The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were the fifth time that baseball was included as a demonstration sport, following the 1912, 1936, 1952 and 1956 Olympiads. The 1964 games, however, were different than the games before them in that more than one game would be played.
Until recently, most English-language accounts of the 1964 Olympic baseball events described it as a single game played between a US team made up of college players against “a Japanese amateur all-star team”. The game was played at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo on October 11th,1964 in front of 50,000 fans and was won by the US team by a score of 6-2. One of the US players, Shaun Fitzmaurice, hit a home run on the first pitch of the game.
As it turns out, this account is not entirely accurate. There were actually TWO games that Team USA played in at Jingu Stadium that day – one against a team of Japanese collegiate players and one against a team of Japanese corporate league players. Neither Japanese team should really be considered an “all-star” team. The collegiate team was essentially the Komazawa University team (which had just won the All-Japan University Baseball Championship four months earlier) which was fortified with seven players from other colleges in Tokyo. Similarly, the corporate league team was the Nippon Express team (which had won the Intercity Baseball Tournament – essentially the corporate league championship – two and a half months earlier) that was bolstered by seven players from other corporate league teams.
Rod Dedeaux, the legendary USC baseball coach, was the manager of the US team. He’d put together an all-star team of collegiate players for a 14-game tour of Japan and South Korea that included these two games in Tokyo. The tour was organized to drum up interest in having baseball added to future Olympics. The team would include eight players who would go on to play in the major leagues – Mike Epstein, Gary Sutherland, Chuck Dobson, Alan Closter, Dick Joyce, Jim Hibbs, Ken Suarez and the previously mentioned Shaun Fitzmaurice.
The baseball team was not considered part of the official US Olympic team and was not quartered in the Olympic Village. Neither were they allowed to participate in the Opening Ceremony. On the plus side, however, they were not subject to the curfew that the other athletes had and were able to enjoy the Tokyo nightlife deeper into the evening. Similarly, the Japanese teams were not considered part of the official Japanese team and also did not take part in the Opening Ceremony.
The Japanese collegiate team (seen above with Team USA) was managed by Akihito Kobayashi, the head coach of the Komazawa University team. Eleven of the eighteen players on the roster were from Komazawa with another two players coming from one of the University’s Tohto League rivals, Chou University. The other five players came from Tokyo Big Six league schools – two from Hosei, two from Keio and one from Rikkio. All the players wore Komazawa uniforms.
Twelve members of this team would go on to have professional careers in NPB. Tokuji “Atsushi” Nagaike of Hosei University was the biggest name here – he won two Pacific League MVP awards (1969 & 1971) and led the league in home runs and RBIs three times each. Shozo Doi (Rikkio) and Toshimitsu Suetsugu (Chuo) were key members of the Yomiuri Giants team that won nine straight Nippon Series between 1965 and 1973 (known as the V9 Giants). Doi managed the Orix BlueWave in the early 1990s and is most famous (infamous?) for saying that Ichiro Suzuki would never be able to hit with that batting stance. Taisuke Watanabe (Keio) had thrown the first perfect game in Tokyo Big Six history five months before these games.
The corporate league team (seen above with Team USA) was managed by Seiji Inaba, the head coach of Nippon Express. Like the collegiate team, the corporate league team’s eighteen player roster featured eleven players from their manager’s team. The other seven players consisted of two players each from Nippon Oil and Nippon Steel Pipe and one each from Sumitomo Metal, Nippon Columbia and Kanekalon Kaneka. All the members of the team wore Nippon Express uniforms.
Only three of these players would have professional careers. The most interesting story of any of these players is Shigeo Kondo of Nippon Columbia who, after an eleven-year corporate league career, was taken by the Lotte Orions in the 1971 NPB draft. At 29 years and one month, he was the oldest player drafted, a record he would hold for eleven years until 30-year and five-month-old Norio Ichimura was drafted by the Dragons in 1982.
With the smoke of the Olympic cauldron (which had been lit during the Opening Ceremony the previous evening) at the National Stadium visible just beyond the left field stands of Jingu Stadium, the teams held their own “opening ceremony” before the two collegiate teams faced off in the first game. While there’s no record of whether Fitzmaurice did indeed hit a home run on the first pitch of the game, the US team did score a run in the top of the first inning. Japan matched that run in the bottom of the inning and went ahead 2-1 with a single run in the fifth inning. Team USA tied the score in the top of the ninth and that’s how the game ended – a 2-2 tie. The corporate league team proved no match for Team USA in the nightcap with Dedeaux’s squad shutting out Inaba’s by a score of 3-0.
Team USA’s tour of Japan would conclude two weeks later with a doubleheader in Urawa. Their first game against “a selected team from Saitama Prefecture” ended in a 3-3 tie while Nippon Express got their revenge by winning the second game 3-2. The collegiate team would finish the Japanese portion of their tour with a record of 5-2-2.
Baseball would not return to the Olympics for twenty years when it was again a demonstration sport for the 1984 Los Angeles games. Unlike the previous instances, the 1984 games featured an eight-team tournament rather than a single day event. The only connection to the 1964 games was Rod Dedeaux, who would again manage Team USA. The Japanese team took the “unofficial” gold medal with Team USA taking silver. The two nations would swap spots at the 1988 Seoul games, the last that baseball would be played in as a demonstration sport. It would become an official sport at the 1992 Barcelona games.
Note – the photos for this post were taken from the “Japan National Team Uniform Catalog”, a book/magazine published by Baseball Magazine She in April of 2020. The baseball cards are from the author’s personal collection.
Dave McNeely has been collecting Japanese Baseball cards for more than 25 years and has been blogging about them since 2007. His blog can be found at Japanese Baseball Cards.
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.
He caught nearly 3,000 games, hit 657 home runs, and never believed he was gifted
If you were playing bar trivia and the category was baseball catchers, the answers would feel obvious.
Who hit the most home runs?
Mike Piazza.
Who finished with the most hits?
Ivan “Pudge” Rodríguez.
Those are good answers. They are also incomplete.
Because in Japan, one man redefined what a catcher could be—hitting more home runs than any catcher in baseball history, winning a Triple Crown at the position, and changing how the job itself was understood.
And the irony is this: Katsuya Nomura never believed he was a natural home run hitter.
That may sound like false modesty coming from a man who hit 657 of them—more than any catcher in the history of professional baseball, second-most in Japanese history behind Sadaharu Oh—but Nomura was serious. He believed power was borrowed, not owned. Something earned through preparation, positioning, and timing, but never brute force.
He believed that if you wanted to understand baseball, you had to understand why the ball went where it did, and why people behaved the way they did under pressure.
Those beliefs did not come from theory: they came from survival.
Nomura’s father went to war when he was two years old and never came home. By three, his father was dead. What followed was not tragedy in the cinematic sense, but something quieter and more exhausting: illness, poverty, and responsibility arriving too early. His mother battled cancer—first uterine, then colon—and spent long stretches hospitalized in Kyoto. Nomura and his older brother Yoshiaki were sent to live with neighbors.
Nomura would later say that poverty itself was survivable. Even hunger was survivable. What stayed with him was learning that in someone else’s house, you could not say you were hungry at all.
When his mother finally returned, he waited for her train hours in advance at a tiny rural station surrounded by rice fields. Only a few trains passed each day. He waded into a nearby stream and chased fish to pass the time. When the train arrived, she stepped down supported by another woman, her face white, her body spent. There was no car so they borrowed a handcart, loaded her onto it, and walked home together—three people, a cart, and a future that suddenly felt very heavy.
At home, she sat silently in front of a small dresser inside their equally small room. She didn’t move and she didn’t say anything. Nomura asked what was wrong. Still, she said nothing. Only later did he understand: she was trying to figure out how to keep her children alive.
Help came from unexpected places. A local factory manager offered her work spinning yarn for carpets. Nomura learned, early, the value of kindness and the necessity of endurance. He delivered newspapers. He babysat. In summer, he sold ice candy wherever people gathered: factory lunch breaks, school fields, festivals.
Without realizing it, he was learning how information worked. If you went where people were, the ice candy sold. If you guessed wrong, it melted in your hands.
When Nomura showed promise in middle school, he aimed for high school baseball. His mother told him to abandon the idea and apprentice somewhere after graduation. It was Yoshiaki who intervened, offering to give up his own plans for college so that Katsuya could continue. Nomura never forgot that trade.
He attended a small, obscure high school—so obscure that, by his own account, they sometimes had to bring in a university student just to hit fungoes before games. Nomura was everything at once: catcher, cleanup hitter, captain, and de facto manager. They barely won. Scouts did not come. He cheated on exams to keep the team alive. He did not know what pitch calling really was. He was, in his own words, just a wall.
That turned out to be enough.
When it came time to chase baseball seriously, he did so practically. He studied the player directory and looked for teams with aging catchers. Two teams fit the bill, Nankai and Hiroshima. Nomura entered professional baseball as a test player for the Nankai Hawks, one of hundreds trying out. Seven were selected. Four were catchers, all from rural areas. Nomura didn’t understand why until later: test catchers were cheap bullpen labor and country boys were thought to be obedient. No one expected them to matter.
His first contract was ¥84,000, paid over twelve months. ¥7,000 a month. ¥3,000 went straight back to the team for dormitory fees. He only took home ¥4,000. When his hometown celebrated him as a professional player and people asked about his signing bonus, he smiled and deflected. “Use your imagination,” he said.
After his first year, having barely played, a team official told him he was being released.
Nomura went back to his dorm room, sat in the dark, and thought of home.
The next day, he returned and begged for one more year. He even offered to play for free.
The team relented and gave him another chance.
His second year nearly ended the same way. Coaches suggested he abandon catching and move to first base; his arm wasn’t strong enough to behind the plate. Nomura accepted the logic but refused the conclusion. He stayed late, throwing long toss every day in an empty stadium. For months, nothing changed.
Then one day, veteran outfielder Kazuo Horii noticed how Nomura gripped the ball.
“That’s a breaking-ball grip,” he said. “You’re a pro and you don’t know how to hold the ball? Turn the seams sideways.”
The throw changed instantly. Nomura had been teaching himself baseball from its first principles and had gotten one of the most basic ones wrong. He laughed about it later and remembered it forever.
He returned to catching because he had done the math. Beating a star first baseman was impossible. Beating a mediocre catcher was not.
He began to watch everything. How hitters reacted to pitches. How pitchers repeated mistakes. How counts shaped decisions. A former journalist working as a scorer agreed to chart pitch sequences for him. Nomura studied them obsessively. He discovered patterns where others saw randomness.
That is the version of Katsuya Nomura that explains everything that followed: the refusal to rest, the obsession with preparation, the willingness to endure being unseen. Baseball did not teach him how to survive. Baseball merely gave survival a uniform.
The numbers followed. Then the power, improbably. Nomura was never built like a slugger. He shortened his swing, widened his grip, focused on contact and rotation. “A home run that barely clears the fence counts the same,” he said.
Catching every day, hitting every day, Nomura became something Japan had never seen: a catcher who did not wear down. A catcher who hit in the middle of the order. A catcher who led the league in home runs.
During a Japan–U.S. exhibition series, Willie Mays nicknamed Nomura “Moose,” not for his size or speed, but because he stood still, watched everything, and reacted instantly when it mattered.
He moved from sixth in the order to fifth to fourth. He won batting titles as a catcher—something no one thought was supposed to happen. He led the league in home runs eight straight years. In 1965, he became the first catcher in professional baseball history to win the Triple Crown.
He thought it was terrifying. He had never believed the batting title was meant for him. He had won home run and RBI titles before, but batting average felt different. It depended too much on luck. The batting title arrived because other great hitters like Isao Harimoto and Kihachi Enomoto slumped.
Late in the season, the final obstacle was Daryl Spencer, a former big leaguer playing for the Hankyu Braves. Nankai had already clinched the pennant. Manager Kazuto Tsuruoka was away scouting for the Japan Series. Acting manager Kazuo Kageyama* pulled Nomura aside before a crucial doubleheader.
*In 1965, Tsuruoka stepped down and Nankai named Kageyama manager. Four days later, he was dead. The shock forced Tsuruoka’s return and left a lasting impression on Nomura.
“I’ll take responsibility,” he said. “Walk Spencer every time.”
Nomura hated it.
He was the catcher. He had to call those pitches. Spencer grew visibly angry, eventually holding his bat upside down in protest. Days later, before the race could resolve itself cleanly, Spencer was injured in a motorcycle accident and ruled out for the season.
When reporters congratulated him, he didn’t celebrate. He said only that he wasn’t the kind of person who could rejoice in another man’s misfortune. Later, he admitted something closer to the truth:
“If I’m the only one allowed to be this lucky,” he wondered, “is that really okay?”
He decided the only acceptable response was more work. More swings and more gratitude expressed through effort.
“I am a second-rate hitter,” he said. “That’s why I work.”
He whispered to hitters. He studied their lives. He categorized their minds. He manipulated timing and doubt. Some ignored him. Some rattled. Some fought back. Nomura accepted all of it. This was work.
He worked for 26 seasons. He was behind the plate until he was 45, catching 2,921 games. He became player-manager when he was 35. He was named MVP five times. He endured doubleheaders, summer heat, stolen bases he could no longer stop. He believed the catcher did what no one else could: give shape to baseball’s scriptless drama.
The catcher sees everything first. The catcher absorbs every mistake. The catcher makes decisions that never appear in the box score and lives with consequences that always do. When things go wrong, it is the catcher’s fault. When things go right, it is simply how the game was supposed to go.
When Nomura reached 600 home runs in 1975, the moment barely registered nationally. Nomura played for the Hawks, who played in the Pacific League, and everybody knew that what happened in the PL didn’t matter. Oh and Shigeo Nagashima were dominating headlines for the Giants in the Central League. Nomura understood. He prepared a line in advance.
“If they are sunflowers,” he said, “then I am a moonflower, blooming quietly along the Sea of Japan.”
It became his most famous quote. He even jumped rounding the bases, a rare display. The moonflower, it turned out, wanted to be seen, even if only once.
When his playing career finally ended in 1980, it happened in a way that felt fitting. With the bases loaded and his team trailing by one, Nomura was lifted for a pinch hitter. Sitting on the bench, he caught himself hoping the substitution would fail.
It did.
On the drive home, Nomura realized something unforgivable had happened: he had put himself ahead of the team. That night, he decided to retire. After all, a player who no longer put the team first had already retired in spirit.
Katsuya Nomura caught more pitches than anyone in the history of Japanese professional baseball. He endured more innings, more games, more seasons than anyone should have had to. He also grounded into more double plays than anyone in NPB history.
At his retirement ceremony, Nomura put on his catcher’s gear one last time. His teammates lined up between first and third base. One by one, they stepped onto the mound, said a few words into a microphone, and threw him a ball.
Nomura caught every one.
Nomura once said that if you take baseball away from him, nothing remains.
Zero.
But that was never quite true. Because even when the uniform came off—when the knees finally stopped cooperating, when the dugout door closed for the last time after stints of managing Yakult, Hanshin, and the newly formed Rakuten, Nomura kept doing the same thing he had always done.
He watched.
Because to Nomura, baseball was never a game solely for the gifted.
It was a game for the people who noticed.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Rob Garratt tells us about Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants 1960 visit to Japan.
The San Francisco Giants enjoyed a banner year in 1960. After almost five years of planning by the city’s mayor and Board of Supervisors and two years of problem-plagued construction, the Giants’ new ballpark, Candlestick Park, opened in time for the 1960 season. It was a dream come true for Giants owner Horace Stoneham and it justified his move from New York at the end of the 1957 season. The Giants, with a new identity as a West Coast team, now had a permanent location in a new ballpark. The team drew well in its first year at Candlestick, and Stoneham was pleased. And while the Giants would miss out on the National League pennant in 1960, they did manage an exciting postseason, nonetheless. In October 1960, the San Francisco Giants traveled to Japan on a goodwill tour, carrying on a tradition of the city’s connection with Japanese baseball.
San Francisco baseball was known to the Japanese public first through the energy of Frank “Lefty” O’Doul, a San Francisco native who visited Japan in the 1930s with American baseball teams, fell in love with the country and its people, and saw the potential there for good baseball. O’Doul, who is enshrined in Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame for his contribution to the Japanese game, took his San Francisco Seals Pacific Coast League team to Japan in 1949 (O’Doul was the Seals manager), the first time after World War II that an American team toured Japan. The team’s visit was endorsed by General Douglas MacArthur, the American administrator of Occupied Japan, who felt that the game would lift the spirits of the Japanese people and do wonders for diplomacy between two former foes. The Seals’ visit was a resounding success, with the team greeted by some of the largest crowds that had assembled publicly in Japan since the end of the war. By all accounts it was a successful diplomatic venture with the added bonus that it increased the popularity of the game in Japan.
The Giants’ 1960 tour was the second postwar visit for a San Francisco ballclub and the second for Horace Stoneham as well. Stoneham took his New York Giants to Japan for an exhibition tour in 1953, the first single major-league team to do so. The Giants dominated the 1953 series with Japan, drubbing the Yomiuri Giants 11-1 in the opening game and going on to win nine straight games, finishing the series with 12 victories against one loss and one tie. The Japanese players may have lost on the field, but the Japanese people won their way into Stoneham’s heart. The tour itself made a great impression on the Giants’ boss, who was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the Japanese fans, and by the gracious hospitality of the Japanese officials. Treated as an international celebrity, he was moved by the attention and honor paid to the Giants as foreign guests and he was charmed by the country itself – its sights, its food, and its ceremonies and rituals that reflected a deep sense of culture. Stoneham was quoted as recognizing the goodwill gesture of the tour, especially its importance in strengthening the ties between the two countries.
Those 1953 memories were dancing in Stoneham’s head in late 1959 when he received an invitation from Japanese officials for the Giants to return to Japan in the fall of 1960. The proposal was backed by Matsutaro Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the leading newspaper conglomerates in Japan, and brokered by Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada, a Nisei Japanese American who was helping develop Japanese baseball in the 1950s. Stoneham was so enthusiastic about the invitation that he sent Lefty O’Doul to Japan in the winter of 1959-60 to work with Harada and Shoriki to firm up the plans; O’Doul had been working for the Giants as a consultant since their arrival in San Francisco and Stoneham wanted to take full advantage of O’Doul’s ties with Japanese baseball. The initial discussions went well and by the summer of 1960, Shoriki and Harada presented the Giants with a formal plan for a tour of Japan.
The proposed invitation called for the Giants to play a 16-game exhibition schedule in 10 Japanese cities, under Japanese rules and officiated by Japanese umpires, with participation by San Francisco’s “star players.” Shoriki was careful to insist on Giants star power, knowing that the likes of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Orlando Cepeda would appeal to Japanese fans eager to see great hitting. Stoneham was more than happy to accept and returned the signed agreement in late August 1960. Twenty-two players agreed to travel to Japan, including Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, and a young Juan Marichal, all of them future Hall of Famers. Most of the Giants starters joined the tour as well, among them Felipe Alou, Jim Davenport, and pitchers Jack Sanford and Sam Jones. Included were club officials, headed by Stoneham and his wife, Valleda, acting manager Tom Sheehan, club secretary Eddie Brannick, team publicist Garry Schumacher, and O’Doul.
