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

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

    by Dennis Snelling

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week DENNIS SNELLING tells us about what was supposed to be a true World Series: the 1971 Baltimore Orioles visit to Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1971 Baltimore Orioles Goodwill Tour ticket (Robert Fitts Collection)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read the rest of the article on SABR.org

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

    Nippon Professional Baseball Teams: A Primer

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

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

    Listen here:

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

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

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The quiet slugger from Oklahoma who became a Kansai folk hero

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

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

    Kamisama. Hotokesama. Baasu-sama.

    God. Buddha. Bass.

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

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

    They meant it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Nine.

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

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

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

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

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

    “Hanshin Bus Stalls.”

    Or if he had a slump.

    “Hanshin Bus Breaks.”

    It was too easy.

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

    And then he started playing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Two outs. Runners on first and second.

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

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

    He had been waiting for that pitch for two years.

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

    It rose toward center field.

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

    The ball disappeared into it.

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

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

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

    Three consecutive home runs to center field.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He finished at 54.

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

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

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

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

    Triple Crown.

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

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

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

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

    It sounds absurd. It was perfectly Kansai.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Yet still, he hit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Even then, he sounded surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Think about that arc.

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

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

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

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

    He left abruptly. He returned gently.

    And through it all, the chant remained.

    Kamisama. Hotokesama. Baasu-sama.

    God.

    Buddha.

    Bass.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • ‘They Beat Us the Japanese Way’: The San Francisco Giants’ 1970 Spring Tour

    ‘They Beat Us the Japanese Way’: The San Francisco Giants’ 1970 Spring Tour

    by Steve Treder

    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 Steve Treder writes about the 1970 San Francisco Giant’s spring training visit to Japan.

    The San Francisco Giants – a party of more than 60, including players, management, and staff, plus embedded sportswriters – boarded their chartered Japan Airlines jet at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on the damp gray morning of Tuesday, March 31, 1970. Among the players, the prevailing mood was one of relief that their two-week ordeal in Japan was finally ending, spiked with a sense of annoyance at having to pull this damn slog in the first place. From their perspective, the tour – while offering bits of fun and adventure – had mostly been an exercise in discomfort, exhaustion, and competitive humiliation.

    Yet the club owner, 67-year-old Horace C. Stoneham, was settling into his first-class seat in a more ambivalent state of mind. To be sure, he was aware of the unhappiness among the players, and that pained him. Whatever else he was, Stoneham was an owner who cared deeply about his players – it would not be an exaggeration to say that he loved his ballplayers – and frustrating his boys, disappointing them in any way, was the last thing he ever intended to do. But as the operator of the business, he had broader concerns, and chief among them was the increasingly urgent need for cash revenue. The 1970 spring-training tour of Japan had netted the Giants a fat payday, something that was getting harder to find these days. This fact steeled Stoneham, reassuring him that, despite the trip’s problems, his decision to go was the right one. He’d done what he needed to do.

    Moreover, beyond the cold hard accounting, these two weeks of on-the-ground, in-the-flesh examination of the state of Japanese baseball had kindled in Horace Stoneham a familiar old sense of wonder and excitement, of boyish eagerness for the future. He hadn’t personally been over to Japan in 10 years (though he had engaged in long-distance baseball business with his Japanese friends and associates), and the progress and power now vividly demonstrated by Japanese baseball – not just as a modern business, but as a cultural spirit – delighted Stoneham. Even when things are at their toughest, he knew, when it all looks bleak, there’s always a fresh new way to go. The Giants owner knew this. His life’s work had demonstrated it to him, in so many ways. You just had to be looking for the new opportunities, and to make yourself ready for them. That was the thing. That was always the thing.

    Lefty’s Giants

    There was never any American major-league ballclub more indelibly connected to Japanese professional baseball than these Giants, whose full ownership Horace Stoneham had inherited from his father in 1936. Their first opponent on this tour’s schedule was none other than the perpetual powerhouse Yomiuri Giants – so christened in the spring of 1935 by their strategic adviser Lefty O’Doul. He named them in specific honor of the New York Giants, O’Doul’s final major-league team. The Yomiuri lads would forever be clad in Giants-style black-and-orange caps, uniforms, and regalia.

    When O’Doul was in New York with the Giants, he and Stoneham came to know each other well. When O’Doul’s career took him back to San Francisco, he and Stoneham sustained a good relationship. In 1945-46 their paths crossed again, when Stoneham’s Giants affiliated O’Doul’s Seals into their farm system, and in that period (as well as later), O’Doul was widely rumored as a candidate whenever Stoneham was thought to be pondering a managerial change.

    It was through the O’Doul connection that Stoneham’s Giants first toured Japan in the fall of 1953, and then again in 1960, at which point O’Doul was back on the (now San Francisco) Giants’ payroll as a hitting coach. In 1966, when O’Doul bought out his investment partners and became sole owner of the landmark San Francisco bar and restaurant bearing his name, the scuttlebutt was that he’d done it with the financial assistance of Stoneham. O’Doul would have been prominently engaged in the Giants’ 1970 Japan visit, too, but he’d so suddenly and sadly died in December of 1969. Among Lefty O’Doul’s vast legion of true friends distressed by his passing, not many had known him longer, or loved him more, than Horace Stoneham.

    Readily taking the torch from O’Doul, the key organizer of the 1970 tour was 48-year-old Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada. A native of Santa Maria, California, the son of Japanese immigrants, the bilingual Harada was spared internment during World War II, and instead was inducted into the US Army to serve as an intelligence officer. After the war he remained in Japan and soon became one of the key figures working with O’Doul to help heal the deeply wounded American-Japanese relationship with the tonic of baseball. When Stoneham’s Giants moved to San Francisco, they hired Harada, officially as a scout, specifically as their direct agent within the realm of Japanese baseball.

    Shared Goals

    The press accounts of the Giants’ 1970 tour reliably described it as a “goodwill” venture, dedicated to forging and expanding friendship between the two countries and their baseball communities. No doubt that much was true. But the tour wasn’t only that, or even mostly that. Fundamentally it was a business deal, designed and expected to deliver a profit to its sponsor, the Lotte Orions of the Japan Pacific League, as well as its invited guest star Giants.

    And for Stoneham’s Giants, generating some extra income wasn’t just a luxury. After enjoying consistently robust attendance in their first 10 years in San Francisco, the Giants saw ticket sales plummet with the arrival of the Athletics in Oakland in 1968. Stoneham needed this business. The deal he negotiated had favorable terms: The Orions would underwrite the Giants’ expenses, while guaranteeing Stoneham $150,000 from the proceeds.

    The Giants’ 1970 Japanese tour was a springtime visit, a first. All previous American excursions had taken place in the fall, at the conclusion of the US and Japanese seasons, and were thus understood to be “just fun” barnstorming exhibitions. Staging it in March instead made these games a part of the spring-training schedule for both the Giants and their opponents; while they were still exhibitions, these contests took on the purpose of training the participants for their coming regular seasons.

    For the Giants’ opponents, any disruption to their normal springtime routine was minimal: they were training in Japan anyway, and now they’d get to test themselves with some games against a formidable US major-league ballclub. As for the Giants themselves, Stoneham was no doubt considering this jaunt to be comparable to the springtime barnstorming schedules that were customary in earlier decades, as big-league teams played their way home after initial training at their “camp” somewhere in the South or Southwest.

    What Stoneham was perhaps not properly appreciating was that his 1970 ballplayers were too young to have experienced springtime barnstorming. These were creatures of the modern Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues, and they were accustomed to spring training (a) in balmy weather, (b) with minimal travel, and thus (c) allowing for extended daily and weekly routines of conditioning, practice, and in-game action – as well as American-style time off. To yank them away from Arizona in mid-March, put them on a marathon jet-lag-inducing flight to a faraway place notorious for cold and wet spring weather, and once there submit them to a wearying schedule that prohibited their usual daily routines, wasn’t the most player-friendly course of action.

