I was saddened to hear of the passing of former baseball player Bob Horner this week at the age of 68 due to yet unannounced causes. Horner arrived on the scene just as my curiosity about Japanese baseball was achieving critical mass.
I got into the game here because my first posting as an English teacher in 1984 was in Toyama City, on the Sea of Japan coast, where the edition of the Japan Times we received at my office had to go to the printers in Tokyo before west coast night games were finished.
As a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan, I got my daily results fix from the most popular sports paper, which published the scores, winning and losing pitchers, saves recorded and home runs for each game. The Nikkan Sports became my gateway drug into Japanese baseball through its elaborate color-coded graphic scoresheets of each pro baseball and high school championship game.
Before long, I was scanning the available broadcasts to watch the players whose results had stood out for me in the papers, and I began thinking how I might possibly make use of the mountain of game data at my finger tips.
From 1986 to 1987, while I was living in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, my student, Dr. Michiro Shikimori introduced me to the allure of the also-ran Yakult Swallows, their cheering culture and their history.
Like author Haruki Murakami, Dr. Shikimori had been living near Jingu Stadium as a student in 1978 fell in love with the that year during their unbelievable run to the Japan championship. Ahead of the 1987 season, our English lessons were enlivened by the team’s prospects following their signing of free agent slugger Bob Horner.
Horner fit the Japanese stereotype of the American import, a guy who was big, slow, uninterested in learning from Japan, but who could hit home runs. He was a teammate that year of Leon Lee, a consummate professional who was then in his 10th Nippon Professional Baseball season, and his last as a player.
Author Robert Whiting, who wrote about Horner in his outstanding book, “You Gotta Have Wa,” and Leon Lee, joined me a few years ago in a chat with blog readers, and among the various treasures they shared were several stories about Horner’s year in Japan.
Playing in a home-run park in a good hitter’s league, Horner finished second in the Central League in OPS, beating Hall of Famer and two-time Triple Crown winner Hiromitsu Ochiai, who was so disappointed by his own results that year, his first in the CL, that he announced he would refuse a pay raise.
For years Bill James had documented Dale Murphy’s results when Horner was and wasn’t in the lineup batting behind his superstar teammate, and concluded that Horner’s presence as “protection,” made absolutely no difference on Murphy’s production.
In 1987, Murphy produced the best season of his career as measured by WAR, and James recalled listening to a Braves broadcast, when the play-by-play guys speculated on how much better Murphy would have been doing HAD Horner been there.
The biggest disappointment for me was when Horner returned to MLB in 1988 year and disparaged NPB, saying “It wasn’t baseball.” Even considering that the talent level in Japan in 1987, when each organization was allowed to sign just two imports, Horner did remarkably well for someone with so much disdain for the context he was playing in.
Baseball is really, really hard, and it take a rare talent to do really well at any level without taking it very seriously. Most players who come here get chewed up if they don’t take it seriously enough to make the necessary adjustments.
Perhaps Horner wouldn’t have done any better had he studied more and worked harder, but I would have liked to think he would have.
Rest in peace, Bob.