The organizing Japanese committee pulled out all the stops. The schedule of events upon arrival was nothing short of breathtaking, with almost no hour unaccounted for in the daily routines. Everything was meticulously planned from a television press conference at the airport to a celebrity parade from the airport to the city. Crowds lined the 10-mile parade route and packed the rain-soaked streets in downtown Tokyo as the Giants made their way to the hotel. That evening a welcoming dinner reception was held at the Imperial Hotel and Stoneham read a message from San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, a special greeting to “[our] ‘sister city,’ expressing best wishes to the Japanese people on the 100th anniversary of US-Japan diplomatic relations.” On the second day more ceremonial activities took place as the Giants toured Yomiuri’s headquarters, visited the Nihon Television Studios, where the players were interviewed and introduced to Japan’s national TV audience, practiced for 1½ hours at Korakuen Stadium, and attended a reception in their honor at the US Embassy, hosted by Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the nephew of General MacArthur. Japanese planners had thought of every probability, working in “alternatives” for events and sightseeing, in case of changes due to bad weather. In what must have seemed a whirlwind pace of parades, receptions, and ceremonial lunches and dinners, the Giants, with very little time for themselves, might have thought that a game of baseball was almost anticlimactic.
The 1960 San Francisco Giants arrive in Japan (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York)
On the third day, the time finally came for the Giants to face the Yomiuri Giants in the inaugural game of the tour. But the visiting players would wait again as the game provided the Japanese with yet another opportunity for pregame pageantry, described by one source as part parade, part theater spectacle, as “shapely Japanese models and the Tokyo police band led the Japanese and American Giants around Korakuen Stadium as fireworks exploded, and balloons and pigeons soared skyward.” Once the teams had finished the procession and the air had cleared, Ambassador MacArthur read a greeting from President Dwight Eisenhower that recalled the long history of exchanges between Japanese and American baseball players, noting the important role of the national pastime in both countries. The president’s message stressed the importance of this year’s exhibition series as a promotion of “the spirit of international understanding and co-operation essential to the peace of the world.” Then Matsutaro Shoriki threw out the traditional first ball and the game officially began, at last.
Initially things did not fare well for the visitors, who were perhaps weary from international travel and overwhelmed by welcoming ceremonies. In the first two games of the scheduled 16-game tour, the Japanese beat San Francisco, much to the surprise and chagrin of some of the local sportswriters, who expressed a tinge of disappointment over the Japanese success. Writing for the Japan Times, Katsundo Mizuno labeled the Giants’ start as the “worst of any major league outfit” that ever visited Japan, and he wondered what was wrong with them. The headlines in the local coverage of the opening game reflected a mixture of shock with a dash of hyperbole: “Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants Bomb San Francisco, 1-0” although the Japanese managed only two hits against Giants pitching.
The first game was the only one in which San Francisco faced players from a single team. For the rest of the exhibition tour, the Giants played squads of all-stars drawn from the two Nippon Professional Baseball leagues. The Giants lost the second game, but managed a win in Game 3, prompting the Japanese journalists to collect their breath, astonished by the Americans’ poor start. “By squeaking past the Japan All-Stars 1-0 at Tokyo’s Korakuen stadium yesterday, the Giants have averted unheard of catastrophe for major league baseball. No visiting U.S. big league team has ever lost three games in a row in Japan.” Hisanori Karita, a veteran Japanese baseball commentator, was quoted as demanding more “major-style action” from the visitors.
When questioned by the Japanese press about their slow start, Giants players and team officials responded politely and diplomatically, although privately they must have wondered what the fuss was about, given that they were adjusting to international travel, a frenetic welcome schedule, and a foreign cultural environment. Interim Giants manager Tom Sheehan tried some American tongue-in-cheek humor, “I understand we’ve set a new record for major leaguers by losing two games in a row. We may lose all the remaining games, too, you know.” “We’ll play better tomorrow,” he added.
The folksy Sheehan proved a truthful prognosticator. Games 4 and 5 were on the road, in Sapporo and Sendai, and the San Franciscans won them both, with plenty of offense including four home runs, three of them by Willie McCovey. The Giants then returned to Tokyo for two more games at Korakuen Stadium, which they split with the host team, giving them a 4-3 record for the series as they prepared to play the rest of the tour “on the road.” One highlight for the American squad was the attendance of Japanese royalty in Game 6 at Korakuen. Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko, guests of Matsutaro Shoriki, watched the Japanese all-stars erupt for 10 runs – the most they would score in any game of the tour – and beat the Giants, 10-7, before 32,000 fans. The crown prince and princess saw Willie Mays homer in the game, and then watched All-Star Isao Harimoto answer with a two-run blast of his own.
For the remainder of the exhibition tour, the Giants played outside of Tokyo, on a swing throughout southern Japan taking them to seven cities: Toyama; a three-game series in Osaka; Fukuoka; Shimonoseki; Hiroshima; Nagoya; and finishing in Shizuoka. It was on this road trip that the Giants found their mojo, winning seven straight games. But it was the manner in which they won that was impressive. Unlike the games played in Tokyo, which were usually low-scoring and tight, most of the road games were one-sided, with the Giants’ bats coming alive, much to the delight of the Japanese fans, who expected to see home run fireworks from the likes of Mays, McCovey, and Cepeda.
After an unusual game in Toyama in which the Giants banged out three home runs in the first inning to take a seven-run lead, only to see the All-Stars claw their way back, highlighted by a three-run homer by Kenjiro Tamiya off Mike McCormick – the game ended in 10 innings in a 7-7 tie – it was on to Osaka. The Giants found this stop to their liking, sweeping the three-game series in front of enthusiastic Osaka fans (the three games drew 90,000). During the Osaka series, they also enjoyed a day off touring the historic city of Kyoto.
Then it was on to Fukuoka, where the Giants won decisively, 8-4, and then to Shimonoseki, where they beat the all-star team, 11-5, in a demonstration of offensive fire, hitting four home runs. In an example of the goodwill that underscored and permeated the entire baseball tour, there was a somber and emotional moment when the Giants arrived in Hiroshima. Prior to the game, which the Giants won, 4-1, Stoneham led the players and team officials to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, where both Stoneham and Sheehan placed bouquets of flowers by the Memorial Cenotaph in a solemn ceremony honoring the memory of those Hiroshima citizens who died in the final days of World War II. After Hiroshima, the Giants traveled to Nagoya and put up big numbers once again in a 14-2 win. The last game of the tour was played at Shizuoka’s Kusanagi Stadium on November 13, won by the Japanese All-Stars, 3-2. The Giants totals for the series were 11 wins, 4 losses and 1 tie. After the game, the Giants boarded a train to Tokyo for three days of sightseeing before they flew home on Friday, November 18.
*****
Despite their slow start, the Giants finished their exhibition goodwill tour of Japan with a flurry and put up impressive numbers for the series, hitting 31 homers over 16 games, much to the delight of the Japanese fans; McCovey hit eight home runs, Mays seven, and Cepeda five. Mays hit .393 for the tour and was named by the all-star and Giants managers as the series’ Most Valuable Player. Giants pitching was strong as well, with an overall 2.41 ERA and 92 strikeouts in 142 innings. Sam Jones had a 3-0 record with an amazing 0.82 ERA; Juan Marichal posted a 1.55 ERA with a 2-0 record and a complete game; Mike McCormick had 22 strikeouts in 23 ⅔ innings. In a memorable and significant moment for Japanese fans, Jones displayed his own version of goodwill when he went over to first base after hitting a batter and apologized to the hitter. There were other friendly exchanges between the Giants players and the all-stars throughout the tour, some of which involved discussions of techniques for hitting and pitching. Overall, the relations between the two teams were positive and gracious, with a healthy sense of mutual respect. The Japanese fans were also captivated by the tour and turned out in all the cities to welcome the Giants and attend the games. The fans’ enthusiasm was evident in the exhibition tour’s great success at the turnstiles. The Giants drew 441,000 for the 16 games, according to the Japan Baseball Commission and the Yomiuri Shimbun.
*****
For all the goodwill that came of the Giants’ visit, the tour was not without its controversy, however. Buoyed by the games and the enthusiastic Japanese response – both the total attendance and the ticker-tape parades in various cities that drew huge crowds – and heady about the future of cooperation between the United States and Japan, Ambassador MacArthur spoke at a farewell reception at the US Embassy of more baseball competition between the two countries. MacArthur was specific in his proposal; he envisioned a future world series between the American champion and the Japanese champion and even had a date in mind. He thought an initial exhibition series could be played in 1964, in concert with the Tokyo Olympic Games, which could lead to a more established series a few years later.
His idea was immediately supported by Nobori Inouye, the commissioner of Japanese baseball. Both Lefty O’Doul and Cappy Harada also favored the idea and thought that with reasonable planning an international world series could take place perhaps in five or six years. Both men felt that Japanese baseball was improving rapidly and would offer good competition. So did Stoneham. In a press conference upon his return to San Francisco, the Giants boss remarked that he was “amazed” at the improvement of the Japanese players in the seven years since he first visited Japan. Moreover, Stoneham wanted a continued connection with Japanese baseball.
But when Harada, who was working as a consultant to the Giants, brought the idea to Commissioner Ford Frick in New York, it was dead-on-arrival. Perhaps it was an idea that was too embryonic, requiring planning, research, and co-operation between organizations. Possibly Frick accepted the prevailing view of Japanese baseball as inferior to the American game. Or it might have been the process by which the idea took flight that Frick objected to, coming out of the blue from an American ambassador in Japan. What was certain, however, was that Frick wanted to assert his authority about such matters. He fired off an official statement indicating that no decision can be made about any international baseball series without input from the commissioner’s office, and suggested that he had no immediate plans to entertain such a proposal.
Another controversy emerged during the tour involving the Giants’ interest in Japanese players. Upon Stoneham’s arrival in Japan, in an uncharacteristic slip of the tongue – Stoneham usually was tight-lipped about personnel matters, especially when it came to player acquisitions – the Giants’ owner commented that there were “several Japanese players we have heard about and are anxious to see.” Explaining that he would like to reach some formal agreement with a few Japanese clubs, he hoped to invite some players to the Giants’ spring training. These were just casual remarks folded into his words of appreciation of the Japanese invitation and nothing much was spoken about any plans or arrangements for the first 10 days of the tour. By the end of the second week, however, word had leaked to some in the press that Stoneham was interested in signing some Japanese players, or at least having them affiliate in some fashion with his organization, including a spring-training visit.
While the newspapers were speculating, Stoneham was working quietly behind the scenes. When the Giants arrived in Osaka on November 3 for the three-game series, Stoneham extended an invitation to the Nankai Hawks, to have pitcher Tadashi Sugiura attend their 1961 spring training in Arizona. The Japanese responded almost immediately to the offer. Makoto Tachibana, the president of the Nankai Hawks, issued a statement to the local press rejecting Stoneham’s invitation and made it clear he was suspicious of the Giants’ motives.
“I feel it isn’t only a case of having [Sugiura] attend the camp, but an underlying intention to hire him,” Tachibana said. “Even if this isn’t true, it can be considered that they may want to learn something from him, to – I hate to say it – steal his techniques.” Tachibana’s paranoia tended somewhat to the bizarre – “there is a possibility they want to use Sugiura for experiments” – but the Nankai owner’s root cause for worry was evident in his closing remarks to the press. He feared that Sugiura would be “separated from his team,” that is, playing for the Giants, “and we cannot permit a man as valuable to Japanese baseball to be used to his disadvantage.” The concern that Japanese baseball might lose some of its best players to American clubs was clear. There was also an invitation extended to a position player, Takeshi Kuwata, a third baseman for the Taiyo Whales, but that, too, came to nothing. The invitations and their subsequent refusals were minor incidents in the larger story of the tour, the games, the associations between players and the Japanese fans’ excitement over the competition, but they provided an interesting subplot to the 1960 Giants’ visit.
Once home from Japan, Stoneham more or less confirmed Tachibana’s suspicions. In remarks to a local sportswriter at a post-tour press conference, the Giants boss praised the Japanese players, taking care to emphasize the improvements in the quality of play, the skill, and the athleticism of many Japanese players since his 1953 visit with his New York Giants team. He implied that a few of the Japanese players, chiefly pitchers, might be able to have good results immediately in the major leagues, something that Tom Sheehan had noticed on the tour. That Stoneham saw the potential of Japanese players is not surprising; he had become a keen observer of major-league talent over the years. What is surprising is how prescient his notions were in the fall of 1960. The thinking behind those public remarks would take shape quickly, much to the surprise of both the major leagues and Nippon Professional Baseball. Just three years later, Stoneham’s musings on Japanese players would materialize with a radical move that would change baseball history.
In the fall of 1963, Cappy Harada, working for Stoneham as a scout and on the payroll with the Nankai Hawks as a consultant, came up with a proposal for cooperation between the two clubs. With Stoneham’s blessing, Harada arranged for three Hawks players – third baseman Tatsuhiko Tanaka, catcher Hiroshi Takahashi, and pitcher Masanori Murakami – to come to the United States for 1964 spring training and a chance to develop within the Giants’ minor-league system. According to the agreement, the Japanese players would participate in general spring training and then be assigned to minor-league teams for the rest of the season, Murakami at single A, and Tanaka and Takahashi at lower levels. Once the minor-league season was finished, the Giants sent the position players home to Japan, but kept Murakami, who had progressed so well in Fresno that he was called up to the big club in September. On Tuesday evening, September 1, 1964, in Shea Stadium, New York, Murakami made history as a baseball pioneer, pitching one inning of scoreless relief, the first Japanese national to play in the majors. He would pitch through the month of September and would return to the Giants for the 1965 season.
Horace Stoneham has many achievements on his résumé as a baseball owner. After Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Stoneham was soon to follow with the signing of African American players. He led the way in breaking a second barrier in the signing of Latino players. Along with Bill Veeck, he was responsible for founding the Cactus League in 1948. With his signing of Murakami, he broke another barrier in baseball, making the game global. It is tempting to think that this last achievement germinated in the stands at Japanese ballparks in 1960, as the Giants boss watched the Japanese players, especially the pitchers. He was certainly impressed enough with the players’ abilities to extend an invitation for two of them to come to spring training, even though the gesture did not bear fruit. Nonetheless, he sensed the latent talent in Japanese baseball. And perhaps on that 1960 tour, he saw the immediate future: a Japanese national wearing the uniform of the San Francisco Giants and playing in the major leagues.
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
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.
There are players who dominate their era, and then there are players who disrupt it.
Suguru Egawa did both.
He finished his career with 135 wins, a 3.02 ERA, and one of the most overpowering fastballs Japanese baseball had ever seen. He led the Central League in wins twice, strikeouts three times, ERA once, and in 1981 captured the pitching Triple Crown while carrying the Yomiuri Giants to a championship. At his peak, he was the best pitcher in Japan. Americans who saw him said he was as good as Nolan Ryan.
And yet, for much of his career, he was treated not as a hero but as a problem.
Egawa was called “Dirty Egawa” and was labeled “The Enemy of the People.” A verb—egawaru—entered the language, meaning to forcefully impose one’s opinion on others without regard for custom or consequence. Newspaper articles questioned his character. Fans booed him. Team executives worried he was changing baseball in the wrong direction. In hindsight, much of what angered people about Egawa now feels familiar: he managed his workload, he listened to his body, and he believed a career was something to steward, not sacrifice. The problem was timing: he was behaving like a modern athlete in a baseball culture that still worshiped obedience and working oneself to exhaustion.
Long before he was framed as selfish or ungrateful, Egawa had already been turned into something other than a person. As a high school pitcher at Sakushin Gakuin*, he was labeled Kaibutsu—the Monster. The nickname began half as a joke, borrowed from a popular manga character, inspired by his ears as much as his velocity. But it stuck, and it hardened. In an era without video highlights or instant replay, rumors traveled faster than proof. Somewhere in Tochigi Prefecture, people said, there was a teenage pitcher throwing a fastball so violent that bats barely grazed it. Egawa threw no-hitters and perfect games. He piled up strikeouts in numbers that sounded implausible. Fans reacted audibly when hitters merely made contact. For years, he hovered at the edge of the national stage, not quite reaching Koshien, the national high school baseball championship, which only added to the mystique. By the time he finally arrived, crowds were not watching a pitcher so much as a legend.
*New Astros pitcher, Tatsuya Imai, led Sakushin Gakuin to the Summer Koshien title in 2016.
But he never won a Koshien championship. His final high school game in the tournament ended in a rain-soaked walk-off loss. Even then, the Monster felt unfinished. That sense—that Egawa was always incomplete and never quite fulfilling his potential—would follow him for the rest of his career.
At Hosei University, Egawa refined himself. Surrounded by one of the most talent-rich eras in collegiate baseball, he learned to pace his power. He no longer tried to overpower every hitter. He learned restraint, timing, and how to reach back only when it mattered most. He won 47 games in Tokyo Big6 play and struck out 443 batters.
There is a story from his university days that explains more than any stat line. When Egawa had a date scheduled on a day he pitched, he didn’t give a time like everyone else. He said things like, “Meet me three hours after first pitch.” And if the game moved too quickly, he would deliberately waste a few pitches to slow the game down. He wanted the game to end when he said it would end.
No one doubted what he would become. What complicated everything was that Egawa wanted only one thing: to pitch for the Yomiuri Giants.
That simple and stubborn desire would reshape Japanese professional baseball.
What became known as the “Blank Day” affair has often been portrayed as a clever loophole exploited by an arrogant young pitcher. Years later, even Egawa would quietly correct that version. A 23-year-old, he admitted, did not invent this plan.
During his senior year at Hosei, he was selected by the Crown Light Lions with the first pick of the 1977 draft. He turned down the Lions at the urging of relatives who begged him to stay in Tokyo, to play for the Giants or at least a Central League team. The following year, just before returning from baseball study in the United States*, his father called him. “There’s a way to get into the Giants,” he said.
*At the time, the Lions were based in Kyushu, far away from Tokyo.
Egawa signed a surprise contract with the Giants on November 21st, 1978, the day before the draft, claiming that the Lions’ exclusive negotiating year had expired. The Giants agreed. The Central League did not. The league declared the contract invalid, but the Giants boycotted the draft the following day. Four teams drafted him anyway; Hanshin won his negotiating rights by lottery but the Giants refused to recognize Hanshin’s right to negotiate with Egawa.
Finally, under pressure from the commissioner, Egawa signed with Hanshin—then, the same day, was traded to the Giants for ace pitcher Shigeru Kobayashi.
If you want to understand why so many people reacted so harshly, you just have to see what they saw: Kobayashi, who had won the Sawamura Award in 1977, was suddenly recast as the tragic hero in Egawa’s story. Kobayashi was traded without warning, but did not complain. At a late-night press conference, he said he needed no sympathy. The public adored him for it.
Egawa was framed as selfish, cold, and ungrateful. Few asked how much control he had truly exercised and fewer noticed that he never celebrated the outcome. He had arrived where he wanted to be, but became a villain before he threw a pitch.
What offended people most wasn’t the maneuvering and rule bending—it was Egawa’s attitude. At his first Giants press conference, reporters shouted accusations before the press conference even began. When Egawa tried to calm the room—asking everyone not to get so excited—the words were clipped, replayed, and transformed into evidence of arrogance. In a culture that prized ritual humility, plain speech became another offense. “Don’t get excited” turned into a national punchline.
Egawa’s rookie season was delayed and uneasy. He finished 9-10. Kobayashi won 22 games and took home the 1979 Sawamura Award. The contrast was unavoidable. Then Egawa settled in. In 1980, he won 16 games and led the league in strikeouts. In 1981, everything came together: 20-6, a 2.29 ERA, 221 strikeouts, the pitching Triple Crown, league MVP, and a Japan Series championship in which he captured the final out himself.
