Kaichi Masu

Kaichi Masu is the kind of figure who quietly keeps baseball history honest — born in Kyoto in 1908, he did the rare double shift of playing the game and then stepping back to officiate it. That transition from player to umpire is genuinely fascinating to me; most guys who love the sport want to stay in the spotlight, but there's something admirable about choosing the role where nobody claps for you and everyone argues with you. He lived through the entire formative era of Japanese professional baseball, from its scrappy prewar beginnings right through the postwar boom, and passed away in 1981 — so he basically got a front-row seat (or, well, a spot on the field with a chest protector) for all of it. He also managed Nagoya as a player-manager before the war, yet the umpire years are the part that sticks with me: the game couldn't happen without them, but history tends to forget their names anyway. I find that a little poignant.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Kaichi Masu (March 8, 1908 – December 18, 1981) was a Japanese baseball player and umpire born in Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture. An outfielder for Nagoya from 1936 to 1944, he also served as the club's player-manager, and after the war he worked for a time as an umpire before managing the Nippon Kokan company team. He passed away in December 1981.

Name (English)

Kaichi Masu

Name (Japanese)

桝嘉一

Reading

ます かいち

Born

March 8, 1908 – December 18, 1981

Origin

Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan

Height

170 cm

Occupation

Baseball Player / Baseball Umpire

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Pisces / Monkey

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A1%9D%E5%98%89%E4%B8%80
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11538248

Tags

• From Kyoto Prefecture
• Baseball Player
• Baseball Umpire

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.