Two Sword Players

I did a post a couple weeks ago about Yomiuri Giants infielder Daiki Masuda pitching in a blowout loss against the Hanshin Tigers and how unusual it was for a position player to be used as a pitcher in NPB.  Someone left a comment asking about an Orix outfielder from the late 90's name Toshihiro Kase who had pitched in a couple games in 1997.  I started looking into him and ended up going down a rabbit hole about "Two Sword Players".

A "Two Sword Player" is a player who is both a pitcher and a position player (i.e. a "Two-Way Player" but I like the idiom better).  Shohei Ohtani is the most obvious example of this (in fact there was a subset in the 2013 BBM Fighters set featuring him called "The Two Sword Player") but there were a number of such players in the early days of Japanese professional baseball including guys like Michio Nishizawa, Jiro Noguchi, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Fumio Fujimura and Junzo Sekine.   In the last 50 years or so there've really only been three guys other than Ohtani - Yozo Nagabuchi, Felix Perdomo and Kase.  (Note that this doesn't include players like Kazuya Fukuura, Yoshio Itoi, Ryuji Miyade and Yuhei Takai who started their careers as pitchers and then converted to position players).

2009 Kintetsu Memorial #23

Yozo Nagabuchi had been the ace pitcher for his high school team and both pitched and played right field for Toshiba in the corporate leagues for a number of years in the 1960's.  He was the Kintetsu Buffaloes second round pick in the 1967 draft.  I'm not sure I'm getting all the details correct on this based on the Google translation of his Japanese Wikipedia page I think he got a 3.3 million yen salary (or bonus) that he needed to pay off a 200,000 yen bar tab that he had run up - he was only making 30,000 yen a month with Toshiba.  He was drafted as a pitcher but his manager, Hall Of Famer Osamu Mihara, decided to use him as a pitcher, an outfielder and a pinch hitter.  He made 12 appearances as a pitcher in 1968, going 0-1 with a 2.79 ERA in 19 1/3 innings.  He made only one start.  Mihara apparently was not impressed with his pitching as his last appearance on the mound was in June.  He ended the season with a .274 average in 270 at bats over 109 games.  He was exclusively a position player in 1969 and hit .333 which was tied with Isao Harimoto for the Pacific League lead.  I suspect that this ended any further discussion of him pitching.  He put up a couple solid seasons for the Buffaloes over the next few seasons but age (and probably his drinking) started taking its toll on his performance and playing time around 1973.  He was traded to the Nippon-Ham Fighters (where Mihara was now the team president) in the 1975-76 offseason and retired after the 1979 season.  Probably his biggest legacy is that he was one of the inspirations for the "Abu-san" manga character Yasutake Kageura (along with Masaru Kageura, Fumio Fujimura and Masahiro Doi):

1998 BBM Hawks #FD74

Felix Perdomo was an interesting story.  He was a product of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp's Dominican Academy in the early 1990's and spent the 1992 season with the Carp's farm team as an infielder.  He dropped out of sight for a couple seasons before reappearing with the China Trust Eagles of the CPBL in 1995.*  He rejoined the Carp in 1996 and hit .083 in six games with the ichi-gun team.  He converted to being a pitcher in 1997 and got into 30 games with the top team over the next two seasons.  He changed his registration back to infield in 1999 but the Carp still occasionally used him as a pitcher.  There was some concern about this as the rules at the time only allowed NPB teams to have two foreign pitchers on the active roster.  The league said that this did not present an issue as long as all three didn't get into the same game.  Of course, on June 27th all three appeared in a game - Nate Minchey started against the Giants and was relieved by Perdomo who was relieved in turn by Rick Dehart.  I suspect that this would have caused more of a stink had the Carp won the game but they lost 4-2 with Perdomo taking the loss.  He was released following the 1999 season - partly due to roster pressures over the foreign player limit but probably also due to the fact that he wasn't particularly good either with the bat (he hit just .200 in 1999) or on the mound (1-2 with 4.56 ERA in 17 games).  As far as I can tell there are no Japanese baseball cards of Perdomo.  The only card I know of for him is from the 1995 CPBL A-Plus card set.  (There was a player by the same name in the Mets organization in the 1980's but he was about 10 years older.)

*It's actually not clear to me that he wasn't still associated with the Carp when he played for China Trust as the Carp had a working agreement with them for a number of years and had a couple players on their roster that season.  Or perhaps his being on the team that year led to the Carp re-signing him.

