Victor Starffin — baseball (legend) with roots in the USSR (Civil War)
He was born Viktor Starukhin at Nizhny Tagil in the Urals on 1 May 1916, in the last year of the Russian Empire. His family were White emigres who left after the revolution, reached the large Russian refugee community at Harbin in Manchuria, stayed there nearly five years, and in 1925 paid the Japanese authorities 4,500 yen - a sum they could barely raise - for permission to settle in Japan. They ended up at Asahikawa on Hokkaido.
He grew up there, enormously tall by the standards of the place and time, and started pitching. In 1934 an American all-star team toured Japan, and the teenager was put in for an inning against them: he walked Lou Gehrig, struck out Jimmie Foxx, walked Earl Averill and got Bing Miller to ground into a double play.
He became the first foreign player in Japanese professional baseball, joining what became the Yomiuri Giants, and in 1937 the first foreign player to throw a no-hitter. In 1939 he won 42 games, which remains the league record. In 1940 he won 38 more, with 436 innings pitched and an earned run average under one. He was called the blue-eyed Japanese, and was said to be more Japanese than the Japanese.
None of it made him a citizen. His applications were stonewalled and he remained stateless for life. As relations with the Soviet Union collapsed after the Nomonhan fighting of 1939 and Japan moved toward war, foreign words were driven out of the game - even strike and ball - and in 1940 he was required to take a Japanese name, Suda Hiroshi, if he wanted to go on playing. His daughters later pointed out that the league's most valuable player in 1939 was Victor Starffin and in 1940 was Hiroshi Suda, and that these were two trophies belonging to the same man. He was suspected of spying and spent part of the war in a detention camp for foreign nationals.
Afterwards he worked as an interpreter for the American occupation forces, went back to baseball in 1946, and moved through several clubs. On 9 September 1955, pitching for the Tombo Unions, he became the first man in Japanese professional baseball to win 300 games. He finished with 303 wins and 83 career shutouts, a record that has never been beaten.
No club signed him after that season. In January 1957 the car he was driving was struck by a train and he was killed, at forty; the circumstances are still argued over. In 1960 he became the first foreigner elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, and when Asahikawa built a new stadium in the 1980s it was named after him - still the only ground hosting Japanese league games named for a single player. A statue of him stands at the entrance.
"Urals to Harbin after the revolution; to Japan in 1925; stateless for life"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Nizhny Tagil
He remained stateless all his life, his applications for Japanese citizenship refused. In 1940 he was required to adopt the Japanese name Suda Hiroshi in order to keep playing, and was later interned as a suspected spy.
Born Viktor Starukhin at Nizhny Tagil in the Urals in 1916. His family left Russia after the revolution as White emigres, spent nearly five years in the Russian refugee community at Harbin, and settled at Asahikawa in Hokkaido in 1925.
Nizhny Tagil. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.