Sadaharu Oh

Japanese baseball player

• Born: May 10, 1940
• Place of Birth: Tokyo, Japan

With 868 career home runs, Oh hit more home runs than any other professional baseball player worldwide while a member of the Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants in the Central League in Japan. When he retired, he also held the Japanese career records in runs batted in (RBIs), runs scored, and total bases. Philosophically and psychologically, Oh was dedicated to Japanese self-discipline and the martial arts, which served him well as a player and, later, a manager.

Early Life

Sadaharu Oh (sah-dah-hah-rew oh) was born on May 20, 1940, in Sumida-ku, a ward of Tokyo, Japan. His father was a Chinese immigrant who owned a restaurant. During World War II (1939–45), which saw Japan fight the United States, China, and other Allied powers, his father was imprisoned for several months and permanently scarred during questioning as a possible Chinese agent. Oh would remain a Chinese national even though he was raised as a speaker of Japanese only, and he gained permanent working rights in Japan. His heritage and the availability of food gave him the size (five-feet-ten and 175 pounds) that made him relatively tall for Japanese players and certainly contributed to his power hitting.

The family survived the fire-bombing of Tokyo, though their restaurant was destroyed and had to be reestablished after the war. During the occupation, Oh’s elder brother, a star on an amateur baseball team, introduced him to baseball. Since he had never seen a left-handed batter, Oh first batted right-handed even though he pitched left-handed. When Oh was in the eighth grade, he was converted to a left-handed batter at the suggestion of Hiroshi Arakawa, a major league outfielder.

Oh’s father had high ambitions for his sons. The eldest son became a medical doctor, and Oh was being prepared for a career as an engineer. He did not, however, make a high enough score on the entrance exam to get into the exclusive local high school and instead was accepted at Waseda Commercial High School, far across the city. High school baseball has been one of the major sporting events in Japan, and Waseda always had a good team. Oh was persuaded, as a highly rated young player, to travel long hours to and from school to participate.

The climax of the high school baseball season each year was the National High School Tournament at Koshien Stadium in Osaka. Fifty thousand spectators watched each game and each game was nationally telecast. In 1956, Waseda reached the national finals for the seventeenth time in thirty-eight years. The team won its first game, but Oh, the starting pitcher in the second game, did not pitch well and the team was eliminated. The next year, Waseda reached the finals again, and this time Oh was the team’s only pitcher. He had two badly injured fingers on his pitching hand with deep blisters that bled as he pitched. He managed to pitch three straight complete games to reach the climactic game. Before the final game, his hand lost some of its sense of touch, but it still was painful for him to grasp the ball. Just when Oh thought that he might not be able to pitch, his father arrived with a special herbal remedy, which worked. Oh won the final game 4–2 and was lauded by the newspapers for his fighting spirit.

Soon after Oh’s display of fortitude, however, he was refused the right to participate in the Kokutai (National Amateur Athletic Competition) because he was a Chinese national. In his last year in school, Waseda was beaten in its last game in Tokyo and failed to reach the Koshien tournament.

Life’s Work

In 1959, Oh joined the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo, signing a bonus contract for sixty thousand yen after a bidding war in which considerably higher sums were offered by other teams. He began practice as an eighteen-year-old rookie on the veteran team of the Japanese leagues and was almost overwhelmed by all the activity, particularly since Shigeo Nagashima, a college graduate and the most popular player in Japanese baseball history, had enjoyed a brilliant rookie year in 1958. Quickly, Oh earned a reputation for being very hardworking, even in comparison to the Japanese players, all of whom worked much longer hours than the American players in the Japanese leagues. During the first year, he lived in the dormitory for younger players. Often he practiced from 8:00 a.m. until noon with them and in the afternoon with the Giants, then played in a game in the evening. Throughout his career, he never took less than forty minutes of batting practice on a game day and carefully drank a secret blend of Korean ginseng before each game.

During his first year Oh had a batting average of just .161, with only seven home runs and twenty-five RBIs ninety-four games, making the Giants’ decision to convert him to a first baseman seem quite questionable. Though he played poorly, it was prophetic that his first hit was a home run. The next year he did improve to .270, with seventeen home runs and seventy-one RBIs, leading the league in bases on balls (walks) for the first of nineteen times. The third year, Oh slumped again to .253, with only thirteen home runs and fifty-three RBIs.

In the spring of 1962, Manager Kawakami of the Giants hired Hiroshi Arakawa as Oh’s batting coach. For the next nine years, Arakawa would almost completely dominate Oh’s life. He had been told to turn Oh into a .280 hitter with twenty home runs a year, a goal that Arakawa considered modest from the start. The training regimen established included work in traditional Japanese martial arts and philosophy and orders to give up visiting the bars in the Ginza and all tobacco products. Then began intensive instruction for both of them in Zen and in the martial art called Aikido, the latter under the direction of the founder of the school Ueshiba. Aikido is based on the idea that the power of the opponent is absorbed and put to one’s own use. Arakawa would always emphasize that Oh should use this technique with a pitcher, so that each at bat would be like a samurai sword fight or a sumo wrestling match, a battle between two individuals that affects all that is around them.