1995 BBM #537

2001 BBM Late Series #608

Like Nagabuchi 30 years earlier, Toshihiro Kase was the ace pitcher for his high school team.  He was also the cleanup hitter and hit 52 home runs during his high school career so Orix took him as an outfielder in the second round of the 1994 draft.  He made his ichi-gun debut in 1996 and hit .227 in 17 games.  Orix manager Akira Ohgi (another Hall Of Famer) tried him as a pitcher in an intersquad game in training camp in 1997 and was pleased when he retired Ichiro, Koichi Ohshima and Troy Neel.  He came into an exhibition game against the Hawks and retired Tadahito Iguchi to finish the game.  He didn't fare quite as well in the regular season however.  He ultimately only pitched three innings over two appearances and gave up three earned runs on four hits (including a home run from Hiromitsu Ochiai) and three walks while striking out three before Ohgi pulled the plug on the experiment.  Meanwhile his hitting wasn't particularly going well either - he hit .077 in 1997 and .053 in 1998.  Now you might be excused for thinking that the 32 ichi-gun at bats those two seasons weren't enough of an opportunity to see how well he could really hit but he hit only .147 in 68 at bats in 1999 so his performance didn't really improve with more opportunity.  After five hitless plate appearances in 2000 he saw the writing on the wall and decided to switch back to pitching full time (although he was still registered as an outfielder).  His 2000 season on the mound was so-so - he went 1-4 with a 5.10 ERA - but he had a pretty good season in 2001 (his first officially as a pitcher), going 2-0 with an ERA of 3.21 in 70 appearances.  His numbers declined every season after that and Orix let him go at the end of the 2004 season.  He's apparently been a batting practice pitcher for the Hanshin Tigers ever since.

Those three players plus Ohtani pretty much cover the NPB "Two Sword Players" since the 1960's.  However there is another professional baseball league in Japan and was somewhat surprised to discover it had three "Two Sword Players" last season.  Two of them performed in this role last season while the other has been strictly a position player since 2015.  I speak of course of the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL).

2016 Epoch JWBL #18

2018 Epoch JWBL #61

Mika Konishi was a charter member of the JWBL in their first season in 2010 (when they were the GPBL or "Girl's Professional Baseball League").  Despite both baseball cards I have of her listing her as a pitcher, she's been both a position player and pitcher for most of her ten professional seasons.  It looks like she was mostly a pitcher in 2018 and 2019.  From her Wikipedia page it looks like she's been star player both on the mound and at the bat.  She's led the league in wins four times (2010-12, 2019), ERA three times (2010, 2012, 2018), strikeouts three times (2010, 2011, 2016) and saves twice (2014, 2018) as well as home runs twice (2011, 2012) and stolen bases (2010).  She's a two time MVP winner (2011, 2012) and two time Best 9 winner at pitcher (2011, 2012).  She also won a Golden Glove award in 2019.  She retired at the end of the 2019 season.  Her cards only have her pitching statistics but her page in the JWBL "Players File" I picked up last year has both her batting and pitching statistics:

Konishi was the only JWBL player mentioned on the Wikipedia "Two Sword Player" page but when I went thumbing through the "Players File" I came across a couple more.

2016 Epoch JWBL #26

2018 Epoch JWBL #48

Miri Iwaya is another charter member of the JWBL.  Unlike Konishi, she only pitched for a couple of years before becoming exclusively a position player.  She pitched pretty well her first two seasons, putting up ERAs of 2.31 and 2.99 in 2010 and 2011 respectively.  She led the league in saves in 2010.  Her ERAs climbed to 4.38 and 5.02 the next two seasons and after not pitching at all in 2014 she made her last trip to the mound in 2015.  She's probably the closest thing that the JWBL has to a power hitter as she holds the record for most home runs in a season (5) and career (10 going into this season but it looks like she has three so far in 2020).  She's the only JWBL player to win a Triple Crown, having done it in 2017.  She also led the league in home runs in 2019 and RBI in 2018.  She won the MVP in 2017 and has four Best 9 awards at third base (2011, 2012, 2017, 2019) along with a Golden Glove award in 2017.  Her page in the "Players File" has both her pitching and hitting statistics:

She's a player/coach with Saitama Astraia this year. Here's a home run she hit last Saturday:

2016 Epoch JWBL #71

2018 Epoch JWBL #40

Unlike Konishi and Iwaya, Haruka Ebi is not a star.  She both pitched and batted her first three years in the league but was exclusively a pitcher last season.  She hit .533 in just 9 games in 2016 but as she got more playing time her average dropped to .296 in 2017 and just .136 in 2018.  Her ERAs got worse over the same period of time (4.32 to 4.92 to 6.88) although it dropped to 3.97 last season.  She retired from the league at the end of the year and is with the Sagawa Express women's corporate league team.  Here's her write up from the "Players File":