The Sawamura Award went to someone else. It went to his teammate Takashi Nishimoto.
Nishimoto represented everything Egawa was supposed to be: tireless, durable, unquestioning. He threw more innings. He made more starts. He embodied the virtue Japanese baseball prized above all else: availability. Egawa never complained publicly. But from that moment on, Nishimoto became his measuring stick. They avoided eating together. They avoided joint interviews. From 1979 through 1987, Nishimoto never finished a season with more wins than Egawa. Even when Egawa’s shoulder began to fail, even when Nishimoto absorbed heavier workloads, Egawa stayed ahead.
If Nishimoto represented the path Egawa rejected, Masayuki Kakefu represented the opponent Egawa chose. Egawa never pitched around Kakefu. Not once. Kakefu was Hanshin’s cleanup hitter, the emotional center of the Tigers, and everything Giants fans feared. On one occasion, the bench signaled for an intentional walk. Egawa ignored it and threw his best fastball. Kakefu later said Egawa’s pitches did not simply beat swings; they passed above them, forcing hitters to rethink what a fastball could do.
Egawa hated avoidance. He hated walks. He believed pitching around a hitter was dishonest, not only to the batter, but to the crowd. Fans had come to see something decisive and he felt he owed them that. Against the bottom of the order, he saved his shoulder. Against the heart of the lineup, he emptied it.
When Randy Bass chased history in the mid-1980s, Egawa refused to pitch around him. Bass would later call Egawa the best pitcher he ever faced, in Japan or America.
But by his sixth season, the shoulder was beginning to fail him. Even in university, he pitched through pain. As a professional, he hid it carefully. When the pain returned for good, he was mocked as having a “hundred-pitch arm.” When his shoulder hurt, he rested. When it didn’t respond, he adjusted. To many, that looked like weakness. To others, it was baseball heresy.
Egawa still had flashes—like the 1984 All-Star Game where he struck out eight consecutive hitters and nearly broke the record of nine—but the strain was constant. On September 20, 1987, in Hiroshima, he took a one-run lead into the ninth inning. Two outs, no one on. The batter was Takehiko Kobayakawa. The catcher signaled for a curveball but Egawa shook him off. He threw his best fastball: elevated and down the middle. Kobayakawa hit it into the right-field stands for a walk-off home run. As Kobayakawa circled the bases, Egawa sank to his knees on the mound, unable to move.
He knew.
Egawa retired at 32, fresh off a 13-win season. Critics called it selfish. They said he quit too early. They said he should have pitched until his arm fell off. Egawa said his shoulder was done.
Years later, when he finally reconciled publicly with Kobayashi in a television commercial, Kobayashi said only this: “It was hard, wasn’t it? It was hard for both of us.”
For a long time, Suguru Egawa was framed as a villain who won too easily and left too soon. What he never did was perform suffering on demand. Suguru Egawa did not pitch until his arm fell off.
He stopped.
In the end, Suguru Egawa was less a rebel than a mirror. He reflected back to Japanese baseball the things it did not yet want to see: that exhaustion was not virtue, that loyalty could coexist with self-preservation, that excellence did not require ruin. The anger he provoked said less about his choices than about the fear of what those choices implied. By the time the game accepted those truths*, Egawa was already gone, carrying the weight of having been right too soon.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Adam Berenbak focuses on Stan Musial, Shigeo Nagashima, and the Cardinals 1958 visit to Japan.
Game Seven of the 1958 Japan Series featured a winner-take-all finish to a classic contest between two storied franchises.
In the bottom of the ninth, with a six-run lead, 21-year-old Kazuhisa Inao stared down at Shigeo Nagashima, ready to wrap up one the most famous pitching feats in Japan Series history. He had earned the win in the previous three games for the Nishitetsu Lions and was prepared to win his fourth in a row, and with it the championship. With such a comfortable lead, Inao had little to worry about, even though he faced Nagashima, the star rookie of the Yomiuri Giants. The Rookie of the Year hit a high fly ball deep into Korakuen Stadium that the Lions center fielder couldn’t make a play on. Nagashima displayed his blazing speed and sailed around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. Inao then finished off the remaining Giants and took the crown.
Though Nagashima’s home run had little effect on the outcome of the game, the matchup represented the best of baseball in Japan and the future of the sport. At the same moment, roughly 680 miles (1,100 kilometers) away in Seoul, the St. Louis Cardinals were playing a Korean all-star team in preparation for a 16-game tour against Japan’s best. A few days later, they would face an all-star team built around Nagashima and Inao, assembled by tour sponsor Mainichi Shimbun and tour organizer Yetsuo Higa, to showcase the young talent that would be the future of Japanese baseball.
THE TOUR STARTS
To quote Jim Brosnan, who was splitting duties by pitching for the Cardinals and covering the tour for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “From one of the longest runways in the world, San Francisco, we took off on the longest trip of this or any other year. By sunrise on the tenth we gained four hours changing time zones and explaining to the stomach wha’ hoppen [sic] in our 28-hour day.” The tour began in earnest the next day in front of a mere 3,000 fans at the Maui County Fairgrounds in Kahului, on the island of Maui. They faced a team that featured Bob Turley, Lew Burdette, and Eddie Mathews bolstering a collection of local ballplayers that Higa put together.
Two years before, Commissioner Ford Frick had helped arrange for the two major Japanese papers, Yomiuri Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, to host US tours, after each paper had tried to host teams in 1955. The solution was to alternate responsibility every other year, beginning with the 1956 Dodgers tour. Yomiuri had hosted first and it was no surprise that the Giants had played a big role. This time Higa, a Nisei businessman representing Mainichi, had arranged the tour to be unlike previous tours, pitting a Japanese all-star team against the Cardinals.
Although formidable, St. Louis was a team in transition. The Cardinals in 1958 had finished fifth in the National League. The only real highlights of the season were Stan Musial’s 3,000th hit and the debut of Curt Flood, who eventually helped the team to three pennants. Most of the team’s regulars made the trip, including Musial, Don Blasingame, Ken Boyer, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Wally Moon, Hal Smith, and Gene Green. However, last-minute substitutions, even after the vaccination shots had been administered, gave rise to a team that much more resembled the 1959 Cardinals. Gene Freese, Billy Muffett, and Hobie Landrith had already received their shots and clearances when they received trade notices just days before the team left. The 1958 coaching staff was set to go, too, but they were let go at the end of the season, two weeks after manager Fred Hutchinson received his pink slip.
Instead, newly minted Cardinals Alex Grammas, Bob Blaylock, and Ernie Broglio, along with brand- new manager Solly Hemus, made the trip. The pitching corps included Sam Jones, Mizell, Larry Jackson, and newcomers Blaylock and Broglio, the latter a promising rookie who was later (infamously) traded for Lou Brock. After tours by the San Francisco Seals in 1949 and all-star teams in 1951 and 1953, Japan had been visited by all three teams from New York. It was not shocking that the Cardinals were the third choice for 1958, behind the AL and NL pennant winners. Higa had made his play, but when major stars on both the Yanks and Braves decided against making the trip overseas, Higa was forced to reassess and offer the tour to St. Louis. His relationship with Cardinals, and the involvement of J.G. Taylor Spink, drove the decision, as well as an ability to exploit Musial’s stardom against an all-star team designed to showcase Japan’s youth.
Also along on the tour was Cardinals broadcaster Joe Garagiola. He was at the mike to broadcast a select number of games aired via tape-delay over KMOX Radio in St. Louis. The Sporting News claimed it was the first time a domestic radio station had broadcast baseball from overseas.
After the Kahului game, which the Cardinals took, 4 1, on Larry Jackson’s strong arm and his third-inning home run off Burdette, the two teams met twice in Honolulu. The Cardinals won the first game in a 9-1 rout, collecting six runs in five innings off Bob Turley, fresh off his historic Game Seven World Series win. St. Louis tacked on three more runs off Len Kasparovitch. The sole run for the Hawaiian All-Stars came when Ken Kimura drove in Wally Dupont, who had reached third when his base hit skipped past center fielder Bobby Gene Smith and rolled to the fence. In the final game, St. Louis edged the Hawaiian All-Stars, 5-4. Mathews tied the game, 4-4, with a home run off Broglio in the fourth, but two consecutive Hawaiian errors in the fifth allowed the Cardinals to regain the lead. The true star of the game was former Dartmouth pitcher Jimmy Doole, a schoolteacher who held the Cardinals to one hit during the final three innings. Strong seasonal rain forced the cancellation of a game in Guam, but otherwise the Cardinals soundly defeated the opposition in games at Manila and the Air Force Base in Kadena, Okinawa, before boarding the plane to Japan.
JAPAN
The touring group arrived in Tokyo on October 20 to a 1,500-person welcome party at Tokyo International Airport. In 13 open-topped cars, the team then paraded through streets packed with fans before arriving at the Imperial Hotel. They caught Game Six of the Japan Series and then set out on a two-day trip to South Korea to play before 25,000 fans in Seoul, including President Syngman Rhee. After they returned to Japan, there was a workout in Tokyo attended by nearly as many fans, before the real contests against the Japan All-Stars began on October 24 in a sold-out Korakuen Stadium, where the 1,200-yen seats were going for 10,000 yen on the side.
The Cardinals faced a formidable foe. The Mainichi newspaper distributed a supplement to advertise the tour that listed a Japanese roster that averaged just 24 years old—a whole generation of players coming into their own. Nankai Hawks ace Matsuo Minagawa was described as “specializing in terrific shoots,” an ode to his side-arm screwball, which, along with his slider, baffled hitters into the late 1960s. He was one of the 23 future Japanese Hall of Famers on the squad,joining several players not bom in Japan, like the Cuban Roberto “Chico” Barbon and Bill Nishida, a Nisei born in Hawaii. But it was Shigeo Nagashima who was the real sensation of Nippon Professional Baseball and would be “the most watched player in the coming series against the Cardinals.” He was already a “national hero,” even before joining the Giants due to his turning Rikkyo University into champions. Nagashima signed the largest contract for a rookie in Japanese history (to that date) and came through with a spectacular performance, leading the Central League in home runs and winning the Rookie of the Year Award. As the series got under way, Nagashima was praised by both Japanese and touring Cardinals as being a “major-league third baseman.” Besides Nagashima, the young All-Stars included Futoshi Nakanishi, Tatsuro Hirooka, and Katsuya Nomura, as well as aces Inao, Tadashi Sugiura, Takao Kajimoto, Motoshi Fujita, and 20-year-old Tetsuya Yoneda.Added to that core was one of the best pitchers in the history of the game, Japan’s only 400-game winner, Masaichi Kaneda, who was already well known to US fans as the man who had struck out Mickey Mantle three times in the second game of the Yankees’ 1955 tour. These players formed the core of Japanese baseball for the next decade as the sport moved into its own, with Nagashima at its center, epitomizing both youth and progress.
With the stadium full and the cameras broadcasting across Japan, the tour was underway. The Cardinals took the game, 5-2, but the star of the day was Nagashima, who hit a home run in a game that saw no homers from the Americans. Stan Musial went hitless. The two All-Star runs came on home runs by Nagashima and Chunichi Dragons sure-hitting second baseman Noboru Inoue. Mizell got the win thanks to Don Blasingame, who notched three hits off Tetsuya Yoneda and Masaaki Koyama.
The next day’s game featured a start by Kazuhisa Inao, who did not pitch in the first game, possibly because he needed rest after his recent performance in the Japan Series. Inao, in his third full season, had attained a superhuman veneer after capturing all four of the Lions’ wins in the Japan Series. The press referred to him as the “Iron Man” and “Superman.”The sellout crowd, including Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama, who threw out the first pitch, appeared thin due to a steady rain that eventually led to the game’s premature end. Nonetheless, countless fans cheered on the All-Star team from home on television.
The rain started falling in the second inning, which saw Inao, along with Nishita and future Hall of Famer Takao Kajimoto, give up 13 hits over six innings to lose 8-2. The Cardinals broke out in the fourth, knocking in four runs, all off Inao, who gave up seven hits. Larry Jackson pitched six innings, giving up four hits—though one was a 390-foot homer off Nakanishi’s bat. The driving rain eventually forced the umpires to call the game at the end of six innings.
About 185 miles (300 kilometers) away in Sendai on October 27, the All-Stars won their first game, as Kazuhisa Inao showed off his ironman stuff. Coming back on only two days’ rest, Inao pitched three innings in a relief to grab the win after southpaw Atsushi Aramaki had allowed the Cardinals to knot the game, 2-2, in the top of the seventh. In the bottom of the seventh, the Japanese surged ahead on “three walks, a wild pitch, a sacrifice bunt and two costly errors for four runs” to win, 6-3.
The tour then moved to Sapporo, where on October 28, before 30,000 fans, the Cardinals won 9-1. Blaylock pitched a brilliant seven-inning stretch, giving up only an inside-the-park homer to Nagashima along with one other hit. Two days later, the Cardinals won another behind Bobby Smith’s two doubles, a single, and a homer, just barely missing the cycle. However, Smith didn’t leave the stadium without claiming one—he was awarded a motorcycle as MVP of the game, and then proceeded to drive around the infield as the crowd cheered him on. The Cardinals won again, 7-2, in Nagoya before another game scheduled for November 1 in Osaka was rained out. On November 2 the Cardinals faced Aramaki in Nishinomiya. Aramaki held the Americans to one run in five innings before being removed for a pinch-hitter. Inao came in but the Cardinals scored three in the seventh and won handily 6-1.
According to The Sporting News, the “Cardinals were in formal dress more than baseball flannels” as they moved from party to party, highlighted by an audience with Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II (the general’s nephew).
The tour’s largest crowd showed up at Koshien Stadium on November 3. Each August, Koshien is home to the National High School Championship, which, along with the spring invitational, showcases the future of Japanese baseball. The 1957 tournament had featured a legendary performance by Sadaharu Oh, and the August 1958 tournament had seen the first team from Okinawa to participate—a great step forward in the relationship between the occupied island and mainland Japan. Before the game, a home run contest was held. Shigeo Nagashima paced the All-Stars with seven home runs, matched only by Musial. In the end, the All-Stars eked out a 15-14 victory, though the crowd cheered each and every dinger, proving the old adage “you can’t boo a home run.” Before roughly 50,000 energized fans at Koshien, Masaaki Koyama pitched brilliantly over eight innings holding the Cardinals to two runs. Ken Boyer proved to be the heavy hitter, tying the game in the ninth with a home run and then winning it in the 10th by driving in Blasingame.
Sitting in the crowd that day was Haruki Murakami. The future award-winning writer recalled:
When I was nine, in the fall, the St. Louis Cardinals played a goodwill game against an All-Star Japanese team. The great Stan Musial was at his peak then, and he faced two top Japanese pitchers, Kazuhisa Inao and Tadashi Sugiura, in an amazing showdown. My father and I went to Koshien Stadium to see the game. We were in the infield seats along first base, near the front. Before the game began, the Cardinals’ players made a circuit of the whole stadium, tossing signed soft rubber tennis balls to the crowd. People leapt to their feet, shouting, vying to grab the balls. But I just sat in my seat, vacantly watching all of this happen. I figured that a little kid like me had no chance of getting one of those signed balls. The next instant, however, I suddenly found one of them in my lap. By total chance, it just happened to land there. Plop—like some divine revelation.
“Good for you,” my father told me. He sounded half shocked, half admiring. Come to think of it, when I became a novelist at age thirty, he said almost the same thing to me. Half shock, half admiration. That was probably the greatest, most memorable thing that happened to me when I was a boy. Maybe the most blessed event I ever experienced. Could it be that my love for baseball stadiums sprang from this incident? I took that treasured white ball back home, of course, but that’s all I remember about it. What ever happened to that ball? Where could it have possibly gone?
The second game in Osaka saw half the crowd but provided twice the thrill as the Japanese All-Stars punished the Cardinals for their second win of the series. Futoshi Nakanishi, whom the Cardinals nicknamed “Big Buffalo,” hit a grand slam after Blaylock loaded the bases in the fourth inning, and added a two-run double in the sixth off Brosnan, driving in six of the All-Stars’ nine runs. “Too much Buffalo,” quipped Cardinals manager Solly Hemus after the game. Tadashi Sugiura allowed two runs over nine innings to earn the victory.
The home-run derby wasn’t the only exhibition that Mainichi had planned for the tour’s stop in Osaka. At their broadcast studio, the paper arranged for four members of each team, including Nakanishi and Brosnan, to participate in a singing contest live on- air.Joe Garagiola taped the contest for future broadcast and referred to it as “the highlight of the whole tour.” Brosnan noted that the real entertainment was the lack of musical talent among professional ballplayers, and there was a general sense of teasing and self-deprecation.
While the broadcast ended up a fun goodwill gesture, in the vein of so many vaudeville appearances by pro ballplayers dating back nearly a century, an undercurrent of racial insensitivity by poking fun at cross-cultural differences persisted in other aspects of the tour. The American press often contained racially insensitive terms, images, and innuendos. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch mocked stereotypical Japanese English with the headline “So-Sorry Cards Make Sad Sam at Home in Japan, Boot Game.” The Sporting News ran cartoons featuring buck-toothed and squinty- eyed Japanese fans—a style now called yellowface that was commonly used in American propaganda during World War II. Even Garagiola at times expressed a giddy fondness for poking fun at cultural differences, such as insensitive quips about how bowing was just a way for businessmen to check the size of your bankroll.
National League Secretary-Treasurer Fred Fleig proclaimed that the Japanese All-Stars were the equivalent of Triple-A players and that they lacked “quick judgment and alertness for unexpected situations.” He praised Koshien Stadium as ranking with Yankee Stadium and Municipal Stadium. His comments reflected the patronizing and racially insensitive viewpoints of many in the US traveling party and press in postwar Japan. These evolving racial and national identities exemplify both countries at a crossroads, as the prejudices of the Second World War era evolved into the coming challenges of the 1960s. Though toned down from the racist rhetoric of previous times, it was still problematic. This in turn was juxtaposed with the team’s solemn visit to Hiroshima.
On November 6 the teams went to Hiroshima and were greeted by Mayor Tadao Watanabe and a flower-throwing crowd in front of the Hotel New Hiroshima. Before the game, Musial and Hemus held a baseball clinic at the American Cultural Center for 250 Japanese players and fans. Before 20,000 excited fans, Atsushi Aramaki faced Ernie Broglio, who pitched a complete game despite two first-inning wild pitches that led to a run. The Cardinals hit Aramaki hard, going ahead 6-1 in the top of the sixth inning. Once again it was the rookie Nagashima who provided the punch for the All-Stars. After Kenjiro Tamiya reached base in the bottom of the ninth, Nagashima patiently waited for his pitch before hitting a 3-and-2 meatball over the left-field stands. However, it wasn’t enough, and the All-Stars fell, 6-3.
Earlier in the day, the American visitors had visited the Memorial Monument for Hiroshima and placed floral bouquets at the base of the arch. Then the club physician, Dr. L.C. Middleman, trainer Bob Bauman, coach Johnny Keane, and players Don Blasingame and Alex Grammas visited the 72 patients at the Hiroshima Atomic-Bomb Survivors Hospital signing autographs and offering kind words. Solly Hemus kept a video diary of the trip to Hiroshima, but his camera was stolen from the dugout during pregame ceremonies. Before he returned home, local fan Tsutomu Hayashi presented Hemus with a gift of over 150 feet of footage taken in Hiroshima, “in the interest of better US-Japan relations.”
