RIP Bob Horner

Bob Horner passed away yesterday at the age of 68 years old.  Horner was a star player at Arizona State in the 1970's, winning the first ever Golden Spikes award in 1978.  He was the number one overall pick in the MLB draft that year and was immediately put on the Atlanta Braves' major league roster, skipping the minor leagues entirely.  He'd hit 23 home runs in just over half a season and was named National League Rookie Of The Year.  He'd would team up with with Dale Murphy to be a deadly middle of the lineup combination for much of the next nine seasons in Atlanta, hitting 215 home runs over that time span.  And then, in 1987, Bob Horner went to play in Japan.

Horner had become a free agent following the 1986 season and wanted a contract for $2 million.  No major league team would offer him that but the Yakult Swallows did.  Horner signed and headed overseas.

A major league star at the peak of his career signing with a Japanese club was unheard of at the time (and pretty much still is).  These were the days of Japan's global economic dominance and it seemed like it was just another example of the Japanese buying up everything.  Robert Whiting used Horner's signing and experience playing in Japan as the opening chapter in his 1988 book "You Gotta Have Wa" and put the signing in context:

Japan was at the height of its economic muscle.  Japanese interests owned 54 percent of all the cash in the world's banks, 65 percent of all Manhattan real estate, and 3 percent of the entire U.S. national debt.  A staid Japanese insurance company had paid 39 million dollars for Van Gogh's painting Sunflower.

And now, in what one TV commentator had called the piece de resistance, a Japanese baseball team had outbid the American major leagues for a prime American player: James Robert Horner.

What Whiting didn't know or account for at the time was that the main reason the Swallows were able to sign Horner was that the major league owners were illegally conspiring to not sign each other's players.  Almost no free agents changed teams that winter.  What he also couldn't know was that the Japanese economy would stagnate starting in 1990.  Horner's signing by the Swallows was not a harbinger of things to come but basically a one-off due to unique circumstances - Japan's economic clout and MLB collusion.

The Swallows issued Horner uniform number 50 with the implication that he'd hit that many home runs, despite not joining the team until mid-April.  For the first few weeks, it looked like that was a possibility.  He homered in his first game and hit several more in his next games.  But inevitably the league adjusted to him and and pitchers stopped challenging him.  He finished 1987 with a .327 average, 31 home runs and 73 RBIs in 93 games.  

The Swallows offered him a three year contract for $10 million dollars but Horner had had enough of Japan after one season.  He returned to MLB and signed a one year deal with the Cardinals.  He was invited to spring training with the Orioles in 1989 but retired instead.  

Horner was one of only two Golden Spikes winners to play in NPB (with Trevor Bauer being the other) and one of only four number one overall picks to do so (along with Danny Goodwin, Floyd Bannister and Bryan Bullington).  

As far as I can tell, he only had six cards showing him with the Swallows that came out in 1987.  Five of these were in that year's Calbee set, numbers 101, 111, 121, 201 and 319.  The other was from the Play Ball set which was an unlicensed set issued in the United States, possibly to capitalize on Horner's presence on the Swallows.  He's only appeared in two OB sets since he retired - the 2013 BBM Legendary Foreigners and the 2020 Epoch OB Club Career Achievements sets.  Here are the cards I have of him:

1987 Calbee #101

1987 Calbee #111

1987 Calbee #121

1987 Play Ball #1

2013 BBM Legendary Foreigners #35

In rereading Robert Whiting's book when doing research for this post, I saw that he mentioned a commercial Horner had done for Suntory beer.  I went spelunking through YouTube and found this, although I'm not positive it's the one Whiting meant:

RIP Rick Krueger

I wanted to do a quick post on the passing of Rick Krueger, the former pitcher who was somewhat briefly a member of the Yomiuri Giants in 1979.  Krueger had signed with the Boston Red Sox in 1971 out of Michigan State University (I'm not entirely sure why he wasn't subject to the draft) and spent seven seasons (one of which he missed due to injury) in their organization, including 11 games in the majors between 1975 and 1977.  He was traded to Cleveland for Frank Duffy just before the 1978 season started and split that season between Triple-A Portland and the big league team.  

He joined the Giants in the spring of 1979 with the expectation that he'd be replacing Shigeru Kobayashi in the rotation - Kobayashi had just been dealt to the Tigers as part of the resolution of the "Egawa affair".  However, he made just one start before the team was concerned about his stamina and moved him to the bullpen.  He ultimately got into just 18 games, going 2-1 with an ERA of 4.66.  He was sent home by the team in mid-September and hung up his spikes after playing that winter in Puerto Rico (despite getting a spring training invite from Cleveland for 1980).  He would later coach at Cornerstone College and ran a baseball school.  He was 77 when he passed away on May 7th.

