There are currently 12 Japanese players in Major League Baseball (MLB) and their rarity results in significant attention. However, 23 of the 59 Japanese MLB players in the past only played for one or two years or were on the disabled list for most of their tenure and only actively played in one or two seasons.
So, the question remains: Is all the attention they get deserved or are they overhyped?
A giant first step
The first Japanese player to play in MLB was Masanori Murakami, a relief pitcher for the San Francisco Giants from 1964 to 1965. He pitched in 54 games with good enough performance that the Giants initially refused the order from his Japanese team for him to return after his first season there. After some negotiations, the Japanese baseball commissioner allowed the Giants to keep him for one more season.
'The Tornado'
Another Japanese player wouldn’t join the MLB for another 30 years.
Hideo Nomo, nicknamed “The Tornado” due to his unique twisting pitching style, was one of Japan’s top pitchers, so his team wasn’t happy to see him go. However, the ¥200 million signing bonus was too much to resist. Nomo was a popular player in MLB, pitching there from 1995-2005. His MLB salary peaked in 2004 at ¥973 million, and his performance was often good, winning over 10 games in seven out of his 11 seasons.
Historically, salaries in MLB have always been significantly higher than in Japan. In 2023, the average salary in Japan was ¥44.68 million. The MLB’s average salary was 10 times higher. This huge discrepancy in salary is a factor that has led the MLB to poach some of Japan’s best players.
A preference for Japanese arms
Ten of the MLB’s current 12 players are actually pitchers (excluding two-way player Ohtani).
Japan’s smaller strike zone may have something to do with this since pitchers in Japan need to be highly accurate, and they thus develop very high skills. Also, Japanese players being shorter and having less muscle in general leads to less of a pool to choose from regarding big sluggers.
Of the 59 players who came to MLB in the past, 43 were pitchers.
Major and minor letdowns
Major league baseball usually attracts Japan’s best, but one player who came over left many people scratching their heads. Besides his defensive skills, fashion sense and dazzling smile, Tsuyoshi Shinjo (2001-2003) was not an exceptional player in Japan or America. Mac Suzuki (1996-2002), Kei Igawa (2007-2008) and Masao Kida (1999-2005) didn’t fare much better in MLB.
Then there’s Hideki Irabu (1997-2002). During his six MLB seasons, he only had two in which he won more than 10 games. However, both of these seasons were with the World Series champion New York Yankees. Irabu was not a popular player and was known for his weight problem, smoking cigarettes between innings and drunken brawls. Sadly, Irabu committed suicide at the age of 42.
The biggest disappointment of all was Daisuke Matsuzaka. The Red Sox acquired him for a then astounding $51 million bid and he played in MLB from 2007-2014. While he lived up to the hype with decent results in 2007 and an amazing 2008 season, injuries led him to miss most games from 2009 to 2014. As for the games he did pitch during his last six years, his results were quite poor. Thus, he is probably the highest profile Japanese player with the most disappointing performance.
“Ohtani has 38 wins, so he is 7.5% of the way there, but would you be considered as having the potential to be the best of all time at anything if you still had 92.5% to go?”
Tail end stats
Sometimes it's unfair to judge Japanese players by traditional standards. Hideki Matsui’s stats in Japan were amazing, but they were just decent in MLB. “Godzilla” was a power hitter, once hitting 50 home runs in Japan in a season. However, in 10 seasons in MLB, he only hit over 30 homers once. He did get over 100 RBIs in four seasons, had a decent .282 MLB average and was a clutch player, though.
Yu Darvish is also similarly difficult to place. His first three seasons in MLB were very good, but he’s been somewhat inconsistent since then. However, he put up very impressive numbers in 2020 and 2022. Granted, he did spend his best years in Japan and nearly all pitchers struggle later in their careers due to injury or aging.
You can say the same for Kenta Maeda, Hisashi Iwakuma, Masahiro Tanaka, Hiroki Kuroda and Koji Uehara. All excellent pitchers in MLB, albeit with some performance limitations due to injury or age-related issues.
The next GOAT?
No player has created as much excitement as Shohei Ohtani has since the 1998 race to break Roger Maris’ home run record by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Many people even say he has the potential to become the greatest of all time. But is it too soon to tell?
Regarding home runs, let’s compare Ohtani’s numbers with Hank Aaron’s. Aaron averaged 37 homers per season. While Ohtani has a similar average of 39, Aaron did that for over two decades. Ohtani must keep it up for another 15 years to catch up.
Ohtani deserves a lot of attention because he can not only hit but also pitches superbly. Cy Young is the pitching wins record holder with 511. Ohtani has 38 wins, so he is 7.5% of the way there, but would you be considered as having the potential to be the best of all time at anything if you still had 92.5% to go?
