Asian Baseball History and Culture is Our Passion
On January 28, 2026, Tatsu Shinke, the CEO of Mint Sports Cards, joined SABR’s Asian Baseball and Baseball Card Research Committees to talk about the sports card industry in Japan. You can now watch the talk on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIco-gUF5s8
Mr. Shinke is the CEO of Mint Sports Cards and Games, Japan’s largest chain of sports card shops. He has previously worked for Upper Deck and Japan’s largest sports card producer, Baseball Magazine.
SABR member Ray Nickson work on early Japanese baseball in Australia is featured on the website The Conversation.
by Dennis Snelling
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Dennis Snelling focuses on one of the most important pieces of baseball diplomacy in history: the 1949 San Francisco Seals tour of Japan
There are moments, sometimes fleeting, often accidental, when sport transcends mere athletic competition. These moments are not judged by wins or losses, nor by runs scored or surrendered. The baseball tour of Japan undertaken by Lefty O’Doul and his San Francisco Seals in October 1949 serves as a prime example—an event that changed the course of history.
At the tour’s conclusion, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, declared, “This trip is the greatest piece of diplomacy ever. All the diplomats put together would not have been able to do this.”
In a letter supporting a campaign aimed at Lefty O’Doul gaining membership in the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgway, wrote, “Words cannot describe Lefty’s wonderful contributions, through baseball, to the postwar rebuilding effort.”
In September 1945, a month after Japan’s surrender, reporter Harry Brundidge landed in the country and was barraged with queries about O’Doul. Lefty’s old friend Sotaro Suzuki, who first met O’Doul in New York in 1928 and was instrumental in organizing the 1934 tour featuring Babe Ruth, wanted Lefty to know he was okay. Emperor Hirohito’s brother inquired about the San Francisco ballplayer. Prince Fumimaro Konoe, the former prime minister of Japan, told Brundidge that O’Doul should have been a diplomat.
If the 1934 tour was a watershed moment in the history of baseball between the United States and Japan, then 1949 served as a bookend, providing a yardstick for the Japanese after they had been shut off from the rest of the baseball world for 13 years. And, while he is not enshrined in Cooperstown, the 1949 tour is a major reason that Lefty O’Doul is in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame.
Immediately after the end of the war, Douglas MacArthur was tasked with maintaining order in an occupied Japan, while at the same time maintaining the morale of its citizens. Communists were gaining a foothold, taking advantage of everyday Japanese life that was harsh, plagued with shortages of food, housing, and other basic necessities. Ruins and rubble pockmarked the country’s major cities, and families were disrupted by severe illness and death. Orphans hustled on the streets to survive, bullied, abused, and used; most of them homeless because existing orphanages could accommodate—at best—one-tenth of the need. Those who did make it into orphanages were sometimes stripped of their clothing in winter to prevent their escape.
MacArthur saw sports as a means to boost the spirit of the Japanese, and assigned General William Marquat and his aide-de-camp, a California-born Japanese American named Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada, to rebuild athletic facilities around the country. University and professional baseball soon flourished, and in 1948 the amateur game was boosted through an affiliation with the National Baseball Congress, which served as an umbrella organization for semi-pro baseball in the United States and was expanding its reach to other countries. Within two years a Japanese team, All-Kanebo, was hosting a team from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a well-received “Inter-Hemisphere Series,” won by Fort Wayne in five games.
While local baseball remained extremely popular, it was not enough to arrest the decline in morale, leading MacArthur to grill his aides about the deteriorating situation. The story goes that Cappy Harada proposed an American baseball tour, recalling the one that had brought Babe Ruth to Japan 15 years earlier. He further suggested minor-league manager and two-time National League batting champion Lefty O’Doul, widely considered the most popular living American player by the Japanese, as the man to lead such a mission.
MacArthur reportedly replied, “What are you waiting for?”
O’Doul had spent three years pushing for just such a tour and was indeed interested. In March 1949 General Marquat announced that he was deciding between two proposals, one involving O’Doul and his PCL San Francisco Seals, and the other Bob Feller and his All-Stars.
O’Doul enthusiastically made his pitch, declaring, “I think we can contribute something to postwar Japan.” While his plan involved minor-league players versus Feller’s big leaguers, the veteran manager held an advantage due to his popularity and willingness to play for expenses only. He lobbied Marquat to choose his proposition over Feller’s, arguing, “A well-trained team which has been playing together all season doubtless could demonstrate much more than a group of all-stars who had been on different teams all season.”
Marquat agreed, and in July 1949, Seals general manager Charlie Graham Jr. arrived in Japan to finalize what was hoped to be a 22-game tour beginning in mid-October.
Graham was quoted as saying that General MacArthur told him, “The arrival of the Seals in Japan would be one of the biggest things that has happened to the country since the war.” Graham said that the General added, “It takes athletic competition to put away the hatred of war and it would be a great event for Japan politically, economically, and every other way.”
Lefty O’Doul had visited Japan more than a half-dozen times by 1949, highlighted by trips while still an active player in 1931 and 1934, the latter of which led to an opportunity for him to play a role in establishing the first successful Japanese professional team, the Tokyo Giants. He had even helped that team stage two tours of the United States, in 1935 and 1936.
Now, 15 seasons into managing the San Francisco Seals, O’Doul was on a plane in October 1949 bound for Japan. There was some disappointment that for financial reasons the schedule had been pared to 10 games, but O’Doul couldn’t help experiencing an emotional mix of excitement and anxiety, reflecting the gravity of the moment.
Even so, he and his players were unprepared for the reception that awaited. The motorcade, led from Shimbashi Station by the Metropolitan Police band, was greeted by, according to some accounts, nearly one million people lining a route that stretched five miles. By all accounts, it was the largest gathering in Japan since the end of the war.
The players were astounded by the reception. “It got the boys off on the right foot,” crowed an enthusiastic Seals owner Paul Fagan. Charlie Graham Jr. sputtered, “I couldn’t believe it. Never have we seen such a demonstration anywhere.” Infielder Dario Lodigiani exclaimed, “You would have thought we were kings.”
As the 22-vehicle caravan wound through the streets of downtown Tokyo, the players were nearly obscured by a five-color flurry of confetti flung from office windows while they attempted to navigate a sea of humanity pinching the thoroughfare, fans close enough for the players to shake hands, and even sign a few autograph books. O’Doul shouted above the din, “This is the greatest ever!”
It was at this point O’Doul realized that when he greeted those along the route with a triumphant “banzai,” it was not returned.
“I noticed how sad the Japanese people were,” recalled O’Doul during an interview nearly 20 years later. “When we were there in ’31 and ’34, people were waving Japanese and American flags and shouting ‘banzai, banzai.’ This time, no banzais. I was yelling ‘Banzai’, but the Japanese just looked at me.”
O’Doul asked Cappy Harada, “How come they don’t yell banzai?” Harada replied, “That’s the reason you’re here, Lefty. To build up the morale so that they will yell ‘banzai’ again.”
The players spent their second day in Japan as a guest of Douglas MacArthur, highlighted by a luncheon served at the general’s home. MacArthur made a few remarks acknowledging the undertaking, and reminded the athletes of the importance he placed on the tour. He then turned to O’Doul and, noting his dozen-year absence from the country and the esteem in which he was held by Japanese baseball fans, told the Seals manager, “You’ve finally come home.” In public, players were treated as celebrities, provided special badges with their names printed in both English and Japanese so they would be recognized wherever they went. According to Seals outfielder Reno Cheso, every team member was assigned a car and driver, standing at the ready 24 hours a day.
The Americans were quickly exposed to the Japanese mania for baseball. There were more than two dozen magazines devoted to the sport in Tokyo alone, and the game was played everywhere, all the time. “It was nothing to see Japanese kids playing ball on the streets and in vacant lots as early as six o’clock in the morning,” noted Dario Lodigiani—without revealing whether he was witnessing this as he was rising for the day, or as he was crawling back to his hotel following a raucous night.
And then there were the autograph seekers—none of the Seals had ever seen anything like it, O’Doul included. Bellboys served as lookouts, and when the players returned to their hotel they confronted a gauntlet of fans in the lobby, each with baseballs and autograph books at the ready.
“I remember the hordes of people who used to line up seeking Babe Ruth’s autograph when the Babe was at the height of his career,” said O’Doul. “But that was a bit more than a puddle of beseeching humanity compared to the ocean we encountered on every street comer, store, and hotel lobby in Kobe and Tokyo.”
Many were repeat customers, looping back multiple times to obtain a signature on a ball or a program. Seals owner Paul Fagan was approached by one such man for three straight mornings. When he appeared for a fourth day in a row, Fagan asked him why he wanted another autograph from him. The man cheerfully replied, “All I need is four of your signatures and I can swap them for one of O’Doul’s!”
The evening after lunch with MacArthur, O’Doul quashed a potential rumble at the Tokyo Sports Center, during a rally held in the team’s honor. People had lined up for nine hours in anticipation of gaining admittance; while 15,000 successfully obtained a coveted seat, 2,000 more remained outside, frustrated when the doors were locked.
Made aware of the situation, which threatened to turn ugly, O’Doul rushed outside and apologized for not being able to admit the unlucky fans. He then told them, “I think speaking to you personally will no doubt serve to promote goodwill and friendship.” The crowd peacefully dispersed.
The day before the first game, following a two- hour workout that included his taking a few swings, O’Doul made it clear that the Seals would respect their opponents. “In order to show our gratitude,” he said, “we intend to fight to the best of our ability and win the first goodwill game with the Giants with our best members.”
The manager of the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, Osamu Mihara—who had broken O’Doul’s ribs in a collision at first base during the 1931 tour—also vowed to use his best lineup, with one exception; his starting pitcher would be Tokuji Kawasaki, arguably the team’s third- best hurler. Mihara gambled that Kawasaki’s unusual breaking pitches would surprise the Americans. Since this would be the only meeting between the Seals and the team O’Doul had helped launch, Mihara’s choice disappointed many Japanese commentators, who had wanted to measure how their best professional team matched up against O’Doul’s squad.
Fifty-five thousand fans jammed Korakuen Stadium for the tour’s first contest—the largest crowd ever to attend a game there. The stands were packed three hours before the first pitch despite a steady drizzle that had threatened cancellation.
O’Doul addressed the fans before the game began, and the crowd roared its approval when he began his speech with a single word—a word he knew they would appreciate. The word was, “Tadaima,” translated in English as “I am home.”
He presented a dozen American bats to each manager of the Japanese professional teams, and received thanks from the Japanese chairman of the event, Frank Matsumoto. Cappy Harada then introduced the Seals players to the crowd, and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur threw the ceremonial first ball to Seals pitcher Con Dempsey.
Controversy would not absent itself from this event. The Japanese were surprised—and thrilled—when the national anthems of both nations were played and their flags flew together, the first such instance since the war. In contrast to the deep emotional response of the crowd, some in the American military contingent were angered by the display.
Cappy Harada then ignited a firestorm by saluting both flags, a gesture that did not go unnoticed by the crowd. That salute, coming from a Japanese American no less, further infuriated some of Harada’s fellow American officers, who wanted him punished immediately. Complaints reached General MacArthur, who quashed the objections by revealing that he not only approved, but had asked Harada to do it, and Harada continued to do so for the remainder of the tour. O’Doul was pleased by the raising of the flags, and reflected on the emotion of that day. “I looked at the Japanese players and fans,” he remembered nearly two decades later. “Tears. [Their eyes] were wet with tears. Later, somebody told me my eyes weren’t too dry either.”
The Seals easily won the opener, 13-4, even though San Francisco starter Con Dempsey was less than sharp, having been idle for three weeks. The 52-year- old O’Doul, energized by his return to Japan, grabbed a bat in the eighth and grounded out as a pinch-hitter. Pittsburgh Pirates left-hander Bill Werle, a former Seal added to the roster because several of the current Seals could not make the trip, relieved Dempsey and hit two batters in the fifth, but settled down and struck out the side the next inning. Werle closed the game with a one- two-three ninth, a pair of strikeouts and a slow roller to the mound. Werle’s opposite, Kawasaki—chosen because Osamu Mihara thought he would prove more effective against the Seals lineup—failed to make it out of the first inning. Afterward, Kawasaki blamed his underwhelming performance on the American horsehide baseballs that were used, complaining that they were more slippery than the cowhide baseball normally employed by the Japanese.
Continue to read the full article on the SABR website
by Keith Spalding Robbins
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Keith Spalding Robbins examines a little-known amateur tour from 1935.
“Last year in the Guide it was the pleasure of the editor to call attention to the fact that the Japanese had so thoroughly grasped Base Ball that they were bent on some day playing an American team for the international championship.” So proclaimed John Foster in the 1913 Spalding’s Guide. That anticipated “some day” finally arrived in November of 1935; that “American team” was the Wheaties All-Americans. The nascent beginnings of the hoped-for “international championship” series participants were the Wheaties All-Americans and Tokyo’s best amateurteams.
The 1935 Wheaties All-Americans were not just a team, but part of a multi-year effort to create a global sports organization. The team was the brainchild of Leslie “Les” Mann, a former major-league player who became a college coach and leading organizer and promoter of amateur baseball. Mann wanted to make baseball an Olympic sport and to create organized international competition. But first the European- based Olympic Committee had to be convinced that the American national pastime would be appropriate for their global games.
Given the complex requirements established by the International Olympic Committee, it took Mann five years to create the new necessary domestic and international amateur baseball organizations to push his plan forward. By 1935 he had the pieces in place to stage an amateur baseball exhibition in Tokyo “to encourage Japan to form an amateur organization … for participation in [an] Olympic Baseball championship,” and to show Olympic officials that baseball was a viable and legitimate international sport. The 1935 Wheaties All-Americans were trailblazers on a global goodwill baseball mission—to bring baseball to the Olympic Games.
THE GREAT FINANCIAL CHALLENGE
Initially, Mann had promises of financial support from the major leagues, and the A.G. Spalding & Bros, firm. As the Great Depression wore on and corporate profits declined, that support waned. Needing more financial resources for the expensive transpacific journey, Mann went looking outside the traditional sports funding sources, and found General Mills. Thus, the team was dramatically introduced to the American public by Wheaties Cereal on the Jack Armstrong, All American Boy radio show. This amateur ballclub was known as the 1935 Wheaties All-Americans.
UNEASE WITH COMMERCIAL SPONSORSHIP NAME
The Minneapolis cereal producer subsidized the trip for $12,000, and the “Wheaties” name was prominently displayed on the left sleeve of the players’ uniform. Yet the name “Wheaties” is not listed in many sources describing the team. The Japanese Olympic committee objected to the name as a symbol of the commercial corruption of amateur sport.The Japan Advertiser and the Japan Times & Mail, for example, did not use the Wheaties name when referring to the team, yet the Honolulu Advertiser called it by its Wheaties moniker.
SELECTING THE TEAM
With his trademark bravado, Les Mann announced that the final player selections were taken from a baseball talent pool of 500,000 to 1 million American youths. To narrow the pool, Mann and General Mills created a contest. Consumers could nominate an amateur player by writing his name on a Wheaties box top and mailing it to Mann. Players with the most box-top votes would be given a tryout. Some 1,000 players were nominated out of the countless thousands of Wheaties breakfast cereal box tops submitted. This list was narrowed down to a final 100, who were then reviewed by trusted scouts and a selection committee. Other players were added to the list through recommendations of top collegiate and amateur coaches. Forty players were then selected to the first and second teams and announced in newspapers in the fall of 1935. The final candidates for the Japan trip were announced nationally in late September. This was the first nationally selected amateur baseball All-American team.
THE 1935 WHEATIES ALL-AMERICANS
The final team included 16 ballplayers: pitchers George Adams (Colorado State University), Lou Briganti (Textile High School, Manhattan), George Simons (University of Pennsylvania), Hayes Pierce (Tennessee Industrial School, Nashville), and Fred Heringer (Stanford University); catchers Ty Wagner (Duke University) and Dirk Offringa (Ridgefield High School, Wyckoff, New Jersey); infielders Bob Chiado (Illinois Wesleyan College), Leslie McNeece (Fort Lauderdale High School), Alex Metti (Fisher Foods, Cleveland), Frank Scalzi (University of Alabama), Ted Wiklund (Kansas City), and Ralph Goldsmith (Illinois Wesleyan); outfielders Jeff Heath (Garfield High School, Seattle), Ron Hibbard (Western Michigan Teachers College), and Emmett “Tex” Fore (University of Texas). The manager was Max Carey and the coaches Les Mann and Herb Hunter.
The players were selected not only for their ability but also for their character to act as ambassadors during a nearly three-month-long trip to a foreign land. The team also reflected Mann’s habits of clean living and notable positive behaviors. Carey, an old-school veteran player, gruffly lamented, “Only two of them smoke, and none of ’em drink. What kind of a ball team is this?”
Briganti, McNeece, and Offringa were teenagers, and all but McNeece had graduated from high school. Metti, Pierce, Simons, and Wiklund were well-established amateur or semipro ballplayers. Wiklund’s semipro career was unique; he attended Missouri Teachers College at Warrensburg and was the starting guard for their basketball team, but the college had no baseball team. His baseball fame was generated at the local sandlot Ban Johnson Amateur League of Kansas City, where he was the league MVP. Heringer and Wagner had graduated from college that spring and kept their amateur status active. Scalzi returned to Tuscaloosa to finish his college career as a three-year starter and Alabama’s team captain, and led the club to three consecutive SEC baseball titles. Scalzi’s immortality in Alabama sports history was cemented: He was football Coach Bear Bryant’s college roommate. Wagner was the captain of coach Colby Jack Coombs’ winning Duke baseball team. Adams, Chiado, Goldsmith, Fore, and Hibbard were underclassmen ballplayers. Hibbard also had played for the Battle Creek (Michigan) Postum team against the 1935 barnstorming Dai Nippon Baseball Club. Like Babe Ruth, he too was struck out by the Japanese great Eiji Sawamura. Hibbard was the only player who had faced Japanese opposition before the trip.
The All-Americans boarded the NYK line’s passenger ship Taiyo Maru on October 17 in San Francisco, with a scheduled arrival at Yokohama on November 3. The joyous troupe posed for syndicated newspaper photos in their grand quasi-Olympic apparel. The ballplayers wore white buck shoes, white dress pants, white shirts, red neckties, red sweater-vests, and resplendent and elegant dark blue baseball sweaters. The embossed logo was Art Deco-inspired, with giant USA letters and an eagle emblem atop a red and white shield. Adding to the ensemble, all the players wore the now-traditional USA signature Olympic beret. Honoring their bat sponsor, many were holding their Louisville Sluggers high.
JAPANESE TOURISTS
Once in Japan, the ballplayers were given the special tourist treatment and were well feted. Staying at the historic Imperial Hotel, they attended private receptions at the Pan-Pacific Club, the US Embassy, and the Japanese government’s Education Department. Iesato Tokugawa, a member of the Japanese royal family and chairman of the 1940 Japanese Olympic Committee, sponsored a banquet for the American baseball tourists. Bob Chiado and his Illinois collegiate teammate, Ralph Goldsmith, were overwhelmed by the authentic Japanese cuisine experience. Writing back to his hometown newspaper, Chiado remarked:
They say that [the sukiyaki’s] aroma is a great appetizer for it is said to be a mixture of all those best kitchen smells which excite the salivary glands and thus make the mouth water but neither Ralph nor I could eat it. … [A]bout all we could do was to eat the rice, and the dessert, which was persimmons. … The main feature of the suki yaki dinner is a large fish, done up artistically. At this time, we were using chop sticks and sitting on the floor. After this came some raw fish, and some more fish, and “Goldie” and I were happy when the party was over.