I wouldn't have thought that Krueger had many Japanese baseball cards but he had a couple more than I expected.  He didn't appear in any of Calbee's sets for 1979 but he did show up in that year's Takara Giants set.  He was also in a card set given away in Gekkan Giants magazine as uncut sheets of six cards.  The most common Japanese card of him, however, is from the 1979 TCMA set.  I have the TCMA and magazine cards:

1979-80 Gekkan Giants #19 

1979 TCMA #58

 I used his SABR biography as a source for this post.

RIP Isami Okamoto

I haven't been very diligent in monitoring the list of the dead over at Japanese Wikipedia lately so I didn't realize that former Nankai Hawk infielder Isami Okamoto had passed away on April 15th at the age of 95.

Okamoto had signed with Nankai as a "test player" in 1949 and made his debut with the team in 1950.  By 1952 he had established himself as the Hawks starting second baseman, a role he'd keep for the rest of the decade (with the exception of 1954 which he spent as an outfielder).  His best season was 1953 when he won the Pacific League batting title with a .318 average and the league MVP award.  He was the first player born in the Showa Era to win a batting crown or an MVP award.  He won five Best 9 Awards (1952, 1953, 1955, 1957 and 1959) and made four All Star teams (1953, 1955, 1956 and 1959).  He along with first baseman Tokuji Iida, shortstop Chusuke Kizuka and third baseman Kazuo Kageyama formed what was known as the "Million Dollar Infield" in the mid-50's.

He homered twice off of Hall Of Famer Takehiko Bessho in Game One of the 1959 Nippon Series which was pretty much his last hurrah.  He lost his starting position to Carlton Handa the next season and missed the entire 1961 season due to injury.  He retired as an active player at the end of 1963.  He coached for the Hawks for the following two seasons before switching to the Sankai Atoms for 1966-67.  He returned to Nankai in 1968 and coached for them through 1972.  He switched teams again then, staying in Kansai with the Hanshin Tigers for 1973 and 1974 before becoming a commentator for Fuji TV for the next seven years.

He returned to coaching with the Kintetsu Buffaloes under manager Seiji Sekiguchi in 1982 and took over as manager when Sekiguchi retired after the 1983 season.  Okamoto managed the team for the next four seasons, going 239-242-39.  He led the team to a second place finish in 1986 but was let go when the team finished sixth (and last) in 1987.  He became a baseball commentator again after parting ways with Kintetsu and later was the director of the OB Club (aka the All Japan Baseball Foundation and the Japan Baseball Promotion Association) for a number of years.

Okamoto had a number of cards issued for him during his playing career - Gary Engel's latest "Vintage Edition" of his "Japanese Baseball Card Guide" lists 23 menko, bromide, game and gum cards.  There's a bit of an odd dichotomy in his OB player cards - they're all from BBM until Epoch paired up with the All Japan Baseball Foundation in 2009 to produce sets.  After that, he only had cards from Epoch in sets they did with the organization.  I guess it makes sense since he was their director for a while but it also meant that he only appeared in BBM's set for the Hawks' 70th Anniversary, not the ones for their 75th (in 2013) or 80th (in 2018).  Here's all the cards I have for him:

1958 Yamakatsu JCM 33b

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #051

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #171

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #291

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #411

2002 BBM All Time Heroes #112

2006 BBM Nostalgic Baseball #046

2008 BBM Hawks 80th Anniversary #12

2009 BBM Kintetsu Memorial #48

2009 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 15th Anniversary #45

2011 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation Managers #43

In addition to these cards, TCDB lists a couple cards that I don't have - 2003 BBM Sluggers (#14), 2012 Epoch JBPA History Of Best 9 (#28), 2015 Epoch OB Club MVP Of The Year (#13) and 2018 Epoch OB Club Batting Leaders Holographica (#15).

Actually, I'll slightly correct something I said above - Okamoto DOES appear in BBM's 2018 Hawks 80th Anniversary set although he doesn't have a player card in the set.  There's a card in the set dedicated to the "Million Dollar Infield":

2018 BBM Hawks 80th Anniversary #HH3

I'm pretty confident that's him in the upper right part of the card.  I'm assuming the players' positions in the photo reflect their infield positions so that would mean that's Chusuke Kizuka to the left of Okamoto with Kazuo Kageyama in the lower left and Tokuji Iida in the lower right.  I'm going to guess that that's manager Kazuto Tsuruoka in the center but I don't know that for sure.

