Asian Players in the Majors: From Masanori Murakami to Shohei Ohtani

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

The history of Asian-born players in the major leagues, from Masanori Murakami in 1964 through Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui to Shohei Ohtani, with the numbers that mark each step.

On September 1, 1964, a 20-year-old left-handed reliever named Masanori Murakami pitched for the San Francisco Giants, and baseball in two countries changed without anyone quite noticing. He was the first player born in Japan to appear in a major-league game. Sixty-one years later, in the 2025 season, Shohei Ohtani hit 55 home runs for the Los Angeles Dodgers, pitched, and won his fourth Most Valuable Player award. The distance between those two facts is the subject of this article.

The path between them was neither straight nor quick. After Murakami there was a gap of three decades before the next Japanese player arrived, and it took a contract loophole, a labor dispute in the majors and a pitcher with an unusual windup to reopen the door. Then came a flood: Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Yu Darvish, Ohtani and others from Japan, plus Chan Ho Park, Shin-Soo Choo and Hyun Jin Ryu from South Korea, and Chien-Ming Wang from Taiwan. This article follows that history in order and uses the historical record through the 2025 season for every figure. The historical record covers the major leagues only, so the careers these players had in Japan, Korea and Taiwan appear nowhere in its tables.

Murakami, 1964 and 1965

Murakami arrived in the United States as part of an exchange. His Japanese club, the Nankai Hawks, sent a few young players to the Giants' minor-league team in Fresno, California, to gain experience, and Murakami pitched well enough to be called up on September 1, 1964. He appeared in nine games that month and went 1-0 with a 1.80 earned run average and 15 strikeouts in 15 innings.

His second season, 1965, was his only full one. He pitched in 45 games, won four and lost one, saved some games, and struck out 85 batters in 74 and a third innings, with a 3.75 ERA. The historical career line is 5-1, 3.43, nine saves and 100 strikeouts in 89 and a third innings over 54 games. For a reliever in his early twenties, an ocean from home, it was a strong debut.

The complication was his contract. The Hawks and the Giants disagreed about who held the rights to him after the 1964 season, and the dispute was settled by compromise: he pitched for the Giants in 1965, and then he went back to Japan. His final major-league game was on October 1, 1965. Thirty years passed before another player came to the majors from Japan's professional leagues, and the fact that Murakami's story ended in a dispute over who owned him is the clearest explanation of why. (The historical record does list a few Americans born in Japan to military families, such as Bobby Fenwick, who debuted in 1972, but they came up through American baseball.)

Why the door stayed shut

Both leagues bound their players to their clubs. In the United States that was the reserve clause, which tied a player to his team for as long as the team wanted him until the 1970s, when it began to break down. The reserve clause and how it ended covers the American side of that history. Japan's professional league had its own version, with the effect that a Japanese player could not simply leave a club and sign elsewhere. A player became a free agent only after many years of service, and by then most had passed their peak.

The two sides also had an understanding that neither wished to damage the other by signing a player the other still claimed. After the Murakami dispute that understanding hardened into a general reluctance, and for three decades almost no player moved from Japan's leagues to the majors.

The crack came from an unexpected direction. In 1994 a young Kintetsu Buffaloes pitcher named Hideo Nomo, who had been a star in Japan, found a way to use the rules of his own contract. By choosing to retire from the Japanese league under a clause that governed voluntary retirement, he became a free agent in the eyes of American clubs, and in early 1995 he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Japanese league and his old club were angry, and the rules were later rewritten, but the precedent was set.

Nomo and the breakthrough of 1995

Nomo's timing was fortunate. Major League Baseball in the spring of 1995 was emerging from the strike that had ended the 1994 season, and fans who had been angry at the game were looking for a reason to come back. Nomo gave them one. He used a twisting windup that hid the ball, a split-finger pitch, and a fastball, and his rookie season was one of the best by any pitcher of his time: 13-6 with a 2.54 ERA, and 236 strikeouts in 191 and a third innings. His strikeout total led the National League, ahead of John Smoltz's 193. He was named Rookie of the Year and an All-Star.

