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

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

    by Robert Fitts


    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Rob Fitts focuses on the 1990 Super Major Series– the first time Japan captured the series against an MLB visit team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Where’s everybody going?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

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

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Oh left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He was standing on one leg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What he accomplished:

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    There is one more thing worth knowing about Sadaharu Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    And every single one of them was earned.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • The 1988 Major League-Japan All-Star Series

    The 1988 Major League-Japan All-Star Series

    by CHRIS HICKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

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

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

    The man who became more than the sport itself.

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

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

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

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

    Shigeo Nagashima steps to the plate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    His rookie season, 1958, was extraordinary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    And yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Then Nagashima came back out.

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Some players have careers. Nagashima had a whole country.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • Baseball from Mars: The 1986 Super Major Series

    Baseball from Mars: The 1986 Super Major Series

    by James Forr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “‘And no take signals, either.

    “‘On 3-0, you’re all swinging.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

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

    My Baseball History Podcast on the History of Japanese Baseball

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

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

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

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It never is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Matsui kept it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The reporters asked what he meant by that time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Then came 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

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

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

    by Carter Cromwell

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

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

    It didn’t quite work out that way.

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

    It didn’t quite work out that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    His prediction was on the mark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Stan Isle explained in The Sporting News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    The 1984 Baltimore Orioles Tour in Japan: The Final Attempt at a True World Series
  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 5, Hideo Nomo

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Make of that what you will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

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

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

    by Thomas Love Seagull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He would have taken both as compliments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “I got it,” he said. “Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    There’s also the story about a batting cage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    One relationship was different from all the others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Oreryu. My way.

    It was the only way he ever knew.

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

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com

  • The 1979 Major League All-Star Series in Japan

    The 1979 Major League All-Star Series in Japan

    by Carter Cromwell

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Carter Cromwell tells us about the 1979 MLB All-Stars visit to Japan.

    When a group of major-league baseball all-stars traveled to Japan in November 1979 for a series of games, it represented a shift, of sorts. Since the end of World War II, most baseball tours of Japan had been by single teams. A US all-star team had not played in Japan since the Eddie Lopat All-Stars made the trek after the 1953 season.

    The 1979 tour was dreamed up by Philadelphia Phillies Vice President Bill Giles and Cappy Harada, who was born in Santa Maria, California, to Japanese parents and at the time was director of the international division of the Major League Baseball Promotion Corporation. This was the first time the United States had sent complete American League and National League all-star teams to Japan for a series.

    The American squad was divided evenly among American Leaguers and National Leaguers and was managed by the Orioles’ Earl Weaver and the Dodgers’ Tom Lasorda respectively. The schedule ran from November 7 to November 20, with the US teams playing seven games against each other and a combined US club playing twice against a team of Japanese players.

    In the years since, the Japanese have consistently demonstrated their baseball prowess in various international competitions. But though it had made strides, the game in Japan in 1979 was still not the equal of the game in the United States, so the Japanese were eager to see the Americans play. Virtually every ticket for every game was sold in advance, with the most expensive costing $22,or about $89.79 in 2022 dollars.

    Of course, the Japanese weren’t unfamiliar with US players, since they could watch videotaped highlights of US games on television on Sundays, and newspapers and magazines in the country reported on the major leagues. An Associated Press story noted, “[Pete] Rose is at least as familiar a name in Japan as Jimmy Carter. The escapades of Reggie Jackson and the salary hassles of [Dave] Parker are followed with keen interest. Ever since American teachers introduced the game to Japan in the 1870s, the Japanese have looked upon America as baseball’s holy land – at the same time aspiring to build their own version to match it.”

    So actually seeing the Americans play in person was an exciting proposition.

