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World War II ended when I was in
the sixth grade. We had a lot of air raids, so there was
nothing left to do but sports. You name it, I was number
one. I was number one at fighting, sumo, running,
everything. Had times been different, I would've been
recruited as a soldier. Fortunately the War was over, so
one of my teachers invited me to start playing ball. I
officially started playing baseball in 1946 when I entered
junior high school. I lived in Shikoku in place called
Takamatsu, where the great Shigeru Mizuhara and Osamu Mihara
came from. So there was a strong tradition of baseball in
the area.
At that time, we had no
equipment. We had no balls. We had nothing. So we had to
play mentally. Because we had no equipment, we had the
basics in our heads and our bodies. So we didn't have a lot
of injuries. I think the players nowadays don’t have that
basic knowledge instilled in them.
Everything was burned away by
the air raids so there were no baseball fields left except
for the ground at our junior high school. This was during
the occupation so the U.S. soldiers would come over and play
there. They would hit the balls all over the place. So we
would hide them and tuck them in our shirts, so we could use
them to practice with. The sempai/kohai
system was very much in place and the seniors were very
strict. If we lost a ball, everybody would have to take
responsibility. So the seniors would come and hit all of us
on the side of the head. I've lost my hearing on one side
from being hit so many times.
At practice, we did the 1,000
groundball drill and we’d play catch but it was a really
concentrated catch. The pitchers would be about 20 meters
away in a circle and they would throw the ball toward you.
It was really cold and our gloves were all worn and were
like mittens. So if you didn’t catch it right in the
middle, you would break your fingers! Naturally, we learned
to catch it in the middle of our palms. Every time it
rained, we would study the rulebooks, have meetings,
practice swinging the bat, or train our wrists and the lower
halves of our bodies. We used to swing the bat by
candlelight, and run the bases after dark. We did so much
running that there was a path, a trench, dug by our
footsteps from home plate to first base. That was our
generation’s baseball.
Sometimes, I would listen to the
radio while swinging the bat. I’d listen to the Pro and the
Big Six University games. It was the same radio we had used
to get the bombing raid alarms, so it didn’t work very well
and we had to bang on it to make it work. I knew some of
the famous players. My favorites were Kazuto Yamamoto of
the Hawks (who was later known as Tsuruoka), Kaoru Betto and
especially Fumio Fujimoto of the Tigers. He was a really
good batter and I became a third baseman like him.
In high school, I played at
Koshien three times. Koshien has a very long history, and
playing in the tournament is the ultimate goal of all
Japanese high school players. The seniors told us about the
experience and its importance. When we went to Koshien
immediately after World War II, we had to take rice with us
from home because they had so little decent food to eat in
Osaka! Now everybody takes a little bag of sand from the
field home with them, but back then we weren't allowed to do
that. To become a pro, you had to go to Koshien. It was
the first step. Afterwards, you had two choices, to go to
the Waseda or Keio University teams or go directly to the
pros.
I had wanted to go to Waseda
University, but my parents negotiated a contract with the
Nishitetsu Lions. I got 35,000 yen a month and just to sign
I got 700,000 yen. But nobody told me these things. It was
all done through my parents. It was like they sold their
kid! That was how I felt. When you got your monthly salary
of 35,000 – you bought your equipment, you sent something
for your parents and then nothing was left. But if you
became a public servant you only got about 6,000 or 7,000
yen a month, so 35,000 in those days was quite an amount!
When I entered the Lions, the
manager was Mr. Mihara. Mr. Mihara was an old-timer but he
was able to look ahead and had foresight. For example, he
was against the brutal hazing of rookies. He said once you
were on the field, age doesn't matter as long as you have
ability. This helped produce great players such as Kazuhisa
Inao and Yasumitsu Toyoda. I don’t think they would have
become such great players if they had gone directly to a
team like the Giants.
