Tag Archives: Hall of Fame

Hall of Fame time again for 2020

I don’t mean to be rude but it’s time for many of my fellow Hall of Fame voters to get their thumbs out of their butts and use their heads for a change.

A player needs to be named on 75 percent of the ballots, and voters this year are able to select up to seven players. Frankly speaking, anyone who doesn’t think Tuffy Rhodes is the best available player is a moron.

Here is a list of NPB’s 10 best players who are not in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame based on career win shares:

NameStatus2019 pctHigh PctCareer Win Shares
Ichiro SuzukiNot eligible581
Kazuo MatsuiNot eligible378
Kosuke FukudomeActive367
Kazuhiro KiyoharaNot on ballotNA22.6365
Masahiro DoiNot on ballot355
Shinnosuke AbeNot eligible349
Taira FujitaNot on ballot322
Tadahito IguchiNot eligible321
Takashi ToritaniActive 321
Michio AritoNot on ballot310

As I mentioned this time a year ago, Masahiro Doi slipped through the eligibility cracks because of his long coaching career and it remains uncertain if he will get another chance. Kazuhiro Kiyohara has not been included on the ballot since the vote for the 2016 class following his drug conviction, while Taira Fujita and Michio Arita were apparently passed over because of their poor relationships with the press during their stints as managers of the Hanshin Tigers and Lotte Orions, respectively.

Below are the top 10 players who are eligible to be inducted this year in the players division. Tuffy Rhodes not only had the best career of any foreign player in NPB history, but he also won an MVP award and became only the second batter to hit 55 home runs after Sadaharu Oh. Hiroki Kokubo comes close to him in career value because he played until he was old enough to manage Japan’s national team — the same goes for the next two guys on the list. In terms of peak value, the only player who can compare with Rhodes in terms of sustained high performance is catcher Kenji Jojima.

NameTimes on ballot2019 pctHigh pctCareer WS
Tuffy Rhodes6th29.639.6298
Hiroki Kokubo2nd32.132.1296
Norihiro Nakamura1st290
Takeshi Yamasaki2nd11.311.3287
Takuro Ishii3rd24.824.8281
Atsunori Inaba1st279
Kenji Jojima3rd15.115.1270
Tomonori Maeda2nd29.629.6243
Alex Ramirez2nd40.440.4230
Kenjiro Nomura7th37.239.6227

Here are the top five in last year’s balloting:

Name2019 PctCareer Ws
Kazuyoshi Tatsunami *77 .4302
Shingo Takatsu60.6113
Masahiro Kawai50.7137
Shinya Miyamoto41.2187
Alex Ramirez40.4230

The voters clearly got the best available player not yet in the Hall of Fame a year ago, but after that it was a mess. Takatsu, at least, at one point was Japan’s career saves leader. Ramirez won two MVP awards and was clearly the best of this bunch, but his career value last year was seventh among the available candidates, and five of those others finished behind him in the voting.

Here are the top 10 players who are eligible to be inducted this year in the experts division,. The Hall of Fame does not publish old records of voting, so these are based on the results I’ve received attending press conferences announcing the votes.

NameTimes on ballot2019 pctHigh pctCareer WS
Koichi TabuchiAt least 7th64.764.7301
Hideji KatoAt least 5th23.032.0290
Masayuki Kakefu2nd30.830.8286
Isao Shibata3rd26.326.3275
Atsushi NagaikeAt least 7th17.323.6240
Hiromu Matsuoka3rd7.513.1238
Mitsuhiro AdachiAt least 5th14.323.0221
Shigeru Takada1st177
Masayuki DobashiAt least 7th24.126.8171
Yoshinori Sato1st166

The top five in last year’s expert division vote were:

Name2019 pctCareer WSOther notes
Hiroshi Gondo *76.797Success as coach, manager
Koichi Tabuchi64.7301
Randy Bass63.21322 Triple Crowns, MVP
Masayuki Kakefu30.8286
Keiji Osawa30.1Success as manager

Rhodes is not an all-time, hands-down, no-question Hall of Famer. But the few players who had better careers than him who are not in the Hall of Fame, Kiyohara, Doi, Arito and Fujita, are bizarre exceptions. None of the players on the ballot have close to his credentials, and in this age of information, one would hope that would make a difference.