In typical first-time tourist behavior, the more sushi the mid-westerners saw and were offered, the more they became homesick. The lumbering first baseman and football player lamented, “I will still stick to those big T-bone steaks.”
Chiado overcame his fear of raw fish to enjoy and admire Japanese architecture, the scenic mountainous landscape, and the island nation’s unique cultural and historic sites. The team traveled north to the Kinugawa Onsen and spent the night in Nikko. “We lived native for the night here, all sleeping on the floor, in keeping with an old Japanese custom” on traditional tatami mats, Chiado noted with a tourist’s pride of accomplishment. The team visited the famous Dawn Gate, the Sacred Stable, and the famous vermillion-lacquered bridge at the Futarasan-jinja shrine. Then the team hiked through the snow to the mountain peaks. Overwhelmed with the scenic views of the numerous majestic waterfalls, Chiado wrote back home glowingly, “The Nikko Shrine is probably the most beautiful sight in Japan, if not the world.”
Some of the baseball tourists carried with them letters of introduction to selected Japanese officials and industry leaders. New Jersey’s Dirk Offringa carried a letter of introduction from the governor of New Jersey to certain dignitaries in Tokyo. The letter allowed Offringa to create a collection of souvenirs that made him a popular presenter when he returned to New Jersey.
Back in Tokyo, the intrepid Midwestern tourist/ reporter Chiado found city life modern and familiar. Chiado noted the abundance of both taxicabs and bicycles, including specialized department-store delivery bicycles darting throughout the Japanese metropolis. He noted how expensive individual automobile ownership was due to high gas prices and taxes and that Tokyo streets were overflowing with thousands of taxis. Chiado reported on up-to-date Tokyo, which had “all the modern devices and equipment of any of our leading cities and compares favorably with Chicago.”
Being college athletes, they were keenly observant of their opponents. The Japanese college experience was six years, not the United States’ traditional four years. Unlike the small-town, coed Illinois Wesleyan where he played, Chiado noted that all the opponents came from male-only urban universities with student bodies of 10,000-plus. Being a starter on the baseball team as an underclassman, Chiado was taken aback by the Japanese seniority system. He remarked, “[E]ven if a freshman was a stronger player in Japan, than a four-year man, he would not play because of seniority.” Chiado noted with some envy that Japanese baseball players received preferential and exceptional collegiate athletic treatment, “The college teams all have special houses to live in and are not scattered about campus … as are our boys.”
Witnessing how the game was played in Japan with an air of respectful honor, Chiado wrote, “They are a jump ahead of us certainly as to sportsmanship.” Ever respectful of the experience, Chiado concluded that the Japanese baseball tourist experience was both “a marvelous trip” and educational, commenting, “We have learned a great deal.”
HIGHLY SKILLED EXHIBITIONS
By 1935, Tokyo’s Big Six Collegiate Baseball League teams had played many American college teams and beaten them handily. In March of 1935, the Harvard nine’s lack of performance was described as “[t]he least said … the better. … [T]hey underestimated the strength of the Japanese collegians.” In August, Yale’s varsity nine faced the same fate. The Elis’ baseball coach, former big-leaguer Smoky Joe Wood, remarked pensively, “I know exactly what the Japanese college teams can do. … [T]hey are mighty tough. … [I]f we are lucky enough to win half our games, I shall consider the trip a success.” Yale was not lucky, going 4-6-1.
Beating the Big Six teams and capturing the favor of a smart, rabid Japanese baseball fan would be challenging, a Ruthian task. Chiado remarked that manager Mann and coaches Carey and Hunter stressed the serious nature of the trip and noted that the 1935 Wheaties All-Americans “were not out for ajoyride.” Much was at stake, as the Wheaties All-Americans vs. Japanese Big Six Series would determine the unofficial amateur champion of the baseball world. Moreover, a successful tour would help persuade the Japanese authorities tojoin the 1936 Olympic baseball exhibition game in Berlin and to establish future tournaments, fulfilling Les Mann’s Olympic baseball ambitions.
DIFFERENT BASEBALL APPROACHES
The series presented a test of different baseball philosophies. Japanese teams were noted for playing a “small ball” offensive game, while the American approach focused more on power hitting. Japanese batters were noted for their keen understanding of the strike zone, being aware of game situations, employing bunts, and hitting behind the runners as needed. Hayes Pierce noted that his fellow pitchers were pressured when runners got on, since “the first thing they think of when they get on base is to steal.” But Max Carey, had who led the National League in stolen bases in 10 seasons, was not impressed, stating in US papers that the Japanese players were not as fast as perceived.
BASEBALL AS METAPHOR
Japanese national pride in achieving parity with the United States on both the baseball diamond and high seas was a driving force in 1935. In his articles, Chiado observed, “When a Japanese boy plays against an American, he has his country at heart, and wins for his country.” In November, as the Wheaties All- Americans played the Big Six colleges on the Meiji Jingu diamond, British, American, and Japanese diplomats were preparing their governments’ positions on naval strength for the 1935 London Naval Conference. The British and American position called for a weaker Japanese naval ship ratio of 10:10:7, while the Japanese position sought parity and no quotas. Chiado concluded: “Every time a Japanese nine beats an American team, the natives feel that it is just like winning a war.”
THE BALLGAMES
The All-Americans had five days to regain their legs from three weeks at sea, practice, and do some sightseeing before their first game. They wound up playing just eight games, after some scheduled games were rained out. All the games were played during the day, which allowed time for banquets and sightseeing and helped avoid the November cold.
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by Robert K. Fitts
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Rob Fitts writes about Babe Ruth and the ALL Americans’ 1934 visit to Japan.
Katsusuke Nagasaki’s breath billowed as he loitered outside the Yomiuri newspaper’s Tokyo offices. The morning of February 22, 1935 was chilly. But that was good; nobody would look twice at his bulky overcoat. Matsutaro Shoriki, the owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun, was late. Nagasaki strolled up and down the block, trying to remain inconspicuous.
Finally, at 8:40 A.M. a black sedan cruised down the street. Nagasaki halted in front of a bulletin board by the building’s entrance. He studied the announcements as a short, balding man with thick-framed glasses emerged from the car. As Shoriki began to climb the stairs into the building, Nagasaki strode forward, pulling a short samurai sword from beneath his coat. The blade flashed through the air, striking Shoriki’s head. The bloodied newspaper owner stumbled forward, as Nagasaki fled.
Later that day, Nagasaki walked into a local police station and gave a detailed confession. The primary reason for the assassination attempt: Shoriki had defiled the memory of the Meiji Emperor by allowing Babe Ruth and his team of American all-stars to play in the stadium named in honor of the ruler.
Three months earlier, nearly a half-million Japanese had lined the streets of Tokyo to welcome the ballplayers to Japan. The players’ motorcade was led by Ruth in an open limousine. At 39, he had grown rotund, and just weeks before had agreed to part ways with the New York Yankees. But to the Japanese, he still represented the pinnacle of the baseball world. Sharing the car was his former teammate Lou Gehrig. The rest of the All-American baseball team, distributed three or four per car, followed: manager Connie Mack, Jimmie Foxx, Earl Averill, Charlie Gehringer, Lefty Gomez, Lefty O’Doul, and a gaggle of lesser-known stars.
Only one player didn’t seem to belong—a journeyman catcher with a .238 career batting average named Moe Berg. Although he was not an All-Star caliber player, his off-the-field skills would explain his inclusion on the team. Berg was a Princeton University and Columbia Law School graduate who had already visited Japan in 1932. He was multilingual, causing a teammate to joke that Berg could speak a dozen languages but couldn’t hit in any of them. Berg would eventually become an operative for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and many believe that the 1934 trip to Japan was his first mission as a spy.
The pressing crowd reduced the broad streets to narrow paths just wide enough for the limousines to pass. Confetti and streamers fluttered down from multistoried office buildings, as thousands waved Japanese and American flags and cheered wildly. “Banzai! Banzai, Babe Ruth!” echoed through the neighborhood. Reveling in the attention, the Bambino plucked flags from the crowd and stood in the back of the car waving a Japanese flag in his left hand and an American in his right. Finally, the crowd couldn’t contain itself and rushed into the street to be closer to the Babe. Traffic stood still for hours as Ruth shook hands with the multitude.
Ruth and his teammates stayed in Japan for a month, playing 18 games in 12 cities. But there was more at stake than sport: Japan and the United States were slipping toward war as the two nations vied for control over China and naval supremacy in the Pacific. Politically Japan was in turmoil. From the 1880s through 1920s, Japan had enjoyed a form of democracy. This period saw great strides in modernization, a flourishing of the arts, and close ties to the United States. Yet, as Japan’s power grew, so did its nationalism. A growing minority of Japanese citizens felt that the country should take its place among the world powers by expanding its military and colonizing its neighbors. Ultranationalist societies began assassinating liberal politicians and members of the free press. By the early 1930s, the civilian government could no longer control elements of the military. In 1931 nationalistic officers engineered the invasion of Manchuria and twice plotted to overthrow the government. War between the United States and Japan seemed inevitable.
