The lesson took place late in the season, in the video room of a visiting ballpark, where one pitcher destined for Cooperstown passed on the techniques that another pitcher would use to chart his own path to immortality.
Greg Maddux is not typically linked to Hiroki Kuroda. The two were teammates for the final days of Maddux’s illustrious career. It was a brief encounter for Maddux, who spent significant time with the Braves and Cubs, but a career-changing one for Kuroda. He credits it for helping him pitch into his 40s and, ultimately, for helping him to recently receive his highest honor, induction into Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame
The last two of Maddux’s astounding 355 career victories gave the Dodgers a boost. Greg Maddux is not typically linked to Hiroki Kuroda. The two were colleagues in the latter half of Maddux’s incredible career. It was a brief contact for Maddux, who was heavily involved with the Braves and Cubs, but it transformed Kuroda’s career. His biggest accomplishment, which he credits to his recent induction into Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame, is his ability to pitch well into his 40s. the 2008 West National League championship. After being acquired by the Dodgers on August 19th in exchange for two minor leaguers, he went on to make three more playoff appearances in relief as the team ultimately lost to the
Kuroda, meanwhile, was a rookie—but only in the sense that Major League Baseball defines it. He was a seasoned professional when he came to the United States, having won 103 games in 11 seasons with Japan’s Hiroshima Carp before becoming a free agent and joining the Dodgers at the age of 33. Pitcher Kuroda was no youngster at all. Because he already knew who he was and what he was looking for, the 58 days he spent in Dodger Blue with Maddux would be crucial to his professional advancement.
“Of course I knew who he was and marveled at the way he pitched from the time I was still in Japan,” Kuroda said in his native Japanese. “He was not afraid to throw a two-seamer front door to lefty batters. That was an intriguing weapon to me, because the concept of locating a pitch there was basically unheard of in Japan, but I sensed that I needed weapons like that in order to survive at that stage of my career.”
Since Maddux and Kuroda are both right-handed pitchers, a front door pitch to a lefty requires controlling the ball to begin inside and break away for a strike at the last second. It is one of several tricks Maddux used during his career to get the exact movement he wanted, and it frequently stumps batters at the plate.
When contacted at his Nevada residence, Maddux remembered his collaboration with Kuroda.
“I talked with him through his interpreter about it,” Maddux said. “I saw (Orel) Hershiser do it, so I started doing it. I came up as a power pitcher, but when I was playing with Kuroda in LA, I was throwing 82 miles an hour. He saw that and realized you don’t have to throw it 90-plus to still be effective. It’s a two-seam fastball.”
Kuroda had to first become proficient with the two-seamer, a pitch that was unpopular in Japan in the past. Pitchers should be very proud of themselves for being able to throw the hardest four-seam fastball possible. A two-seamer gives up spin in order to move, but a four-seamer depends on spin rate to reach maximum velocity.
In addition to learning a pitch that was controversial at the time, Kuroda had to get over his discomfort as a right-hander trying to locate it to left-handed hitters without having it hit them or catch too much of the plate.
“That’s the way I was schooled,” Kuroda said. “I thought the same way throughout my career in Japan. I was a power pitcher focused on being precise with my power. The four-seamer was my bread and butter, along with a slider and fork ball. I didn’t throw a two-seamer, and even if I did, I would have never even thought to go front door with it to lefties.”
Before moving to the United States, Kuroda was seen as a prototypical Japanese pitcher. He never led Nippon Professional Baseball in strikeouts, but in his final seven seasons before joining the Dodgers, he averaged exactly seven strikeouts per nine innings with fewer than two walks.
However, Kuroda had a patchy first year in Los Angeles. Over 31 starts and 183 1/3 innings, he recorded a 9-10 record with a 3.73 ERA. Kuroda decided he needed to make changes after realizing that his strikeout rate of 5.7 per nine innings was lower than his usual averages.
“I was now in my thirties and couldn’t rely on power like I did in my younger days,” Kuroda says. “I needed to learn some new techniques for survival.”
At that point, he stopped seeing Maddux with admiration and went straight to him for assistance.
“My image is definitely of a video room at an away ballpark,” Kuroda recalled as he described where he summoned the courage to seek advice from Maddux. “He graciously sat down and watched video of my pitching with me and he pointed out situations where the two-seamer front door to a lefty would be effective and explained the technique for throwing it.”
The final three games of the Dodgers regular season were played in San Francisco. In his final start of his legendary career, Maddux started the penultimate game, requiring just 47 pitches to restrict the Giants to one run in six innings. Kuroda then took the mound for the final game of the season.
