How a 20-Year-Old Left-Hander from Japan Rewrote Baseball's Borders

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He sailed to America on a thirteen-day voyage with $400 in his pocket and two dictionaries in his back pockets – one Japanese-to-English, one English-to-Japanese – and the vague understanding that he was going to learn something about baseball before going home.

He never did figure out which pocket to check first. He also never quite made it home on schedule, and the argument over when and whether he would return consumed two leagues, two commissioners, and the better part of two years. By the time it was resolved, the contract dispute involving a twenty-one-year-old relief pitcher had reshaped the relationship between American and Japanese baseball for three decades.

Masanori Murakami did not set out to be a pioneer. He set out to be a better pitcher. Baseball turned him into something much larger than that, and then sent him home before he had a chance to do anything about it.

 "When I was here in '64, I felt like baseball was a little lighter, much more fun. In Japan, there's all this calculation and control and I felt like it was maybe a little bit dark. So here, I had more freedom to play baseball and enjoy it the way that I loved." -- Masanori Murakami

The Voyage
Masanori Murakami was born on May 6, 1944, outside Tokyo. His family wanted him to become a doctor or take over the family business. The Nankai Hawks drafted him out of high school instead, and after one year in the Hawks' minor league system, he was selected for something unusual: a player exchange program with the San Francisco Giants.

He left Yokohama on March 2, 1964 with $400 in his pocket and a basic understanding of English. His ship arrived in San Francisco thirteen days later. Still Alive He was not alone -- two Hawks teammates, Tatsuhiko Tanaka and Hiroshi Takahashi, made the crossing with him. None of them spoke serviceable English. All three reported to the Class-A Fresno Giants to learn American baseball, which was the entire stated purpose of the arrangement.

The arrangement worked out considerably better than anyone had anticipated, and then considerably worse.

Murakami arrived unaware that American baseball players were only paid in-season rather than year-round like in Japan, and his funds quickly dwindled. Still Alive He carried those dictionaries everywhere. He navigated Fresno, California, by pointing at things and checking both pockets. He was nineteen years old and four thousand miles from home.

He was also, almost immediately, the best pitcher in the California League.

Fresno and the Long Road to Shea
Murakami's Fresno numbers were not the work of a developmental prospect learning to adjust to American hitters. He posted an 11-7 record with a 1.78 ERA and 159 strikeouts in 106 innings and was named the California League Rookie of the Year. The Giants' manager called him a scintillating prospect, and Murakami endeared himself to fans by sprinting toward a teammate who made a great catch, doffing his cap and bowing several times. HISTORY

Not everything about Fresno was welcoming. Off the field, Murakami sometimes dealt with racism from teammates and media -- the Fresno newspaper called him the "Nipponese Rally Nipper." HISTORY He absorbed it, kept pitching, and kept winning.

By late August, the San Francisco Giants were in a pennant race and desperate for left-handed relief. They called Murakami up. He had six months of experience in American baseball. He hopped a propeller plane from Fresno to San Francisco, then a jet to New York, then a taxi to the hotel. The 20-year-old took the mound in his major league debut on September 1, 1964, at Shea Stadium in New York, called upon in the eighth inning with the Giants trailing the Mets 4-0. CBS8

The crowd that night was 39,739 people -- roughly 200 times larger than anything Murakami had pitched in front of in Japan.

As he walked from the bullpen, he sang a famous Japanese song called "Sukiyaki" by Kyu Sakamoto -- a melody about a man who looks to the sky so his tears don't fall -- to calm his nerves as he became the first player of Japanese origin to appear in the major leagues. Still Alive

He struck out the first batter he faced.

 As Murakami walked from the bullpen at Shea Stadium for his major league debut, he sang "Sukiyaki" – a Japanese song about a man who looks up at the sky so his tears don't fall

Mashi Mania
In his only inning that first night, he didn't allow a run, struck out two, and gave up a single. He received a standing ovation from the crowd at Shea Stadium. HISTORY The Giants kept him on the roster for the rest of September. He finished 1964 with a 1-0 record, a 1.80 ERA, and 15 strikeouts in 15 innings.

