” by the way, was what Oh’s friends and teammates called him. His surname in Chinese is Wang, and also “wan” is close to how one, his uniform number, sounds in Japanese.

    Then one morning in the fall 1959, Oh opened the sports newspaper and read that Fumio Kitsugi, a powerful first baseman from Waseda University, was joining the Giants. Oh put down the paper and stood up. Kitsugi was a first baseman. Oh was a first baseman. If Kitsugi* took the position, Oh would be sitting on the bench. He went to practice that day with different eyes, and he never entirely stopped.

    *Kitsugi only played parts of two seasons with Yomiuri before being released. He signed with the Swallows for the 1962 season but retired at the end of the year.

    In his second and third seasons he improved, but not quite enough. He hit .270 and led the team with 17 home runs in 1960, but fell to .253 with 13 home runs in 1961. By late June in his fourth year, he was in a slump with only nine home runs, and he was being yanked from the lineup, and the situation had become desperate enough that after a 0-for-2 night on June 30, his manager pulled him from the game entirely.

    That night, Oh got into Arakawa’s car and they drove to Arakawa’s house.

    Hiroshi Arakawa was not a famous man. He had played nine seasons as an outfielder for the Mainichi Orions and never hit more than .270. What made him remarkable was something else entirely: he was a devoted student of Zen philosophy, a man who had spent years thinking about the relationship between mental stillness and physical movement, about the way the samurai tradition of focused, explosive action mapped onto the act of hitting a baseball. He had been brought on as the Giants’ hitting coach that spring at the suggestion of shortstop Tatsuro Hirooka, who had watched Arakawa work miracles with another struggling hitter.

    Now, late on the night of June 30, Arakawa looked at Oh and told him what he needed to do.

    The problem, Arakawa had concluded, was timing. Oh was starting his swing too late. His upper and lower body were moving at different speeds. The solution he proposed was something almost no one had ever tried in Japanese professional baseball.

    “Tomorrow,” Arakawa said, “when the pitcher lifts his leg, you lift yours.”

    Oh later said he didn’t fully remember how the one-legged stance began. I was in a slump, and one day Arakawa told me to try lifting my right foot, and in that at-bat everything just exploded. What the records show is this: on July 1, 1962, in the first game of a doubleheader against the Taiyo Whales in Kawasaki, batting leadoff, Sadaharu Oh lifted his right leg off the ground and became the most dangerous hitter in Japan.

    In his first at-bat he slapped a single to right. In his second at-bat, on an 0-and-2 count, he drove a pitch into the right field seats for his tenth home run of the season. In the fourth at-bat, with the bases loaded, he cleared them with a hit to center. Five at-bats, three hits, four runs batted in.

    The reporters didn’t even notice the new stance. Not one newspaper the next morning mentioned it. It was only when Oh kept hitting—one home run, then two, then three that week, then ten in the month of July alone—that people began to say: wait, what is he doing up there?

    He was standing on one leg.

    More specifically: as the pitcher entered his windup, Oh would lift his right foot off the ground, balancing entirely on his left leg, the tip of his bat tilted toward the mound. He would hold that position and then, in the moment of release, he would plant his foot and fire. The stance looked precarious, almost comic. He looked like a flamingo. But it was, in fact, the result of years of refinement and the product of one of the most extraordinary training regimens in the history of professional sports.

    Because Arakawa did not just tell Oh to lift his leg. He also made him swing a samurai sword.

    The logic was Zen: to hit a baseball with consistency, you needed to achieve a state of perfect mental clarity in the moment before action. A samurai drawing his sword against an opponent had to be entirely present, entirely focused, thoughts of fear and failure and the crowd purged from his mind. Arakawa brought in a master of iaido. the art of sword-drawing, and Oh spent hours and then years swinging an actual katana in Arakawa’s house, the blade cutting through a strip of paper hanging from the ceiling on a thread, the goal being not the cutting itself but the emptying of the mind that the cutting required.

    The floors of Arakawa’s training room wore down from the friction of Oh’s footwork. They had to replace the tatami mats repeatedly. A flooring manufacturer, hearing about this, developed a new kind of sports tatami based on the problem. Oh’s training literally changed how floors were built in Japan.

    Arakawa died in December 2016, at eighty-six. In his final years, when people asked him about Oh, he always gave the same answer. “The essence of martial arts,” he said, “is the mastery of an unshakeable mind. Oh, through his years of training, became a true master of that path.” He donated the sword he had used to teach Oh to the Baseball Hall of Fame inside Tokyo Dome, where it is still on display.

    Here is where the story gets complicated because the story of Sadaharu Oh is not simply the story of a man who worked very hard and became great.

    Oh’s father, Shifuku, had come to Japan from China in 1922. He ran a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo’s Sumida City. He carried a Chinese passport. He was arrested during the war on suspicion of being a foreign spy and Sadaharu’s earliest childhood memories included being carried on his mother’s back as they fled their neighborhood during the American firebombings that destroyed much of Tokyo.

    Sadaharu was born in 1940, the son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother. He grew up speaking only Japanese. He went to Japanese schools. He played for the most beloved Japanese team. He became Japan’s most decorated baseball player. He was, by any measure of the lived experience, Japanese.

    But he was never allowed to forget that he was not, in the eyes of many, purely Japanese.

    He could not compete in the National Athletic Competition in high school because the tournament was restricted to native Japanese citizens. His team went to the event and insisted he wear his uniform anyway. They let him sit in the dugout. He just couldn’t play. He later described this as the most painful moment of his youth, more painful than any defeat on the field.

    Throughout his playing career, the newspaper coverage that celebrated his home runs also contained regular reminders that he was of Chinese descent. He could never become a Japanese citizen without renouncing his Chinese passport*, and he refused to do this because to renounce that passport felt to him like a betrayal of his father. His father had worked hard and built something in a country that had never fully welcomed him, and Sadaharu would not erase that.

    *His passport is for the Republic of China as it still governed the mainland when his father left for Japan. So he actually holds a Taiwanese passport.

    Oh was beloved, yes, but he was never beloved the way his teammate Shigeo Nagashima was beloved. Nagashima, the third baseman, was the face of Japanese baseball in a way that Oh, despite his superior statistics, could never quite become. Nagashima was exuberant and theatrical and purely Japanese. Oh was quiet and disciplined and half Chinese. The crowds screamed for both of them. But they screamed differently.

    Oh understood this. He wrote about it in his autobiography with characteristic honesty and without particular bitterness. He admitted that he could never match Nagashima in pure popularity, and he admitted that this had driven him to become something Nagashima couldn’t. “Nagashima-san was the eldest son of the Giants, the face, the one who carried all the responsibility. I was the second son, free to pursue records in my own way. That freedom is probably what let me accomplish what I did.”

    What he accomplished:

    In 1964, at twenty-four years old, Oh hit 55 home runs in a single season, a record that stood in Japan for nearly four decades. He hit them with such force—24 of the 55 traveled more than 120 meters (393 feet), and three cleared the stadium entirely—that the image some people have of him as a late-career craftsman hitting soft shots over short fences is simply wrong. The young Sadaharu Oh was a monster, a destroyer, a man who hit a ball into the concourse of an ice skating rink adjacent to Korakuen Stadium and who once drove a ball that struck the outfield light fixtures so hard the sound rang out across the park.

    That same season, the visiting Hiroshima Carp introduced a defensive alignment against him: six fielders deployed to the right side of the diamond, the entire left side of the field left open. It was almost identical to the shift Cleveland Indians manager Lou Boudreau had invented for Ted Williams eighteen years earlier. Oh, like Williams, refused to take the easy hit the other way. “It felt like a trap,” Oh said. “But I’m not especially clever, so I had no choice but to hit the way I always do.” He hit the ball over the shift instead. He hit it into the seats.

    Two days before the shift appeared, Oh had hit four home runs in a single game against the Hanshin Tigers. Four consecutive at-bats, four consecutive home runs, a feat that had never been done before. He had been hitless in his previous eight at-bats going into that game. “Even I was surprised,” he said afterward.

    He won the home run title in 1962. And then he won it again in 1963. And 1964. And 1965. And 1966. And 1967. And 1968. And 1969. And 1970. And 1971. And 1972. And 1973. And 1974. Thirteen consecutive home run titles. The MLB record is seven by Ralph Kiner. Oh won thirteen straight, and wound up with fifteen home run titles in total.

    He walked more than any player in Japanese history. 2,390 career bases on balls, a figure that eclipsed Babe Ruth’s American record at the time of Oh’s retirement. Only Barry Bonds has more. In his greatest single season, 1974, he drew 158 walks and was intentionally walked 45 times. Forty-five times, the opposing team decided it was safer to put him on base than to face him. His on-base percentage that season was .532. His OPS was 1.293. These numbers have not been approached in Japan since. His career on-base percentage is .446, higher than Bonds.



    He also scored more runs than anybody in Japanese history, crossing the plate 1,967 times. He won four batting titles and thirteen RBI titles. He won two Triple Crowns. He earned nine Golden Gloves for his work at first, and was named MVP nine times as well.

    In November 1974, Hank Aaron came to Japan for a home run exhibition. Forty thousand plus people filled Korakuen Stadium to watch the two men take turns hitting into the stands. Aaron, who had broken Ruth’s record earlier that spring, went first: ten home runs in twenty swings. Oh followed: nine. Aaron won, barely, in one of the stranger athletic competitions of the century—two old men (by baseball standards) hitting balls into the seats of a stadium in Tokyo while tens of thousands of people watched in a near-religious trance.

    Oh later wrote that he was saddened when Aaron retired in 1976. Not because the competition was over, but because he had genuinely loved having something to chase.

    He caught Aaron on September 3, 1977, in the third inning of a game against the Yakult Swallows at Korakuen Stadium. The pitcher was Yasujiro Suzuki, a tall right-hander the Swallows called Jumbo. Suzuki had told reporters before the game, as a joke: I guess I’ll be going to Saipan. The team had promised a trip to Saipan to whatever pitcher surrendered the record-breaking home run.

    The at-bat lasted six pitches. The stadium was wound so tight the crowd could barely breathe. Suzuki worked carefully: a ball outside, a fastball for a strike, a ball inside, a foul tip, a ball outside again. Full count.

    The sixth pitch was a sinker that drifted toward the middle of the plate.

    At 7:10 in the evening, Sadaharu Oh hit a line drive into the right field seats. Six paper balls exploded along the first and third base lines. Fireworks went off behind the outfield wall. The stadium became one enormous sound.

    Oh touched home plate, bounced once on both feet as a small, involuntary celebration, the kind of thing a coach had had to instruct him to do, since he had trained himself for twenty years not to show emotion after home runs, and was immediately engulfed by his teammates.

    After the game he found Suzuki in the hallway and apologized.

    Suzuki, to his credit, declined the Saipan trip. A professional’s pride, he explained. He had thrown the pitch so he would live with the consequences.

    He finished the season 13-9 and helped the Swallows win their first pennant. Oh later said he had followed Suzuki’s career closely after that night and had been genuinely moved by what the pitcher made of himself.

    Oh knew he was done in August of 1980. He told no one except his manager. That manager was, of course, none other than Shigeo Nagashima, his partner, his teammate, the other half of the ON Cannon, the man who had always been more beloved by the fans and who had always, privately, driven Oh to reach further than he thought he could. Oh told Nagashima he was retiring at season’s end. Nagashima talked him out of it. Oh stayed in the lineup, hit his thirtieth home run in October, and then told Nagashima again. Nagashima talked him out of it again. Then, before Oh could announce anything, Nagashima himself was dismissed by the Giants’ front office, a firing so sudden and unexpected that it sparked a boycott campaign against the team’s parent newspaper. Oh found himself still in uniform, now under a new manager, Motoshi Fujita, who asked him to stay on as player and assistant coach. He wavered. He was forty years old and hitting .236 but he was still Sadaharu Oh, still the Giants’ cleanup hitter, and the thought of abandoning the team in a moment of chaos weighed on him.

    In the end, he chose his own standard. It was the only standard he had ever really respected.

    At the retirement press conference, he sat before the reporters and smiled throughout. His eyes were full of tears.

    “It may sound presumptuous,” he said, “but I could no longer bat the way Sadaharu Oh bats. That happened more and more, one game at a time. I considered the possibility of combining playing with coaching duties, but to continue playing any longer would not be good for the team, the fans, or myself.”

    A few days later, he was at the Giants’ practice facility at the Tama River. There was no period of mourning, no transition. He had been a player and now he was a coach.

    The farewell ceremony came later, at the season-ending fan appreciation day. There was no dramatic flourish, no theatrical lap around the stadium. Oh gave a speech, walked to first base, the position he had manned for twenty-two years, and set his first baseman’s mitt down on the bag, quietly. That was all. He struck out in his genuine last at-bat. Then he took to the pitchers mound one last time and gave up a home run. Baseball is funny that way.

    He managed the Giants, then the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, a team that had spent decades losing in a city that loved baseball and received very little in return. The Hawks years were humbling at first, the kind of humbling that a man accustomed to winning nine championships in a row is not prepared for. But he stayed, and he rebuilt, and in 1999, forty years after his first professional season, Sadaharu Oh won his first championship as a manager. It was, by all accounts, as meaningful to him as any of the eleven he had won as a player.

    He managed Japan’s national team in the first World Baseball Classic, in 2006, and won it. At the victory celebration, a foreign reporter asked him: are you Japanese or Chinese?

    “My father is Chinese,” Oh said, “and my mother is Japanese. I was born here and raised here and educated here and I have spent my life in Japanese professional baseball. Without any doubt, I am Japanese.”

    It was the most direct he had ever been on the subject, and he was sixty-five years old when he said it.

    You can argue about the comparisons to Aaron and Ruth and Bonds. People do argue about them, and they always will, and the arguments are not pointless. The quality of pitching, the size of the parks, the nature of the baseball all matter, and honest people can reach different conclusions about how much they matter.

    But here is what is not arguable: Sadaharu Oh spent twenty-two years hitting a baseball at the highest level available to him, in a country where baseball was the national religion, against opponents who had devoted their lives to stopping him, and he did it with a discipline and a focus that his peers and rivals and opponents all described in the same way. They described it as something close to frightening.

    Oh once said, when Ichiro asked him if batting had ever felt easy: “Every time I thought I’d grasped it, it would slip away. That happened over and over. It never felt easy, not once in my career.”

    Ichiro said later that this had been a kind of relief to hear. If Oh had never solved it either, then the struggle was simply what hitting was.

    There is one more thing worth knowing about Sadaharu Oh.

    He almost never refused to sign an autograph. He answered fan letters. He wrote back to children. Oh once said, with characteristic understatement: “My autograph probably isn’t worth very much.” That wasn’t modest. What he meant was that he had given so many of them that they were probably not worth much more than the paper they were on.

