Russia is not a place that you would typically associate with baseball. It ranks 27th in the WBSC rankings and the game's history there dates only to 1987 when the Soviet authorities decided to try and get a baseball team into the Olympic Games. Russia does, however, boast a 2nd place finish at the 2001 European Championships. Also, Russian born Victor Cole pitched briefly for the Pirates in 1992. Today, 21 year old Moscow native Anton Kuznetsov is working his way up the Phillies' minor league system. This article is about another Victor though, who became a pitching legend, in Japan.
Victor Konstantinovich Starffin was born in 1916 at Nizhny Tagil in the Urals. His family moved to Japan in the aftermath of the Russian revolution and civil war of 1917-19.
His start in professional baseball was more than a bit coerced. The story goes that his father was facing an involuntary manslaughter charge. This became known to Matsutaro Shoriki, the man responsible for assembling the team that would face the touring major leaguers who arrived in Japan in 1934. Starrfin's intent had been to enroll in university. However, the Japanese Ministry of Education had decreed that any high schoolers who faced the American professionals would forfeit college eligibility. To ensure Starrfin's inclusion on his team Shoriki offered to make the details of his father's court case public. It should be noted that whole affair put the Starffin family at risk of deportation.
Upon accepting this irresistible offer from Shoriki, Starffin would appear in exactly one game on the tour that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. It was a 23-5 blowout. Still, one of the greatest careers in Japanese baseball had been born. Of the Japanese players who faced American stars, two are in Japan's baseball Hall of Fame. One is Starffin, the other, the tragic hero of Japanese baseball, Eiji Sawamura.
From 1936, Starffin would become part of the Tokyo Kyonjingun, today's Yomiuri Giants. He would pitch for them until 1944 when WW2 put an end to pro baseball in Japan for a time. In those years he would never post an ERA higher than 2.63 and win as many as 42 games in 1939. He was a star of what is today referred to as the Japanese dead ball era. (Most of Japan's best players were in the military in the early 1940s as many American stars were) Nevertheless, he was not lucky. He was a dominant workhorse who enjoyed success even after the war although the innings piled up early in his career would eventually show their effects.
He was not always lucky in life either. He spent much of the late stages of the war in an internment camp, a casualty of heightened war paranoia against those of foreign descent. Nevertheless, he did avoid the more tragic fate of other Russians who either died in battle or were captured by Soviet troops during their attack on Japan. At the end of the war, Starffin would spend some time as an interpreter for US occupation forces in Japan. This ended in 1946 as he returned to baseball.
He would sign with the Pacific Baseball Club, remaining there through 1947. In 1948 he moved to the Daiei Stars where he spent the bulk of his post-war career including his brilliant 27 win season of 1949. He would join the Takahashi Unions (today the Chiba Lottery Marines) in 1954 and retired with them a year later. It was here where he would become the first pitcher in Japanese baseball to ever win 300 games. He would finish with 303 wins against just 176 losses across 19 seasons. His 2.09 career ERA and 4175 innings pitched still stand among the best in Japanese history.
Sadly, Starrfin would not have long to enjoy retirement. A car crash would claim his life in 1957. Suicide, drunk driving, a simple accident? The cause remains unknown. He was survived by his son George from his first marriage, and daughters Natalya and Elizaveta from his second. He was inducted into the Japanese baseball Hall of Fame in 1960, only a year after the institution opened. So highly regarded did he remain in Japan and as baseball grows in Russia, he will hopefully come to enjoy the same revered status in his homeland as well.
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