Japanese Baseball Cards: RIP Hidetoshi Hakamada

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

RIP Hidetoshi Hakamada

The news broke last week that former Lotte Orions catcher Hidetoshi Hakamada had passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage in early February at age 69.

Hakamada was born and raised in Shizuoka and attended Shizuoka Kita Senior High School where he was the cleanup hitter in his senior year. He was drafted by Lotte in the third round of the 1973 draft but opted to attended Hosei University instead. He was the starting catcher for Hosei by the spring season of his sophomore year and became somewhat notable for being the battery-mate of Suguru Egawa, the "Monster Of The Showa". He ended his collegiate career with 6 home runs, 43 RBIs and a .300 batting average in 89 games. He was named to the Best 9 team four times (keep in mind that there are two separate seasons - spring and autumn - every year for collegiate baseball).

Lotte took him again in the 1977 NPB draft, this time with their first pick. He spent most of his first four seasons with the farm team as veteran Hiroshi Takahashi* was firmly entrenched as the Orions' starting catcher. It wasn't until 1982, Takahashi's final season, that Hakamada took over the starting job, which he would not relinquish until 1989. He would make the All Star team in 1982 and 1985 but did not have an opportunity either time to face Egawa. He led the Pacific League in sacrifices in 1986.

*Takahashi was one of the other players along with Masanori Murakami that Nankai loaned to the San Francisco Giants' organization in 1964. He spent the season with the Magic Valley Cowboys of the Pioneer League

He earned a reputation as good handler of pitchers and became future Hall Of Famer Choji Murata's preferred battery-mate, even after he'd been replaced as the primary catcher by Yoichi Fukuzawa. He apparently caught Murata without giving him signs as (if I'm understanding his Japanese Wikipedia page correctly) Murata had poor eyesight and couldn't make out the signs. Hakamada announced his retirement at Murata's final game in 1990. Murata had also been the pitcher for Hakamada's debut with the top team in 1978.

After retiring, Hakamada coached for Lotte for twenty of the next 22 years, missing only the 1998 and 1999 season. He sat out a year after the Marines fired him following the 2012 season before spending 2014 and 2015 coaching with the Saitama Seibu Lions. His final coaching job was with the Musashi Heat Bears of the independent Baseball Challenge league in 2016-17. He inherited "Retto Koshien", Murata's baseball school, when Murata passed away in 2022.

Hakamada doesn't have a lot of baseball cards from when he was an active player. He never had a Calbee card as much of his career was from the period of time when Lotte didn't allow Calbee to issue cards of Orions players. As far as I can tell, his first card is from the 1981 Takara Orions set and most of his active player cards are from other Takara Orions sets - 1983-90 as well as the 1984 Takara Kids Orions set. His only other card from the 1980's was from the 1989 Lotte set. He appeared in some of BBM's Marines team sets from the 00's that included cards of the team's coaches and has appeared in a handful of OB sets from both BBM and Epoch over the years. Here's a handful of his cards: