Who Is Kippei Mikami?

The Cubs announced that they had signed a Japanese pitcher named Kippei Mikami this week and I have been obsessed with answering one simple question:

I had never heard of this guy before.  Here's what the article on Cubs HQ said about him: 

A former Rikkyo University pitcher, Mikawa, briefly retired from Baseball only to leave CyberAgent 3 a few months ago to pursue a dream in American Baseball. That dream has officially become a reality, as Mikawa is joining the Cubs and will await his system placement. Before his brief retirement, Mikawa was part of the Yomiuri Giants Jr. squad, which is equivalent to a Minor League affiliate in the U.S.

Hmm, I've never heard of the Giants farm team being referred to as the "Jr. squad" before, but, OK, I'll take that at face value.  But if he went from Rikkyo to the Giants, he must have been drafted, right?  But I looked through the last few years of the NPB draft and I don't see a player by that name being drafted by the Giants (or anyone else).  And I looked through the Giants rosters for the past four or five seasons as well (both 70 man and ikusei) and I didn't find him there either.  

I did some Google searching and once I found the kanji for his name (三河吉平), I started finding some information for him.  He did pitch for Rikkyo but it looks like he only appeared in three games over his four years there.  He pitched 1/3 of an inning against Keio on September 10th, 2023, facing three batters and giving up no runs.  His next outing didn't go as well - one inning against Meiji on September 30th of that year in which he gave up two runs on a hit and a walk.  It would be 13 months before he'd appear in another game and it was a disaster.  He recorded no outs against Tokyo on October 27th, 2024, facing seven batters and walking four of them, hitting one of them and giving up two base hits.  He was charged with five earned runs.  Keep in mind that Tokyo University is traditionally the doormat of the Tokyo Big Six league so read into that what you may.  (I got the stat lines from his college games here.)

Rikkyo University's web page for the "career paths for 2024 graduates" does indicate that he went to work at a company called "CyberAgent" but does not indicate that he'd be playing baseball for them - which more or less matches what the above blurb said.  

OK, so his story is more or less checking out.  Except for the thing about the Giants.  Seems a weird thing to lie about since it's relatively easy to check it out.  But then I found this web page listing all the teams he played for and it all fell into place.  He did indeed play for the "Yomiuri Giants Jr." team but it was in 2014 when he would have been 12 years old.  The "Yomiuri Giants Jr." team is apparently a youth team that I assume has some connection to the NPB club but is not in any sense "equivalent to a Minor League affiliate in the U.S.".

I'm somewhat baffled about why the Cubs signed this guy.  He hasn't pitched competitively in 18 months and he didn't pitch particularly effectively or often before that.  I mean, I wish him the best of luck and it's not my money, but he's certainly a long shot.  I would think there would be other guys playing in the corporate or indy leagues in Japan that would be more likely to pan out (although we're still talking long odds).

I can't imagine that the Cubs thought he'd actually been in the Yomiuri Giants' organization.  If they did, that's really embarrassing.

It should go without saying but I'll mention it anyway - as far as I know, Mikawa doesn't have any baseball cards.

Card Of The Week May 31

There were a couple interesting events last week, both in MLB and NPB.  On Monday night, three Astros pitchers combined to no-hit the Texas Rangers.  One of those pitchers was Tatsuya Imai, who started the game and went six innings.  Imai had also been part of a combined no-hitter last year in Japan.  I had briefly thought that Imai was the first pitcher to have taken part in a no-hitter in both NPB and MLB but I had forgotten that Shota Imanaga had thrown a complete game no-hitter in Japan and been part of a combined no-hitter in MLB.  In fact, Imanaga's combined no-no was the most recent no-hitter in MLB before the Astros' one last week.   Fun fact - the final pitcher of the night for Houston, Alimber Santa, was making his big league debut in that game.  He's the second player in history to debut in a no-hitter, after Bumpus Jones in 1892.

On Tuesday, the news broke that Shinnosuke Abe, manager of the Yomiuri Giants, was stepping down after having been arrested under suspicion of assaulting his teenaged daughter.  I'm not sure all the details have been established but apparently he intervened in an argument between his daughters and may have thrown the older one to the ground.  The daughter contacted child consultation services who then got the police involved.  The whole thing is quite serious and disturbing and it's not what I want to focus on.  With Abe stepping down, the Giants have named Hideki Hashigami as interim manager.  Hashigami had a 12 year career playing for the Swallows (1988-96) and the Fighters (1997-99) - and notably did not play for the Giants.  He's coached for numerous teams since retiring as a player.  Yomiuri is stressing the "interim" part of his job title as the team hasn't replaced a manager mid-season since 1949 and they've never had a manager who didn't play for them.  In fact, they've never had an "official" manager who ever played for another team (at least not before he managed the team).  There's a lot that will still play out in the story but I doubt Hashigami will have the job after the season ends.

