The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [78]
For that, we have to give some background and answer the question in several parts. First, why where there no Japanese players in the majors prior to 1960? Second, why were there no Japanese players outside of Masanori Murakami in the mid-1960s? And third, why did it take more than thirty years after Murakami for the next Japanese player to come to the States and play in the Majors? Incidentally, I compared Nomo (and not Masanori Murakami) to Jackie Robinson because their immediate success paved the way for others in their race to make the Major Leagues. Nomo (and Jackie Robinson) weren’t the first ever but the first in decades, as there were African Americans playing in the Majors almost sixty years before Robinson.
Let’s look at the first question about what took so long. According to Robert Whiting’s 2004 The Samurai Way of Baseball: The Impact of Ichiro and the New Wave From Japan,
By the time the first professional league in Japan had been established in 1936, amateur baseball had a solid grip on the Japanese public. A team of Major Leaguers from the States first toured Japan in 1908. Other tours followed, including one in 1934 that Babe Ruth played in. The team of Americans won all of its sixteen games against a team of former college players, semi-professionals, and high-school players.
It would take years for Japanese players to compete with the Major Leaguers. As late as 1955, when the Yankees made a tour of Japan following their World Series loss to Brooklyn, the team from the United States won every game. Even if a Japanese player had wanted to overcome the language barrier and the increased caliber of competition, there would have been problems with the Japanese players locked into their own reserve clauses.
In 1961, the Tokyo Giants began training in Vero Beach, Florida, the spring training home of the Dodgers. The Tokyo team had a young third baseman, Shigeo Nagashima, that piqued the interest of Dodgers owner Walter O′Malley. Matsutaro Shoriki, the owner of the Giants, had grand illusions of his team soon battling a Major League team in a true World Series, and turned down O′Malley′s advances. Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh, the Japanese home run king, formed the most lethal one-two punch in Japanese baseball history. There was no way that the Giants would have let either of them go.
Hundreds of American players had played in Japan, both before and after World War II. In the early 1960s, Japan became a lucrative market for aging Major Leaguers no longer in demand for their Major League teams. However, traffic the other way was nonexistent, thanks to a combination of NPB contractual restrictions and cultural barriers. The stars had to align for a Japanese player to finally be allowed to wear a Major League uniform. The year it happened was 1964, and the player’s name was Masanori Murakami.
Murakami was a very young left-handed pitcher who pitched in the Minor League system of the Nankai Hawks of the Japanese Pacific League. In 1964, the twenty-year-old Minor Leaguer was sent to America, along with two other young players, to spend the season in the lower Minor Leagues of the San Francisco Giants. It was like an exchange program. He was part of a player exchange agreement, approved by both the American and Japanese baseball commissioners. The Giants organization anticipated that one day they might be able to send players from their minor league farm system to train in Japan, and inserted a standard option clause in the agreement which allowed San Francisco to purchase the contract of any of the Japanese players who made the parent team for only $10,000. The Hawks signed off on this clause, figuring that the odds that any of their players would ever advance out of the Minor Leagues was virtually unthinkable. The three players that