    Nor were the games themselves anticipated to be cupcakes for San Francisco. In the assessment of Harada, “Our club is going over there next week expecting that it won’t have any easier time playing their clubs than it has been playing American teams in Arizona. The Japanese teams used to be comparable to our Class A minor leagues. But that was some time ago.”

    On March 15, a few days before the US team was scheduled to depart for Japan, the San Francisco Examiner reported:

    All of [the Giants players] are looking forward to the trip, but in varying degrees. Some fear the interruption of the normal spring training process could leave the Giants unprepared for the season opener at Candlestick. Others fear that cold weather in Japan could hamper them.

    The same article noted that Stoneham was doing his best to cheer them up: He was providing everyone with $500 spending cash, and players did look forward to shopping for pearls, cameras, and stereo equipment.

    Bumpy Ride

    The Giants’ flight from San Francisco, consuming nearly all of Wednesday, March 18, was an ominous start. Headwinds buffeted and slowed the plane, and the leg from Honolulu to Tokyo was itself a 10-hour barf-bag nightmare. When they finally landed in Japan, it was 45 degrees and windy.

    A welcoming party greeted them at the airport. Giants manager Clyde King, addressing the thronging press, vowed that his club was there on serious business, ready to play hard. Moreover, he noted that the team from Candlestick Park was “not afraid of cold weather.”

    The next morning the groggy Giants boarded a bus that inched through the city’s monumentally snarled traffic to Tokyo Stadium. There they worked out. The wind at the ballpark was described as “colder than Candlestick’s notorious breeze,” blowing straight in toward home plate with “a knife edge.” Hitters taking batting practice attempted to warm numb fingers over a smoldering bucket of charcoal. The infield grass was reported as “green but skimpy,” while the springtime outfield was “still brown from the cold wind.”

    The next day they played their first game, and lost to the Yomiuri Giants, 6-5, in 11 innings. Sadaharu Oh belted two home runs, including a walk-off game-winner, and Shigeo Nagashima homered as well. The day after that, also at Tokyo Stadium, in 39-degree overcast weather, the host Lotte Orions defeated their guests, 4-3, this time in 12 innings. Despite the gloom, a hardy band of San Francisco Giants Boosters some 100 strong, all the way from California – in loudly colorful attire, contrasting sharply with the drably clothed Japanese fans – lustily sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and traded cheers with the Lotte faithful.

    After the game the Giants embarked upon their first intra-Japan road trip. It didn’t go well. Having already checked out of their Tokyo hotel that morning, the players had to wait in a long queue to shower and change, because the ballpark clubhouse had only two showers, and the Americans weren’t keen on using the large communal soaking tub. Then, without time to eat, they were jammed onto a tourist-class flight to Fukuoka, over 600 miles distant, and from there, packed like sardines with all their gear into two small buses for a 2½-hour ride to their hotel. Neither conveyance was designed for 6-foot-tall passengers.

    When they finally arrived at nearly midnight, the players were loudly displeased. As one veteran put it, “This is like the low minors.” Their ire was directed at travel arranger Cappy Harada. “Where’s Cappy?” they asked. “Why isn’t he here?” Alas, Harada was not there, having instead flown ahead with Stoneham to Kyoto, first class, to woo potential broadcast sponsors.

    In Shimonoseki the Giants at last won a game, though not without rancor. Lotte Orions manager Wataru Nonin complained that San Francisco pitcher Gaylord Perry was throwing a spitball:

    Umpire Al Kuboyama warned Perry that if he continued to rub his fingers over the back of his head he would call those pitches balls. Perry pretended to not understand and imitated the umpire’s motion with his gloved hand. After Perry left the game he started to run in the outfield – a standard practice in spring training in the States – and umpire Kuboyama chased him off the field. King protested, but the Japanese were very serious about the whole thing.

    The Giants lost their next game, making it three out of four defeats to begin the trip. This was widely noticed, given that no previous big-league American barnstormer had encountered much competitive challenge in Japan. Willie Mays, reflecting on how different this was from his previous visit, in 1960, assessed that the Japanese “play much better today as a team. They make fewer false moves and fewer mistakes. They don’t make any bad throws and don’t throw to the wrong base. They run the bases better, hit behind the runner and sacrifice. They have been very well coached.”

    Sportswriter Jim McGee concurred, but believed that wasn’t the only thing making it hard for these Giants:

    The improvement in Japanese baseball explains only in part why the Giants have been able to win only one game in four so far. The Giants record here does not mean that the Japanese are surpassing the Americans in baseball. There are other factors.

    For one thing, the Japanese clubs are ahead of the Giants in conditioning. The Giants are far from ready to open the National League season. The playing conditions are primitive compared with American fields and clubhouses. The weather has been bitterly cold.

    Also, the Japanese teams have been playing strictly to win while the Giants have been following spring training procedures – giving less experienced players a chance in every game. The Japanese managers change pitchers according to the situation, while manager Clyde King is letting his hurlers go a certain number of innings no matter what is happening.

    The tour then took the Giants to Osaka, and the weather only got worse: On the morning of March 25, they were greeted with snowfall. Willie McCovey, no stranger to knee trouble, visibly limped into the breakfast room. “My knee always hurts when it’s going to rain,” he observed, “but it didn’t tell me it was going to snow.”

    The snow let up to allow that day’s baseball, albeit with the temperature at about 50 degrees and the wind icy cold. The Giants played a doubleheader, beating the Lotte Orions 2-0 and losing to the Nankai Hawks, 9-0, along the way being shut out in three innings of relief pitching by Masanori Murakami, the former Giant. (The previous week a rumor had circulated that Stoneham was engaged in negotiations with the Hawks to reacquire Murakami in a trade; however valid that notion was, nothing ever came of it.)

    Former big-league second baseman Don Blasingame, who was with the Giants in 1960-61, had played in Japan for three years and was now a coach for the Hawks. He acknowledged the problematic spring weather:

    “I told [current Giants’ second baseman] Ron Hunt in St. Louis last winter to wear his long underwear over here for the tour,” Blasingame said. “I’ve started spring training over here as early as January 27 and it does get cold. I don’t mind it though. I guess I’ve gotten used to it. It’s no colder than a night game at Candlestick Park. This year it is staying colder a little longer.”

    By this time, Stoneham’s wisdom at choosing to undertake the spring tour was being roundly questioned in the San Francisco press:

    The difficulty … seems to lie with owner Horace Stoneham’s decision to pack up in the middle of spring training, upsetting the annual rites and leaving the Arizona sunshine to barnstorm in Japan. It’s cold and snowy over there and the surroundings are totally unfamiliar, and, well, it just isn’t anything like how a major league baseball player gets ready for the major league season.

    “I don’t know what it is exactly,” Hal Lanier, the Giants’ veteran shortstop, was quoted the other day. “I mean, Japan is an interesting place and the people have been hospitable and all that. Most of the guys pretty much agree on the subject, all due respect to Mr. Stoneham’s decision to make the trip. It just isn’t the same, know what I mean? We’re supposed to be concentrating on getting ready for the season and trying to win a pennant. We hope this trip won’t hurt our chances.”

    The fed-up Giants players now did what they could to assert some control. The team voted to tell Harada and the tour management to change the schedule: Instead of staying in Nagoya on March 26 for a day off, they opted to return to Tokyo a day early and spend their precious leisure hours in the big city. Their frustrations were again articulated in the press: there was almost no opportunity for practice outside of the games, as even batting practice was limited to 15 minutes before each game; pitchers were unable to take their usual daily running in the outfield, because the ballparks were so small that they’d have to run in front of the outfielders instead of behind them; and moreover, Japanese fans were angered at the sight of pitchers running during a game, considering it an insult, a signal that the Giants weren’t taking the competition seriously.

