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Throwback Thursday: Sadaharu Oh Hangs 'Em Up

Sadaharu Oh wrote one of the best sports books ever. Some of its most memorable passages were about confronting the end of his career.

Thirty-five years ago this week, Sadaharu Oh retired from baseball. He played 22 seasons with the Yomiuri Giants, and hit 868 home runs.

His approach was singular. Oh stood in the left hand batters box on one foot, his bat held up in front of him, and simply waited, waited, waited for the pitcher to deliver; waited for the spin of the ball to reveal itself, for the ball to practically nestle itself into the catcher's mitt before uncorking a swing that was big and small at the same time.

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In this manner, Oh hit more home runs than any other professional baseball player ever—his total still places him more than 100 ahead of Major League leader Barry Bonds (762). Oh spawned, if not successful imitators, millions of admirers in Japan, some of whom would go on to become the first generation of Japanese players to star in the United States.

Read More: Three Days at the End of the World (Series)

You might now be wondering why you are reading about Oh's retirement and not, say, the home run he hit to pass Hank Aaron, or one of the many times he went yard in exhibitions against visiting American superstars like Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver—demonstrations that proved what was already known to anybody who saw him play in Japan, that Oh was a world class hitter against any competition.

The answer lies in the profound and profoundly forgotten book that Oh wrote with David Falkner, "Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball." Published in 1985, "A Zen Way of Baseball" is among the best baseball books ever written. Rather than glorify his successes, Oh meditates on his failures and details the arduous and unlikely path he took to overcome them. He also describes, in painful detail, the process of losing his abilities, and finally, retiring as a player.

What made Oh a special player, and by extension a special writer, was not his ability to hit home runs or the beautiful way he hit them standing on one leg, but the keen self-awareness that allowed him to do what he did. Oh treated hitting as more than a calling, and more than an art. It was the guiding principle of his life, and he pursued the smashing of baseballs with the same deep, reverential thinking and feeling that a priest might give to scripture. This is what separates "A Zen Way of Baseball" from books like Ted Williams' "The Science of Hitting." For Oh, hitting was much more than science.

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"I went to the plate with no thought other than this moment of hitting confronting me. It was everything. And in the midst of it, in the midst of chanting and cheering crowds, colors, noises, hot and cold weather, the glare of lights, or rain on my skin, there was only this noiseless, colorless, heatless void in which the pitcher and I together enacted our certain preordained ritual of the home run."

***

"A Zen Way of Baseball" begins with a glimpse, in the prologue, of Oh's last game. But the first chapter is the story of his childhood in Tokyo at the end of World War II.

"I believe Fortune like a breath of wind on my cheek has always hovered close to me in this life," Oh, writes in the opening line. "I was born to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother at a time when China and Japan were at war; I was born a twin, but my twin sister died at fifteen months."

After signing with the Giants out of high school with great fanfare, Oh's first three seasons were disastrous. There was some debate as to whether he would be a pitcher or hitter. As a pitcher for Waseda High School, Oh had thrown four consecutive complete games to lead his team to a victory, despite bloody blisters on his hand, in Japan's famed Koshien tournament. The Giants decided that he would be a first baseman

In his rookie year, Oh batted just .161, and he continued to struggle into his second and third seasons. Things did not begin to turn around until a hitting coach named Hiroshi Arakawa took it upon himself to take Oh under his wing. Arakawa was something of a seeker, a baseball intellectual who used the full scope of human knowledge and Japanese culture to help Oh master his talents and overcome a crippling hitch in his swing.

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Oh and Arakawa studied Noh Theater, Zen philosophy, Aikido and traditional Japanese sword fighting. They read long books and then discussed them at length. They spent thousands of hours practicing swings, with a bat and without. They sought out wise people far from the world of baseball, ranging from Aikido masters to Kabuki performers. Oh writes vividly about the hours of desperate work he put in training at Arakawa's home, even on game days.

Oh was on the verge of giving up—he had, in fact, decided that his own desire for success was what was causing him to fail—when Arakawa ordered him to try something drastic that they had experimented with once before but never practiced: to bat while standing on one foot. He singled in his first at bat and homered in his second.