Since we only had one coach and one manager in those days,
we rookies would pitch batting practice and carrying the
equipment. Remember I grew up during World War II, so
obeying orders was embedded in me. I had to carry three
people’s bags, but I didn’t mind. Back then it took between
10 and 20 hours to get to Osaka and 20 some odd hours to go
to Tokyo, and we rode in the lowest class cars. Often we’d
be together with kids from elementary or junior high schools
going on field trips. I was pretty smart and clever and the
bags in those days weren’t quite as big as they are today,
so I’d line the three of them up in the train corridor, make
it into a bed and sleep on it.
In
the United States to be 18 years old and suddenly play in
the Majors would be unbelievable, but that was what happened
to me here. I was really scared to become a pro because I
might have failed, but in my first game I was the seventh
hitter and I hit a double. So they gave me the nickname:
“Young One With Power.” I ended up hitting twelve home runs
and being the Rookie of the Year.
My second year I changed my
batting form from a contact hitter’s style to the slugger’s
style. Mr. Sabuo Hirai, the Giants shortstop, was a friend
of the manager of my high school in Kyushu. We would go
over to the high school and practice together. He would
also give me a lot of advice. I would think about the
advice and change my form by myself. I have a small body
and I thought, “How could I hit it far despite my small
body?” So I figured out how to use the sharp twist and
torque of my spin to hit with power and to balance my body.
Bat control and balance are everything. So I practiced in
camp and changed my form.
The hard work really paid off.
That year, I hit .314 with 36 home runs and 86 RBIs. In the
old days, the balls didn't carry as far, so if you hit more
than 25 home runs you became a home run king. I was able to
hit so many home runs because I could hit it
anywhere--center, right, or left.
That season in July, we were
facing Giichi Hayashi of the Daiei Stars at home. He was a
good pitcher, an under-hander with good control. He wasn’t
very fast but he was able to hit the corners. He threw me
an outside slider that just missed and I hit it. I was
young, so I just started running and didn’t look at the
ball. Everybody was screaming, and I still didn’t look.
Well, it went over the centerfield scoreboard—over 500 feet
away.
When I joined the Lions, we were
a weak team from Kyushu. We had an inferiority complex and
we thought that we could never win against the Nankai
Hawks. Nankai was very strong but they were growing old.
We were a young team but we had recruited a lot of young and
powerful players and they matured in a good way. We also
had Hiroshi Oshita, who was an established veteran. Oshita
was one of the first players to have a lot of home runs plus
a good average. He really was a technician of Japanese
baseball. He had a very strong sense of not wanting to lose
and that kept him going. He saw us young ones hitting home
runs and he would come in earlier to practice and try to
compete with us. Mr. Mihara was smart and arranged it so
that we would feel a rivalry and be stimulated by each
other. We learned from Mr. Oshita and he was pushed by us.
At spring training, he would climb the mountain near camp
before any of us got up. I respected him very much and
learned from him that you have to work hard to get results.
It was really Mr. Mihara who
took a team of country bumpkins and turned us into winners.
Mr. Mihara had a real head for baseball. In those days
there was Mizuhara and Tsuruoka and other famous managers
but Mr. Mihara was 15 years ahead of any of his
contemporaries. He was a strict manager but very
broad-minded and full of ideas. His philosophy was called
“Inch Baseball.” It was a very detailed way of looking at
the game. He thought about everything. He also liked
mah-jong and enjoyed its strategy. He watched how his
players played Mahjong and tried to figure out how they
thought from their moves and learned about his players that
way.
To make us stronger, he actually
paid soldiers from the U.S. occupation force to practice
with us. There was an Air Force base in Kyushu and Mr.
Mihara would hire a soldier to be a pitcher for one day.
Some of those soldiers who came to practice with us became
Major League players. I don’t know how he got the
information about them. He had an amazing network of
information.
A lot of managers in Japan, at
both the high school and professional level, were very
emotional, but Mr. Mihara wasn’t like that. He was all
theory. He said, “Never lose your temper and don't try to
intimidate your players.” Of course, if you broke a promise
to him then he would scold you. He really looked after the
athletes. If somebody was in a slump, he would take them to
another baseball field for extra practice.
