Sadaharu Oh or officially Wang Chenchih (Chinese: 王貞治; pinyin: Wáng Zhēnzhì, Hepburn: Ō Sadaharu, born May 20, 1940), is a former baseball player and manager of the Yomiuri Giants in
Nippon Professional Baseball and is the current manager of the
Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. He holds the world record for home runs on a professional
level, having hit 868 in his career.
Oh is the son of a Chinese father (from Zhejiang) and a
Japanese mother and was born in Sumida, Tokyo, Japan. He had Japanese citizenship when he was born, but the family changed
their nationality soon after the end of World War II. He speaks Japanese and has lived in Japan all his life. He and his three daughters hold Republic of China passports.
Playing Career
Prep Career
In high school, Oh made many appearances at Koshien Stadium and suffered several
tough defeats. In 1957, Waseda Jitsugyo High School made it to the Spring Koshien Tournament with the second-year Oh as its ace
pitcher. Right before the tournament started, Oh suffered serious blisters on two fingers of his
pitching hand. The only way to heal the injury was with rest, but Oh refused to let his team down. Hiding his injury so as not to
demoralize his team, Oh pitched the entire first game at Koshien and won. Oh's catcher noticed the bloodstained ball, but agreed
to keep the injury secret from the rest of the team. The next day, Oh pitched another complete game and earned the victory, and
again his catcher kept the injury a secret, but the blisters worsened. The pain and infection was unbearable, and now Oh faced
the prospect of pitching two more games — on back-to-back days — for the championship. All the same, Oh pitched and won another
complete game, enduring the pain. After the game, on the eve of the final, he had already lost all feeling in his fingertips, and
was convinced he could not pitch in the final.
That night, Oh was paid a surprise visit by his father, who had noticed the injury while watching his son pitch on television.
Oh's father had traveled 350 miles from Tokyo to bring him a Chinese herbal
remedy. The miracle treatment worked, and Oh was able to just make it through his fourth complete game in four days,
squeaking out a one-run victory. Oh had won the championship, proved his fighting spirit, and earned fame and the respect of the
nation.
Professional Career
In 1959, he signed his first professional contract as a pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants. However,
Oh was not a strong enough pitcher to succeed professionally and soon switched to first
base, working diligently with coach Hiroshi Arakawa to improve his hitting skills. This led the development of Oh's
distinctive "flamingo" leg kick. It took the left-handed hitting Oh three years to blossom, but he would go on to dominate the
baseball league in Japan.
Oh led his league in home runs fifteen times (and for thirteen consecutive seasons) and also
drove in the most runs for thirteen seasons. More than just a power hitter, Oh was a five-time batting champion, and won the Japanese Central League's batting
triple crown twice. With Sadaharu Oh at first
base, the Yomiuri Giants won eleven championships, and Oh was named the Central League's Most Valuable Player nine times and to the All-Star team eighteen
times.
Sadaharu Oh retired in 1980 at age 40, having amassed 2,786 hits (third after Isao Harimoto and Katsuya Nomura), 2,170 RBIs, a lifetime batting average of .301, and 868 home runs.
His hitting exploits benefited from the fact that, for most of his career, he batted third in the Giants' lineup, with another
very dangerous hitter, Shigeo Nagashima, batting fourth; the two players forming the
feared "O-N Cannon". In his autobiography, Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way Of Baseball (ISBN 978-0812911091), Oh said he and
Nagashima were not close, rarely spending time together off the field. Oh was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.
Managing career
Oh was the assistant manager of the Yomiuri Giants between 1981 and 1983. He became the manager of the Yomiuri Giants between
1984 and 1988. He led the Giants to one Central League pennant in
1987.
In 1995, he returned to baseball as the manager of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (later the Fukuoka
SoftBank Hawks). Oh led the Hawks to three Pacific League pennants in 1999, 2000 and 2003, and two Japan Series titles in 1999 and 2003.
In 2006, Oh managed the Japan national baseball
team, winning the championship in the inaugural 2006 World Baseball
Classic over Cuba. On July 5, he announced that he was
taking an indefinite leave of absence from the Hawks to combat a stomach tumor.[1] On July 17, 2006, Oh underwent
laparoscopic surgery to remove his stomach and its surrounding lymph nodes. The surgery was considered to be a success. [2] Although the tumor was confirmed to be cancerous, it was caught in early stages. He has since
returned to coaching the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks.
Oh's tenure as a manager has not been without controversy. On three occasions, foreign players have challenged his
single-season home run record of 55 (Americans Randy Bass in 1985, 54 HRs, and
Karl "Tuffy" Rhodes in 2001, 55 HRs; and Venezuelan Alex
Cabrera in 2002, 55 HRs). Each of these men played against teams managed by Oh late in the season with the record on the
line. In each instance Oh's pitchers were either instructed or refused to throw hittable pitches, in order to safeguard Oh's
record. Reacting to treatment of Bass in 1985, Japanese baseball commissioner Hiromori Kawashima
termed Oh's team's behavior "completely divorced from the essence of...fair play."
The Bass/Oh record incident was used as a plot point in the Tom Selleck movie
Mr. Baseball in which Selleck's character, preparing to break his team's manager's
record for consecutive home run games, starts getting walked by pitchers when he comes to bat. And similar to Bass, Selleck would
challenge the pitchers to throw strikes by gripping the bat upside down.
In the case of the Rhodes incident, Oh's pitching coach, Yoshiharu Wakana, took the blame by
saying he gave the order to pitch around Rhodes. He then bluntly added, "I just didn't want a foreign player to break Oh's
record.". Hawks pitcher Keizaburo Tanoue went on record saying that he wanted to throw strikes to
Rhodes and felt bad about the situation.[3]
In the wake of the most recent incident involving Cabrera, ESPN listed Oh's single-season home
run record as #2 on its list of The Phoniest Records in Sports.[4]
Others
In 1988, Oh and Hank Aaron created the World Children's
Baseball Fair (WCBF), to increase the popularity of baseball by working with youngsters.
Oh was married to Kyoko Oh (王恭子 Ō Kyōko) and has three daughters.
Kyoko Oh died of stomach cancer in December 2001 at age
57. In December 2002, her ashes were stolen from their family grave. The reason for this theft is
still unclear.
"Ō" is the Japanese rendering of the common Chinese surname "Wang", which literally means "king". This is a coincidence considering he is considered a "Home Run
King" in baseball.
References
- ^ The Seattle Times,
"Briefs:
Sadaharu Oh to have stomach surgery", July 6, 2006.
- ^ Associated PRess, "Japanese Baseball Great Sadaharu Oh Has Operation for Stomach Cancer", RedOrbit,
July 18, 2006.
- ^ Roah, Jeff, "tokyo under the tracks: It's Never Too Late to Insert an Asterisk", Tokyo Q,
October 12, [[2001].
- ^ Merron, Jeff, "The Phoniest
Records in Sports", ESPN.com, February 28, 2003.
External links
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