    Though some like Jim Rice, George Brett, and Jack Clark had to pull out of the tour beforehand for various reasons, the US roster was loaded. It included eventual Hall of Famers Rod Carew, Lou Brock, Ozzie Smith, Ted Simmons, Paul Molitor, and Phil Niekro. The California Angels’ Don Baylor was coming off the best season of his career, in which he had hit 36 home runs, driven in 139 runs, and was voted the American League’s Most Valuable Player. Others might be classified in the so-called Hall of the Very, Very Good – players like Parker, Cecil Cooper, Lance Parrish, Larry Bowa, Bill Madlock, Jim Sundberg, Dennis Martinez, Tug McGraw, and Ken Singleton. Singleton, in fact, finished second to Baylor in the MVP voting that year after hitting 35 home runs, driving in 111 runs, and posting a .938 OPS. There was also Rose, who would be in the Hall if not for his gambling issues.

    “[Rose] is my favorite American player,” said Japanese Hall of Famer Sadaharu Oh, who holds the world career home-run record (868). “He never misses a game.”

    Nonetheless, a spokesman for the Japanese baseball commissioner’s office said the Japan team will be “playing to win.” And there was no doubt that it was a strong club. Compiled by a vote of sportswriters, it included eight players who would eventually gain induction into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame – first baseman Oh, plus outfielders Yutaka Fukumoto, Koji Yamamoto, and Tsutomu Wakamatsu, and pitchers Choji Murata, Keishi Suzuki, Hisashi Yamada, and Manabu Kitabeppu.

    Oh, of course, was the biggest name. He had even received a National Hero Award from the Japanese government after exceeding Hank Aaron’s career record of 755 home runs. Sometimes referred to as the Bamboo Bambino by the Japanese news media, he had a slash line of .301/.446/.634 over 22 seasons with the Yomiuri Giants. He drove in 2,170 runs in his career, even though the Nippon Professional Baseball season was 22 to 32 games shorter than that of the American majors.

    “I really like to watch Oh swing,” Rose said. “He picks up his front leg but doesn’t go forward until he’s ready to commit himself. He keeps his hands and his weight back until he’s ready to swing.”

    In 1979, at the age of 39, Oh had just completed his next-to-last season and had hit 33 home runs while batting .285, driving in 81 runs, and posting a .980 OPS. To many, that would have been very good, especially at that age, but Oh found it unacceptable. “I had a very disappointing year,” he said. “I hurt my side and missed several weeks. I had 33 home runs … but drove in only 81 runs. Five years ago, I had ‘only’ 33 home runs but drove in 118. And besides, the [Yomiuri] Giants finished 10½ games out this year. Very sad.”

    Other Japanese players were nearly as transcendent as Oh, though not well known to most Americans. An 11-time all-star, Tsutomu Wakamatsu posted a .319/.375/.481 career slash line, won two batting titles, and as of 2023 still held the second-highest career batting average in Nippon Professional Baseball history for players with 4,000 or more at-bats. He was the Central League Most Valuable Player and MVP of the Japan Series in 1978. In 1979 he batted .306 with an .871 OPS. Koji Yamamoto was a 13-time all-star for the Hiroshima Carp, a 10-time winner of the Diamond Glove Award, and seven consecutive seasons the leader in assists among outfielders. At the time of the 1979 series, he was coming off a .293 season with a 1.002 OPS.

    Yutaka Fukumoto played 20 seasons with the Hankyu Braves, a predecessor of today’s Orix Buffaloes, and posted a .291 batting average and .819 OPS, along with an otherworldly total of 1,065 stolen bases.

    American Leon Lee, who played 10 seasons in Japan, observed that Fukumoto “was a great base runner, too, adding, “I remember many times he would lead off a game by getting on base, stealing second, getting sacrificed to third, and scoring on a sacrifice fly.”

    On the pitching side, Choji Murata won 215 games over 23 seasons, 22 of them with the Lotte Orions. He was a three-time Pacific League ERA champion and threw five one-hitters. He had finished the 1979 season with 17 victories, a 2.96 earned-run average, and a 1.09 WHIP.

    Leon Lee’s brother Leron, who played in Japan for 11 seasons, remembered, “Choji Murata was … fabulous. He was the best pitcher I’ve seen except for Bob Gibson. In 1979, he pitched against the American All-Stars, and Ted Simmons … told me that Choji Murata was the best pitcher he ever faced in his life, bar none. That’s how good Murata was. He could throw 90 to 96 miles an hour consistently, had a great forkball, and he had this really funky windup with a high kick. I saw him throw an inside pitch that hit the bat below the label, broke it in half, and the ball had so much power that it went through the bat, hit the batter on his back leg, and rolled out into fair territory along with the head of the bat. Everybody in the stadium stopped for two or three seconds and looked. It was unbelievable for a ball to go through a bat and still have enough momentum to hit the batter in the leg and roll forward.”