    The morning after he tied Hank Aaron’s record with his 755th home run, Oh stepped out of his house to find more than 160 fans waiting for him. Three police cars had been dispatched to manage the crowd. Oh signed for every single one of them.

    The policy traced back to a day when he was a boy at Korakuen Stadium watching the Giants. He went around asking players for autographs. Most of them said no. Only one said yes: Hawaiian-born outfielder named Wally Yonamine, who had come to Japan in the early 1950s and spent his career being treated as an outsider, a foreigner, a man who did not quite belong. Yonamine had signed without hesitation.

    Oh made a promise to himself that day: if he ever became a professional baseball player, he would be like Yonamine. He would never turn a child away.

    It is possible that Oh recognized something in Yonamine that he would spend his own career navigating: the experience of being celebrated and othered at the same time, of belonging completely to a place that would not quite claim you as its own. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps a man had been kind to a boy, and the boy never forgot.

    That is the thing about Sadaharu Oh that the numbers, enormous as they are, do not quite convey. He was not a man who found the answer and went along with it. He was a man who understood that there was no final answer, only practice, only the next swing, only the paper hanging from the ceiling and the sword in his hands and the mind emptied of everything except the present moment.

    Eight hundred and sixty-eight times, the ball left the park.

    And every single one of them was earned.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • The 1988 Major League-Japan All-Star Series

    The 1988 Major League-Japan All-Star Series

    by CHRIS HICKS

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week CHRIS HICKS tells us about the 1988 MLB vs. NPB all-star series.

    The 1988 Major League-Japan All-Star Series was the 24th time that major leaguers had gone on a goodwill tour of Japan. Although many independent tours had happened over decades, the semiannual Japan All-Star Series had only begun in 1986. On that tour, the major-league All-Stars won the series six games to one. Gearing up for the seven-game 1988 event, the American press, public, and those involved in professional baseball all expected a similar performance.

    Future Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson of the Detroit Tigers managed the US team, called the M.L. All-Stars, along with coaches Roger Craig of the San Francisco Giants and Alex Grammas of the Tigers. Anderson had previously managed the Cincinnati Reds in a tour of Japan in 1979, winning the series 14 to 2 with 1 tie. During a workout in Los Angeles on November 1, Anderson announced his goal for the team: winning all seven games. However, he also knew a sweep of the series would not be easy, acknowledging that the Japanese had much improved since the last time he was there. “If we don’t go and play them hard, they can beat us,” Anderson warned. He declared that the outcome would be determined mostly by the effort of the M.L. squad. Anderson added that the social aspect was what the players would remember for the rest of their lives. He spoke of reciprocal respect between the Japanese and American players, ensuring that “the players will never enjoy anything more than their 12 days in Japan.”

    The Major League Baseball Players Association and the commissioner’s office worked together to carefully assemble a squad of players. None of the players on the 1986 squad were chosen for this iteration of the tour. In contrast to the older players who toured Japan in 1986, the 1988 team was almost entirely a group of young stars and players who were just coming into their own, including Benito Santiago of the San Diego Padres, Willie McGee of the St. Louis Cardinals, Fred McGriff of the Toronto Blue Jays, and David Cone of the New York Mets. Five of the chosen players were later enshrined in the Hall of Fame: Greg Maddux of the Chicago Cubs, Paul Molitor of the Milwaukee Brewers, Alan Trammell of the Tigers, Barry Larkin of the Reds, and Kirby Puckett of the Minnesota Twins. Puckett commented, “You couldn’t put a better one together.” Six of the hitters had batting averages of .300 or above and five had more than 24 home runs. The pitching staff was also strong, including four 20-game-winners, all Cy Young Award contenders.

    The players were selected not only for their talent, but also for “their diplomatic skill.” At this point, Japan had emerged as an economic superpower, contending with the United States. Japan invested heavily in American industries and real estate. The popularity of Japanese products with American consumers resulted in a sizable trade deficit and threatened American manufacturing jobs, which led to resentment and anti-Japanese rhetoric. Politicians capitalized on the discontent of many Americans whose livelihoods were threatened by the shift in the economy during the 1980s. These leaders fanned anti-Japanese sentiment further. Lawmakers were even photographed destroying imported Japanese products with sledgehammers on the Capitol Hill lawn.

    At the same time, Congress passed major legislation benefiting the Japanese American community by a veto-proof majority. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was passed to address actions toward Japanese Americans in World War II. The measure acknowledged the injustice of placing Japanese Americans in internment camps, and provided reparation payment to them. It served as a formal apology and signified the intent to award those who had suffered internment a $20,000 tax-free disbursement. These reparation payments only later came to fruition, though. The funding that had been allocated for them disappeared before the payments were made. The next year’s austerity budget reduced or eliminated funding for many programs. Ironically, the Japanese government supported the American budget cuts, demanding continued financial austerity when it agreed to stabilize the US dollar in December 1988.

    During the 1988 season, Los Angeles Dodger Orel Hershiser’s scoreless streak was one of the top news stories. On September 28 Hershiser pitched 10 innings, extending his run to 59 scoreless innings and breaking Dodgers Hall of Famer Don Drysdale’s record of 58⅔ innings set in 1968. Drysdale, who was a broadcaster for the Dodgers, was in attendance. On the heels of Hershiser’s achievement, the Dodgers went into the playoffs, ending up in the World Series against the Oakland A’s. Hershiser’s Dodgers won the Series in five games; Hershiser was named the Series’ Most Valuable Player.

    During the 12-day stretch between the World Series and the start of the Japan tour, coverage of Hershiser dominated the sports pages. He originally declined to participate in the tour. However, his contract with the Dodgers expired at the end of the 1988 season, and he agreed to go on the tour, possibly hoping his performance would have a beneficial effect on his salary negotiations. He said he wanted to stay with the Dodgers, but was open to the possibility of playing in Japan in 1990, when he could change teams. The record-breaking streak was alive, and many expected him to lengthen it with more innings in the following season. In early 1989, Hershiser was able to leverage all of these factors to sign a record-breaking three-year contract worth $7.9 million with the Dodgers.

    The US All-Star team gathered for a workout in Los Angeles on November 1. Their flight left the next day, giving the players time to get acclimated to their surroundings. Although they could recover from the long flight before taking the field, they didn’t have the same opportunity to rest before playing their roles as ambassadors. It was a two-hour drive from the airport to their hotel, but mere minutes after arriving, the players had to appear at a press conference at the hotel.

    The Japanese public treated manager Anderson “with the reverence accorded a Zen master.”Japanese baseball fans were very welcoming, latching onto such stars as Hershiser and future Hall of Famer Puckett. Based on his physique, Puckett was likened to a Sumo wrestler; Hershiser was acclaimed for his historic performance on the mound in 1988. One Japanese reporter said of Puckett, “We have never seen anyone like him before.” An American reporter responded: “Neither have we.”

    The media did not disappoint its public by focusing coverage on these players. Hershiser, tapped to start the series opener, expressed concern about being at a disadvantage facing new batters. Still, Hershiser asserted that his “competitive juices will be flowing.”Puckett was also eager to get on the field in Japan, saying, “I’ve been off for almost a month, and I’ve got the itch to play again.” That evening, a banquet was held for the two teams. Hershiser was seen showing Japanese pitchers how he gripped different pitches. The American press referred to his demonstrations when they discussed Hershiser’s performance during the series.

    On November 5 the series began at the Tokyo Dome, the only domed stadium in Japan. The dome was at capacity, with 56,000 in attendance. In a broadcast first, ESPN aired the game live starting at 11:30 P.M. ET. The announcers ESPN used for this game and one other in the series were Baltimore Orioles broadcaster Jon Miller and future Hall of Famer Don Sutton, who had just retired after 23 years as a major-league pitcher.

    The Japanese All-Stars won the first game, 2-1. In the fifth inning Seattle Mariner Harold Reynolds drove in Willie McGee for the only M.L. run.The score was tied, 1-1, until the bottom of the ninth, when Japanese designated hitter Kazuhiko Ishimine of the Hankyu Braves hit a walk-off RBI single, known in Japan as a “sayonara hit,” on a pitch from San Diego Padres pitcher Mark Davis. This first game was an adjustment for the Americans. Not only had they not faced the Japanese pitchers before, but the crowds were different. They were largely silent until cheerleaders led them in “loud and monotonous” cheers.

    The second game of the series, on November 6, was also played at the Tokyo Dome, again before a sellout crowd of 56,000. The major leaguers went out to an early lead on a solo home runs by Cincinnati’s Barry Larkin and Ellis Burks of the Boston Red Sox. They added a third run in fifth inning as pinch-runner Vince Coleman stole second and third and scored on a wild throw by catcher Tsutomu Ito. In the fifth the Japanese tied the score on an error, a walk and three hits but the visitors retook the lead in seventh as Molitor singled in Burks.

    In the bottom of the seventh with one out, Hiromi Matsunaga and Akinobu Mayumi singled off David Cone. With runners at the corners, Shinji Hata grounded to second. Second baseman Vance Law attempted to tag Mayumi as he ran towards second, but Mayumi swerved out of the baseline to avoid the tag. Law then threw to first to retire Hatta as Matsunaga crossed the plate. The umpire ruled Mayumi safe a second and allowed the run. Anderson charged on to the field to protest and “a heated argument ensured,” but the call stood and the game was tied, 4-4.

    In the top of the ninth, after Molitor had knocked in Dave Henderson to give the major leaguers a 5-4 lead, reliever Genji Kaku of the Chunichi Dragons came in with Vince Coleman on first and Willie McGee on third. American umpire Jim Evans then called a balk, a rule that was rarely enforced in Japan, on Kaku allowing McGee to score. After the game Kaku complained, “How can they call a balk when we don’t even know what they are?”

    Down 6-4 in the bottom of the ninth, Matsunaga, Mayumi, and Hiromitsu Ochiai each singled off Cone to narrow the score to 6-5. Anderson brought in Doug Jones to close the game but Hideaki Takazawa greeted him with a double to tie the score. Jones then intentionally walked Yutaka Takagi to load the bases with one out before striking out slugger Kazuhiro Kiyohara and inducing Katsumi Hirosawa to ground out to third. As the teams had agreed not to play extra innings during the series, the game ended in a 6-6 tie.

    On November 8, Game 3 was played at Heiwadai Stadium in Fukuoka, where 32,000 fans saw the American bats come alive. The Americans topped the Japanese All-Stars 16-8. Willie McGee, Ellis Burks, Harold Reynolds, and Bobby Bonilla all hit home runs. Makoto Sasaki of the Nankai Hawks had three RBIs for the Japanese squad. He hit a home run off Orel Hershiser, who pitched in relief of Greg Maddux.During the game, the Americans had a guest in their dugout, Yasokichi “Sally” Konishiki. The 530-plus-pound Sumo wrestler from Hawaii was the heaviest Sumo competitor in history at that point. The players were fascinated by the hulking figure of Konishiki as he signed autographs for them.

    The Americans celebrated their first victory by joking around with the fans. Greg Maddux, for example, had a 10,000-yen note attached to a string and dangled it in front of fans. In 1988, the bill was worth US $81. Roger Craig faked throwing his cowboy hat to the crowd, and Rafael Palmeiro threw an empty baseball box into the stands. The fans, who were eager to see the American team, relished the attention.

    Hershiser had to leave the tour unexpectedly after the game. He returned home to California to be with his sick son. The two-month-old boy, Jordan, had been born with fluid in his lungs, making even a cold a serious condition. Hershiser had struggled mightily in this series, exiting with a 7.37 ERA, the polar opposite of the stats he turned in during the 1988 season. Despite this performance, the focus of the tour remained the interaction with the Japanese. Reflecting on his experience in Japan, Hershiser said the media and fans treated him “like … a rock star.”

    Game 4 took place on November 9 in Osaka’s Koshien Stadium. The crowd of 30,000 saw the Americans win their second game in a row, 8-2. Andres Galarraga of the Montreal Expos had three RBIs while Jimmy Key of the Toronto Blue Jays gave up just two hits with six strikeouts in five innings of work. The Japanese got their runs from a seventh-inning homer by the Hanshin Tigers’ Akinobu Mayumi off Mark Davis. Doug Jones of the Cleveland Indians closed out the game with three strikeouts in the final two innings.

    Game 5 saw a return to the Tokyo area on November 10 when 23,000 fans went to see the contest at Seibu Stadium in Tokorozawa. The Americans took their third in a row, 3-1. Cincinnati’s Danny Jackson, the New York Mets’ David Cone, and Kansas City’s Mark Gubicza combined to give up just three hits and strike out nine. Rafael Palmiero of the Cubs, Vince Coleman of the Cardinals, and Tim Laudner of the Twins had doubles; Coleman also had a stolen base.

    Also on November 10, the Cy Young Awards were also announced. Jackson and Cone finished second and third, respectively, in the National League vote and Gubicza finished third in the American League. The three men celebrated that night. Gubicza told reporters, “We were commenting on how nice it would have been if we could have been on the same staff together, but it turned out just great for all of us. We all had dream seasons.” The three pitchers had all been on the Kansas City Royals’ staff in 1986.

    In Game 6, on November 12, a sellout crowd watched as the Japanese squashed any ideas of a continued US winning streak. The Nippon team came back to win its second game, 5-4, behind the efforts of the Nankai Hawks’ Makoto Sasaki, who had two hits, two runs, and an RBI. Barry Larkin was the star for the Americans with two doubles and two RBIs. Greg Maddux, working in relief with a 3-0 lead, gave up five runs, six hits, two walks, and a wild pitch in a little over two innings; the result was four runs for the Japanese. In the field, first baseman Rafael Palmeiro had an error as a ball went under his glove and rolled to the left-field wall during Japan’s decisive seventh-inning rally.Hiromi Makihara of the Yomiuri Giants gained the win, pitching four scoreless innings and striking out Dave Henderson with a split-fingered fastball that American pitching coach Roger Craig had just taught him. This was the second and last game of the series that ESPN showed live.The games the cable network aired were the only two the M.L. All-Stars lost, showing their worst performances to the American television audience.

    The seventh and final game of the series was played on November 13 before a sold-out crowd at the Tokyo Dome. Vince Coleman had a solid day with three singles. Overall the game saw a lack of offense. It finished in a 0-0 tie after nine innings, again because of the series’ no-extra-inning rule. The Americans had a chance to score in the first after Coleman and Paul Molitor led off with singles, but Masumi Kuwata of the Yomiuri Giants retired Puckett on a groundball and struck out Fred McGriff and Bobby Bonilla. Mark Gubicza, David Cone, and Doug Jones allowed only three hits while striking out seven Japanese hitters.

