Marinerds, etc.

Wally Yonamine, the first Japanese-American to play baseball in Japan after World War 2, died of complications from cancer on Monday. He was 85.

Two years ago, I was fortunate enough to go to a book reading/signing at the Tokyo American Club, when Rob Fitts's Wally Yonamine biography came out. Rob and Wally were a two-man show, with Rob playing the straight man and answering questions about the book, and reading a scene from the book, and Wally sitting there with a big smile on his face, entertaining the crowd with stories about his life.

Wally told many stories that day, about dealing with the grim postwar Japan, about bringing his American football and baseball play style to Japanese baseball, about Hiroshima Carp fans lying in front of the bus and throwing things at him in the outfield, and about a foggy game at Koshien where he faked catching a fly to centerfield that really bounced off the fence, and so on. All of these stories are in the book, but getting to hear them straight from the man himself made them that much more real and amusing.

I feel really lucky that I got to meet him, even if only for a few minutes that afternoon. He was a Japanese Baseball Hall of Famer but also just a real class guy; by the sheer number of people gathered at the Tokyo American Club that day, he clearly had a very full life with a huge circle of family and friends, both in Tokyo and back in Hawaii. I felt a little bit nervous as a complete stranger (I think many of the people there knew Wally through his family or his church, and it was my first time meeting Rob, too) but when I went up to ask him to sign my book and told him how much I enjoyed his speech, he was very friendly and kind.


Wally making a point in one of his stories.


Rob's on the left, Wally's on the right, I'm in the back!

I never reviewed the Yonamine biography here because I got sidetracked from the blog that winter when my father died of cancer. Now I feel really bad about that. Really, if you want to know more about Wally, and certainly if you want to know more about the 1950's era of baseball in Japan, I recommend reading the book. There were some typoes in the first edition that I think were fixed for a second printing, because other than that, it's a pretty solid account of the 1950's Giants, the 1970's Dragons, and the state of postwar Japan, as well as Hawaii in those days. There really aren't nearly enough accounts in English of Japanese baseball, especially historical; this and Rob's other book Remembering Japanese Baseball are both a good read both for stories about Wally and stories about the era.

It's never easy to be a foreigner in the world of Japanese baseball, but certainly, it's nowhere near as difficult as it must have been right after the war, so you have to respect and admire him for what he accomplished, and for being who he was and enabling so many other foreigners to play baseball in Japan, and bringing the two worlds closer together.

You can also read a few other obituaries of Yonamine here, here, here.

Very sad. I'd mentioned in my previous post that he collapsed on the field during pre-game fielding practice in Hiroshima on Friday, essentially with a stroke, and had been in a coma for the past several days with "very little hope of recovering". This morning, he passed away. He leaves behind a wife and three kids, and a host of Giants and Carp fans.

This is pretty much the only decent photo I ever took of him (I rarely get close enough to Giants players; this was during batting practice before a game in May 2008):



The saddest thing, to me, is that he would have turned 38 next week. That's just too young for a recently-retired baseball player to be dying of a stroke.

Mainichi has a photo gallery of his career here.

Nikkan Sports has the progression of his condition here.

The Japanese baseball cards blog has a bunch of cards over his career here.

I vaguely wonder if Takuya Kimura of SMAP will make any comments. Haven't seen any yet, but there was a long ongoing joke about their sharing the same name, and the Giants player even used "Kimutaku" as a nickname just like the SMAP guy.

I just got back from the weekend and was reading news and had a HUGE shock when I saw that Hiroyuki Oze died on Friday. At first I figured it must be a typo, or I was misreading it (originally saw the news in Japanese), or something. Oze-kun? MY high-socks-wearing, speedy-running, cute-smiling lefty-batting up-and-coming young awesome outfielder? *WHAT?!*

Unfortunately, no, it seems to be true. Worse, it seems to have been suicide. Various sources indicate that Oze had been depressed for a while since his mother died when he was in college, and he had even sent emails to some friends the night before saying "Thank you for everything until now", and then his body was found unconscious and bleeding on the roof area over the second floor of the hotel the team was staying in; I think he was staying on the 10th floor.

