This is the story of three men, and how they helped revolutionize Japanese baseball. In so doing, they created a space for the kind of individual pursuit of excellence that Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto have engaged in and been rewarded for.

Their huge contracts this winter, as surprising as they are now, would have seemed impossible to those watching Japanese pro baseball in the 1980s.

This is the third part of a series discussing the transformation of Japanese pro baseball.

Part 1 outlined how NPB has continued to grow and thrive:

• Through unintended consequences of owners trying to restructure the existing domestic balance of power
• Through effort of individuals working on their own and eventually with others to create new paradigms within obsolete structures.
• Through a collective effort by players to combat owners’ abuse of power

Part 2 is about how owners’ efforts to petrify a system and ensure their control, set in motion a set of circumstances that ensured players would strike out on their own for MLB.

Don’t get me wrong, the baseball of the era was fun and the players entertaining, but it was being portrayed as a morality lesson on the purity of playing for one run, and the absolute necessity of executing boringly predictable tactics.

Today’s story starts in the 1960s, a free-wheeling era for Japanese baseball and discusses Tatsuro Hirooka’s attempt to rein in the chaos of his time and perfect the game. It’s about a quiet counterrevolution, where his contemporary, Akira Ogi, presented an alternative view of baseball that unleashed the unique Ichiro Suzuki, whose impact resounds to this day.

Shadow of the past

The Yomiuri Giants “V9” dynasty of nine straight Japan Series championships under manager Tetsuharu Kawakami not only generated generations of fans, but also created a massive cadre of coaches who fanned out to spread the lessons of the Giants’ success across the breadth of NPB.

Kawakami’s Giants were powered by the ability of Yomiuri to outspend every other team for amateur talent and were built around two of Japan’s greatest stars, third baseman Shigeo Nagashima and first baseman Sadaharu Oh. As players did then, both Nagashima and Oh developed their own styles, and mastered them.

When Yomiuri’s dynasty crashed in the mid-1970s due to the competitive balance ushered in by the draft, and the replacement of Kawakami with newly retired superstar Nagashima, former Giants rushed in to explain how baseball could progress if it learned the lessons of the past and refined successful tactics, approaches, and techniques to their ultimate form.

This was the start of the “kanri yakyu” (controlled baseball) movement, whose principle advocate, former Giants shortstop Hirooka, had been a teammate of Japan’s most popular and dynamic player. Nagashima, a player who expanded fans’ belief in what was possible on the diamond through his dramatic, exaggerated, unpredictable and often reckless play, and Hirooka saw a better future.

The control freak

Hirooka envisioned a form of baseball where players and teams would excel, not by raw talent and seat-of-the-pants intuition as Nagashima had, but through study and regimentation. Properly applying prescribed approaches from nutrition and exercise, playing techniques and tactics, he believed could reproduce the remarkable efficiency of Japanese industry on the ballfield.

From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, although there were always iconoclasts and holdouts, Hirooka’s success with the Seibu Lions spawned imitators. Of course none of them had the advantage of front office wizard Rikuo Nemoto and his legendary machinations that supplied the Lions with an unbelievable treasure trove of talent.

When Hirooka went to coach the Central League’s Yakult Swallows in 1974, they were a lower-division club in park that favored home runs and scoring but finished last in home runs almost every year, and sacrificed like nobody’s business and hadn’t had a winning record in over 10 years. They finished third in Hirooka’s first year. He was promoted to head coach in 1976, and took over as manager midway through that season.

The Swallows’ strength had been its pitching and defense, and in 1978, Yakult suddenly had an offense. The club got a tremendous Japan debut season from new second baseman Dave Hilton, veteran Kaoru Osugi’s first decent year in six seasons, and a breakout year for young outfielder Toru Sugiura. On top of that, Yakult was fortunate. They won the league by three games after winning nine more games than their runs scored and runs allowed totals would have predicted.

After a season in which everything that could go right did, including Kaoru Osugi’s decisive Japan Series foul home run, things went sour in 1979. A players’ uprising resulted in Hirooka quitting after the team president fired his unpopular battery coach, Masaaki Mori.