So, although Ohtani’s performance has been amazing so far, and his ability to both hit and pitch is ultra rare, it’s still quite early in his career.
And the pendulum swings
Let’s talk about a bona fide GOAT. One of the greatest contact hitters of all time, Ichiro Suzuki got 3,089 hits in 18 years in the majors.
If you add his hits from his nine seasons in Japan, Ichiro would be the all-time hit leader of the world. Interestingly, his unorthodox swing (nicknamed “pendulum”) was unacceptable to his manager in Japan, who kept him in the minors for his first two years due to it. Perhaps the rigidity of Japanese baseball is another reason why some of Japan’s best players hop the pond.
Japanese players in MLB surely bring their best, whether they’re successful or not. The fact that most are pitchers who spent their primes in Japan is an important factor to consider when judging their performance. The plain fact is nearly all pitchers experience injury and lose velocity later in their careers. Regardless, Japanese players are not just athletes — they are also like bridges between two cultures.
Their journey is more than miles: it’s a testament to the universal language of baseball.
Dr. James Rogers is a university professor who has published books and over 50 articles on linguistics and Japanese studies. He is the author of the book "On Living and Working in Japan."
© Japan Today
16 Comments
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shogun36
Irabu was the worst.
“who these Padres? I only play for Yankees!”
and then proceeded to be sub par……
Gene Hennigh
Cy Young had 511 wins. Walter Johnson had 417.
From The Hurricane to Ichiro to Shohei Ohtani, Japanese players have been mostly good to great. The hype? Well, the three I mentioned were not over-hyped but underhyped. Ichiro is a first ballet Hall of Famer. The way he's going, pitching or not. Ohtani will make it, too.
Moderator: Thanks for pointing out the mistake. It has been corrected.
rainyday
This is a pretty egregious error, Cy Young won 511 games, not 417.
Also even if that was correct, its kind of meaningless to compare Ohtani’s career home run and win totals to Aaron’s and Young’s. It should be blatantly obvious that a guy who has only played for a few years hasn’t accumulated anywhere near as many career totals as guys who played for more than twenty (especially irrelevant in the case of Young, who last played more than a century ago and whose record has been rendered unbreakable due to changes in the game since then).
While its equally obvious that talk of Ohtani being the GOAT is way premature, I also don’t know of anyone who seriously thinks that accumulated career stats are a way of evaluating that anyway. As a two way phenom its hard to compare, Ruth is the only similar player in that regard but he is in a category of his own.
Moderator: Thanks for pointing out the mistake. It has been corrected.
ak
Irabu killed himself??? I had no idea! Jesus!
kohakuebisu
Matsuzaka was overpitched as a schoolkid, whole games with extra innings on consecutive days! There are stricter rules about it now, so hopefully the next generation of Japanese pitchers will get off easier.
Japanese pitchers breaking down after two or three seasons in MLB is a known problem and has been written about before.
Moonraker
Provocative headline.
Give this a downvote to disagree with it.
rainyday
This is a minor nitpick, but to fully correct the error you also have to adjust the numbers in the following sentence since the math with the correct 511 wins works out differently. He is about 7.5% of the way to 511 wins (versus 9% of the way to the incorrect 417 wins).
rainyday
Its a bit frustrating that the article poses an interesting question like this, but doesn't give us a straightforward answer to it.
In order to answer it you really have to know what the basis of comparison is (over-hyped compared to players from other countries? Or over-hyped compared to the overall pool of players in MLB).
If its the latter, then out of a pool of 71 former and current Japanese players you have:
1 sure-fire Hall of Famer (Ichiro)
1 current player building a HOF career (Ohtani)
3 guys with arguable "Hall of Very Good" cases (Hideki Matsui, Darvish, Nomo)
9 out of 18 position players with more than 500 career games played.
25 out of 53 pitchers with more than 100 appearances.
The above population looks about average in comparison to all MLB players, maybe slightly better but not remarkably so. If Ohtani ends up making Cooperstown (he's still a few solid years from that standard) it'll be 2 HOFers out of 71, which is a higher proportion than MLB players in general, but its a small sample size. The average MLB career is a little over 5 years and that seems about the average for Japanese players in MLB too.
In terms of "hype" though one also has to account for the fact that almost all Japanese players come to MLB mid-career after several seasons in NPB so they are distinct from most other MLB players who came up through the minors (or in some cases out of college or from Korea or other countries). Japanese players thus probably get more attention than your average rookie. This is a hard point to compare since there aren't statistics about "hype". One can certainly point to a lot of guys who received a lot of media attention and then completely failed to live up to expectations (Irabu), but there are an endless supply of similar stories about up and coming players from the minors or college you could say the same about (Todd van Poppel, etc). I'm not sure Japanese players fail to meet expectations at a higher rate than their counterparts from other countries, likely they have about the same success/failure rate.
collegepark30349
rainyday is spot on with the analysis.