Of the 19 players who led their league in 10-plus offensive categories and won six or more Best Nine Awards are out of the Hall of Fame? Three. These are Rhodes, Masayuki Kakefu and Atsushi Nagaike. Kakefu had a longer career than Rhodes with less peak value but he was a quality player and deserves to make it through the expert’s division.

Marvin Miller’s legacy and Japan

Labor organizer Marvin Miller, who energized major league baseball players into seizing a huge amount of control over their labor from the owners, was voted into National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday. According to his son Peter, it wasn’t something he aspired to or wished to acknowledge.

His election has sparked some thoughts about how Japan’s baseball labor situation differs from that in the majors and why the two games are so different. Typically, we talk about the differences in how the game is played, but labor relations, too, are somewhat different.

In MLB, Miller’s acumen and leadership skills galvanized the players into taking action that eventually revealed the owners’ flawed basis for dictatorial control over players’ rights. His actions brought arbitration and then free agency. Because these changes removed the ability of owners to pay pennies on the dollar for labor, baseball executives at the time predicted they usher in the destruction of Major League Baseball.

They meant that like destroying Major League Baseball was a bad thing. Of course, it didn’t. Instead of destroying baseball, it forced teams to revolutionize their business models in order to be able to afford to buy players on a more free market. That change revitalized the business of baseball.

Before Miller MLB was not plantation slavery but a form of wage slavery. Players were bound to serve their owners or find other employment that did not reward their most marketable skills. After Miller, the MLB labor market became a kind of indentured servitude, where players handed owners control over their work for a fixed period of time.

Whenever MLB wants to defend itself, it talks about the owners as caretakers of American tradition. Talk like that has zero connection with the truth when owners defend their heinous policies as “normal business practices.” In that sense, MLB is a caretaker of American tradition, the 19th-century kind, when business owners relied on detectives and police to help “settle” labor disputes, by busting heads and breaking bones.

Japan’s “model” society

The best thing about Japanese baseball is that while the game is influenced by developments in the majors, it is ordered by different beliefs about how and why it is played. Japanese teams and owners can be just as stupid or innovative or ignorant as their MLB counterparts, but their behavior is modified by Japan’s social norms.

Just as in MLB, Japan’s owners have long assumed they deserved the power to exercise total over the game and the players. Japan’s version has rarely been so harsh as the bitter anti-labor ownership in America. Not because baseball team owners in Japan are kinder, but because society expects them to occasionally demonstrate ritual acts of kindness.

A Japanese company will work its laborers to death but is expected to organize a free employees trip every year,

Thus while MLB teams routinely manipulate players’ service time to maximize control over prospects at the cost of wins in the short term, Most Japanese teams will listen to requests of players wishing to leave and go to the majors and many of those requests are granted — at great cost to the team giving up the player.

Japanese teams aren’t pro-labor and do in fact exploit their players, but they also observe social expectations about pay raises. Rookies who have outstanding seasons can earn salaries many times the minimum. Japan’s owners are under no real obligation to reward the players — other than the social one.

Any analogy of pre-arbitration MLB as slavery is clearly wrong — because players could opt-out at great personal cost and not be pursued as runaway athletes. But for the sake of comparison, let’s assume MLB was a form of slavery. If so, MLB was the slavery exposed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where the mere existence of pernicious abuse was a threat to its apologists and proponents — who claimed human beings were better off in benevolent bondage.

If that light, the Japanese form of baseball labor relations has always been a little closer to apologists’ romanticized view of slavery. But simply being less onerous than MLB’s version doesn’t make it right.

According to Peter Miller, his father’s ultimate goal was freedom for the players to choose, something even the most benevolent of baseball autocracies cannot accept.