The Bay Area responded with immediate and genuine affection. "Mashi Mania" swept San Francisco. On August 15th the Giants celebrated Masanori Murakami Day, where he was presented with a brand new Datsun from the Kikkoman soy sauce company. As he took the mound, he was greeted by a sea of Japanese flags in the stands. Still Alive Local bars named cocktails after him. Japanese-American fans who had never had reason to see themselves reflected in a major league uniform found one suddenly, unexpectedly.

The "Same! Same!" story circulated through the clubhouse and eventually to the press. Murakami, uncertain how to navigate American restaurants, had taken to following teammate Juan Marichal through dinner. Whatever Marichal ordered, Murakami would tell the waiter "Same! Same!" and point at his plate. It worked reliably until Marichal ordered something Murakami found thoroughly unpleasant, at which point the system required renegotiation.

He was surrounded by greatness and knew it. Willie Mays patrolled center field. Orlando Cepeda played first base. Willie McCovey was in the dugout. Juan Marichal -- the man he ordered dinner by following -- was the ace of the staff. Murakami learned the major leagues in the company of four eventual Hall of Famers, none of whom spoke his language, all of whom respected what he did on the mound.

He told the Sporting News that he had studied the difference between American and Japanese pitching. "I throw a fastball and curve, but no change," he said. "The changeup is no good. Relief pitcher comes in, men are on base. If you throw a change... Boom! Long ball." Baseball Hall of Fame

He understood the game. He was twenty years old.

The Cold War Begins
After the season, Murakami flew to Japan to have his tonsils removed and to visit his family. He did not come back as scheduled.

The Giants had invoked a clause in the original 1964 agreement that gave them the right to purchase the contract of any of the three Japanese players who reached the major leagues, paying $10,000. San Francisco believed this made Murakami their property. The Nankai Hawks believed nothing of the kind. They argued the $10,000 was a performance bonus, not a purchase price, and that the original arrangement had been a loan. Both teams had relied on the same intermediary, a scout named Cappy Harada who worked for both organizations. The Hawks later accused Harada of prioritizing San Francisco's interests over theirs.

The dispute escalated with remarkable speed. Murakami, back in Japan, signed a $40,000 contract with the Hawks -- more than triple what the Giants were offering and an astronomical figure by Japanese baseball standards of the era. He also remained under contract with San Francisco, which he had signed before the tonsil surgery. He now had two valid contracts with two teams in two countries, and neither country was inclined to yield.

MLB Commissioner Ford Frick made the American position clear: the Hawks relented after Frick threatened to end all baseball relations with Japan. Baseball Hall of Fame The commissioner was prepared to cancel the lucrative postseason exhibition tours that American teams ran through Japan each fall, which represented serious money for Japanese baseball. The Hawks argued back that Murakami was a minor under Japanese law -- he was twenty years old -- and that his parents had not co-signed the contract, rendering it legally void.

For months, negotiations went nowhere. Two commissioners, Ford Frick of MLB and Yushi Uchimura of Japanese baseball, eventually hammered out a compromise that satisfied no one fully: Murakami would return to pitch the entire 1965 season for San Francisco, and then go home permanently.

1965: The Last Season
Murakami returned and pitched the best baseball of his major league career. In 45 games, all in relief, he went 4-1 with a 3.75 ERA, walked 22, and struck out 85 in 74.1 innings. His strikeout-per-nine rate of 10.3 would be elite in any era. The Giants finished second in the National League at 95-67, close but not close enough.

That season also produced the Sandy Koufax story that Murakami told for years afterward. He was proud of his hitting ability -- insisted, in fact, that he was a capable hitter who had simply not been given enough opportunity to prove it. Against Koufax, one of the most dominant pitchers in the history of the game, Murakami singled. He brought that story up regularly, with appropriate satisfaction, for the rest of his life.

At the end of the 1965 season, he wrote a letter to Giants owner Horace Stoneham. "I did not realize until my return how much I missed Japan and its ways," Murakami wrote. "The thought of returning to the United States makes me homesick." Baseball Hall of Fame

He was twenty-one years old. He went home.