In 1982, the pair resurfaced with Seibu, where Hirooka and his drill sergeant show proved capable of developing the mountain of talent Nemoto left under his Christmas tree every year and turning the Lions into a juggernaut.

Hirooka and Mori, outstanding defenders at short and catcher, respectively, during their careers with the Giants, heavily emphasized error-free pitching, defense and one-run tactics, and advocated it, not as THEIR style, but as the ONLY correct style. This attitude was in part their response to four Pacific League teams adopting a ball in 1979 made by Mizuno that saw home run totals shoot up across the league.

Listening to Hirooka and Mori harp on endlessly about the sanctity of scoring the first run and thus the use of the sacrifice bunt as an essential tool, it was as if the home run surge sweeping across the PL was a personal affront to them.

Their idea was to control as many variables within the game as possible by playing perfect baseball that would flow top-down to the players from the all-knowing manager and coaches.

Because Japan thrives on hierarchies, the relationship between players, coaches and managers has tended to be one-way, but the idea that each intricacy of baseball–on and off the field–should be codified so it could be reproduced and players shaped like manufactured goods on an assembly line was Hirooka’s breakthrough. It found willing disciples across the baseball spectrum.

And even as home runs and offense surged across both leagues in the 1980s, Hirooka’s ideas led to bunt frequencies in both leagues reaching historic proportions. This was not because it made sense, but because it was the only “correct” way to play baseball, which by the 1990s in Japan had become an exercise in dogma. 

It was like watching moderate Republicans in America kowtowing to Donald Trump’s brand of authoritarianism. A former Nishitetsu Lions star, ace pitcher Kazuhisa Inao, speaking on TV around 1990 about the power-hitting that had driven manager Osamu Mihara’s teams to great success in the 1950s, apologized for having played baseball “wrong” by playing for big innings and emphasizing home runs over the sacrifice bunt.

Look at photos and videos of players in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and you’ll see a cornucopia of styles, batting stances and pitching deliveries. It wasn’t just Nagashima. Every star was unique. By the mid-1980s, things like having pitchers bat eighth, which makes perfect sense, had been eradicated, while batting stances were becoming homogenized along prescribed patterns. 

The iconoclast

One former Lion who never apologized for Mihara’s vision of baseball was Akira Ogi.

Three years younger than Hirooka, Ogi had been a teammate of Inao’s and both played and coached for Mihara with the Lions in Fukuoka. In 1970, he followed his mentor to the PL’s Kintetsu Buffaloes, where he earned the respect of another Hall of Fame manager, Yukio Nishimoto. 

The Buffaloes had built a reputation for free-wheeling, big-hitting baseball that started with Mihara, carried on under Nishimoto’s reign, and continued with Ogi, who became manager from 1988 when he finished second behind Seibu, now managed by Mori, on winning-percentage points.

For the next decade, the rivalry between the power-laden Buffaloes and a Lions team that emphasized precision over power was a clash of styles that played out in front of packed houses, with holiday dates sold out weeks in advance.

The Buffaloes’ big-hitting lineup was backed by closer Masato Yoshii and a trio of starting pitchers who turned in one marathon season after another. Under the tutelage of another iconoclast, pitching coach Hiroshi Gondo, Kazuyoshi Ono, Hideyuki Awano and Hideo Nomo made the Buffaloes, for a few years, annual contenders.

Nomo, of course, is famous for being an outsider whose unique “tornado” delivery was anathema by Japan’s control freaks, but Ogi encouraged individual excellence wherever he found it with little concern for dogma.

Hirooka, who zealously dealt in dogma, could easily be mistaken for a missionary, something that could never be said about Ogi, who would easily chat with fans in public and who was famous for hitting the night spots and hitting on women he liked.

Tactically, too, he was an antidote for the boring baseball that had descended on Japan like a curse. If his personal life resembled that of American skipper Leo Durocher, as a manager, Ogi was Japan’s Casey Stengel, with carefully laid out plans and backup plans that defied the orthodox explanations of the time.

Like Mihara before him, whose managing success was referred to as “Mihara magic,” Ogi’s habit of winning while doing the unexpected became “Ogi magic.”