    The Long-Term Perspective

    Horace Stoneham, perplexed though he was by his players’ sour experience, was nevertheless able to perceive sweetness in the tour. His interest wasn’t only in making immediate money off these engagements. He was also keenly focused (notwithstanding his mid-1960s misunderstandings in attempting to recruit Murakami) on the development of Japan as a source of player talent for the Giants. Stoneham’s organization had been second to none in opening up the Caribbean region to major-league talent-harvesting in the 1950s and 1960s, and he believed that by investing in relationships and forging trusting partnerships in Japan, he could gain another competitive advantage here.

    With that in mind, Stoneham was warmly encouraged by what he was seeing on this tour. Most obviously, the generation of young Japanese nourished from childhood by an ample postwar diet had simply grown taller and stronger than their elders. Stoneham assessed that the average height of the Giants’ opposing players in 1953 had been perhaps 5-feet-3, then jumped to about 5-feet-6 or 5-feet-7 in 1960, and was now getting closer to 6 feet. The drawback of Japanese players being too small was rapidly becoming outmoded.

    And not only were modern Japanese players ever more athletic, they were vividly, as Willie Mays had observed, “well coached.” They demonstrated baseball technique and skill better than ever before, and if the top-tier Japanese leagues altogether weren’t quite major-league quality, they were clearly gaining ground. Unquestionably there were now several, perhaps dozens, of Japanese players capable of at least making the majors, if not excelling there. “In five years, the Japanese will be a source of players for American baseball,” Stoneham predicted. “The Japanese player will be a common sight on American clubs.”

    While that assessment rested upon a sound reckoning of the baseball talent issue, the assumption Stoneham displayed in making it was telling: It was right and proper, indeed inevitable, that the American big leagues would recruit all the best young Japanese talent for themselves. The best interests of Japanese ballclubs, and Japanese fans, weren’t part of the equation. Stoneham was plainly not anticipating that the Japanese professional baseball business itself, vastly better organized and more unified than any counterpart in Latin America, could and would refuse to accommodate the Americans in positioning Japan as just another major-league feeder.

    Yet there was another potentiality beyond even that, and this was one in which the interests of US and Japanese baseball might fully align: a high-level partnership. Perhaps a truly international World Series could be staged, and/or perhaps Japanese franchises could be incorporated into major-league baseball. What was emerging in Japan wasn’t just a cadre of world-class players, but a broader world-class baseball culture, and a tremendous fan base: a world-class baseball market.

    It was this aspect of baseball in Japan that most captivated Stoneham. He was aware that the Japanese public consumed 13 daily sports newspapers, with most of the content for most of the year devoted to baseball. He noted that from his bullet-train window between Nagoya and Tokyo he’d seen countless kids engaging in baseball games all through the countryside. He was particularly struck by the image of one lone boy in a field, a husky teenager not attending to his farm chores, but instead swinging a bat, practicing his cut.

    “You have to be impressed when you see them using any vacant space to play, including cobblestone streets,” said Stoneham. “The other day, I saw a group of boys going along the street carrying fishing poles and nets. I asked Cappy where they could fish because I couldn’t see water anywhere. He told me they weren’t going fishing. As soon as they found an empty lot, they’d stick the poles in the ground, put the nets on top and use them for a backstop for the catcher. Most of them were wearing getas, the shoes with wooden clogs. You haven’t seen baseball until you’ve seen a kid in his getas, running down a fly ball on a cobblestone street.”

    End of the Bumpy Ride

    On Sunday, March 29, the Giants concluded their schedule with a 10-6 loss to the Orions at Tokyo Stadium. It was their least impressive performance yet: Gaylord Perry was riddled for seven runs in the first three innings, Ron Hunt crudely booted two grounders, and catcher Dick Dietz dropped a simple throw, botching a force out at the plate. The defeat finalized the team’s tour record at 3-6, by far the worst ever compiled by an American visitor to Japan.

    Manager Clyde King squarely faced reality:

    “The Japanese beat us completely. That was a fact. No alibis, no excuses. They beat us the Japanese way, with thorough preparation and planning. I knew they were laying for us and tried to get the club ready for what they had to face. We didn’t do the job, that was all there was to it.”

    The misadventure was hooted in the San Francisco press: Reporter Jim McGee, who traveled with the team, concluded that “the Giants lost face in Japan,” and commented, “[W]hat happened … was a blow to [the players’] professional pride. They are nettled that they were sent there virtually unprepared and are now being castigated for not playing better.” Columnist Prescott Sullivan put it bluntly: “The Giants made asses of themselves over there.”

    And to add illness to insult, ace pitcher Juan Marichal was one of several Giants players who came down with colds and flu on the tour – hardly surprising given the conditions. But Marichal’s bout was especially severe:

    “We went to Japan and the weather was so cold. It was about 27 degrees, it was so cold. And the stadium was concrete all over which made it colder. And they don’t have any heaters in there or nothing. The only thing they have is charcoal you would burn to warm up, and quite a few players got sick. I was one of the guys that got sick, I caught a real bad cold.”

    By the time he returned to the States, Marichal had developed a respiratory infection, and was running a high fever. He was given multiple shots of penicillin, and that provoked a serious allergic reaction. He became dangerously ill, and had to be hospitalized. Marichal missed several weeks of play, and then pushed himself back to the mound before he’d regained his strength. For the first time in his brilliant career he was miserably ineffective, until at last rounding into form over the second half of the season.

    Whether it was caused by their tumultuous spring training tour or not – Marichal’s struggles surely didn’t help – the Giants started the 1970 regular season poorly. In late May, with the perennially contending team mired in fourth place, 12 games behind, Stoneham fired Clyde King.

    The Lotte Orions in 1970 went on to enjoy a marvelous season, a pennant-winning 80-47 campaign. Spring training had presented no problems for them.

    As for Horace Stoneham, his dreams of finding a competitive and financial revival for his Giants amid the gathering abundance of Japanese baseball were to be unfulfilled. Within five years, facing bankruptcy, he would be forced to put his beloved Giants – his family legacy and his life’s work – up for sale, and retire to Arizona.

    Read the rest of the article on SABR.org

    ‘They Beat Us the Japanese Way’: The San Francisco Giants’ 1970 Spring Tour
  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 10, Atsuya Furuta

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The four-eyed catcher who changed Japanese baseball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He had finally made it.

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

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

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

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

    Furuta learned quickly because thinking was already his instinct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    By his second season, his transformation stunned the league.

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

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

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

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

    *The pair combined for 101 home runs that season.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He refused.

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

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

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

    Games stopped for two days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

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

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The thinking pitcher who survived by understanding the game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The path turned complicated in 1985.

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

    Then the Giants selected him first overall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Then came the injury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    And in the end, they did.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 12, Masayuki Kakefu

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 12, Masayuki Kakefu

    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 unlikely star who learned what it meant to carry Hanshin

    Some players arrive in professional baseball destined to be stars due to their size or abilities or knack for performing in big moments. Some were already on the national stage due to legendary performances in high school tournaments or breaking records in university leagues. And still some other players grow into greatness slowly enough that, even while it is happening, nobody quite realizes what they are watching. 

    Masayuki Kakefu was not supposed to become “Mr. Tigers.”

    The men who carried that title before him had all entered professional baseball as celebrities. Fumio Fujimura was a Koshien* hero. Minoru Murayama was a national collegiate ace. Koichi Tabuchi arrived as the prince of university baseball, already famous for hitting home runs before he wore a professional uniform. The title belonged to players who were known long before they reached Hanshin.

    *Koshien refers to the high school baseball championship tournament that takes place every summer, held at Koshien Stadium, which is also the home of the Hanshin Tigers.