Mr. Oshita would take out the
older players drinking but he’d never take us out. We were
just kids, and Mr. Mihara always watched over us. While he
kept an eye on us, we couldn't do anything. For example,
it was popular in those days to form a circle and pour for
each other to see who could drink the most, but Mr. Mihara
would never allow such contests among his players. Besides,
we really had to practice hard to be able to compete against
the strong Nankai Hawks and the strong Giants. So we had no
time for such things. Mr. Mihara was always a very
sensitive about how the mass media covered the Lions. For
example, if reporters wanted to photograph him during an
interview and there was a beer bottle on the table, he would
say, “Stop. Get rid of the beer bottle first. Never get
that in the picture.” If we were too rowdy the night before
and we weren’t in good shape for the game the next day, Mr.
Mihara wouldn’t use us in the game, so we had to behave.
We actually didn’t do much
socially as a team. The regular players didn't go out
together. We’d go our separate ways because we were
rivals. Japanese always talk about team unity. The idea is
that teammates should all get along and in a friendly
atmosphere compete against each other and that power will
lead a team to victory. But that's an ideal. In reality,
you're an individual out there and you're playing for
yourself. In the end, your efforts are intermingled with
everybody else’s efforts and you win. It is really a battle
out there between the players and if such a battle didn't
exist, it would be the end of the team. Some managers don't
understand that.
We had a really balanced team
with good hitting and good defense, so we began to rise and
then we got Kazuhisa Inao in 1956. That’s when it all came
together. Mr. Inao was very balanced. He was a great
pitcher and also very good at defense as well as hitting.
The highlight of my career was 1956. I got the MVP Award
that year, I married Mr. Mihara’s daughter, and we beat the
Giants for the first time. The following year, we also
played the Giants in the Series. That was a real tough
one. We won four straight games with one tie and all of
them had a one run difference!
The 1958 Japan Series was the
famous one where Inao won four and lost two in the seven
game series. We had gained confidence from the previous
year and we had a very balanced team. The Giants were
saying, “We can't lose this series. We’ve got to win!” The
Giants won the first three games and they were just saying,
“We’ve got to win this next one!” But we were out there
saying, “Let’s just play a normal game and do it.” And we
had the God, Mr. Inao. It was his third year and he was at
his peak. There's a saying, “A cherry blossom comes out for
only a short time. Let it blossom and show its stuff.”
Well, it was the moment of his career and we let him show
his stuff. He won four straight games and hit the
game-winning homer in the fifth game!
Our baseball facility was run by
the local government, but every time we won the Series, Mr.
Mihara would get something added to it. For example, one
year we got lighting for night games and another year we got
practice facilities.
I spoke to Hideki Matsui before
he went over to the U.S. He came over to me and said, “Mr.
Nakanishi, it was you and I who always missed the Triple
Crown.” I had forgotten all about it but he made me
remember it! I just missed getting the Triple Crown in four
different seasons (1953, 1955, 1956, and 1958). Twice I
missed it by 1 RBI and once by one hit. But it was just bad
luck, so we didn’t make a big deal about it. For example,
in 1955 we were playing the Orions at the end of the season
and Mamoru Otsu was pitching for us. Otsu was intentionally
throwing balls to Kazuhiro Yamauchi, my rival for the RBI
title. But Yamauchi swung at an outside pitch and lightly
hit it for a base hit and an RBI. So he won the title. It
was luck.
In 1956, my teammate Mr. Toyoda
won the batting title with a .3251 average. I had a .3246
average. After we clinched the pennant, I didn’t play in
the next two games. A lot of people in the mass media keep
saying that I let Toyoda take the title, that I gave it to
him, but no, that’s not true. The championship was what
mattered, individual titles were secondary.
I had been swinging this really
heavy bat, 35 inches, for all that time. I practiced so
much with this heavy bat that in 1960 I got
tendonitis--that's what they said in the old days. Nowadays
if a doctor looked at the injury, they probably would find a
splintered bone or something of that nature. Maybe with
modern-day medicine, they could've fixed my injury. I think
if I had rested it, I could have gone on but I didn't. I
had been spiked in the leg the year before and I was
recovering from that injury. When I don't play, I become
fat. So to lose that weight I used to run up mountains and
things like that. It was also the year that Mr. Mihara had
quit so I needed to work extra hard for the new manager.