His career MLB line: 5-1 record. 3.43 ERA. 54 games. 89.1 innings. 100 strikeouts. 1.6 WAR. He struck out 10.1 batters per nine innings. He walked 2.3.

 The Door Closes
The fallout from the Murakami dispute reshaped the relationship between the two leagues for a generation. In 1967, both sides signed a formal working agreement that strictly prohibited MLB teams from signing any player currently under contract in Japan. The intent was to prevent another Murakami situation, and it succeeded. No Japanese player appeared in the major leagues again for thirty years.

Murakami went on to pitch seventeen more seasons in Japan for the Hawks, the Hanshin Tigers, and the Nippon Ham Fighters. In 1968 he went 18-4 with a 2.38 ERA for Nankai -- the best season of a career that lasted, in Japan, until 1982. At thirty-eight, he attempted a comeback with the Giants in spring training 1983. They cut him before the team broke camp.

His name faded from the American baseball conversation almost entirely. "For a long time, he was kind of a footnote in history. He was a trivia-question answer," said biographer Robert Fitts. Time The man who had drawn a sea of Japanese flags at Candlestick Park in 1965 became, for most American baseball fans, a blank.

The Loophole
Thirty years passed.

In 1995, Hideo Nomo was twenty-six years old and one of the best pitchers in Japan, a four-time All-Star with the Kintetsu Buffaloes who had posted back-to-back seasons with over 200 strikeouts. He wanted to pitch in the major leagues. Under the 1967 agreement, he could not. His agent, Don Nomura, and lawyer Jean Afterman studied the agreement carefully.

They found something. The 1967 accord restricted active Japanese players from signing with MLB teams. It said nothing about retired ones. Specifically, the voluntary retirement clause stated that a retired player wishing to return to professional baseball was bound to his original team only if he played in Japan. There was no restriction on playing somewhere else.

To trigger this status, Nomo had to actually retire, which meant deliberately ending his career in Japan with no guarantee the plan would work. Nomura's solution was elegant: Nomo submitted a contract demand to the Buffaloes so outrageous -- a multi-year deal worth $36 million, unheard of in Japanese baseball -- that management would have no choice but to refuse it. When Nomo refused to back down, the Buffaloes placed him on the voluntarily retired list as a punitive measure.

It was exactly what Nomura wanted. Nomo was now legally retired in Japan and a free agent everywhere else. The Los Angeles Dodgers signed him.

Nomo won National League Rookie of the Year in 1995, threw the first of two career no-hitters in 1996, and ultimately played in America for thirteen years. Time His success caused such disruption to Japanese baseball's stability that both leagues created the Posting System in 1998, establishing a formal process for MLB teams to bid for the right to negotiate with Japanese players. The system is still in use today for players like Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto -- men who exist in the major leagues, at least in part, because of what a twenty-year-old lefthander from the Nankai Hawks did at Shea Stadium on September 1, 1964.

What He Was
Robert Fitts, whose biography Mashi recovered Murakami's story for American readers in 2014, put the legacy plainly: Mashi coming over as an exchange student at nineteen and then going all the way to the major leagues showed what potential Japanese baseball had and how far it had come. Time

A Facebook post from a San Francisco native, discovered by Fitts in his research, captured the other half of the story: "I was born and raised in San Francisco and was only 8 years old when he played here. I didn't realize until later in life how important it was to have someone that looked like you playing in a professional sport." Time

He was not the Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball -- the obstacles he faced were contractual and political rather than the systematic exclusion Robinson confronted. But he was, unquestionably, the man who proved Japanese players could compete in the major leagues, who planted the flag that Nomo and Ichiro and Ohtani eventually marched through, and who absorbed a contract dispute not of his making with the dignity of a twenty-one-year-old who understood that something larger than his own career was at stake.

He sang "Sukiyaki" walking in from the bullpen on the biggest night of his life.

He looked up so his tears wouldn't fall.

He struck out the first man he faced.

Career: 5-1 / 3.43 ERA / 106 ERA+ / 100 K in 89.1 IP | First Japanese-born player in MLB history, September 1, 1964