The next day an earthquake hit while the team was waiting for a train to Fukuoka, but the players did not feel the tremors. At Heiwadai Stadium on November 8, Bishop Seiemon Fukahori of the Fukuoka Catholic Church, presented the Cardinals with a silk pennant embroidered with the team’s logo. This was a thank-you from leprosy patients at the Biwasaki Leprosarium, who were expressing their gratitude for Christmas gifts the Cardinals sent to the hospital in 1941. Attendance up to this point was 338,000 in addition to the millions who tuned in at home. Stan Musial had knocked out 12 hits for a .324 average—however, he had yet to smack a home run. (Some of the Cardinals players complained that the Japanese balls used during the tour were dead.) Meanwhile Nagashima had three, in addition to his seven from the home-run contest. Fukuoka fans came out to Heiwadai Stadium 30,000 strong on November 8, cheering Cardinals starter Phil Paine, who had pitched for the Nishitetsu Lions for a few games in 1953 while he served with the US Fifth Infantry Division stationed at Camp Drake in Fukuoka. The crowd saw him pitch out of a jam in the first by striking out Nakanishi, and then witnessed Musial finally slam his first home run, as the Cardinals won 5-1.
After a 7-1 St. Louis victory in Shimonoseki, Broglio then nearly no-hit the All-Stars the next game, played three days later in Shizuoka. Supported by home runs from Wally Moon and Gene Green and 15 hits off Sugiura, Zenjiro Tadokoro, and Hiroomi Oyane, Broglio held the All-Stars hitless for 6⅔ innings. With two outs in the seventh, Kenjiro Tamiya eked out a single for Japan’s only hit of the afternoon. Sam Jones finished it off with two hitless innings to hand the All-Stars their only shutout of the tour.
HOME
The last game before heading back to Tokyo was played in Mito on November 13. Masayuki Dobashi started for All-Japan but was relieved in the fifth by Bill Nishita, the Nisei who had played on and off in Japan since joining Yomiuri in 1952. Nishita pitched in the International League, the American Association, and the Pacific Coast League, as well as in the Central and Pacific Leagues in Japan, and with UC Berkeley—a true journeyman. The Cardinals won 5-1, thanks to Blasingame, who repeated his four-hit day from November 9, and also Gene Green, who homered twice. Green’s good fortune continued into the trip home and December, when he married St. Louis model Mari-Frances Rosenthal, a match The Sporting News dubbed a “wedding of blond and blond.”
It was back to Tokyo on the next to last day of the tour, in front of 20,000 shivering fans at Korakuen Stadium. Though they were treated to a 400-foot, two-run homer off the bat of Nakanishi, the Cardinals eventually walked away with the game, 9-2, as they racked up 16 hits. Blasingame nearly hit for the cycle: After hitting a single and triple, he homered to deep center off Tetsuya Yoneda.
November 16 marked the final day of the tour. A doubleheader at Korakuen Stadium attracted 80,000 fans. In the morning Takashi Suzuki faced off against Sam Jones. A pair of solo home runs by Green highlighted the 8-2 victory for the Cardinals. In the second game Japan was up 2-0 in the sixth when Boyer homered off Inao to cut the lead in half. The Cardinals took the lead in the seventh behind Lee Tate’s two-run double and another Boyer RBI. This brought the tour to a close with 14 wins for the Cardinals against only two wins for the Japan All-Stars, bucking the prediction by “Japanese baseball experts” that the Cardinals would match the 1956 Dodgers and lose four or five games. Yet each game was a display of the young talent in the Japanese game, and an affirmation that the Japanese were becoming strong enough to complete with talent from the major leagues. Nagashima lived up to the hype and was awarded the trophy as MVP of the Japanese team, which was donated by J.G. Taylor Spink. In the eyes of many Giants fans, Nagashima would be the heart of a Yomiuri team that announced during the tour that it would no longer sign foreign players, stating, “Japanese baseball should be played by Japanese players.”
Stan Musial hung on for a few more seasons, but it was a new generation of players who would take St. Louis to heights in the 1960s. And despite Yomiuri’s announcement that it would no longer recruit foreign players, other teams leapt at the chance. During the trip, three Cardinals pitchers—Phil Paine, Bill Wight, and Jim Brosnan—were even offered contracts to pitch in Japan during the 1959 season. All three declined, though only Brosnan was still officially a Cardinal after Wight was released and Paine demoted in the middle of the tour. Don Blasingame’s performance over the course of the tour cemented his visage in the minds of Japanese fans, and was the start of a long-lasting relationship between him and Japan. He would spend a decade and a half playing, coaching, and managing in Japan after a long major-league career.
Though the Cardinals seemed to represent the end of an era, the young talent represented in the Japanese All-Star team signaled a new beginning. The 1958 tour was at the crossroads of postwar bridge-building, straddling the end of the American occupation with the 1960s and beyond. Wally Yonamine made way for Sadaharu Oh, who joined the Giants in 1959, creating the “Oh-Nagashima Cannon” that drove the golden era of baseball in Japan. Sugiura, another rookie in 1958, won both Pacific League MVP and Japan Series MVP honors in 1959 on his way to a Hall of Fame career. And though Inao would not win another MVP after his back-to-back awards in 1957 and 1958, he won 30 games in 1959 and continued to dominate batters in Japan for the next decade. The tours of Japan that followed continued to strengthen the relationship between the two countries and their baseball leagues. When Ichiro is inducted into Cooperstown, he will have players like Nagashima and Blasingame in his baseball DNA, as well as the strong bonds engendered by 1958’s new direction.
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
The baseball film Moneyball depicts a moment when one club tried to understand baseball in a completely different way. The 2002 Oakland Athletics questioned the conventional wisdom that permeated the baseball world. By acquiring undervalued players through sabermetrics, they redesigned their team. Similar attempts did not appear only in the United States.
In Korean baseball history, the 1990s were a time when even the word “data” was unfamiliar. Even in this environment, there were people who questioned an operating style that relied on intuition. The starting point was not a front office meeting or a research report. It was a single book written by a baseball fan.
Lotte at the end of the 1980s, having lost its direction
In the late 1980s, Korean professional baseball still remained a “people’s game.” A manager’s experience and instincts, trust in veteran players, and internal organizational inertia were the standards for team operations. When results were bad, the manager was replaced, and when momentum was good, existing methods were maintained. Long term development and structural reform were always pushed to the back. The Lotte Giants, who finished last in 1989 and stayed in the lower ranks in 1990, were likewise a team that had lost its way amid this inertia. The fandom was overwhelming, but the team had no explanation for why it was losing.
A perspective formed outside baseball
Around this time, there was one person who looked at the team from a completely different angle. His name was Jeong-gyu Song. He was born in Busan and studied at Korea Maritime University, which trains navigators. He then began his career as a deck officer on merchant ships. Later, he was promoted to captain at a U.S. shipping company, making the sea his workplace. Baseball was not his profession, but his interest ran deep.
Baseball fan Jeong-gyu Song (front center), who chose the path of a navigator under the influence of his father, a professor at Korea Maritime University
Long voyages gave him time to study baseball. Through Japanese professional baseball newspapers, American sports magazines, and Major League related books, he naturally came to place Korean baseball alongside overseas baseball and compare their structures. The differences became increasingly clear. At the time, player usage in Korean baseball relied excessively on intuition, and team management lacked a consistent philosophy. There was no system to systematically develop prospects, and responsibility for poor performance always fell on the field staff. Jeong-gyu Song began recording and accumulating the problems he felt while thinking about the Lotte Giants.
Choosing records instead of protests
Jeong-gyu Song did not initially intend to write a book. He called the club several times to explain the team’s problems. However, the opinions of an “ordinary fan” were repeatedly brushed aside. Deciding that conveying things verbally no longer worked, he chose to organize his thoughts and leave them as a written record. After seven months, during which he even set up his own publishing company, The Winning Formula: Lotte Giants’ Top Secret was released into the world.
A book that is still talked about among Korean baseball fans today
It was self published, and sales were not high. However, the contents were concrete. The role of the front office, standards for player usage, and the necessity of a long term development system were organized by topic. From today’s perspective, these are not unfamiliar ideas, but at the time they were novel problem statements in Korean baseball. The book gradually spread by word of mouth. Unexpectedly, it reached the hands of Lotte owner Jun-ho Shin.
Becoming a general manager with a single book
In 1991, the Lotte Giants made a radical choice. Jeong-gyu Song was appointed general manager. Former sailor, late 30s, no practical experience in baseball team operations. In the front office culture of the time, it was a highly unusual appointment. Internal reactions were cold. Open turf battles and exclusion followed, and there were even times when, because budget cooperation was not provided, he had to go out personally to look for sponsors.
Jeong-gyu Song greeting the players after taking office
His operating philosophy was also different. He spoke about statistical analysis, the strong number two hitter theory, and the need for a development system. Concepts that are familiar now were met then with reactions like “that sounds like baseball comics.” However, change quickly appeared in results. In his first year, 1991, Lotte rose to fourth place and advanced to the postseason. They surpassed one million spectators in a single season for the first time in professional baseball history. In 1992, they even won the Korean Series.
The experiment ended, but the questions remained
The championship was not the end. Internal conflicts still remained. An assessment arose that he “damaged organizational harmony.” This evaluation was reported to club management. Jeong-gyu Song, who encountered this while on his honeymoon, resigned voluntarily after returning home. Since then, Lotte has gone more than 30 years without another championship.
He is also known as Korea’s top expert in the field of maritime economics, combining practice and theory
He returned to the shipping industry. Afterward, he continued working in key positions in shipping and port related organizations. Even after mandatory retirement, he has continued to advise on and contribute to major issues in Korea’s shipping and port sectors. His distance from baseball grew, but his perspective remained sharp. In 2024, he appeared on a Busan regional radio broadcast and became a topic of conversation again after predicting Lotte’s preseason ranking with considerable accuracy. Decades have passed, but he left the impression that his eye for the team had not changed.
The Winning Formula: Lotte Giants’ Top Secret is now an out of print book. Rather than a theoretical text, it is closer to a record of one fan asking questions and working through the answers. Attempts similar to Moneyball clearly existed in Korean baseball as well. However, they did not take root as a successful management strategy, nor did they expand into a popular narrative. Even so, this attempt showed a brief but meaningful possibility in Korean baseball.
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Rob Fitts focuses on the Brooklyn Dodgers 1956 tour of Japan where Jackie Robinson played his final game.
The Brooklyn Dodgers straggled into Idlewild Airport in Jamaica, Queens, on the morning of October 11, 1956. It had been a long, grueling season, ending the day before with a 9-0 shellacking by the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. Now, less than 18 hours later, the Dodgers were leaving for a four- week goodwill tour of Japan.
The subdued party of 60 consisted of club officials, players, family members, and an umpire. Although participation was voluntary, most of the team’s top players had decided to take advantage of the $3,000 bonus that came with the all-expenses-paid trip.1 Noticeably absent were Sandy Koufax, who was sharpening his game in Puerto Rico; Sandy Amoros, who was playing in Cuba; and World War II vet Carl Furillo who proclaimed, “I want no part of it. I’ve seen Japan once and there’s nothing there I want to see again.”2
As they readied to board the private flight to Los Angeles, Don Newcombe and his wife were missing. The Dodgers ace had won 27 games during the season and would win both the National League Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Awards. But he had failed spectacularly in the World Series, getting knocked out in the second inning of Game Two, and in the fourth inning of Game Seven. When asked about the up-coming trip after the Game Seven loss, Newcombe snapped, “Nuts to the trip to Japan!” “There’ll be trouble if he’s not on that plane!” countered Dodgers General Manager Buzzie Bavasi.3
Just after 11 A.M. the big pitcher arrived at the airport without wife or luggage. “The Tiger is here!” he announced as he boarded. He had spent the morning at the Brooklyn Courthouse to answer a summons on an assault charge for punching a parking attendant who had made a wisecrack about his Game Two performance. The plane left on time and after a stop in Los Angeles arrived in Honolulu at 5:30 P.M. on October 12.4
The Dodgers spent five days in Hawaii, attending banquets, sightseeing, sunbathing on Waikiki Beach, and playing three games against local semipro teams. As expected, Brooklyn won the first two contests comfortably, beating the Maui All-Stars, 6-0, behind 20-year-old Don Drysdale’s seven perfect innings on October 13 and the Hawaii Milwaukee All-Stars, 19-0, the next day. On the 15th, Don Newcombe took the mound against the Hawaii Red Sox. Spectators serenaded him with boos and jeers as the Red Sox scored three times in the second inning and chased him from the game in the fourth. “I can’t believe that I am still the target for abuse after getting 5,000 miles away from Brooklyn. I never want to come back here again! I didn’t want to make this trip in the first place,” he complained after Brooklyn pulled out a 7-3 win in the 10th inning. “This abuse thing has me worried,” he added. “I am afraid the emotional effect might continue to grow and become a detriment to my future career.”5 After a day of sightseeing, the Dodgers left for Japan on a 10 P.M. overnight flight.
The plane touched down at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport at 3:25 P.M. the following day, five hours behind schedule after mechanical trouble forced a seemingly endless stopover on Wake Island. A light rain fell from the gray sky. The weary players trudged off the plane and down the metal stairs to the tarmac where they were greeted by the first group of dignitaries and reporters. “Man, we’re beat,” Jackie Robinson complained as he left the plane. “We are all very tired,” Duke Snider added, “but we’re glad to be here. If we have a chance to shower and clean up, we’ll feel much better.”6
Japanese dignitaries and 40 kimono-clad actresses, bearing bouquets of flowers, welcomed the Dodgers as a crowd of fans waved from the airport’s spectator ramp. During a brief press conference, team owner Walter O’Malley proclaimed that “his players would play their best … and hoped that the visit would contribute to Japanese-American friendship.” “We hope to give the Japanese fans some thrills,” said Robinson.7
Despite the delay and relentless drizzle, thousands of flag-waving fans lined the 12-mile route from Haneda Airport to downtown Tokyo. Although many of the players longed for a shower, a warm meal, and a soft bed, they would not see their hotel for hours. After a brief stop at the Yomiuri newspaper’s headquarters, the team went straight to a reception at the famous Chinzanso restaurant. As they arrived, the hosts presented each visitor with a happi coat made to resemble a Dodgers warmup jacket and a hachimaki (traditional headband). Dressed in their new garb, the Dodgers mingled with baseball officials, diplomats, and Japanese ballplayers for several hours. Exhausted, the Dodgers finally checked into the Imperial Hotel around 9 P.M. Some of the younger players, however, went back out, attending “a giddy round of parties” before staggering back to the hotel in the wee hours of the morning.8
Fred Kipp, Gil Hodges, Wally Yonamine, Vin Scully, Roy Campanella and Don Demeter at the October 18 reception at Chinzanso, Tokyo. (Rob Fitts Collection)
Weary from the trip and the late night, the players struggled to get out of bed the next morning for the opening game against the Yomiuri Giants at Korakuen Stadium. Ceremonies began at 1 P.M. with the two teams parading onto the field in parallel lines behind a pair of young women clad in fashionable business suits. Each woman held a large sign topped with balloons, bearing the team’s name in Japanese. As the Giants marched on the field, some of the Dodgers gaped in surprise. “We went over there with typical American misconceptions,” Vin Scully later wrote. “We expected the local teams to be stocked with little yellow, bucktooth men wearing thick eyeglasses. When they first walked onto the field in Tokyo, I heard one of our players yell, ‘Hey fellas, we’ve been mousetrapped!’ One of the first ballplayers out of the dugout was a pitcher who was six feet four. … They averaged five feet ten or so, and they were all built like athletes.”9
Like the Dodgers, the Yomiuri Giants had just finished an exhausting season topped with a defeat in the Japan Series two days earlier. The Japan Timesnoted, “The Giants, battered and worn in their losing bid for the Japan championship …, are regarded as a pushover for the Bums. The Brooklyn club is expected to win their opener by a margin of over ten runs.”10 But that is not what happened.
The Giants jumped out to a quick 3-0 lead off Don Drysdale. At 6-feet-5 he towered over most of his Japanese opponents and expected to dominate them with his overpowering side-arm fastball. But as Scully noted, “Another misconception we had was that our big pitchers would be able to blow them down with fastballs. We were dead wrong. They murdered fastball pitching. Our guys would rear back and fire one through here and invariably the ball would come back even harder than it was thrown. They hit bullets.”11
Brooklyn battled back to take a 4-3 lead in the fourth on five hits, including homers by Robinson and Gil Hodges. But that would be all for Brooklyn as relief pitcher Takumi Otomo, who had beaten the New York Giants in 1953, stifled the Dodgers for 5 2/3 innings. Homers by Kazuhiko Sakazaki and Tetsuharu Kawakami in the eighth gave Yomiuri a 5-4 upset victory. “The fans,” wrote Leslie Nakashima of the Honolulu Advertiser, “could hardly believe the Dodgers had been beaten.”12 Otomo had struck out 10 in his second win over a major-league team.
Since the major-league tours began in 1908, the game was just the fifth victory by a Japanese team against 124 loses.13 After the loss, manager Walt Alston made no excuses, “They just beat us. They hit and we didn’t.” Duke Snider had a particularly bad day, striking out three times and being caught off base for an out. “We’re pretty tired,” he explained. “But that’s no excuse. We’re all in good physical shape and should have won. A good night’s sleep tonight and we’ll roll.” “We’ll snap out of it,” predicted Robinson. Pee Wee Reese agreed: “We don’t expect to lose any more. But,” he added, “we didn’t expect to lose this one either.”14
As predicted, the Dodgers bounced back the next day. Masaichi Kaneda, recognized by most experts as Japan’s all-time greatest pitcher, began the game for the Central League All-Stars by loading the bases on two walks and a single before being removed from the game with a sore elbow. Roy Campanella greeted relief pitcher Noboru Akiyama with a towering drive into the last row of the left-field bleachers to put the Dodgers up, 4-0. Campy added another home run in the third inning to pace Brooklyn to an easy 7-1 victory as Clem Labine pitched a four-hit complete game.15
On Sunday, October 21, approximately 45,000 fans packed Korakuen Stadium to watch Don Newcombe face the All-Japan team—a conglomeration of the top Japanese professionals. Newcombe’s outing lasted just 17 pitches. He began by walking Hawaiian Wally Yonamine, then surrendered a home run and three consecutive singles before Alston took the ball.16 The former ace “stormed from the hill” and stumbled into the clubhouse “like a sleepwalker … jerkily, almost aimlessly. He wore the frozen expression of a kid who’s just seen his puppy run over. Wonder, shock, disbelief, hurt. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. … Slowly he picked up his shower shoes, detoured a sportswriter to get to his jacket. Then out the back door, back to the hotel.”17
After the eventual 6-1 loss, manager Walter Alston noted, “Newk wasn’t right again today. … He’s not throwing natural.”18 Reese explained, “He’s still got it (the World Series) on his mind. It’s getting to be a terrible thing. Not only does he feel he’s letting himself down, he feels he’s letting the club down. … Don doesn’t say much, but it’s building up and building up inside him. It could run him out of baseball.”19
Unfortunately, Reese’s assessment was prophetic. The next day, Newcombe announced that he had injured his elbow in the final game of the regular season. It hurt to throw curveballs. He had kept the injury to himself, hoping that rest would cure the ailment. Although his arm may have healed, Newcombe never fully recovered from the psychological injury of the blown 1956 World Series. He had begun drinking heavily in the early 1950s and his alcohol abuse intensified after the loss. After a mediocre 1957 season, he was traded to Cincinnati in 1958 and would be out of the major leagues after the 1960 season. He played his final season with the Chunichi Dragons of Japan in 1962—coached by Wally Yonamine, who had begun the onslaught on that fateful day in Tokyo.