    Though 1979 was a down year for Keishi Suzuki (10-8, 4.41 ERA), he spent 20 years with the Kintetsu Buffaloes and won 317 games with a 3.11 ERA and low 1.12 WHIP. He had eight 20-victory seasons and led the Pacific League in strikeouts eight times. Leron Lee learned about Suzuki very early on, the night before his first game in Japan, in fact. The team had a meeting to go over the opponents, and a scout went on and on about how good Suzuki was.

    “I said to [teammate] Jim Lefebvre that if this guy pitches like the scout says, we’re not going to get any hits tomorrow,” Lee said. “And, sure enough, Suzuki pitched a one-hitter! That guy was the best left-handed pitcher I ever faced. I faced Steve Carlton and several pretty good pitchers in the big leagues, but this guy was unbelievable. He was an absolutely fabulous pitcher who could have pitched in the major leagues very easily.”

    An interesting aside is that when he was the Kintetsu manager, Suzuki’s disputes with pitcher Hideo Nomo indirectly played a role in Nomo’s eventual signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995.

    In 19 seasons with Hiroshima, Manabu Kitabeppu was 213-141 and ranks 17th all-time in pitching victories in NPB. He was an all-star seven times. In 1986 he won the ERA title, took the MVP and Gold Glove awards and was named to the “Best Nine,” which includes the best player at each position in both the Central and Pacific Leagues, as determined by a pool of journalists. During the 1979 season, just his fourth in the NPB, he had won 17 games and allowed an average of just 1.6 walks per nine innings.

    Hisashi Yamada, Japan’s greatest submarine pitcher, was 284-166 in 20 seasons with the Hankyu Braves. His lifetime ERA was 3.18 and his WHIP a low 1.13. In the mid-1970s Yamada was the most dominant pitcher in Japanese baseball, winning three consecutive Pacific League MVP Awards (1976-1978). He was named to five Best Nine teams and 13 all-star squads, and won five Gold Glove Awards. In 1979 he had finished with a 21-5 record and a 2.73 ERA. Leon Lee said Yamada was the “toughest pitcher I ever faced in my 17-year professional career. He had great control and was never afraid to pitch inside. The biggest thing was that he completely controlled the tempo of the game and never gave the hitters time to get comfortable at the plate.” Leron Lee named players like Oh, Yamada, Murata, Suzuki, Yamamoto, and the Hanshin Tigers’ Masayuki Kakefu (also on the 1979 Japan All-Stars) among several he said could have been major leaguers.

    The schedule began on November 7 with the American League battling the National League at Yokohoma Stadium. The teams played each other again on November 8 (Kusanagi Stadium in Shizuoka), November 11 (Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo), November 12 (Seibu Stadium in Tokorozawa), November 13 (Nagoya Stadium), November 17 (Seibu Stadium in Tokorozawa), and November 18 (Yokohama Stadium).

    The NL stars won the first game 11-2 behind a 16-hit attack. The Chicago Cubs’ Dave Kingman hit a two-run homer, and Niekro picked up the win. In Game 2 the Nationals rallied from a 4-1 deficit to tie the game 5-5 on an eighth-inning sacrifice fly by Kingman. The contest was called after 10 innings because of a time limit in Japanese games.

    Game 3 went to the American League, 6-3, and the AL followed that with a 6-5 victory in Game 4 before 21,000 fans at Seibu Stadium, as Kansas City’s Willie Wilson singled home the winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning. The National League had scored three runs in the first inning and another in the second to lead 4-0 before the AL rallied.

    After that, though, the NL had its way, winning the last three games of the series by scores of 12-9 (after trailing by 7-0), 3-2, and 7-1 in the finale on a two-hitter by Niekro.