    The major-league All-Stars won the series 3 games to 2 with 2 ties. The outstanding players of the series were Barry Larkin and Hiromi Makihara. Larkin hit .476 (10-for-21). Yomiuri Giants pitcher Makihara had nine strikeouts in nine innings and a Game 6 victory under his belt.

    Sparky Anderson said, “The Japanese should stop comparing themselves to Americans. They are good baseball players, period. They should stand on their own.” Hershiser commented, “Their pitching is real strong. I think it’s the closest thing they have to the big leagues.” Excuses abounded for why the major leaguers had not performed more strongly against the Japanese, whose talent was seen as far inferior to that of the Americans. According to Steve Wulf of Sports Illustrated, they included, “They weren’t in shape; they didn’t take the series seriously; they were playing under foreign circumstances.” To support the criticism that the major-league team was not taking the games seriously, Wulf pointed to the two teams’ behavior during batting practice. The Japanese were seen as taking a very serious approach, focusing on the game. In contrast, the Americans seemed to be overconfident, throwing around a football on the field instead of maximizing the practice.

    Wulf broached the idea of a US vs. Japan world series. Sparky Anderson praised the Japanese, commenting that pitcher Hiromi Makihara “would make any pitching staff in baseball.” Makihara, asked if he would like to play baseball in America, said, “If that is possible, I’d like to.” Anderson also liked the idea of eventually having a US vs Japan world series, but said it would take time for the Japanese talent levels to rise to the level of the Americans. Toru Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri Giants, agreed. “Having a real world series between Japan and the US has been my lifelong dream,” he said. “We are still a long way away, but as this tour has shown, we are progressing.” Though the Americans still won the series, the fact that the Japanese came within one game of winning for the first time could be considered a moral victory.

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    The 1988 Major League-Japan All-Star Series
  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 3, Shigeo Nagashima

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 3, Shigeo Nagashima

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The man who became more than the sport itself.

    The date is June 25, 1959. The place is Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo, and for the first time in the history of professional baseball in Japan, the Emperor is watching. Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako have come to see the Giants play the Tigers, and the country has paused. The game means something different now. The players have walked onto the field and into a kind of myth.

    The atmosphere inside the stadium is unlike any baseball game before or since. Noisemakers have been banned. The drums are silent. The crowd sits in something closer to the hush of a concert hall than the roar of a ballpark. The Giants’ manager purified himself twice that morning and barely spoke all day. Everyone understands that the normal rules of this sport are suspended for the evening.

    In the owner’s box, Matsutaro Shoriki watches with particular satisfaction. He is the man who made this night happen, who lobbied the imperial household for months, outmaneuvering the Pacific League, which had its own designs on an imperial game, steering the Emperor toward a Giants-Tigers matchup specifically. He has arranged everything. He sits near the Emperor and watches his team fall behind, then tie, then fall behind again, the score knotting itself back up as if the game understands its own significance and refuses to end undramatically. 

    By the ninth inning, it’s 4-4. The Giants are at home, which means the bottom of the ninth belongs to them. The Emperor is scheduled to depart at 9:15. It is past nine o’clock. The first batter due up is a twenty-three-year-old third baseman in only his second professional season, a young man from Chiba Prefecture with a swing like a screen door blowing open in a storm.

    Shigeo Nagashima steps to the plate.

    Shoriki leans over to the man sitting beside him and whispers: “Nagashima looks like he might hit a home run. Let’s watch.”

    The pitcher for the Tigers is Minoru Murayama, a rookie, a young man who will go on to become one of the finest pitchers in Japanese baseball history, who will strike out two thousand batters before he is done, who will be remembered as one of the greats. At this particular moment, he is twenty-one years old and standing sixty feet from the greatest stage his sport has ever offered him.

    Before we get to what happened, there is something you should know about the bat.

    Nagashima had a bat he preferred: a slim, light Al Simmons model, built for a hitter who wanted to make contact. He did not use it that day. That morning he had put it aside and picked up something heavier: a Ralph Kiner model, built for a man who hit 54 home runs in a single major league season. Nagashima had never used it in a game. He broke it out for the Emperor.

    This is who Shigeo Nagashima was. He did not come to that game hoping something dramatic would happen. He came prepared for it.

    The count is even at 2-2 in the ninth. Murayama’s fifth pitch, a fastball up and in. Nagashima’s bat flashed and the ball sailed toward the left-field foul pole, curling just inside it, and landed in the upper deck. A sayonara home run—a walk-off, in the American parlance—in front of the Emperor of Japan, in the game that more than any other single moment announced to the Japanese public that professional baseball was no longer minor, no longer secondary, no longer a sport for weekday afternoons. It was the national pastime now. It was now the thing Japan watched.

    Shoriki—the man who had engineered the entire evening, who had whispered his prediction to his neighbor thirty seconds earlier—stood there looking like he couldn’t believe it.

    As Nagashima rounded third base, he looked up. The Emperor was leaning forward out of his seat. His Majesty had been scheduled to depart at 9:15. It was 9:12.

    Murayama spent the rest of his life insisting the ball was foul. “That was absolutely a foul ball,” he maintained for decades, with the particular conviction of a man who has decided that history got something wrong and intends to correct it. When he struck out Nagashima for his 1,500th career strikeout, years later, he said: “Now I’ve repaid the debt from the Emperor’s Game.” He went to his grave still arguing. In 2023, 64 years after the home run, NHK colorized the original footage using artificial intelligence, and the ball appeared on screen in crisp, undeniable clarity: fair, passing to the right of the foul pole. Murayama had been wrong for six decades. He was not alive to hear it*.

    *This game sparked the famous rivalry between Murayama and Nagashima. Murayama also recorded his 200th strikeout against Nagashima. His fixation on Nagashima even appeared in his personal life: when he noticed that the last four digits of his home telephone number, “3279,” could be read as a pun meaning “crying over 3” (Nagashima’s jersey number), he pushed to have it changed.

    Years later, Nagashima reflected that the game had changed everything, not just for him personally, but for the sport itself. Professional baseball, he said, had until that night been something minor in the lives of Japanese people. After that, baseball became everything.

    That is about as modest as a man can be while describing the moment he changed his country. He does not mention the bat.

    That same night, after the stadium had emptied and the Emperor had gone home and the newspapers were already setting their front pages, Shigeo Nagashima almost certainly went home and swung a bat in the dark.

    No, this is not a metaphor. He had built a practice room in his house specifically for this purpose, and the ritual was absolute: he did not sleep until the swing felt right. Some nights that took fifteen minutes. Other nights he was still in there when the sky began to lighten. It did not matter whether the Giants had won or lost, whether he had gone four-for-four or oh-for-four. On game days, especially, he would skip his bath at the stadium entirely, unwilling to let the physical memory of the day’s at-bats fade from his body, and come home still in his game-day sweat to stand alone in that room and swing.

    He turned the lights off. Darkness was not an obstacle; it was the point. In the dark, there was only the sound of the bat.

    “When the bat speed is too fast,” he explained once, “it means my body is opening up and my contact point has drifted too far back. The sound tells me everything.” A short, sharp crack at the right moment in the swing meant the mechanics were correct. He would not stop until he heard that sound.

    This is the man Japan called a natural. The man they called effortless. The man they held up, for decades, as the contrast to his teammate Sadaharu Oh. “The effort of Oh, the genius of Nagashima,” went the saying, as though genius and effort were opposites, as though one person could not contain both. Nagashima heard that characterization throughout his career and seems to have done nothing to correct it. He had, by all accounts, a strong aesthetic preference for making difficulty look easy, for concealing the machinery behind the performance. If people believed the swing was God-given, he was not going to argue with them.

    But the sweat-soaked work gloves told a different story.

    He was born on February 20, 1936, in Usui, a small town in Chiba Prefecture near the shores of Lake Inba. 1936 is also the year professional baseball in Japan began, a coincidence that feels less like coincidence and more like something out of mythology. His father was a local government official; his mother was, by all accounts, a woman of formidable will. She sewed his first baseball glove herself. When there were no real baseballs, she made one from marbles and hard cloth. His first bat was a length of green bamboo, split and shaped by hand.

    He grew up idolizing Fumio Fujimura, the great Osaka Tigers slugger, and covered the walls of his room with Fujimura’s photographs which made him, as a boy in the Tokyo suburbs, an unusual Hanshin fan. He would imitate Fujimura’s long, sweeping swing, the one they called the “clothesline pole.” In high school he was not particularly well known. He moved from shortstop to third base after committing four errors in a single game at a practice match; his coach converted him mid-game and Nagashima immediately looked like he had been born to play third.

    He attracted serious attention for the first time with one swing: a rocket at a regional tournament that the newspaper of the day estimated at three hundred and fifty feet, a line drive that hit the grass beyond the warning track and stayed low. That home run was seen by a scout, who told a journalist, who told another scout, and the chain of conversations that followed eventually led to a recommendation that Nagashima visit Rikkyo University and speak with its baseball coach, a man named Kuninobu Sunaoshi.

    What happened at Rikkyo would set the template for everything that followed. Sunaoshi saw Nagashima’s talent immediately and subjected him to what was later recalled as special-treatment brutal training: running thirty minutes each day after team practice to arrive at the coach’s house, where a bat twice the normal weight was waiting. One thousand swings a day. There were no batting gloves in that era, so Nagashima wore cotton work gloves, and the work gloves soaked through with blood from his burst blisters, and when they did, he rinsed them out and put them back on and kept swinging.

    The model for those swings was a sequence of photographs that Sunaoshi had obtained of Joe DiMaggio. They were frame-by-frame stills of DiMaggio’s mechanics, showing a lower-body-led swing that had not yet been theorized or systematized in Japan. Nagashima studied those photographs obsessively. He used American-made Louisville Slugger bats, imported through a trading company, for nearly his entire professional career. He won two batting titles in the Tokyo Big6 University League. He led Japan’s national team to the Asian Championship in 1955. Every team in Japan wanted him, and the Nankai Hawks offered more money than the Yomiuri Giants. But his mother asked him to stay in Tokyo, and that was that.

    His rookie season, 1958, was extraordinary.

    He won the home run title and the RBI title. He was the first rookie in Japanese baseball history to do both simultaneously. His 92 RBI were a Central League rookie record. His 34 doubles were a Central League rookie record that stood for seven decades. His 153 hits were a Central League rookie record until 2019. He played every inning of every game, the first player in Central League history to accomplish that. He stole 37 bases while batting cleanup.

    And in that first season, there was the debut against Masaichi Kaneda.

    Kaneda was the greatest pitcher in Japanese baseball, a lefthander of intimidating velocity and contempt, and he had heard a radio analyst praise Nagashima so effusively before the season that he had spent weeks in special preparation, timing his arm to peak precisely for their first meeting. On April 5, 1958, Nagashima came to the plate four times and struck out four times, each swing a full-commitment lunge that accomplished nothing except to make an enormous sound and send his helmet flying. The crowd roared at the strikeouts.

    Nagashima came back the next year and hit a home run off Kaneda on Opening Day, and their career duel ended with Nagashima hitting .313 against Kaneda with 18 home runs.

    Here is something worth sitting with: Shigeo Nagashima was not supposed to be the most popular player in Japanese baseball history. The logic of statistics would have assigned that distinction elsewhere. His teammate Sadaharu Oh hit 868 home runs, the most in professional baseball history, on earth, ever. Oh won fifteen consecutive home run titles. By almost any measure you choose to apply, Oh’s numbers were more dominant, his peak more extreme, his production more consistent.

    Even in America, Sadaharu Oh is well-known. Nagashima is unheard of.

    And yet.

    Ask anyone in Japan who grew up watching them both, and the answer comes back the same way, with a particular warmth that data cannot explain. Nagashima. Always Nagashima.

    There is a debate to be had here, and it is not entirely comfortable, because part of the explanation is simply that Nagashima was ethnically Japanese and Oh was the son of a Taiwanese father, and Japan in the 1960s was not a country that offered its full embrace to those it considered outsiders. That is a real part of the story. It would be dishonest to leave it out.

    But it’s not the whole story. Consider the batting order. During the sixteen seasons they played together, Oh batted third and Nagashima fourth in 1,061 games, the most common arrangement. And 146 times, opposing pitchers intentionally walked Oh in order to face Nagashima instead. Think about that. The man with 868 career home runs was being bypassed so the pitcher could take his chances with the cleanup hitter. Oh never won a Japan Series MVP award, while Nagashima won four, and Oh once addressed this with characteristic grace: “The pressure I put on opponents was enormous. I think I fulfilled my role. I just never got the car.” 

    He meant the car that came with the MVP prize. He was smiling when he said it.

    The pair won 11 Japan Series titles together as teammates, including 9 in a row from 1965-1973. The dynasty became known as V9.

    The statistics bear out what the pitchers feared. Batting fourth, Nagashima hit .314 with 314 home runs across 1,460 games. Batting third, the numbers fell to .291 with 112. The cleanup spot summoned something from him that no other position in the order could. Manager Tetsuharu Kawakami understood this intuitively, that the home run king could fulfill his role by drawing walks and setting the table, while the burning man needed to bat fourth, needed the runners on base, needed the stadium holding its breath. The V9 Giants had two cleanup hitters. Kawakami was wise enough to know which one should wear the title.

    The people who loved Nagashima most were not loving him out of prejudice. They were loving him for something that statistics have never been built to capture.

    Watch the way he played third base. He stood a step and a half deeper than most third basemen, which let him cover extraordinary ground going to his right — he was famous for ranging into the shortstop’s territory — and when he threw, his arm followed through with a flourish, a little wave of the hand, a gesture borrowed from kabuki, the Japanese theatrical tradition in which every movement is a declaration. His throws, according to Oh himself, were the easiest in the league to catch: perfect rotation, perfect carry, a baseball thrown the way a textbook would throw it if a textbook could throw. And then the little wave.

    He calculated where his helmet would land when he swung and missed, so that it would fly off at the right angle to thrill the crowd. He thought about that. He worked on it. He believed, deeply and professionally, that even a strikeout was a performance he owed the fans.

    Katsuya Nomura, the great catcher who spent his career crouching behind home plate and whispering doubt into opposing batters’ ears, attempted his trademark psychological destabilization on Nagashima once, pointing out a supposed flaw in his batting stance. Nagashima stopped, took a practice swing, and hit the next pitch for a home run. As he crossed home plate, he turned to Nomura and said, “Thank you for the tip.”

    The most authoritative summary of what made Nagashima different came from Isao Harimoto, the man who holds the all-time NPB hits record. Harimoto looked at the career statistics—.305 average, 2,471 hits, 444 home runs, 190 stolen bases—and noted that none of them were records, and that his own numbers were higher in most categories. Then he said this: Oh could hit home runs but was not fast. Harimoto himself produced hits in great quantities but his right hand was damaged and his defense suffered for it. “But Nagashima had no weaknesses,” Harimoto wrote. “He had everything.” If you want to picture him, Harimoto suggested, think of Ichiro, just one size larger, and able to hit home runs, too.

