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Catching Up With . . .
Sadaharu Oh, Home Run King
August 15, 1977
Posted: Tue September 29, 1998
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(T. Tanuma)
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It
is as revered in the Far East as it is in Far Rockaway, N.Y.,
a cause for celebration whether your game is baseball or
beseboru. "Whether you're in America or Japan," says
Sadaharu Oh, "the home run is the ultimate
challenge."
Oh in Japanese means "king," which
describes the 58-year-old Oh's rank among the nobility of
home run hitters. He hit 868 homers in his 22-year career
with the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo, including 55 in 1964 to
set the Japanese single-season record. Oh
developed his lefthanded stroke by repeatedly swinging a
samurai sword until he could cut a straw doll in half with
one slice. On Sept. 3, 1977, he delivered his most
memorable blow. Swinging from his familiar flamingo
stance—his right foot aloft as he
awaited the pitch—he supplanted Henry Aaron as the world's
alltime
sayonara leader when he
deposited number 756 into the rightfield bleachers of Tokyo's
Koraku-en
Stadium.
Oh retired in 1980 and became the
manager of the Giants in '84. Though he guided his club to a
Japan Series appearance in '87, he resigned after five
seasons. Following a stint as a television analyst, he
returned to the field in '95 to manage the
Fukuoka Daiei Hawks. He and his wife, Kyoko, who have three
adult daughters, live in
Fukuoka.
With the exploits of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa being
played up on the front pages of Japan's dailies and on
NHK-TV, Oh followed this year's home run chase as if he
lived on Waveland Avenue. "The games were on
television very early in the morning, so
they were hard to watch," he says. "But I always
checked the highlights." He is convinced that
McGwire, despite his sumo wrestler-like strength, would
never hit 70 homers in Japan. "Pitchers wouldn't go
right at him," says Oh, who had 2,504 bases on
balls during his career. "I think Mark would be very
frustrated
here." He thinks McGwire, who was walked 162 times this season,
could have received at least 200 free passes from Japanese
pitchers.
Whenever Oh is interviewed by a Western journalist, he's
asked to partake in the parlor game of imagining how he
would have fared against the likes of Bob Gibson, Tom
Seaver and Nolan Ryan. "Out of four levels, my
fielding at first base would have been
top-level, but my hitting would have been just
second-level," Oh says. "American stadiums are
much bigger, and everything about the game is faster. I was
a fastball hitter, so it would have been quite a challenge.
But I would have liked to have tried."
—Richard
Deitsch
Issue date: October 5, 1998
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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