    For the Japanese fans, though, the most anticipated games of the series were the two between the United States and Japan. A wire-service story just prior the tour noted that the US players would be “scrutinized, idolized and analyzed for what makes their game different from the Japanese national pastime of ‘besuboru.’” And there were differences. The Japanese relied more on small ball and fundamentals, and they utilized off-speed pitches more often. The Americans, on the other hand, focused more on the big inning, especially with a manager like Weaver. In addition, both the baseball itself and the ballparks in Japan were slightly smaller.

    The first game took place November 14 before 31,000 fans in Nishinomiya, a city between Kobe and Osaka. Yamamoto, of the 1979 Japan Series champion Hiroshima Carp, hit a solo home run off US starter Niekro in the bottom of the second inning to give Japan a 1-0 lead. The Americans scored twice off Yamada in the top of the third inning, but the Japanese answered quickly with three runs in the bottom of the third to take a 4-2 lead.

    The US team came back with a run in the fourth when Cooper tripled and scored on a sacrifice fly by Madlock, and the Americans got a two-run home run by Simmons off Suzuki in the sixth to lead 5-4. Bowa then hit a solo homer off Japan’s Shigeru Kobayashi in the seventh, and that proved to be the difference as Japan got an RBI single from Kakefu of the Hanshin Tigers in the bottom of the inning to account for the final 6-5 score.

    Knuckleballer Niekro pitched three innings and allowed four hits, two walks, and two earned runs before being relieved by Oakland’s Rick Langford. Nonetheless, he baffled Oh, whom he struck out twice, once with the bases loaded and no one out. Oh said, “It felt like the ball was swaying left and right. I wasn’t able to hit it at all. It was a mysterious ball.” For the Japan side, Murata held the major leaguers hitless in the eighth and ninth innings, primarily with his forkball.

    After the game, US manager Weaver said, “It was a close game. I was worried and felt relieved that we won. There was little difference today with the pitchers of either team. [The Japanese] certainly could play major league baseball.” That, of course, was 16 years before Nomo proved the point by signing with the Dodgers and earning All-Star and Rookie-of-the-Year honors in his first season.

    Yukio Nishimoto, who had managed the Kintetsu Buffaloes to the 1979 Pacific League title and was leading the Japan All-Stars, said, “The Americans are speedier than the Japanese. … I’m afraid the difference is decidedly in their favor. We’d be lucky to win two games out of 10.”

    They got one six days later.

    A crowd of 42,000 at Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium watched the Americans score single runs in the third inning (a home run by Parrish off the left-field foul pole against Japan starter Naoki Takahashi) and in the seventh (a sacrifice fly by the California Angels’ Carney Lansford) to lead 2-0. Six US pitchers held the Japanese scoreless until the bottom of the eighth inning, when Kinji Shimatani of the Hankyu Braves electrified the fans by ripping a 2-and-0 pitch from Cleveland’s Sid Monge for a three-run homer to give the Japanese a 3-2 lead. And that was enough, as Kitabeppu pitched the eighth inning and Tatsuo Komatsu of the Chunichi Dragons the ninth to get the save.

    Since the US and Japanese teams played just two games against each other, the final statistics do not represent a large sample size. For the Americans, Cecil Cooper was 2-for-3 in the one game he played, and Ted Simmons was 2-for-7 in two games with a home run and two RBIs. They were the only Americans to get more than one hit in the two games, as the team batted a minuscule .172. The US pitchers posted a 3.18 earned-run average over 17 innings and held the Japan stars to a .210 batting average.

    Virtually all the Japanese position players participated in both games, with Yasunori Oshima (Chunichi) batting .500 (1-for-2), Kakefu and Fukumoto each .429, and Hideji Kato (Hankyu) .333. On the pitching side, Murata did not allow a run in four innings while striking out five batters. Takahashi gave up just one run in four innings, while Yamada allowed two runs in three innings of work. The Japan ERA in the two games was 3.50.

    Overall, the tour was considered a success, though there was some complaining by players about the travel. One day, for example, eight buses and trains were necessary to get the group from a hotel in Tokyo to a ballpark and then to Nagoya.