    Harimoto also noted something about Nagashima’s character that several of his contemporaries observed independently: he never spoke badly of anyone. In the normal social life of a professional baseball clubhouse, when conversation drifted toward gossip about other players, Nagashima simply did not engage. “In one word,” Harimoto wrote, “he was like the sun. Always bright. That’s why he could draw fans to him.” Oh and Harimoto, between them, held records that Nagashima could not match. Neither of them, they both understood, could match what he was.

    Over seventeen seasons, Nagashima collected 2,471 hits and 444 home runs and won six batting titles and five Most Valuable Player awards and became the only player in the history of Nippon Professional Baseball to be named to the Best Nine in every single season he played. Not most seasons. Every season. All seventeen. He hit .305 for his career; .343 in the Japan Series; .313 in All-Star Games. He is the only player in NPB history to hit .300 in all three categories simultaneously.

    He was intentionally walked 205 times, the most ever by a right-handed batter in Central League history. In his first season alone, opponents walked him intentionally six games in a row. There is a moment from 1968 that captures what it meant to be pitched around in that era: in a game against the Dragons, Nagashima put down his bat after two consecutive intentional-ball pitches, walked to the plate and stood in the batter’s box with his bare hands raised. No bat. The pitcher threw two more balls and walked him anyway.

    His four Japan Series MVP awards are the most in history. His career totals in the Japan Series—91 hits, 25 home runs, 66 RBI, 184 total bases—are all-time records.

    The 1974 season had been the first in which he looked mortal. It would be his last. His average fell to .244, the worst of his career. His perfectly struck balls, which for sixteen years had found gaps as if directed by some internal compass, now flew straight at fielders. Nagashima noticed and made it into a small joke. “My hits have become honest,” he said, using a Japanese word, sunao, that means obedient, straightforward, no longer tricky. He smiled when he said it. That was the whole of his public complaint.

    His retirement had almost happened on October 13th. The Giants were scheduled to play a Chunichi doubleheader at Korakuen, and the plan was set: Nagashima would play, the ceremony would follow, and seventeen seasons of number 3 would come to an end. But it rained all day, and the games were postponed, and that night the Giants’ public relations director stood outside looking up at the sky, praying for it to clear.

    October 14th came in clear and cool, a bright autumn Monday. The Giants took the field for game one of the doubleheader against the Chunichi Dragons, the same Dragons who had clinched the pennant two days earlier, ending the V9 and completing one of the most historic achievements in Japanese baseball. The next morning’s newspapers barely mentioned it. The front pages were about Nagashima. Most of Chunichi’s stars were in Nagoya for the championship parade. Nagashima batted third and played third, and in his second at-bat he hit his 444th career home run, added two more hits, and finished with the 186th multi-hit game of his career. The Giants won 7-4.

    After the final out, both teams went to their dugouts. The field emptied. For a moment, Korakuen Stadium held forty thousand people in silence.

    Then Nagashima came back out.

    This was not in the script. The team had asked him not to do it but he had refused. “The ceremony won’t take me close to the outfield,” he said. “I want to greet my fans.” So he walked out of the first-base dugout and turned toward right field, alone on the grass, and began to move along the warning track. The stands erupted. People were screaming his name, and crying, and screaming his name again.

    He was smiling. And then, somewhere along the track, his feet stopped.

    He reached into his pocket and took out a small towel and brought it to his face. His shoulders moved. The crowd, which had been roaring, went quiet to let a man cry. And then they were crying too, all of them, the stadium full of people weeping in the autumn afternoon with Shigeo Nagashima standing alone on the warning track with a towel over his face.

    He played the second game. He batted fourth and played third. His last hit was a single to center field. His last at-bat was a double-play grounder to short.

    The Giants won 10-0. By the time the ceremony began, the stadium lights had taken over for the sun, and when the moment arrived, the lights around the field were switched off one by one until a single spotlight remained, cutting through the October dark, finding the man in the number 3 jersey. 



    The scoreboard glowed: MR. G, GLORIOUS NUMBER 3.

    Nagashima raised his voice and said: “I retire here today but our Giants will live forever.”

    In the stadium and in living rooms across Japan, people wept again.

    He later wrote: “I was called ‘The Burning Man’ by my fans. But nothing keeps burning forever. The more intensely something burns, the bigger the sense of loss after it is extinguished.”

    He was known by many other names: Mr. Giants, Golden Boy, Mr. Professional Baseball, and even just Mr.

    He went on to manage the Giants twice, winning two more Japan Series championships.

    The second championship came in 2000, when Nagashima’s Giants faced Oh’s Hawks in the Japan Series, the two old teammates meeting as opposing managers to close out the century. For fans who had grown up watching them both, the outcome was almost beside the point. The confrontation itself was the thing. The sport had begun in 1936, the year Nagashima was born, and now here were its two greatest players, grey-haired in dugouts on opposite sides of the field, finishing the century together the way they had filled it.

    Here is what I keep coming back to: the swing room, the light offs, and the sound.

    There are players who practice in secret because they are ashamed of their weaknesses. Nagashima practiced in secret because he was protective of his image, yes, but also because the dark was simply where the work got done. In the dark there was no audience to perform for, no helmet to angle correctly, no kabuki flourish to calibrate. There was only the question of whether the swing was right, and the sound that answered it, and the willingness to keep going until the answer was yes.

    Japan called him a natural. The genius, not the worker. The flame, not the fuel. And he let them, because that was part of the performance too, because he understood that what the country needed from him was not evidence of struggle but evidence that excellence was possible, that a young man from Chiba could step to the plate in front of the Emperor and hit the ball over the fence and make the whole nation feel, for a moment, that it was capable of anything.

    He played every season in the Best Nine. He batted .514 in games attended by the Imperial Family. He thanked Nomura for the strikeout tip. He swung in the dark until the sound was right, and then he went to bed, and the next day he made it look easy.

    Some players have careers. Nagashima had a whole country.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • Baseball from Mars: The 1986 Super Major Series

    Baseball from Mars: The 1986 Super Major Series

    by James Forr

    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 JAMES FORR tells us about the begins of the MLB vs. NPB all-star series..

    Opposing thoughts can complement one another and fill our lives with elegant contradictions. In ancient Chinese philosophy, this theory was known as yinyang. In Japan, the word is inyo.

    Although frequently associated with Eastern thought, inyo is a universal part of the human experience. Any virtue can be a vice. There is no light without shadow. Love is the first cousin of hate.

    By 1986, America’s visceral wartime animosity toward Japan had long receded. In its place bubbled a complex brew of fascination and fear. Inyo.

    In September 1980, NBC aired a nine-hour miniseries called Shogun, an adaptation of a novel about an Englishman in feudal Japan. Shogun’s scenes of sexuality and violence were shocking for its day, and the show featured extended stretches of Japanese dialogue with no English subtitles. It was a weird choice for a prime-time network slot, and some executives feared it would be a disaster.

    Instead, it was all anyone could talk about. Nearly one-third of all Americans watched Shogun, a cultural phenomenon that “spurred a faddish mania for all things Japanese.” Before long, sushi became mainstream in the United States, loyal communities of anime fans popped up out of nowhere, and the hoity-toity set grew enchanted with Kabuki theater and Japanese fashion.

    Meanwhile, the term “Made in Japan” was taking on new meaning. For years, Americans had derided Japanese products as cheap crap doomed to fall apart five minutes after you left the store. However, by the mid-1980s, even if you weren’t scarfing down eel rolls or watching Star Blazers, you might have been driving a Honda, listening to music on a Sony Walkman, or replaying your favorite shows on a Panasonic VCR.

    In contrast, US manufacturing was in decline, which wounded Americans’ national pride and inflamed insecurities about the nation’s economic future. While Japan was becoming cool, it was, at the same time, emerging as a bogeyman for those fears.

    Democratic nominee Walter Mondale gave voice to this apprehension during his presidential campaign, asking a group of steelworkers in 1984, “What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around the Japanese computers?” Conservative lawmakers called for boycotts. Frustrated autoworkers and other self-styled patriots got into the spirit by pulverizing Japanese cars with sledgehammers.

    Oddly, in certain ways, Americans held Japan in higher regard than Japan held itself. Inyo.

    The searing humiliation of World War II still lingered in the folds of Japan’s collective memory, and a nagging sense of inferiority was never far from the surface. The country and its people felt a constant pressure to measure themselves, particularly against the West.

    “I always felt Japan collectively was looking in the mirror saying, ‘Look at us!,’ and then looking around and asking, ‘How do we stack up?’” observed Michael Shapiro, who worked as a correspondent for the New York Times in Tokyo from 1984 to 1988.

    These conflicted feelings extended to baseball, where American and Japanese cultures had overlapped clumsily around the edges for decades. The Japanese considered American players to be, well, a little too American. In this highly collectivist culture, the gaijin from the West who joined Japanese teams often called attention to themselves in most unfortunate ways – berating umpires, criticizing managers, abusing equipment, and starting fights.

    “There were stories about how gross American ballplayers were,” said Shapiro, who traveled with the Baltimore Orioles during their 1984 tour. He recalled the team bus rolling through crowded streets as one player exposed himself through the window, a pair of sunglasses perched on his penis and a cigarette tucked under his scrotum.

    Americans might have been obnoxious, but in baseball they were the yardstick. So, with the revulsion came a certain hypnotic allure. Inyo.

    Although television coverage of American baseball was sporadic, astute Japanese fans knew all about the stars of the US game and built them up into superheroes. American teams made goodwill visits of Japan every few years, but no team of big-name all-stars had made a tour to compete solely against the Japanese since 1953. Here was an opportunity.

    On August 25, 1986, after 19 months of discussions, Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and Nippon Professional Baseball Commissioner Juhei Takeuchi announced that all-stars from both leagues would meet in a seven-game series in Japan November 1-9. It was dubbed in Japan the Super Major Series.

    “Major-league baseball was trying to spread its wings,” remembered Boston’s Rich Gedman, one of the players selected. “For Japan, it was probably a measurement of where their game was at. For us, it was to give American baseball exposure to the world.”

    Really, though, it was less a measurement of the Japanese game as it was a measurement of the Japanese. Some of the best players in Nippon Professional Baseball were Americans, but when one of those expats, Leron Lee, asked to represent Japan, he was rebuffed. “No. Japanese only. Sorry.”

    Greg “Boomer” Wells received the same line. After being “sold like a slave” by the Minnesota Twins to the Hankyu Braves in 1983, Wells immediately established himself as one of Japan’s most fearsome sluggers. Yet, there was no room for him with the Japanese all-stars. “I would have loved to have played because I had something to prove, too,” Wells said.

    Wells believed his omission also was a lost symbolic opportunity, a missed chance to show the world a different face of the Japanese game. These newer American stars like Wells, Leron and Leon Lee, and Randy Bass weren’t cynical retreads trying to score one last baseball paycheck. They were young and skilled and they treated the game and the nation with respect.

    “We were a part of Japanese baseball,” Wells insisted. “We were changing Japanese baseball and changing the way they thought of Americans. So we wanted to play. But they didn’t want that. They wanted to play them on their own. They wanted to prove something.”

    The US team consisted almost entirely of players who had been chosen for the 1986 All-Star Game in Houston. It wasn’t a tough sell. To travel to a new country and share a clubhouse with supremely talented peers was enticing. The money probably didn’t hurt, either. Each American received $30,000, plus all expenses paid for themselves and a companion.

    While coverage was limited in the States, the series was all over the front pages of Japan’s sports dailies. “Everything was about how great the majors were, but it was almost like they were from Mars,” joked Jim Allen, who was teaching English in Hamamatsu and who later became a journalist and statistical analyst specializing in Japanese baseball. “It was like the major leagues were a league meant for aliens. ‘We play baseball, they play baseball. But their baseball is different.’”

    “There was so much respect and reverence toward the major leaguers from the Japanese media, the fans, and even the players,” remembered Rob Smaal, who covered the series for the Japan Times. “It was like, ‘We’re going to get pounded by these guys, and it’s going to be an honor to get pounded by these guys.’ I was taken by the fact that it wasn’t, ‘Let’s go win this thing.’ It was more like, ‘Let’s watch these guys perform.’”

    But even when optimism is in short supply, there is always hope. After all, Japan had won a number of games against the two most recent major-league clubs to visit, the 1984 Orioles and the 1981 Kansas City Royals. Those weren’t all-star teams, of course, and the Americans spent half the time drunk or hungover, but still, wins are wins.

    “The Japanese were practicing furiously,” according to Smaal. “It was important to them to perform well. They didn’t want to be embarrassed.”

    The Japanese team was mindful of the historic context of the event. “In the past we studied the Americans in baseball. Now we want to lead,” proclaimed Hiroshima Carp legend Koji Yamamoto, who at age 40 was making his final appearance as a player.

    Recently retired Yokohama Taiyo Whales manager Sadao Kondo, chosen to pilot the Japanese squad because he had been the eldest manager in NPB, offered a warning for the Americans. “If they think they are here for a sightseeing tour, they may be in for a shock.”

    US manager Davey Johnson made sure there was none of that. He, too, had something to prove. Johnson had just piloted the New York Mets to a World Series title. Now, only weeks after his greatest success, he was returning to the site of his greatest failure.

    Johnson’s entire Japanese experience had been streaked with inyo. A three-time Gold Glove winner and four-time All-Star, Johnson left the Atlanta Braves to join the revered Yomiuri Giants as their starting third baseman in 1975. He wasn’t the first big-name major leaguer to sign with a Japanese team; however, for a prominent American to come over near the peak of his career, as Johnson did, was unheard of.

    His arrival was both eagerly anticipated and deeply controversial. The Giants had won 10 pennants from 1963 to 1974, their “pure-blooded period” when they employed no foreign players at all. Many fans and even some players preferred it that way.

    Johnson flopped – spectacularly. He struggled with the language and the culture and hit just .197. The Japanese press was brutal, dubbing him, “Dame Johnson,” which loosely translates to “No-good Johnson.” To boot, the Giants tumbled to last place.

    Johnson rebounded in 1976 and helped the Giants rocket to a pennant, but he clashed with his manager, the legendary Shigeo Nagashima, and chose to return to the United States – not exactly in disgrace, but hardly awash in glory.

    Ironically, unlike many gaijin, Johnson actually enjoyed Japan, which made his experience all the more painful. Ten years later, as he prepared for the Super Major Series, the wound still festered. As he told historian Robert Whiting, “I especially wanted to do well because of what had happened before.”