“If that’s the case,” Kuroda recalled, “it likely could have been there, because I still hadn’t thrown the pitch at that time and it makes sense that we both would have been in the video room before the first game of the series preparing for our starts.”
while Maddux grew comfortable throwing the two-seamer, he told Kuroda essentially what to do with the pitch while facing lefties. Specifically, Maddux stressed that when throwing glove side, accurate alignment is required to accomplish the sink and movement.
But what about the dread of striking the hitter or pitching the ball in a position where it may be whacked that had been ingrained in Kuroda since he was a little child?
“There’s no difference in having the courage to throw a curveball,” Maddux said. ”You might hang that and they might hit that as well. You’ve got to trust your stuff and trust your location and execute pitches. I know today’s game is all about throwing it hard and making it break so you don’t have to locate it, but even so, the pitchers who execute the best are the ones who win.”
Kuroda’s thoughts were filled with the master’s straightforward encouragement as he worked to hone the technique.
“‘You, too, can go front door to lefties,’” Kuroda recalled Maddux saying. “’You have the ability to do it, you just can’t be afraid.’”
In 2010, Kuroda’s third season with the Dodgers, he started to put everything together, winning 11 games and recording a 3.39 ERA across 31 starts. As the first Japanese pitcher in Major League Baseball history, his 11 triumphs led the Dodgers and Yankees to five straight seasons with ten or more wins.
After rejoining the Carp, he added two more seasons with ten or more wins, and he concluded his career with seven consecutive victories—the greatest stretch in his 20-year professional career overall. In addition, he made MLB history by being the first pitcher from Japan to pitch more than 200 innings in three consecutive seasons.
His walk rate and K/9 even recovered to his career averages as he got closer to 40.
Kuroda remembers a particularly successful 2012 Yankees performance in which he used his newly acquired two-seamer front door to locate lefties.
“I started the game in Seattle on the day we acquired Ichiro (Suzuki),” Kuroda recalled. “Even without Ichiro, the Mariners had a lefty-heavy lineup and I used the two-seamer to go front door with two strikes and freeze a lot of them.”
That July night, Kuroda did indeed win his tenth game of the year, recording nine strikeouts in seven innings pitched with three hits. Lefties made up six of his batters, and five of them were caught staring at the pitch that Maddux had given him.
Kuroda is one of the 51 Japanese pitchers that have followed Hideo Nomo to the Major League Baseball since his debut in 1995. Though he was one of the oldest in that group to make his debut, Kuroda trails 37-year-old Yu Darvish, who came in 2012 at the age of 25, in games started (211), wins (79), and innings pitched (1,319).
Despite supposedly receiving a contract offer from the Yankees for the 2015 campaign, Kuroda decided to play two more seasons in Hiroshima in order to keep his word to go out as a carp. He added 21 additional wins during his seasons at ages 40 and 41, for a total of 203.
The well-known Japanese baseball program Kyujien saw a completely different pitcher following his return. When Kuroda recorded the largest proportion of his total strikeouts that were caught looking, the hosts were taken aback. Prior to retiring to play in Major League Baseball, he had caught looking rates of 22.9 percent and 12.5 percent in his final two seasons. Upon his return, those percentages shot up to 27.6 percent and 36.8 percent, respectively, demonstrating his confidence in throwing the two-seamer to lefties and his application of it.
Kris Johnson, a former Red Sox first-round choice and winner of Japan’s Sawamura Award, which is comparable to the Cy Young Award, saw that fearlessness. When Kuroda returned to the Carp rotation in 2015, Johnson was there and he saw with his own eyes what Kyujien had seen with data.
“The reason that he dominated at 40 and 41 years of age,” Johnson said, “is because he threw inside to hitters and he threw inside with a purpose. Nobody really could command the inside part of the plate back then, because I believe they were afraid of hitting batters.”
Along with Nomo, Kazuhiro Sasaki, Shingo Takatsu, and Hideki Matsui, Kuroda became the fifth player from Japan to be inducted into the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame last month. Kuroda played in MLB for a portion of his career.
Hearing that his one-time pupil credits his advice for helping him gain immortality in Japan, Maddux was typically comradely.
“I think it’s great,” he said. “But that’s just a part of being a teammate, trying to make each other better. Hopefully, I helped as many people as I had people that helped me throughout my career.”
Journalist Brad Lefton is a St. Louis native who speaks two languages. He has spent the last thirty years covering baseball in both Japan and the United States. For this piece, he spoke with Kuroda in Japanese.
(Top photo of Hiroki Kuroda: Stephen Dunn / Getty Images)