Here are cards of both Imai and Hashigami:

2024 Calbee Series Two #114

1994 BBM Late Series #594

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:

Japanese MLB Players With No NPB Experience

Rikuu Nishida made his MB debut with the White Sox today.  Nishida was born in Osaka, Japan but played college baseball in Oregon for Mt. Hood Community College and the University of Oregon.  He was drafted by the White Sox in 2023 and has been working his way up their farm system ever since.

I think that Nishida is the seventh Japanese baseball player to make it to MLB without having played in NPB first but I'm not positive.  Part of the uncertainty is defining what "Japanese baseball player" means.  Does it mean being born in Japan?   That would mean that someone like Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was born in Okinawa to an American serviceman father and Japanese mother, or Lee Jung-hoo, who was born in Nagoya while his father Lee Jong-beom was playing for the Dragons, would count.  I'm not sure folks like that are what most people think about when thinking about "Japanese baseball players", however, so I'm going to go with "players who could reasonably be expected to hold a Japanese passport".

The six previous players by my definition are Mac Suzuki, Michael Nakamura, Kazuhito Tadano, Junichi Tazawa, Gosuke Katoh and Lars Nootbaar.  I'm a little iffy on whether or not Nootbaar has a Japanese passport but obviously he meets the definition of "Japanese" for the purposes of the World Baseball Classic.  I suspect Nootbaar would probably not want to let anyone know he's got a Japanese passport if he ever decided to play in NPB as he would then be subject to their draft rather than being a free agent (which is why Katoh was drafted by the Fighters despite being born in California to Japanese parents).

Four of these six players eventually played in NPB with Tazawa and Nootbaar (so far) being the exceptions.  Three of those four joined the Fighters oddly enough.  Tazawa had wanted to join NPB but was pretty much blackballed after spurning the league for MLB in the late 00's.  He had made himself available for the 2020 NPB draft but wasn't taken by anyone.

Here are NPB cards of the four plus a Japanese WBC card of Nootbaar:

2003 Calbee Series One #082

2006 BBM Nippon Series #S08

2013 BBM 1st Version #171

2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition #29

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #10

There have been a number of Japanese baseball players who started their professional careers in North America (but didn't necessarily make it to MLB) before ending up back in Japan with NPB.  I did a post on a bunch of them some years back (which included Suzuki, Nakamura and Tadano) but I don't know if I missed anyone or if there's anyone that's come in the years since then.

Card Of The Week May 24

Taisei Irie of the Baystars tied a dubious record yesterday when he threw 60 pitches in the first inning of his start against the Swallows.  He faced ten batters and gave up six earned runs on six hits (including three doubles) and a walk.  Incredibly, he gave up all the hits (and the walk) after having gotten the first two batters of the game out.  It was the only inning he pitched and the six runs were the only runs scored in the entire game.  

The record he tied was set 29 years ago by Bob Milacki of the Kintesu Buffaloes, who gave up 10 runs int the first inning against the Seibu Lions on June 27th, 1997.  Milacki's stint with Kintetsu was fairly short-lived, going 0-2 with an ERA of 7.30 in six games (including five starts).  Irie was the Baystars first pick in the 2020 draft so I suspect he'll be given a longer rope than Milacki was.

Here are cards of the two players:

2021 BBM 1st Version #265

1997 BBM #166

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.

Cards From Kenny

I received yet another envelope in the mail today from Kenny (Zippy Zappy) in Japan.  As he promised me a few weeks ago, this one contained some cards from the lastest Calbee set, 2026 Series One.  There were two base set cards and two insert cards.  Curiously, three of the four cards featured members of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows:

#007

#059

#L-4

#S-23

Now that I have some 2026 Calbees in hand, I see that my initial impression that this year's cards looked identical to last year's was pretty much correct.  (Sean has mentioned to me in an email that the only difference between this year's cards and last year's that he's seen is "a slightly different font size for the player name on the back".)  I really wish I had some insight in to why Calbee decided to stop making any sort of effort since at least 2023.

Regardless of Calbee's shortcomings, however, I'm grateful as always to receive the cards.  Thanks once again, Kenny!