Politicians on both sides of the Pacific hoped that the goodwill generated by the tour and the two nations’ shared love of baseball could help heal their growing political differences. Many observers, therefore, considered the all-stars’ joyous reception significant. An article in the New York Times, for example, said, “The Babe’s big bulk today blotted out such unimportant things as international squabbles over oil and navies.” Connie Mack added that the tour was “one of the greatest peace measures in the history of nations.”
Yet, not all Japanese wished the nations reunited. At the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, just two miles northwest of the parade, a group known as the Young Officers was planning a bloody coup d’etat, an upheaval that would jeopardize the tour’s success and put the players’ lives at risk. In another section of Tokyo, Nagasaki and his ultranationalist War Gods Society met at their dojo. Their actions would tarnish the tour with bloodshed.
The 1934 tour began not as a diplomatic mission but as a publicity stunt to attract readers to the Yomiuri Shimbun. Matsutaro Shoriki had purchased the financially troubled newspaper in 1924 and quickly turned it into Tokyo’s third-largest daily by increasing its entertainment sections.
In 1931 Shoriki decided to bolster sports coverage by sponsoring a team of American all-stars to play in Japan. The team, which included Lou Gehrig, Lefty Grove, and five other future Hall of Famers, won each of the 17 games against Japanese university and amateur teams, and the newspaper’s circulation soared. But Shoriki wasn’t satisfied. The major-league team had lacked the greatest drawing card in baseball—Babe Ruth.
Shoriki immediately began organizing a second tour. Working closely with Sotaro Suzuki, a sportswriter who had lived in New York for nearly a decade, and National League batting champion Lefty O’Doul, Shoriki lined up the powerful 1934 squad. Most of the players’ wives accompanied their husbands on the trip, and the Ruths brought along their 18-year-old daughter, Julia. The tourists boarded the luxury liner Empress of Japan in Vancouver, British Columbia, on October 20 and, after a stop in Honolulu, arrived in Yokohama on November 2.
Although American teachers had introduced baseball in 1872, Japan didn’t have a professional league. To challenge the Americans, Shoriki brought together Japan’s best amateur players to form the All-Nippon team. The team included 11 future members of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and numerous colorful personalities.
Two players, in particular, stood out. The first was hard to miss: 18-year-old Victor Starffin was the blondhaired, blue-eyed, 6-foot-3 son of a Russian military officer who had served Czar Nicholas II. During the Russian Revolution, the Starffins escaped by traveling in a freight train packed with typhoid patients, and later by hiding from the Red Army in a truck carrying corpses. After years on the run, the family settled in Japan. Young Victor fell in love with baseball and soon became a regional star. He hoped to play college ball, but in 1933 his father was convicted of killing a young Russian woman who worked in his teashop. The Yomiuri newspaper promised to use its influence to help Victor’s father if the young man would forsake college and play for the All-Nippon team.
The All-Nippon squad also included a young American who hoped to become the first ethnic Japanese to make the major leagues. Jimmy Horio was born in Hawaii and left for California to follow his dreams at the age of 20. He played semipro for several years without breaking into Organized Baseball. Hearing that Shoriki was creating a team to challenge the visiting major leaguers, Horio traveled to Tokyo to try out. He hoped a stellar performance against the All-Americans would lead to a major-league contract. As a switch-hitter with power, Horio made the AllNippon team easily and hit cleanup, but would fail to impress the Americans.
Over the next four weeks, the All-Americans and All-Nippon traveled together throughout Japan, visiting the northern island of Hokkaido; the industrial cities of Yokohama, Nagoya, and Osaka; the ancient capital of Kyoto; Kokura on the southern island of Kyushu; and, of course, Tokyo.
The tour began with two games at Tokyo’s Meiji Jingu Stadium. Prior to the games, fans camped out overnight to secure the best general-admission seats. They followed the Babe’s every move. A reporter stated, “The fans went crazy each time Ruth did anything—smiled, sneezed, or dropped a ball.” One old man brought a pair of high-powered binoculars, amusing himself and neighboring fans by focusing on the Bambino’s famous broad nose, making his nostrils fill the lens. Another fan, who worked in a textile factory designing kimono and undergarment patterns, had a novel plan. He would sit as close as possible to the field and study the Bambino’s face. He would memorize every feature, every wrinkle. Then he would return to the factory and create a pattern of the Babe’s face for a new line of Babe Ruth underwear. He was certain he would become rich.
The Babe relished the attention and transformed into a comedian. During batting practice, he purposely missed some pitches—twisting himself around like a pretzel before falling over. Later, he began a game of shadow ball—hitting an imaginary grounder to Rabbit McNair at shortstop, who fielded it convincingly and started a double play, timed with perfect realism. The opening game itself was less interesting than Ruth’s antics. It pitted the All-Americans against the Tokyo Club, a team of recently graduated players from the Tokyo area, not the All-Nippon squad. It took just a few minutes for the fans, and players, to realize the difference in skill level between the two teams—the ball even sounded louder when coming off the American bats. The Americans seemed to score at will, pilling up 17 runs to Tokyo’s 1. To the crowd’s disappointment, none of the Americans hit a home run. Afterward, the Babe apologized for not going deep, telling reporters, “I was a little tired today, but tomorrow I will do my best to hit a home run.”
The next day, November 4, the All-Americans played their first game against All-Nippon. It was the first time in history that true all-star teams representing the two countries clashed. Prior to the 1930s, visiting American professional teams were a mishmash of stars,journeymen, and minor-league players, and while the 1931 American club was a legitimate all-star team, it played only Japanese collegiate and company squads. The All-Nippon lineup featured six future Hall of Famers—Naotaka Makino, Hisanori Karita, Osamu Mihara, Minoru Yamashita, Jiro Kuji, and pitcher Masao Date. Although Date pitched “courageously,” and limited the All-Americans to five runs, the game’s outcome seemed inevitable. Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, and Earl Averill homered, with Averill going out twice. On the other side of the scorecard, American pitcher Joe Cascarella dominated the Japanese, giving up just three hits and walking only two.
Next, the All-Americans traveled north. As they boarded a ferry to cross the straits to reach Hokkaido, officials handed each traveler a small map with three coastal areas circled in red. Large cursive writing proclaimed, “Photographing, sketching, surveying, recording, flying over the fortified zone, without the authorization of the commanding officer of this fortress are strictly prohibited by order.” The handout was not an empty threat. Japan was paranoid about espionage, and officials even inspected Ruth during the trip to make sure that he wasn’t taking photographs. But neither the proscription nor the officials stopped Moe Berg. Defying the warning, Berg whipped out his camera and filmed the area.
The teams played two games in the northern provinces, enduring bone-chilling winds and frosted fields. Once again, the Americans won comfortably. On November 8 in Hakodate, the All-Americans took control of the game minutes after the first pitch as Averill hit a two-out, first-inning grand slam. Meanwhile, Lefty Gomez dazzled the fans and opponents with both his speed and control. Up 5-1, manager Ruth brought in third baseman Jimmie Foxx to close out the game. The burly third baseman preserved the victory by allowing just one run in the final three innings. The following day in Sendai, Ruth went deep twice and Gehrig, Foxx, and Bing Miller each hit one out in a 7-0 American victory.
As the teams returned to Tokyo, two dozen army officers met at an isolated restaurant. Their purpose—to overthrow the Japanese government.
The Great Depression had hit rural Japan particularly hard, leading to widespread starvation. At the same time, large trading companies, known as zaibatsu, flourished due to the unstable markets and rampant inflation. The conspirators, led by Captain Koji Muranaka, belonged to the loosely organized Young Officers movement. The Young Officers felt that Japan’s government had betrayed its citizens by putting the interests of big business before the welfare of the populace. The group advocated the violent overthrow of civilian rule, the declaration of martial law, and the Emperor taking direct control of the government. The divine Emperor, they believed, would end rural poverty by redistributing wealth and would lead Japan to world prominence by conquering Asia.
On November 27 Japan’s parliament would meet in a special session. Once the politicians gathered, the Young Officers and their troops planned to attack the Diet Building, slaughter the civilian government, and seize power. Other sympathetic troops would battle loyalist regiments in the streets of Tokyo. No mention was made of Babe Ruth and the ballplayers, but as the Imperial Hotel faced the Emperor’s palace and was just a few blocks from the Diet Building, Muranaka’s plan put the Americans in the line of fire.
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by Dennis Snelling
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Dennis Snelling tells us about the 1931 Major League tour of Japan.
It was a tour initially framed by the dreams of retired fringe major-league outfielder Herb Hunter, the continuing quest of a Japanese newspaper publisher to bring Babe Ruth to Japan before he retired as a player, and the metastasizing of Japanese militarism.
The tour ended with the best baseball team to visit Japan up to that time—including seven future Hall of Famers—winning all 17 games they played in the country, Japan’s political landscape in violent disarray, Babe Ruth still not having visited the country, and the beginning of the end of Herb Hunter’s global baseball aspirations.
By 1931, Hunter was considered “Baseball’s Ambassador to Japan.” He had first crossed the Pacific Ocean 11 years earlier with a group of minor-league and marginal major-league players. During that trip, Hunter partnered with pitcher Charlie Robertson to earn money on the side, coaching the Waseda University baseball team.
Hunter developed an affinity for the country— and the potential it offered him to make his mark on the baseball world—returning in 1921 to coach the baseball teams of both Waseda and Keio universities, wearing a chrysanthemum in his lapel each day. The San Francisco Chronicle reacted to this news by derisively challenging its readers to visualize the ex-San Francisco Seals outfielder coaching baseball to anyone, since Hunter’s reputation was that of the proverbial million-dollar athlete with a ten-cent head. He was physically gifted, but legendary for his onfield blunders.
He once executed an outstanding running catch with the bases loaded and one out in the ninth, only to absent-mindedly exit for the clubhouse, oblivious to the fact that the ball was still in play. On another occasion, with two out and the bases loaded, he decided to showboat on an easy fly, making a one-handed swipe at the ball, which he dropped. Three runs scored.