    Kakefu was different. He had reached Koshien once as a second-year student, but by his senior year there were no professional offers. He was small for a power hitter, 168 or 170 centimeters (around 5 feet 7 inches for my fellow Americans), and few scouts imagined him surviving in professional baseball. It is almost impossible, knowing what came later, to imagine that the boy who would eventually hit 349 home runs was once considered an unlikely prospect.

    His path opened only through chance and persistence. Through a connection to Hanshin’s Motoo Andoh arranged by his father Taiji, who had coached amateur baseball, Kakefu was allowed to participate in Hanshin’s autumn camp, effectively as a tryout. Manager Masayasu Kaneda saw something others had missed and insisted the young infielder be kept close to the first team. The Tigers selected him in the sixth round of the 1973 draft, not as a future centerpiece but as a hopeful project.

    After Kakefu’s rookie season, during a gathering with team officials, his father made a simple request: “Masayuki has been trained to endure anything. Please give my son a chance to become a regular.” It was a simple request, but it captured something essential. Before Kakefu became known for power or popularity, he had been prepared to withstand difficulty. That would prove to be his defining trait.

    Even after being drafted, nothing came easily. He was not taken to the main spring camp in Aki City and instead remained behind at Koshien with the leftover group. When he first watched the regular players train, he later recalled that everyone looked like monsters. Koichi Tabuchi in particular seemed enormous, “like he was two meters tall*,” and Kakefu wondered whether he truly belonged in that world. Unsure of himself, he asked Tabuchi whether someone with such a small body could survive as a professional. Tabuchi answered simply: professional baseball was interesting precisely because even smaller players could become great. Then he handed Kakefu one of his own bats. The words and the bat became treasures.

    *About 6’7” for my American friends.

    When he signed, he did not yet have a uniform number. Only later was he handed number 31. Stories would eventually claim the number combined Shigeo Nagashima’s 3 and Sadaharu Oh’s 1, or symbolized working three times harder to become number one. Kakefu laughed at those explanations. “All after-the-fact,” he said. It was simply the lowest number available. But he intended to make it his own.

    Opportunity arrived by accident. During an open-season stretch, injuries and personal absences forced the Tigers to summon him from the minors. Used first as a pinch hitter, he produced results immediately, then continued hitting when given a start at shortstop. Against expectations, he made the Opening Day roster. Chunichi Dragons pitcher Senichi Hoshino later remembered facing him early and noticing a violent full swing that produced a sharp foul tip. Even in an ordinary groundout, Hoshino felt instinctively that this was a future star.

    Strong performances earned him a roster spot, and by his second season he was locked in a fierce competition at third base with first-round draft pick Noriyoshi Sano. Endless defensive drills under coach Andoh pushed him to exhaustion: he once fell asleep during practice and was sharply reprimanded. Nothing about his rise was smooth. Errors came, confidence wavered, and his rookie numbers were modest at best. Yet he kept working. Even after nights out, he returned to the dormitory and swung a bat on the rooftop until one or two in the morning. Practice, he believed, was the only thing he possessed that others could not take away.

    By 1976, only his third professional season, now a little taller at 175 centimeters, he broke through with a .325 batting average, 27 home runs, Best Nine honors, and the confidence that came from finishing ahead of Sadaharu Oh in the batting rankings. At twenty-one years old, he became the face of a phenomenon. “Kakefu calls” echoed through Koshien Stadium. Banners bearing the number 31 appeared in the stands. Young fans and women in particular were drawn to the shy young player whose gentle smile disappeared the moment he stepped into the batter’s box, replaced by an intense, almost feral focus. A song titled “GO! GO! Kakefu” was even released, and the excitement surrounding him became known as the “Kakefu Fever.”

    Then came 1978. Tabuchi, the third Mr. Tigers, was traded away at the end of the season. Soon afterward he phoned Kakefu with advice that would follow him for the rest of his life: “Finish your career in the striped uniform.”

    Suddenly the responsibility of the franchise shifted. Kakefu did not ask for it, but he felt it immediately. When he struggled, newspaper headlines blamed him directly. When he struck out four times, his name filled the front pages. “Hitting and becoming a headline anyone can do,” he later said. “But becoming the headline when you fail is different. That’s when I understood what Tabuchi had been carrying.”

    In 1979 he responded with 48 home runs, breaking Fujimura’s long-standing franchise record and winning his first home run title. Yet the transformation required reinvention. Kakefu had been a gap-to-gap batter by nature. Now he was expected to be a slugger in Koshien, a park hostile to left-handed power.

    He engineered power through mechanics. By striking the ball millimeters underneath its center, he created spin that allowed the hamakaze, the sea breeze at Koshien, to carry drives toward left field. “Home runs are something you aim for,” he believed. “A single is often just a missed home run.”

    Of course, there were drawbacks to his transformation. The swing demanded violent rotation from his lower body and placed enormous strain on him physically.

    His rivalry with Giants ace Suguru Egawa soon became the defining confrontation of the era. Kakefu believed a cleanup hitter’s duty was to defeat an ace’s best pitch. Egawa’s rising fastball represented the ultimate risk. “You either win or you lose,” he said. “That’s the job of the fourth batter.” Their duels became the centerpiece of the Tigers-Giants rivalry.

    Fame, however, carried darker consequences. During slumps in 1980, fans shouted for him to return to Chiba. Harassing phone calls arrived at home and even letters containing knives were mailed to him. Newspapers, as they tend to do, speculated about trades. The pressure broke his trust in people outside a small inner circle.

    After injuries disrupted 1980, he returned in 1981 and made a radical decision. He abandoned the pursuit of home runs and returned to being what he believed he truly was: a line-drive hitter. He hit .341, rediscovering joy in baseball.

    He later described that season as a return to his original self and to the hitter he believed he had always been. But fans were dissatisfied. A supporter once asked why he had hit “only” 23 home runs.

    “I realized then,” he said, “if I didn’t hit home runs, I wouldn’t be forgiven.”

    So he changed and rebuilt his swing once again. The results were immediate: home run and RBI titles in 1982, another home run crown in 1984, and the elegant opposite-field blasts became known as the “Kakefu Arch.”

    More than statistics, he embraced durability. Advice from Japan’s ironman Sachio Kinugasa convinced him that the fourth hitter must appear every day, to endure in front of fans whether succeeding or failing. From 1981 through 1985, Kakefu played every game, anchoring the lineup without interruption.

    After years of shouldering expectations, the moment he had been preparing for finally arrived in 1985. Coming off of consecutive 4th place finishes, it was supposed to be a rebuilding year. Yoshio Yoshida, in his second stint as manager, described it as laying a foundation, and few were imagining a championship. That changed early in the season at home against the hated Yomiuri Giants.

    Randy Bass launched a towering home run toward the backscreen. Kakefu followed calmly with one of his own. Akinobu Okada completed the unforgettable sequence with a third blast to nearly the same spot. The three consecutive backscreen home runs felt like an announcement. Something had changed.

    Suddenly, Hanshin’s lineup was dangerous. Bass dominated pitchers, Okada broke out, and veterans like Akinobu Mayumi stabilized the offense. At the center stood Kakefu, the longest-tenured Tiger, redefining the cleanup role. Sometimes he forced pitchers to face Bass, sometimes he extended innings, and sometimes he accepted walks instead of chasing glory.

    Hanshin hit a league-leading 219 home runs and captured its first pennant in twenty-one years before winning the franchise’s first Japan Series title. Yoshida later credited victory to having the best cleanup hitter in Japan. Kakefu, hitting fourth every game, combined power with patience, drawing league-leading walks while driving in runs and protecting teammates in the lineup. At thirty years old, in his twelfth season, Kakefu finally experienced the reward that responsibility had promised.

