Carp Tales: Gail Hopkins, Part 2

After a seven-year MLB career Gail Hopkins joined the Carp in 1975 helping the team to its first Central League title. I had the pleasure of interviewing Gail for nearly 5 hours in December 2024. The full interview will appear in a future book of Carp Tales, but for now please enjoy Gail's recollections of Joe Lutz's time as Carp manager.

The Carp’s owner, Mr. Kohei Matsuda, was an American-educated Japanese businessman, and so is his son. They were quite successful in the auto industry, and he could see that the Carp were just in this malaise and that there was no way of getting them out. I spoke with Mr. Matsuda a number of times. He would ask me to ride with him in his car. He was a very engaging, entertaining fellow. He wanted to change the way the Carp played because nobody was playing American style baseball. So, he hired Joe Lutz as the manager. [Lutz was the first Caucasian manager in Japanese professional baseball and the first manager who had coached in Major League Baseball].

Lutz had been the Southern Illinois University baseball coach, and then he was the third base coach for the Cleveland Indians. He had had a few issues in the United States. I'm not personally familiar with all that. It seemed to be about interpersonal relationships with players and things like that. But his baseball was actually good. I talked baseball with him a lot. He was going to come in and radically change the Carp.

Japanese baseball was very different from American baseball. American culture affects how we play baseball. We live in it, so we don't see it. We play a result directed, statistical kind of a game. We look for ways of winning that can be duplicated. We want a certain statistical significance to what we do that you can trust; if you do it this way, you're going to win more often than not. In Japan, their culture and history influence their game too. It's sometimes hard to understand Japanese baseball and not be Japanese because the culture is very much involved in how they do things. [In the 1970s] they played hunches and did not rely much on statistics. Also, the idea of catching somebody by surprise was very important. For example, a Japanese manager might try to catch somebody by surprise by calling a hit and run when the bases were loaded. And that will catch you by surprise! It's just whether or not it will work. There's the difference—Japanese want to catch you by surprise while Americans say, “Will it work?”

I saw things in Japan that I had never seen before. I routinely saw guys on first and second with a pitcher at bat and instead of bunting, they would hit and run. When you do that, the batter could hit into a triple play, or he could swing and miss and the runner would be thrown out just like that. One night, the Giants were leading us something like 12 to 1 in the ninth inning, and one of their players got on first and stole second. I yelled out something about it being a bush play. Then he stole third, and then he was thrown out trying to steal home. Now why would he do that? I found out that if he had stolen all three bases, he would have gotten two round trip tickets to Paris and a week in Paris as a prize! We had a prize for the first person who got a double in a game. A real silver spoon. So, we had a lot of players thrown out at second by 20 feet trying to stretch a single into a double to get the prize. There were all these kinds of things that really screwed up the game. Lutz was going to play American-style baseball and not doing any of those crazy things.

There were lots of other little things that went on. Like, the way they trained and used pitchers. Some of the clubs had guys with really great arms, but they would throw them every two days. They would do stuff that was just crazy. So, Lutz came in and his thinking was I'm going to get a fixed American-style pitching rotation. He had some pretty good pitchers. He had a guy [Kazushi Saeki] who won 19 games two years before, and Motoyasu Kaneshiro who won 20 games [in 1974]. He had Yoshiro Sotakoba and he had this younger guy, Kojiro Ikegaya, who really had a great arm. Then he had a whole bunch of other guys, and they picked up a couple of guys to be in the bullpen.

The idea of making the team more aggressive was one of the things that Joe tried to do. He brought in what they called Fighting Baseball. That was the phrase that was used in town and in publicity, Fighting Baseball. The idea was to play aggressive baseball. For example, Japanese players would run out of the baseline on double play balls, and he was telling them to hard slide into second base to try to break up the double play.

Lutz brought Warren Spahn to spring training. Spahn was just a great guy. Warren worked with the Carp players to think about situation baseball. For example, when there is a runner on first base and a right-handed batter up with nobody out, the batter should look for a ball away so that he can hit it in the hole at first base.

During one of these sessions, Shiny and I were sitting in the back of the room and Spahn was talking to all the players about situation baseball. His interpreter was a fairly young guy (my interpreter was seasoned. He spoke English better than I did!). And Warren said, “You guys are putting the cart in front of the horse.” Spahn’s interpreter said something to the Japanese players, and all of a sudden, my interpreter just cracked up laughing. I said, “What's so funny? What's so funny?” And he said, “Spahn’s interpreter said, ‘This guy says something about not getting the cart in front of the horse. Doesn't he know that we always push our carts? We don't have horses behind them!’”

