Doorways and staircases that lead to nowhere. Doorknobs where there is no door. Pipes sticking up from the ground, attached to nothing. A functioning tray below a boarded-up ticket window. Train tracks where no trains go. Unnecessary signs. Stairway railings where there’s no longer a stairway. Stumps from cut-down telephone poles. They’re all part of an art movement started by Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa called Hyperart: Thomasson, and inspired by former major leaguer Gary Thomasson.
The San Francisco Giants drafted Thomasson in the seventh round of the 1969 June Amateur Draft out of Oceanside High School in Oceanside, California. He probably never dreamed he’d inspire an art movement, however accidentally, when he made his major league debut with the Giants at age 21 on September 5th, 1972. The left-handed-hitting outfielder/first baseman had his best season in the majors in 1977, when he hit .256/.358/.451, with 17 HR, 71 RBI, and a 117 OPS+. However, during spring training in 1978, he was one of seven players traded to the Oakland Athletics for pitcher Vida Blue. (A’s owner Charlie Finley loved this type of trade, one where he tried to replace quality with quantity.)
Oakland didn’t keep Thomasson long, dealing him to the New York Yankees before the 1978 season was half over. With the Yankees, he earned a World Series ring, going 1-for-4 in the 1978 Series. After the season, the Yankees dealt him to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team they defeated in that Series. Thomasson remained with Los Angeles for the 1979 and 1980 seasons, after which his contract was sold to the Yomiuri Giants of the Nippon Professional Baseball Central League in Japan. For his nine-year major league career, Thomasson hit .249/.330/.391, with 61 HR and 294 RBI.
The Japanese Yankees
The Yomiuri Giants, whose white, black, and orange uniform resembles that of Major League Baseball’s Giants, are by far the most successful baseball team in Japan, having been compared to the Yankees. By 1980, they had won a combined 24 championships in the Japanese Baseball League and its successor, the NPB. They’ve added seven more championships since then, but none since 2012. The Yomiuri Giants play their home games in Tokyo and are owned by The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, Japan’s largest media conglomerate. The American media refers to the team as the Tokyo Giants, a name that the team hasn’t used since 1946. Like many teams in the NPB, their name includes that of their corporate owner rather than their city. (It’s amazing that MLB teams haven’t caught on to this idea yet. I’m waiting for the day when we’re watching the Little Caesars Pizza Tigers and the Rogers Communications Blue Jays.)
It’s only natural that the Yankees of Japan would have the Babe Ruth of Japan. Sadaharu Oh, a left-handed-batting first baseman, played for Yomiuri from 1959 to 1980. Oh retired at age 41 with 868 home runs, more than any professional ballplayer in any league. He finished his career with a .301/.446/.634 slash line and 2,170 RBI.
Oh’s Successor?
Yomiuri thought it had found Oh’s successor in Thomasson. They gave him the biggest contract ever given to an American player. The dollar amount was never disclosed. The Japanese don’t make salaries public, unlike here in the United States. By way of comparison, Associated Press estimated that former Yankee Roy White, who was Thomasson’s teammate with Yomiuri, was making the equivalent of $227,000 per year in Japan. (It was believed that late in his career, Oh was earning the equivalent of around $300,000 annually.) Toru Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun, told AP that Thomasson and White held “the key to success” for the 1981 Giants, who had gone three consecutive years without a championship for the first time. In 1980, White, then 36, had a .284/.365/.514 slash line and hit 29 home runs, one behind team leader Oh.
Not an Easy Transition
In 1980, White and former major league third baseman Steve Ontiveros, the latter having completed his first year with the Seibu Lions, spoke with Melinda Leach and Ed Barmakian of Baseball Digest about the adjustments American ballplayers faced in Japan. “The strike zone is much higher,” said White. “It can be from head level to ankle level. It can also be five inches inside and five inches outside. You never adjust to that.” Japanese pitchers at the time didn’t throw as hard as American pitchers, and thus threw more breaking pitches. “I have yet to see a ball that is right down the middle of the plate,” said Ontiveros. “Their biggest asset is that they have more control.”
Japanese teams never gave their players a day off. On days when there was no ball game, they practiced, even if the game was rained out. The Japanese believed in the adage “practice makes perfect” and placed great emphasis on conditioning. In April 1982, Yomiuri manager Motoshi Fujita benched White and Thomasson for not being in “top shape.”
