Photo credit: @theScore

By: Amaury Pi-Gonzalez

OAKLAND — Although Hideki Matsui played most of his Major League career with the New York Yankees, he also made a brief stop in the Bay Area for the Oakland Athletics. His name was on the ballot for this 2018 MLB Hall of Fame election. He will not make it to Cooperstown, New York, but at least he is in the Hall of Fame of his native Japan. He was recently inducted to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame.

Also known as “Godzilla,” Matsui is a legend in Japan. He won the People’s Honor Award, three Central League MVPs, and was an All-Star in nine of his 10 seasons. His most memorable award in the major leagues was in 2009 as he won the MVP in the World Series. He became the first and only Japanese-born player to win this award, and he did it with sensational numbers. As a designated hitter during the 2009 World Series, he hit .610 with three home runs and eight runs batted in.

The most impact a DH had on a World Series game came in the Game 6 of the 2009 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies. Yankees’ DH, Hideki Matsui, contributed to six of the seven runs his team had in the game. Matsui batted .600, the highest average for a DH in a World Series, and was also the first DH to win the World Series MVP Award.

Hideki Matsui played for 10 years from 2003 to 2012 with the Yankees, Angels, Athletics and Rays. In 2011 with the A’s, he played in 141 games and hit  .251 with 12 home runs and 72 runs batted in. During his Major League career, he finished with a respectable .282 average 175 home runs and 760 RBI.

In Japan, Matsui was one of the most popular players ever. Extremely marketable, his face appeared in tea cups and even on the fuselage of a 747 plane. During his brilliant Hall of Fame career in Japan, he compiled a .309 batting average, 332 home runs and 889 RBI in a total of 1,268 games played.

There are some among the United States baseball media members that said while he was playing in the states, he was the first Japanese player to reach 500 home runs, which was correct.

However, there is one caveat, you have to add the 332 home runs in Japan to the 175 here in the big leagues, to reach that number. Many also had similar combined numbers when it came to hits for another great Japanese player, Ichiro Suzuki, who will be someday the first ever Japanese player inducted to Cooperstown.

One interesting note about these two players: While Matsui was popular in Japan and in the U.S., Suzuki is not as popular. It has to do with two totally different personalities. Not to take anything away from Suzuki, who is the best Japan-born player that I have seen here in the major leagues, but he was never as well-liked in Japan as Matsui. That is what my Japanese colleagues have told me for years.

In the 2011 season that Hideki Matsui played for the A’s, he was well-liked by his teammates, fans and media members in the Bay Area. He was a soft-spoken young man with a strong presence along with excellent professionalism and skills.

Congratulations to Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui!