The legend of ace Eiji Sawamura
The year was 1934. A Japanese newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, had sponsored a team of U.S. all-star baseball players to come to Japan following the end of the major league season and play against the best that the Japanese had to offer. The team that was put together had its fair share of legends, including the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx.
On November 20, during one of the later exhibition games, Japan’s team trotted out a 17-year old Eiji Sawamura. Mere months earlier, Sawamura had been pitching against his high school peers; now he was facing the greatest players in the world. In an earlier appearance against the Americans, the teenager had been blasted for 10 runs over eight innings. But that day was going to be different.
Sawamura, less nervous after his first start and wiser for it, attacked the U.S. lineup relentlessly upon entering the game. At one point, he struck out Charlie Gehringer, Ruth, Gehrig and Foxx in a row. That’s four Hall of Fame players, in case you are unfamiliar with them. In his five innings pitched, he struck out nine batters, his only run surrendered on a home run to Gehrig in the seventh inning. While the solo home run was enough to give the Americans the win, it was also the closest the Japanese team had been to claiming victory thus far and Sawamura’s performance propelled him to national fame.
To put his feat into a more modern context, his four consecutive strikeouts would be as if a high school pitcher struck out Freddie Freeman, Mike Trout, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani in consecutive at-bats. It’s not something that you see every day. Or really any day, for that matter.
Following the November 20 performance, the American manager Connie Mack reportedly tried to sign Sawamura to a major league contract, but the young pitcher decided that he wanted to continue to play in Japan. When the Japanese professional baseball league was formed, he went on to play for the Yomiuri Giants. With the Giants, he threw three no hitters, including the first in professional Japanese history, and carried 1.74 ERA and 554 strikeouts. Unfortunately, his life was cut short after the ship he was serving on was sunk near the end of World War II. However, his legacy lived on, and the Nippon Professional Baseball league’s equivalent of the Cy Young award is named after him.
Baseball is full of stories like these, which is part of the reason why it’s my favorite sport. There is history that borders on mythology, a legendary feel to the game, with stories of incredible feats backed up only by the repetition of being told and potentially sketchy box scores. I just recently found Sawamura story myself and it is certainly one of those that fits the bill; the idea of a 17-year old pitcher slicing through an All-Star lineup is the very definition of legendary.
It makes me wonder though; did the 8,000 some fans that witnessed this feat in 1934 realize that they were currently witnessing history? Sure, the moment was not entirely lost on them, but I don’t think that it is possible to truly understand and appreciate the magnitude of such events without the power of retrospection.
And I don’t think that this is something that applies to just sports, or even big historical events. It’s very easy, at least for me, to miss out on small things without properly appreciating them for what they are in the moment.
At any rate, with the power of Internet I was able to find and properly appreciate Sawamura’s impressive feat nearly 90 years later, which is pretty cool. I guess I can thank Facebook’s algorithm for finally giving me something worthwhile.
A C ertain Point of V iew