Arakawa also began instructing Oh in his theory of hitting, which was down swinging, or hitting downward through the ball, so that is was met at the nadir of the swing as it started upward, with the wrists exploding forward after contact was made. Moving pictures of Oh after he established his style show a swing that looks remarkably like that of a professional golfer with an elaborate backswing, downswing through the ball, and a high follow-through. The wrist explosion technique is very similar to the technique of Hank Aaron, the great American home run hitter.

Even with Arakawa’s help, the early part of 1962 was a disaster for Oh. Then, in June, Arakawa ordered Oh to bat one-footed, holding his right, or front, foot off the ground. It was an extreme measure to solve a hitch, a double back-swing, that Oh had developed. Because he would have fallen down if he tried a double back-swing, it worked. He got a single and a home run the first two at bats, and Oh’s famous “flamingo,” or scarecrow, stance was born. By the end of the year, Oh was hitting .272 and led the league in home runs (38), games played (134), runs scored (79), total bases (281), RBI (95), walks (84), and intentional walks (9). It was a stunning turnaround. The Giants developed the so-called O-N cannon, the middle of the order for the Giants featuring first baseman Oh and third baseman Nagashima. They were the equivalent of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig for the New York Yankees of American professional baseball, completely dominating the batting crowns for Japan’s leagues.

From 1962 to 1979, Oh dominated Japanese baseball, leading the league each year in at least one, and usually several, categories. He was extremely durable, playing every game in eleven of his twenty-two years and never missing more than ten games in a season. He led the league in home runs thirteen straight times and fifteen in total. In 1964, he hit 55 home runs in a 140-game season, equal to Ruth’s pace in his 60 in 154 games. From 1962 to 1980, he never hit less than thirty home runs in a season, including two other fifty-plus seasons and ten more in the forties.

In the same years that he led in home runs, Oh also led the league in runs scored, thus benefiting from Nagashima’s RBIs ability. Oh himself led the league in RBIs thirteen times, including a run of eight straight as Nagashima aged and retired. Oh also led the league in walks nineteen out of twenty-two years, including sixteen years in intentional walks. This occurred because of his fearsome reputation and his excellent eye. He was often compared to hitting great Ted Williams for his refusal to swing at a ball that was out of the strike zone. Surprisingly, Oh never led the league in strikeouts, and, as he matured, his strikeouts decreased. Five times he hit more home runs than he struck out, a very unusual feat for a power hitter in any league. He also led in total bases twelve times, in hits three times, and in doubles once.

The most underrated part of Oh’s game was his fielding. Nine times he won the award for best defensive player as the first baseman with the highest fielding average, and his career fielding average was .994. He was the Gil Hodges of Japan, a fine power hitter who was slow afoot but graceful and quick and so knowledgeable about the game that he almost never made an error. However, in Oh’s autobiography, or in any other publication in English, this inherent knowledge about the game and his graceful defense are not mentioned. Philosophically, Oh was a hitter who played first base so that he would be allowed to hit.

From 1965 to 1973, the Giants won both the Central League pennant and the Japan Series, the longest run of success in Japanese baseball history, even surpassing the runs of the great Yankee teams of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1973 and 1974, Oh reached his zenith with back-to-back triple crowns, leading the league both times in home runs, RBIs, and batting average, something no other player has ever done in any league.

By 1975, Oh’s goal became to surpass Ruth in home runs and, if possible, his friend Aaron, who was still playing and with whom Oh put on some famous home run exhibition contests. On October 11, 1976, Oh hit home run number 715, surpassing Ruth. In the same month, Aaron retired, giving Oh a definite goal for the overall record. On September 3, 1977, Oh hit his 756th home run, surpassing Aaron. There was a tremendous outpouring of acclaim, particularly throughout Asia, where he was seen as a continent-wide hero. By the time Oh retired, he had hit 868 home runs with an average of one home run to every 10.7 at bats, a better average than either Ruth or Aaron. He had been an All Star for eighteen years and most valuable player in Japan’s Central League nine times.

When Oh began to have vision and coordination problems, he tailed off to .236 in 1980, though he still hit thirty home runs. He had accumulated 2,786 hits with a lifetime batting average of .301. Oh also played 110 exhibition games, achieving an overall batting average of .260 in 338 at-bats and 25 home runs. His home run performance in Japan’s all-star games also was impressive, 13 in 188 at-bats, although his batting average was only .213. He retired at the end of the year and was named assistant manager of the Giants. At the end of the 1983 season, he became the team’s manager.

Oh’s managerial style was a combination of Japanese hard work and discipline with the understanding of how to use star players to the best of their ability. Originally, like so many other all-stars who became managers, he had problems, but in 1988 he led the Giants to their first pennant in several years and appeared to have built another dynasty. At that point he left baseball until 1998, when he became manager of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. With the Hawks he won three Pacific League championships in 1999, 2000, and 2003 and the Japan Series in 1999 and 2003. In 2006 he led the Japan national team in the World Baseball Classic, which defeated the Cuban team for the overall victory. Controversy troubled his tenure with the Hawks. He was accused of ordering his pitchers to walk players on other teams who threatened to surpass his 55-home run single-season record; all of them were foreign players: Randy Bass in 1985, Karl Rhodes in 2001, and Alex Cabrera in 2002. Rhodes, an American, and Cabrera, a Venezuelan, ended up tying Oh’s record. In 2013, Wladimir Balentien broke Oh's single-season home-run record, finishing with 60.

In December, 2001, Oh’s wife, Kyoko, died of stomach cancer (the couple had three daughters). He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2006, and in July he took a leave of absence for treatment. The stomach tumor and one infected lymph node were surgically removed, and Oh returned to his duties as general manager and vice president of the Hawks.

When Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants hit home run number 756 in August, 2007, surpassing Aaron’s American record, Oh was quick to announce his admiration for Bonds’s achievement. He told a reporter, “Hitting home runs requires tenacity and passion for baseball while overcoming hardship, and I want to congratulate him from the bottom of my heart.” Although Bonds had surpassed Aaron's American record, Oh remained the global world record holder in home runs, with a career total of 868.

Because of his health issues, Oh was unable to manage the Japanese national team either the 2009 or 2013 World Baseball Classic, though he did throw the ceremonial first pitch of the tournament in 2013 at the Yahoo Dome in Fukuoka. In 2009, he was honored in Taiwan, his ancestral homeland, with the Taiwanese Order of the Brilliant Star.

Oh remained active in Japanese professional baseball throughout the remainder of the 2010s and into the 2020s. He remained chairman of the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, although he had stepped down as the team's manager in 2008. During the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, which were held in 2021 after a delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oh was part of a group that carried the Olympic torch into the stadium. Oh also remained involved in charitable efforts, namely the World Children's Baseball Fair (WCBF), an annual international summer baseball camp he founded with Aaron in 1988.

Significance

By consensus, Oh was the greatest player in Japanese baseball history, whom all observers agree could have been a star in the American major leagues. His legacy includes dozens of record-making feats. He hit more home runs than any other player in organized baseball while playing twenty-two years with the Yomiuri Giants. Of those home runs, 191 flew 394 feet or more, and 286 traveled between 361 feet and 394 feet; such distance would have guaranteed him home runs over the right field fence (his favored direction) in almost any baseball park in the world during his career.

When Oh retired, he also held the Japanese career records in RBIs, runs scored, and total bases as well as the second highest marks in doubles and games played. Oh was included in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994. Based largely on the type of career he might have had on an American professional team, some players believe he also should be inducted into American baseball’s National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

No player dominated an organized baseball league so completely as did Oh for such a long period. Ruth won twelve home run titles, Aaron won four, and Bonds only two, but Oh won that title in the Central League fifteen times. His career RBIs total of 2,170 was even more astounding: He won the title thirteen times. Oh won the most valuable player award nine times; only Bonds comes close to that record, with seven.

Philosophically and psychologically, Oh’s dedication to Japanese self-discipline and martial arts was quite significant in enhancing not only his own reputation but also that of those aspects of life. At the same time, though, his status as a Chinese national remained one of the principal symbols of the Japanese internationalization movement. Nothing can be more symbolic of the tremendous popularity that Oh, more than any other player and manager, brought to Japanese baseball than the Tokyo Dome, which opened in the spring of 1988. The dome can be considered the “house that Oh built.”

Bibliography

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McCallum, Jack, and Richard O’Brien. “Hall Oh Fame.” Sports Illustrated (1997).

NcNeil, William F. Baseball’s Other All-Stars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Nagano, Miho. "Sadaharu Oh Was a Major Hit." Investor’s Business Daily 7 May 2009: n.pag. Business Source Complete. Web. 11 Dec. 2013.

Oh, Sadaharu, and David Falkner. Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball. New York: Times, 1984.

Rappoport, Ken. Baseball's Top Ten Home Run Hitters. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2011.

Wallace, Bruce. "Home Run King and Gentleman." The Los Angeles Times, 4 Jul. 2007, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jul-04-sp-oh4-story.html. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Whiting, Robert. The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: Baseball Samurai Style. New York: Dodd, 1977.

"Why and How WCBF Was Founded." World Children's Baseball Foundation, wcbf.or.jp/aboutwcbf. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.