    Johnson was no authoritarian, but he implored his team to take the tour seriously. Indeed, players reportedly were chosen not only for their talent, but also for their professionalism. Fun would be had, but these particular guys weren’t going to drink themselves blind every night or spark any international incidents.

    Johnson led his squad through two days of workouts at Dodger Stadium before chartering a 747 to Tokyo. According to Cal Ripken, “At the first team meeting, Davey said, ‘Let’s go over the signs. … Aw, the hell with it. Let’s not have any signs.

    “‘And no take signals, either.

    “‘On 3-0, you’re all swinging.

    “‘Anytime you want to steal, then steal.’”

    The clubhouse roared at every line, but Johnson was serious. The way he saw it, the best strategy was no strategy. According to Washington Postcolumnist Thomas Boswell, Johnson’s experience in the country taught him he could rattle the Japanese by throwing the book out the window. Japan would play its way – traditional, disciplined, cautious. The Americans would swagger in and do whatever they darn well pleased.

    “[Baseball officials] figured we weren’t taking it seriously enough,” said Ripken. “They were wrong. We played together great. Davey had jacked our confidence sky-high.”

    The US contingent arrived in Tokyo on October 30. Their hosts welcomed them with an imperial feast, complete with ornate ice sculptures; taikodrums; servers dressed as Geisha offering up sushi, Kobe beef, and other delicacies; and a bottomless well of desserts and alcohol.

    “They really rolled out the red carpet,” marveled Smaal. “Reporters are generally slobs, walking around in T-shirts and jeans. They said, ‘Guys, please, jacket and tie required for this thing.’ What a festival they put on.”

    The next day both teams appeared for workouts at Tokyo’s venerable Korakuen Stadium, Johnson’s home ballpark when he was with the Giants and the site of the series’ opening two games. Michael Shapiro wrote in the New York Times that Johnson looked like “a man who, when his life is rosiest, happens to run into the high school flame who broke his heart.”

    He enjoyed a pleasant reunion with his erstwhile teammate, the great Sadaharu Oh, Yomiuri’s manager, who served as a coach for the Japanese all-stars. As the old friends exchanged pleasantries, Johnson turned to reporters and said, “He was the guy. I used to cry on his shoulder.” Oh replied wistfully, “Good things and bad things.”

    Texas Rangers reliever Greg Harris says the atmosphere was loose, but he and his teammates knew they had a job to do. They prepared almost the way they would have for regular-season games in the States. “It was a mindset of, ‘We’re representing the United States. We better be serious here.’ We didn’t want to lose.”

    The highlight of that first workout was batting practice. Japanese players stood slack-jawed as the Americans launched one ball after another deep into, and sometimes over, the bleachers. After Ripken ripped a drive to the base of the scoreboard, some 450 feet away, three-time NPB Triple Crown winner Hiromitsu Ochiai of the Lotte Orions could only shake his head. “Look at that,” he gasped. “Nobody in Japan could do that, not even me.”

    That spectacle replayed itself throughout the series. “The fans really enjoyed watching power hitters,” according to José Canseco, who reportedly cracked a seat with one of his interstellar pregame shots. “They really got into [batting practice] more than the game.”

    “The ballparks were really, really small and everything was going over the fence,” said Harris. “You’re shagging fly balls, but everything in the air was gone. You might as well have just sat in the stands.”

    Game 1 likely would not have been played in the United States. After ceremonies that featured the Japanese, American, and Canadian national anthems, a persistent drizzle transformed into a steady rain. Even though the grounds crew emerged multiple times to manicure the mound, US pitchers Teddy Higuera and Willie Hernandez each slipped repeatedly in the expanding quagmire. Johnson, alarmed, tried to get the game stopped, but the umpires were determined to squeeze in an official game, risk of injury be damned.

    The rain limited attendance to a disappointing 34,600 but failed to dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm. Fans waved American flags, rattled plastic noisemakers, and bellowed fight songs and chants. That atmosphere was something new for the Americans, including California Angels pitcher Mike Witt.

    “They had cheering sections and drums. It was almost like going to a football game. Constant noise and chatter.” Witt said.

    One recurring song, set to the Mickey Mouse Club theme, drove Cincinnati reliever John Franco to distraction. “I’ll probably fall asleep tonight with that same M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E tune ringing in my ears,” he quipped.

    Amid the din, the Americans took a quick first-inning lead when Ryne Sandberg drove a hanging slider from Yomiuri’s 16-game winner, Suguru Egawa, over the fence for the first run of the series. Moments later, Dale Murphy’s two-run blast made it 3-0.

    In the bottom of the first, the Japanese readied themselves to face Mike Scott, who was an intriguing figure for fans like Shinichi Ota. “Until his visit,” Ota wrote, “the split-fingered fastball was not known in Japan.” Scott had just captured the National League Cy Young Award after winning 18 games and leading the Houston Astros to the NL West title.

    Yoshihiko Takahashi opened the bottom of the first with a single, but Scott immediately picked him off. Japanese baserunning pratfalls became a leitmotif of the series. In those days of Astroturf infields across the major leagues, only the most audacious baserunners would put one foot outside the dirt cutout when taking a lead. Japanese runners, though, routinely took leads with both feet on the turf.

    “It was like, ‘Is this for real?’” said Harris. “Their own pitchers had slow moves, so they were able to get back, but we knew what to do. We’d just pick them off left and right.”

    Then there was Tony Peña behind the plate. His arm was impressive even to Americans; for the Japanese, it was like science fiction. “He picked a runner off second base without standing,” marveled one fan, Hitoshi Morita. “The runner had been walking back to the base and suddenly the second baseman caught the ball and tagged him. It was amazing.”

    Japan cut the lead to 3-2 later in the first on run-scoring hits from Ochiai and Koji Akiyama. Scott’s mysterious split-fingered fastball proved not too perplexing, after all. “I guessed he might not have been carrying his Vaseline in Japan,” joked one fan, Takeyuki Inohiza, referring to Scott’s reputation for doctoring baseballs. Scott blamed the weather. “It was a little wet throwing off that mound. We’re not used to playing when it’s that slick.”

    In the fifth, third baseman Hiromichi Ishige flubbed Murphy’s two-out groundball, which allowed Peña and Tony Gwynn to score and made it 5-2. Meanwhile, Higuera took over for Scott in the middle three innings and allowed just two baserunners while striking out six.

    In the seventh, with the score 6-3, the umpires finally halted play and awarded the game to the Americans. In the press box, Japanese sportswriter Kenichi Haruda turned to a colleague and predicted, “I think this is going to be a bad series for us.”

    By the start of the second game, the skies had cleared and 47,000 packed into Korakuen. Yomiuri’s Hiromi Makihara pitched brilliantly in front of his home fans, striking out five and allowing one hit as Japan led, 2-0, heading into the sixth.

    However, reliever Yutaka Ono immediately stumbled, with walks to Ozzie Smith and Jesse Barfield. Smith scored on a throwing error by the shortstop, Takahashi. Later, after a walk to Ripken, Glenn Davis launched a three-run homer to put the Americans up 4-2. “The pitcher that gave up the big home run to Davis had control problems,” said Johnson. “It looked like he was trying to throw too hard.”

    In the ninth, Barfield’s homer was the centerpiece of a five-run outburst, as the Americans prevailed, 9-2. US pitchers –Witt, Harris, Franco, and Jeff Reardon – combined to strike out 15.

    “The first inning, I got my breaking ball hit consistently,” remembered Witt. “Then I figured out they were really late on the fastball and couldn’t get the gist of the speed and movement of it, so I went with that the rest of the time I was there.”

    “Their style of pitching over there is to spot it, mix it up, and throw off-speed stuff,” Witt said. “The way the hitters get out on their front foot with their hands back is more conducive to hitting breaking balls and off-speed stuff than fastballs.”

    To make it even tougher, series organizers were using a special baseball, one that was a bit lighter than the ball used in the United States but heavier than the one used in Japan. “Trying to hit those fastballs from the American pitchers feels like hitting a steel pipe,” moaned Ochiai. “When I hit the ball, I can feel the vibrations from the impact flow all the way back into my arms. There’s just no way we can beat that kind of pitching.”

    The venue shifted to Seibu Stadium, on the outskirts of Tokyo, for Game 3. Jack Morris, Rick Rhoden, and Hernandez combined on a three-hitter and Peña homered as the visiting stars won their third straight, 3-0, in a brisk 1 hour, 56 minutes.

    The Americans lost one of their catchers during the game. Rich Gedman was warming up Rhoden in the bullpen without a mask when a forkball glanced off the tip of his mitt and shattered his cheekbone.

    “It was kind of messy,” Gedman deadpanned. At the time, his wife was away on a shopping excursion arranged by the series organizers. “The wives had a great time, but mine didn’t, in particular, because she found out that I was traveling on a bullet train to get to her and fly home.”

    Sadao Kondo admitted that reality had landed hard. The Americans looked almost like the bulletproof giants that fans thought they were. “[W]e would like to win at least one game,” the skipper told reporters.

    Next, the teams trekked west to the port city of Fukuoka, on the southernmost island of Kyushu. The venue was Heiwadei Stadium, a historic park built in the shadow of the remnants of a seventeenth-century castle and known for its udon noodle soup. Before 27,000, the Americans hammered Japan, 13-3, on the strength of a 17-hit barrage that featured two home runs apiece from Barfield, Von Hayes, and José Canseco.

    Johnson noted afterward that his hitters were “beginning to come around” after their post-regular-season layoff. Witt figured it was just a matter of time. Japanese pitching was simply overmatched. “They didn’t have anyone throwing 95 over there. Our guys knew they could always [be ready to] react to a breaking ball, knowing they could hit any fastball thrown at them.”

    For Game 5, the series zigzagged about 400 miles back east to Koshien Stadium, near Osaka. With two aboard and the game tied, 2-2, in the seventh inning, Frank White’s groundball devoured Yoshihiko Takahashi at third. Davis and Murphy scored, and the Americans led 4-2. As White told it, Takahashi “came running over to second base, shaking his hand, and shouted, ‘Too strong, too strong.’”

    But moments later, the Japanese pieced together three infield hits, two errors, a wild pitch, and a pair of bloop singles against Reardon, Montreal’s fireballing closer. With the score tied, 4-4, Fujio Tamura of the Nippon Ham Fighters flicked a two-run, bases-loaded single over White’s outstretched glove and into shallow right field for the go-ahead runs.

    The US team got runners to the corners with no one out in the bottom of the eighth, but Hankyu’s Yoshinori Sato struck out Canseco, Davis, and White to snuff out the rally and preserve Japan’s 6-4 victory, its lone win of the series.

    As they traversed the country, the Americans received what was, for most, their first exposure to Japanese culture. The most fascinating things were the minutiae of daily life, things most Japanese probably took for granted.

    “I had never seen cabs that had automatic-open doors,” said Canseco. “They had this car there that looked like a go-cart with a box on it. It must have been maybe six feet long, at the most.”

    The shopping grabbed Greg Harris, specifically a trip to the towering Mizuno flagship store in Tokyo, where he was fitted for his first set of golf clubs. “Each floor was a sport. I had never seen anything like that. We could pick out what we wanted and they would pack it up and send it back.”

    What stood out in Witt’s memory was the traditional chabudai tables in restaurants. “The table we sat at was no more than 18 inches off the ground,” he chuckled. “I’m 6’7”. Mike Scott is about 6’3”. You got Rick Rhoden, Buddy Bell, José Canseco – all these big dudes trying to sit cross-legged, putting our legs under this table. It was not happening.”

    After the ornate welcome banquet, Rob Smaal, the reporter from the Japan Times, took Rhoden and Hayes to Tokyo’s fashionable Roppongi district, where the nightlife is always hopping. “[Hayes] was a super-nice guy. He was interested in seeing everything. I showed him my apartment, which was tiny. He’s like, ‘Wow, that’s impressive that you can live here.’ He wanted to take it all in.”

    Rhoden, not so much. “He was more like the typical American – ‘I can’t believe you’d live in this kind of squalor!’” Smaal said with a laugh.

    Yokohama Stadium, just south of Tokyo, hosted the sixth game, which was a snoozer. Hayes and Cal Ripken each homered twice as the US cruised, 15-3. A notable moment was the final home run for Koji Yamamoto, a stalwart in Hiroshima since 1969 and one of Japan’s premier power hitters, with 536 career home runs.

    “I’ve enjoyed this series, seeing some of my old friends from the States,” Yamamoto reflected. “So, I’m swinging relaxed and the ball just made it into the stands.”

    One of those old friends was Ripken, who had toured Japan with the Orioles two years earlier. Ripken credited his offensive outburst to some pregame advice from Yamamoto. “[He] pointed out that my swing has changed since 1984.” Ripken was a well-known tinkerer, so that wasn’t surprising. However, Yamamoto had an idea. “He suggested I get out in front of the ball more. I tried it and it worked.”

    US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tom Gorsuch of Baltimore hollered, “Way to Go, Cal!” as Ripken rounded the bases after one of his home runs. Gorsuch was among hundreds of American service members in attendance at Game 6, many of whom were stationed at nearby naval installations at Atsugi and Yokosuka. “I’ve been suffering from withdrawal symptoms,” Gorsuch said. “I haven’t seen a big-league game in two years, and before that I’d seen at least one Orioles game every year for 25 years.”

    Petty Officer Mike Honeysett of Detroit secured autographs from the two hometown Tigers on the tour. “Morris and Hernandez all the way. They’re my boys.” Honeysett and his fellow petty officer, Bill Pearson, tried to get the wave going during the game and bellowed “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at high volume. “I just love sports,” said Pearson. “We go to the Mirage Bowl, the Japan Bowl, anything that’s sports from the States, we go.”

    The series concluded back at Korakuen Stadium, where things ended as they had begun. Barfield, Peña, and Davis each homered to lead a 13-hit onslaught and Rhoden spun three-hit ball over five innings as the Americans swamped Japan, 9-4. The US team won six of the seven games, outhomering Japan 19-2 and outscoring them 59-21.

    Peña batted .318, caught every inning after Gedman’s injury, and was named the American MVP. Several other players had magnificent tours, too. Ripken hit .500, while Barfield batted .450 with 4 home runs and 9 RBIs. Hayes hit only .182, but all four of his hits were home runs. Rhoden and Higuera combined for three victories and 15 scoreless innings. The Hanshin Tigers’ Akinobu Okada, who batted .500 (8-for-16), was named Japan’s MVP.

    Davey Johnson thought the quality of play in Japan had deteriorated over the preceding decade. “Guys like Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, and Koji Yamamoto stood head and shoulders above these guys.” Johnson speculated that if the Japanese all-star team played in a major-league division, they would finish .500 – at best.