    There was also some controversy when first Carew and then Rose went home early and Kingman had to be talked out of going home the same day Carew left. Japan’s Kyodo News Service quoted Rose as saying he had suffered a leg injury while going after a pop fly “and it’s been getting worse.” Rose had also arrived in Japan ahead of the others and had announced beforehand that he would not be staying until the end.

    As for Carew, American League spokesman Bob Fishel said he had injured a tendon in his right heel before the trip. Carew, however, said that the injury was just part of the reason for his leaving after playing in two games. He also felt league officials had not come through on prior commitments for endorsement and appearance income. He said he had been hesitant to make the trip but did so because of promises that he could make $40,000 to $50,000 in endorsements and appearances, in addition to the base pay of $11,000 to players on the winning team and $8,500 to those on the losing club.

    “Now I can’t help but feel that we were told these things simply so that we would say ‘yes’ to making the trip,” Carew said. “I definitely doubt that I’d ever make another. I had wanted to stay home, but they made it sound as if it was something I couldn’t pass up.”

    The Pittsburgh Pirates’ Bill Madlock said, “We’d been led to believe there would be ways to pick up extra money for endorsements. It just didn’t happen.” Cecil Cooper added, “I really was disappointed. I thought we would be involved in a lot more endorsements and things like that. Only a few players got them. I don’t think I would come back.”

    The expectation of ancillary income was due in part because Rose had been to Japan the previous year with the Cincinnati Reds and had been in demand for endorsements, television appearances, and autograph sessions. Joe Reichler, who at the time helped run the Major League Baseball Promotion Corporation, was quoted as saying, “I think a lot of the players saw how well [Rose] did and figured the same thing would happen to them. [But] there really were no firm commitments along these lines.”

    Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Lary Sorensen felt that that it was “not a big issue teamwide. Maybe it was for a few of the main guys. But I was young and just happy to be there.” And Singleton said in a 2021 conversation that “it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. Some guys may have been concerned about it, and it would have been OK if it had happened to me, but it was no big deal that it didn’t.”

    In the past there had been incidents of Americans going to Japan and behaving in a rude, arrogant, boorish manner. This time, they were generally considered to be well-behaved, though interpreter Toyo Kunimitsu sometimes saw them differently, as described in Robert Whiting’s seminal book about Japanese baseball, You Gotta Have Wa.

    The [US] All-Stars were rather tacky and rude,” said Kunimitsu, who worked as translator for foreign players with the Yakult Swallows and, later, the Chunichi Dragons. “Once we were on a long bus ride [and] John Candelaria, the pitcher for the [Pittsburgh] Pirates, had been drinking a lot of beer and had to urinate. So he urinated into a bucket and threw it out the window. I was shocked. The driver was really angry. He wanted me to throw Candelaria off the bus, but finally agreed to let him stay when Candelaria said he would stop drinking beer. I saw a lot of bad examples of spoiled Americans on that tour.”

    Nonetheless, the Americans took the games seriously, and many had positive memories.

    Parker had not wanted to come on the tour because of a bad knee, but he finally agreed and played in most of the games, even playing some in center field and sliding on his bad knee. The New York Yankees’ Bobby Murcer was said to have been upset that he did not get more playing time. Kingman, usually not accommodating to the media, stood on the sidelines after the first US-Japan game and answered question after question from reporters through an interpreter. Simmons could have returned home after the last AL-NL contest, but he volunteered to stay for the second game against Japan and played the entire game.

    “To me, this was the trip of a lifetime,” Simmons said. “I really have no complaints. I enjoyed it, and so did my wife. Japan is a country I [had] always wanted to visit, and to be able to do it this way is terrific.”

    Singleton said, “It was a great trip. We were treated well and enjoyed it tremendously.” Pitcher Rick Langford of Oakland said, “It’s an honor and a pleasure to be here [in Japan].” And Sorensen and Angels pitcher Mark Clear, both newlyweds, considered the trip to be their honeymoons.

