Carlton Haruo Hanta was an all-star baseball selection on several levels who helped his teams win championships in college and the pros, but a big part of his legacy is in the celebration he started.
In Japan, where professional baseball teams traditionally celebrate championships by dousing each other with beer instead of champagne, Hanta is remembered as the one who pioneered the nearly 60-year institution that is the “beer shower.”
Hanta, a Mid-Pacific graduate and native of Kaaawa, died April 1 at the age of 87 after an accomplished career as a player and coach.
Hanta helped the University of Houston to its first College World Series appearance in 1953 as an All-America shortstop and guided the Nankai Hawks to their first Pacific League pennant in 1959 as an all-star second baseman.
After the Hawks swept the powerful, star-studded Yomiuri Giants in four games to win the Japan Series, Hanta grabbed one of the large bottles of beer on hand at the victory party, shook it and sprayed it over the head of the winning pitcher, Tadashi Sugiura.
The spontaneous gesture found a quick following, “and everyone got excited and started to copy,” Hanta said in a 2015 online Nippon Professional Baseball chat. “Everybody went nuts.”
But, Hanta added, “We got a good scolding because the tatami got soaked and the hotel had to change them all.”
Decades after inaugurating the “beer shower,” Hanta said, a Japanese TV crew came to Hawaii to do a story on the trend he had started.
Hanta played parts of five seasons in Japan with the Hawks and Chunichi Dragons between 1958 and 1962 with a .256 career batting average.
He went on to be a coach for nearly a decade with the Hawks, Dragons, Toei Flyers and Nittaku Home Flyers before a bout with cancer curtailed his coaching career in Japan.
Hanta was a pitcher at Mid-Pacific and was a high school all-star in 1947 and ’48 and later named to the Owls’ Hall of Fame. But he wound up at Houston with the intention of playing organized football for the first time and saw playing time on the Cougars’ junior varsity before making the move back to baseball.
Hanta eventually earned a baseball scholarship as a shortstop after the coach told him that, at 5 feet, 6 inches, he was too small to pitch.
Hanta initially struggled mightily fielding ground balls, but through persistence became a solid shortstop and hit .363 to earn third-team All-America honors as a senior, the first American of Japanese ancestry to do so, the school said. He would later be named to the school’s athletic hall of fame and the Missouri Valley Conference’s all-time (pre-1975) baseball team.
“He was aggressive, and when he did anything he did it with all his heart,” teammate Foy Boyd said in a 2008 interview.
Hanta played three seasons of minor league baseball, hitting a collective .260, and after stints in the Army and as a teacher, was signed to play in Japan.
Later this year when the victors in the 2019 Japan Series toast their triumph, chances are they will also be raising one for the man who popularized a way of celebrating championships that marks its 61st year.
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A private celebration of life is planned, the family said.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