With the loss, the Dodgers became the first professional American club to lose two games on a Japanese tour. Criticism came from both sides of Pacific. “The touring Flatbushers once again were disemboweled by a band of local samurai,” wrote Bob Bowie of the Japan Times.20 “The Dodgers are known for their fighting spirit,” noted radio quiz-show host Ko Fujiwara, “but they have shown little spirit in the games here thus far.”21 The Associated Press reported that “most Japanese fans have been disappointed in the caliber of ball played so far by the Brooklyns,” but Yoshio Yuasa, the former manager of the Mainichi Orions, offered the harshest criticisms.22 “I can sympathize that the Dodgers are in bad condition from fatigue after a hectic pennant race, the World Series and travel to Japan and that they are in a terrific slump, but they are even weaker than was rumored at bat against low, outside pitches and we are very disappointed to say the least. … It would not be an overstatement to say that we no longer have anything to learn from the Dodgers.”23
Roy Campanella, Jakie Robinson, and Duke Snider signing autographs for Japanese fans. Cappy Harada is in the dugout. (Rob Fitts Collection)
The US media picked up these criticisms, reprinting the stories in large and small newspapers across the country. “Japanese Baseball Expert Hints Brooks Are Bums,” screamed a headline in the New York Daily News on October 23.24 Three days later, a Daily News headline noted, “Bums ‘Too Dignified,’ Say Japanese Hosts.” The accompanying article explained that some Japanese experts believed that the Dodgers were “too quiet and dignified on the playing field … and … were acting like they were all trying to win good conduct medals” rather than playing hard-nosed baseball.25
After a day of rest, the Dodgers flew to Sapporo in northern Japan for a rematch against the Yomiuri Giants. Before the game, Walter O’Malley addressed the team. Starting pitcher Carl Erskine recalled, “Mr. O’Malley was very upset. He thought it was a scar on the name of the Dodgers to have gone to Japan and lost two games.”26 “He was embarrassed. He held a team meeting and read the riot act. He said, ‘I know this is a goodwill tour and I want you to be gentlemen. Sign autographs and be cordial. However, when you put on that Dodger uniform, I want you to remember Pearl Harbor!’”27
Erskine was near perfect, giving up three hits and a walk but never allowing a runner to reach second base as he faced just 27 batters. But the Dodgers continued to struggle at the plate, failing to score until Duke Snider led off the ninth inning with a 380-foot homer over the right-center-field wall to give Brooklyn a 1-0 victory.28
Despite the win, many Japanese were not pleased with the Dodgers’ performance. An Associated Press article noted that Tokuro Konishi, a broadcaster and former manager, “and other experts agreed that most Japanese fans have been disappointed in the caliber of ball played so far by the Brooklyns. … Konishi said he believed the two losses could be chalked up to the fatigue from the grueling National League pennant race and seven game World Series.”29 “The Dodgers’ ‘old men’ are tired,” noted Bob Bowie of the Pacific Stars and Stripes. “Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella are so weary it’s an effort for them to put one foot before another. It’s been a long season and they are anxious to get back home and relax before heading for spring training in February.”30
Indeed, the “Boys of Summer” were aging. The core of the team had been together nearly a decade. The starting lineup averaged 32 years old with Robinson and Reese both at 37. Their weariness showed on the playing field. After four games, the team was hitting just .227 against Japanese pitching. Both management and fans knew it was time to change, and the team had plenty of young talent. At the top of the list were power hitters Don Demeter, who hit 41 home runs in 1956 for the Texas League Fort Worth Cats, and his teammate, first baseman Jim Gentile, who hit 40. Outfielder Gino Cimoli had ridden Brooklyn’s bench in 1956 and was now ready for a more substantial role. Smooth-fielding Bob Lillis from the Triple-A affiliate in St. Paul seemed to be the heir of Pee Wee Reese at shortstop while his teammate Bert Hamric would fight for a role in team’s crowded outfield. On the mound, knuckleballer Fred Kipp hadjust won 20 games for the Montreal Royals and looked ready to join Brooklyn’s rotation. The tour of Japan was an ideal chance try out these players. As the tour progressed, Alston moved more prospects into the starting lineup.
In the fifth game, held in Sendai, Alston gave Kipp the start and backed him up with Gentile at first, Demeter in center and Cimoli in left. For seven innings Kipp baffled the All-Kanto All-Stars, a squad drawn from the Tokyo-area teams, with his knuckleball—a pitch rarely used in the Japanese leagues, while the hurler’s fellow rookies racked up five hits during an easy 8-0 win.31
Don Drysdale started game six in Mita, a small city about 60 miles northeast of Tokyo. For seven innings the promising young pitcher dominated the Japanese. Then, the Japanese erupted for three runs in the bottom of the eighth inning, breaking a streak of 29 straight shutout innings by Dodger pitching. With the scored tied, 3-3, after nine innings, the Dodgers requested that they end the game so that the team could catch their scheduled train back to Tokyo.32 Although it was not a win, an Associated Press writer called the result “a moral victory for Japanese baseball.”33 After six contests, the National League champions were 3-2-1—the worst record of any visiting American professional squad.
Despite the Dodgers’ poor start, the Japanese fans adored the team packed with household names. About 150,000 spectators attended the first five games while hundreds of thousands more, if not millions, watched the games on television or listened to them on the radio.34 “There is widespread interest in the Dodgers and their style of play,” an Associated Press article noted. All of the sports dailies and many of the mainstream newspapers covered each game in detail—often including exclusive interviews and pictorial spreads of the players. Many dailies ran “sequence shots of various Dodgers in action.”35
Although the Dodgers were winning over the Japanese fans, their opponents on the diamond were unimpressed. Ace pitcher Masaichi Kaneda noted, “The pitchers this time were not as good as [on the previous major-league tours]. … On the bench, I was looking forward to hitting. I had never had that feeling before.”36 Shortstop Yasumitsu Toyoda agreed: “Even their fastballs didn’t look fast enough.”37 Kazuhiro Yamauchi, the star outfielder for the Mainichi Orions who hit .313 in 48 at-bats during the tour, complained that the Dodgers lacked hustle. “The Yankees [during the 1955 tour] would always try for an extra base on a hit, while some Dodger runners stopped dead.”38 Yamauchi also noted that the Dodgers had trouble with low, outside pitches. “All our pitches have been aiming for the outside comer.” Yomiuri right-hander Takehiko Bessho added, “Most of them were not good at hitting curveballs. …I wasn’t [even] scared of Campanella. He looked huge, but only he could hit in one spot … the high inside corner. … If an umpire called [a low outside pitch] a strike, he complained. He was just desperate.”39
During a November 11 round-table interview moderated by Masanori Ochi, several Japanese players bristled when asked about a training session run by Dodgers coach Al Campanis. Campanis was actively promoting his book, The Dodgers’ Way to Play Baseball, which had been translated into Japanese. “We attended it, but we already knew ‘how to throw a slider,’” Tetsuharu Kawakami snidely told Ochi. “They only told us what we already knew. I think we practice small tactics more than they do.” “Al Campanis only talked about general things,” Takehiko Bessho added, “and nothing was new.”40
Oblivious to the Japanese players’ feelings, after the tour Campanis told Dan Daniels of The Sporting News, “For the good of Japanese ball, it would be well to send several American coaching staffs there for the purpose of staging clinics rather than having a different team visit each year. Of course, that wouldn’t be the sort of spectacle the fans would want, but it would be more helpful to the progress of Japanese ball. We held one clinic while we were over there, and I never had a more attentive audience. They want to learn our methods and a few clinics would help them tremendously.”41
Underwhelmed by the Dodgers, some of the Japanese players began to jeer their opponents. The Dodgers were undoubtedly unaware as the “rudeness” consisted mainly of addressing the visitors by their first names—an offensive act in Japan, especially in the mid-1950s. The players confessed during the November 11 round table interview:
Yasumitsu Toyoda: (Looking at Kaneda,) Remember you jeered at him [Newcombe] in Mito, something like ‘Come on, Don!’ He was offended by that.
Masaichi Kaneda: We became good at jeering. Our pronunciation became better.
Takehiko Bessho: You [Kaneda] were best at it. You called the first baseman [Gino] Cimoli, ‘Gino, Gino,’ and he turned and smiled at you. When the game is over, you were like ‘Goodbye Gino.’
Masaichi Kaneda: ‘Come on, Don’ was a good one!
Masanori Ochi: Did you jeer at the other major leaguers like the Yankees?
Masaichi Kaneda: No, we just did it this year.
Takehiko Bessho: That was because we were winning.
Masaichi Kaneda: Alright, I will say ‘Hey Don!’ to his face. If he gets angry, I will hide quickly!42
Undoubtedly sensing the players’ distain, Fujio Nakazawa, a commentator and future member of the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame, cautioned his countrymen. “The two victories over the Dodgers should be no reason for jubilation among the players here. They should by no means become conceited. Japanese ballplayers have much to learn from the Dodgers, who have not complained about their busy schedule which started the day after their arrival. The Dodger players are always cheerful and play hard. A defeat does not discourage them.”43
Perhaps sparked by the ongoing criticism, perhaps finally rested, the Dodgers began winning in late October as the rookies led the way. On October 27 in Kofu, Gentile hit two home runs and Demeter and Cimoli each hit one during a 12-1 romp over an allstar squad of players drawn from the Tokyo-area professional teams. The next day, Gentile went 5-for-5 with another home run as the Dodgers beat All-Japan, 6-3, in Utsunomiya.44 On October 31 Kipp pitched two-hit ball and Gentile and Demeter each homered to pace Brooklyn to a 4-2 win over All-Japan. During these games the players began showing a little fighting spirit. Somehow, they learned the Japanese word “mekura,” meaning “blind,” and began shouting it at the umpire after questionable calls.45
“Some of those ballparks were small, [holding] 20,000 or 25,000,” Carl Erskine remembers. “There were acres of bicycles in the parking lots. After the games were over, the men were all lined up along the ditch by the side of the road relieving themselves. I guess they had a couple of beers. So, it was a little unusual leaving the ballpark and passing rows and rows of men. That was a strange sight!”46
On the evening of October 31, the team arrived in Hiroshima and checked into the Hotel New Hiroshima, an ultra-modem structure near the Peace Park and ballpark. Local officials warned the players not to leave the hotel unescorted at night as gang-related crime made the area unsafe for tourists. The following morning the team visited the Peace Park and posed with their hats in their hands in front of the Memorial Cenotaph, the saddle-shaped concrete arch that bears the name of each person killed in the atomic bomb blast.
In a solemn ceremony before the start of the 2 P.M. game, the Dodgers presented city officials with a bronze plaque reading: “We dedicate this visit in memory of those baseball fans and others who died by atomic action on Aug. 6, 1945. May their souls rest in peace and with God’s help and man’s resolution peace will prevail forever, amen.”47
Walter O’Malley, Walt Alston, and Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara. (Rob Fitts Collection)
Walter O’Malley, Walt Alston, and Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara. (Rob Fitts Collection)
The emotion from the morning boiled over during the game against the Kansai All-Stars. In the bottom of the third inning with the Japanese already up 1-0 and one out and a runner on second, future Hall of Fame umpire Jocko Conlon called Kohei Sugiyama safe at first on what looked to be a groundout. Incensed, Jackie Robinson walked over to first to protest the call. “Everybody knew Jocko had missed the play because he was in back of the plate and couldn’t see clearly,” Robinson explained.48 Conlon, of course, did not reverse his decision so Robinson persisted, eventually arguing “so loud and so long” that Conlon tossed him from the game. “I never told him how to play ball,” Conlon said after the game, “and he, or anybody else, can’t tell me how to run a ball game.”49
Kansai padded its lead to 4-1 before Brooklyn tied the game in the sixth on Roy Campanella’s three-run homer. The Dodgers went ahead in the seventh in a bizarre inning. After recording an out, reliever Yukio Shimabara walked Jim Gilliam, who stole second base and then moved to third on a passed ball. Shimabara then walked both Reese and Snider. With the bases loaded, Campanella fouled out to the catcher. Gilliam decided to take matters into his own hands. With two outs and the bases still jammed, he stole home to give the Dodgers the 5-4 lead. Rattled, Shimabara then made a mistake to Jim Gentile, who pounded the ball into the stands for a three-run homer. Brooklyn tacked on another two in the ninth for a 10-6 victory.50
After the Dodgers won 14-0 on November 2, the Japanese squads rebounded. On the 3rd the Dodgers and the All-Japan team entered the eighth inning knotted 7-7 before Brooklyn erupted for another seven to win 14-7. The following day, Japanese aces Takehiko Bessho and Masaichi Kaneda held the Dodgers to just one run for eight innings as the hosts entered the ninth leading 2-1. The Dodgers rallied in the ninth as Snider led off with a 480-foot home run to tie the game. Two outs later with the bases loaded, Robinson tried to steal the lead with a surprise two-out squeeze play. But Jackie missed the bunt and Demeter was tagged out on his way to the plate. In the bottom of the inning, Tetsuharu Kawakami, the hero of the opening game, came through again with a bases-loaded single to win the game.51
On the 7th the Dodgers squeaked out a 3-2 win over the All-Japan squad in Nagoya. Gil Hodges, however, stole the headlines. Alston started the normally staid first baseman in left field and to keep himself amused Hodges “pantomimed the action after almost every play for five innings. He mimicked the pitcher and the ball’s flight through the air, the catcher and the umpire. When a Dodger errored, Hodges glowered and pointed his finger. He made his legs quiver, shook his fist, stamped on the ground, swung his arms, frowned and smiled in the fleeting instant between pitches.” The fans loved it, cheering him so loudly as he left the game in the eighth inning that “[y]ou’d have thought it was Babe Ruth leaving.”52
Vin Scully recalled how Hodges’s antics eased a tense moment. “During a game before an overflow crowd, one of our players was called out on strikes and, in a childish display of petulance, dropped his bat on the plate, took off his helmet and hurled it to the ground with such force that it bounced up on top of the Dodger dugout. The crowd was shocked. The Japanese had never seen an umpire held up to such humiliation and it was an embarrassing moment for us in the Brooklyn party. Gil saved the day. While the crowd still sat in stunned silence, Gil suddenly appeared, jumped up on the dugout roof and approached the helmet as if it was a dangerous snake. He circled it warily, made a couple of tentative stabs at it, and quickly pounced on it, tossed it back on the field and then it did a swan dive off the top of the dugout. The fans beat their palms and shouted until they were hoarse.”53
The Dodgers and All-Japan met again the next day at Shizuoka, a small town at the foot of Mt. Fuji, where 22 years earlier the All-Nippon behind 17-year-old Eiji Sawamura nearly beat Babe Ruth’s All-Americans. Once again the Japanese team thrilled the fans of Shizuoka as pinch-hitter Kohei Sugiyama of the All-Japan squad broke a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off single.54 With their fourth loss, criticism of the Dodgers’ performance continued. An International News Service article headlined, “Fans Debate Reasons for Dodger Losses” asked, “Are Japanese baseball teams improving, major leaguers getting careless or the Brooklyn Dodgers just getting old?”55
On November 9 the Dodgers returned to Tokyo for a rematch with their hosts the Yomiuri Giants. Once again, the game was tight. Home runs by Jim Gentile and Herb Olson as well as an inside-the-park homer by Giants catcher Shigeru Fujio left the score tied up after nine innings. Jim Gilliam led off the top of the 11th with a single and two outs later stood on second base as Jackie Robinson strode to the plate. Yomiuri manager Shigeru Mizuhara called for an intentional walk but Giants ace Takehiko Bessho refused. After some discussion, Mizuhara allowed Bessho to challenge Robinson. Jackie jumped on the first pitch, pounding it foul “far over the left-field stands.” On the next offering, he “drove a hot grounder through the pitcher’s box,” bringing Gilliam home to win the game.56
The win seemed to energize both the Dodgers and Robinson. They won the next two games easily, 8-2 and 10-2, as Jackie went 2-for-5 with two runs and two RBIs. After the game in Tokyo on November 12, the Dodgers flew to the southern city of Fukuoka to make up a game that had been rained out on October 30.
Fittingly, the final meeting of the 19-game series was tight. Nineteen-year-old phenom Kazuhisa Inao and Kipp dueled for eight innings, each surrendering one run. The score remained tied as Duke Snider led off the top of the ninth with a groundball to first, which the usually sure-handed Tokuji Iida muffed, allowing Snider to advance to third base. Robinson strode to the plate—unknowingly for the last time in his professional career—and grounded a single between third and short to score Snider and give the Dodgers the lead. After two outs and a walk, Don Demeter singled and Robinson crossed home plate for the final time. Immediately after the 3-1 victory, the Dodgers flew back to Tokyo and after a day of rest, returned to the United States.
Brooklyn’s tour of Japan marked the end of an era. Robinson retired soon after returning to the United States. The team’s troubles on the diamond continued in 1957 as they finished in a distant third place. It was time to rebuild. The games in Japan allowed many of the younger players to display their skills. Jim Gentile, for example, led the team with a .471 batting average, 8 home runs, and 19 RBIs, while Fred Kipp won three games and posted a 1.26 ERA in 43 innings.
Although Alston and others claimed that fatigue had led to the Dodgers’ poor showing on the diamond, they also conceded that the greatly improved Japanese had put up stiff competition. National League President Warren Giles, who accompanied the Dodgers to Japan, noted, “[T]he quality of baseball in that country is improving steadily and the day may come when the ablest players of Japan will compete on even terms with the best the United States has to offer.”57 Walter O’Malley concurred, telling reporters that the Japanese clubs would be nearly even with US ballclubs in the not-too-distant future. “Their pitchers have uncanny accuracy. They rarely walk anyone. In fielding, particularly in the infield, the Japanese teams are really excellent. Some Japanese players could play on teams in contention in pennant races here, or at least on the better minor league clubs.”58
When asked if any of the Japanese players were ready for the majors, Al Campanis responded:
There’s one fellow who must have been really good in his prime. He’s 38 years old now [actually 36] and they tell me he hasn’t hit under .300 for 18 straight years [actually eight]. I would have liked to [have] got a crack at him a few years back. His name is Kawakami. … High in my book were three others. A shortstop named Toyoda … was the best hitter in his league. His arm might have been a little short, but he had everything else. Then there was a catcher, Fujio, in his first year of pro ball. Never saw anyone with a better arm. Man, he had a rifle. Good receiver, too, and a fair hitter. But the number one prospect in my judgment was a pitcher named Sho Horiuchi, a 21-year-old right hander with the Yomiuri Giants.59
The following spring, the Dodgers invited Fujio and Horiuchi along with their manager Shigeru Mizuhara, to spring training at Dodgertown to help them mature as players. The invitation began a long friendship between the two clubs. The Giants would be the Dodgers’ guests at Vero Beach in 1961, 1967, 1971, and 1975 and the two clubs would maintain close relations for over 65 years.
NOTES
1 “All Dodgers’ O’Malley Gets Is Ride,” New York Daily News, October 13, 1956: 36.
2 “Dodgers Invited to Tour Japan in Fall; Most Favor Trip, but Furillo Votes No,” New York Times, May 2, 1956: S36.
