Category Archives: History

articles about Japanese baseball history

Oh, Matsui and Murakami

There was an interesting post on Twitter Saturday, which just begged for verification. It questioned whether Munetaka Murakami should be considered Japan’s best young home run hitter ever, since the conditions in which the Swallows star has hit his home runs are quite different from those faced by Sadaharu Oh and Hideki Matsui.

Conditions are always in flux, offhand I would agree with this post about Oh, the early part of Matsui’s career was a fairly normal era for home run production. The perception that Matsui hit in a “mini dead-ball era” is created by the switch to Mizuno’s rabbit ball by the Giants, Dragons and BayStars toward the end of his time in Japan.

The same thing probably led Robert Whiting to recently declare Wladimir Balentien’s 60 home runs to have taken place with a lively ball in place. The ball wasn’t particularly lively that year, but it was normal compared to the soft ball used the previous two seasons.

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Talkin’ bout a revolution

Why does MLB, like other American sports leagues exist in a fixed stratified hierarchy of leagues that preclude promotion and relegation?

Last Sunday, when the reason for this hit me right between the eyes, I wrote about it in the newsletter subscribers receive. Although I want to start with that question, I would like to push on to how major league baseball—including MLB and NPB–could be re-imagined.

Japan, in particular, is ripe for a revolution that would allow baseball to do an end run around the iron grip of the Yomiuri Giants’ dictates about what teams and leagues can do.

America’s awful truth

I didn’t start by thinking about baseball and relegation, but about how Japanese children are taught in school that their ranking among their peers is of critical importance, and how American kids in my day were taught the opposite: that we were all equal without regard to color or ethnicity, and that only character, skill and effort mattered.

I learned from an early age outside of school that opportunity and advancement were not equally portioned out regardless of background, gender or skin color, but my school did a bang-up job of convincing me that what I saw was, at worst, an aberration.

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