RIP Kim Min-jae

Long time KBO infielder Kim Min-jae passed away from cancer this past week at age 53.  Kim was born in Busan and joined his hometown team, the Lotte Giants, after graduating from high school in 1991.  He spent eleven seasons with them before leaving for the SK Wyverns as a free agent after the 2001 season.  After four seasons, he moved on as a free agent again, this time to the Hanwha Eagles where he played the last four years of his career.  He was the first player in KBO history to play in over 2100 games although his 2,113 total games played has since been passed by other players.

He was considered a defensive whiz and was frequently selected for the Korean National Team, most significantly for the 2006 World Baseball Classic and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Korea won the Gold Medal.

Following his playing career, he coached for half the KBO teams - Hanwha in 2009-12, the Doosan Bears in 2013, the KT Wiz from 2014 to 2016, Lotte in 2017-18, back to Doosan for 2019-20, the SSG Landers from 2021 to 2023 and back to Lotte in 2024 and 2025.  He also was a coach for the Korean National Team for the 2023 WBC.

Because there weren't many KBO cards produced during his playing career, he didn't have a lot of baseball cards.  TCDB lists six although one of those is an autographed card and one is kinda-sorta an insert card.  I have three of the four base cards along with the insert - it's from the "Future Watch" insert set in the 2006 SP Authentic set.

1999 Teleca #47

1999 Teleca Premium #48

2000 Teleca #41

2006 SP Authentic "Future Watch" WBC-69

In Memoriam 2025

 

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #T-06

I've seen a couple posts on Bluesky and other places, giving a list of the baseball players who passed away in 2025 and I noticed that generally, they don't include any NPB players.  At least, no NPB players who didn't play in MLB.  I thought I'd try to do a quick post that listed some of the major NPB stars who left us this past year.  This isn't a comprehensive list and it's not even a full list of folks that I did Memorial posts for.  I just wanted to recognize that four Japanese Hall Of Famers died in 2025 along with some other fairly big names.  I'm not going to write anything about each player but I will link to the Memorial post I did for each of them.

February 5 - Hall Of Famer Yoshio Yoshida

2015 BBM Tigers 80th Anniversary #08

Feburary 16 - Swallows mascot Tsubakuro (obviously this was the actor who portrayed him since 1994 but I don't know his name.  And apparently Tsubakuro will return to Swallows games next season)

2013 Calbee Series Two #C-8

April 4 - Tony Blanco

2013 BBM Baystars 20th Anniversary #75

April 18 - Hall Of Famer Masaaki Koyama

2005 BBM Glorious Stars #024

June 3 - Hall Of Famer Shigeo Nagashima

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #185

September 22 - Yukihiro Machida

2003 BBM Sluggers #018

November 2 - Hall Of Famer Yoshinori Hirose

2009 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 15th Anniversary #46

November 24 - George Altman

1975 NST #134

In addition, I also did Memorial posts this year for Hidetoshi Hakamada, Yutaka Ohhashi, Jack Bloomfield, Jitsuo Mizutani, Davey Johnson, Jim Marshall & Brian Dayett, Yoshihiro Itoh, Hiroaki Inoue, Nobuhiro Takashiro and Mike Campbell.  There were other NPB players who passed away this year that I did not do posts for - mostly because I had few if any cards of them.  I mean no disrespect to anyone I neglected to do a post for or the players I didn't highlight in this post.

RIP Nobuhiro Takashiro

As I mentioned yesterday, former Nippon-Ham Fighter Nobuhiro Takashiro passed away last week from esophageal cancer at age 71.  Takashiro had a stellar collegiate career at Hosei University, winning four Best 9 awards and hitting .500 in the fall 1975 season.  He joined Toshiba of the corporate leagues after graduating and played well enough for them in his first season of 1977 that he was named to the "Amateur Baseball Best 9" team and was selected for the Japanese team for the 3rd IBAF Intercontinental Cup (they came in third).  Toshiba made the Intercity Baseball Tournament that year but they were eliminated in the second round.  In 1978, however, they not only made the tournament again but they won it for the first time.  

Around this time, the Takashiro family's chopstick factory was having financial difficulties due to the ongoing oil crisis and he decided to turn professional to raise money to help the family.  Luckily, his role in leading Toshiba to victory paid off for him when the Fighters took him as their first round pick in that fall's draft (although only after they lost the lottery for Shigekazu Mori to the Lions). 

He immediately became the starting shortstop for the Fighters and ended up winning a Diamond Glove (as the Golden Glove award was called at the time) in his rookie season of 1979.  He was the first rookie ever to win the award as well as being the first player other than Yutaka Ohashi to win the PL award for shortstop.  He also made the All Star team that year.  He followed that up in 1980 with another All Star team selection and a Best 9 award.

