Long time Japanese baseball personality Marty Kuehnert has passed away at age 78. Kuehnert had entered Japanese baseball in 1972 and 1973 as the business manager of the Lodi minor league team that was owned by Nagayoshi Nakamura, the owner of first the Lotte Orions and then the Taiheiyo Club Lions. He later worked as a sportswriter in Japan, opened the first sports bar in Japan (in Kobe), and would found the International Sports Management and Consulting firm (ISMAC) in the 1980's. It was with ISMAC that he was involved in the birth of BBM's baseball card business. He was the president and part-owner of the Birmingham Barons for a few years in the 1990's, including the season that Michael Jordan spent with the team. He was the first ever Westerner to serve as the GM of an NPB team when he was named to that role with the expansion Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in 2005 and was a senior advisor to the team for a number of years after that. He was also a senior advisor for the Sendai 89ers basketball team in Japans B. League. I'm sure I'm leaving out many things but my point is that he was involved with Japanese baseball in one way or another for over 50 years.
As the first GM of the Eagles, he had a baseball card in the Eagles inaugural team box set from BBM in 2005 (#E02):
Aw man, that is too bad, he was a good writer and I enjoyed his stuff (in addition to everything else).
ReplyDeleteI had had some correspondence with him over the years and I'd been trying to work up the courage to ask him for an interview. He was just a fascinating guy whose name always seemed to pop up when I was reading about Japanese baseball between the 70's and the 00's.
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