    “I was just 23, had never been to Japan and had just gotten married, so I thought ‘Wow, what a great opportunity to travel and see some of the world,’” Sorensen said. “They treated us with great respect, and the games were great because the fans were so enthusiastic. It was like going to a football game in the U.S.

    “The whole trip was an autograph session,” he added with a laugh. “Whenever we’d go out, people would point at us and then ask for autographs. For the majority of us, it was a fabulous tour, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun.”

    Sorensen remembered a couple of amusing occurrences, one on the team plane. The Pirates had recently upset Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles to win the 1979 Word Series and, in the process, had adopted the Sister Sledge hit song “We Are Family” as their unofficial anthem. During a flight, Sorensen noticed Candelaria, Parker, and Madlock sneaking toward the front of the plane where Weaver was sitting.

    “They had a big boom box and blasted out ‘We Are Family,’” Sorensen said. “It didn’t bother Earl, but we all thought it was funny.”

    Sorensen recalled another time when a Japanese TV reporter was in the US dugout and providing live commentary during a game. As he was wont to do, Weaver got into a profanity-laced argument with a couple of the American umpires, and the reporter translated what was being said for his Japanese audience. However, when Weaver said something like “You’re a bleeping, bleep, bleep,” the reporter was stumped for a translation and simply repeated Weaver’s exact words over the air.

    Lou Brock, who had retired after the just-completed 1979 season, was honored after the final game for his fine career, and Lasorda gave big thanks to the Japanese, in particular chief sponsor Junichi Wada. “It was a great gift Mr. Wada gave the Japanese people,” Lasorda said. After the final game, both teams paraded around the perimeter of the stadium, and the fans came as close as possible to the field to give them a standing ovation.

    “Overall, it was a good experience,” Larry Bowa said. “There were problems with travel, and we all got tired. Going to Japan, however, was quite an experience.”

    Had the Japanese game made up some ground in its quest of equaling or surpassing the Americans? Weaver said after the first game that Japanese baseball had made tremendous improvement since his previous visit in 1971. All the players, he added, looked like potential home-run sluggers.

    Sorensen felt somewhat differently, though he could see that there was quality in the Japanese roster.

    At the time, I think the Japanese game was at the Triple-A level. The biggest thing was the size difference; we had size and skill sets that, at the time, were noticeably different. They didn’t have any (Shohei) Ohtanis then, although that’s changed over time. But there’s no question that they had some really good players, were fundamentally sound, and were very well prepared. They took the game very seriously, probably more so than we did, and they were more aggressive with small ball than we were. Skillwise, they had some infielders that could probably have been major leaguers. And while most of their pitchers didn’t throw hard, they were tough because they could throw a bunch of different pitches with different deliveries and from several arm angles.

    Singleton said he “wasn’t too impressed with the Japanese pitchers then, though they did a good job of mixing their offerings and using off-speed pitches.” He commented, “I was more impressed with them when I went back to Japan with the Orioles after the 1984 season. Since then, of course, they’ve had quite a few pitchers come over to the major leagues and do well. The two games were really competitive, though. We were more about power – the Japanese players would watch us in batting practice and were impressed. On the other hand, the Japanese played small ball really well.”

    As the Japan Times noted, “the gap that existed between American and Japanese baseball has been narrowed by the two U.S.-Japanese games.”

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    The 1979 Major League All-Star Series in Japan
  • BK, Another Side That Continued After Retirement

    BK, Another Side That Continued After Retirement

    By Tae-in Chun

    When people think back to the 2001 World Series, many remember this scene: a game-tying home run with two outs in the ninth, and a pitcher collapsing on the mound. The man at the center of that moment was BK, Byung-hyun Kim. That year, he was the closer for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He took responsibility for finishing games in both the Division Series and the Championship Series, helping Arizona reach the World Series. In Games 4 and 5, he gave up two home runs. The series went all the way to Game 7, and in the end, the team won the championship. Kim became the first Korean player to appear in the World Series and experience winning it.

    Byung-hyun Kim made his professional debut at twenty. At twenty-two, he was entrusted with the ninth inning of the World Series. His pitches, rising sharply from a low release point, felt unfamiliar to hitters. That unfamiliarity was his weapon.