It was said that Hunter had once nearly spiked himself dodging a line drive. “He played that ball like a camel,” the account went. “He was not hurt but he had a narrow escape. A lot of runs scored while Herbie was untangling himself.”
Even when Hunter’s efforts won a game, it sometimes resulted from a bonehead move. He stole home in a game against Portland on a 3-and-0 count and two runners on base. He was called safe, his run the eventual game-winner despite the fact that he never touched home plate, not to mention that during the play the shocked hitter had backed into the catcher, which should have been ruled interference. Al C. Joy of the hometown San Francisco Examiner wrote, “Just why he stole home at that particular moment nobody seems to know. And just why Umpire Casey did not call him out for several reasons nobody seems to know.”
Despite his shortcomings, Hunter’s connections to Japanese universities enabled him to organize a troupe of major leaguers to Japan in 1922, and make several subsequent visits, including in 1928, when he enlisted Ty Cobb, Bob Shawkey, and Fred Hofmann. Hunter was now ready to bring another team of major-league all-stars to the Orient in 1931.
But he was not to be wholly in charge of the effort. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, mindful of the international implications of such an event, and noting Hunter’s checkered success with past ventures—especially when it came to handling money—permitted the tour to proceed only under the supervision of veteran sportswriter Fred Lieb.
Hunter acquiesced—he had no choice—and once the tour was approved by major-league owners in mid-January, he prepared to finalize arrangements with Japan’s largest newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun.
Catching wind of Hunter’s intentions, Matsutaro Shoriki, publisher of the rival Yomiuri Shimbun, intercepted him, ultimately persuading the American to award his newspaper exclusive sponsorship of the tour’s Tokyo segment. When Mainichi Shimbun backed out of sponsoring games in other parts of the country, Shoriki stepped in despite the added, and significant, financial burden, gambling that the event would put his publication on the map.
Arrangements complete, Hunter returned to his home in Red Bank, New Jersey, where he managed a semipro team headquartered on his diamond, Hunter’s Field, while Fred Lieb pursued ballplayers for the trip.
A 14-man roster was ultimately secured, including four 1931 World Series participants: A1 Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove, and Frankie Frisch. To Shoriki’s disappointment there would be no Babe Ruth—who claimed barnstorming and movie commitments—but Ruth’s teammate and co-American League home run champion Lou Gehrig would be there. So would Willie Kamm, Rabbit Maranville, Muddy Ruel, George Kelly, Lefty O’Doul, Larry French, and Tom Oliver. Boston Braves pitcher Bruce Cunningham, a right-hander who had won only three of 15 decisions in 1931, and outfielder Ralph Shinners, who was just completing his career in the International League, rounded out the roster.
Fred Lieb had thought the All-Stars unbeatable— although they did not start out that way.
The team initially gathered in California in early October for a series of games in the Bay Area, and lost four of five against lineups composed almost entirely of Pacific Coast League players. The third game, against the San Francisco Seals, proved the most embarrassing. Lefty Grove, who arrived after the first two games along with the other World Series participants, took the mound and was battered for six runs in the first inning. The All-Stars began pointing fingers, with Grove loudly complaining about not having enough time to warm up. The left-hander settled down, shutting out San Francisco from the second inning through the fifth and striking out seven. But the All-Stars lost, 7-4, while collecting only four hits.
Stateside exhibitions complete, the All-Stars boarded the luxury liner Tatsuta Maru for Japan; ship captain Shunji Ito, a talented golfer, accommodated the Americans by converting his deck-side course into a batting cage. On the way, there was a quick stop in Honolulu to play another tune-up game against locals.
During the brief sojourn in Hawaii, the team slaughtered a group of local semipros, 10-0, before 12,000 fans—many of them arriving from other islands. The famously dour Grove displayed uncharacteristic enthusiasm afterward, declaring himself enamored with Hawaii and musing, “.. .wonder what my chances are of buying a small place here, I can use this old sunshine in January and February.”
While the All-Stars cavorted in paradise, events in Asia were unfolding at a dramatic and dangerous pace. A month before the players’ departure for Japan, a renegade faction of the military, seeking war with China, destroyed a section of the South Manchuria Railway and blamed it on the Chinese. This contrivance provided the pretext for Japan to invade Manchuria; the Japanese government was caught off-guard by its own armed forces, but did nothing of consequence to curtail the action, and was widely condemned in the court of world opinion. As a result, the country the American ballplayers entered was far more dangerous and unstable than they appreciated.
Thousands of enthusiastic Japanese baseball fans were on hand when the Tatsuta Maru docked following its two-week passage. After the mayors of Yokohama and Tokyo made brief presentations, the players boarded a special train bound for the capitol. There, the party was met by limousines waiting to convey them through the streets of downtown Tokyo.
Fred Lieb described the journey “a continual ovation.” Special flags combining the emblems of the American and Japanese national banners were provided to those lining the route. Fans jammed the streets, pressing in on the motorcade as shouts of “banzai” and “welcome” rained down from office windows. Some of the more enthusiastic jumped onto limousine running boards to shake the hand of Rabbit Maranville or Lefty Grove—repeatedly shouting “Thirty-One!” at the latter in recognition of his total wins for Philadelphia that year.
The Americans were flabbergasted. “I will remember this reception to my dying day,” remarked Lou Gehrig. “I do not know of anything in my entire career that has touched me as much as this welcome.” Frankie Frisch added, “It made me feel like a great military hero or a man who had flown across the Pacific.”
Other than George Kelly, who had been a member of Hunter’s 1922 All-Stars, none of the players had previously visited Japan. The world was more compartmentalized than today, and the visitors were surprised and astonished by the modernity of Tokyo, on course to becoming one of the world’s major cities. At the same time, there were obvious differences in food, language, and customs—it was both fascinating and disorienting.
Because Japan lacked professional baseball, the Americans would challenge college teams from the Tokyo Big Six University League—the highest level of baseball in the country—as well as all-star teams of alumni from those colleges and a few industry-sponsored squads.
Despite massive unemployment in Japan due to the collapse of the silk industry, 65,000 attended the opening contest; the ceremonial first pitch was thrown by Japanese Education Minister Tanaka, decked out in formal dress, including a top hat. The starting pitcher for Rikkyo University, Takeshi Tsuji, pitched well, allowing only four hits and four runs, all unearned, in six innings. Three of the unearned runs were due to missed fly balls by the Japanese right fielder, who did not wear sunglasses—according to Fred Lieb, it was considered cowardly to use them.
Al Simmons complimented Tsuji afterward for his deceptive sidearm delivery and impressive control, but the first game was an easy, 7-0, win for the All-Stars behind Bruce Cunningham, who allowed only two hits.
The second game nearly resulted in a shocking Japanese victory. Masao Date, pitching for Waseda University, impressed Lieb, who afterward said that the Americans felt he would be a major league prospect if he were in the States. Date calmly escaped a first-inning bases-loaded jam by fooling Frankie Frisch on a full-count curveball, taken for strike three.
The game was tied, 1-1, until the seventh, when Larry French surrendered a bases-loaded two-run double that gave Waseda a 3-1 lead. French, the possessor of an explosive temper, was removed from the game and furiously hurled his glove in disgust upon reaching the bench, cursing and screaming, “I’ve traveled nine thousand miles to be knocked out of the box by a bunch of Japanese college players!”
Things did not get better. With only three pitchers along for the tour, others were utilized as emergency hurlers, including Lou Gehrig, who relieved French and allowed two more runs to score on a wild pitch and an out, stretching Waseda’s lead to four runs.
Lieb, whom Landis had made responsible for the comportment of the players, watched in horror as French began hurling racial epithets from the bench. He attempted to shush the pitcher, pointing to Viscount Taketane Sohma, sitting at the end of the bench. Sohma, director of general offices at the Imperial Palace, had been educated in America and understood every word. To Lieb’s relief, he diplomatically chose not react to French’s tirade, which continued despite Lieb’s entreaties.
The Americans ultimately stormed back to win, 8-5, saving French the embarrassment of losing, as Masao Date tired while Lefty Grove, who replaced Gehrig, struck out six straight batters on 19 pitches to end the game. Lieb later revealed that the All-Stars were arguing among themselves on the bench until Date walked the bases loaded and Lefty O’Doul promptly cleared them with a double to key a seven-run eighth inning.
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This 1982 documentary on Gary Carter’s visit to Japan is dated and at times cringy by today’s standards but is nevertheless interesting and contains some great footage of Japanese baseball from the 1982 season.
by Tom Hawthorn
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Tom Hawthorn tells us about Ty Cobb’s visit to Japan.
On an off-day on the road in Cleveland, Tyrus Raymond Cobb, hailed for much of his career as the greatest player the game had ever known, announced his impending retirement. It was September 17, 1928. He had last been a starter in late July when he batted second for the Philadelphia Athletics before trotting out to right field. He went 2-for-5 that day with a single and a double, scoring what would be the winning run in a 5-1 game on a passed ball. Since then, he had been used sparingly as a pinch-hitter, going 1-for-9.
The Georgia Peach was in his 24th season, a 41-year-old man who was now caught stealing more often than not. He appeared in only 95 games for Connie Mack’s team. While his .323 batting average was far from disgraceful, it was still his poorest performance in two decades.
Many of his younger teammates spent the rare offday at the racetrack. Cobb invited reporters to gather in his room at the glamorous Hollenden Hotel, where he handed each of them a typewritten statement in which he announced his retirement even “while there still may remain some base hits in my bat.” The player spoke informally with the writers for hours, examining his career (he called Carl Weilman the toughest pitcher he faced) and expressing a desire to do nothing but enjoy his family’s company for a year. The only item on his agenda was some winter hunting near his home in Augusta, Georgia.
