RIP Yoshinori Hirose

Longtime Nankai Hawks star and Hall Of Famer Yoshinori Hirose passed away earlier this month from heart failure at age 89.

Hirose originally signed with the Hawks as a pitcher in 1955 but an elbow injury in his first few months with the team caused him to switch to being a position player.  He made his debut with the top team in 1956 and by the middle of 1957 was Nankai's starting shortstop.  He shifted to the outfield in 1961 to make way for Kenji Koike at short and ran off a streak of five straight years of leading the Pacific League in stolen bases.  He also won the batting crown in 1964, becoming the first player to ever win the batting and stolen base titles in the same season.  He also set the NPB record for most at bats in a season with 626 in 1963.

Speed obviously was a major part of Hirose's game and he was the first player in NPB history to reach 500 stolen bases.  He was obviously the career leader in steals for a number of years but was passed by Yutaka Fukumoto late in the 1977 season, Hirose's final year.  He finished his career with 596 stolen bases, which is still second all time (albeit distantly to Fukumoto's 1065).  He also hold the records for consecutive steals without getting thrown out with 31 in 1964 and for stolen base success rate with 95.7% in 1968 (in which he stole 44 bases while only getting thrown out twice).

He won three Best 9 awards and the first Diamond Glove outfielder award (as the Golden Gloves were called when they were introduced in 1972).  He was selected to the All Star team 11 times (1958-66, 1968-69) although he declined to play due to injury in 1964 and 1968.  He won two All Star game MVP awards (1961 Game One and 1966 Game One).  He got his 2000th hit in 1972, becoming only the sixth player to reach that milestone.  He'd become a member of the Meikyukai when that club was established in 1978.  He was elected to the Hall Of Fame in 1999.

He became the manager of the Hawks after retiring, taking over for Katsuya Nomura, who'd been dismissed for "mishandling personal and professional matters" as Hirose's Japanese Wikipedia page states.  I've never gotten a clear understanding of what happened but Nomura's wife (who he had married after having an affair with her during his previous marriage) was apparently interfering with the running of the team.  Hirose's team was weakened by the departures of both Yutaka Enatsu and Junichi Kashiwabara who had sided with Nomura.  The Hawks had finished second in 1977 (well, second overall - the PL was using a split season at the time and Nankai had finished second in the first half and third in the second half) but dropped to sixth in 1978 (overall and in both halves).  They climbed to fifth in 1979 but after dropping back to last in 1980, Hirose was replaced by Don Blasingame (who'd been the head coach under Nomura for a number of years).  

He was a baseball commentator during most the 1980's before returning to the Hawks (now in Fukuoka and owned by Daiei) as a defensive and base running coach in 1991.  Under his tutelage, three Hawks players (Hisashi Ohno, Makoto Sasaki and Hiroshi Yugamiya) had more than 30 steals in 1991, with Ohno leading the league with 42.  The following year, Sasaki led the league with 40 steals and became only the second player (after Hirose) to win a batting and stolen base title in the same year.  He went back to being a baseball commentator following the 1992 season, a job he'd continue until he retired in 2015.

Now that I'm looking at Hirose's vintage cards, I'm a bit surprised about something.  While he appears in a lot of menko, bromide, gum and game sets from the late 50's and early 60's (as well as the 1967 Kabaya-Leaf set), he almost completely absent from Calbee's sets.  He only appears on three cards and only one of those (#800a from the 1974/75 set) features only him.  He shares a card with Katsuhiro Nakamura (1974/75 #95) and is included on the Hawks team card from the 1975/76/77 set (#410).  He's appeared pretty regularly in BBM's OB sets over the last 25 years, especially any of the various Hawks OB team sets.  He's also appeared in at least two Epoch OB sets.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

1959 Marusho JCM 39

1960 Marusho JCM 13a

1962 JGA 146 "Tassel Playing Cards"

1967 Kabaya-Leaf #318

1974/75 Calbee #800a

1977 NST #324

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #457

2002 BBM All Time Heroes #115

2006 BBM Nostalgic Baseball #052

2014 BBM Young Hawks - Futures And Legends #35

2018 BBM Hawks 80th Anniversary #06

2018 BBM Hawks #HH13

2022 BBM Hawks History 1938-2022 #11

A couple comments:

• I think both Marusho menko cards use the same image but the 1960 card is cropped tighter and the colors are different
• I don't actually own the Kabaya-Leaf card - I swiped the image from TCDB.
• That 2018 BBM Hawks card is from the "Hawks History" cross set subset and is the only card I've seen depicting him as Hawks manager (there may be another one from something Engel refers to as "JA 9" but I've never seen any cards from that set).

One final thing - I was kind of taken aback at the photo on the back of Hirose's 2002 BBM All Time Heroes card:

I'm kind of curious about why he's got a motorcycle.  I suspect this is for one of his All Star game MVP awards but I don't know that for sure.