A lot of players in baseball history have transitioned from pitching to playing in the field, but few have done both for a prolonged period. There were 12 seasons before 1940 in which a player really contributed to wins as a pitcher, batter and a fielder at another position, and the Shohei Ohtani Award’s inaugural winner accounted for four of those.
Hall of Famer Masaru Kageura was more than just a pitcher who could hit and field, or a position player who could pitch. Using Bill James’ Win Shares as a starting point, I identified players who contributed significantly to wins as a pitcher, batter and fielder.
Starting in the 1936 autumn season, through the spring and autumn of 1937 and into the spring of 1938, the Hanshin Tigers right-hander created 25.5 win shares as a pitcher, 31.2 as a hitter, and 4.1 as a fielder, mostly in right field but with 15 games at third and a handful in left.
Here’s his story.
Kageura was the oldest of five children, whose family owned a lumber yard in Matsuyama in Shikoku island’s Ehime Prefecture. Matsuyama was a baseball hotbed. Competition, even at the youth level was fierce, and teams were not eager to burden themselves with someone like Kageura, who was small as a young boy. Instead, Kageura turned his attention to kendo, in which he trained until his second year at Matsuyama Shogyo Middle School.
This video on the niconicodoga site, shows one clip from an old TV special on Kageura. In it, his former classmate, Isamu Hirooka tells of Kageura’s drive to build himself up with endless training and by pushing himself to eat.
“He really loved baseball, but at first, he was the smallest boy in our class,” Hirooka said. “He built up his body and by our third year, he had grown.
Struggling due to lack of numbers after a number of seniors graduated, the school’s baseball manager, Jiro Goto, began raiding the school’s other sports clubs, and lured Kageura to his team.
According to his sister, their father, who knew nothing of baseball, crafted a bat for Kageura out of cherry wood, that he swung relentlessly. As a ballplayer, the core and wrist strength he developed from training with a sword, proved valuable. The 15-year-old’s batting and speed off the mound helped push Matsusho into the upper reaches of Japan’s national schoolboy competitions at Koshien Stadium.
Along with future pros Hideo Sanmori and Kiyoshi Takasu, Matsuyama reached the quarterfinals of the 1931 spring invitational. At the summer nationals after his 16th birthday, he and his teammates reached the national championship semis.
The following year, Matsusho won the spring invitational and finished runner-up in the summer championship. In the final, Kageura starred in long relief and with a big ninth-inning triple that helped force extra innings. Forced to leave the mound after a batted ball struck his foot, Kageura moved to third, where the hitters from Nagoya’s Chukyo Shogyo bunted relentlessly on him and walked off 11th-inning national champions.
“When he got back to Matsuyama, they took him to the hospital, and discovered his leg had been broken,” Hirooka said in the second clip on niconicodoga, which shows images from the game.
Kageura went to Rikkyo University and contributed to a league championship with four wins as a freshman. Future Hall of Famer Michinori Tsubouchi, a year ahead of Kageura at both Matsusho and Rikkyo, would, when they returned home, practice with the students at Matsusho, hitting balls to them. Future Hall of Famer Shigeru Chiba, four years behind Kageura, said he would shiver with excitement when he heard Kageura was back in town.
“During (Rikkyo’s) training camp, I’d be sleeping when the pitchers practiced in the bullpen, but I could tell when Kageura was pitching by the sound his pitches made from how hard he was throwing,” Tsubouchi said.
The video said that balls Kageura hit out of the school’s practice ground into western Tokyo’s Senkawa Aqueduct would have had to travel 150 meters from home plate.
Prior to his 22nd birthday Kageura’s family was swindled and fell deeply into debt and, as he had been in high school, a baseball club struggling to find players came begging for him. Yomiuri had formed Japan’s fourth pro team in 1934, long after the first three independent teams had disappeared without leagues to sustain them, and had taken its pick of the top talent available.
This meant that the teams coming into the newly created Japan Baseball League, had to be creative.
Although the Tigers were the second club formed, the team’s rivals from the get-go were not the Giants, but the Braves, owned by the Hankyu Railroad, Hanshin’s business rival in the traction business between Osaka and Kobe. Hankyu had taken over Japan’s first pro team after the 1929 Kanto Earthquake drove it out of Tokyo and installed it in the Takarazuka resort and entertainment center served by its railroad.
