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Chapter 5 Futoshi Nakanishi During the 1950s, Futoshi Nakanishi was the most feared slugger in Japan’s Pacific League. The 5’ 8”, 205 pound Nakanishi could generate incredible power. He began his career by capturing the Pacific League Rookie of the Year Award in 1952. Over the next six seasons, he led the league in home runs five times, RBIs three times, and batting twice. He nearly captured the Triple Crown in four seasons—missing it by 1 RBI twice and a single hit once. He won the Pacific League M.V.P. Award in 1956 and was named to seven Best Nine teams. A debilitating wrist injury limited his playing time and transformed Nakanishi into a playing manager for most of the 1960s. After stepping down as manager, he spent nearly 30 years as a hitting instructor. Nakanishi was elected to the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame in 1999. Today he lives in Tokyo. - - - 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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