Only four active baseball stadiums remain where Babe Ruth once played: Wrigley Field, Boston’s Fenway Park, and two in faraway Japan. This, as it happens, is largely why the Cubs season will begin in Japan on Tuesday.
There were several major league exhibition tours to Japan from 1908 through 1931, with the American pros playing against amateur and college teams.
In 1934, almost 500,000 fans welcomed the American baseball motorcade in Tokyo for a barnstorming tour against Japanese pro players. The American team featured the hallowed Babe Ruth, then 39 years old, and included Lou Gehrig, Connie Mack, Jimmie Foxx and a rather inconspicuous journeyman catcher named Moe Berg.
Ruth became a Japanese icon, and a notable monument to him still exists next to the Hanshin Koshien Stadium, a three-hour train ride west of Tokyo.
Berg was a decent backup catcher but not a superstar. He was there because he happened to speak Japanese and had already been to Japan for a baseball instructional visit in 1932.
He was also a capable, willing spy, of all things, who performed undercover espionage by taking photos of Tokyo for the American Armed Forces. Berg’s work was later used for the Jimmy Doolittle retaliatory bombing raid over Tokyo in April 1942, about four months after Pearl Harbor.
Berg was both exceptional and eccentric. He studied modern languages at Princeton and spoke six of them reasonably well, including German, French, and Japanese. He also loved baseball and played on five major league teams, including the White Sox. He also became a lawyer along the way. In late 1944, he was sent to Germany undercover as a “Swiss physics student,” but he was really there to spy on the German nuclear program.
The visiting 1934 team dominated during its 18-game excursion. But one day the American all-stars were shut down by a 17-year-old Japanese pitcher, Eiji Sawamura, who struck out nine in a row, contributing to a 1-0 shutout win for Japan.
Baseball was first introduced to Japan in 1873, and it grew in popularity at all levels from high school to the professional leagues. It became Japan’s national game and most popular team sport. Now its players are making a splash for the major leagues, too.
Reigning MVP Shohei Ohtani goes home
The reigning National League MVP is Dodgers sensation Shohei Ohtani. The first Japanese player to appear in the major leagues was pitcher Masanori Murakami, who took the mound for the San Francisco Giants against the New York Mets on Sept. 1, 1964.
Other Japanese players would follow Murakami to the big leagues. Ichiro Suzuki signed with the Mariners in 2001 and eventually became the first Japanese player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame with the 2025 class.
Hideo Nomo was signed by the Dodgers. The Cubs took pitcher Yu Darvish, and Masahiro Tanaka went to the Yankees, as did Hideki Matsui who was named 2009 World Series MVP.
So far, 80 Japanese-born players have made it to the major leagues. On Opening Day 2025, the Cubs and Dodgers will feature four of them: Shota Imanaga and Seyia Suzuki for the Cubs and Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto for the Dodgers.
The Cubs-Dodgers matchup is the sixth big-league spring opener to take place in Japan, and Ohtani will make his first appearance back home since leaving for the majors.
Japan’s obsession with baseball even comes with an American-style baseball curse much like Boston’s curse of the Bambino and the Cubs’ Billy Goat curse. It was anything but highbrow though, since it featured the ceremonial ruin of a Kentucky Fried Chicken statue of Col. Sanders.
When the Hanshin Tigers won a key game on its way to a championship in 1985, the exuberant crowd tore down the statue and threw it into the nearby river. Soon the team began losing again, so the locals concluded it was a curse from Col. Sanders. That’s baseball.
The team finally made it back to the series in 2003, but it did not win. The statue was finally fished out of the river in 2009, sorely worse for wear.
More and more Japanese-born players are finding their way to the big leagues, which is good for baseball. And for Ohtani. His 2024 MVP numbers include a .310 batting average, 54 home runs, 130 RBIs, 59 stolen bases and a new $700 million contract.
Ruthian numbers, to be sure. Except for that contract and his stolen bases. Ruth never made over $80,000 in a year, and he never swiped more than 17 bases in a season, let alone 59.
Eldon Ham is a faculty member at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching sports, law and justice. He is the author of five books on the role of sports history in America.
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