My father turns 87 on October 1, 2018 and I have a special gift for him. While in Japan, I was able to have some Japanese friends translate a few things that I found in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum under the Tokyo Dome. I couldn’t read the articles in Japanese and Google Translate is pretty sketchy. I wanted to find out if any of the articles were about him. Luckily, this guy who worked in my hostel in Hiroshima was a big baseball fan and helped me out.
![](https://fredkipp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DF6324F8-9321-4A54-A23E-8B6632857372-e1538262263393.jpeg)
The articles are from a Japan baseball magazine that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know what was about my father until my friend translated it for me. The article below says how my dad threw a shutout against the Japan All-Stars on October 31, 1956 in Shimonoseki Stadium. Unfortunately, they didn’t include a picture of him even though he was the headline.
![](https://fredkipp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Kip-Good-Pitching.png)
I could identify my dad in another page of the magazine. The Dodgers and the All Japan team formed a “D” and I can see him in the back of the photo. I marked him with the blue arrow. You might notice that there is a pitcher in the upper right picture on the page. I wasn’t sure it was him until he was found in the translation.
![](https://fredkipp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/D-Picture.png)
My friend translated the photo and said how the text talked about how my father manipulated the ball in mid air. He tried to translate a word about how the ball shifted in the air, but the best he could come up with was “manipulated”. There are other newspaper articles where the Japanese called him a knuckleball artist.
![](https://fredkipp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Knuckleball-1.png)
A professor I ran into at the baseball museum helped me translate this picture that I already had. Check it out.
![](https://fredkipp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Fred-Kipp-Pitcher.png)
While my father was a great knuckleballer on the field, he always threw us softballs that made my life easy. Thanks for all the support over the decades Dad!