    Witt may have been even less impressed. He compared the quality of competition to what one would see in winter ball. “There were [the equivalent of] fringe major leaguers and really good Triple-A players. They were really skilled but did not have the physical prowess that we had.”

    Bob Brown of the Baltimore Orioles, who handled media relations for the series, was confounded. “As long as they’ve been playing the game so seriously, you’d think they’d be able to play us tougher now,” he said.

    The humbling results raised two questions for the Japanese – “What happened?” but also “Who cares?” Inyo.

    Without question, the thorough wipeout was embarrassing. “It’s a mistake to think we can ever challenge the Americans,” said the Triple Crown winner Ochiai. “We’re like a team of Little Leaguers playing adults.”

    Nonetheless, although they looked at the series as an opportunity to measure themselves, and although the series suggested they didn’t measure up very well, the lords of the Japanese game almost seemed to pretend it hadn’t happened. Japan’s approach to baseball emphasized relentless drills and practice, risk-averse in-game strategies, and a rejection of weight-training methods common in the United States. Those philosophies did not shift easily.

    “It gave them something to think about, but it really didn’t change anything,” according to Boomer Wells, who played in Japan until 1992. “It was sort of like if your team hasn’t won a game and you’re playing against the best team – you have nothing to lose, no pressure. That’s kind of how they took it.”

    Maybe it was also because the Japanese saw themselves as playing a fundamentally different game, one that was purer at its core. Kondo conceded the “big difference in speed and power” between his team and the Americans, but journalist Jim Allen argued that there was an unspoken ‘but’ at the end of that phrase.

    “That is a stock quote. In one way it is praise; in another way it is an insult,” Allen explained. “What the Japanese are telling you is, ‘They’re big and strong, but we play the game the right way. We work harder at the fine points of the game. We are craftsmen. They are just big, fast guys who play baseball.’” In other words, sizing up Japan against the Americans was a little like comparing Snoop Dogg and Stravinsky – fun and interesting, sure, but ultimately futile and kind of pointless. That’s how they rationalized it, at least.

    Perhaps the series lacked any immediate overarching impact, but Sadaharu Oh later told Allen that it began to inspire some younger players who would make their names in the future. “Japanese baseball has narrowed the gap quite a bit for a number of reasons,” according to Allen, “but Oh credits a lot of that to the major-league tours of Japan.”

    In the coming years, those other reasons included the trailblazing efforts of Hideo Nomo and Ichiro, Japan’s victories in the World Baseball Classic, and increased television coverage of major-league baseball. But, true to the philosophy of inyo, the twenty-first-century triumphs of Japanese baseball may have taken root in the mire of one of its starkest defeats.

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    Baseball from Mars: The 1986 Super Major Series
  • My Baseball History Podcast on the History of Japanese Baseball

    My Baseball History Podcast on the History of Japanese Baseball

    In his latest episode podcaster Dan Wallach focuses on the history of Japanese baseball with an interview with SABR’s Asian Baseball Committee Chair Rob Fitts.

    https://www.shoelesspodcast.com/season-five/08

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 4, Hideki Matsui

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 4, Hideki Matsui

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    Of course they walked him. It couldn’t be helped.

    There is a scene from August 16, 1992, that tells you everything you need to know about Hideki Matsui.

    Matsui is standing in the batter’s box at Koshien Stadium, the great cathedral of Japanese high school baseball, its ivy-covered walls gleaming in the summer heat. He is seventeen years old and enormous. He looks less like a high school student and more like something assembled in a factory to hit baseballs. His bat is on his shoulder. He is watching the Meitoku Gijuku pitcher, a kid named Kazuhiro Kouno, go into his windup.

    The ball, when it comes, will not be aimed at the strike zone.

    It never is.

    The first walk comes in the first inning, two outs, a runner on third. Defensible. A dangerous hitter, a tight spot, the book says put him on. The crowd accepts it.

    The second comes in the third inning, one out, runners on second and third. Still defensible, maybe. The game is close. You can tell yourself a story about it. You can justify it.

    The third comes in the fifth inning, one out, a runner on first, and Meitoku Gijuku leading by two runs. This is when the crowd begins to murmur. The story is harder to tell now.

    The fourth comes in the seventh inning, two outs, nobody on base. There is no story to tell. The stadium turns hostile. People are shouting. The atmosphere has changed. Koshien is about pitcher versus batter, but there will be no showdown.

    The fifth, in the ninth inning, two outs, and a runner on third, is when the bottles and cans come onto the field. Empty cans, empty bottles, megaphones, anything people have in their hands. The game is stopped. The scene has turned ugly.

    And Matsui says nothing. He does not slam his bat. He does not glare at the opposing dugout. He simply takes his base, all five times, and waits for a pitch that never comes.

    Meitoku Gijuku wins, 3-2. During the winning school’s anthem, the crowd chants go home. The winning players have tears in their eyes. Their manager, Shiro Mabuchi, speaks to reporters afterward as if describing a crime he committed rather than a game he won. “I wanted to compete honestly,” he says. “But with the score close, this was the only way. I gave all the instructions myself.” The team’s hotel receives so many harassing phone calls that they are forced to change the number.

    The Japan High School Baseball Federation calls an emergency press conference. Mabuchi is criticized in every newspaper in the country. He defends himself by saying he had watched Matsui in practice and seen something that disturbed him. “There was a professional player mixed in with the high school kids,” he says.

    He meant it as a justification. It reads, in retrospect, as prophecy.

    Afterward, when the reporters find Matsui, he is quieter than anyone expects. “I don’t remember,” he says at first, and then: “I’m fine. It’s thanks to that I became famous. And I’m glad I didn’t get angry in the batter’s box.”

    Years later, he will say something more considered: “I wanted to become the kind of player where fans would say of course Matsui got walked five times in high school. It couldn’t be helped.“

    That is the whole story, right there. Everything that follows, the ten years in Japan, ten years in America, the titles and the injuries and the consecutive games and the World Series, is Matsui trying to become that player. The player who made the walks make sense in retrospect. The player so obviously dangerous that refusing to face him was not cowardice but simply the smart thing to do.

    He spent the next twenty years earning that description. He almost always succeeded.

    He was, from the beginning, physically preposterous. The nursery school teachers thought he was eight years old when he was three. By the time he entered middle school, he stood 170 centimeters (5’7”) and allegedly weighed 95 kilograms (209 lbs). He was a thirteen-year-old with the frame of a sumo wrestler, which was not merely a metaphor, since he also won a local youth sumo championship that year. He could, honestly, have been almost anything physical. He chose baseball.

    His father gave him a phrase to live by when he was in elementary school, written in brushwork on a piece of paper and hung above his desk: Effort itself is a talent. Matsui kept that idea his whole life, making it his guiding principle. He was gifted, yes—the swing was effortless, the power was outrageous, the instincts were those of someone born for the sport. But what the people around him noticed most was how hard he worked at things that weren’t natural to him, and how patiently he absorbed failure.

    He arrived at Seiryo High School in Kanazawa, one of the legendary baseball programs in Japan, weighing over 100 kilograms, and the coach told him to lose weight before he touched a bat. So he ran. Every day, he just ran, until his body was ready.

    He actually joined Seiryo as a pitcher. On his first day of practice, the coaches took one look at his pitching and asked him where else he’d like to play. His hitting in that same first session was something else entirely. He cleared the fence while the upperclassmen were still figuring out how to get the ball off the infield. His classmates, initially, worried that maybe they were supposed to be doing more. “Maybe the seniors aren’t trying,” Matsui thought. They were trying.

    He was 15 years old and batting fourth for a team of 18-year-olds.

    By his third year (and final since high school in Japan is equivalent to grades 10-12 in America), Matsui had hit 60 home runs in total. The way he counted them matters: he only counted balls that cleared the fence on the fly. No inside-the-park home runs. No cheap ones. A ball either went over the fence or it didn’t, and everything else was just running.

    It’s a good thing he did so much of it when he joined the team.

    The scouts who watched him compared him to Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the most celebrated power hitter of his generation, and then said Matsui might be even better. One scout, watching Matsui at the spring tournament of his final year, described the experience as watching a different species play the same sport. Matsui hit two home runs in his first at-bats of that tournament. When the Seiryo coaches were asked about his power, they mentioned that during summer practice, he routinely broke softballs with his swing and the team’s budget for replacement balls ran to over 100,000 yen in a single year.

    There is more. Behind the right field wall at Seiryo, five meters past the 91-meter (299 feet) mark, stood a ten-meter net placed there specifically because Matsui’s practice shots kept clearing the fence. Beyond the net, some distance away, sat the home of the school principal. On more than one occasion, a baseball was found in his garden. On at least one occasion, a ball was discovered lodged in the snow guard on his roof. The estimated carry on some of these shots was over 150 meters (492 feet). The school, concerned about the liability, took out an injury insurance policy specifically to cover the possibility that Matsui’s batting practice might hurt someone outside the grounds.

    Sometime in 1990, a first-year outfielder from Meiden High School named Ichiro Suzuki was playing a practice game against Seiryo. He reached base and found himself standing next to Matsui on first. Years later, when a reporter asked him about it, Ichiro laughed. “The thing I remember,” he said, “is that his ears were really big.”

    His nickname came from a reporter named Misako Fukunaga who covered high school baseball for Nikkan Sports. She was watching Matsui before his third year and searching for words. She landed on Godzilla because of his lower body and his prominent canine teeth. Matsui initially protested. “Isn’t there something cuter?” he asked. There was not.

    Then came August 16, 1992, and the five intentional walks.

    Here is what Matsui did after that game, and this is the part that matters most.

    He didn’t sulk. He didn’t complain to reporters. He went home and, somewhere in the weeks and months that followed, he turned the humiliation of being deemed too dangerous to face, of being denied the right to compete into fuel of the purest kind.

    He said, years later, after he had retired: “When I went to the Giants and people knew me as the batter who was walked five times at Koshien, I felt I had to show them with my results.”

    He was drafted by the Yomiuri Giants in November 1992, when the great Shigeo Nagashima was returning to manage the team. Four teams tried to draft Matsui: the Dragons, the Hawks, the Tigers, and the Giants. They drew slips in that order. The Giants drew last, and their slip was the winning one.

    Nagashima called Matsui personally that same day. Matsui had wanted to play for the Hanshin Tigers his whole life (he had grown up a Tigers fan, his father’s influence) but when Nagashima called, something happened. He said yes.

    Then, a few days later, a piece of handwritten calligraphy arrived in the mail. It was from Nagashima. It read: “Matsui-kun, you’re destined to be a star for the Giants. Let’s put in the work together and build something great. I’m counting on you.”

    Matsui kept it.

    At his signing press conference, while other young draftees talked about the players they idolized or the statistics they hoped to reach, Matsui said something different. Soccer, he noted, was growing in Japan. Sumo had its stars. Children were being pulled in other directions. “I want to give those children dreams,” he said. “I want them to come to the stadium to see baseball played live.” He was only eighteen years old.

    His Giants career began poorly. The professional game was faster and harder and meaner than anything Matsui had ever seen, and in the spring of 1993 it showed. His first professional at-bat was in an exhibition game against a young Kazuhisa Ishii, who struck him out on a curveball. He went home and, by his own account, felt something close to fear. It wasn’t fear of failure exactly, but the dawning awareness that the distance between where he was and where he needed to be was real and large. He spent that spring hitting .094 in exhibition play, leading the team in strikeouts, and looking very much like what he was: a boy with enormous talent who had never been truly tested.

    Nagashima demoted him in April. This was not a small thing. Matsui was the most celebrated young player in Japan, the boy from Koshien, the Godzilla of a thousand newspaper headlines, and now he was playing in the minor leagues because he couldn’t hit professional pitching. He responded in the characteristically Matsui fashion: he said he would make Nagashima regret the decision, and then he went out and hit .375 with four home runs in twelve minor league games before being promoted to the top team, ichi-gun, May 1.

    His first professional home run came the following day, off Shingo Takatsu of the Yakult Swallows, a line drive into the right field stands at Tokyo Dome so pure and hard that teammates said you could hear the difference between that ball and the balls other people hit.

    He finished that season with 11 home runs, a record for Giants rookies who had graduated high school, and Nagashima started making plans.

    The plans were elaborate. Nagashima had a system he called the Thousand Day Plan. It gave him three years, starting from the moment he drafted Matsui, to turn him into the player Nagashima believed he could be. It began four days after Matsui joined the team. From then on, Nagashima worked with him almost every day: in the indoor batting cages at Tokyo Dome on home games, in hotel rooms on road trips, in the basement of Nagashima’s own home, and on days off, at whatever hotel Nagashima happened to summon him to. Matsui once described walking into the Seiyo Hotel in Ginza, one of the grandest hotels in Tokyo, carrying a bat, because Nagashima had called him in. He was, he noted, probably the only person in the history of that establishment to arrive that way.

    One of the things Nagashima told him: calluses on your hands are not a sign of hard work. They are a sign of a flaw. If your palms are calloused, you are gripping the bat too tightly. If you are gripping too tightly, you are losing bat control. The goal was not to build calluses but to eliminate them.

    When Matsui arrived at the Giants, his palms were covered in them. By the time he left Japan ten years later, after the home run titles and the MVP awards and the thousand consecutive games and all those swings in all those hotel rooms, his hands had become smooth. The calluses disappeared as the titles accumulated. He found this remarkable enough to mention at his retirement press conference, twenty years later, when a reporter asked him what he remembered most from his career.

    He paused for a moment. Then he said: “Swinging the bat alongside Nagashima-kantoku. That might be what stays with me most.”

    In 1994, in Matsui’s second year, the Giants were in the middle of one of the great pennant races in the history of Japanese baseball. The Central League came down to the final day: October 8th, a Sunday, the Giants against the Chunichi Dragons, winner takes all. It is remembered in Japan simply as “10.8” the way certain games are remembered only by their date*. Matsui, just twenty years old, hit a home run. Yomiuri won the pennant. He was not yet the best player on the team. He would be soon.



    *Like one of the most famous double headers in Japanese baseball history, 10.19.

    By 1995 he was hitting .274 with 22 home runs and winning his first Best Nine award. By 1996 he was something else entirely.

    That is the one that defined the first chapter of his career.

    Matsui hit 38 home runs that year at age 22, a performance so good that it tied Sadaharu Oh’s then-record for home runs by a player that age. He was the engine of a Giants comeback that nobody had expected. They were trailing badly in the standings in midsummer, and Matsui almost single-handedly dragged them back into contention. He won the July and August monthly MVPs. He won the season MVP. He was, without question, the best player in the Central League.

    But the home run title is the thing that got away, and the way it got away was somewhat familiar.

