NPB History | Baseball Hall of Fame Museum — Where Oh Sadaharu's 756th Ended Up

A bat and a ball in a case, a few metres inside the door, under a wall of terracotta figures swinging and sliding and diving. The bat is the one Oh Sadaharu was holding on 3 September 1977, and the ball is the one he hit with it. That evening the Giants were at home to the Yakult Swallows at Korakuen, next door to where the museum now stands. Oh had been stuck on 755 for two games, level with Hank Aaron, with the country watching every at-bat and photographers camped outside his house. He walked in the first. He came up again in the third, and the count ran full. The pitcher was Suzuki Kōjirō, a tall right-hander in his first full season as a starter, on his way to fourteen wins. A great many pitchers that summer had found reasons not to give Oh anything to hit. Suzuki went at him. On the sixth pitch of the at-bat he left a breaking ball up, and Oh put it into the right-field stands: home run number 756, one past Aaron, a world record. Paper streamers, fireworks, and a ceremony in which the veteran Horiuchi Tsuneo drove Oh around the ballpark in the bullpen car. Days later Oh became the first person to receive the People's Honour Award, an honour the government created for the occasion. He finished his career on 868. There was a prize on offer for whichever pitcher surrendered the record — a trip to Saipan for two. Suzuki turned it down flat and said the memory of the day was enough. The following season he helped Yakult to the first pennant in the club's history. The Baseball Hall of Fame Museum has assembled the whole sequence: the balls from 600 and 700, the ball and bat from 714 when Oh drew level with Babe Ruth, 715, 755 when he drew level with Aaron, 756, and 800. Laid out together they turn a record into an errand a man ran for twenty years. The museum sits beside Gate 21, on the first-base side of Tokyo Dome, and is open to the public without a game ticket. The home run itself was struck about two hundred metres away, on the Korakuen footprint, where there is nothing at all to mark it — which is exactly why the museum is the place to go. Coordinates 35.705579, 139.752898 — the museum entrance beside Gate 21; ±20 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check. Cover: the entrance to the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum, Tokyo, photographed 15 January 2022 by Kaidai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.