A dislocated ankle kept him out of 40 games in 1981 but he still made some noise by hitting two grand slams that season, becoming only the fourth player in Fighters history to hit two in one season.  He was healthy enough to play in the Nippon Series that season against the Giants although he only hit .227 as the Fighters lost in six games.

Takashiro remained the Fighter's starting shortstop for four of the next five seasons, missing time in 1984 due to injury and losing his starting role to Takayuki Iwai.  He changed his registered name to Shinya Takashiro in 1985.

The emergence of Yukio Tanaka in 1987 pushed him to a back up role at both shortstop and third base (behind Hideo Furuya).  His lack of playing time continued the following year, when he was banished to the farm team in mid-May and was expected to retire and the end of the season.  Instead, he was dealt to the Hiroshima Toyo Carp for Mitsunori Takiguchi and Michio Nabeya.  Now you might be surprised that a guy who was so obviously at the end of his career could get dealt for TWO players but it turned out that 1989 would be the final season for all three players.  Neither Takiguchi and Nabeya made any appearances with the top team but Takashiro (who went back to his original registered name of Nobuhiro Takashiro) played in 24 games with the ichi-gun Carp.

After retiring as an active player, Takashiro embarked on an coaching odyssey that would last 31 years and see him don the uniform of half the teams in NPB as well as the National Team and a Korean team.  He coached for the Carp from 1990 to 1998, the Dragons from 1999 to 2001 and rejoined the Fighters for the 2002 season.  He would be interim manager for two games for Nippon-Ham that season, filling in when Yasunori Ohshima was suspended for "violent conduct toward an umpire".  The team went 2-0 in those games.

He moved on to the Marines in 2003 before moving back the Dragons for five seasons the following year.  He coached for the Japanese WBC team in 2009 and the Hanwha Eagles in 2010 before spending two seasons with Orix.  In 2013 he was again a coach for the Japanese WBC team and he finished his coaching career with a seven year stint with the Hanshin Tigers from 2014 to 2020.

He had a great reputation for good judgement as a third base coach.  Thanks to him, the Dragons only had one player thrown out at home during the 2006 season.  Katsuya Nomura dubbed him "Japan's Best Third Base Coach". 

Since he left the Tigers, he did some TV commentary as well as coaching for the Osaka University of Economics baseball team.  He had also done TV commentary in 2009 after the WBC ended (don't know if he did the same in 2013).

Takashiro didn't have a lot of baseball cards during his career.  Engel only lists 14 - 10 Takara cards, three Calbee cards and a somewhat obscure game card.  He's appeared in a handful of OB sets over the past quarter century although probably not as many as you'd expect - most likely due to the lack of any good OB team sets for the Fighters.  And considering how many teams he coached for, it's kind of surprising there's only one card of him as a coach.  Here's almost all the cards I have of him:

1987 Takara Fighters #2

1989 Takara Carp #5

2002 BBM All Time Heroes #150

2003 BBM Fighters #119

2007 BBM Dragons #D004

2009 BBM Back To The 80's #046

2009 BBM The Premium Malts #29

2019 BBM Time Travel 1979 #50

2020 BBM Time Travel 1985 #64

A couple notes about these cards:

• The only other card I have of his is his 1988 Takara card which is very similar to his 1987 one
• Two of these cards identify him as "Shinya Takashiro".  One of them is obviously the 2020 Time Travel 1985 cards but the 1987 Takara card lists him as "高代 慎也" which is the kanji for that name.  The 1989 card has him as "高代 延博" which is "Nobuhiro Takashiro"
• That 2002 BBM All Time Heroes card is one of my favorites but I almost always forget about it.  Which is surprising since that mascot (Gyorotan) is kind of nightmare fuel
• I'm guessing that him not having a coaching gig in 2009 after the WBC was over allowed him to play in the Premium Malts game as it was the only time he appeared in one of the sets.

RIP Hiroaki Inoue

Two retired NPB players passed away last week - Hiroaki Inoue on Tuesday and Nobuhiro Takashiro on Wednesday.  Despite there being an ten year ago difference between the two of them (ten years and six days to be exact), there's some superficial similarities in their careers.  Both players spent a few years playing in the corporate leagues before being drafted in the first round.  Both players played for the Carp (Inoue's first team and Takashiro's last) and both players played for the Fighters - they were teammates for four years starting in 1981.  Both players also coached for the Dragons.  The similarities kind of end there and, as I said, they were pretty superficial but I found it interesting that two members of the 1981 Pacific League Champion Fighters passed away on consecutive days.  I'll do a post for Takashiro tomorrow (hopefully) while I'll talk about Inoue today.