"You have passed the 'dog-lifting-his-leg-at-the-hydrant' test," Oh recalls Arakawa telling him. "Now all that remains is for you to become what you secretly are."

And so the hitch was not eliminated, so much as absorbed. The flamingo stance was so absurd, so drastic, that Oh no longer had to worry about the hitch. He no longer had to worry about failure. Oh spent thousands more hours more learning to stand on one foot. Learning to wait. And in doing so, he became the greatest hitter in Japanese history.

***

The book's final chapter is about the end of Oh's playing career. Much is made of the way professional athletes, especially superstars, struggle to cope with diminishing skills. They strain against reality for as long as possible, long after the skills are gone, driven by the same blinding confidence that rocketed them to stardom in the first place. This is ungraceful and unfortunate, but it is how this works. Ken Griffey Jr. hit .184 in his abbreviated final season. Nobody wants to think about that.

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Age, writes Oh, "became a waiting and unwelcome guest that I knew I could put off for only so long." He describes how his home run production fell in the seasons leading up to 1980 and details the adjustments he made: starting to guess more, starting his swing sooner, and moving his contact point forward. He describes being acutely aware of the diminishment of his reflexes, his quickness, his vision, and calls the adjustments he made "a kind of intelligent cheating."

Oh believed that he could put age off, that he could reach 900 career home runs, that there were at least a few more years left in the tank. But he was wrong. "As though I were staring into the face of a sudden wave in a calm sea, I saw the end of my career rise up in a single game."

He then proceeds to describe the experience of being blown away by a junkballing 18-year veteran that he had previously homered off in the Japan Series. "My strategic decline, it turned out, lasted only to this finite point—one summer evening in Tokyo. And between the time the evening began and ended, the idea of 'retirement' emerged from the shadows to take me by the hand."

Oh played out the season futilely. He came to grips with the fact that for the first time in his career, he was not even angered by his own failures. They simply passed him by. He returned to his Sensei, Arakawa. They took up their long since abandoned studies for three hard days and at the end of it, Oh could still not hit.

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"Mastery in Aikido means loss of desire for combat," Arakawa said.

And so, Oh describes, "I went back to this torture rack of decline that season's end brought with it. Nothing changed. There were no flurries of recovery, no sudden changes of spirit. The fire was gone."

In the afterward of the 1985 paperback (which also includes a cool flipbook of his swing), Oh's co-author, David Falkner collected some testimonies from major leaguers who played against Oh in various exhibitions. The general consensus was that while he may not have broken Aaron's home run record, Oh would have been a .300, 30 home run type hitter in the majors.

Oh himself wrote that it would have been unfair to compare him to Ruth or Aaron, just as it would have been unfair to compare them to him. He was Oh, and they were Ruth and Aaron. But he would, he admitted, be sad to see his records fall. One of them, Japan's single-season home run record, was broken a few years ago by Wladimir Balentien, a former major league prospect from Curacao who never quite put it together in the United States.

Balentien was not the first player to threaten Oh's single-season record of 55 home runs in a 140-game season. Randy Bass nearly broke it. Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera tied it. All three players found that Japanese pitchers—including pitchers on clubs managed by Oh—were not willing to throw them strikes when the record was in sight. But nobody has come close yet to 868. "I am prouder still," Oh wrote, "of this matter of duration."

In his final game as a player, Oh homered in the fifth inning against the Hanshin Tigers. That was number 868. As he rounded the bases, the Tigers players left the third base dugout and lined up along the baseline to greet Oh with bows and handshakes as he headed toward home.

He went on to become a coach, and then a manager, and then an executive. After his playing days, he built a room in his home just for the study of hitting. He thought he would be a sensei to some young hitter the way Arakawa was to him. But no such hitter came to him.

'It was hard to learn this—perhaps I am only just beginning to follow its lead—but my baseball career was a long, long initiation into a single secret," Oh wrote in his prologue. "That at the heart of all things is love."