    Going into the final game of the season, Matsui was one home run behind Takeshi Yamasaki of Chunichi for the league lead. So the Dragons, playing the Giants in the season finale, walked him intentionally in all four of his plate appearances. Nagashima had even batted Matsui leadoff in an attempt to give him as many chances to swing as possible and it didn’t matter. The Chunichi battery walked him when he stepped into the box in the first inning, and then again in the third, the sixth, and the seventh. Sixteen consecutive balls. Four straight intentional walks. The Tokyo Dome crowd erupted. Fans threw things onto the field, screamed obscenities at the Chunichi dugout, rained down a fury that the reporters would describe the next morning as unlike anything they had witnessed.

    He was 22 years old, and it had happened again.

    What nobody quite expected was how Matsui would respond. When the reporters found him after the game, they asked how he felt. He was, by multiple accounts, the calmest person in the building.

    “They did it to me good,” he said. “But it can’t be helped. Not getting the title is frustrating, but that time was more frustrating.”

    The reporters asked what he meant by that time.

    He meant August 1992. He meant Koshien. He meant the five intentional walks in the summer tournament that had made him a national story and a national symbol and, in some ways, a national obligation. Four years into his professional career, standing in the ruins of his first serious chance at a batting title, he was still measuring his professional disappointments against that afternoon. As if nothing in the professional game could quite match what it felt like to be seventeen and refused.

    In 1997, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the great Kiyohara, the man every scout had compared Matsui to when Matsui was still in high school, came to the Giants as a free agent, and suddenly the team had two of the most feared hitters in Japan batting in the same lineup. They were called the MK Cannon, a portmanteau of their names, and the partnership was genuinely terrifying for opposing pitchers. Matsui hit 37 home runs. He lost the home run title by a single homer, again. It had become almost a joke. He kept hitting 37 or 38 home runs and kept finishing second.

    In 1998, he injured his knee during spring training. He would spend the rest of his career managing his knee. But that same year, he finally won the home run title. He also won the RBI crown. He also won the on-base percentage title. It was the first time since Oh Sadaharu in 1977 that a Giants player had won both home runs and RBI in the same season. He was 24 years old.

    The next year, he hit 42 home runs, the first time a Japanese player had hit 40 home runs in a season since Hiromitsu Ochiai in 1989, and the first time for the Giants since Sadaharu Oh in 1977.

    By 2000, Matsui was the unquestioned best player in Japan. That season he did something that had not been done at Yomiuri since 1950: he played every inning of every game in the cleanup spot. Every inning. Every game. All 135 of them. He hit .316 with 42 home runs and 108 RBI. He won the regular season MVP, the All-Star Game MVP, the Japan Series MVP, and a Golden Glove in the outfield. His consecutive games streak, despite his injuries, stood at over a thousand.

    His final season in Japan was 2002, and it was the greatest of his career.

    For the first half of the season, his numbers were not remarkable. He had hit 18 home runs in the first 76 games. Then something changed.

    In the second half of the season, over 64 games, he hit 32 home runs, a pace that would have given him 70 over a full year. He finished with 50 home runs, becoming only the eighth player in NPB history to reach that mark. He also hit .334 and drove in 107 runs and won the home run and RBI titles, and took home Central League MVP for the third and final time.

    And then, after the Japan Series, after his Giants won the championship, sweeping the Seibu Lions in four games, he sat down with Nagashima, the man who had drafted him, the man who had developed him, the man who had listened to the sound of his swing in empty batting cages for ten years, and told him he was going to America.

    He called it, later, the hardest decision of his life. He said he used the word “traitor” about himself, because that was how some Giants fans would see it, and he wanted to acknowledge the weight of what he was doing. He was leaving the team, the city, the league, the country that had made him. He was leaving Nagashima. He had won everything there was to win in Japan and he needed to know if he could win somewhere else.

    He came to New York in December of 2002, signing with the New York Yankees. The tabloids announced his arrival with the headline: Godzilla Comes to the Bronx. He was 28 years old, and he was starting over.

    His first game at Yankee Stadium started out ordinarily enough. Matsui grounded out and walked in his first two at-bats. But then in the fifth inning, with one out and the bases loaded, he ran the count full, and Twins starter Joe Mays threw a changeup. Matsui hit it into the right-center stands. Grand slam. First home run as a Yankee, in the first home game as a Yankee, with the bases loaded. It’s etched into my memory.

    He came back to the dugout and manager Joe Torre nudged him back out. He stepped onto the top step and acknowledged the crowd. Godzilla lands in New York.

    He played 518 consecutive games from his major league debut before a broken wrist ended the streak in 2006. He played through bad knees, through allergies that sabotaged his April numbers year after year, through the particular loneliness of being a man who spoke carefully through an interpreter in a clubhouse that moved fast and loud. He missed significant time due to a wrist injury. His teammates called him Mats. Derek Jeter called him one of his favorite players. Torre said he had never seen a player who treated his equipment with more respect.

    Then came 2009.

    He was 34 years old. His knees were shot. He had not played the outfield in more than a year. He was a full-time designated hitter, which in the National League parks where the World Series would partly be played meant he could only appear as a pinch hitter. He hit 28 home runs in the regular season. He had been brilliant in the playoffs.

    The World Series was against the Philadelphia Phillies. He was relegated to pinch hitting in games 3 (he hit a home run), 4, and 5. In Game 6, back in the Bronx, with the Yankees needing a win to close it out, Matsui batted fifth. He hit a two-run home run off Pedro Martínez in the second inning. He singled up the middle in the third. He hit a two-run double to right-center in the fifth. When the game ended, he had gone 3-for-4 with 6 RBI, tying the World Series record for RBI in a single game. The Yankees won. The stadium chanted his name.

    He was named the World Series MVP. He was the first Asian player to win it. The next morning, a column in the Asahi Shimbun compared him to Ichiro, finding their contrasting styles: “If Ichiro is a razor, Godzilla is a machete.” The Sankei Shimbun called them “the statistical Ichiro” and “the memorable Matsui.”

    That second phrase is the one that stuck, and it stuck for a reason. Matsui’s career was not defined by its peaks but by the consistency, the seriousness, and the absolute refusal to ever be less than fully present, in good times and bad. He gave interviews after every game regardless of outcome. He polished his glove every day. He never said a bad word about another person. He never missed a game unless his body literally could not continue.

    Matsui hit 502 home runs across two continents in his career. He played in 1768 consecutive games. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018 and became the youngest inductee at 43 years and 7 months, surpassing Hideo Nomo’s record of 45 years and 4 months in 2014.

    He had learned something as a teenager, watching a pitcher throw balls deliberately outside the strike zone, and had carried it with him for the next twenty years: that the world would not always give you the chance to prove yourself. That sometimes the greatest insult was not the criticism but the refusal to compete. And that the only real answer was what you did when they finally threw you a strike.

    By the end, the fans said exactly what he had hoped they would say:

    Of course they walked him. It couldn’t be helped.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • The 1984 Baltimore Orioles Tour in Japan: The Final Attempt at a True World Series

    The 1984 Baltimore Orioles Tour in Japan: The Final Attempt at a True World Series

    by Carter Cromwell

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Carter Cromwell tells us about the 1983 Baltimore Orioles visit to Japan.

    When the idea arose of a major-league team making a tour of Japan after the 1984 regular season, the grand vision – the hope – was that a true world series could finally take place.

    It didn’t quite work out that way.

    Ideally, the major-league representative would have been the Detroit Tigers, who outpaced all comers from Opening Day and easily won the World Series. But the logistics weren’t workable, so the 1983 champion Baltimore Orioles were invited. It was envisioned that the Yomiuri Giants – essentially, the New York Yankees of Japanese baseball and owned by the tour sponsor, Yomiuri Shimbun media group – would easily win the Japan Series, as they had so often done.

    It didn’t quite work out that way.

    In 1984 the Orioles slid from World Series champions to fifth place in their division. And the Giants – runners-up in the Japan Series in 1983 – finished third in the Central League and did not make the postseason.

    So the expectations were lowered, and the agenda was rewritten. Rather than two champions battling, the final schedule had the Orioles playing five games against the 1984 Japan Series champion Hiroshima Carp, five games against the Giants, two against a Japanese all-star team, and three against teams comprising players from two different clubs. The trip, spread over 22 days, coincided with the celebration of professional baseball’s 50thanniversary in Japan.

    As one writer noted, “To many Japanese, it was if someone slipped in two glasses of Coke for the Pepsi Challenge.”

    Still, the Japanese always took very seriously opportunities to play against American teams. In the years since, Japan has proved its baseball capabilities, winning the first two World Baseball Classics and the Gold Medal at the 2020 Summer Olympics, but at the time the country was still striving to equal the United States, and fans were looking for any evidence that the Japanese game was catching up.

    When Baltimore had its first practice after arriving in Japan, the Japanese press reported on how much power the Orioles displayed. Sadaharu Oh, the former Yomiuri Giants star, Japan’s all-time home-run leader (868), and by then the Giants’ manager, said of the Orioles, “We are going to learn more from them than they get from us. … They are 75 years ahead of us.”

    Many Japanese, though, including Nippon Professional Baseball Commissioner Takezo Shimoda, wondered if the gap was that yawning. While the Japanese didn’t have the power of the Americans, they felt that “like judo masters,” they “could turn the Americans’ strength against them.”

    And, indeed, Baltimore did not have a cakewalk. The Orioles went 8-5-1 overall: 4-1 versus Hiroshima and 4-1 against Yomiuri, but 0-3-1 against the combined teams and all-star teams. The Japanese had certainly improved since the last time Baltimore had come to Japan. The 1971 Orioles, a powerhouse club that had been upset by Pittsburgh in the World Series, toured Japan after that season and posted a 12-2-4 record. Those Orioles were 8-0-3 against the Giants – who had just won their seventh consecutive Japan Series title – including four shutouts and a no-hitter.

    It had been a month since the Orioles had completed their season, while the Carp had finished up their campaign just a week earlier with a victory over the Hankyu Braves in the Japan Series. It was hard to tell how seriously the Americans took the games. It was, after all, an exhibition tour, and a chance for the entourage to sightsee and experience Japan. And of course, the Orioles were getting paid – each player was to receive $22,500 (around $60,000 in 2022 dollars) plus expenses for his family.

    Players said pitchers did not want to risk arm injuries in games that meant nothing as far as a pennant chase went. First baseman Eddie Murray said, “You just come over here to enjoy yourself and try to play a good game of baseball.”

    Baltimore, though, did play five intrasquad games just before leaving home in an effort to stay sharp, and manager Joe Altobelli said, “It would be silly to come all the way over and not give them the best possible Baltimore Orioles.”

    The games began on October 27 at Korakuen Stadium, the home of the Yomiuri Giants from 1937 until 1988, when the Tokyo Dome opened next door. Korakuen Stadium was also, for various periods of time, home to seven other Japanese professional teams, and it housed the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame until the advent of the Tokyo Dome.

    Game 1 was all about Hiroshima left-hander Kazuhisa Kawaguchi. He had just completed his fourth season in NPB with a middling 8-6 record and a 4.23 earned-run average, but he looked like a world-beater against Baltimore. He went the distance, allowed just six hits, and drove in the only run of the game with a second-inning single off Orioles starter Mike Boddicker, who had won 20 games and made the American League All-Star team in 1984.

    Baltimore had three scoring threats. They loaded the bases in the first inning on a single by Cal Ripken Jr., a walk to Eddie Murray, and an infield hit by Gary Roenicke, but couldn’t push across a run. John Shelby got as far as third base in the fifth inning, but he could get no farther, and in the seventh they had runners on first and second with no outs and failed to score. Asked what he thought of the Orioles’ hitters, Kawaguchi said, “I don’t know. They all looked alike to me.” The Carp got only three hits against Boddicker, Bill Swaggerty, and Sammy Stewart, but Kawaguchi made the difference.

    “I want[ed] to see a home run,” said disappointed fan Harumi Michikawa, who was watching American baseball for the first time.

    Altobelli fell back on the tired-but-true cliché: “Good pitching will stop home runs every time. He’s a good kid, Kawaguchi.” “Our pitchers did very well,” Altobelli added. “Boddicker just got one ball up (against Kawaguchi). We’ll win tomorrow.”

    His prediction was on the mark.

    Infielder Todd Cruz, who in 1984 had hit only three home runs in what turned out to be his last season in the major leagues, smacked two the next day and made a diving catch from his third-base spot to lead the Orioles to a 5-3 victory over the Carp. Cruz’s solo shots came in the seventh and ninth innings before a reported crowd of 45,000 in Korakuen Stadium.

    Hiroshima jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the third, but Murray tied the game with an RBI single in the fourth inning. After Cruz homered, Hiroshima rallied with two seventh-inning runs to take a 3-2 lead, but Baltimore regained the lead in the top of the eighth when Murray and Ripken hit RBI singles. Storm Davis went five innings for the Orioles, allowing just one run, and Mark Brown, Tom Underwood, and Nate Snell finished up.

    The atmosphere surrounding the second game was spiced by a flap between managers Altobelli and Takeshi Koba of Hiroshima. Japanese rules at the time required lineups to be exchanged by both managers at the same time 30 minutes prior to a game. Japanese managers would usually reveal their starting pitchers at this time, forcing opposing managers to guess whether their players would be facing a left-handed or right-handed starter. Unaware of this rule, Altobelli brought two lineups to home plate two minutes before the start of game 2 and handed the umpires his preferred lineup once he determined that Koba was starting right-handed Kazuo Yamane.

    “You call this major league?” Koba asked after the game. “We are playing here. We should play by our rules.” Altobelli, who took responsibility for the mix-up before the second game, said simply, “In our minds, all managers think alike. He’s looking for any advantage he can get and I’m doing the same thing.”

    The Orioles gained the advantage, winning the next three games over Hiroshima by scores of 5-3, 7-5, and 5-2.

    In Game 3 before just 15,000 fans on a cold, windy night at Seibu Stadium, the Carp scored on a first-inning sacrifice fly by Koji Yamamoto (an eventual Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame inductee) and a two-run home run off Ken Dixon in the fourth by outfielder Tatsuaki Ogawa. However, Larry Sheets helped the Orioles overcome the early deficit. His seventh-inning solo home run tied the game, 3-3, and the Orioles took the lead later in the inning when Ripken tripled and came on home on Murray’s sacrifice fly. In the next inning, Sheets doubled home Al Bumbry for an important insurance run.

    Sheets, who had been called up late in the season after batting .302 at the Triple-A level, said the Japan series was “a proving time for me. Good play will give me a better chance to make the team next year.”His .400 average, 4 home runs, and 11 RBIs on the tour led to a long look in spring training of 1985 and an eventual eight-year big-league career.