“I am just baseball tired and want to quit,” Cobb said. “I will be leaving baseball with a lot of regrets and still with a light heart. It’s hard to pull away from a game to which one has given a quarter-century of his best manhood and which paved the road to lift me to a place of prominence and affluence.”
He had been for a time the highest-paid player in the game, earning nearly a half-million dollars in salary over the seasons, while investments in a car company later absorbed by General Motors, as well as in Coca-Cola from his home state, ensured that he faced few future privations.
The news of his pending retirement was greeted by newspapers as the passing of an era.
“He is worth more than a million dollars,” noted the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, “and is not worrying about his future or the price of pork chops.”The newspaper predicted that he might become a minority owner of a franchise in the high minors.
Cobb recorded his 4,189th hit, a double, against the Washington Senators as a pinch-hitter on September 3. He played what would be his final game in the majors eight days later, popping out to Mark Koenig at shortstop to lead off the ninth in a 5-3 loss at Yankee Stadium. He would get his final two hits in an A’s uniform in Toronto in an exhibition game at Maple Leaf Stadium on September 14. Then it was on to Cleveland to sit on the bench.
For a player reputed to be ill-tempered, he was wistful about spending time with his family.
“Guess it’s time to get out of the game and play with my kids before they grow up and leave me,” he said in announcing his pending retirement. “And there’s that trip to Europe that I promised Mrs. Cobb this year.”
His wife, Charlotte Marion Lombard, known as Charlie, did not get to see Europe in 1928. Three weeks after the hotel room session to announce his retirement, Cobb was traveling through Virginia on his way home to Georgia when he told friends of plans to play baseball overseas. In Japan.
The news broke nationally on October 7 when the Associated Press carried on its wires a news item based on a Richmond Times-Dispatch story. The report said Cobb would spend seven weeks in Asia, accompanied by former pitcher Walter Johnson, the manager of the Newark Bears of the International League.
Three days later, George A. Putnam, secretary-owner of the San Francisco Seals and a friend of Cobb’s, offered further details. The player was going to give lectures on the game. He was also going to suit up and play with university teams. The tour was sponsored by the Osaka newspaper Mainichi Shimbun and four universities—Waseda, Meiji, Osaka, and Keio, whose own baseball team had toured the United States for six weeks earlier in the year.
The Pittsburgh Press had a scoop on the pending trip by several days. Sporting editor Ralph Davis, who was in New York to cover the first game of the World Series on October 4, slipped in a final paragraph at the end of his lengthy report on the Yankees’ 4-1 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. He noted that Cobb had popped into the press box at Yankee Stadium and mentioned that he was off to Japan later in the month with two players on a tour organized by Herb Hunter.
Hunter, whose own major-league career as a weak-hitting infielder-outfielder lasted 39 games with four different teams, first traveled to Japan with Doyle’s 1920 All-Americans and ended up coaching at several Japanese universities after the tour. In 1922, after what was his final season as a player, he led an all-star team of players, including Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock, Casey Stengel, and George “High Pockets” Kelly, on a successful tour of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Hunter would go on to become a baseball ambassador, making at least 10 goodwill trips to Japan between 1920 and 1937.
A month before Cobb made his announcement, Hunter got a cablegram from Japan inviting him to bring over another team of major leaguers. The assignment was going to be difficult, as active players were now banned from playing exhibition games after October 31. Hunter hoped whatever disappointment the hosts might feel would be assuaged by bringing the greatest all-around player the game had seen. According to Cobb biographer Charles C. Alexander, Hunter offered Cobb $15,000 for his services.
Also joining the tour were Bob Shawkey, a savvy right-hander who had gone 195-150 over 15 seasons as a starter in the majors, mostly with the Yankees. When they released him after the 1927 season, Shawkey held team records for wins, shutouts, strikeouts, and innings pitched. He was a pitching coach and starter with the Montreal Royals in 1928, going 9-9.
His catcher was former Yankees teammate Fred Hofmann, a 34-year-old journeyman who when once asked how he batted (right, left, or switch), responded, “Poor.” He was nicknamed “Bootnose” for an obvious facial feature. Hofmann hit .226 for the Boston Red Sox in 1928 in what proved to be his final major-league campaign, though he continued playing in the minors until age 43.
Joining the three players was Ernest Cosmos “Ernie” Quigley, a stocky umpire bom in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Quigley lettered at the University of Kansas as a football player and hurdler in track and field for the Jayhawks. A limited minor-league career gave way to coaching football and officiating in three sports. By the time he retired, he estimated he had worked 400 college football games, 1,400 college basketball games (as well as the 1936 US Olympic qualifying tournament), and more than 3,000 major-league games. He officiated three Rose Bowl games and six World Series, the most notable being the one remembered as the 1919 Black Sox series.
Tagging along were Seals owner Putnam and travel agent Frank Ploof of Tacoma, Washington, described as a sponsor of the trip. The latter, who stood nearly 6-feet tall though weighing just 150 pounds, posed for a photograph in a baseball uniform with the three players.
After traveling across the continent to Seattle, Cobb met with Japanese consul Suemasa Okamoto and his wife. He also led his tour mates, bolstered by local players, in defeating an amateur team from West Seattle by 12-5. Cobb went 4-for-6.
The baseball tourists boarded the steamship SS President Jefferson of the American-Oriental Mail Line in Seattle on October 20, the ship departing at 11 A.M. Cobb was accompanied by his wife and three youngest children, Herschel, Beverly, and James. Quigley and Hunter were also joined by their families. Although some newspapers were still reporting that Johnson was on the tour, the old pitcher had backed out after signing days earlier to manage the Washington Senators.
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by Bill Staples Jr.
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Bill Staples Jr discusses the Philadelphia Royal Giants 1927 visit to Japan.
Kazuo Sayama, baseball historian, author, and member of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame (enshrined in 2021), states with great passion and conviction that had it not been for the tours of the Negro Leagues’ all-star Philadelphia Royal Giants in 1927 and the early 1930s, a professional baseball league in Japan would not have started when it did, in 1936.
“There is no denying that the major leaguers’ visits were the far bigger incitement to the birth of our professional league. We yearned for better skill in the game,” said Sayama. “But if we had seen only the major leaguers, we might have been discouraged and disillusioned by our poor showing. What saved us was the tours of the Philadelphia Royal Giants, whose visits gave Japanese players confidence and hope.”
Sayama first learned about the Royal Giants as a member of the Society for American Baseball Research in the early 1980s. Like the fictional Ray Kinsella, who heard voices telling him to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield, Sayama was a man possessed during much of the early part of that decade, researching and documenting the history of the Royal Giants.
Also fueled by the desire to honor the Black US soldiers who coached him as a boy in Yokohama during the post-World War II occupation, Sayama hit the library stacks and microfiche in the archives and traveled the world interviewing anyone with a connection to the team.
In doing so he discovered that the Negro Leaguers had visited Japan just as many times as the famous All-American major leaguers during the 1920s and 1930s (three times each), yet historians on both sides of the Pacific had all but forgotten the Philadelphia Royal Giants.
“It is unfair that no words of gratitude have been spoken by the Japanese to this team,” lamented Sayama. He changed that by publishing his seminal work in Japan in 1985, Kuroki Yasashiki Jaiantsu, which details the events of their tours and the impact the team made while in Japan. Best of all, he captured firsthand accounts from many Japanese players who competed against the all-Black team, men who were so impressed and impacted by the touring players’ unique blend of baseball skill and human kindness that it inspired a term of endearment from Japanese players—with gratitude and fondness in their hearts, they referred to their guests as “Gentle Black Giants.”
The Philadelphia Royal Giants were indeed the first all-Black team to play in Japan, but their games did not mark the first time for Black and Japanese baseball teams to compete head-to-head on a diamond. The history of games between ballplayers of Japanese ancestry and Black teams dates to at least May 19, 1908, when the Issei (first-generation Japanese in America) Mikado’s Japanese Base Ball Team from Denver played the Lexington (Missouri) Tigers. But earlier undocumented games probably took place. After that contest, and long before the Royal Giants set sail for Japan in 1927, dozens of such games occurred. Of those matchups, the following are noteworthy for their ties to the Royal Giants:
Plans to take a Negro League team to Japan were proposed in the early 1920s but failed to materialize. On February 21, 1921, the Chicago Defenderwrote, “A syndicate of Japanese here representing authorities at Waseda, Tokio [sic], Yokohama and Kobe Universities in Japan, announced last week that they are eager to take an all-star baseball team made up of members of the Race to their fatherland next fall for a series of games. A large sum of money has been deposited in a local bank to defray all expenses, which guarantees the proposition is in good faith.”
The goals of the planned 1921 tour were ambitious. “The spokesman further stated that … the main idea is to put baseball on a firm foundation, and to have the interest manifested in the pastime [in Japan] as in this country [United States].” The stars never aligned for that Negro Leagues all-star tour of Japan to occur. That would take another five years.
As a follow-up to their thriller in 1925, Lon Goodwin and Zenimura scheduled a rematch for the L.A. White Sox and the Fresno Athletic Club (FAC), a doubleheader in Fresno over the Fourth of July weekend, 1926. Zenimura’s team, bolstered by a few non-Japanese players, called themselves the Fresno All-Stars. They defeated the L.A. White Sox in both games, 9-4 and 4-3.
Off the field, it was customary for Zeni to invite visiting teams to social outings the night before a game. Thus, the Fourth of July weekend created the opportunity for Zenimura and Goodwin to discuss the possibility of parallel tours of Japan in the future.
Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Zenimura had visited his motherland as a baseball ambassador a few times prior to 1926. In 1921-22 he traveled to Hiroshima, where he coached baseball at Koryo High School. In 1924 he returned with his FAC, completing a successful 46-day tour of Japan, playing 28 games and finishing with a 21-7 record.
By the summer of 1926, Zeni already had plans in place for another tour of Japan for the following spring. He had learned valuable lessons during the first tour and shared them with the Fresno press. “In Japan it doesn’t pay to win a game [by] a far margin. If we do then there won’t be any crowd coming to the next game … One day we played against the pro team of Osaka which is known as Diamonds and in our first game we defeated them by a score of 11-2. In this game quite a many fans [sic] came to see the outcome but on the following day with the same teams there was hardly any people in the stand[s]. For this reason, it is hard for the visiting team to play a game in Japan.”
Months later, Goodwin received a chance to put Zenimura’s advice into practice. On December 21, approximately five months after the series in Fresno, the Nippu Jiji reported that Goodwin’s L.A. White Sox—not the Philadelphia Royal Giants—had received an invitation to tour Japan from officials in Fukuoka City, one of the locations where the FAC competed during the 1924 tour.
To help plan his team’s tour, Goodwin turned to Joji “George” Irie, a Japanese native who was known in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo area as an active sports and entertainment manager. The Japanese Who’s Who in California described Irie as a man “with an impressive mien and stature of such dignity,” adding that professionally he was “agile and enthusiastic, quick to weigh the interests, and daring enough to take any means to achieve his ends; his inscrutable ability defies imagination for his swiftness and vehemence.”
Bom in 1885 in the Yamaguchi Prefecture of Japan, Irie arrived in the United States at age 20 and went east to study law at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to California in the early 1920s and worked as a translator in sectors that served the legal needs of the Japanese immigrant community. He eventually caught the attention of Yoshiaki Yasuda, president of the Japan-US Film Exchange Company, who hired him to be the organization’s secretary. In that role, he helped Yasuda oversee the world of entertainment in LA’s Little Tokyo, including sumo, kembu (Japanese sword-fight theater), baseball, and gambling. In 1935, several years after Irie’s involvement in the Royal Giants ended, Yasuda was assassinated by the yakuza (Japanese mob). According to Professor Kyoko Yoshida, this murder, coupled with the photos of the Royal Giants posing with sumo and other figures of Japan’s underworld, suggest that Irie’s work might have placed himself, Goodwin, and the Royal Giants, in close proximity to the Japanese mob during the 1927 tour.
Before the team departed for Japan, Irie sent officials there an advance roster of the players slated to join the tour. The names reflected on the list included all of the members of the Philadelphia Royal Giants entry in the 1926-1927 California Winter League: O’Neal Pullen, C; Frank Duncan, 1B-C; Newt Allen, 2B; Newt Joseph, 3B; Willie Wells, SS; James Raleigh “Biz” Mackey, SS, P, C; Carroll “Dink” Mothell, Utility; Norman “Turkey” Steames, OF; Herbert “Rap” Dixon, OF; Crush Holloway, OF; Andy Cooper, P; Bill Foster, P; George Harney, P; Wilbur “Bullet Joe” Rogan, P-OF.
Of those 14 players, Goodwin could persuade only five to take him up on his offer to tour Japan—Pullen, Duncan, Mackey, Dixon, and Cooper. Goodwin had fallen out of favor with organized Negro Leagues baseball in the East, and delivered a parting shot when the team sailed off for Japan. “The National Negro and the Eastern Leagues are cutting salaries to a place where a ballplayer is not fairly paid for services rendered,” Goodwin told the press.
To fill out the roster, Goodwin recruited players from his semipro team, the L.A. White Sox. Thus, when the ship pulled away from Los Angeles on March 9, 1927, the revamped Philadelphia Royal Giants roster comprised O’Neal Pullen, C; Frank Duncan, 1B-C; Robert Fagen, 2B; Jesse Walker, 3B; James Raleigh “Biz” Mackey, SS, P, C; John Riddle, 3B-SS; Julius “Junior” Green, OF; Herbert “Rap” Dixon, OF; Joe Cade, OF; Andy Cooper, P; Ajay Johnson, P; Eugene Tucker, P; Alexander “Slowtime” Evans, P; Lonnie Goodwin, manager; and George Irie, promoter/ interpreter.
As a result of the roster change, the team chemistry changed too. For the five members of the Philadelphia Royal Giants of the California Winter League, baseball was their full-time profession. For the others, it was a passion and an extracurricular activity outside of their day jobs. For example, Ajay Johnson was a police officer who would later become one of the first Black lieutenants in LAPD history. John Riddle attended the University of Southern California, where he also played football and earned a degree in architecture. Joe Cade was a US Navy Veteran and firefighter, who became a favorite in Hawaii to fans with military ties. The captain of the team was Mackey, whose ability to play multiple positions combined with his laid-back demeanor and patience in teaching others made him the perfect fit as a team leader on a goodwill tour.
After a rocky 5,497-mile, 20-day journey crossing the Pacific Ocean, the Royal Giants arrived in Yokohama on March 29. The team spent two days working out their sea legs and preparing to do battle against the best college, amateur, and industrial leagues teams Japan had to offer. Their first game, against the Mita Club, was scheduled for April l.
Coverage by Yakyukai (Baseball World) magazine revealed that the Japanese media misunderstood the ethnicity of their dark-skinned guests. “The ‚ÄòPhiladelphia Royal Giants’ sounds like a magnificent name. This team of American Indians became very famous. …”
Setting aside the mix-up on players’ racial backgrounds, Yakyukai detailed the events of the first game: “The stadium was jam-packed because people had heard that the black players had the reputation of being a powerful team. While the Mita Club were practicing on the field, the Royal Giants entered with big smiles and were welcomed by loud applause from the crowd. They wore off-white jerseys just like the Sundai uniform. The Royal Giants started to entertain the fans. They began light warm-ups and batting practice. They hit very well for sure. All their hits looked like line drives. They were well-built and physically much stronger than Mita’s batters. During fielding practice, the shortstop, Mackey, showed off his strong arm. The speed of the ball was like a bullet. The first baseman (Duncan) also performed well with his slick glove work. Both Mackey and the first baseman shined among the infielders. However, some flaws in their fielding skills were noticeable. If the Japanese team were to stand a chance, they needed to take advantage of the Giants’ weak points. … There were two umpires, Ikeda and Oki. The game started with the Mita going to bat first. The pitchers were Takeo Nagai and Cooper.”
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Author Robert Fitts will talk about his new book In the Japanese Ballpark: Behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball and highlight key differences between the American and Japanese games. A cocktail reception and book signing will follow.
Fitts is the author of 11 books on Japanese baseball and is the curatorial consultant to the Yakyu-Baseball exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Tickets are available through the Japan Society.
by Kat Williams
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Kat Williams discusses the Philadelphia Bobbies 1925 doomed visit to Japan.
“Crack! The ball hits the bat. Smack! That ball hits Edith Houghton’s waiting glove at short who quickly throws to first to get the batter and all in a twinkling of an eye. These women play the game in a manner that would no doubt delight the heart of many a manager who ever saw them play.”
Writing about a baseball game between the Passaic Girls and the Lansdale Chryslermen, this unnamed reporter was shocked to see women play baseball with talent and dedication. “It was surprising to watch the brand of ball that these girls can play,” he continued. “They take their baseball in a serious way and all the jeering of the “wise guys’ who stand on the sidelines and do the looking on cannot daunt them.” Even the crowd’s “jeers soon turn to cheers when they see the girls in real action.” The reporter’s shock at the women’s quality of play was not a new phenomenon. Rather, it echoed hundreds of other local news reports about female baseball players written in sports pages during the early 1920s. Why so shocked? Did they not read each other’s work?
Perhaps it was a lack of public interest in women’s baseball that kept reporters from recognizing a growing trend? But that wasn’t the case. Even reports of large crowds and fervent fans did not stick in the minds of sports reporters. Approximately 1,500 fans showed up to the Lansdale, Pennsylvania, game, roughly 20 percent of the town’s population. Meanwhile, in Maple Shade, New Jersey, the largest crowd of the season came to watch the “famous invading lassies,” the Philadelphia Bobbies, play the local baseball club. In that game, shortstop Edith Houghton had five hits, including two doubles and a home run. By this time, the late 1920s, Houghton had been widely written about. She was a standout on the Philadelphia Bobbies team that toured Japan in 1925 and was so well-known that fans in small towns clamored to see her play. There was public interest. Still, in story after story, sports reporters seemed shocked to see women playing baseball at a high level.
Were they skeptical of other reporters’ assessment of good baseball? Some of the language was kind of over the top. In a Philadelphia Inquirer article, “The Quaker City Maids of the Diamond,” Gordon Mackey hailed the play of Edith Houghton and Edith Ruth. “Both members liked to play baseball and they COULD play the game—make no mistake on that score.” In a baseball barnstorming tour their play was legendary but, “like Alexanders in skirts or Hannibals in bloomers, they longed for other worlds to conquer after they had cleaned up most of the alleged sterner sex in duels of the diamond in 1925.” Houghton “could play shortstop in a way that would make Joe Boley toss his glove in the air and yell, “bravo,’” and Ruth was “the holder of the initial sack and how she can go after those quick throws and hug that base is nobody’s business.” Team play was also lauded with the same exaggerated language. “What an infield. They work with the rhythm and snappiness that is characteristic of any big-league team.” That over-the-top language—Hannibals in Bloomers and shouts of bravo!—made the players appear aberrant. There is almost a freakshow quality to the enthusiastic description.