Spahn went on to describe the situation I alluded to. “If you're a right-hand batter and you’ve got a runner on first with nobody out, take a shot to right field. Try to hit the ball through that hole over there.” And the kid was just looking at him, so Spahn said, “Tell them to hit the ball through the hole at first.” So, the interpreter said in Japanese, “This guy says when there is nobody out and a runner is on first base, you should hit the ball into the hole over there at first. I don't think this guy knows what he's talking about. He thinks there's a hole over at first base that you could hit the ball into.” My interpreter just went nuts. He was laughing his head off because what Spahn was saying is just fundamental American-style baseball. So that's the way it was then. Now it's a little different, but so those were the kind of things that Spawny had to put up with. The interpreter made all the difference in the world. When you're trying to teach American-style baseball to the Japanese, you had to have somebody who had an idea what the game was really like.

I think Warren did help some of our pitchers, despite the interpreter. He hung around for a long time. Warren was a gracious and incredible gentleman.

By the end of spring training, I could see that we had some pretty good players. They had some talent. I remember standing with Joe in Hiroshima one day just before the season started, and I said, “Joe, what do you think it would take for us to win?” He said, “Well, we’ve got this guy Yamamoto, and he's going to be a really good one. And Kinugasa. They're both solid players. They'll both hit 25, 30 home runs. If we have somebody else hit 30 home runs, I think that we'll be in the race, given our pitchers.”

I said, “Well, I'm only going to be here this year as you know. If you want me to, I'll move up in the box (because I stood off the plate and I would hit the ball wherever was pitched), and try to pull everything. I'll try to hit the ball out of the ballpark. It's up to you. You're paying me.”  So, we talked about it and he said, “Yeah, why don't you go for it?” So, I did and I ended up breaking the club’s home run record that year.

In the decade that I played in the Majors, I led the big leagues in walk to strikeout ratio. I just hated to strike out, but that season was the first time, and actually the only time in my career, that I struck out more times than I walked. I went up as the proverbial saying goes and swung from my ass every time I could. I tried to pull the ball, and I even pulled pitches that you shouldn't. And Lutz was right, we won. That was what it took. Between the three of us [Yamamoto, Kinugasa, and Hopkins], we hit close to 100 home runs. 

Lutz was trying to teach our pitchers that each pitch must have a purpose. One of the things that drove Joe nuts was wasted pitches. Sotokoba and our other top pitches were good enough to get two strikes right away. But somewhere in the baseball annals in Japan, probably back in 1950, somebody told them if you get two strikes on the batter, you can't let the batter hit the next ball, so you have to waste a pitch. Well, that's nonsense. It needs to have a purpose, so it sets up your next pitch. Lutz came up with a dictum, and this became an issue, he said, “If you go strike one, strike two, with the next pitch I want you to throw the ball inside and back the guy off the plate.” This became an ongoing battle with the pitchers who didn’t want to do it.

Joe was doing all kinds of really good things. Like, setting up a fixed pitching rotation, having pitchers throw purposeful pitches, and “Fighting Baseball.” He also had a set lineup that did not change just because a guy went 0 for 15. Some of the players didn't like it, but he didn't change the lineup because some guy was in a slump. He stayed with players and let their talent come out. But it was not working the way he wanted. The guys were not responding the way they should have. They didn't want to do those things. They had always played the Japanese style of baseball, and they were sticking to it. We had three or four guys that were Hall of Fame players on that club. Two of them hit 500 home runs in their careers and we had Sotakoba and Ikegaya and all these guys. We had really great ball players. One of them, Jitsuo Mizutani, led the league in hitting a couple of years later.  They were just really good ballplayers, but they weren't playing well. They weren't going after balls. They weren't sliding hard and weren't taking guys out. They weren't doing anything. They had rebelled passively. Lutz had lost control.

There was just a lot of unhappiness, and the management was aware of it. They don't live in a vacuum. They knew what was going on, and we weren't winning. The guys weren't playing well. We were in Osaka to play game 15 or 16 and we were 6-9, when they made a managerial change and brought in Takeshi Koba. Koba did not change anything that Joe had initiated. He left the starting lineup the same, he managed his bullpen the same way, and he wanted the team to play hard. He really was a good manager. He didn't hit and run with the bases loaded. He didn't do those [crazy] things like the other Japanese managers did. As I said, in the U.S. we played a more statistical baseball, and in Japan they played more of a hunch or guessing baseball and that was probably one of the reasons our club stood out because Koba did not. Koba played straight up American-style baseball that whole season, and actually for most of the next season, too, I had great respect for him as a manager.