Lessons from a Legend: M's Johjima mentored by Japan's best

MIYAZAKI, Japan — Kenji Johjima had one final piece of unfinished business in Japan before crossing the Pacific Ocean to begin his second season with the Mariners. He traveled down the southern island of Kyushu to visit his former team's spring-training camp and see for himself the sight of his longtime manager, Sadaharu Oh, in uniform.

"One glimpse of him in uniform really got me pumped up for baseball," Johjima says with a smile. "I was ready to begin another season after seeing him on that field."

Johjima treasures the sight because for a while, he wasn't sure he'd ever see it again. Oh was diagnosed with stomach cancer in the middle of last season. Oh immediately left the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, Johjima's former team, July 5 and had his entire stomach removed in surgery. The occurrence of such a serious illness at age 66 left the return to uniform of Japan's all-time home-run king in doubt.

Johjima keeps in close contact with Oh and had already made a point of seeing his former manager as soon as he arrived back in Japan last October. But seeing him in uniform is a completely different sensation than seeing him in street clothes.

"He's the consummate presence in a baseball uniform," Johjima says, beaming. "His eyes glitter when he's in uniform, and there's just a certain aura about him.

"His facial features and his physique seemed fine. To be able to recover as swiftly as he has at that age is a tribute to his will and, most of all, a testament to his love for baseball."

To simply refer to Oh as Johjima's former manager is to overlook more than a decade of Japanese baseball history. Oh, as Johjima readily acknowledges, is Johjima's mentor. His development as a catcher and Oh's reputation as a manager are intertwined.

When Oh was named manager of the Hawks shortly after the 1994 season, his first order of business was to preside over the November draft in which his new club selected high-schooler Johjima with its first pick. A close relationship, at times surrounded by an outside tempest, began ripening from that moment.

The Hawks salivated over Johjima's potential as a home-run slugger who could also hit for average. Their assessment was validated in 1997, when he hit .308 with 15 homers in his first full season.

Over the next eight years, until he came to Seattle, Johjima hit better than .300 five more times and clubbed more than 20 homers in five seasons. But while his manager may have been the holder of five batting titles and a career .301 average to go with 868 home runs, Oh was dispensing much more than just batting advice.

"He wouldn't talk to me as a batter or even as a manager; he would talk to me as a seasoned baseball person who wanted to share his infinite wisdom about the game," Johjima says. "He sees baseball as a game of chess, where each move is an attempt to force the other side to do something. He would explain his thoughts about game strategy to me, and it was my job as catcher to understand it and help choreograph it on the field."

The more time Oh spent with Johjima, the more he became convinced that his prospect also possessed the ingenuity to make a great catcher. He'd have to staunchly defend that belief because it wasn't initially shared by others.

"Johjima has the unique ability to analyze opposing batters," Oh explains with animated gestures that underscore his enthusiasm for the subject. "He then takes what he knows about a pitcher's strengths and develops a very strategic approach to getting the batter out. He's the type of catcher who enjoys using his head to defeat a batter.

"Even in Japan, the common type of catcher is the one who looks at a batter and says, 'This guy is this type of hitter, so let's pitch him this way,' and they kind of fall into a pattern in the way they call pitches to that batter. Johjima's different. He makes very intricate observations throughout the game and changes his attack based on the information he absorbs.

"He'll say, 'The last time we pitched this batter this way, but I noticed he made a slight alteration in his stance,' or 'I detected a different swing in the on-deck circle, so this time, let's try this.' He's always thinking and changing his attack so it's difficult for opposing batters to detect a pattern to his pitch calling."

Oh was so convinced Johjima had a special aptitude for catching, he unwaveringly made him the team's starting catcher after just two seasons in the minor leagues, at age 20.

It was a particularly bold move at a difficult time in the franchise's history and in Oh's career. The Hawks were awful. In the first six seasons after relocating to Fukuoka, before Oh was hired, the franchise did not finish higher than fourth in the six-team Pacific League.

When Oh took the Hawks managerial post, it was the first time in 30 years as a player, coach and manager that he had worn a uniform other than that of the vaunted Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo. But as the losing continued under his stewardship, disgruntled fans threw eggs at his team and there were rumblings he was losing the confidence of his players.

In the midst of such turbulence, Oh remained committed to developing the potential he saw in his young catcher. Johjima remembers it as a tough but significant part of his career.

"First and foremost, he taught me you can't run away from adversity," Johjima says. "The easy decision would have been to change catchers after we kept losing, but he simply wouldn't do it. He put me in game after game, every game, despite the constant losing. It was excruciating.

"We would lose, lose, lose, and I'd have to keep going back out there. The pitchers would shake off my signs, the batters would hit whatever we threw, we'd lose, and then I'd have to go out there again the next day and endure it all over again.

"He was as patient with me as any human being could have possibly been."

Johjima's on-the-job training continued without interruption. He spent countless hours talking with Oh, the coaching staff and the veteran pitchers about the game and its strategy. But as the losing continued, murmurs could be heard questioning why Oh hadn't moved the young catcher to third base or first base or even designated hitter in favor of a stronger veteran presence behind the plate.

Oh still saw potential and wouldn't budge. Then in 1999, everyone else finally began to see the results of Oh's patience and tutelage.

"Johjima began to display his stubbornness," Oh recalls. "If he got it in his mind that something should be a certain way, he wouldn't listen to me. But you know, only people who produce results survive in baseball, and stubbornness is just another word for confidence in your ability to get results.

"He's a man of conviction and that means when he develops the confidence to use it, he shows no hesitation. That's an important quality. It was a pleasure to watch him develop and I'm grateful to have had him as my player."

In that breakthrough season of 1999, the Hawks defeated the Chunichi Dragons for their first Japan Series championship since 1964, when they played as the Nankai Hawks in Osaka.

Johjima earned the first of what would be seven consecutive Gold Gloves. More significant, he began attracting a reputation as a clever game strategist. He developed into one of the leaders of the Oh-managed Hawks who won two more pennants and another Japan Series title in 2003. Johjima won the league MVP that year, too.

With Johjima as one of his centerpieces, Oh built a Hawks powerhouse that has finished as low as third only once since 1999.

After watching Johjima develop into the tactical catcher he envisioned over 11 seasons, Oh hopes his student will find more ways to assert himself as his comfort grows in Seattle.

"Offensively he'll be fine," Oh says. "He just missed .300 last year, but he'll get there. He hit more home runs than I imagined in his first year, so he'll be fine at the plate.

"As for behind the plate, I think he struggled last year getting comfortable in his new environment. Who wouldn't? He not only had to learn a whole new group of pitchers and study an entire league of new hitters, but on top of that, he had to figure out how to do his job within the context of a different culture.

"In Japan, pitchers are brought up to follow the lead of their catchers. He mastered the art of pitch selection to such a high degree, I had no problem deferring to his judgment.

"But it's the opposite in America, where the pitchers are in charge; they have the final say in throwing the pitch they want. Johjima is an expert at judging situations and reacting accordingly, so I expect in his second year, he'll figure out a way to work within the American system to lead his pitchers to a better performance."

As Johjima prepares for year two and tries to play with more of the style he developed in Japan, he might need to rely on one of the most impressionable teachings of his mentor, the great Oh: A stubborn conviction to be true to your beliefs can pay off in the end.

Brad Lefton is a bilingual St. Louis-based journalist who covers baseball in Japan and America. He often follows the Mariners for Japanese media and he interviewed Oh and Johjima in Japanese for this article.