Inoue passed away last week at age 81 from hypovolemic shock after being in poor health for the last month or so.  He had joined Telecommunications Kinki in the corporate leagues after graduating from Hokuyo High School in Osaka.  He played in the Intercity Baseball Tournament in both 1965 and 1966 and was named to the "Amateur Baseball Best 9" team in 1966, the first year such a team was selected.  He was drafted in the first round of the 1967 draft by the Hiroshima Carp.  The Carp only played him sparingly in his first season as he only got into 35 games and hit .224.  He became a regular in 1969 though, first as an outfielder and then as a third baseman.  He didn't hit much, though.  After hitting .252 in 1969, he dropped to .209 in 1970 and .216 in 1971.  His performance didn't improve in 1972 and he ended up getting benched, finishing the season hitting .186.

A change of scenery was in order and the Carp traded him to the Dragons for pitcher Kazuto Kawabata.  His batting average improved considerably in Nagoya, reaching .271 in 1973 and .290 in 1974.  He had the best year of his career in 1975, making the All Star team for the first time and hitting a career high 18 home runs (he had also hit 18 in 1974).  He and Koji Yamamoto of the Carp were fighting for the batting crown late in the season and a couple unfortunate things happened to keep him from beating out his former teammate.  In the next to last game of the season on October 19th, he came in as a pinch hitter in the third inning against the Carp with the bases loaded.  He was intentionally walked to drive in a run and deny him an opportunity to pass Yamamoto.  The Dragons were already up 4-0 so it didn't make a whole lot of sense strategically (the Carp did come back to win the game 11-5).  Then in the Dragons' final game of the year two days later against the Tigers, Inoue still had a shot at passing Yamamoto - it was the first time in NPB history that a batting race had come down to the last game of the season.  Inoue went one for three but was hit by a pitch in his last plate appearance in the game and the season, leaving him with an average of .318, one point behind Yamamoto's .319.  Inoue did lead the Central League in hits that year with 149 (although it wasn't an official category at the time) and won a Best 9 award as well.

He slumped somewhat in 1976 but bounced back the following season.  He repeated this pattern again in 1978 and 1979, making the All Star team for the second time in 1979.  Injuries and the arrival of Seisuke Toyoda (who was 12 years younger than the 36 year old Inoue) cut his playing time in 1980 to only 58 games.  The Dragons sent him to the Fighters in a trade for Masaru Tomita and Hideaki Oshima.  As I mentioned, he spent four seasons with Nippon-Ham, mostly as a bench player.  Probably the highlight of his years with them was his pinch hit, walk off single in the bottom of the ninth of Game One of the 1981 Nippon Series.  He retired following the 1984 season and was hired by Tatsuro Hirooka, the manager of the Seibu Lions and a former Carp coach during Inoue's time there, to be the team's defensive and base running coach.  However, due to the retirements the previous year of Koichi Tabuchi* and Hiroyuki Yamazaki, the Lions were a bit light on right-handed pinch hitters so Inoue ended up getting pressed into service for ten games.  He retired for good after that.

* Yamamoto, Tomita and Tabuchi were teammates at Hosei University in the late 1960's and collectively were known as the "Hosei Three Crows".  I'm kind of amused that Inoue had a link (albeit a somewhat tenuous one in Tabuchi's case) to each one of them - battling Yamamoto for the batting crown, being traded for Tomita and (barely) replacing Tabuchi as a bench player for the Lions

Following his retirement, Inoue was a TV commentator although he did coach for the Dragons for two seasons (1993-94) under his former teammate Morimichi Takagi.

Inoue's nickname was "Popeye" due to his somewhat sturdy build.  His 137 career hit-by-pitches was third all time in NPB when he retired but he has since fallen to tenth.

Inoue appeared fairly regularly in various card sets between 1974 and 1984.  He has cards in Calbee, NST, Nippon-Ham, Takara and some of the more obscure mid-70's menko and game cards.  I don't believe there are any cards of him with the Carp and the only card I know of showing him as a Lion is from the 2020 BBM Time Travel 1985 set.  He showed up in a handful of OB sets from the last 25 years or so, especially the various Dragons Anniversary sets.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

1974/75 Calbee #502

1975/76/77 Calbee #397

1975/76 Nippon-Ham

2003 BBM Fighters #124

2005 BBM Dragons 70th Anniversary #48

2011 Epoch OB Club 1977 #RP15 (Mini Parallel)

2017 BBM Time Travel 1975 #60

2020 BBM Time Travel 1985 #78

2021 BBM Dragons History 1936-2021 #22