If you've been around this blog for a while, you may know that Oze was actually pretty much my favorite Orix Buffaloes player these last two years. Not sure exactly how it happened beyond me just noticing his high socks first and then realizing he was an awesome young player shortly afterwards. Nadya and I used to talk about him being the secret gem buried in the Orix lineup; I kind of saw him as an outfield version of Shunichi Nemoto from the Marines, who was another one of those hardworking exciting young college-drafted guys who tore up the minors and who you really wanted to see succeed rather than get lost in the shuffle.

Oze was only 24 years old. I feel terrible for his family -- he was recently married, even. That's got to be really tough to deal with for them, for all the players and the fans as well, seeing such a bright young man with such potential ending his life like this. I really thought this year was going to be a breakout for him, especially with more playing time in the outfield likely to open up. I mean, I'm not an Orix fan, certainly, but there are usually one or two players I secretly pull for on just about any team, and Oze was my guy for the Buffaloes. Urgh.

Well, I just went back and cropped a few photos that I took of Oze last spring in Chiba, which I felt were kinda stalkerish at the time, but seriously, I *really* liked him. So here's a few of those and a few other Oze-related photos from earlier posts here..



Oze in the dugout at Chiba, April 29 2009. He had started on the bench, though he came into the game later on as a pinch-runner, stole a base, played left field for a bit and hit a pop fly out.


Same game, Oze during batting practice. He was in the last group to bat.


Playing catch with Tuffy Rhodes between innings.


Another pregame shot of him.

And a few other images...

From April 26 at Skymark:

The scoreboard at Skymark with Oze's at-bat cartoon, in the lineup.


And my view of him. I have more shots like this than I care to admit, as this is generally how I saw him, standing in front of the Fighters ouendan. One of my friends used to make fun of me like "There's your Orix boyfriend!"

From the Kiyohara farewell at Seibu day, Sept 29 2008:

Oze during batting practice with Makoto Moriyama. I tried so hard to get a shot of him that day and also failed.

Also Sept 2008, the first time I actually sat in the infield at the Osaka Dome, so I could see the scoreboard:


Seriously, this sucks. I don't know any other way to put it. Every time I see Orix this year, I am going to be thinking of him. I'm sure a lot of other people will be too.

I had a few emails in Japanese about this when I woke up this morning from my Fighters friends -- "You probably already know, but Kobayashi-coach died of a heart attack..."

Shigeru Kobayashi died on Sunday at a hospital in Fukui at the age of 57. He was with the Fighters as a ni-gun pitching coach in 2009 and was set to become the ichi-gun pitching coach in 2010, with Masato Yoshii being assigned to a ni-gun coaching role.

The stupid thing is, I never actually talked to Kobayashi, nor do I even have any photos of him from this year. I mean, I certainly saw him around, but my friends were better friends with the other coaches like Shimazaki and Yamanaka and Arai and all, so those were the coaches I ended up talking to or taking photos of. (Well, and Hajime Miki-coach, who is a week older than me.) I best remember Kobayashi as being "that guy who goes on roadtrips when Shimazaki isn't there". Like, I remember seeing him at minor-league games at places like Sagamihara.

There's already a pretty good obituary in English on the Japan Times site. Kobayashi had an extraordinary career in some ways, or more like, he had a few years of greatness that unfortunately mostly left him as a historical footnote for a lot of people of my generation.

If you've heard of the "Egawa Affair", where hotshot pitcher Suguru Egawa came out of Hosei refusing to play for any team but the Giants, but was drafted by Hanshin and tried to sign with Yomiuri after holding out for a year, and eventually Hanshin was essentially forced to trade Egawa to the Giants (despite a rule that said you could not trade first-year draftees) for the Giants' "best" pitcher in 1978 -- the 1977 Sawamura-award-winning, sidearm righty Shigeru Kobayashi. The story says that Kobayashi was at the airport on the way to spring training in January 1979 when he learned of the trade, and was diverted from a flight to Giants' spring camp to the Hanshin camp instead. Despite Hanshin only being barely over .500 that year at 61-60-9, Kobayashi became a Giants-killer, went 22-9 in 1979 with a 2.89 ERA, including being 8-0 against the Giants, and won ANOTHER Sawamura Award.

