Thursday, February 18, 2021

The Golden Days of Japanese PItching

 
I picked up another pile of late 50s menko the other day.  I got a little over 50 cards including the five above, which each feature one of Japan's greatest all time pitchers.  It got me thinking that Japan's amazing pitchers from that era tend to get a bit overlooked relative to the dominant hitters like Sadaharu Oh who are more well known.  

In the same way that guys in MLB in the 19th or early 20th century put up insane stats (511 career wins, 40 plus wins per season, etc), NPB had some insanely dominant pitchers back in the 50s and 60s.  Back then the best pitchers basically threw until their arms fell off (as they sort of still do, though to a much lesser extent).  This meant that a lot of them suffered career ending injuries early on, but also that for the few who survived they amassed some incredible career and single season records.

Check these guys out:

Masaaki Koyama won 323 games (3rd all time) in a career lasting from 1953 to 1973.  His career ERA was 2.45. He won 20 or more games 7 times, and won 30 in 1964.  In addition to being 3rd on the career wins list he is also 3rd on the career strike outs list.
Masaichi Kaneda won 400 games in his career, the most of any NPB pitcher.  He compiled an amazing 14 consecutive seasons with at least 20 wins, including a 31 win campaign in 1958.  His career ERA was 2.34. He is also the NPB career strikeout leader with 4,490.
Minoru Murayama compiled a 222-147 career record with a miniscule 2.09 career ERA in a relatively short career between 1959 and 1972.  He won three Sawamura awards, including in his 1959 rookie season when he led the league with a remarkable 1.19 ERA
Shigeru Sugishita was a remarkably dominant pitcher for a 6 year stretch, kind of like Sandy Koufax in the US.  From 1950 to 1955 inclusive he never won fewer than 23 games, and broke the 30 win mark twice in that stretch.  He won 215 games in his career and finished with a 2,23 ERA.  
Tetsuya Yoneda doesn't get anywhere near enough attention.  He won 350 games in his career between 1956 and 1977, almost entirely with Hankyu.  He had eight seasons with more than 20 wins.  He never won 30 games, but came close in 1968 with 29.  Like Kaneda (and in fact, most of these guys) he played for some weak teams so he also ended up accumulating some bad stats - 285 career losses (2nd to Kaneda), and due to his lengthy career he also holds the record for most hits and runs surrendered.  And while his 2.91 career ERA would be insanely impressive in MLB, its noticeably higher than the other four guys in this post.  

I don't think any contemporary pitchers will approach what these guys did in NPB, partly because of the emergence of 5 man rotations and relief pitchers, but  more so because the best pitchers in Japan get skimmed off the top and sent to MLB for a few of their prime years, which dents their ability to come close to these guys.  Hideo Nomo, Yu Darvish, Kenta Maeda, Masahiro Tanaka and Daisuke Matsuzaka (to name a few) might have put up similar career numbers (albeit with higher career ERAs) had they stayed, but until NPB finds some way of retaining its top players rather than selling them off guys like that aren't going to stick around long enough.  

14 comments:

  1. There's two other pitchers you could have mentioned - Kazuhisa Inao and Tadashi Sugiura - although both suffered injuries that prevented them from accumulating the career numbers that these guys did. Inao won 42(!) games in 1961.

    Kaneda especially was a beast. As you eluded to, he played for some very weak Swallows teams. There were six seasons that he lost 20 games as well as won 20. He's not only the NPB career leader in wins but also in losses - 298. He regularly appeared as either a starter or reliever in almost half of the Swallows games in the 50's. Oh, and he made his debut in 1950 as a 16 year old!

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    1. Good call, I had Inao and Sugiura in mind actually, but I didn't have any cards of them handy when I wrote the post!

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  2. Nice-looking cards, as usual! Is there much video footage of these guys? It would be great to see their pitching techniques and some game action.

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    1. There are some clips of them on Youtube, this is one of Kaneda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6IILQbgUn8

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  3. When pitchers threw so much, on the plus side for the pitchers that meant if you were good you were one of the most valuable players in baseball, but on the other hand you'd be toast by 25.

    I've always found it interesting that the workloads of the pitchers in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s were similar to the workloads of American pitchers in the 19th century. If you don't know history, you are bound to repeat it I guess.

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    1. I find that Japan in the 50s/60s to US in the 19th century/dead ball era comparison interesting too.

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  4. As John already mentioned, it's kind of interesting to see how similar Japanese pitchers from this era were to the pitchers from the early days of baseball over here. Great post btw!

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  5. Dang, these guys were beasts!! That is a lot of pitching.

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  6. Kaneda was incredible. Maybe the second greatest player in NPB history. I guess it's either him or Katsuya Nomura. (Hard to eyeball this sort of thing. Has anyone calculated WAR for Japanese players?) I was thinking it would be fun to see their numbers against each other, but then I realized that they never played in the same league.

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    1. Yeah, I'm curious if anyone has ever calculated the WAR for Japanese players from that era, just a casual look around Google doesn't turn anything up.

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    2. I've actually made some attempts to calculate WAR for the Japanese leagues, but I had some calculating problems with Excel and didn't get very far. It was very frustrating.

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    3. Wow, I can imagine that was a frustrating project!

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