    The celebration revealed his personality as much as his performance. During the beer-soaked victory party, teammates found him smiling while sitting inside a ceremonial sake barrel, drenched but joyful. It was a rare glimpse of playfulness from a player otherwise known for seriousness and responsibility.

    But men called Mr. Tigers rarely live peaceful careers. In 1986 a hit-by-pitch shattered his wrist and ended his streak of 663 consecutive games. More injuries followed—shoulder, back, hand—and the powerful swing that had defined him and carried the franchise began to fade. He later admitted something inside him changed after that first fracture, as if the tension that drove him loosened all at once. Criticism returned. Doubt followed. Personal struggles and declining performance marked his final seasons, and by 1988, still only thirty-three, he knew the end had come.

    Other teams offered opportunities to continue playing. Even Shigeo Nagashima suggested rebuilding quietly before returning. But Kakefu remembered something Tabuchi had told him years earlier after being traded: never take off the striped uniform midway. Kakefu chose to retire as a Tiger.

    His final appearance at Koshien came in October 1988 against Yakult. He started, as he had so many times, batting fourth and playing third base. The symbolism was unmistakable: the role remained even as the body no longer could. In his last plate appearance, he drew a walk. The opposing catcher reportedly urged him to swing, to give the crowd one last moment, but Kakefu did not. He accepted first base quietly.

    He left with 349 home runs, 1,656 hits, a .292 average, three home run titles, an RBI crown, seven Best Nine selections, six Golden Gloves, and ten consecutive All-Star appearances. Yet numbers alone never explained his meaning.

    I asked Trevor Raichura, a social media content creator who occasionally serves as an interpreter for the club, why Kakefu still means so much to Tigers fans. He didn’t hesitate. Kakefu had not arrived as a prodigy but as a late draft pick who forced his way into the lineup. He practiced relentlessly, played dependable defense, and appeared every day. Trevor noted that Randy Bass later said his own success depended on hitting in front of Kakefu, a reminder that the cleanup hitter’s role was not only to shine but to make others dangerous. He never celebrated at an opponent’s expense or carried himself as larger than the game, and when injuries shortened his career, fans saw not decline but sacrifice: a smaller player who had spent every ounce of himself generating power in a ballpark that rarely rewarded left-handed hitters. In that sense, Kakefu’s legend rests as much on how he played as on what he achieved.

    He once refused an offer to change his number to 3 out of respect for Nagashima, insisting that 31 should become his own identity. Later he said numbers should live on players still competing rather than be preserved in tribute. Baseball, to him, belonged on the field.

    Masayuki Kakefu never hit a walk-off home run in regular-season play. It feels oddly fitting. His career was less about single dramatic moments than about sustained responsibility and the daily weight of expectation carried through effort and endurance. He was not born a star, nor was he destined for greatness in the way earlier “Mr. Tigers” had been. He became one through relentless work, adaptation, and acceptance of a role larger than himself.

    For years, when Hanshin fans looked toward the batter’s box in moments that mattered most, they saw number 31 standing there, shoulders squared against impossible expectations.

    Because once he accepted what it meant to be the cleanup hitter of Hanshin, there was nowhere else he believed he could stand.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • 1966: The Dodgers Return to Japan

    1966: The Dodgers Return to Japan

    by Andy McCue

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Andy McCue focuses on the 1966 Los Angeles Dodgers tour of Japan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Game 1: October 22, Tokyo

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

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

    Game 2: October 23, Tokyo

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

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

    Game 3: October 25, Sapporo

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

    Game 4: October 26, Sendai

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

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

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

    Game 5: October 28, Osaka

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

    Game 6: October 29, Nishinomiya

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

    Game 7: October 30, Osaka

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

    Game 8: November 1, Toyama

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

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

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

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

    Game 9: November 3, Tokyo

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

    Game 10: November 5, Tokyo

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

    Game 11: November 6, Tokyo

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

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

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

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

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

    Game 12: November 8, Okayama

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

    Game 13: November 9, Hiroshima

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

    Game 14: November 11, Kumamoto

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

    Game 15: November 12, Fukuoka

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

    Game 16: November 14, Kokura

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

    Game 17: November 15, Nagoya

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

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

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

    Game 18: November 16, Shizuoka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    1966: The Dodgers Return to Japan
  • DEVELOPMENT OF BASEBALL IN SAUDI ARABIA

    DEVELOPMENT OF BASEBALL IN SAUDI ARABIA

    by Carter Cromwell

    Probably few are aware of it, but baseball has a history in Saudi Arabia. Until recently, though, it was like an old, rarely perused book that had long gathered dust in the attic. 

    Not many know that Americans brought baseball to Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s when companies began searching there for oil, which was finally discovered in 1938. Then-king Saud even attended a game in 1954. Children of expat employees of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) played baseball in Dhahran, whose team advanced to the Little League World Series 23 times before interest slackened for a number of years. 

    The 1954 game attended by King Saud
    (Photo courtesy of Nayef bin-Humaid)
    The 1954 game attended by King Saud
    (Photo courtesy of Nayef bin-Humaid)

    But now there is an effort to update the story for a larger audience. Much is yet to be written, but people from the governmental level on down are working to change the narrative. 

    In part, this reflects the pivot toward sports that some Middle East countries have made in recent years, the Saudi-sponsored LIV Golf Tour and Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup football (soccer) tournament being two examples. It also fits with Saudi Vision 2030, the goal of which is to increase diversification in the country economically, socially, and culturally. 

    The Saudi Baseball and Softball Federation (SBSF) was established in late 2019. Baseball United, the Dubai-based professional league that played its initial regular season late last year, is working with the federation to develop the sport, and the Dhahran Youth Baseball Association (DYBA) is rebuilding a program that had gone into decline.

    It is unquestionably a long-term project, but it’s happening.

    Nayef Bin-Humaid is president of the Saudi Baseball and Softball Federation. He lived for 10 years in the United States, mostly near Washington, D.C. His interest in baseball began when he would go with friends to games of MLB’s Washington Nationals. After returning to his home country, he eventually landed in a government job with a project for Vision 2030.

    “I was approached in December 2019 by the Saudi Olympic Committee, which was interested in establishing a governmental body supporting baseball,” Bin-Humaid said. “That would feed into one of the pillars of Vision 2030 in terms of expanding sports activities in the country and, more importantly, expand the game for Saudis.”

    Nayef bin-Humaid
    “Photo courtesy of Nayef bin-Humaid”

    Bin-Humaid was elected president of the federation and got to work immediately, only to be delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

    “We started in January 2020, and our first order of business was to find out who was playing the game in Saudi, who wants to play, and what could we do to expand the game within the country,” he said. “We started by going into American and Japanese communities, as well as others that we thought might include people who were interested in baseball. Though baseball is not that popular here, we were surprised to find that there were Saudis who loved the game, wanted to participate, and follow MLB teams closely.”

    Covid-19 soon hit and put a lot of efforts on hold, but the working group was still able to develop a plan and the necessary steps. It connected the Saudi federation with the Asian Baseball Federation and the World Baseball Softball Confederation, while also obtaining seed funding from the Saudi Ministry of Sport. 

    “That enabled us to hire some employees, kick-start a marketing campaign, and get a few other things in motion,” Bin-Humaid said. 

    Jean-Michel Mayeur came on as technical director of the Saudi federation in 2024. The native of France has a long background as a player and coach, directing a baseball academy in Montpellier for nearly 20 years. 

    “I’m excited because I understand the potential here, but it’s going to take a while to develop,” he said. “It’s a big challenge. The main focus now is grassroots development.”

    Bin-Humaid echoed that, saying, “We’re definitely working to develop at the grassroots levels. We’re very lucky to have someone like Jean-Michel who loves the game, is great with kids, and has run an academy. He took on the challenge of coming to a foreign country with the game in its very early stages and help put together a development plan that we can take to schools.”