His magic touch got a huge boost in 1994, when he was asked to take over the Orix Buffaloes from former Giants star Shozo Doi, a former teammate of Hirooka and later a kanri yakyu disciple.

In addition to reorganizing an already talented BlueWave team, Ogi gave a job to a uniquely talented player who had spent two years on the farm team, exiled by the demands of kanri yakyu by Doi for failing to adopt an orthodox batting style. So after two years of destroying Western League pitching as a teenager, Ichiro Suzuki found someone who could see beyond the reigning ideology.

The meaning of Ichiro – with apologies to Robert Whiting

There’s not a lot I can say about Ichiro Suzuki that isn’t well known already. Although his baseball childhood was overseen by his overzealous father, the rigorous attention to detail that was a hallmark of Hirooka’s teaching was as much a part of how Ichiro was taught as a belief that anything might work.

Like Oh, who developed his unique batting stance to combat a hitch in his swing after he turned pro and refined it through a multi-disciplinary approach, Suzuki was taught to study swings of golfers as well as ballplayers, and trained using the makeshift ideas his dad came up with rather than the “scientific” approach of kanri yakyu.

And though his father took the fun out of baseball, as Japanese coaches try to do, the focus was on what an individual might accomplish rather than what he did wrong that needed to be corrected.

The pendulum leg swing Suzuki brought to pro baseball, and his constant work to refine his technique on the farm team proved their worth in the minors, something that made no sense to manager Doi, who insisted Suzuki’s batting form would prevent him from filling the role kanri yakyu prescribed for swift left-handed hitters with defensive value.

Dogma dictated that those types bat first or second, hit the ball on the ground between third and short, beat out infield singles, sacrifice bunt, and pinch run. A guy who could not even adopt a conventional batting stance had no chance of filling that role in Japan’s majors, according to Doi, whose focus was on what Suzuki couldn’t do rather than what he was so obviously able to do.

Thanks to Ogi, Suzuki was given the only real chance he would need to prove he could hit. By the end of a 1994 season, during which he flirted with batting .400, late night news broadcasts were expected to have a report on how Suzuki did in his at-bats that day. Ichiro won the first of his three straight PL MVP awards and forced every batting coach in Japan to dump his orthodox batting style rules in the garbage since every hitter in the country was swinging his leg like Ichiro, and there was no going back to the “one-size fits all,” “only this works” idea that one could succeed only by repeating orthodox motions.

Of course, Ichiro’s leg movement became the new orthodoxy for youth ball and it eventually filtered up to the pros before guys began eliminating those elements that didn’t work for them and began pursuing their own paths under coaches who were beginning to adapt to the truth that what is good in general is not always the ideal way for most individuals.

Ichiro had another huge impact on Japanese baseball. Until he began playing for the Seattle Mariners in 2001, all of Japan’s successful exports had been pitchers. While he opened eyes in MLB to the possibility that Japan could produce something besides pitching, what he really did was open Japanese baseball’s eyes to MLB on a daily basis.

The daily broadcasts of MLB games in Japan were of interest at first only when a Japanese player was featured in a game, but Suzuki made the Seattle Mariners’ MLB game a daily routine that provided children and their parents a view of a style of baseball that wasn’t designed to look like it had been stamped by a machine tool.

The games gave extra work to Japan’s host of former players, coaches and managers who served as broadcast analysts. And though there was no wave of baseball people saying Japan needed to copy MLB, the idea that Hirooka’s vision had all the answers began to be replaced by the belief that experimenting and being a little different was acceptable.

Japan’s game will always be a little different, because Japan is different. Its infrastructure is different and its expectations are different. But the idea espoused by Hirooka 40 years ago, that for every question baseball poses there is only one right answer, has, thanks to Akira Ogi and Ichiro Suzuki, been diminished slightly.

Japanese culture teaches individuals that orthodoxy, no matter how illogical or counterproductive, is never wrong, and that behaving in an orthodox fashion is a shelter for criticism when things go sideways.

Still, the idea that players, operating independently, can surpass the limitations of orthodoxy has taken root in Japan. Without it, there would be no record contracts for Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto.