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Japan’s most dominant

Who has been the most dominant pitcher in Nippon Professional Baseball history, and how would one go about answering this question?

It’s not an easy answer, since baseball careers represent multiple dimensions: performance over a career, performance within seasons and performance in individual games of greater or lesser import.

Therefore, there is no single objective answer, but I’ll give it my best shot.

While researching a story for Japan’s Slugger Magazine, I spoke to MLB scouts about the next crop of pitchers who might move to MLB, and they all referred to the difficulty in identifying a Japanese pitcher to follow in the footsteps of Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

I casually mentioned my belief that Yamamoto might have been the most dominant pitcher in the history of Japanese pro baseball without any objective evidence to back it up. In one sense, I believe I was spot on, and had his career continued in Japan, he certainly would have had a chance to turn in the greatest career in NPB history.

In 2013, I had a similar conversation with a co-worker at Kyodo News when I suggested that Masahiro Tanaka’s 2013 was the greatest pitching performance in Japanese history, better than Hall of Famer Kazuhisa Inao’s 1961 season, when the big guy went 42-14 with a 1.69 ERA in a career-high 404 innings.

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Baseball thinking, neurodiversity and Japan

It’s often said one can learn a lot about societies by observing how it treats its most vulnerable members. Are they exploited, shunned, persecuted, or neglected? Or are they welcomed and allowed opportunities to contribute to society?

Similarly, we can learn a little about societies and organizations based on whether they can accept unconventional ideas and ways of thinking. This is a serious problem in Japan, as I discovered the hard way, and for baseball in general.

Take baseball for example.

Baseball with its strict rules and limits on behavior within games tends to attract those with an authoritarian leaning. It is no surprise that baseball people often assert that there is a “right way” to play the game, and that abusing players who fail to observe those orthodoxies is not only justifiable but encouraged as “educational.”

Because baseball cultures develop orthodoxies and doctrines, even the most objectively counterproductive tactics that stem from doctrine are sacred cows that can never be criticized, while objectively efficient tactics originating from outside the establishment are controversial when they work and severely criticized when they fail.

Until a decade ago or so, virtually every criticism of Japanese baseball by those who grew up in American baseball could be paraphrased as “this is isn’t the way we do it back home, therefore it’s wrong.”

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