    The efforts currently focus on a number of areas, including:

    • Working with schools to get baseball instruction into physical education curricula so that more Saudis will be exposed to the game
    • A partnership with the Yokohama DeNA BayStars of Japan’s top professional league to bring some young Saudi players to clinics there
    • Integrating Baseball5 programs into school curricula as a pathway to baseball
    • Establishment of Saudi national teams in baseball, softball, and Baseball5
    • Staging tournaments
    • Working to develop leagues, so players can get consistent competition

    “We’re working hard to get baseball into schools,” Mayeur said. “Getting people interested early on is key. First, we need to teach physical education teachers how to teach baseball. The goal is to have classes during the school days and then after-school activities involving baseball. Baseball5 should help people get interested, too, since you don’t need a ton of equipment or have to train pitchers.”

    Joan Bonhaure, Karim Mejri, and Jean-Michael Mayeur

    Mayeur also noted the need to establish academies; train coaches, players, scorekeepers, and umpires; organize tryouts and tournaments; build more fields that meet regulation standards; establish leagues; and … well, a lot of stuff.

    “The list is long,” Mayeur acknowledged, “but we’ve made progress. We’ve established national teams in baseball, softball, and Baseball5, and having the partnership with the BayStars is really nice. We have four Saudi kids, ages 13-16, there to get instruction and observe the pro team’s practices. We hope to send more in the future, and also have some Saudi teams go there to compete against high school players.”

    Owen Reid of Reid Baseball is an independent consultant who conducts clinics in various countries, many of which – such as Tunisia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Kyrgyzstan – are not on the baseball map. He started holding clinics in Saudi Arabia in 2016 and made more than 30 visits before moving there with his family early in 2025.

    “I’ve seen the game shift from being a novelty to an option, and now it’s more and more becoming an opportunity for families and Saudi kids eager to challenge themselves with something new,” Reid said. “It’s still true that most of the players I work with are expats, but I’ve seen encouraging growth in the number of Saudi ballplayers. And what excites me most is retention.  Once they try it, they often stay with it. Curiosity is turning into commitment.”

    Bin-Humaid said, “We have around 1,000 registered players in the country now. We focus on kids who are interested and show potential. We monitor them and work to keep them in the game, even when they go abroad to university and play. We’ve taken some to camps in places like eastern Europe, France, and the Dominican Republic, in addition to Japan. We hope to carry the torch for advancement of the game in western Asia.”

    He added that there are now baseball coaches in about a dozen high-level private schools, since physical education classes in public schools mostly focus on football (soccer). 

    For his part, Reid has increasingly worked with coaches, as well as players, and said, “By equipping coaches in Saudi Arabia with the tools, language, and standards to create positive baseball environments, we multiply the impact. The more educated and empowered coaches are, the more impact they can have on the next generation of people and ballplayers.”

    Under the terms of its partnership with the Saudi federation, announced in March 2024, Baseball United has the right to establish franchises in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam. Baseball United will help promote the game across the region, develop local talent in Saudi Arabia, and design training programs and curricula for players, coaches, and umpires at both the amateur and professional levels. The league will also look to host future tournaments and league games in Saudi Arabia.

    Kash Shaikh, who will leave his role as chairman and CEO of Baseball United effective March 1, has led the organization since its inception four years ago.  He has a personal connection that helps drive his interest in bringing baseball to the region – he lived in Dhahran for three years while his parents worked in the oil industry, and he played Little League baseball there.

    “For the longer term, we have a 15-year partnership to bring baseball to Saudi. This is the most under-developed region as far as baseball goes, so we’re doing as much as possible to help the sport grow. We’re helping with the Saudi national team program – we put a team on the field last fall for the Baseball United Arab Classic. We’re also helping from a resource and financial standpoint, as well as bringing expertise to the training and curriculum programs.”

    Bin-Humaid added, “Baseball United has made a significant commitment to developing the game here. They sponsored one of our tournaments, which involved people from various embassies in Riyadh, and they also committed to sending expert coaches and trainers when we need them.”

    Mayeur also sees Baseball United’s participation as a positive: “The partnership is huge. We need to make baseball fashionable for the kids. Once they get teams in Saudi, it will give people a reason to come watch. We need that kind of thing to push development.”

    Bin-Humaid also noted the importance of the long-standing baseball community in Dhahran. 

    “Luckily, we connected with the baseball community in eastern Saudi – the Aramco people in Dhahran,” he said. “The coaches, parents, and kids there are very much into it.”

    Erich Sutterlin (third from left) and teammates from the Saudi Arabia national team. Photo courtesy of Erich Sutterlin

    Erich Sutterlin, president of the Dhahran Youth Baseball Association (DYBA) and a school teacher in the Aramco community, added, “The federation identified us as an entry point for finding baseball talent in the Kingdom. Several of our players participate in international tournaments under the auspices of the federation and the Saudi Committee. We’re separate from an organizational standpoint, but our players benefit from being involved with their teams.

    “The relationship with the SBSF has led to some interesting developments such as a Baseball5 club at our school, which has helped introduce the game to players from countries that don’t have strong baseball backgrounds,” Sutterlin continued. “And the SBSF has visited schools and encouraged the Saudi players in our leagues to invite their friends so they can learn about baseball.” 

    Getting more Saudis playing the game is a major part of the federation’s mission, of course, and there has been some progress in Dhahran. Sutterlin said that a 12-U team played in a tournament in the Czech Republic in September 2025, finishing second out of 12 teams, and a 15-U team comprised of expats and Saudis competed in a tournament in Italy in November. He noted, however, that “the expat and Saudi kids here don’t go to school together, so it’s more of a challenge to get the Saudis to play. The ones that do participate are often children of ‘mixed’ parentage.”

    Still, there is progress. As Reid remarked, “I see Saudi families returning season to season and ballplayers coming back to the field each time I return to Dhahran.”

    Glenn Makechnie, Sutterlin’s predecessor as head of the DYBA and a geologist with Aramco, said that there are Saudis playing in every age group, and also on the travel teams. “They’re still in the minority, but we’re inclusive of kids at all skill levels, not just the more interested ones. Recently, one team had 11 different nationalities among the 13 players.  And while the number of Saudi participants is low, some of our best players are Saudis.  There are some on our 12-U and 15-U travel teams who are performing very well. 

    “We also collaborate with the Little League in Qatar, which is very active and hosts regional tournaments. Two American high schools there have programs, as well.”

    This comes after baseball interest in the Aramco community trended downward for more than a decade. After the long period of success from 1983-2011, the Dhahran Little League team was shifted to the Asia-Pacific region, which was more competitive. That, combined with a shrinking expat population at Aramco that reduced the pool of potential players and baseball-savvy parents, resulted in less success and dwindling interest in attending the Little League tournament. 

    After the 2017 season, when the program struggled to get nine players to fill out an all-star team, the DYBA’s board of directors let the association’s Little League charter expire. Overall participation fell off, and the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the decline.  The program was completely shut down from the spring of 2020 until the fall of 2021.

    The DYBA Little League just after playing Chinese Taipei in the 2025 Asia-Pacific & Middle East Tournament in South Korea.  Photo courtesy of Erich Sutterlin

    “When we tried to reboot after Covid, we could barely field two teams for a 12-U kid-pitch division,” Makechnie said. “It’s taken a monumental effort from all involved to grow the league back to where it is today. We’ve had great support from parents internally and from external resources such as the SBSF and Reid Baseball.”

    Makechnie said there are parallel programs within the Aramco community – youth baseball supported by Aramco and a chartered Little League initiative that “intertwines with the youth baseball program.” There are approximately 260 young people playing on the various teams, including T-ball, and there are 20-25 girls playing softball, with some of the latter also involved with baseball. In addition, there is a new senior league that utilizes pitching machines, rather than live pitchers. “There aren’t enough older people who can pitch,” he said wryly.