Seeking talent, the Tigers’ first manager, Shigo Mori, traveled to Tokyo to persuade his fellow Matsusho alumni Kageura to quit school and turn pro ahead of the JBL’s start.
Tsubouchi said in the third niconicodoga clip that taking a job in a baseball business with no standing in Japanese society was a wrenching decision for his friend.
“Kageura looked at me with a troubled expression on his face and said, ‘I’m going to join the Tigers,'” Tsubouchi said. “His shoulders slumped as he said he needed to help his father, ‘I need the money.'”
His first contract with the Tigers was for a yearly salary of 1,680 yen, worth approximately 8 million yen in the late 1990s when the special was filmed or around $75,000 today. He received another 2,220 yen as a signing bonus for a first-year total worth 18.5 million yen or $170,000 now.
But things were not all rosy.
“He didn’t want to turn pro,” first-year Tigers teammate and fellow Ehime native Ryohei Igaue said. “College baseball was a big thing. Pro baseball had been established in America, but the feeling here was, ‘It’s all about money? That players were selling out.'”
The JBL opened before sparse crowds, which must have come as a shock to Kageura, who was accustomed to playing in front of big crowds for the Tokyo Six University League games at Jingu Stadium. On top of that, the Tigers apparently neglected to tell their new college star that they were paying a portion of his salary directly to his parents, something that became an issue later.
Kageura was primarily a third baseman when the JBL kicked off with its first league games on April 29, 1936, in the absence of the Tokyo Giants, who had not yet returned from Yomiuri’s second baseball tour of the United States.
When Kageura arrived, he surprised teammate Kenjiro Matsuki, by swinging a 36- to 37-ounce, 35-inch bat. Matsuki was six years older in his physical prime and only swung a 35-ounce stick.
“Other players shouldn’t swing my bat,” Kageura reportedly said.
Although Kageura was strong in the upper body, his legs were thin and the force of his powerful swing as he twisted his core could hurt his ankles. Years later, his younger brother Kenichi, who was also a pro ballplayer, not to imitate it.
Tsubouchi said that when Kageura hit a ball on the screws trying to catch it was “like catching a shot put, even at the outfield fence,” and he had a habit when hitting the ball in practice to shout to his teammates taking infield grounders to get out of the way.
Kageura went 0-for-3 with a walk in the Tigers’ first league game, a 3-0 win over Nagoya Kinko. The Tigers’ pitcher that day, Fumio Fujimura, another Shohei Ohtani Award candidate, struck out 11 over the distance. With Fujimura and Hawaiian-born U.S. citizen Tadashi “Bozo” Wakabayashi doing most of the pitching, Kageura didn’t make his mound debut until he moved over from third base to finish a game in relief on May 24 in a 10-2 loss to Hankyu in the JBL’s third tournament, in Takarazuka.
For some reason, the batting, pitching and fielding stats from the JBL’s 1936 spring season, including the first three tournaments—without the Giants—and the next three, all single elimination formats, from July 1, have never been made official, and no winner was declared. Yomiuri Shimbun owner Matsutaro Shoriki was the driving force behind the league, and the omission may be from the fact that his team didn’t take part from Day 1.
The Tigers were 9-6 when their spring season concluded on July 19 with an 11-7 win over Hankyu in the Nagoya tourney finale, but on July 29, Mori, who had recruited Kageura, was abruptly fired.
Mori’s replacement as skipper was Shuichi Ishimoto, who’d been a journeyman—including a stint for a corporate club in Japan’s treaty port of Dalian, Manchuria, and a sports writer before managing his former school Hiroshima Shogyo, where he won four national titles and managed legendary future Hawks manager Kazuto Tsuruoka. He then worked for the Mainichi Shimbun as a sportswriter before being brought back to the game as manager of the Tigers.
In a team as famous for any in Japan for its factions, Ishimoto’s arrival may have signaled the club’s first. Second baseman Toshio Kojima, who came out of Tokyo’s Waseda University as Mori had, and was recruited by the Tigers’ first skipper, reportedly formed a clique with Kageura rebelling against the new skipper.
Despite talk of their insubordination against the hard-driving new manager, Ishimoto installed Kojima as his regular cleanup hitter and second baseman, forcing Fujimura to move to the outfield between starts, and made Kageura the team’s third two-way player alongside Fujimura and Takao Misonoo.