    The next night, October 31, before 20,000 fans in Yokohama Stadium, Baltimore again came from behind to win. The Orioles scored four times in the top of the ninth inning on a single by Jim Traber, a pinch-hit double by Ken Singleton, and a two-run single by Lenn Sakata. That rally came just after Hiroshima had scored twice in the bottom of the eighth inning on hits by Shinji Hara and Kiyoshi Yamanaka to take a short-lived 5-3 lead.

    Hiroyuki Saito had given the Carp a 2-0 lead on a home run off Orioles starter Dennis Martinez. Sheets then doubled in a run in the third inning, and Sakata’s groundout in the fourth tied the score. Sheets hit another RBI double in the seventh inning, but Hiroshima tied the game in the bottom of the inning on a single by Yoshihiko Takahashi.

    A day later, 16,000 spectators in Osaka saw Murray drive in three runs with two home runs and Vic Rodriguez hit a two-run shot to lead Baltimore to a 5-2 victory and a 4-1 series win over Hiroshima. Kawaguchi was less successful than in his first outing, giving up three runs and eight hits in five innings. Mike Flanagan started for the Orioles and allowed four hits over five scoreless innings. Stewart earned his first save of the series. Altobelli said afterward that “[a]fter the loss in the first game, I thought it would be a little tough. But we played the best game of the series today.”

    The Orioles and Yomiuri Giants played the first of five games between the teams two days afterward, and Baltimore won, 7-4, on the strength of home runs by Murray, Ripken, and Sakata. Murray’s homer, a three-run shot, came in the first inning, and Ripken’s blast in the fifth gave the visitors a 5-1 advantage before 50,000 fans in Korakuen Stadium. Sakata homered in the sixth inning.

    Davis allowed four runs and eight hits in his five innings, while Snell and Stewart combined to hold the Giants hitless in the final four innings. Yomiuri starter Takashi Nishimoto, who had posted a 15-11 record in the regular season, gave up five runs and seven hits in his five innings of work. Outfielder Sadaaki Yoshimura was 3-for-5 with an RBI for the Giants. (Yoshimura batted .433 in seven games during the tour.)

    On November 4 Baltimore faced an all-star team made up of players from the 12 NPB teams and lost 5-4 as its three-run ninth-inning rally fell short. All-Japan scored single runs in each of the first three innings on a hit by Masayuki Kakefu of the Hanshin Tigers, a home run by Masaru Uno of the Chunichi Dragons, and another RBI single by Kakefu. Murray, who batted .367 with 9 home runs and 21 RBIs on the tour, homered in the seventh inning, but the all-stars scored twice in the eighth on run-scoring singles by Makoto Shimada of the Nippon Ham Fighters and Takayuki Kono of the Nankai Hawks. Baltimore got a two-run homer by Ripken and a solo shot from Murray in the ninth to get within a run, but reliever Kazuhiko Ushijima of the Dragons stopped the bleeding by striking out Sheets, Traber, and Singleton to end the game.

    All-Japan took another one-run victory two days later in Okayama, scoring six runs in the eighth inning to erase a 7-2 deficit and win 8-7. Stewart, who had saved four games earlier in the Orioles’ tour, didn’t have it this time. With two out in the eighth, he walked two batters to force in a run, allowed a two-run single to Masataka Nashida of the Kintetsu Buffaloes, and later gave up a three-run home run to Yomiuri second baseman Kazunori Shinozuka, who had led the Japanese Central League that season with a .334 batting average. Baltimore had gained its lead largely on the strength of three runs in the seventh and two in the eighth. Sheets hit a two-run homer in the seventh.

    The next game, played in a light drizzle before 16,000 fans in Hiroshima, featured Baltimore against a team comprising players from the Carp and the Giants. The game was called after nine innings and ended in a 5-5 tie. The Orioles scored twice in the first inning on Traber’s two-run homer, in the second on Gary Roenicke’s solo shot, and once in the fourth on Murray’s sixth homer of the series. Yoshimura hit a two-run homer in the third inning off Martinez and got another run in the fourth when third baseman Victor Rodriguez misplayed a groundball, allowing Kiyoyuki Nagashima to score from third base. Nagashima scored again in the sixth inning from third base when Orioles reliever Mark Brown dropped the ball while covering first base. Mitsuo Tatsukawa then hit a double to give the Japanese a 5-4 lead, but Traber hit his second home run of the game in the eighth to tie the score.

    Next, on November 9, the Orioles played the Giants again, this time in Kumamoto, and won 11-6, capitalizing on a 14-hit attack and four Yomiuri errors. Ripken, who batted .315 on the tour, was 4-for-5 with a home run, and Sheets, Cruz, and Rick Dempsey also homered. The Giants scored five runs in the fourth inning to take a 5-2 lead, but Baltimore rallied with six runs in the fifth as Dempsey, Ripken, and Cruz homered, and two more runs scored on a wild pickoff attempt.

    The teams traveled to Kokura, in southwestern Japan, for the next game. Playing before a crowd of 26,000, the Orioles held off a furious rally by Yomiuri to win 9-8. The Orioles jumped to a 4-0 lead after two innings – Rich Dauer’s two-run homer in the second was the highlight – and added five more in the fifth and sixth innings to lead, 9-3. Bumbry, a .360 hitter on the tour, homered in the fifth, and he and Floyd Rayford did the same in the sixth. The Giants nearly came all the way back, though, as Yasutomo Suzuki hit a two-run shot in the eighth inning and then two Baltimore errors in the ninth aided a three-run outburst that fell just short of tying the game. Though shaky, Swaggerty pitched the final two innings and managed to hold off the Giants, who outhit the Orioles 14 to 12.

    The same teams played again the next day before 31,000 in Kokura, and Baltimore had to again hold off a Yomiuri rally. Three-run homers by Murray and Sheets helped the visitors to a 9-0 lead after 4½ innings, but Yomiuri scored five times in the last half of the fourth, the big hit being a two-run home run by Kenji Awaguchi. The Orioles got a run in the fifth on Mike Young’s homer and then three more in the eighth to lead 13-5. The Giants, however, scored four runs in the eighth and ninth innings against Stewart to make the final score 13-9. Snell, the second Baltimore pitcher, picked up his fourth win of the tour. Giants starter Hiromi Makihara took the loss. Shelby, Sheets, and Murray combined for 10 RBIs, and Sheets went 4-for-5 at the plate.

    The next stop was Nagoya on November 13, where Baltimore played a team composed of players from the Dragons and Giants, who had finished second and third respectively in the Central League’s regular season. The Japanese team took a 5-1 lead after three innings, the big blow being a three-run homer in the third by Chunichi’s Masaru Uno. After Murray ripped a two-run shot in the sixth, Uno answered with a solo homer in the bottom of the inning. The Japanese scored twice more in the seventh, and Ripken homered for the Orioles in the eighth but it wasn’t enough as the Japanese won 8-4.

    A couple of days later, the Giants got a measure of revenge by defeating Baltimore 10-5 at Kusanagi Stadium in Shizuoka. Yomiuri scored all its runs in the fifth, sixth, and seventh innings. The Orioles held a 2-0 lead going into the bottom of the fifth. Coincidentally, just as Altobelli was telling a Japanese television interviewer that he was impressed with how the Japanese teams could create big innings, the Giants got to Flanagan, the Orioles starter. Yoshimura’s three-run home run was the highlight of a five-run outburst that got a laugh out of Singleton. “I’ll always remember Flanny for his sense of humor,” Singleton said. “I’ll never forget … when Altobelli went to the mound to ask [Flanagan] what was wrong, and he said, ‘That’s the problem with being on this side of the earth. My pitches go the other way.’”

    The Giants got three more runs in the sixth inning and then a two-run homer in the seventh by first baseman Kiyoshi Nakahata, who batted .571 in eight games during the tour. Cruz, Roenicke, and Murray all homered for Baltimore, but their efforts weren’t nearly enough, as the Orioles got only five hits off four Yomiuri pitchers.

    Baltimore was to play the next day in Kawasaki against a combination team of Lotte Orions and Yokohama Taiyo Whales players, but bad weather canceled the game and ended the tour.

    Statistically, the Orioles played somewhat better than their hosts. They had a .269 team batting average to .263 for the Japanese. Baltimore had a huge 35-12 advantage in home runs, but outscored the Japanese only 87-77 over the 14 games. Murray hit nine home runs for the Orioles, tied for the third highest total for a player during a single tour; only Babe Ruth with 13 in 1934 and Hank Sauer with 12 in 1953 had hit more. (Johnny Bench also hit nine in 1978.) The Orioles’ 35 home runs topped their 1971 tour total by one but did not come close to surpassing the team totals for the 1934 All-Americans (47), the 1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars (42), or the 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers (40).

    Singleton remembered the frustration Murray’s power display caused the Japanese pitchers. “Once we were playing in one of the old outdoor stadiums, and the opposing pitcher threw at Eddie’s head and knocked him down,” Singleton said. “Eddie got up, stared at the pitcher, and then ripped the next pitch. The fans all stood up, hoping someone would catch it, but it went completely out of the ballpark – 500-something feet.”

    “He was deliberately slow rounding the bases; I bet he took 30 minutes to do it,” Singleton added with a laugh. “We were yelling at the Japanese pitcher to keep throwing at us.”

    Uno led the Japanese in home runs with three in the three games in which he played. Awaguchi batted .429 in 14 at-bats. Hiroshima third baseman Sachio Kinugasa, an eventual Japanese Hall of Famer, hit just .136 in eight games. Kinugasa later surpassed Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games streak and finished with 2,215.

    On the pitching side, the Orioles posted a 4.83 earned-run average, while the Japanese had a 5.71 mark. Snell was the most impressive Orioles pitcher, going 4-0 with a 1.08 ERA. He had gone 1-1 with a 2.35 ERA in seven innings after a late-season call-up in 1984. Club officials had thought he was 29 years old, but when they arranged for his passport prior to the Japan trip, they discovered that he was 32. Nonetheless, he stuck with the Orioles in 1985 and went 3-2 with a 2.69 ERA, pitching 100 innings – all in relief. He then played two additional seasons in the majors.

    Of the Japanese pitchers, 24-year-old Kazuhisa Kawaguchi had a 2.25 ERA in 16 innings over three games, and he struck out 16 batters. He went on to have an 18-season NPB career. Only two others – Suguru Egawa and Takashi Nishimoto, both of the Giants – pitched at least 10 innings. Egawa had a 3.00 ERA, and Nishimoto’s was 5.40. Two of the Japanese pitchers – Manabu Kitabeppu of Hiroshima and Masaki Saito of the Giants – later made the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. Kitabeppu, who had just completed the ninth of his eventual 19 NPB seasons, threw nine innings and posted a 4.00 ERA. Saito, who had just completed his rookie season, allowed seven hits and two walks in four innings and had an 11.25 ERA.

    Inevitably, key topics of conversation were the differences between the US and Japanese styles of play and how well the Japanese matched up against the Americans. That is still true today, but it was even more so at that time, when fewer Americans were knowledgeable about Japanese baseball.

    Orioles catcher Rick Dempsey noted the contrast between the small ball of the Japanese and the wait-for-the-big-inning Americans that still exists, saying, “The Japanese like to hit and run. They like to steal bases. They generally play a much more aggressive, a little quicker game than the Americans do.”

    As previous American players had learned, the umpires’ strike zone for foreign players can be much wider. As Sakata remarked, “If you’ve got a strike zone from your neck to the ground, it’s hard to hit.”

    Stan Isle explained in The Sporting News:

    The Orioles’ exhibition tour of Japan provided some interesting contrasts in baseball technique. Ray Miller, Baltimore pitching coach, was surprised to learn that most Japanese pitchers throw hard every day and warm up much longer than their American counterparts. “The Japanese pitchers could throw a lot harder if they didn’t have them throwing 24 hours a day,” Miller said. He also noted that most Japanese pitchers have a hitch in the middle of their lengthy windups … [something major leaguers would discover 11 years later when Hideo Nomo debuted with the Los Angeles Dodgers]. Also, many Japanese hitters have hitches in their swings and lift their front feet in the manner of Sadaharu Oh. “They can get away with that stuff because the Japanese pitchers can’t throw hard enough,” said Ralph Rowe, Orioles batting instructor. Pitcher Sammy Stewart found Japanese hitters especially anxious to protect the plate on a two-strike count. “It’s like it’s a sin for them to strike out,” Stewart said, “but it’s OK to ground out.”

    Clyde Haberman of the New York Times noted, “Japanese teams spend many more hours in practice than the Americans are used to. Players carry their own bags and bats. The Japanese put far more emphasis on fundamentals. … Americans who insist that they know more about the game usually find their suggestions ignored, and sometimes scorned. The concept of team play almost always overrides individual considerations. Displays of temper and hurt, regarded by many American players as marks of desire and hustle, tend to be viewed by Japanese as selfish.”

    “A lot of guys get here thinking it will be easy [in Japan] hitting 30, 35 homers, batting .300,” said Tim Ireland, who played for the Carp in 1983 and ’84. “Then they find it’s a lot harder than they thought, and many just can’t deal with the Japanese way of doing things. I’ve gotten where I can tell in a few minutes whether someone is going to make it. … The biggest problem is communication. You’re isolated a lot of the time, with a language you don’t know and, for some families, it’s a style of living they can’t adjust to. In the States, if you’re a ballplayer, you’re just a commodity. But here you’re an imported commodity, and it’s worse.”

    In the wake of the tour, opinions seemed to be leaning slightly toward the sentiment that the Japanese game was getting better vis-à-vis the American game. After the first game, Altobelli commented, “Our team is superior in power and the Carp in speed. A trade between the two teams would make the best team.”

    Singleton, who had also played on the 1979 American League all-star team that toured Japan, said he wasn’t impressed with the Japanese pitchers at that time but “was more so when we went back there in 1984. They moved the ball around a lot and threw from different angles. And, certainly, they’ve had guys come over to the US since then and do well.”

    The mass-circulation newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, whose conglomerate owns the Yomiuri Giants, wrote that “the Orioles’ win-loss record shows that Japanese players’ abilities are almost the same as American players, but it is still true that Japanese pro baseball is behind the US in terms of power and speed of its players.”

    The 31-year quest for an international world series by matching the Japanese and major league champions in an exhibition series had failed yet again. Beginning in 1953 Japanese organizers had tried to predict the World Series winner and invite that team to Japan. Although the predictions sometimes came close, a reigning World Series champion had never visited the Land of the Rising Sun. It was time for a change. The Orioles became the last major league club to face the Japanese champion in post-season exhibition series. The next time major leaguers visited Japan it would be under a new format.

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    The 1984 Baltimore Orioles Tour in Japan: The Final Attempt at a True World Series