3 Ed Wilks, Newcombe ‘Gets Lost’ After Humiliation,” Monroe (Louisiana) News-Star, October 11, 1956: 12.
4 United Press, “Dodgers Arrive at 5:30 P.M. Today,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 12, 1956: 14; Carl Lundquist, “Flatbushers Full of Frolic as They Leave For Japan,” The Sporting News, October 17, 1956: 13.
5 Tom Hopkins, “Sportraitures,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 18, 1956: 38; Red McQueen, “Dodgers Outdraw Yankees,” Honolulu Advertiser,October 16, 1956: 14.
6 Associated Press, “Bums Arrive in Tokyo,” Passaic (New Jersey) Herald-News, October 18, 1956: 46.
7 United Press, “Japanese Fans Defy Rain to Hail Dodgers,” New York Daily News, October 19, 1956: 155.
8 Vin Scully, “The Dodgers in Japan,” Sport, April 1957: 92; Bob Bowie, “Actresses, Flowers, Cheers Welcome Tourists to Tokyo,” The Sporting News,October 24, 1956: 9.
12 Leslie Nakashima, “Dodgers Beaten 5-4 by Yomiuri Giants in Japan,” Honolulu Advertiser October 20, 1956: 14.
13 >Other victories came in 1922, 1951, 1953 against the Eddie Lopat All-Stars, and 1953 against the New York Giants. The Royal Giants’ tours are excluded from these figures as not all of their results are known.
14 Mel Derrick, “Alston Explains: ‘They Hit, and We Didn’t,’” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 20, 1956: 23.
15 Bob Bowie, “Dodgers Belt Central Loop Stars 7-1,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 21, 1956: 24.
16 Mel Derrick, “Newcombe a Study in Dejection After Loss,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 22, 1956: 24.
17 Bob Bowie, “All-Stars Rout Brooks 6-1,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 22, 1956: 24; Derrick, “Newcombe a Study,” 24.
49 “Jackie Drops Verbal Bomb at Hiroshima—Gets Thumb,” The Sporting News, November 14, 1956: 4.
50Hochi Sports, November 2, 1956: 2; “Dodgers vs. Kansai,” United Press, “Dodgers Top Kansai, 10-6; Robby Chased,” New York Daily News,November 2, 1956: 175.
51 Associated Press, “Bums Win 14-7 Before 60,000,” Honolulu StarBulletin, November 3, 1956: 11; Associated Press, “Labine of Dodgers Loses in Japan, 3-2,” New York Times, November 5, 1956: 44.
52 Associated Press, “Hodges Delights Fans with Baseball Performance,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, November 8, 1956: 22.
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Roberta Newman highlights the New York Yankees 1955 tour of Japan.
On Thursday, October 20, 1955, the New York Yankees and their entourage landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to begin a three-week, 16-game goodwill tour of Japan. There, they were mobbed by kimono-clad young women bearing bouquets, an eager press corps, and a thousand devoted fans. The result was chaos, as children, autograph seekers,joumalists, businessmen, and advertisers of all stripes besieged the Yankees party. But the airport crowd was tiny compared with the throng lining the streets of Tokyo. An estimated 100,000 turned out to shower the motorcade—23 vehicles carrying the players and coaching staff, team co-owner Del Webb, general manager George Weiss, Commissioner Ford Frick, and accompanying wives—with confetti and ticker tape. They were also showered with rain from Typhoon Opal, but the weather, which caused significant damage and loss of life elsewhere in Japan, did little to dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm.
The Yankees were not the only American visitors to arrive in Japan on that day. Former New York Governor and failed presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey also landed in Tokyo on the Japanese leg of his world tour, with the stated aim of learning about Japan’s recent economic advances. In reality, Dewey’s aim was to spread pro-American Cold War propaganda to a new democracy still finding its political direction, a nation he called “one of the keystones to any sound system of freedom.” Dewey stayed but four days, his visit gamering little coverage in the English- language press. In contrast, the Yankees remained in the spotlight and on the pages of newspapers for the entirety of their visit. If influence can be measured by column inches, the Yankees’ impact on Japanese attitudes toward America far outweighed that of the political power broker.
Ten years before the Yankees arrived, Japan was thoroughly beaten, exhausted from fighting the “Emperor’s holy war.” Of the early postwar period, historian John W. Dower writes:
Virtually all that would take place in the several years that followed unfolded against this background of crushing defeat. Despair took root and flourished in such a milieu; so did cynicism and opportunism—as well as marvelous expressions of resilience, creativity, and idealism of a sort possible only among people who have seen an old world destroyed and are being forced to imagine a new one.
For the Japan that greeted the Yankees, this new world had just begun to become a reality. The year 1955—Showa 30 or the 30th year of Emperor Hirohito’s reign by the Japanese dating system—marked the beginning of what would be called the Japanese Miracle, a period of unprecedented economic growth that lasted more than three decades. Ironically, war was the engine that drove the Japanese Miracle—the Cold War. In 1945, Japanese industry was crippled—almost one-third of its capacity had been demolished. With staggering unemployment rates among an educated labor force, combined with the country’s advantageous geographic location near Korea, China, and the USSR, Japan became an ideal place to establish new war-related industries and revive old ones. In a very real sense, Japanese manufacturers played an active part of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would come to call the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell speech. Nevertheless, in 1955, relations between the United States and Japan were occasionally tense, the United States fearing that Japan, like India, would take a neutral position in the power struggle between it and the Soviet Union. It did not. Instead, it became one of the United States’s strongest allies. But the strength of that alliance was still wobbly as the two nations negotiated an ultimately successful trade deal, one that would see Japan’s entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and become a player in the global economy.
Though clearly not as delicate as treaty talks with international implications, negotiations to bring the Yankees to Japan were handled with care. In a very broad sense, these negotiations were a microcosm of the larger, far more complicated economic and political talks. In June, during the broadcast of a “good will talk” for the Voice of America, Yankees manager Casey Stengel, who had toured Japan in 1922 as part of an all-star outfit, let it slip that he might be returning. An anonymous source within the Yankees intimated that the team had, in fact, been discussing the possibility of a tour, as had several other clubs. Although there may have been other teams under consideration, it had to be the Yankees. As New York World Telegram and Sunsports columnist and Sporting News contributor Dan Daniel observed, “Information from U.S. Army sources says that baseball enthusiasm over there (in Japan) and rooting support for the pennant effort of the Yankees have achieved unprecedented heights.” Daniel, who covered the New York team, became the primary source of information regarding tour negotiations, though he did not cover the tour itself. But he was not the only sportswriter to weigh in. Writing in the Nippon Times, F.N. Mike concurred, noting, “The Yankees is a magic name here, where every household not only follows baseball doings in Japan, but also that in America. The Yankees, of all others epitomizes big-time baseball in the States, just as Babe Ruth, who helped to build up its name and who led the great 1934 All-Americans to Japan, represented baseball in America individually.” And not only were the Yankees the most recognizable and most popular American team in Japan, but their very brand meant “American baseball” and, by extension, America, to the Japanese, in the most positive sense.
Before the Yankees front office would consent to the visit, it required assurance that both governments were on board. More importantly, even after they were invited to tour by sponsor Mainichi Shimbun, the second largest newspaper in Japan, the organization would not begin to plan a tour without a formal invitation from the Japanese. The Japanese government laid down certain conditions, most specifically, that the visiting team would not be compensated. According to Daniel, “the proposition offers no financial gain to the club. Nor would any of the players receive anything beyond an all-expense trip for themselves and their wives.” In fact, it was absolutely essential that the team agree to forgo any type of payment. Writing in Pacific Stars and Stripes, columnist Lee Kavetski observed, “Each Yankee player is likely to be asked to sign an acceptance of non-profit conditions before making the trip.” Kavetski continued, “It is recalled an amount of unpleasantness developed from the Giants’ 1953 tour. Upon completion of the tour, some of Leo Durocher’s players complained that they had been misled and jobbed about financial remuneration. There was absolutely no basis for the complaint. And the beef unjustly placed Japanese hosts in a bad light.” This was hardly goodwill. Indeed, it was a public-relations disaster that extended into the realm of foreign relations. Kavetski noted, “As Joe DiMaggio, who has been to Japan twice, said to New York sports writer Dan Daniel, ‘Stengel’s players can perform a great service to baseball and to international friendship if they sign up for the trip even though there is no prospect for personal financial gain.’”
Why did the bad behavior of a few American baseball players border on an international incident? On April 28, 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed by 49 nations, including the United States and Japan, officially ended World War II. It also ended the Allied Occupation. As such, the Giants were guests in a newly sovereign nation trying to find its way and to establish its identity on a global stage. Tour sponsor Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, promised to pay each player 60 percent of the gate of their final two games in Osaka in return for their participation. Unfortunately, the resulting figure was smaller than the players expected. Only 5,000 of the 24,000 who attended the first of those games actually bought tickets. As a result, each player was to be paid $331, in addition to “walking around money.” While this was no small amount—it translates to approximately $3,550 in 2021 dollars—it was nowhere near the $3,000 they believed they would net. Writing in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Cpl. Perry Smith noted, “The individual players did not appreciate the ‘giving away of the remaining 19,000 tickets and six team members refused to dress for the final contest.” Although they were eventually persuaded to take the field, they were not happy. This represented a significant cut in revenue for players accustomed to making good money during the offseason.
Although the players thought they had a legitimate beef, their complaints did not play well in the press. To demand more was a public insult. Conditions in Japan had certainly improved by 1953, when the Giants toured, but they were far from ideal. Poverty and unemployment were still an issue, as was Japan’s huge national debt. That representatives of a wealthy nation demanded payment from the representatives of a newly emerging nation looked especially bad. That the players themselves were no doubt viewed as wealthy by individual Japanese could not have helped, either. It was essential that the Yankees not make the same mistake, treating their hosts as inferior and not worthy of due respect.
In 1955, US-Japanese relations were still a work in progress. While arrangements for the tour were being discussed, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu visited the United States for talks with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. At a press conference, Shigemitsu, who simultaneously served as Japan’s foreign minister, “emphasized the desire of his government for a more independent partnership with the United States.” For Japan to make what Shigemitsu called “a fresh start,” he said, “we must talk things over frankly with the United States and see that the two governments understand each other.” Of course, Shigemitsu’s conference with Dulles had nothing directly to do with the goodwill baseball tour. But as he suggested, conditions laid down by a government seeking recognition of its independence had to be given their due. And given the timing, it would have been terrible optics were the insult to be repeated.
Ultimately, the Yankee players agreed and the tour was organized, but not before another major wrinkle had to be ironed out. Once Mainichi Shimbunoffered its sponsorship, its chief competitor, Yomiuri Shimbun, countered with an offer to another team. Commissioner Frick was not having any of it. He responded negatively, announcing that simultaneous Japanese tours by two major-league clubs was out of the question—it would be one or none. Following their own delicate negotiation, competitors Mainichi and Yomiuri came to their own agreement. The two papers would sponsor tours by American clubs in alternating years.
On August 23 George Weiss announced that the visit would proceed. Beginning with five games in Hawaii and ending with several more in Okinawa and Manila, the Yankees would leave New York shortly after the World Series on October 8 and planned to return on November 18. Included in the group of 64 travelers were many of the players’ wives, though some planned to stay behind in Hawaii. Among these wives were those of Andy Carey, Eddie Robinson, and Johnny Kucks, all of whom were on their honeymoons.
The schedule, which included games in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyushu, Sendai, Sapporo, Nagoya, and Hiroshima, was announced on September 24. Tickets, which went on sale on October 1 for the Tokyo games to be played at Korakuen Stadium, ranged in price from 1,200 yen (approximately $3.33) for special reserved seats, to 300 yen (approximately 83 cents) for bleacher seating. Games at other stadiums would top out at 1,000 yen (approximately $2.77). According to Japan’s National Tax Agency, in 1955 private sector workers earned an average annual salary of 185,000 yen (approximately $513). This was a great improvement from the poverty of the early postwar years. Indeed, it was approaching twice the annual salary that private sector workers earned in 1950. But even a ticket to the bleachers would have been a considerable reach for the average worker. As a result, it is safe to assume that the live spectatorship for the Yankees games would have consisted primarily of well-off Japanese as well as American servicemen. Other Japanese fans had to make do with newspaper coverage, radio and, in many cases, television. Realistically speaking, television receivers were extremely expensive, making individual ownership rare—in 1953, for example, even the least expensive receivers cost more than a year’s wages for the average Japanese consumer. But this didn’t mean that television was only for the wealthy. As in the United States, sets were placed strategically in front of retail establishments in order to draw customers. Far more common, however, was the institution of gaito terebi, plaza televisions, sets situated in accessible public spaces, which gave rise to the practice of communal viewing. This would have enabled many Japanese fans to watch the games.
Cover of the 1955 Yankees’ Japan tour program featuring Mickey Mantle. (Rob Fitts Collection)
A Japanese poster promoting the series announced, “Unprecedented—the marvelous terrific team of our time—Champion of the Baseball World—New York Yankees—coming! Sixteen games in the whole country.” While not entirely accurate—the Yankees went on to lose the World Series to the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games after the poster was printed—it did not matter to Japanese fans. Given the public response to the team’s arrival in Tokyo, the Yankees were, in fact, the “marvelous terrific team” of l955.
That the series had a purpose beyond “goodwill” was publicly stated by Vice President Nixon, speaking on behalf of President Eisenhower, on October 12. Eisenhower had, in fact, been involved with the planning, according to Del Webb. Prior to arranging the tour, Webb had discussed its potential benefits with the president, Secretary Dulles, and General Douglas MacArthur, former commander of the Allied powers in Japan. “I asked the president last summer if he thought a trip by the Yankees might help bring the American and Japanese people closer to each other,” said Webb. “He said it would.” So it was no surprise that Nixon made a statement, addressing Commissioner Frick, expressing the president’s best wishes. Nixon wrote, “Appearances in Japan by an American major league baseball team will contribute a great deal to increased mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of Japan, and thus to the cause of a just and lasting peace, which demands the continued friendship and cooperation of the nations of the Free World.” It was up to the Yankees, Nixon implied, to help cement the US-Japanese alliance, assuring that Japan would come down on the side of “freedom” rather than neutrality in the ongoing struggle against the unfree Soviet bloc. Of course, the vice president’s statement was a clear example of the inflated rhetoric of Cold War propaganda. But the message was unavoidable. Public relations played an essential role in geopolitics, and this tour was, above all else, an exercise in public relations.
Having fared well on their Hawaiian stop, winning all five games against a mixture of local teams and armed forces all-stars, and having survived their mobbing at the airport, the Yankees began their hectic schedule. The sodden but jubilant welcome was followed by a series of events, receptions, and press conferences. The next day, the team worked out while Stengel, who would serve as the face of the club, and Weiss attended a luncheon at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Lest it be thought that the tour consisted only of propaganda, the proceedings included their fair share of frivolous fun, which was also covered in the press. At the club, Stengel was presented with a gift—a large box, labeled “For 01’ Case.” According to the Nippon Times,“Stengel stood patiently by while bearers deposited the box at his feet. Then, lo and behold, a pretty girl in a kimono crashed through the wrapping pounding her fist into a baseball glove in the best tradition of the game.” Sensing an opportunity to get in on the act, Weiss “went through the motions of putting the girl’s name to a contract.” In what might, in twenty-first-century terms, be considered in very bad taste, Weiss asked her how much she wanted. But under the circumstances, Weiss’s actions were just part of the fun. Nevertheless, Stengel took a moment to emphasize the true nature of the tour. The Yankees were in Japan “on a serious mission of good will.”
It would be nice to say that the first game, held on Saturday, October 22, went off without a hitch. But rarely does this happen when there are so many moving parts. This time, Opal did more than just soak a parade. The typhoon caused a postponement of Game Five of the Japanese championship series between the Nankai Hawks and the Yomiuri Giants, which was scheduled to be played at Korakuen Stadium on Friday. As a result, the Yankees contest had to be moved to the evening to accommodate both games. A smaller crowd than expected—35,000, about 5,000 shy of a capacity crowd—turned out to see the Yankees make quick work of the Mainichi Orions, beating the Japanese team 10-2. After Kaoru Hatoyama, the wife of the prime minister, threw out the first pitch—the very first wife of a head of state to do so at a major-league game, exhibition or otherwise—fans and dignitaries were treated to a 10-hit barrage by the Yankees, including two home runs and a triple by rookie catcher Elston Howard. The Orions countered with seven hits, but committed a costly first-inning error in their loss. The crowd, which included Thomas E. Dewey and his wife, was not disappointed.
Baseball, however, never completely supplanted diplomacy, as Prime Minister Hatoyama greeted the Yankees, Frick, and their entourage at a reception. Among the many photo ops, one stood out. Hatoyama, having been presented with a Yankees hat by Stengel, became the first Japanese prime minister to wear a baseball cap.
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
As a player I had kind of an up and down career. I played a year and a half, two years, in the big leagues, off and on, and it just didn’t look as though that [an MLB career] was going to happen. I played for Charlie Manuel, who managed the Phillies in the World Series and had played in Japan as well. He was managing Cleveland Indians AAA team, and he wanted me on his team. I ended up being kind of a utility player. I went to him and said, “Hey man, I would love to play in Japan.” I was really not the prototypical player to go to Japan because they wanted a Jessie Barfield or Lloyd Mosby, those type of guys. But Hiroshima is a smaller market, and they had an interest. When their scout came over to see me, I performed very well, and he signed me.
When I went over, I really went into it wholeheartedly. I wanted to make a good impression. I did all their practice stuff. I was doing everything. Man, at the end of the year I was tuckered out! It was just their workload, what they did, plus we practice differently. Americans here practice full tilt, like in a game, whereas Japanese sometimes back off. They get a lot out of 70%. That’s just how they practice. You hear about some of the ridiculous things that they do, like they’ll go take 1000 swings, right? Well, there’s nobody that can do that full tilt. One of the examples on the pitching side, is Hiroki Kuroda, who pitched for me when I was managing. He just had a chip removed from his elbow and on his first day back, he said, “I want to throw a 100-pitch bullpen.” I said, “Why would you want to do that?” “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll throw probably 15 full tilt. I’ll back off on everything else.” He just wanted to show the press that he was healthy. That was very important to him.
I didn’t know a lot about Japanese baseball before I went over. I knew Mr. Baseball and I had friends who had gone over; some were successful, some weren’t. The guys who were really successful in the States were not always so successful in Japan. There was a different mindset when it came to Japanese baseball, as opposed to American baseball. I think the speed of the game in the United States is obviously faster. Players can adapt to the speed of the game, whereas in Japan they have a way of being successful that works for them and that’s what they want to do. They don’t deviate from that very much. It’s a kind of old school like mid 1940s. They still practice a lot that way.
[When I joined the Carp in 1992] everybody was upbeat about how the team had done the year before. [They had won the Central League pennant]. I had some really good teammates, like Tomonori Maeda and Kenjiro Nomura. Akira Etoh was there. He led the league in home runs, and I hit behind him normally. 1992 was a pretty satisfying year for me individually. I had a pretty good season. There were a lot of really good players, but we had aging pitching staff. Manabu Kitabeppu was getting older. It was unfortunate that we just kind of ran out of pitching, because we had such a good nucleus of position players. We just didn’t have enough bullpen [arms] to really take care of the bigger-tier teams. The Giants were difficult, and the Swallows were really a good team at that time with Atsuya Furuta and their manager [Katsuya] Nomura-san. So, it was a really challenging season, but we played well. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed Hiroshima, especially the fans and the atmosphere. That was pretty cool. The following year [1993], we had some issues with injuries, myself included. That was difficult.