    “We’ve really had to re-think our goals and organizational structure to create meaningful baseball experiences for all our membership,” Makechnie continued. “Even though the North American expat population is decreasing, overall baseball participation is about the same. That’s good in a way, but it also means we have fewer baseball-savvy people helping, so we’ve had to get creative. We’re probably the most unique baseball organization in the world.”

    Now, interest is expanding again, although it hasn’t reached the levels of two or three decades ago. Saudi Arabia returned to international Little League action at the 2025 Asia-Pacific & Middle East Tournament in South Korea, though it failed to advance from pool play. 

    Reid has partnered with the DYBA since 2016, putting on multiple clinics each year, and he worked with this year’s Little League team.

    As for the future, there is a need to continue building more fields, as well as establish leagues. There are perhaps 15 fields in the country now, including several at the Aramco facilities in Dhahran. About half are private, and not all meet regulation standards.

    For the sport to grow and evolve, Reid sees the need for greater access within communities – i.e., more leagues at multiple levels – continued development of coaches, additional facilities that are multi-use and adapted to the hot climate, a clear league structure that provides pathways to greater competitive levels, and role models and greater visibility for the game.

    “The foundation is there, and baseball here continues to build momentum,” Reid said. 

    Bin-Humaid said, “We’re committed to keep pushing forward. We will participate in the Asian Games in Qatar in 2030, and we’ll be the host nation of the Asian Games in 2034. By then, we want to have a team that not only participates but competes.”

    Mayeur added, “We just need time and exposure. If we can show baseball to kids, we can get them interested. We just have to keep going, and things will happen.”

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 13, Kazuhiro Kiyohara

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 13, Kazuhiro Kiyohara

    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 Controversial Slugger who Never Ruled a Season

    Japanese baseball has produced many great hitters, but it has produced very few figures like Kazuhiro Kiyohara.

    From the beginning, Kiyohara was never simply a player. Before he was a professional baseball player, before he was a slugger or a symbol or a problem, he was already famous. He was famous in a way that made the rest of his career almost beside the point, in the way that only a high school baseball star could be. He arrived carrying more narrative weight than any teenager reasonably could, and for a long time he appeared strong enough to carry it.

    Until he wasn’t.

    This is not a story of wasted talent. Kiyohara’s numbers make that argument impossible. More than 500 home runs. More than 1,500 runs batted in. Over two decades in uniform. Championships in both leagues. He remains one of the most productive hitters Japanese professional baseball has ever known.

    And yet his name does not rest easily.

    In the mid-1980s, Japanese high school baseball revolved around a single axis, and that axis ran through PL Gakuen High School. Every summer, every spring, the cameras found the same faces, the same uniforms, the same two players whose names were already inseparable. They were called the KK Combo, a pairing so complete that it functioned as a unit rather than a rivalry: Masumi Kuwata, the ace pitcher, and Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the star slugger.

    Kiyohara arrived at PL Gakuen as a prodigy with a body that already seemed finished. He was large, broad, powerful in a way that made adults uneasy. As a freshman, he was handed the cleanup spot and treated as such. That alone told you everything about what the program believed him to be.

    From his first summer, Kiyohara’s presence at Koshien felt preordained. He did not simply appear in the tournament; he seemed to belong to it. His bat made a sound that separated itself from the noise of the crowd, and his home runs did not merely sneak over fences or ride the wind. They soared through the air. By the time his high school career ended, he had appeared in five consecutive Koshien tournaments* and set a record with thirteen home runs.

    *PL Gakuen qualified for the summer tournament in his first year, and for both the spring and summer tournaments in his second and third years. Japanese high school lasts three years.

    As a first-year player, PL Gakuen won it all. As a second-year, they reached the final and lost. As a third-year player, the pattern repeated. Kiyohara was productive in those runs, but he was never unaware of the comparison standing beside him. Kuwata, smaller, calmer, relentlessly precise, pitched complete games, dominated opposing lineups, and carried an aura of control that Kiyohara himself seemed to envy.

    In interviews years later, Kiyohara admitted as much. He did not want to be the second name. He wanted the order reversed. He wanted “Kiyohara and Kuwata,” not “Kuwata and Kiyohara.” Power alone was not enough to make that happen.

    By his final summer, something snapped into place. Over five games, Kiyohara went 10-for-16. Over the final three games, he was nearly untouchable, blasting five home runs and turning every at-bat into an event. In the championship game, he hit two more, prompting the call that would trail him for the rest of his life: “Is Koshien made for Kiyohara?”

    He was not simply good. He was supposed to be good.

    That distinction mattered. When the Yomiuri Giants, the team of national narrative, passed on him in the draft and selected Kuwata instead, the moment was framed not as a baseball decision but as a disruption of his identity. Kiyohara cried openly. His tears were later read as entitlement or weakness, but they were merely the normal response of a teenager whose future had been narrated for him by adults, and then suddenly revised.

    Kiyohara would say that the pain never left him, that the shock of that moment stayed with him no matter how many home runs he hit or how many championships he won. His mother* told him to stop feeling sorry for himself and prove them wrong. He listened. He just never forgot.

    *At PL Gakuen, first-years weren’t allowed sweets. His mother, trying to sneak comfort into a place where comfort was prohibited, hid caramel candies in the toes of socks.

    Instead of Tokyo, he went just outside of it to Saitama and the Seibu Lions. And almost immediately, he became something else again.

    On April 5, 1986, in the second game of the season, he stepped to the plate for just the second time in his professional career. He was eighteen years old. The stadium was full, the expectation already unreasonable. The pitcher was Shuji Fujimoto of the Nankai Hawks, working toward what looked like a complete-game victory.

    Kiyohara turned on an inside fastball and sent it screaming into the left-field seats.

    As he rounded first base, he leapt into the air. Not the restrained hop of a veteran, but a full-bodied jump, the kind you make when something you have imagined for years suddenly becomes real. The Lions lost the game 4-2, but it didn’t matter. The home run swallowed the night whole. Fujimoto, still the winning pitcher, walked into the postgame interview and muttered, “I won, but…”

    After the opening blast, reality arrived quickly. Pitchers adjusted. Night games under unfamiliar lights exposed timing issues. He went hitless for stretches long enough that whispers began to circulate about a demotion to the minors. Coaches debated it openly. Mori listened and declined.

    Instead, he waited.

    By midsummer, the waiting paid off. Kiyohara’s swing slowed down just enough to find its shape. His hands stayed back. His balance improved. The results followed in waves. In August, he hit over .320. In September, over .360. By October, he looked unstoppable.

    By the end of the season, the line looked unreal: .304 average, 31 home runs, 78 runs batted in. Rookie of the Year. The most home runs ever hit by a Japanese rookie. Attendance surged. Merchandise exploded. Television found a new face. Seibu’s patience with him, especially during his early struggles, proved decisive.

    For a brief moment, he was not “the uncrowned king,” not “the problem child,” not a symbol of anything larger than himself. He was Kiyoma, a nickname that captured youth, novelty, and something almost cartoonish in its brightness. He lived in the Seibu dormitory, his small room filled with gifts from fans after road trips. His monthly allowance was modest. His favorite meal was champon, a noodle dish, from the Ringer Hut near the dorm, eaten with teammates who treated him less like a prodigy than a younger brother who happened to hit the ball very far.

    The Lions won relentlessly and celebrated loudly. Robert Whiting once described a championship celebration that looked less like Japanese baseball tradition and more like controlled chaos: beer sprayed, cake smashed into faces, teammates dumped into barrels of sake, Kiyohara wearing a Ronald Reagan mask while pouring alcohol on a cameraman. Fans loved it. One woman said the Giants were too proper, too dull. The Lions, she said, were interesting. Kiyohara was the youngest player on the team and spoke like he belonged to no hierarchy at all.