His career afterward was uneven but long. He went 16-11 with 234 strikeouts in 1996 and 14-12 in 1997, then moved through several clubs, including the Mets, Brewers, Tigers, Red Sox and Devil Rays. His career line is 123-109 with a 4.24 ERA and 1,918 strikeouts in 1,976 and a third innings. He threw two no-hitters, one for the Dodgers in 1996 and one for the Red Sox in 2001, a feat the historical record does not record, because it keeps no no-hitter list. In the 2014 Hall of Fame vote he received six of 571 votes, not enough to stay on the ballot.

The vote says less about his career than about what the Hall of Fame electorate values: counting statistics from a long American career. Nomo's value was the opening itself. Once he had succeeded, every club had a reason to scout Japan, and every Japanese star had a reason to wonder if he could come.

The posting system and the arrival of Ichiro

The next question was how to arrange the moves in an orderly way. A 1997 dispute over the pitcher Hideki Irabu, whose rights belonged to one American club but who wanted to play for another, led to a formal agreement between Major League Baseball and the Japanese league that took shape in 1998. Under what became known as the posting system, a Japanese club could make a player available, American clubs could bid for the right to negotiate with him, and the winning bidder paid a fee to the Japanese club if a contract was signed. Details were revised over the years, but the structure gave Japanese clubs compensation, which is why they began to cooperate.

Kazuhiro Sasaki, a closer, came in 2000 and was named Rookie of the Year with the Seattle Mariners. He saved 129 games in four seasons. But the player who changed the way American fans thought about Japanese players was another Mariner, who arrived the following spring.

Ichiro: the numbers

Ichiro Suzuki was a right fielder who batted left-handed, ran very well and hit the ball where fielders were not. He debuted on April 2, 2001, and the numbers were extraordinary at once. In his rookie year he hit .350 with 242 hits and led the major leagues in hits. He won the Rookie of the Year and the American League MVP award in the same season, something Fred Lynn had done in 1975 and no other player has. The Mariners won 116 games, a total that tied the 1906 Cubs for the most wins in a single season.

He collected 200 or more hits in each of his first ten seasons, won ten Gold Gloves in a row, and made ten All-Star teams, one for each year from 2001 to 2010. His 262 hits in 2004 broke the single-season record, which had stood since 1920 when George Sisler had 257.

The totals are as impressive as the peak. Ichiro finished with 3,089 hits, 509 stolen bases and a career line of .311/.355/.402. He reached 3,000 hits in 2016 as a Marlin, after stops with the Yankees. He appeared as a pitcher for one inning in 2015 and gave up one run. His final major-league game was on March 21, 2019, in Tokyo, in the Mariners' season-opening series there. These are only his American statistics; his nine seasons in Japan before 2001 are not in the historical record.

In 2025 the Baseball Writers' Association elected him to the Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot, with 393 votes of 394 ballots and 296 needed. He was the first Japanese-born player elected, and one voter short of unanimity.

Matsui, Matsuzaka and the next wave

Hideki Matsui, nicknamed Godzilla in Japan, left the Yomiuri Giants to sign with the New York Yankees for 2003. His American career was solid: 1,236 games, 175 home runs, 760 runs batted in, and a .282/.360/.462 line. He drove in 106 runs as a rookie in 2003, hit 31 home runs in 2004, and batted .305 in 2005. His best moment came in the 2009 World Series, when he went 8 for 13 with three home runs and eight runs batted in as the Yankees beat the Phillies, and was named the Series MVP, an award no other Japanese-born player had won at that time. He was also named an All-Star in 2003 and 2004. In the 2018 Hall of Fame vote he received four of 422 votes.

The pitchers followed. Daisuke Matsuzaka arrived with the Boston Red Sox in 2007, to enormous attention, and went 15-12 with 201 strikeouts in his first season, and 18-3 with a 2.90 ERA in 2008. Boston won the 2007 World Series. His career line is 56-43, 4.45. Yu Darvish debuted for the Texas Rangers in 2012 and led the American League with 277 strikeouts in 2013; his career line through 2025 is 115-93 with 2,075 strikeouts. Masahiro Tanaka went 13-5 with a 2.77 ERA for the Yankees in his rookie year, 2014. Hiroki Kuroda, Kenta Maeda and Yoshinobu Yamamoto arrived over the years, and Yamamoto won the World Series MVP award in 2025.