I was always an aggressive player. It’s just the way I’ve always played. I think a lot of players on the Japanese teams were surprised because it was not the norm. I can remember, [early in the season] scoring from first base on a double. As I came into home, the ball was getting there just as I came to the plate and I knocked the catcher over. The ball popped out and I scored, and we ended up winning by a run. People didn’t like the fact that I knocked the catcher over. But as I got up, I tried to see if I could help because I think I broke his collar bone. Everybody could see that I was trying to help him because it was a televised game against the Giants. So, everybody saw me as being hardnosed and they just knew how I played. They were pretty accepting. I think some of the fans in Hiroshima actually enjoyed it.
When I was a player, there was a veteran locker room in Hiroshima, and there was a rookies locker room. The rookies didn’t stay with the veterans unless the rookie had a friend who was a veteran. I was in the veteran locker room. It was very small and all of my teammates smoked like fish! [As a foreign player] you can feel isolated sometimes, and you have to learn how to live with it. I didn’t speak the language very well at all. Also, I was by myself. Louis Medina got hurt his first year, so I didn’t have a teammate. Robinson Checo, a young Latin kid came over, but he didn’t know any English. They called me in to interpret for him, but I didn’t know Spanish! So, I went in and said, “Que pasa?” That’s about all I knew. There were a lot of really quirky things like that that happened over there.
After I stopped playing, I managed in the Minor Leagues. As a AAA manager in Buffalo, we had some good teams. In 2004 we won a championship and in 2005, we had another good team, but we ended up losing in the playoffs. A good friend of mine, Erik Schullstrom was a scout for Hiroshima, and he said, “How would you feel about managing for the Carp?” I said, “Oh, man, that that would be a great opportunity. I’d love to do that.” He went back and introduced the idea to the owner (I had played for his father). He came to Charlotte, and we had an interview, and they said “Yeah, let’s do this.” That’s kind of how it went down. It was a little difficult at first.
I think I was kind of a stopgap until they got a Japanese manager in there after I was gone. I don’t think it was ever intended for me to win as a manager. I think in their mind they just wanted to try to get somebody else ready and then when they were ready, they could go ahead and kick me loose, which that was fine with me. Didn’t have a problem with that. It was what it was. I thought we did a lot of really good things and I enjoyed my time there as a manager and a player.
Koji Yamamoto was my manger when I played for the Carp and also managed just before I was hired in 2006. Yamamoto is just a super guy. The two nicest people I was around in baseball would be Sadaharu Oh, who I managed against, and Yamamoto-san. He really wanted me to help [the Carp], and he was very positive about me coming over there. That was pretty cool. As an American managing in Japan, some guys get paranoid because they think somebody’s going to do something to sabotage [the changes] they’re trying to get through. I didn’t have that. Some of my coaching staff were former teammates of mine and they wanted to see change. The Carp hadn’t won in a while and so they wanted to see an American way of doing things and then get back to Japanese style at some point refreshed.
The way Yamamoto would work the bullpen, it was about complete games. For example, he would leave Hiroki Kuroda in to complete a game because Kuroda at 60% was better than everybody else in the bullpen. Yamamoto-san wouldn’t even go down and ask Kuroda if he was okay. He would just leave him in there. And Kuroda wasn’t going to say anything. He just kept doing it. I got to manage Kuroda for a while, and said, “Would you rather go through and face these guys, the meat of the order, for the fourth time in the ninth inning when you’re dead tired, or would you rather hand it over to the bullpen when you’ve done your job for that day with a certain amount of pitches? That keeps you healthier.” We even tried him on four days rest. We didn’t really have to, but we tried it just because he wanted to show people in the States that he could do it. And he did okay. He was just not used to it. He was used to pitching every Sunday. That’s another thing that’s different over there, the rotation and how they worked it. Star players were always going to pitch on Sunday, and they announced their pitchers. There were never any flip flops or any of that. As a manager I didn’t understand that. The ownership was like, “Well, [the fans] want to know when they’re going to pitch.” And I said, “Well, they will come [to the ballpark] anyway.” We went through this one time, when Kuroda, pitching on short rest, pitched on a Saturday. It’s just a different mindset. I did it a little more of the American way when I was there, but I [ultimately] did what the owner wanted to do. It was his team.
When I played, [most Japanese pitchers threw a] four-seamed fastball and a slider, sometimes a breaking ball like a curveball, and some guys would throw a change up. That’s kind of how everything was when I was a player, but as I started to manage, it was different. The players wanted to experiment with the split finger. They wanted to take their repertoire up a notch. Kenta Maeda, Masahiro Tanaka, Hisashi Iwakuma, and Kuroda, I managed all those guys, were the top line pitchers in Japan, and they always wanted to experiment with new pitches. That was really never brought up back when I was playing. So, it was good to see how it evolved like that. I think it was good for them and a lot of those players were motivated to get to the States and play. All four of those guys did.
Takahiro Arai was one of my favorite players in Hiroshima. The year before I managed, Arai had won a home run title. The first year I managed, Jeff Livesey was the head coach. Jeff had just showed up to spring camp at Nichinan, so we dressed up one of our interns in Arai’s uniform. He was really skinny, and Arai was a big guy. We got it all set up and I told Jeff, “This guy is the home run king, and he wants to take batting practice strictly for you because you’re going to be the hitting coach and you haven’t seen him hit.” Jeff saw the intern and he went, “Man, he’s not a real big guy, is he?” I just said, “No, no, he’s not that big.” The intern got in there and he swung at the first three pitches and missed them. He was slamming his bat and doing stuff that the Japanese players just wouldn’t do. He was great. He was a good actor. Finally, he popped one up and he pretended like it was going to be a home run but it didn’t get out of the infield. Jeff [was looking worried]. Finally, Arai came out and introduced himself, and then Jeff realized that the guys have tricked him. That was a really funny moment. We tried to lighten things up because Japanese don’t normally do stuff like that. We tried to have a lot of fun, but we worked really hard too.
I named some co-captains the first year when I was manager. I named Tomonori Maeda and Hiroki Kuroda captains because they didn’t get along. Maeda didn’t really want to do any of that. Whereas Kuroda took charge, and he would say, “Hey, we need to do this” and would come into my office and talk to me about stuff. Those two guys really were good. Maeda and I were actually teammates when I played. He was an outstanding center fielder. He could play. When he was only 17 years old, 18 years old, he was a stud. He had all five tools. He could run, could throw, could hit, could hit for power. He was really a top tier player, but he didn’t say anything because he was a young player. He wouldn’t say anything out of the ordinary to ruffle any feathers back then. When he was young, he was an MLB caliber player. If he went over [to the States], he would have had to get adjusted, and that would be the only fear I would have had, that he couldn’t adjust to the American type of playing. He had to do things his own way and that didn’t fly in the United States back then like it does today. He could still play at times [when I managed him], but he couldn’t play in the field anymore. He got to the point where he was kind of just a pinch hitter. The Hiroshima people loved him. He was a mainstay there.
Tomoaki Kanemoto was also a teammate of mine and then I managed against him. When Kanemoto became free agent after the 2002 season, the front office had to make a decision between resigning Maeda or Kanemoto. That was a difficult thing. The owner chose Maeda, whereas Kanemoto went on to be the next Cal Ripken with Hanshin. A lot of people really wanted to see Kanemoto stay. I would have loved to have had him on my team because he was a good friend of mine. He had tools and he was strong. You could see that he was going to be a good player.
Having a small budget has always been a challenge for Hiroshima. I played for Kohei Matsuda, the father of the current owner, before he passed. He would go out and get a player if he thought a foreign player could help them win. He wouldn’t care about spending money to get him. It whereas the ownership now is more constrained. So, I never had the opportunity to pick out an American player when I was the manager. You might think that was kind of weird. I had some good players, but we didn’t get that frontline American player that I thought would take us over the top.
I never managed at the Major League level in the United States. I spent a lot of time in AAA and AAA is more of a development type situation. I always showed up every day to win but I never sacrificed development for winning. If we weren’t winning, I was not going to take the number one, two, or three prospect out of the game. I might give him a day off, but I was not going to take him out of the lineup. I think that’s just an understanding of everybody who is in development in the United States. That’s what they truly believe. Development was a big thing for me, and I knew we had to do that in Hiroshima as well. I just had to figure out a different way to do it. So it was different in that respect. I think the players did have a bit of a challenge, me being American and wanting to do things a little bit differently at times, but I didn’t do it all the time. I tried to make adjustments.
For example, in Japan all of the teams take infield [practice] the same way. They never vary from that, and they take infield every day. Very seldom at the Major League level do teams take infield anymore. If guys want to get in some early work and take some ground balls, or maybe some fly balls if they are an outfielder, they’ll get those in before practice even starts. Even as a Minor League manager I didn’t have my guys take infield every day, but I had them do it often because they were developing. I tried to introduce American-style infield drills to the Carp. We an American style infield [drill] one day and then we would go back and do the Japanese style infield. They didn’t like the American infield. It wasn’t the same. But they could do it and never miss a ball. It was pretty amazing how they could do it, but they just liked it their way. I just finally gave up and said, “Yeah, let’s do it your way. You guys look clean with it.”
When I started, the team was not in good working condition. They had walked over 500 people the year before I got there, and when you play in a little stadium, like Hiroshima, that makes things very difficult. You can’t walk that many. It leads to giving up three-run homers every other inning. That was their demise. But we got them back on track by making sure we pitched ahead in the count. We cut our walks down to just under 400. When our pitchers had a 2-2 or 3-2 count, they were always looking for a swing and a miss, but we really didn’t have strikeout type pitchers. We had contact type guys, but they didn’t really understand that. They thought they needed a swing and miss to not give up a hit, and that wasn’t the case. Working on that improved us tremendously during the first year when I started managing.
I also wanted to get rid of the hogwash. Like we would practice for six hours a day, finish up, and guys would be dead tired, and somebody would tell them that they needed to go to the parking lot and keep swinging the bat for another hour. I thought that was a waste of time. Get your rest, get something good to eat, and get ready to work hard the next day. So, I started taking them to the pool and making them swing a bat in the pool after they got done with practice. Some guys liked that, some guys didn’t. The point was they were not getting anything out of sitting in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and swinging a bat. That was not really what we needed. If you’re going to do something, do it with purpose. I think I brought some of that to the table. It wasn’t as though I was trying to change everything. I just didn’t understand how come there wasn’t any change. But when it came down to it, it was a Japanese team and I was an American manager so I would just try to introduce ideas.
Some of the Japanese managers would do things that you would never see in the U.S. For example, one of the Dragons better hitters was a two-hole hitter. When he would get on base with one out, the Dragons manager Hiromitsu Ochiai would bunt his three-hole hitter and then let the four-hole hitter come up with two outs. I was like “Hell, yeah, that’s perfect for us!” With two outs all we had to do was get that guy out and the inning was over, or don’t pitch to him at all, and go for the next guy. [But my pitchers would insist on pitching to him] and that four-hole hitter would get a hit. It never failed. I would ask my pitchers, “Why are you doing that?” It was almost like an unwritten rule that they couldn’t put him on and couldn’t pitch around him. They had to make him swing at their pitch and get him out. That was very discouraging to me. Ochiai just kept doing it. I was like, “God Dang it. What are you doing here?” It was so different.
The way they would line up defensively was also different from in the U.S. You would see a third baseman playing even with the bag, right next to the bag, and there would be nobody out with a leadoff hitter up or the seven or eight-hole hitter up. Why would you do that? [Well] they were actually looking for a ball to be hit off the end of the bat. They just wanted to cover everything. But you have got to give something up to get something. You want to double play ball? Then, you have to cheat and get to double-play depth. That’s just the way we treat the game over here. To them, it’s not an option. They were going to cover every possibility. If there was a swinging bunt, they were going to cover it.
They would try to take away a double by staying on the line but that would leave a huge gap on the left side of the infield. I was like, “Guys were kind of kicking ourselves in the throat here. What are we doing?” A few little things like that I would change around, but it was very difficult to get them to understand it, especially the veteran players. They had a way to position that they were used to. They would want to play at a certain place on the field, and I’d be like, “Well, that doesn’t make sense. You’re giving up too much.” That was a little frustrating, but I got through it. It was not a big deal.
Here’s one thing that I had never seen happen before [I went to Japan]. When I managed, there were some players who if they had a few bad outings or maybe they weren’t hitting really great would come into my office and say, “Hey, think I need to go down to the minor leagues for ten days and then I’ll come back.” They might not pick up a ball [down there] but when they came back, they were just kind of regrouped and refreshed and they went out and did what they used to do. That’s way different from what we do in the States. I never imagined that that would happen.
My closer did that to me one time. He had already blown two saves, and he blew another lead, but we ended up coming back to win the game. He came into my office and said, “I think I need to go to the minor leagues.” And I said, “Do you want me to tell the media, or do you want to tell them? He said, “I’d rather you tell them.” So, he threw me under the bus. I told management about it, and they didn’t think anything about it. They were just fine with it. They said, “He’s not been very good. Maybe he needs a little rest.” So, I think it was probably normal for a Japanese player to do that if he’s had some failure. Can you imagine somebody doing that here? I was blown away.
Overall, I got along great with the umpires in Japan, but we all have situations in which you get heated on the field and if you don’t then something’s wrong. [As a manager] you’ve got to show your team and your players that you are willing to fight for them and it’s us against them. And if they’re not going to make a proper call, then you have a right to say what you need to say. There was a particular umpire, I won’t mention his name, who had trouble seeing. He’d make a really bad call, and I’d ask him in so many words, “Are you ***ing blind!?” And he would look at me and, I almost felt sorry for him, say, “Yeah, I can’t see very well.” I was like, what the hell? I’ve never had an umpire say that before!
I would go to the umpiring group and ask them the rulings on something or what they saw in a certain situation. I got along with them fine. I would go over and talk to the guys who had thrown me out of games. It was no big deal. Japanese managers didn’t really do that. They would go out and bump them and hit them, and then they would stay in the game, whereas I would just talk to them and get thrown out. I think my interpreter got me into more trouble than what I really did. He would get fired up more than I would, and he’d say stuff and it looked like I was saying it, and I wasn’t really saying it!
[Editor’s note: Marty became famous throughout Japan on May 7, 2006, for throwing first base during a dispute with the umpires].
Well, I had an American pitcher, Mike Romano, on the mound and there was a close play at first base and the umpire called the runner safe. He was one of my favorite umpires over there. His name was Katsumi Manabe. I didn’t know if he was safe or not, it was a tough call. Manabe didn’t know English that well, and I think Mike said, “Well, that was a fucking horseshit call!” Well, Manabe thought that Mike was calling him that. It was just the third inning and Manabe threw my starter out of the game. I went out there, and I’m like, “Oh, God, I’ve got to waste some time here so we can get somebody warmed up enough to get them in the game.” So, I started arguing with the umpires, and as I was arguing with the umpires, I noticed they all had stopwatches. I didn’t know what the hell they had those stopwatches for. Anyway, I was talking, and I was getting heated up, but I still was going to have to waste some more time because we were not going to have anybody ready soon.
Finally, the umps said, “That’s enough. You need to go back to the dugout.” I was like, “What?” And they said, “Yeah, your time is up. You can’t go over the amount of time to argue this call.” So, I was like, “Oh, you’re not going to throw me out after all the hell I put you through here?” They just looked at me, and said, “You’re done.” And they started walking away. I had to figure out a way to waste more time, so I just picked up first base and threw it out into right field. All four of them threw me out at once! All four! That was the first time that had ever happened.
The Carp’s owner made red T-shirts that said, “Danger! My manager throws bases.” He put that out there and they sold them as souvenirs. Pretty good marketing idea. That didn’t bother me any. What did bother me is that first time I got tossed, they finned me 1000 bucks. And the next time I got tossed, it was going to be 2000. My coaching staff thought it was great when I got tossed and the team really liked it. It showed some energy because none of the other Japanese managers really did that. I went to the coaching staff, and I said, “Listen, I can’t do this anymore.” So the coaching staff got together and they paid my fine. I thought that was pretty amazing. They didn’t say anything to the players. The coaches leaked it out that I didn’t feel that I could get tossed because management was not going to help pay the fines. Well, management ended up coming back and said, “If we feel that it’s a worthy cause and you can get tossed, we’ll pay your fine.”
With the history of the city, and the bombing, the culture of Hiroshima is about rebuilding and fighting. “We’re not giving up!” I think that really stands out in Hiroshima and with the fans there. The fans make trips to Tokyo, and they have their own cheering section. They’re just great. If I had to compare them to a team in the States as far as fan base, I’d say the Cardinals. The reason I say that is the Cardinals do very little during the course of the winter to get better, but it always seems to work out because their fan base is behind them all the time and a lot of guys just need that little extra jump. So yeah, Hiroshima is just a special place. I think it’s more about the people there. I think the rebuilding of the team and putting the money back into the team now has really helped them as far as competing in the league. Hiroshima’s new stadium is off the wall great. It’s awesome. Nippon Ham’s new stadium is also really good. With Japan’s culture, loving baseball the way they do, making all these new stadiums and places for the fans to go has been pretty amazing.
My time in Japan was a really enjoyable experience, both as a manager and as a player. I really did love it. Also, I met my wife there, so I brought the best part of Japan home with me!
He never dreamed of being a professional, but ended up giving it his all
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.
Yoshinobu Takahashi never really wanted to be a baseball player.
Even as a kid in Chiba—already stronger and more skilled than the boys around him—baseball felt like something he did well, not something that belonged to him. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he might say “baseball player,” but without conviction. It felt like a hypothetical. He thought his parents felt the same way.
He grew up the youngest of three brothers in a household where baseball was practiced daily. His father, who had played through high school, coached him relentlessly, yet tried to make sure baseball never crowded out education or life. He didn’t even have any idols when he was young. When Yoshinobu cried on the way to practice and declared he wanted to quit, his older brothers resorted to physical means to force him to go.
He tried to quit more than once. He never succeeded.
By middle school, Takahashi was dominant, pitching and hitting cleanup for a Pony League team that won national championships. Still, he believed baseball would end someday. His mother insisted he attend Toin Gakuen High School in Kanagawa as a boarding student. Takahashi resisted. His father resisted, too.
Years later, he would say that living away from home taught him independence and gratitude at the same time.
At Toin Gakuen, Takahashi stood out immediately. He hoped to remain a pitcher. His coach watched him hit once and moved him into the lineup. He played in two Summer Koshien tournaments, became team captain, and finished his high school career with 30 home runs. His final summer ended in disappointment, without a Koshien appearance.
If high school shaped his independence, Keio University shaped his worldview. He chose Keio not because it was a pipeline to professional baseball, but because of the Tokyo Big6 League and the desire to compete in the Waseda-Keio rivalry.
Takahashi enrolled in the law school, studying political science, and thrived in the Tokyo Big6 League. He won a Triple Crown, broke Koichi Tabuchi’s 30-year-old home run record*, and played every inning of every game for four years. Yet what he remembered most about Keio was not dominance, but diversity—older players, late starters, students who treated baseball as only one part of a larger life. Coaches respected individuality. Players were treated like adults.
*Tabuchi was drafted by the Hanshin Tigers and was named Rookie of the Year in 1969.
