by Carter Cromwell

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. In this article Carter Cromwell discusses the first US university baseball team to tour Japan.

Links between Japan and the Seattle area are nothing new. They were first forged in the late nineteenth century when Japanese began immigrating to the Pacific Northwest, and they’ve strengthened over the years. One of the consequential connections has been baseball.

In 1905 a team from Japan’s Waseda University toured the American West Coast and played against various US teams. That led to a trip to Japan three years later by a group of a dozen University of Washington players, and those two journeys set the stage for frequent travels by Japanese and Seattle teams. The 1914 Seattle Nippon was the first Japanese American club to go to Japan, and the 1921 Suquamish Tribe became the first Native American team to do so. Teams from the University of Washington also made trips to Japan in 1913, 1921, and 1926 (and then returned 55 years later, in 1981). Before World War II, 13 clubs from the Pacific Northwest traveled to Japan, and about a dozen Japanese university teams made the reverse trip. The 1908 University of Washington tour was the first US collegiate tour of Japan and the first by a mainland US team. It was made possible by arrangements completed by Professor Isoo Abe, a Japanese college athletic instructor who had been the driver behind Waseda’s trip to the United States in 1905. Professor Abe—known in Japan as the “Father of University Baseball”—had been impressed by the hospitality shown by the University of Washington and the Seattle residents during the 1905 visit. In addition, the University of Washington had accepted the largest number of Japanese students in the United States at the time and was familiar to the Japanese people.

Abe had persuaded his university to subsidize the 1905 tour, despite the fact that Japan was fighting a war with Russia at the time. Baseball historian Kerry Yo Nakagawa said, “From a baseball standpoint, [Waseda was] the best team in Japan, and they wanted to test the water of American baseball at the university level. They wanted to dissect the American game, use it as a laboratory to learn.”

Three years later, that still held true, and Waseda invited the University of Washington to come to Japan. Washington did not send its official team, but all 11 players making the trip had played for the Huskies and were from the state of Washington. They included first baseman Webster Hoover of Everett, pitcher Huber Grimm of Centralia, right fielder Byron Reser of Walla Walla, second baseman Arthur Hammerlund of Spokane, catcher Roy Brown and pitcher Earle Brown of Bellingham, third baseman Ralph Teats and center fielder Leo Teats of Tacoma, and shortstop Walter Meagher, pitcher Ed Hughes, and left fielder Percy Logerlof of Seattle. Howard Gillette managed the team.

Continue to read the full article on the SABR website

The 1908 University of Washington Tour of Japan