By Robert Whiting (2011)
Hideki Irabu, once considered to be one of the best pitchers in the world, has died as most of you know by now. He led a troubled life and his time in major league baseball was marked by turmoil. But he also had an historic impact on U.S.-Japan baseball relations and left an important legacy in the area of players rights, which before him, had barely existed in Japanese baseball. For this alone, he is worth remembering.
Irabu was a 6’4″, 220 pounder who was drafted by Lotte in November 1990 at age 19, and nicknamed Shuwarzenegger, for his impressive physique. He threw the ball up to 99 miles per hour and also developed an intimidating forkball. By the age of 27 he had twice led the Pacific League in ERA and strikeouts and once in wins. Leading baseball figures like American Bobby Valentine were comparing him to Nolan Ryan.
Irabu wanted to play in America without having to put in the 10 years required by free agency. He discussed his ambition with officials on his team the Chiba Lotte Marines, and after some initial resistance the front office began to think it was not a bad idea, since the Marines had just formed ties with the San Diego Padres for annual player exchanges and other forms of cooperation. Despite Irabu’s stated desire to play for the Yankees, Lotte traded him to San Diego for a couple of American hitters.
Irabu refused to go, calling Lotte’s deal with San Diego a “slave trade.” He hired player agent Don Nomura and a long, loud international dispute followed, with Irabu being castigated for his selfishness by media on both sides of the Pacific. However, Irabu was vindicated the following spring when the MLB Executive Council reversed an earlier ruling in favor of San Diego, and initiated a freeze on future transactions of the San Diego-Lotte type, producing a new rule that prohibited a player’s contract or the exclusive rights to it from being sold or traded to or from a U.S. club… without that player’s express permission.
It was an historic decision.
Irabu subsequently signed a four-year deal for $12.8 million and more in bonuses with the New York Yankees. Flown to New York in owner George Steinbrenner’s private jet for his first game as a Yankee, he was welcomed on the steps of City Hall by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a widely covered event. His debut, a winning effort versus the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium on July 11, 1997, in which he allowed two runs on five hits and struck out nine batters in six and two thirds innings, earned him a huge standing ovation from the rapt crowd of 50,000 fans and glowing headlines in the city’s notoriously bombastic tabloids. It was perhaps his finest moment as a Yankee. Weeks later he was in the minors.
The rest of Irabu’s career could only be described as equally “mixed.” By early June 1998, he had won six games and was leading the A.L. in ERA at 1.98. However, he finished at 13-8 after a spectacularly disastrous September in which he lost four of six and watched his ERA balloon to 4.06. One night in Oakland, he blew an early 8-run lead, sending Yankees manager Joe Torre into a yelling fit that could be heard in the stands.
He would win Pitcher of the Month in MLB twice, in 1998 and 1999, but then performed so poorly in subsequent games in each season that the Yankees removed him from the post-season rotation.
Yankees pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, who worked hard to improve Irabu’s tools, could not understand how a player could be so good one minute and so bad the next. “When Irabu is on, he has the best stuff of any pitcher I have ever seen anywhere,” he said, “but when he is bad he is worse than just about anyone else.”
His maddening yo-yo inconsistency was matched by erratic behavior. In one losing game, Irabu spat in the direction of fans who were booing him. After another poor performance, he punched a hole in the Yankees clubhouse door. Such outbursts, combined with the surly displeasure he frequently expressed at the umpiring, pitching mounds and other peculiarities of the American game, alienated many, and he quickly became a target for those initially supportive tabloids. Daily News columnist Mike Lupica declared Irabu a “big baby.” His run-ins with Japanese reporters only added to his bad reputation.
Back in Japan, commentators decried his lack of dignity, while Don Nomura’s opinionated mother went on nationwide television to declare “Irabu is the shame of Japan.” Japanese in Manhattan fretted that he made all Japanese people look bad.
Japan-based sports world figure Marty Kuehnert, well versed in the Japanese game, called Irabu a simple “nut case.” Others cited drinking as the cause of his problems. But Jean Afterman, who went on to join the Yankees front office in 2001, had another explanation, having to do with the fact that Irabu never knew his father, an American GI. “He lacked psychological grounding,” she said. “Because of his background, Hideki never really had a chance to figure out who he was, unlike other Japanese who came to the States. He didn’t have a home or an identity. And I think that was the root of all his trouble… That plus the fact that the Yankees coaches kept trying to tinker with the way he pitched.”
I’ve met Hideki Irabu and I can attest that he could be a likable young man when he was in a good mood. Cap pushed back, chewing bubble gum and talking about throwing his forkball, he seemed quite personable. He could also be very generous. To cite one example, he paid off most of George Rose’s graduate-school loans with part of his first World Series bonus.
But he was often morose and given to long fits of depression. He spent much time alone, sitting by himself in the Yankee Stadium bullpen out in right center field. On the road, he would shut himself in his hotel room poring over anatomy books, a favorite pastime, trying to understand further how the phenomenon of body and muscle worked, drawing pictures of the human body, which, in fact, he was skilled at.