    BK sitting down on the mound after recording a blown save

    A personality that stood out even more in the conservative culture of Korean baseball

    Although Kim was an exceptional talent, the trait that made him even more famous in Korea was his “bad boy” image. In 2003, while playing for the Boston Red Sox, he was heavily booed by home fans and responded by raising his middle finger toward the stands, instantly causing controversy. He later apologized publicly. MLB media at the time also criticized the act as “unprofessional.” Still, after the apology and the club’s disciplinary action, the issue did not grow further there.

    In Korea, however, the image lingered strongly. Even now, it is still remembered as the “beop-gyu incident.” The nickname grew out of the similar sound between the English swear expression and the Korean word beop-gyu meaning “regulation,” along with the trivial fact that he had studied law. It eventually became one of Kim’s best-known nicknames.

    That same year, after returning to Korea, he got into a physical altercation with a reporter while refusing unsanctioned media coverage at a health club. The incident was reported as an “assault controversy.” In 2006, he was unable to join the national team for the World Baseball Classic after losing his passport. There were also a series of mishaps involving his precious World Series rings, including losing them during a move, finding them at home, and then losing them again. Episodes like these reinforced his image as a highly individualistic figure.

    In one entertainment program, Byung-hyun Kim revealed the World Series ring he had found at home

    His choices after retirement, and an extension of his MLB experience

    After retiring, Byung-hyun Kim entered the food business. It began with a sushi restaurant in San Diego. Later, he opened “Gwangju Jeil Hambaego” in Gwangju. His decision to focus on hamburgers goes back to his playing days. He said that when he visited Boston in 1995 for the World Youth Baseball Championship, he walked into a Burger King for the first time. That experience became one of the sparks, and he has said that the food culture he encountered while living in the United States also shaped his business ideas.

    The idea of opening a restaurant inside a baseball stadium was something he had carried with him since his days with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He explained that he was inspired by Gonzo’s Grill at Chase Field. Seeing a stadium restaurant named after a player made him want to open a burger shop inside a ballpark using the name of his alma mater, Gwangju Jeil High School. His stores later opened in places such as Gocheok Sky Dome and Changwon NC Park, and at one point expanded to five branches, though only the main location is currently operating.

    Later, he adjusted both the menu and the direction of the business. He now runs Metz Hannam, a German-style sausage restaurant in Hannam-dong, Seoul. To make sausages, he learned the process from a sausage meister in Korea. Afterward, he participated in a sausage competition held in Germany. The sausages he made received awards from the German Butchers’ Association.

    He said, “Baseball was my world, and I poured all my passion into it. After retirement, there was an emptiness. So I started working in food service, and now I am pouring my passion into that work.” Even after retirement, he has continued baseball in another way.

    He won six gold medals at a sausage competition in Germany

    Past that era, now in a place where he talks about MLB

    Recently, he has been appearing on the MLB Korea talk show Meritalk. The program was created to introduce Major League Baseball to Korean baseball fans. Joining him are Johnny of the K-pop group NCT, Dustin Nippert, former Arizona and Texas pitcher, and Sun-woo Kim, who played for Montreal and Washington.

    Although it is an entertainment program, it also covers how former MLB players adapted to the minor leagues and the major leagues, as well as the cultural differences they experienced.

    Byung-hyun Kim moved to the United States at twenty. At the time, he was only the third Korean player ever to reach Major League Baseball. There was also very little environment for receiving advice on adapting to life and competition in another country. Looking back on his MLB days on Meritalk, he says this:

    “MLB is not a system where someone takes care of you. If you set a goal, you have to fight for it yourself until the end. But rather than trying to force quick results, it is more important to adapt to the system first. English matters as much as baseball. You also should not isolate yourself, and it is important not to compare yourself with others.”

    His advice mentions adaptation before baseball skills. It is the perspective he gained from experiencing the major leagues at a young age. Now, drawing on that experience, he shares entertaining stories that help Korean fans understand and enjoy Major League Baseball more deeply.

    The talk show “Meritalk,” where K-pop stars and baseball figures introduce MLB together, has been receiving a positive response from a wide range of viewers.