Ichiro Suzuki was one of the four new members to be inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame for 2025 on Thursday. He was joined by Nippon Professional Baseball’s career saves leader, lefty Hitoki Iwase, slugging third baseman Masayuki Kakefu and umpire Hiroya Tomizawa.
Both Suzuki and Iwase were elected from the players division, with Ichiro getting 92.6 percent of the vote to become the seventh member to be inducted on the first go. Twenty-six voters cast ballots without Ichiro’s name written on them.
No player has ever been a unanimous selection in Japan, largely because the eligibility was so badly handled for most of the hall’s history. Until 2008, no former player became eligible until he had been out of uniform – even as a coach or manager – for five full years. Thus Sadaharu Oh, who stopped playing in 1980, didn’t become eligible until 1994, when he was elected on the first ballot.
This is not an indictment of those 26 voters who didn’t support Ichiro.
Ichiro was going to go in without a struggle, and there are many deserving candidates on the ballot, and for a short time I toyed with the idea of not voting for him in order to give that vote to another deserving but under-supported player.
We know now that Tsuneo Watanabe died at the age of 98 on Dec. 19, but what wasn’t widely reported were the circumstances of his death. In the Yomiuri’s generalissimo the Giants were coming off their first league championship in four years but had failed to make it out of the playoffs.
I can imagine a scenario where some team executives, keen to appease the irascible but still very much alive Watanabe, did what he had done 30 years earlier and began stocking the Giants with every big name they could find in hopes of buying a championship.
This offseason, the Giants acquired Japan’s most effective closer over the past few years, Cuban Raidel Martinez, and followed that by signing veteran catcher Takuya Kai and former Yankees ace Masahiro Tanaka.
Tanaka’s contract was leaked as being worth about a million dollars for one year, which could be a bargain if the 36-year-old is any good at all. Kai, who won his seventh Golden Glove this year, I’m guessing because SoftBank won the pennant, used to be the best catcher in Japan at throwing out would-be base stealers, but he hasn’t been among the best in years.
The story continues. Read on if you want to access Kai and every other catcher’s records against base stealers since 1950…
Kai joins a Giants team that had three players each catch 40-plus games and his skills are not all that different from that of Yukinari Kishida, who caught the most last year and who is four years younger.
I have a suspicion that if Watanabe looked as his team paid Kai, who looks like a spare wheel at this stage of his career, three million dollars a year for five years, the old coot may have begun shouting at the people who broke the news, had a heart attack and died.
I am a big fan of Kai’s. He was part of a 2010 Hawks draft class most notable for second-round pick Yuki Yanagita, the 24th player taken overall. SoftBank hit the jackpot again with the 90th, 92nd and 94th picks – in the supplemental developmental draft: Kodai Senga, Taisei Makihara and Kai.
If you want to see where Kai stands in his ability to throw out base stealers over his career, I’ll present you with a searchable database of every NPB catcher’s record since 1950. Have fun with it.
As I have time, more and more of this kind of data will be made available to subscribers.
