Japanese baseball’s most popular player ever, Shigeo Nagashima, passed away last week at the age of 89, and across Japan, ballparks began flying their flags and observing moments of silence for the man credited with boosting the pro baseball’s popularity.
Stories about Nagashima’s playing career and his on-field charisma are legend, but I remember him only as a manager in his second and more successful stint, when he was adored by the public and players and simultaneously mocked for his ridiculous statements, idiosyncracies, and tactics.
As a player, Nagashima was a true great, with the fifth most productive career ever by a Japanese player, and the greatest who didn’t turn pro straight out of high school. For the first four years of his career, from 1958 to 1961, Nagashima was the Yomiuri Giants’ most productive player, when he was surpassed by teammate Sadaharu Oh, who remains the greatest player born in Japan to ever play baseball.
In a country with a national obsessive-compulsive disorder, where everything must be as it is designed to be or it’s wrong, and nothing must ever be out of place, Nagashima was a swashbuckler. While paying lip service to the demands placed on him by his role as a star on Japan’s most obsessive-compulsive team, Nagashima was larger than life. He outshone the game, cutting corners whenever it suited him, and people loved him for that.
According to legend, Nagashima literally cut corners, at least once making it back to first base safely after nearly reaching third on a fly out – by taking a short cut across the diamond behind the mound.
Unlike Katsuya Nomura, another contemporary with a vastly more productive career, Nagashima played Japan’s social game like a virtuoso. He never called out the ridiculous inconsistencies Nomura famously mocked. Nagashima flouted convention seamlessly, by praising existing dogma to the skies and then doing the opposite. He was a living expression of the Japanese linguistic style known as “tatemae,” where patent lies are socially acceptable cover for often obvious true intent one mustn’t admit in public.
Nagashima was a master of walking the fine line between displaying the outrageous behavior Japan likes to frown upon but secretly enjoys and the façade of public propriety Japan insists upon. Because of that, Nagashima was proof that one could be one’s own man in a society where conformity is a virtue.
He is of course, famous for his walk-off “Emperor’s Game” home run off Hanshin Tigers star Minoru Murayama on June 25, 1959, in the only game attended by the Showa emperor, Hirohito, and capturing the imagination of the nation.
The home run is sometimes described as the inflection point where pro baseball surpassed collegiate ball in popularity.
When Nagashima was due to retire at the end of the 1974 season as he progressed toward his third consecutive pedestrian season, the Giants, under the leadership of Toru Shoriki, the son of the Yomiuri Shimbun empire’s founder, oversaw the ousting of the club’s greatest manager Tetsuharu Kawakami to make room on the bench for Nagashima, who had never even coached.
In addition to Nagashima’s natural charisma and trait for showmanship and an understanding of how to cash in on star power, his only qualification to manage that I’m aware of was an instinctual biomechanical understanding of how batters and fielders need to move in order to realize their potential and the ability to read pitchers.
It was the most Yomiuri of moves, sacrificing quality and sound thinking in the name of instant headline gratification and publicity. Nagashima promptly “led” the Giants to the only last-place finish in franchise history. The offense collapsed, partly because Oh began to show his age, and because Nagashima failed to take advantage of Davey Johnson’s talents.
After that disaster, the Giants retooled, bringing in Hall of Famer Isao Harimoto as a free agent, and trading for pitcher Hajime Kato, and won the first of two Central League pennants under Nagashima in 1976.
But the Giants’ goal was always to be No. 1 in Japan, something Kawakami had managed 11 times in his 13 years in charge. The drop was not all due to Nagashima’s lack of managing skills. Until 1965, the Giants’ popularity and Yomiuri’s deep pockets meant the club could easily snare more than its share of Japan’s best amateur talent.
The draft, a callous move introduced in 1965 solely to deprive amateurs of their negotiating leverage and deny them fair-market value when entering into lifetime-servitude, did introduce some competitive balance.
Nagashima failed to even win the pennant from 1978 to 1980, and was fired. Yomiuri which had banked on his popularity when hiring him, then learned the cost of firing him, when huge numbers of its newspaper’s readers responded by canceling their subscriptions in protest.
It was the last time Yomiuri would “fire” a manager, preferring to negotiate an exit behind the scenes so that the manager would announce he was stepping down, a fact Tatsunori Hara would later exploit.
Nagashima rejoined the club for his second term in 1994. Yomiuri paved the way for his return by shoving free agency down the throats of the other owners in 1993, allowing the Giants to scoop up their pick of the nation’s big-name veterans, starting with Hall of Famer Hiromitsu Ochiai in Nagashima’s first year back.
Having secured Hideki Matsui in the draft, the Giants annually bolstered their ranks with free-agent retreads, but even with that help, Nagashima’s teams couldn’t match the success of Nomura’s Yakult Swallows, and had to wait until 2000 to win his second and last Japan Series, when Nomura had worn out his welcome at Tokyo’s Jingu Stadium.
That year was significant because it was the first year that Olympic baseball welcomed professionals. While the Pacific League teams each contributed one star to the Sydney squad, and halted play during the tournament, Giants owner Tsuneo Watanabe publicly threatened to have the PL clubs expelled from NPB for not putting their regular season first.
When Yomiuri became an Olympic partner for the 2004 Athens Games, and Nagashima was named to manage the national team, Yomiuri pledged to field an all-star Olympic lineup and treated the Olympics exactly the same way the PL had in 2000.
Nagashima, however, didn’t get to manage in Athens.
Just as Yomiuri learned when it fired him, popularity can come with a high price tag.
One day that spring at his mistress’ apartment in Tokyo’s Nakano ward, he suffered a stroke. Since it wouldn’t have done for his image to have an ambulance take him to a hospital from there, he took a 40-minute taxi ride to his home from where he was then taken in for treatment.
The delay in treating the stroke left much of his body paralyzed for the remainder of his life, but as soon as he was barely able to lift one hand and wave to the crowd, Nagashima was wheeled back to Tokyo Dome as another publicity stunt.
And though he was never Japan’s greatest player, Nagashima was Japan’s most popular baseball player and its greatest entertainer until Ichiro Suzuki’s arrival. But for those 30-plus years, Nagashima was Japan’s undisputed Mr. Baseball and etched himself into Japan’s psyche as the model of how one could shine in a Japanese corporate culture that relentlessly suppressed individuality.
