Agate Type

“jap mikado”

I happened across this discussion (from three years ago) of the first Japanese baseball player to play professionally in the United States.  No, it wasn’t Hideo Nomo; nor was it Masanori Murakami, the San Francisco Giants’ reliever from the 1960s.  We’re not talking first major league player, or even first minor leaguer; but first professional, period.

Apparently it was a man named Goro Mikami.  To quote from one of the posts :

“He was from Kofu, Yamanashi, and played on a university team that toured the U.S. He liked his time in the U.S., and enrolled at a university in the U.S. where he could continue to play ball as well as study.”

This post goes on to note that his nickname in the U.S. was (ridiculously, but not surprisingly) “Jap Mikado.”  Another post (by somebody else) says that he played 1914-15 for the “All-Nations” team, which they identify as the team that “eventually became the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League.”

Just before I came across this thread I had seen, while looking for something else, a box score in the August 5, 1916, Chicago Defender for a game between the Bacharach Giants and the “All-Nations” club of New York City.  Here it is:

There is Mikami, leading off and playing second, along with “Red Cloud” in right and “Hong Long” on the mound.  This is a very early edition of the Bacharachs, by the way; in fact, 1916 was the year in which black Atlantic City businessmen brought the Duvall Giants of Jacksonville, Florida, north, and renamed them after Harry Bacharach, mayor of Atlantic City.  (The game story refers to the team as the “Mayor’s Giants” and the “Mayor’s Pets.”)

After a little searching on ProQuest, I discovered that Mikami first came to the United States when Waseda University’s team toured in 1911.  After graduating from Waseda, he came to the United States and enrolled at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  He joined the baseball team and eventually became its captain.  The Chicago Tribune actually printed a short feature article on him in 1915, complete with photo (they spell his last name “Mikanie” and “Mikanio”).  He was supposed to be a member of the class of 1917 at Knox; his appearance with the All-Nations of New York in 1916 may mean that he left college to play baseball professionally.

Anyway, Bob Whiting (who has written several books on Japanese baseball) says in the thread about Mikami that the Japanese baseball historian Kazuo Sayama has a book in Japanese called “The Mystery of Japan Mikado” (1997).  (Very little, if any, Japanese baseball scholarship has been translated into English, by the way.)

Mikami’s All Nations team was not the same as J. L. Wilkinson’s All Nations club.  In fact, I know of three teams called “All Nations” at around the same time: Wilkinson’s, based at first in Iowa and later in Kansas City, which was the most famous, featuring John Donaldson, José Méndez, and Cristóbal Torriente; another one in Chicago around 1918, which featured Stanley Beckwith, brother of John; and Mikami’s team, based in New York.  I don’t know of any formal connection between them; Wilkinson’s success with the formula probably just spawned imitators.

UPDATE 9/22/2007 Check out Goro Mikami’s draft card.

sayonara home run!

Sayonara Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card
By John Gall and Gary Engel (Chronicle Books)

This is a truly beautiful book that introduces a world of baseball art only rarely glimpsed in the United States.  Japanese baseball cards mostly evolved out of cards manufactured for a children’s game called menko (the name has become attached to the cards themselves, also).  Colorful, sometimes crude, other times finely detailed and nuanced, drawn in styles ranging from the cartoonish to the realistic, these cards came in different sizes and shapes (some are round, some in the shapes of airplanes, some are masks).  Cards from the pre-World War II era and from the 1950s and 60s evoke a technicolor alternate universe of baseball superheroes; after that, Japanese cards unfortunately began to imitate their blander American counterparts.

Most pre-war cards seem to have depicted the popular university teams like Waseda and Keio, but there were amateur clubs, too, like the Mita Club, a team made up of Keio University graduates (shown in the round menko below).  In 1922 Mita won a famous 9 to 3 victory over a touring team of American professionals that included Casey Stengel, George Kelly, Luke Sewell, and Waite Hoyt on the mound. Lefthander Michimaro Ono gave up only five hits for Mita, and his battery mate Zensuke Shimada hit a key home run off Hoyt to seal the victory.

On the subject of Japanese baseball: I’m always interested in origins and obscure prehistories, so I was interested to discover (not in this book, actually) that professional baseball in Japan actually predates the 1934 founding of the team that became the Yomiuri Giants.  I scoured the paltry information on Japanese baseball history available in English on the web, and came up with the following, combining several different sources:

In 1920, Kiyoshi Oshikawa founded the Nihon Undo Kyokai, a.k.a. Shibaura Undo Kyokai (Shibaura Association), with the help of Atsushi Kono, a former pitcher at Waseda University who had captained that team on a tour of the U.S. in 1905.  (Shibaura is a district in Tokyo.) By 1921, according to one source, there were four professional clubs in Japan. I’ve only found the name of one other professional club for certain, Tensho Yakyudan.  Apparently most of them disbanded in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Shibaura club’s ballpark being confiscated by the government to use for relief efforts.  After this, the club moved to the Takarazuka prefecture in the west, where it became the Takarazuka Undo Kyokai.  It lasted until 1929, when it disbanded due to the Depression.  One source says there was actually a professional league that played, off and on, from 1920 to 1929.

Some useful links:

SABR's Asian Baseball Committee

Japanese Hall of Fame

JapaneseBaseball.com