He retired young, at the age of 31; according to his Wikipedia page, after going 11-9 in 1982, he said "If I can't get at least 15 wins next year, I'm giving up and quitting", and he went 13-14 in 1983 and thus retired. He went on to do various TV work including sportscasting and a few spots in TV dramas, and then became a coach for Kintetsu for a few years, also coached for the SK Wyverns in Korea, and then came to the Fighters for the 2009 season.

Some comments from Fighters staff are in the official team release, too. It's kinda sad, even Darvish is like "I never really got much of a chance to talk to the guy, but he was really enthusiastic and I was hoping to work with him this year at ichi-gun. This is a real shock."

If you're in Japan near the Tokyo area, they have a little... I'm never quite sure how to translate kenkadai (献花台), which is basically that place where people put a photo of a deceased person and offer flowers and other stuff to it. Kind of like an altar, but that's not exactly right either. Ojisan has a photo of the kenkadai up on his blog if you want to get an idea what it looks like; in this case they've put a photo and a uniform and cap, and allowed fans to come out with flowers and messages. According to the Fighters website, it'll be out there at Kamagaya from Monday to Wednesday.

I wonder what the team's going to do about it -- my guess is Yoshii's going to be back up at the top team for a year and we'll find someone else to work with the farm, but who knows.

Sanspo also has a photo gallery of Kobayashi up from when he was a player and such, including a great one of him with Nashida and Mayumi joining the Buffaloes in 1997.

EDIT>
First, the Japanese baseball card blog did a nice post about Kobayashi with some old cards.

Second... it seems that Takeshi Shimazaki is going to take over as the ichi-gun pitching coach. I'm happy for him but am going to miss him at Kamagaya this year :(

Just taking out a minute to be freaked out about all the baseball deaths within the last week:

Harry Kalas, 73, legendary Phillies announcer, found unconscious in the broadcast booth.

Mark Fidrych, 54, aka "the Bird", crazy Tigers ROY from the late 1970's, found dead under his truck while working on his farm.

Nick Adenhart, 22, Angels pitcher, died in a car crash.

Oddly, I'm most struck by Harry Kalas. I listened to him and Richie Ashburn all the time when I was a kid, so it's weird to think that they're both gone now and I'll never hear them again.

(Edit: I rarely remember to read The Dugout anymore, but this is pretty good.)

It sounds like a bad punchline to something, but it's not: Joe Kennedy is dead. How completely shocking and sad.

I didn't even realize he had left the A's. No, seriously. It apparently happened during that month after I moved to Japan but still didn't have internet.

I'll best remember Joe as one of the easiest guys to spot in the Safeco bullpen (I could always tell he was warming up from my seat in the upper deck, because a gigantic lefty is pretty easy to recognize).

They don't know exactly how he died yet -- possibly either a heart attack or an aneurysm -- but he was only 28 years old. 28 years old! Also, he leaves behind a pregnant wife and a 1-year-old son. And to think it happened during Thanksgiving, too -- I had something similar happen during Thanksgiving 9 years ago, when my stepfather had a heart attack the night before. He lived, but we were all pretty freaked out at the time, so I can't even imagine how sad Kennedy's family must be right now. Argh.

In other losses for the A's fanbase, Marco Scutaro was traded to Toronto. Dang, that's pretty weird. I always loved seeing Marco at batting practice and he always made me laugh.

I've been thinking about this for the last few days, and it just makes me sad that I don't have appropriate words for the situation at all. If you really want to read a fantastic obituary, go check out Japan Baseball Daily, where Gary has not only written an extensive obituary story but even translated several players' comments and respsects.

I guess what's strange is, it was only a month ago that Inao was a color commentator on the Pacific League playoffs.

It was only a week or two ago that I was IMing with my friend Jeff (who has also written his respects) about Inao and other "oldtimers", as we were looking through the pages of the Master's League pages and giggling over the "OMG, this geezer?" factor on many pages. I was even looking at the Fukuoka team page like "Wow, they have Inao as their manager! How cool is that?" (Seriously, if you're a Japanese baseball history nerd, you should go look through the rosters.)