Now, I can do normal daily activities but if I hold a bat,
pain still runs through my hand. Because of that
experience, I tell the younger players to use a lighter bat
and avoid the same injury.
When I played against the Major
League teams that came to Japan, the players came up to me
and said, “Hey, you’re small, but you’re fast and you’re a
good all-around player, the only problem is that you have
weak arms.” Americans hit with their powerful arms whereas
we Japanese have to hit with timing and technique. So they
said to me, “Nakanishi, you don’t have a strong arm
transfer.” After hearing that comment, I started training
my arms again despite my injury.
But I never considered playing
in the Majors. There was no way that I could match their
power. Everything we saw just amazed us and awed us,
especially their speed and the strength of their shoulders.
Today’s Big Leaguers can hit, but a lot of players are
lacking in technique. Their defense isn’t as good and they
can’t throw the ball as well as they did back then. They
are not the wonderful players as they used to be in the old
days. The second baseman, the shortstop, the outfielders,
they were all amazing. In those days, they had these great
pitchers where we would be still swinging when the ball was
already in the catcher’s mitt! I remember Don Larsen. He
was this giant and we were just midgets against him.
Because of my injury at such a
young age, the team felt sorry for me and made me a playing
manager. So in 1962, I became the manager and a pinch
hitter. I was 27 or 28 years old and I thought, “I can't be
an effective manager,” so it was a learning experience. But
my head coach, a veteran pitching coach named Tadashi “Bozo”
Wakabayashi, helped me. He was a wonderful person from
Hawaii and had been a very successful pitcher in Japan.
As a manager, I let younger
players play ahead of me. I think that I also had a very
good relationship with my foreign players, Jim Baumer, Tony
Roig and George Washington Wilson, so we were able to win
the championship in 1963. The foreign players are like the
joker card. They are the almighty cards. If you can't use
them well, you can’t win. It’s still true today. As a
manager, you have to open yourself up and communicate with
them. They are the ones who are in the inconvenient
situation. They have a hard time even reading a map! I
decided that I couldn't inconvenience them any more. My
English wasn’t very good, but we didn’t use an interpreter.
When I wanted to tell them something, I looked into their
eyes and communicated what I wanted to say. If you really
look at a person, you're able to communicate with him. It’s
important to be friendly and communicate with them the same
way as you do with the Japanese players. You have to tell
them what needs to be said to their faces because if you
just complement them and then complain to the mass media,
it’s not going to work. But you also have to introduce them
to Japanese baseball without forcing them to change.
For example, when Roberto
Petagine first came here, he wouldn’t talk and was really
gloomy. I was an assistant coach and I helped him out. I
taught him what Japanese baseball is and the Japanese way of
practicing. But I said, “Hey, you're from America and you
have your own way of doing things, but if you think that
this way is good, then incorporate it into your style.” I
didn't tell him that he had to do it my way--that was the
key. I'm proud that during my career I was able to use the
gaijin players very well.
After managing, I became a
hitting coach. I’ve managed or coached almost every
Japanese club. I think that the accomplishment I’m most
proud of was being able to coach so many different teams and
help so many different players with their batting. I had
planned to go to the United States to work with the Arizona
Diamondbacks when Buck Showalter was their manager.
Unfortunately, I got cancer so I never went.
I still have the desire to go to
the States and learn more. You always have to be
imaginative and creative in baseball. I want to learn the
good points from American baseball and teach the Americans
the good points about Japanese baseball. Our bodies in
Japan are getting larger but we can never catch up to the
power of the Americans. If you do not have power, you have
to use technique as your weapon. Here in Japan, we have
technique. We have the proper way of hitting the ball and
using our bodies. If you could mix that with the power of
the Americans, I’d like to see what could be accomplished!
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