Reporters’ continued surprise at women’s good play was most certainly related to the more common descriptions of women’s baseball which emphasized the players’ femininity.” For decades reporters introduced female players as “neat,” “attractive in their uniforms,” and as “spectacles.” They simply skipped over a discussion of their play and instead focused on their appearance, their “dainty hands,” and how it must have been hard for them to hold the glove. They marveled at their “feminine strength” and how hard it must have been to play against “professional strength.” They were used to writing about women who were, in their eyes, not very talented and unwilling to get dirty or to take the game seriously. A report about the Hollywood Bloomer girl team began, “A bevy of beauties from Hollywood, California took time out from powdering their noses and gave a picked team of the Coca Cola Greys the battle of their lives. … The ladies put up a good game but couldn’t stand up under the strain.” Even when their play was good and the individual talent exceptional, reporters were still likely to describe games as “an unusual tussle,” played by nine “fair maidens.” Most women had been described in these terms for decades. Just because they donned a baseball uniform did not mean that would change.
To reporters and to many men who played, managed, or promoted baseball, there was a set of expectations, standards for play, and a distinct language used to discuss the game and its male players. There were no such expectations or standards for women. As a result, women’s play was judged against that of men, making it difficult for them to be seen as talented players. So they were not. Because it was unfathomable to even think of women in actual baseball terms—a slugger, a hurler, or aggressive on the basepaths—a whole other language emerged to describe women’s baseball. Reporters sprinkled some baseball terms in among talk of their physical appearance—”The longlegged beauty on the third base bag sure can play the hot corner.” And because women were used to being described this way they did not resist. They just kept playing.
Women’s insistence on playing and the dilemma of reporters tasked with reporting on their games ultimately combined to establish a separate set of standards and expectations for female baseball players. And over time, two separate baseball spheres, one for men and one for women. From our twenty-first-century perspective, we could claim that these gender-specific standards worked against women who sought legitimacy as baseball players. It could be argued that creating separate baseball spheres took agency or control away from women. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Existing in separate spheres was not new to women. They lived, worked, and studied under a different set of standards than men. So it was likely no surprise to them that the same would happen within the game of baseball. As they had always done, though, women never stopped pushing against the boundaries forced upon them. They learned the game, played it, and from within their baseball sphere, they defined for themselves what baseball meant. They set their own standards and, most significantly, they defined baseball success in their own terms. As it was for men, winning games, playing well, and making money were all part of women’s definition of success, but that was only the beginning. Baseball was an opportunity, a new experience, and a location where women could excel in an endeavor previously off-limits to them. Playing the game provided women with a chance to see the country and ultimately the world. It allowed them to make their own money and to realize a sense of independence. To many players, success was found in the opportunities baseball afforded them and not only in the box score.
There are many examples to illustrate the ways in which women embraced their separate baseball sphere and used it to their benefit, but none is more engaging than the story of the Philadelphia Bobbies and their 1925 barnstorming tour of Japan. The Bobbies’ tour provides an opportunity to show how women not only embraced their separate baseball sphere but used it to challenge traditional definitions of baseball success and to define for themselves how and where they fit into the narrative of baseball. The tour shows how one set of baseball standards were used to plan, guide, and then judge the tour, and how another set, the ones defined and accepted by the women themselves, provide a completely different interpretation. One side saw the tour as an unmitigated disaster, while the other saw it as a great success.
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by Bill Staples, Jr.
Every Tuesday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Bill Staples, Jr. tell us about one of the most important Japanese American baseball players–Kenichi Zenimura and three of the tours he organized.
Few baseball fans know the story of early twentieth-century Nikkei (Japanese American) baseball. Despite this lack of awareness, the Nikkei impact is still visible in today’s game. It’s subtle, though, visible only to the well-informed. The legacy is not a retired uniform number displayed inside a major-league ballpark, but the names on the back of the uniforms. In 2022 those names are Akiyama, Darvish, Kikuchi, Maeda, Ohtani, Sawamura, and Suzuki—and in 2025, it will almost certainly include Ichiro on a plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
The national pastime has unofficially become the international pastime, and this is the enduring legacy of Nikkei baseball and the work of pioneers like Kenichi Zenimura (1900-1968).
During the years 1923 to 1930, no major-league team barnstormed in Japan. The highest-caliber competition from the United States during this time came in the form of Nikkei and Negro League teams like Zenimura’s Fresno Athletic Club (FAC) and the Philadelphia Royal Giants. During this major-league void, Nikkei and Negro Leaguers helped elevate the level of play in Japan and set the stage for the 1931 and 1934 tour of stars like Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and the start of the professional Japanese Baseball League in 1936.
In 1962 Zenimura was crowned the “Dean of Nisei Baseball” by veteran Fresno Bee sports reporter Tom Meehan. Shortly after Zeni’s death in 1968, the same sentiment was echoed by Bee reporter Ed Orman. Approximately 25 years later, baseball historian Kerry Yo Nakagawa refined that tribute for a new audience, calling Zenimura “The Father of Japanese American Baseball.” Nakagawa and others believe that Zeni deserves this title for his unparalleled career and collective impact as a player, manager, and global ambassador.
PREWAR GOODWILL AMBASSADOR
Between 1905 and 1940, roughly one out of four (26.5 percent) tours across the Pacific featured a Nikkei team visiting Japan. When examining the tours between 1923 and 1940, Zenimura’s impressive impact becomes apparent. Of the 53 tours during this period, Zenimura was involved, to some degree, with 17 (32 percent) of those efforts. When he himself was not traveling, Zeni supported or influenced 14 different tours by other Nikkei teams, visiting Japanese ballclubs, Negro League teams, and major-league all-stars.
The following is an in-depth look at Zenimura’s three major tours—1924, 1927, and 1937—in which he participated directly, allowing him to shine in his homeland of Japan.
THE 1924 TOUR
The seeds for Zenimura’s 1924 tour were planted on Independence Day in 1923 when the Fresno Athletic Club battled the Seattle Asahi for the National Nikkei Baseball Championship. The Asahi had earned the respect of the baseball world by winning the majority of their games during tours to Japan between 1915 and 1923. In a best-of-three series, the FAC defeated the Asahi to become the undisputed Nikkei baseball champions. With the victory, Fresno also won the right to tour Japan the following year.
In preparation for the tour, the FAC scheduled games against high-caliber competition, including the Pacific Coast League Salt Lake City Bees, who conducted spring training in Fresno. In a three-game series, the FAC surprised the Bees with a 6-4 victory in game one, marking the first time a Nikkei team defeated a PCL ballclub. The series also marked the presence of Frank “Lefty” O’Doul. Newly signed from San Francisco, O’Doul did not compete in the loss, but his powerful bat helped the Bees take games 2 and 3.
More important than O’Doul’s on-field performance was the historical significance of his involvement. The gregarious southpaw would later be enshrined in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame for his life’s work as a celebrated ambassador of US-Japan baseball relations. Most likely, this 1924 encounter marks O’Doul’s first interaction with ballplayers of Japanese ancestry.
On September 2, 1924, the FAC boarded the SS President Pierce for Japan.Six weeks later they stepped inside Koshien Stadium to play their first opponent, Daimai. The FAC recorded a shutout 5-0 victory behind the arm of Kenso “The Boy Wonder” Nushida. Fresno pitchers did not allow a run until their third game, on October 14, a 4-3 loss in a rematch with Daimai.
During their 46-day stay in Japan (October 11 to November 26), the Fresno team traveled approximately 1,300 miles (about 2,100 kilometers), covering nine cities—starting in Osaka, with stops in smaller locales between Hiroshima, Tokyo, and Yokohama. They played 27 games, finishing with a 20-7 record and an overall .741 winning percentage.
After watching the Fresno captain compete on the field, a reporter with the Japan Times wrote, “Zenimura is one of the smartest and most colorful players the writer had ever seen. He was the terror of the diamond, a man who played every position in baseball. He was tricky, shrewd and positive poison to every opponent.”
In Tokyo, Zeni penned his thoughts on the Japan tour experience in a letter to the Fresno Morning Republican, which was published on December 5. It read:
Tokyo, Japan
November 16, 1924
Mr. T.P. Spink
Sports Editor,
The Republican.
Dear Sir: –
The Fresno team is doing a [sic] good work in Japan and so far our record stands 18 victories and 5 lost. In today’s game we played against Keio and defeated them by the score of 8-to-4. We gave the last four runs in the last of the ninth after two men gone.
In Japan it doesn’t pay to win a game in a far margin. If we do then there won’t be any crowd coming to the next game, saying that we are too strong for this Japan team and so on. We had many examples in Osaka.
Beat Diamonds
One day we played against the pro team of Osaka which is known as Diamonds and in our first game we defeated them by a score of ll-2. In this game quite a many fans [sic] came to see the outcome but on the following day with the same teams there was hardly any people in the stand[s]. For this reason, it is hard for the visiting team to play a game in Japan.
Another thing disadvantaging us is the way these Tokyo umpires calls [sic] on decisions against us. … I can’t figure the way these umpires make a bad decision when ever the play is close. We had enough of the raw decisions in Tokyo, but what can we do in Japan!!!
Meet Champions
Tomorrow we are playing against Waseda, the intercollegiate champions of Japan. We hope to beat them badly and by the time this letter reaches you, you will be able to get the result.
On the way to the States I am figuring of stopping over to Honolulu and spend my Christmas and New Year’s there. About five of the players are going to do the same and eleven of the remaining players will be in Fresno by 13th of December 1924.
As soon as the team reaches to Fresno we would like to play a three game series with the Fresno Tigers.
Yours truly,
K. ZENIMURA
(Captain).
The Waseda contest mentioned in the letter resulted in a 3-2 loss for Fresno. FAC lost the game, but won the respect of the opposing manager, Chujun Tobita. He praised the visiting team’s baseball skills, saying they were “amazing” in their demonstration of technique and power.
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