Ontiveros remembered a game where the pitcher surrendered two home runs, so the manager came out of the dugout and removed the catcher. He also recalled a game in which the opposing team’s outfielders couldn’t pick up the ball because of fog. The umpires called time and had the opponents’ coaches hit fungoes to the outfielders for 35 minutes so that they could determine whether to call the game. Then, in the interest of fairness, they let the Lions’ coach hit to their outfielders, too.
Thomas-son
Thomasson was made quickly aware of those difficult adjustments. In 1981, Thomasson told AP that the transition for American players was difficult because of the language, different pitching styles, and the pressure to perform. That year, he hit a respectable, but very un-Oh-like, .261/.317/.468 with 20 HR and 50 RBI for Yomiuri, but also fell just shy of a record in Japan by striking out 132 times. Meanwhile, Yomiuri ended its championship drought by winning the Japan Series in six games over the Nippon-Ham Fighters. (The Fighters are owned by Nippon Ham, a Japanese food processing company. Thus, contrary to popular belief, the team’s nickname is the Fighters, not the Ham Fighters. Nobody has ever had to fight a ham. Or at least not since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle.)
Strikeouts are frowned upon more in Japan than in America, and the Japanese fans and press focused on that more than the fact that Thomasson’s home run total was second on the team. The 1982 season was less kind to Thomasson. He hit just .187/.279/.227 with no home runs and five RBI. He was benched, and then his season was cut short by an injury. Yomiuri finished in second place in the Central League with a 66-50 record.
Japanese sports pages criticized Thomasson heavily for not living up to the hype as Oh’s replacement. They referred to him derisively as “Thomas-son.” In Japan, “son” is a word meaning “loss” or “damage.” Alternatively, he was known as “the fan” because of his tendency to strike out.
Hyperart: Thomasson
The term preferred by Akasegawa was “useless.” Akasegawa’s art career began in 1956, when he was 19 years old. A rundown of his unique, controversial career is beyond the scope of this article. So we’ll jump to 1970, when he was hired to teach at the Bigakko art school. There, he and his students went about photographing objects such as doorways and staircases leading to nowhere, railings where staircases once stood – architectural relics that once had a function but were now “useless, but still maintained.” They began referring to the objects as “Thomassons” when Thomasson was riding the bench with Yomiuri and continuing to draw his large salary – “useless, but still maintained.”
In 1982, Akasegawa was a columnist for the photography magazine Shashin Jidai, where his Thomassons were published and discussed. Readers were encouraged to discover and photograph their own Thomassons and submit them to Akasegawa for publication. They were properly rewarded with a useless, zero-yen note, created by Akasegawa in humorous response to his 1967 criminal conviction for reproducing a 1,000-yen note as a work of art.
In 1987, Akasegawa published his Thomassons along with commentary in a book, Chōgeijutsu Tomason. An English-language version, Hyperart: Thomasson, was published in 2010 and is still available. Akasegawa died in 2014 at age 77.
In Defense of Thomasson
Although Akasegawa’s art project made Thomasson more famous than he otherwise would have been, the reaction to his tenure with Yomiuri was unfair. Thomasson wasn’t a superstar, but he was a good major league player; one doesn’t stick around in the majors for nine years without talent. But he was never an All-Star and never hit more than 17 home runs in a major league season. Not counting the 1972 season, when he appeared in only 10 games, he hit as high as .285 once, and that was in 1973. His MLB career 99 OPS+ pegs him as an average major leaguer. The notion that he would become the next Oh was absurd.
When Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith became MLB’s first free agents in 1976, owners became like kids in a candy store, issuing contracts that players couldn’t live up to, often for players they didn’t even need, under the faulty rationale that if you pay somebody like he’s the best player in the game, they’ll play like the best player in the game. (Today, owners are more sensible with their contract offers. The contract that the Los Angeles Angels gave to Albert Pujols seemed to have cured them.) Perhaps Yomiuri was afflicted with that same kind of thinking as the MLB team owners at the advent of free agency. Just because they paid Thomasson like Oh didn’t mean he was going to play like Oh.
In 1983, the Seattle Mariners invited Thomasson to join their spring training camp on a conditional contract. The Mariners cut him after he was there for 11 days. That was the end of his baseball career.
