Does Japanese Baseball Count?

When I was in Chenery Middle School in Belmont, Massachusetts I had a friend named Eric Oh. When my father heard the name he imediately asked, "Any relation to Sadaharu Oh?" Unfortunately, he wasn't related to hit king of Japan.

With the above average careers (to say the least) of Ichiro and Godzilla (who I recently learned was named for his terrible case of teenage acne and has an extensive collection of adult films), do we need to the Japanese leagues more credit. Oh hit 868 homers in his career. His team won the country's championship nine times in a row.

With the advent of international baseball competitions, it's not impossible to imagine Cooperstown eventually deciding to recognize the work that Ichiro, Matsui, and Dice-K did before they arrived in the US. Sadaharu Oh is alive and kicking and apparently managing in Japan. He still thinks he's the greatest home run hitter of all time.

I would imagine that Oh has some sort of place in the baseball hall of fame. It will be difficult at best for any current major leaguer to 868, but what if A-Rod goes on an insane streak and hits them in bunches for the rest of his career. If he got to 850 and started to threaten the Japanese record, would that make Oh's record more important to Americans? I think so. We would all stop and observe this moment and say, "Now he's the greatest player of time for sure." We wouldn't admit any doubt before the chase begins, but after, we would all agree how important it was. We would at least debate its importance.

I don't think it is about 756 or 800 or even 868. It seems more like every once in a while, the entire country is taken on a road trip where we get to see some giant odometer flip over. We notice it's close to 100, 000 miles or 200,000 miles or in this case 868 homers. We collectively stop to watch one of the great baseball odometers flip (69 homers, 70 homers, 71 homers) and it brings us together.

Unfortunately the only American manager in Japan to be able to comment on the comparison is Bobby Valentine. I like Mr. Valentine, but I also think some of the things he says and does are both self serving and insane, so I'm not copying what he said here. When informed that the world record for homers is 868, Barry could only shake his head and say, "Congratulations Sadaharu Oh."

Of interest to me: Oh was signed as a pitcher who worked on his hitting to become the Big King Homer, much like a certain George Ruth.

related story:
http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070808&content_id=2137191&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb