Regarding the Dec. 5 article "Oh honored by FSAJ for lifetime achievement": I was surprised to see that baseball great Sadaharu Oh was bestowed such an award by the Foreign Sportswriters Association of Japan without any apparent dissent. It's ironic -- given the unfairness that his teams perpetrated against three foreign baseball players who came close to breaking his single-season home run record (55).
Surely some of the writers must remember the Randy Bass incident of 1985, which was repeated in recent years with Alex Cabrera and Tuffy Rhodes (both of whom tied Oh's record). Oh was the manager of the opposing team in three instances when foreign players were close to breaking his home run record. All three times, his pitchers never gave the batter a fair chance to hit the ball. The most famous indignity was against the Hanshin Tigers' Randy Bass -- the best foreigner ever to play in Japan -- who was walked four straight times in the last game of the season against Oh's Giants.
Oh often claims he didn't order his pitchers to give intentional walks. Maybe so, but any manager with a sense of sportsmanship should have ordered his pitchers to challenge the batters and give them a fair chance to break the record. Those were disgraceful events in Japanese baseball, and those of us who have been here since 1985 will never forget them. If anyone ever deserved an asterisk next to a home run record, it is Sadaharu Oh.
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