Posted by Michael Street on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 1:14 am

This week’s Asian baseball highlight likely flew under the radar of most American baseball fans, unless you’re an Astros fan or happened to be watching the Brewers game on Saturday night.

In the top of the third, Houston second baseman Kazuo Matsui shot a sharp grounder deep in the hole between second and third. Milwaukee shortstop Alcides Escobar snagged the ball and gunned it to first, but too late to catch Matsui. An infield single, Matsui’s 567th hit in Major League Baseball.

Hardly a significant landmark in MLB, but when combined with Matsui’s 1433 hits in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), it made a magic 2,000. This made him instantly eligible for Japan’s Meikyukai, or Golden Player’s Club. No, it’s not a casino rewards program; it’s a private organization meant to recognize the greatest Japanese ballplayers ever.

It sounds suspiciously like a Baseball Hall of Fame, but Japan has one of those, too, opened in 1959, and is a lot like ours, right down to voting requirements and veteran’s committee to catch those who fall through the cracks.

So what the heck is the Meikyukai all about? In 1978 Masaichi Kaneda, “The Emperor,” one of Japanese baseball’s all-time great pitchers, created the Meikyukai as a “friendship club . . . to promote baseball and contribute to society.” The membership rules are simple: get 2,000 hits, 200 wins or 250 saves, and you’re in.

Those hits, wins and saves can come in NPB or MLB—although foreign-born players who achieve these milestones in the U.S. and Japan are not eligible for membership—and active players are inducted as soon as they reach the milestone. Japanese MLB players like Kaz Sasaki, Shingo Takatsu, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideo Nomo, and Hideki Matsui have all achieved membership.

This honor seems a bit strange: it’s like getting in the HOF without all the B.S. and while you’re still an active player. No arguments about steroids or whether 500 HRs still means what it once did, no nebulous worries about off-field conduct or friendliness with the media. Just reach the milestone, and you’re in.

Although this seems like an appealing idea (just imagine the lack of controversy in a player reaching this sort of Hall of Fame), one question is whether these milestones represent Hall-worthy criteria. 258 MLB players have reached the 2000-hit plateau, 110 have won 200 games, though just 27 have accumulated 250 saves.

Meikyukai has some excuses for this low bar: Japanese seasons are shorter, and their pitchers are usually in six-man rotations. Matsui, however, joins an elite club of just 48 players (two have refused membership for political reasons—imagine that in the HOF).

That’s a lot less than the 395 who would have achieved the Meikyukai in MLB, and a fair sight less than the 202 players currently in the US Hall. This is due in part because NPB still only has eight teams (and hence far fewer players) and because Meikyukai only recognizes players who played since 1928.

Whatever the standards, few would think Matsui of the U.S. Hall of Fame, even considering his laudable Japanese career.

When Matsui came over to the Mets in 2004, fans had high hopes for the first Japanese-born infielder to play in MLB. He’d hit .305/.365/.549 in eight NPB seasons, flashed Gold Glove skills, and racked up 150 HRs, 569 RBI, and 306 steals.

The Mets signed him to a $20.1M three-year deal and were excited for their switch-hitting shortstop, but he hit .272/.331/.396 in his rookie year, missing about a month and a half due to a lower back strain.

Because of his 23 errors, the Mets flip-flopped him in 2005 with then-2B Jose Reyes. While Matsui’s defense improved, his offense stagnated, and the Mets dropped him from second to eighth or ninth in the order. Again losing time to injury—this time to a bruised knee—he hit only .255/.300/.352 that year

After he started 2006 with a .267/.310/.379, the Mets traded him to the Rockies for Eli Marerro; though the Rockies demoted him to AAA instantly, he rebounded with a vengeance, hitting .345/.392/.504 in their final 32 games after getting called up.

The Rockies brought him back on a one-year deal in ‘07, and he became important during their miraculous run to the World Series, playing in 104 games (his most since his rookie year) and putting up a respectable .288/.342/.405, hitting once more at the top of the lineup, where he scored 84 runs and swiped 32 bags.

In his only postseason, he shone in the first round, with a .417/.500/1.083 line that included a HR, two triples, a double and 6 RBI, but faltered in the next two rounds with the rest of the Rockies, ultimately going just 5-17 (.294/.294/.353) in losing the Series to Boston.

But his production was enough for the Astros to sign him to a three-year deal (this time for just $16.5M) in 2008, where he’s continued to produce at a moderate, unspectacular level. Last season, he hit .293/.354/.427 with 58 R, 33 RBI and 20 SB in just 96 games, missing time for three different injuries (including the infamous anal fissure), and his 2009 line is currently .243/.296/.329, with 38 R, 29 RBI, 12 SB, with one DL stint for a strained hammy.

His overall line, after five years in MLB, is .271/.325/.385, with 308 R, 193 RBI and 94 SBs. Combine that with his Japanese stats, and you get a career line of .297/.355/.456, with 178 HRs, 762 RBI, 1070 R, and 400 SBs.

Seems possibly Hall-worthy, and it compares quite favorably with at least two HOF 2B, Frankie Frisch (The Fordham Flash) and Ryne Sandberg, who both are close to that .801 OPS:

Matsui       .297         .355         .456        178 HR        1070 R        762 RBI        400 SB

Frisch        .316         .369         .432         105 HR       1532 R        1244 RBI      419 SB

Sandberg  .285         .344         .452         282 HR       1318 R         1061 RBI      344 SB

Frisch is hurt by playing the first part of his career at the tail end of the Dead Ball Era, though it is interesting to see Matsui so close to this speedster in swipes. Sandberg’s HRs, interestingly, don’t compensate for Matsui’s other XBH, and his OBP is lower.

Both HOFers clearly beat him in counting stats, which is the product of playing for 19 (Frisch) and 16 (Sandberg) seasons, compared to Matsui’s combined not-quite-13 between the U.S. and Japan, which has been further diminished by his fragility.

This isn’t an entirely fair comparison, of course, since it counts NPB as equal to MLB, and as we all know, NPB is considered a AAAA league. So I used Jim Albright’s rather simple conversion scale that he used to make the case for Saduharah Oh being in the MLB HOF. Using those, we get some slightly different numbers that better represent Matsui’s MLB stats.

His overall MLB-NPB line becomes .277/.341/.413, which seems much more like the Matsui we know. His HR totals would be diminished to 107, but his other counting stats would remain roughly the same (though we ought to dock his RBI totals by at least those 71 missing dingers).

Even with a few more years of production at current levels, he’d be a borderline call for the HOF at best, and he doesn’t flash amazing defense or game-changing hitting/stealing ability the way Frisch and Sandberg did. Had Matsui played his entire career in the U.S., it’s possible he might have done better, with those 2004-5 adjustment seasons coming in his earlier years.

For now, though, he’ll have to be happy with Meikyukai’s odd kinda-sorta-Hall of Fame award, along with the inevitable induction to the “real” Japanese Hall of Fame after his retirement.

It would be great to see him have a late career surge that would get him in the discussion for the U.S. version, bringing up the dilemma of how to regard players who spend half their career in Japan. But before he’d be able to do that, Ichiro will have retired, and we will have had that talk already (though it’s hard to imagine Ichiro being denied the Hall for his MLB achievements alone, considering the record-breaking achievements he’s already accomplished in the States).

So let’s appreciate Matsui for what he is: an above-average second baseman who never quite made the impression we expected from the first Japanese infielder in MLB. By all accounts a good clubhouse guy, a hard worker and good contributor, Matsui should at least earn our respect, which ought to be the most important award of all.