On Sunday, at the Asia Series final, I was looking at my friend Pau's collection of Nostalgic Baseball cards, which is a gorgeous card set overall. One of the cards, of course, is of Inao. We even were talking about Inao for a while, and other "iron man" pitching feats. I don't think either of us knew that he had cancer.

On Tuesday, Inao died at the age of 70.

On Friday, I'm still a little bit stunned when I think about it.

Back when I was first learning about Japanese baseball, I learned about many of the "great" players who did various legendary things. Inao was of course one of the examples of "typical" Japanese pitcher overworking, a guy who was best known for things like personally having a won-loss record of 4-2 in the 1958 Japan Series. (No, really. He pitched 47 out of 62 innings for the Nishitetsu Lions in that series and even hit a walk-off home run in the 5th game.) Inao also co-owns the single-season wins record in Japan, having gone 42-14 in 1961. 42 wins! Pitchers these days don't even make 42 starts in a year! After doing things like regularly pitching 300-400 innings for several years in a row, he inevitably blew out his shoulder and was pretty much done being a legend at the age of 26.

After his playing career was over, he still stayed involved in baseball in various ways. I was rereading Robert Whiting's series of books, and of course they mention that Inao managed for Lotte in the 1980's, and was laid-back and liked to hang out and drink with his players, rather than having a crazy regimen, and this helped guys like Hiromitsu Ochiai flourish with his cocky Triple-Crown-predicting attitude. In a weird chain of events, Inao leaving the Orions and the stricter Aritoh taking over as manager led to Ochiai going off to Chunichi; and perhaps if Ochiai hadn't gone off to Chunichi, he wouldn't have become the Dragons manager in the last few years, and then where would we be?

In some ways, Japan is fortunate that its baseball league is so much younger than the MLB, and thus many of its legends are still alive and still contributing to the game in one way or the other. Thus it's a very sad day when we lose one of them.

Man, I don't even really know what to say. John Vukovich was a player on the Phillies when I was born, came back to them as a coach when I was in elementary school, and has been there ever since. I didn't even know he had a relapse of the brain tumor, and now he's, well, gone.

Jayson Stark, on the other hand, knows what to say. So read his eulogy, because it is good.

The official Phillies site has an announcement of his death, a reprint of a article on Vuke from 2004, and a whole bunch of quotes from baseball people remembering him. They point out that there are only two men in history to wear a Phillies uniform in Connie Mack Stadium, Veterans Stadium, and Citizens Bank Park -- and that'd be Vuke and Bowa. Now *there's* a lifetime with the Phillies.

Bleh.

(EDIT> This might be a good time to join the "Curt Schilling is blogging!" wave by mentioning that he wrote a great entry about Vukovich.)

Johnny Sain dies at 89

I was once at a pub quiz where one of the questions was, "Name one of the 'two days of rain' from the 1948 Boston Braves," and I had to rack my brain for a bit before I came up with Vern Bickford. 60 years later, "Spahn and Sain" is about all anyone remembers about that team, but most people still remember Johnny Sain as the coach who developed pitchers like Whitey Ford, Jim Kaat, and Denny McLain.

Sometimes I wonder whether coaches really make that big a difference on a team's pitching or hitting. But you take a guy like Sain, or current-day Mazzone, and know that there's something special there that sets him apart.

If you saw the news blip that a small plane crashed into an apartment building in NYC today, you might have found that vaguely disturbing.

If you found out that Cory Lidle was the pilot and is now dead, you're probably even MORE disturbed by it.

I don't really know what to say. I know I joked that I disowned him and Bobby Abreu when they were traded to the Yankees, but I always liked him when he pitched for the Phillies, and thought he was pretty dependable if nothing else.

For lack of words, I'm going to leave you with my favorite Cory Lidle memory. Last year at Christmas time, mlb.com did their Holiday Interviews Around The Majors, which was mostly dorky, but I did a blog entry on it and ranked Lidle's to be the second funniest. Infact, any time I see tamales on a menu it actually reminds me of Lidle. No joke.

Lidle enjoys Christmas in California

At the time, that interview completely cracked me up. Now, thinking how his wife and son are on a flight to LA and are going to land and find out about this, I almost want to cry.