Korea and Taiwan

The Pacific pipeline was not only Japanese. Chan Ho Park, a right-hander from South Korea, debuted with the Dodgers on April 8, 1994, becoming the first Korean-born player in the majors. His career line is 124-98 with a 4.36 ERA and 1,715 strikeouts, and his 124 wins are the most in the historical record for a pitcher born in Asia, one more than Nomo's 123. Shin-Soo Choo, an outfielder from Busan, played from 2005 to 2020 and finished with 1,671 hits, 218 home runs and a .377 on-base percentage. Hyun Jin Ryu, a left-hander, went 78-48 with a 3.27 ERA.

Chien-Ming Wang of Taiwan won 19 games for the Yankees in each of 2006 and 2007, with ERAs of 3.63 and 3.70, as a sinkerball pitcher who struck out few batters. His career record is 68-34. It is a reminder that the stream of talent from Asia to the majors includes strong players who never became stars, and who are rarely mentioned in histories of this kind.

Ohtani: a different kind of player

Shohei Ohtani debuted with the Angels on March 29, 2018, as a pitcher who could also hit, a combination that major-league teams had not seriously tried for a century. His first season produced 22 home runs, a 4-2 record and a 3.31 ERA, and he won the Rookie of the Year award. Elbow surgery after the season delayed his pitching, but in 2021 he hit 46 home runs with 100 runs batted in, went 9-2 with a 3.18 ERA, struck out 156 in 130 and a third innings, and won his first MVP award.

He won the MVP award in 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025, and the National League version in 2024 and 2025 made him, after Frank Robinson, the second player to win in both leagues. In 2024 he hit 54 home runs and stole 59 bases, becoming the first player in the majors to reach 50 of each in one season. He also helped the Dodgers win the World Series in both 2024 and 2025. His career line through 2025 is .282/.374/.582 with 280 home runs and 165 stolen bases, and 39-20 with a 3.00 ERA and 670 strikeouts in 528 and two-thirds innings.

The game changed to accommodate him. In 2022 a rule often called the two-way player rule allowed a starting pitcher who was also in the lineup as designated hitter to keep hitting after he left the mound. The last time a player had hit and pitched at this level was in the 1910s, when Babe Ruth did both for Boston.

What the history shows

Three things stand out. The first is that structure, not talent, held the door shut for thirty years: contracts, clubs' fears of poaching, and rules written for other purposes. When the structure changed, the talent was immediately visible. The second is that the Asian players who have succeeded in the majors are far more varied than the early stereotypes allowed: power hitters, speed and contact hitters, strikeout pitchers, finesse pitchers, closers and, now, a two-way star. The third is that international play helped. Japan won the first two World Baseball Classics, in 2006 and 2009, and won again in 2023, which gave American fans a look at players before they arrived.

A parallel story runs through the sport's history in each wave of new talent. Latin American players in major league history and Larry Doby and the breaking of the American League's color line show other times when a door opened after years of closure. The history of baseball collective bargaining explains the strike of 1994 and 1995 that framed Nomo's arrival.

Common questions

Who was the first Japanese player in the majors? Masanori Murakami, who debuted with the San Francisco Giants on September 1, 1964, and pitched through the 1965 season.

Who has the most hits by a player born in Asia? Ichiro Suzuki, with 3,089 in the historical record. The historical record does not include his hits in Japan.

Has any Asian-born pitcher won more than 124 games? Not in the historical record through 2025. Chan Ho Park has 124, Hideo Nomo 123 and Yu Darvish 115.

Where can I find the full records? The players section lists each player's major-league record, and the international section covers leagues outside the majors.

Where to go next

For the careers behind these names, the leaders pages rank hits, home runs and strikeouts, and the international section follows the leagues in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. For another story about who was allowed onto the field, read the history of women in baseball.