In 1997, before he played a professional game, Takahashi starred for Japan in the Intercontinental Cup. He hit .419, drove in 16 runs in nine games, played flawless right field, and helped Japan rout Cuba in the gold medal game by homering and driving in 5 runs, snapping a 151 game winning streak in international games for Cuba.
Drafted by the Yomiuri Giants, he hit .300 as a rookie, won a Gold Glove (the first rookie outfielder to do so), and made the All-Star team. He finished second in Rookie of the Year voting*. In 1999, he delivered what might have been the best season of his career: .315, 34 home runs, 98 RBIs, elite defense, Best Nine honors. The season ended early when he broke his collarbone crashing into the outfield wall.
*Kenshin Kawakami won the award by going 14-6 with a 2.57 ERA. I always thought he should have gotten more chances in MLB.
At the time, it seemed dramatic. Later, it felt like foreshadowing.
Takahashi played the outfield without caution. Diving catches, full-speed collisions, fearless throws, he did them all. He was told to stop diving. He understood the instruction, but he couldn’t follow it.
The legendary Shigeo Nagashima had taught him that a professional’s duty was to move the hearts of the fans, that someone in the stands might be seeing him play for the only time in their life. Takahashi took that literally. “The moment I think I can catch it,” he once said, “my head goes blank.”
The early 2000s were defined by excellence and accumulation: Gold Gloves, All-Star selections, steady power, international success with the national team. He starred in the 2001 Baseball World Cup, the 2003 Asian Championship, and the 2004 Olympics. He tied and set league records for consecutive hits and plate appearances reaching base. He helped the Giants win championships.
After 2004, his career changed shape. Injuries arrived in spades: shoulder surgery, ankle surgery, back pain, broken ribs, muscle strains. From 2005 onward, Takahashi played more than 100 games in a season only three times. He moved across the outfield, then to first base, always adjusting, always in pain.
In 2007, healthy again, he reinvented himself as a leadoff hitter and produced one of the finest seasons in the Central League: .308/.404/.579, 35 home runs, league-leading slugging, Gold Glove, Best Nine. He set an NPB record with 9 first-inning leadoff home runs. It was his last great, uninterrupted year.
Late in his career, the Giants cut his salary by more than half—the largest reduction in team history to that point. Takahashi smiled and signed immediately. “Of course it went down,” he said. “They still want me.”
That was enough.
He played 17 seasons with the Giants, appeared in four Japan Series, won three of them, reached 300 home runs, and never once seemed concerned with whether the numbers told the whole story. Even back in college, his coach remarked that while he was very particular about the outcome of games, he didn’t seem to care at all when it came to his own records or awards.
In 2014, his father died. The day after the funeral, Takahashi played and homered. He looked briefly toward the sky as he rounded the bases. That was all.
At the end of the 2015 season, with his body finally finished, the Giants offered him their managerial job. He accepted. He would say that managing allowed him to see baseball in a new light.
Takahashi never reached 2,000 hits. His body wouldn’t allow it. But he battled all the same. Even diminished, he reached base. Even injured, he delivered. He never stopped playing like someone might be seeing him for the first and only time.
And that, more than any career numbers or award totals, is how he earned the love and admiration of fans across the country.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week C. Paul Rogers III tells us about the 1953 Major League All-Stars visit to Japan.
Eddie Lopat was a fine, soft-tossing southpaw during a 12-year baseball career with the Chicago White Sox and most famously the New York Yankees. Called the Junkman because of his assortment of off-speed pitches, Lopat was also something of a baseball entrepreneur. He not only ran a winter baseball school in Florida, but, after barnstorming in Japan with Lefty O’Doul’s All-Stars following the 1951 major-league season, was very receptive to Frank Scott’s plan to put together a star-studded assemblage of major leaguers to again tour Japan after the 1953 season. Scott, a former traveling secretary of the Yankees who had since become a promoter, proposed calling the team the Eddie Lopat All-Stars. By 1953, after O’Doul’s 1949 breakthrough overseas trip to Japan with his San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, postseason tours to the Land of the Rising Sun had become more common. In fact, in 1953 the New York Giants also barnstormed in Japan at the same time as did Lopat’s team. For the Lopat tour, Scott secured the Mainichi Newspapers, owners of the Mainichi Orions of Japan’s Pacific League, as the official tour sponsor.
Lopat and Scott spent much of the 1953 regular season recruiting players for the tour, including a somewhat reluctant Yogi Berra. Unbeknownst to Yogi, he was already a legend among Japanese baseball fans. At the All-Star Game in Cincinnati, a Japanese sportswriter who was helping Lopat and Scott with their recruiting was aware of Berra’s reputation as a chowhound and told Yogi about the exotic foods he would be able to consume in Japan. Yogi was skeptical, however, and wondered if bread was available in Japan. When the writer and Lopat both assured Yogi that Japan did indeed have bread, he signed on for the tour.
Under the prevailing major-league rules, barnstorming “all-star teams” were limited to three players from any one team. With that constraint, a stellar lineup of major leaguers signed on for the tour including, in addition to Berra, future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Robin Roberts, Eddie Mathews, Bob Lemon, Nellie Fox, and Enos Slaughter. All-Star-caliber players like Eddie Robinson, Curt Simmons, Mike Garcia, Harvey Kuenn (the 1953 American League Rookie of the Year), Jackie Jensen, and Hank Sauer committed as well, as did Gus Niarhos, who was added to serve as a second catcher behind Berra. Whether a slight exaggeration or not, they were billed as “the greatest array of major league stars ever to visit Japan.”
Lopat and his Yankees teammates Mantle and Berra were fresh off a tense six-game World Series win over the Brooklyn Dodgers in which all had played pivotal roles. Lopat had won Game Two thanks to a two-run eighth-inning homer by Mantle, while Berra had batted .429 for the Series. A casualty to the tour because of the long season and World Series, however, was the 21-year-old Mantle, who, after battling injuries to both knees during the year, needed surgery and was a late scratch. Lopat quickly added Yankees teammate Billy Martin, who had hit .500 with 12 hits and eight runs batted in in the Series to win the Baseball Writers’ MVP Award.
The Lopat All-Stars were to first play four exhibition games in Colorado and began gathering at the famous Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs on October 6. Baseball had a no-fraternizing rule then and many of the players looked forward to getting to know ballplayers from other teams and from the other league. The Phillies’ Robin Roberts, who was known for his great control on the mound, remembered spotting fellow hurler Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians in the bar at the Broadmoor and going over to introduce himself. Lemon asked Roberts what he wanted to drink and Roberts said, “I’ll have a 7-Up.”
Lemon didn’t say anything but pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered Roberts one. Roberts said, “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”
Lemon chuckled and said, “No wonder you don’t walk anyone.”
The Lopat team’s opposition in Colorado was a squad of major leaguers put together by White Sox manager Paul Richards and highlighted by pitchers Billy Pierce and Mel Parnell, infielders Pete Runnels and Randy Jackson, and outfielders Dave Philley and Dale Mitchell.
The big-league sluggers quickly took to the rarefied Colorado air as the teams combined for nine home runs in the first contest, a 13-8 victory for the Lopat All-Stars over the Richards group on October 8 in Pueblo. The 21-year-old Mathews, coming off a gargantuan 47-homer, 135-RBI season with the Braves, slugged two circuit shots (including one that traveled 500 feet), as did the Cubs’ 36-year-old Hank Sauer, the Cardinals’ 37-year-old Enos Slaughter, and, for the Richards team, Detroit catcher Matt Batts. Two days later, the Lopats blasted the Richards team 18-7 in Colorado Springs before the four-game series shifted to Bears Stadium in Denver for the final two contests. The results were the same, however, as the Lopat team won in the Mile-High City 8-4 and 14-8, the latter before a record crowd of 13,852, as fourtime American League All-Star Eddie Robinson of the Philadelphia A’s and Mathews both homered off Billy Pierce and drove in four runs apiece.
Mathews went 7-for-8 in the two Denver contests and posted Little League-like numbers for the whole Colorado series, driving in 17 runs in the four games, while the veteran Slaughter had 12 hits, including two homers, two triples, and three doubles.
The Lopat All-Stars then flew to Honolulu for more exhibition games after a brief stopover in San Francisco. On October 12 and 13 they played a pair of games in Honolulu against a local team called the Rural Red Sox and it did not take long for disaster to strike. In the first inning of the first game before a jammed-in crowd of 10,500, Mike Garcia of the Indians was struck in the ankle by a line drive after delivering a pitch. Garcia, who had won 20, 22, and 18 games the previous three seasons, was unable to push off from the mound after the injury and had to leave the game. Although Garcia stayed with the team for most of the tour, he was able to pitch only sparingly in Japan.
Despite the loss of Garcia, the major leaguers clobbered the locals 10-2 and 15-0. After the second game, first baseman Robinson, who had homered in the rout, was stricken with a kidney-stone attack and was briefly hospitalized. He quickly recovered and resumed the tour for the All-Stars, who had brought along only 11 position players.
On October 14 the Lopat squad flew to Kauai, where they pounded out 22 hits and defeated the Kauai All-Stars, 12-3, on a makeshift diamond fashioned from a football field. World Series MVP Martin was honored before the game and given a number of gifts, including an aloha shirt and a calabash bowl. He celebrated by smashing a long home run in his first time at bat and later adding a double and a single. The homer sailed through goalposts situated beyond left field, leading Robin Roberts to quip that it should have counted for three runs.
The big leaguers next flew to Hilo on the Big Island, where on October 17, 5,000 saw them defeat a local all-star-team, 8-3, in a game benefiting the local Little League. But much more serious opposition awaited them back in Honolulu in the form of a three- game series against the Roy Campanella All-Stars, a team of African American major leaguers headed by Campanella, the reigning National League MVP, and including stellar players like Larry Doby, Don Newcombe, Billy Bruton, Joe Black, Junior Gilliam, George Crowe, Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, Bob Boyd, Dave Hoskins, Connie Johnson, and Jim Pendleton.
The Lopats won the first game, 7-1, on the afternoon of October 18 over an obviously weary Campanella team that had flown in from Atlanta the previous day, with a plane change in Los Angeles. Jackie Jensen, then with the Washington Senators, was the hitting star with two home runs, while the Phillies’ Curt Simmons allowed only a single run in eight innings of mound work. By the next night, Campy’s squad was in much better shape and defeated the Lopat team 4-3 in 10 innings behind Joe Black.
Roberts pitched the first nine innings for the Lopats with Yogi Berra behind the plate. In one at-bat, Campanella hit a towering foul ball behind the plate. Campy actually knocked the glove off Yogi’s hand on the follow-through of his swing. Berra looked down at his glove on the ground and then went back and caught the foul ball barehanded.
Roberts picked up Yogi’s glove and handed it to him, asking him if he was okay. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell.”
Over the years Roberts wondered if he had somehow made that story up, since he never again saw a bat knock the glove off a catcher’s hand. Over 30 years later, he saw Berra at an Old-Timers game in Wrigley Field in Chicago and asked him about it. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell,” the exact thing he had said in 1953.
On October 20 Campanella’s squad won the rubber game, 7-1, behind the three-hit pitching of Don Newcombe. Nellie Fox displayed rare power by homering for the Lopats’ only run, while George Crowe hit two homers and Junior Gilliam one for the Campanellas.
The Lopat team stayed at the famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach and had such a great time in Hawaii that many didn’t want to leave. Many of the players had brought their wives but some like Eddie Mathews, Billy Martin, and Eddie Robinson were single and so enjoyed the Honolulu nightlife. Not surprisingly given his before and after history, Martin got into a dispute with a guard at a performance of hula dancers attended by the entire team and sucker-punched him. Fortunately for Martin, no charges appear to have been brought.
The Lopat squad did have a schedule to keep and flew on a Pan American Stratocruiser to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, arriving at 1:05 P.M. on October 22. They could scarcely have anticipated the frenzied reception they received. Although the New York Giants had been in the country for a week and had played five games, thousands of Japanese greeted the plane. After being officially greeted by executives from the trip sponsor, Mainichi, and receiving gifts from beautiful young Japanese women, the ballplayers climbed into convertibles, one player per car, to travel to the Nikkatsu Hotel, which would be their headquarters. The trip, which would normally take about 30 minutes, took almost three hours because of the throngs of fans lining the route and pressing against the cars as Japanese mounted and foot police were overwhelmed. Eddie Mathews likened it to the pope in a motorcade without police or security while it reminded Robin Roberts of a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
That evening the Americans were guests at a gigantic pep rally in their honor at the Nichigeki Theater, where Hawaiian-born Japanese crooner Katsuhiko Haida introduced each player. American Ambassador John M. Allison also hosted a reception at the US Embassy for both the Lopats and the New York Giants, who had just returned to Tokyo from Sendai.
Eddie Lopat All-Stars vs. Mainichi Orions, October 23, 1953 (Rob Fitts Collection
The Lopat squad’s first game was the following afternoon, October 23, against the Mainichi Orions in Korakuen Stadium before 27,000. The Orions, who had finished fifth out of seven teams in Japan’s Pacific League, had the honor of playing the initial game due to its ownership by the Mainichi newspapers. Jackie Jensen won a home-run-hitting contest before the game by smacking six out of the yard, followed by Futoshi Nakanishi of the Nishitetsu Lions with three and then Berra, Mathews, and Hank Sauer with two each. Bobby Brown, stationed in Tokyo as a US Army doctor, was seen visiting in the dugout with his Yankee teammates Lopat, Berra, and Martin before the contest.
The US and Japanese Army bands played after the home-run-hitting contest, followed by helicopters dropping bouquets of flowers to both managers. Another helicopter hovered low over the field and dropped the first ball but stirred up so much dust from the all-dirt infield that the start of the game was delayed.
The game finally began with Curt Simmons on the mound for the Americans against southpaw Atsushi Aramaki. The visitors plated a run in the top of the second on a single by Sauer, a double by Robinson, and an error, but the Orions immediately rallied for three runs in the bottom half on three bunt singles and Kazuhiro Yamauchi’s double. The Orions led 4-1 heading into the top of the ninth but the Lopats staged a thrilling rally to tie the score behind a walk to Mathews, a two-run homer by Sauer, and Robinson’s game-tying circuit clout.
Garcia, who had relieved Simmons in the seventh inning, was still pitching in the 10th but after allowing a single, reaggravated the leg injury suffered in Hawaii. He was forced to leave the game with the count of 1 and 1 against the Orions’ Charlie Hood, who was a minor-league player in the Phillies organization. (Hood was in the military stationed in Japan and had played 25 games for Mainichi during the season.) When Garcia had to depart, Lopat asked for volunteers to pitch. Roberts, sitting in the dugout, said he would and went out to the mound to warm up.
During the game Roberts had told Bob Lemon next to him that he was familiar with Hood from Phillies spring training and that he was a really good low-ball hitter. Then, on his first pitch, Roberts threw Hood a low fastball which he ripped down the right-field line for a game-winning double. Lemon ribbed Roberts for the rest of the trip about his throwing a low fastball to a low-fastball hitter. In one of baseball’s little coincidences, Roberts and Lemon would both be elected to the Hall of Fame on the same day in 1976, 23 years later.
The Lopat squad’s loss in the opener was only the third ever suffered by an American team of major leaguers in a postseason tour of Japan. The All-Stars were certainly embarrassed by losing to a mediocre team and afterward Roberts told the Japanese press, “Look, it’s a goodwill trip and so this was some of our goodwill. You won the first game, but you won’t win anymore.”
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
How 50,000 fans ranked Japan’s most beloved retired stars
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.
The only foreign player to record 2,000 hits in NPB
Charlie Manuel used to tell him stories.
That’s how this whole thing begins—not with a contract or a scout or a dream, but with the manager of the Cleveland Indians, a man with a thick country accent and a Yakult Swallows heart, leaning against a batting cage and talking about Japan.
Manuel was one of the few Americans who had thrived in NPB. He won the Japan Series as a member of the Swallows in 1978. He signed with the Kintetsu Buffaloes and took home the Pacific League MVP in 1979. His nickname in Japan? The Red Demon. He knew the language of the league, the rhythm of its days, the fierce courtesy, the relentless work, the joy buried under the discipline.
Alex Ramirez listened because he respected Manuel.
But he did not yet understand him.
“Charlie told me baseball equals Japanese culture,” Ramirez recalled years later. “Back then, I didn’t understand how baseball and culture could be linked. Now I understand it completely.”
At the time, it had sounded like one of those mysterious lines you hear from someone wiser than you. It was meaningful, but maybe only in retrospect.
Besides, the other players Ramirez talked to painted very different pictures of Japan.
Most had struggled.
Most had returned home with bad stories and worse statistics.
Their message was: Good luck. You won’t last.
Manuel’s message was: If you open yourself to Japan, Japan will open itself to you.
And Ramirez, wonderfully and stubbornly, did not believe either one completely.
He prepared for his trip to Japan the way any sensible ballplayer would: he watched Mr. Baseball a dozen or so times.
In the movie, translators famously shrink long speeches into short summaries, sometimes to comedic effect. Ramirez took this as documentary realism.
“I thought the interpreters were going to lie to me,” he said. “Like in the movie, the player talks for a minute, and the translator says two words.”
So when he arrived in Tokyo in 2001, he was prepared for deception, confusion, and culture clash.
He was not prepared for loneliness.
“The players would talk to me,” he said, “but I couldn’t understand. And I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. It became pressure.”
The language barrier hit harder than the pitching. And the pitching, with its forkballs and cutters and relentless precision, hit pretty hard.
In the clubhouse, the food consisted of onigiri and ramen. He felt there was nothing to eat.
For a while, Japan felt like a puzzle whose pieces didn’t quite fit together.
But fortunately, there was Tsutomu Wakamatsu.
Wakamatsu, the Yakult manager, had a way of making the world slow down. He did not try to turn Ramirez into a Japanese hitter. He simply gave him space and structure and trust.
Wakamatsu, of course, is a Yakult legend. His nickname is Mr. Swallows and his uniform number, 1, is honored* by the team.
“If I hadn’t started with Wakamatsu,” Ramirez said, “I wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame today.”
And slowly, day by day, Ramirez began to see what Manuel had meant.
The long practices were not punishment, they were pride.
The silence wasn’t coldness, it was concentration.
The discipline wasn’t rigidity, it was devotion.
Baseball wasn’t separate from life.
It was woven into the fabric of everything.
Once he understood that, he didn’t just adjust: he blossomed.
What happened next is one of the most beautiful second acts in baseball history.
Eight All-Star selections.
Four Best Nine awards.
Four RBI titles.
A batting title.
Two home-run crowns.
Two MVP awards.
Two Japan Series championships, with two different teams.
He hit .301 over thirteen seasons.
He averaged 29 homers a year.
He collected 2,000 hits, the first foreign player ever to do so.
And the fans called him “Rami-chan.”
The affectionate “chan,” the nickname given to children, pets, and beloved personalities.
He had come to Japan expecting to “teach the game.”
Japan had ended up teaching him something far larger, that baseball equals Japanese culture.
In 2019, Ramirez became a Japanese citizen. He had absorbed it, and became a part of it.
He was voted into the Japanese baseball Hall of Fame, along with Randy Bass, in 2023.
On induction day, he stepped to the microphone and did something that explained everything.
He thanked his interpreters and assistants.
He said their names. All of them.
He honored the people who had helped him find his way in Japan.
Charlie Manuel had been right: baseball and culture were inseparable.
Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan
SABR Asian Baseball Research Committee Blog 