Japanese players have made an indelible impact on Major League Baseball, and nothing could punctuate that fact better than Ichiro Suzuki’s election into the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday.
Ichiro became the first Japanese player chosen to the hallowed shrine on Main Street in Cooperstown, N.Y., elected by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on its annual ballot. He was chosen along with CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner and will be inducted on the stage behind the Clark Sport Center July 27 with the late Dick Allen and Dave Parker. The latter two were elected late last year by the Classic Era Committee.
A consummate hitter, Ichiro led the early surge of baseball players making their way across the Pacific to play in the U.S. Presently, Japanese players draw wildly high salaries and generate significant revenue for their teams; the primary example is Shohei Ohtani, who will undoubtedly join Ichiro in the Hall in the very distant future.
“It’s tremendous,” Fred Claire, the Los Angeles Dodgers general manager from 1987-1998, said Monday in a phone interview. “It’s well deserved and highlights the baseball talent that’s come from Japan. It’s a major, major breakthrough.”
Pitcher Masanori Murakami become the first Japanese player in MLB, signing with the San Francisco Giants in 1964. Thirty years later, Hideo Nomo became the second when Claire signed him to a $2 million minor league contract. In those intervening years, there was no formal scouting of Nippon Professional Baseball players.
“There was a great awareness of the accomplishments of these guys,” Claire, now 89 years old and a survivor of the recent fires that spared his home in Pasadena, Calif., said. “But not much more.”
Scouting in Japan is now extensive. Like scouting across the U.S., every Major League club knows the detail of every Japanese player. And now, talented Japanese players—mostly pitchers—are more commonplace in Major League Baseball. The Dodgers have three: the two-way player Ohtani and pitchers Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki, the latter of whom they just added Friday. But that wasn’t the case in 2001 when Ichiro left Japan after nine productive seasons and signed with the Mariners.
Eight years after Nomo joined the Major Leagues, Ichiro became the first major Japanese position player, signing a three-year, $14 million contract with the Mariners, who had to pay a $13.1 million posting fee to the Orix BlueWave – now the Orix Buffaloes – in Japan’s NPB to obtain his rights.
Ichiro earned $167.2 million during his entire 19-year career in the big leagues.
In comparison, Ohtani signed with the Angels for a $2.31 million signing bonus and $545,000–the Major League minimum in 2018–based on his time in Japan and latter day international signing rules, which also applied to Sasaki.
But after joining the Dodgers last season as a free agent, Ohtani cashed in: 10 years at $700 million, $70 million alone last season—with all except $2 million deferred. Yamamoto signed for 12 years and $325 million, and Sasaki is listed by Spotrac as earning $6.5 million this season out of the Dodgers international signing pool. Last season, according to reports, the Dodgers generated $120 million in revenue and sponsorships from their Japanese player signings.
Ichiro remained with the Mariners until mid-2012 when he was traded to the New York Yankees. After stops in New York and Miami, Ichiro returned to the Pacific Northwest in 2018; he last suited up for the Mariners at the start of the 2019 season, when Seattle played Oakland in Tokyo.
Along the way, he enjoyed 10 consecutive seasons of 200 hits or more, breaking George Sisler’s Major League record of 257 with 262 in 2004. During that period, Ichiro smacked 2,533 of his 3,089 Major League hits, ranking him 25th on MLB’s all-time hits list. Pete Rose, who died last year ostracized by the Hall and still suspended from MLB for gambling on the game, is the all-time Major League leader with 4,256 hits.
Adding his 1,278 hits in nine seasons playing for the BlueWave, Ichiro amassed 4,367 hits as part of a Hall of Fame career on two continents.
Between Ichiro and Ohtani—eventually—there are no other Japanese players to even consider for the Hall of Fame. If Ohtani were to retire in 2033 at the end of his 10-year contract with the Dodgers, he wouldn’t be eligible for the BBWAA ballot until the Class of 2039 at the earliest, per long-standing rules for Hall of Fame election that state a player must be retired for five years to qualify.
Hideki Matsui might have been an option, but he was 29 already when he left the Yomiuri Giants in 2003 to sign with the Yankees, playing the first seven of his 10 MLB seasons in New York. Nicknamed “Godzilla” for his size and power, Matsui hit 175 home runs in the U.S. and 332 more in Japan for a very Hall of Fame worthy 507 homers. He was also MVP of the 2009 World Series when the Yankees defeated Philadelphia in six games, the last time the Yanks won it.
But writers didn’t see it that way, giving him just 0.9% of the vote in 2018, the only year he was on the BBWAA ballot. A candidate needs at least 5% to carry over. He has 10 shots at it.
The Yankees have long been at the forefront of signing Japanese players. The Yanks at one time or another had Hideki Irabu, Masahiro Tanaka, Hiroki Kuroda, Matsui and Ichiro. The late Irabu actually amassed 24 wins for the Yankees teams that won the World Series in 1998 and 1999.
Tanaka had 78 wins after the Yankees signed him in 2014 to a seven-year, $155 million contract at 25. Elbow problems from overuse in Japan caused his MLB tenure to end after seven years.
The Dodgers, like the Yankees, have also long mined Japan for players, and that’s evident by their recent spate of free agent Japanese signings, as mentioned earlier. Claire credits that approach to the club’s legendary Hall of Fame owner Walter O’Malley back in the 1960s. The Dodgers currently have a huge presence in Japan, which began to take shape under O’Malley.
“He helped draw attention to baseball in Japan,” Claire said. “He was a true visionary.”
That vision has borne fruit, with a trio of Dodgers star Japanese players on the current roster and Ichiro joining the Hall of Fame.