Behind the Tigers’ newly dubbed “Dynamite lineup,” Kageura went 6-0 with a league-leading 0.72 ERA, joining Wakabayashi, Fujimura and Misonoo in what was easily the deepest pitching staff in the league.
Kageura was said to have the game’s strongest arm, winning a long toss competition with a throw that was likely 114 meters, although it was recorded later as 144. His best pitch was a hard running fastball, but he also had a heavy sinking pitch that was hard to get in the air.
Because this is Japan and the east-west rivalry is a thing that goes back hundreds of years, a lot is made, perhaps too much, of the rivalry between Kageura and star Giants pitcher Eiji Sawamura in the early days of Japanese pro ball.
“He was an elite hitter, but he might have been even better as a pitcher,” Matsuki said.
By tying the year’s final round-robin tournament with Hankyu, the Tigers earned a spot in the year’s championship series against the Giants. In Game 1, Kageura started and allowed five runs, one earned, and made it a one-run game with a three-run homer out of Tokyo’s bayside Susaki Stadium off Sawamura, who held on to win 5-3.
Misonoo, who went 2-for-4 in the first game off Sawamura, beat him in Game 2, also 5-3. That set up a championship game in which Kageura allowed four unearned runs over four innings, while getting two of the Tigers’ four hits. Sawamura, who entered after the Giants took a 4-2 fourth-inning lead, pitched five shutout innings to earn the win and the Giants the title of Japan’s first pro baseball champions.
In 1937, the Tigers shipped Kojima to the Tokyo-based Eagles, reportedly in order to remove what they considered a bad influence on their slugging right-hander Kageura, who went on to have a pair of banner years at the plate, replacing Kojima as the Tigers’ cleanup hitter.
In the spring, Kageura went 11-5 with a team-best 0.93 ERA, while leading the JBL with 47 RBIs, but his days as a pitcher, like those of Fujimura were becoming numbered. This had probably as much to do with the rise of rookie Yukio Nishimura, and the fact that Misonoo was basically a pitcher who could also hit a little and field.
Kageura pitched just 31-1/3 innings in the autumn 1937 season as he spent most of his time in the outfield, leading the league in batting average and on-base percentage. The Giants won the spring season by a half-game over the Tigers, who won the autumn season by nine games over the Giants, sending the two into a best-of-seven championship series.
With Hanshin leading the series 3-1, Kageura was given a chance to close it out at Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium, but got hammered for 11 runs in eight innings. New Tigers ace Yukio Nishimura closed it out the following day by beating Sawamura in a 6-3 win.
Kageura pitched in 11 games in 1938 and not at all in the championship series, swept by the Tigers 4-0 over the Giants, although he did drive the final nail into Yomiuri’s coffin with an eighth-inning Game 4 homer that made it a 3-1 game.
Sometime between 1938 and 1939, Kageura’s issues with the team boiled over when he found out that new pitcher Tsuneo Tsuri was making more money than him. That was when Kageura discovered that the club had, since Day 1, been making payments directly to his parents and deducting them from his paycheck.
Although he was called up for military duty in 1939, Kageura returned to Japan with the war still going on, but rather than play for the Tigers, chose to work at the family lumber yard.
“I hate the idea of having to think of all the chaos there while trying to play baseball,” he was quoted as saying, although he eventually put on the Tigers uniform in 1943.
Like fellow pitchers Sawamura and Fujimura, Kageura was tasked with being a grenadier in the infantry, and like Sawamura and Fujimura, the duty was said to have ruined his arm, so that when he finally did resume playing for the Tigers in 1941, Kageura was relegated to first base.
In 1944, Kageura was recalled to the army and went to serve in Manchuria. There, an acquaintance of his and fellow Ehime Prefecture native, sumo wrestler and postwar yokozuna Eigoro Maedayama, paid Kageura a visit in Hulin, but barely recognized him as Kageura had lost so much weight and his teeth had begun to fall out.
Kageura was killed while with the army in the Philippines, near Carranglan on the island of Luzon in May 1945, although he has lived on in Japanese culture as one of the models for the title character in Japan’s longest-running sports comics, “Abu-san,” whose full name was Abu Kageura.