    But even during those years, something was already slipping. During the 1987 Japan Series, Seibu was one out away from defeating the Giants. Kiyohara was at first base and he was crying. Not after the final out but before it. His legs shook. Teammates yelled at him to focus. He later said the tears came without warning, that once he took the field his body gave way. When the final fly ball settled into an outfielder’s glove, Seibu celebrated another title. Two years earlier, the Giants had passed on him. Now he was beating them on the sport’s biggest stage, as the cleanup hitter for a team that had become a dynasty almost overnight. The tears were victory and vindication tangled together, indistinguishable.

    From 1986 through the mid-1990s, the Lions captured league titles with such regularity that seasons began to blur together. Eight league championships in nine years. Six Japan Series titles. A dynasty for a franchise that had been an afterthought for nearly two decades.

    Kazuhiro Kiyohara stood at the center of it.

    He was not alone. Koji Akiyama ran the bases like a man late for something important. Orestes Destrade brought a foreigner’s blunt force to the middle of the order. Behind them, the pitching staff turned games into negotiations between balls and outs. But Kiyohara was the constant cleanup hitter who arrived first and stayed longest.

    From the outside, the numbers piled up neatly. Twenty-one consecutive seasons with double-digit home runs, beginning his rookie year. Thirteen straight seasons of twenty or more. Sixteen total seasons clearing that mark. Walks in bulk. Balls crushed to all fields. Hits absorbed by his body—196 of them, more than anyone in league history. Twelve walk-off home runs. Twenty walk-off hits. Eleven grand slams.

    He led the league in on-base percentage twice. He won Gold Gloves at first base five times, more than any Pacific League first baseman had before him, and contemporaries would later say that, at his peak, he was the best defensive first baseman in Japan. Jim Allen once put it plainly: Kiyohara saved more runs with his glove than people noticed because they were too busy watching his bat.

    And yet, for all of it, the major individual titles never arrived. No batting title. No home run crown. No RBI title. Not once.

    On paper, Kiyohara was one of the most productive hitters in the sport every year. In memory, he was something more complicated. He was the cleanup hitter for a dynasty who never ruled a season outright.

    Even Sadaharu Oh framed it this way: Kiyohara, he suggested, was too versatile for his own good. A hitter who drove the ball to all fields would never pile up the kind of pull-heavy totals that win home run titles. From Oh’s perspective, power requires commitment. From Kiyohara’s, a home run was simply a perfectly struck hit that kept carrying.

    Free agency turned him into the center of gravity of Japanese baseball. The Tigers were willing to say they would change their stripes to get him. Shigeo Nagashima told him to leap into his chest and even floated the idea of handing over number 3, a gesture Kiyohara understood was too heavy to accept. But he accepted the Giants uniform. It was, finally, the dream.

    In his first season, the numbers were solid: 32 home runs, 95 RBIs. On paper, it looked like the continuity of his Seibu years. In reality, it felt like insufficiency. The batting average dipped. The strikeouts climbed: 152 of them, a Central League record at the time. Each miss drew commentary. Each slump fed the idea that the player who once looked unstoppable was now fighting gravity.

    The criticism poured in. Too heavy. Too slow. Too emotional. Too indulgent. He had piercings in his ears. His skin was permanently tanned. His body looked different than it had in Seibu. He didn’t fit the Yomiuri aesthetic.

    There were moments when it almost worked. Early in the season, he shared the field with Kuwata again, this time as teammates. When Kuwata returned from injury, Kiyohara hit a home run in his comeback game, the two of them standing together afterward like an echo from another life. For a brief instant, the story felt complete. KK, reunited.

    But nostalgia does not protect you from fastballs inside. He tinkered with his swing. He altered his stance, his weight training, his body composition. The more he tried to adjust, the further he drifted from the hitter who had once trusted himself to react rather than plan. His body grew heavier. His legs betrayed him. Knee pain became chronic. Seasons fractured into stretches of usefulness interrupted by injury and recovery.

    In early March of 2000, in cold, wet conditions during an exhibition game, he tore a muscle in his leg. For the first time in his professional life, Kiyohara opened the season in the minors. The reaction from above was brutal. The team’s owner remarked that the Giants’ chances of winning had improved in his absence.

    And yet, something unexpected happened.

    When Kiyohara returned in July, the atmosphere at Tokyo Dome had changed. He was no longer announced as the centerpiece of a championship machine. He was introduced as a pinch hitter and when his name was called, the stadium rose. Fans sang. They cheered not because he would save the team, but because he was still there. A home run in his first game back triggered something close to collective release. Even when he failed, the applause remained.

    But still, the relationship with the Giants frayed. His body could no longer support the version of himself he needed to be in Tokyo. Playing time shrank. In 2005, he refused a high-five from the bench after a home run, a small act of defiance that became a large symbol. Not long after, the Giants told him he was no longer part of their plans.

    The dream ended quietly. In a parked car, alone, he cried. The call that changed things came from Akira Ohgi.

    Ohgi, already gravely ill, had taken on the thankless task of leading the newly merged Orix Buffaloes, a team born from contraction and resentment. He believed stubbornly that stars still mattered, that baseball owed something to memory and spectacle. He called Kiyohara directly.

    “Come home to Osaka,” he said. “Let me give you your last stage.”

    Kiyohara hesitated. His body was failing, his confidence was fragile. But Ohgi kept calling, speaking not of contracts but of responsibility and unfinished business. When Kiyohara finally agreed, it felt less like a comeback than an acceptance. Ohgi, tragically passed away before the 2006 season.

    When he hit a walk-off home run in May 2006, he spoke afterward not about himself, but about Ohgi and the fans.

    “This might be the happiest home run of my career,” he said. “It didn’t feel like it was just mine.”

    His body, however, would not cooperate. Knee surgeries followed. In 2007, he did not appear in a single game, the first such season of his professional life. He decided 2008 was going to be the end.

    His final game came in Osaka. Sadaharu Oh managed the opposing team. Ichiro watched from the stands. In his final at-bat, he struck out, swinging hard, fully committed.

    Afterward, with his two sons beside him, he apologized to the fans, the media, and the game itself.

    “I wasn’t always strong,” he said. “But I gave everything I had.”

    Oh took his hand and said, “In the next life, let’s be teammates. Let’s hit home runs together.”

    For a moment, improbably, it felt like closure.

    He left with 525 home runs, fifth all-time, without ever leading the league. Twenty-one seasons with double-digit home runs. Records everywhere. A shape no one else quite matched.

    But after baseball, everything fell apart.

    His marriage ended amid reports of domestic violence. He was arrested in 2016 for possession and use of stimulants. The trial revealed years of addiction. He admitted to using drugs after retirement, denied using them as a player, and spoke of emptiness, of having no next step. He was convicted and given a suspended sentence. His Hall of Fame candidacy was withdrawn. His finances collapsed. His health deteriorated. His arrest shocked the country not because it was unimaginable, but because it retroactively contaminated everything people wanted to believe about him.

    Kazuhiro Kiyohara will never be a clean legend. How should baseball remember someone like him?

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • No Alibis: The Detroit Tigers’ 1962 Tour of Japan

    No Alibis: The Detroit Tigers’ 1962 Tour of Japan

    by Andrew Forbes

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Andrew Forbes focuses on the Detroit Tigers 1962 visit to Japan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

    No Alibis: The Detroit Tigers’ 1962 Tour of Japan

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

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

    Chapter 26: Bobby Valentine, Manager.

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

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

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

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

    Chapter 26: Bobby Valentine, Manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Off Base with Howard Cole is available on Substack