From Masanori Murakami to Shohei Ohtani and Jackie Robinson to Mookie Betts

Baseball reflects how America has and must continue to move forward.

Masanori Murakami’s Major League Baseball debut in New York occurred 17 years after Jackie Robinson. Murakami pitched his first game with the San Francisco Giants on September 1, 1964, at the Mets’ Shea Stadium, about 12 miles from Ebbets Field, where Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers 17 years earlier.

Their MLB careers followed very different trajectories. Robinson, of course, went on to win Rookie of the Year in 1947, claimed a batting title in his Most Valuable Player campaign two years later, and helped the Dodgers achieve their first World Series title, the only one claimed in Brooklyn.

Murakami spent the final month of the 1964 season and the entire 1965 campaign with the Giants, primarily operating out of the bullpen. He pitched admirably, but returned to his native Japan in 1966 under what he described to National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum library associate Bill Francis as tremendous pressure.

According to Francis, Murakami said: “I wish I could have stayed a few more seasons with the Giants; I would have liked to have seen what I could have accomplished over a longer period of time. But I still attribute my success in baseball to my experiences in the States. It was such a great thrill, and the people were so kind to me.”

He pitched in Nippon Professional Baseball’s Pacific League until 1982. In 1981, he had one last moment of greatness as a reliever for the Pacific League pennant-winning Nippon Ham Fighters — the same organization for which modern MLB stars Yu Darvish and Shohei Ohtani played.

Murakami and Robinson’s careers were quite different, and so were the circumstances surrounding their first MLB appearances.

Murakami’s debut was met with more warmth than Robinson’s during some of the Dodgers’ travels around the National League in 1947. Robinson routinely received threats, including some infamous incidents when Brooklyn visited Cincinnati.