Take a look at the drafts in any professional sports. Very few first and second round picks have Hall of Fame careers. Some have solid, All-pro careers, some become journeymen, and some wash out. On the other hand, some late round or undrafted players become All-pro or make it to the Hall of Fame. The same with the Japanese players going to the Majors. I think it will get better as time goes on - less hype, more solid careers. Similar to Europeans in the NBA. They were considered "over hyped" in the late 80s and early 90s. Two years ago three made it to the Hall of Fame (Gasol, Nowitzki, Parker) and this year's All NBA first team was 4/5 foreign born.
Ichiro is a generational talent and would have been great in any league in any era.
Hideki Matsui would have been great if he were not so broken down when he got there and then broke his arm in his third year.
Daisuke Matsuzaka liked beer and fast food to much - look at his body between his rookie year with Boston and his final one.
The guys that impressed me the most were So Taguchi and Shigetoshi Hasegawa. Put their heads down, paid their dues (minors for Taguci), then became role players and eventually had solid careers with All-Star game appearances and a World Series ring for Taguchi.
Mocheake
Mostly over hyped. One bona fide hall of famer. One on that trajectory. A few good ones but mostly average to below average. That's being overshadowed now by Ohtani's greatness but just remember that Babe Ruth had over 100 wins and his lifetime batting average was .342. Very few hitters nowadays can hit that in a season much less a career and add in the over 700 home runs he hit. Pump the brakes on that comparison and it's all just recency bias anyway. He's not close yet to being in the company of guys like Aaron, Mays, Mantle, Bonds and Ted Williams.
rainyday
This is more or less true, but if you took a randomized group of 71 non-Japanese current and former players in MLB you'd probably find about the same mix (maybe with a lower proportion of stars), so I don't know if I agree that Japanese players are over-hyped. Some certainly are of course, but American players also get over-hyped quite often too.
I basically agree with this, but I think the question of whether Ohtani is being over-hyped is distinct from the question of whether Japanese players in general are over-hyped. Ohtani is kind of treated as being in a unique category of his own in most fan's minds and its certainly not the expectation that every Japanese player is going to be like him (the same way nobody expects every American player to be the next Ruth or Aaron, etc).
John Wellington
Exactly! Give the guy a chance before everyone ends up jinxing him. No one seems to be talking about the pressure Ohtani is under. They said the same thing about Griffey Jr. when he was young ("next best of all time"). A lot of people don't even know that he actually tried to kill himself in 1988. I think the pressure is even worse for Ohtani now because of his rare skill set. In the end, injuries mostly led Griff to becoming just one of the greats of all time, but certainly not the greatest.
rainyday
Yeah, but Ohtani is almost 30 years old so probably way better at handling pressure than Griffey was in 1988 when he was still a teenager.
And the early pressure Griffey was under had no bearing on his success, he was probably the best non-PED linked position player of his generation and it was only injuries much later in his career after he went to the Reds that blunted his career totals (a bit, 630 home runs is still massively impressive), not anything related to that early pressure.
John Wellington
So sure? Could you see into his head? His first 4 seasons he didn't hit over 30 homers. Perhaps he WAS feeling pressure and that's why. Or perhaps he was just getting his stride. No one can know unless Griffey himself said so. Plus, many people don't like to admit such things anyway. At any age being considered potentially to be the best of all time and being a country's pride and joy can get to anyone. 30 is still pretty young, too. Most guys are still pretty immature at that age.
rainyday
Of course not. I'm not meaning to downplay the stress Griffey was under, I'm just saying he was an exceptional player throughout the 90s who obviously didn't let it stop him.
That is an extremely arbitrary piece of selective evidence to base your argument on. He might not have hit 30 home runs in his first 4 seasons (neither did Barry Bonds BTW), but except for his rookie season in 1989 he hit over 20 home runs, batted over .300, made the All Star team and won Gold Gloves in all of those seasons (and he topped 100 RBI in his 3rd and 4th years too). He was a tremendous success pretty much from the day he played his first game in the majors.
Also Gr
True, but he's been under the intense spotlight and pressure for more than a decade now, so if it was going to get to him it probably would have already. Obviously I'm not in his head, but it seems he's figured out a way to deal with it without it affecting his play.
1glenn
Seems to me that Japan has been sending their best pitchers over here. No complaints from me! I have had the pleasure to watch Ohtani pitch, hit, and run, and was very impressed.