Irabu was eventually shipped out of town, first to Montreal, where he underwent elbow and knee surgery and then went to the minors, where he was suspended for getting drunk before a start. After that it was on to the Texas Rangers, where he had a brief shining spell as a late-inning relief pitcher before developing blood clots that put him in the hospital and ended his major league career.
He completed a circuitous route back to Japan in 2003, joining the Osaka-based Hanshin Tigers of Japan’s Central League, where he enjoyed brief success. But then he retired to a home in Southern California’s Rancho Palos Verdes, saying he preferred the relative anonymity of life in America and that he wanted his children to get an education in the United States. He tried his hand, not very successfully, as an udon restaurateur. He made a comeback in April 2009 in the independent Golden Baseball League but could not stay away from trouble.
In August 2008, Irabu was arrested for assaulting the manager of a bar in Umeda, Osaka, after his credit card was not accepted. At the time, he had consumed at least 20 mugs of beer.
In May 2010, he was arrested in Redondo Beach, California for driving under the influence of alcohol, and was ordered by the court to undergo counseling.
His former manager on the Hanshin Tigers, Shinichi Hoshino, later told of receiving a late night phone call from Irabu, shortly after that time, in which he had broken down crying and begged for a chance to return to Japan to coach baseball.
In April 2011, his wife, fed up with the constant turmoil, left him, taking their two young children with her. His marriage irreparably broken, Irabu grew increasingly despondent. He was found dead in his home near Los Angeles on July 27, 2011.
Irabu was a complex man. He had demons he could not control. At his best he was as good as any pitcher who ever lived. At his worst, however, he seemed to redefine the meaning of the word ‘bad.’ But he will go down in history for having championed players’ rights by refusing to accept that Lotte trade to San Diego and attracting media attention to the deal. The ensuing criticism of this transaction on the part of other MLB teams who had also coveted Irabu at the time, combined with a similar episode the following year involving Alfonso Soriano (who wanted to leave the Hiroshima Carp to play for the Yankees), led to the creation of the Posting System, currently used by Japanese and MLB teams.
The Posting System is a mechanism whereby a player not eligible for free agency who wanted to play in America could be “posted” by his team, which would then sell negotiating rights to his services to the highest MLB bidder. Among those Japanese players who joined the MLB via the posting system were Ichiro Suzuki and Daisuke Matsuzaka, whose rights were sold to the Boston Red Sox for a $51 million bid. It was an irony that if posting had been available when Irabu was at his peak, he would have been the subject of fierce bidding.
Hideki Irabu, Rest In Peace.
NOTES:
One reporter wrote that the real reason Irabu refused to sign with the National League Padres team was because his mother was of North Korean descent and the city of San Diego, as home to a major naval base, had figured significantly in military strikes against the Northern Korean Peninsula in the past.
At his Yankees contract signing ceremony in late May in Tampa, he grandiosely announced a list of offending Japanese publications he would no longer deal with.
The fact was that Irabu, according to those close to him, carried a deep well of anger and shame over being abandoned by his white biological GI father and being subjected to childhood taunts about his different looks.
Despite efforts by Derek Jeter (himself of mixed parentage), David Cone and David Wells to help him integrate into the team, Irabu remained an outsider.
1999 began with a disastrous spring camp. Suffering from what Irabu later described as “private emotional problems,” he made several mental lapses in the field. This prompted Steinbrenner, ever the one for delicate understatement, to label him publicly as a “fat, pussy toad.” He rebounded with a 9-3 record and was voted pitcher of the month for August. But then he experienced another maddening collapse and finished with a record of 11-7 and an ERA of 4.85.
A simple and for the most part congenial youth, he was also burdened with a temper that had surfaced often in his school days when fellow students made unflattering remarks about his bi-racial facial features, as well as in baseball games when he gave up too many hits.
Irabu’s fastball was so imposing that it earned him another nickname, kurage (jellyfish), for the stinging effect his inside deliveries had on batters’ hands.
Training in the minor leagues, he warred with a tenacious phalanx of reporters, many of whom he despised for casting him as a villain in his battle with Lotte and San Diego, insulting them with derisive names like “Locusts” and “Goldfish Shit.”
What bothered some Americans was Irabu’s reluctance to discuss the fact that his biological father was American. Hideki Irabu was born in 1968 to an Okinawan woman and an American GI, a young man who had then departed Japan without leaving a forwarding address. Being racially mixed was not a great advantage in Japan, and the difficult topic of his absent biological father was one that Irabu preferred not to discuss publicly. (However, he did confide in one unguarded moment that he wanted one day to go to the U.S. and become so famous a ballplayer that his father could not help but notice.)
Frustrated at Irabu’s inability to succeed, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner also got into the act, announcing to a group of reporters, “I’ve got seven Hideki Irabu T-shirts I’m giving to the blind.”
His former manager Bobby Valentine added, “He probably was in the wrong place to begin with. What he needed was a more sheltered environment. What he needed was not a ‘show me’ mode but a ‘help me’ mode.”
Tokyo Junkie 