In an earlier post I mentioned getting some cards from the hyper rare 1952 Osato Gangu set. I also picked up a small lot of cards from the 1951 Osato Gangu set, which is almost identical except the pictures are in black and white instead of color. One of the cards in the lot was the above featuring Kaoru Betto.
Betto is a Hall of Famer who played for the Tigers and Orions in a relatively brief pro career that spanned from 1948 to 1957, the start of his playing career having been interrupted by the War (he was already 27 years old when he made his debut). His best season was in 1950 when he led the league in most offensive categories, just missing the batting average title that would have won him the triple crown.
In the US he is probably best known by the fact that Jeff Bridges has a T-shirt of him that he kept wearing in movies back in the 1990s:
In addition to featuring black and white rather than color images, the other big difference between the 1952 and 1951 Osato Gangu sets is rarity. While less than 5 copies of each card from the 1952 set are known to exist, the 1951 set is more common. Engel classifies it as R2, which means somewhere between 100 and 250 copies of each card are known to exist. That makes cards from that set more affordable, hence my ability to acquire a hall of famer in this set while my 1952s are all commons.
Kind of weird that cards where less than 250 copies are out there are the "easy" version, but that is vintage Japanese cards for you.
Awesome card! I've actually thought about picking up that shirt on Amazon a few times. Maybe I'll buy it for myself for Christmas.
ReplyDeleteThat would be a cool shirt to have all right!
DeleteI don't think there's any way that Engel knows how many copies of a card are out there. Maybe for the very rare stuff, but how do you tell that there are 250 copies of a card versus 500? That's too many to do something like actually keep track of all the known cards (like people do with the t206 Wagners). I've probably said this before (I don't remember), but I take R1 to mean "these things are everywhere" and R5 to mean "you'll probably never see one", with corresponding qualitative readings of the other rarity levels.
ReplyDeleteI also think it's a shame that a great baseball player is best known (in America) for showing up on a t-shirt. Karou Betto was a terrific athlete, and one of the better baseball players that Japan ever produced, not a prop for some (admittedly very fine) movies. That's parochialism for you, and not surprising, but still lamentable.
I would disagree with one detail: R1 doesn't mean "These things are everywhere". NS means that. Most of the R1 cards in Engel are hard to find, they aren't available on Yahoo auctions most of the time and when they do show up they get bought up right away (unless they have an insanely high BIN price or something). A lot of the tobacco menko sets are R1, but you just can't find them. NS cards on the other hand are almost always available if you want one.
DeleteOtherwise though I agree. They should be a lot more clear in explaining their methodology in providing specific number estimates for cards. With R5s and R4s its pretty obvious since there are so few, but like you say its very hard to say with confidence "there are between 100 and 250 of this card in existence". I assume they are just extrapolating estimates from the numbers of cards they have seen, and I don't doubt that they have the most experience and information upon which to make such estimates, but they should be clearer with that. Especially since the numbers we are talking about are very small, the risk of errors simply from random noise in their samples is pretty high.
I have to shamefully admit that the first time I ever heard of Kaoru Betto was when I saw that T-shirt of him in the Big Lebowski, which I saw more than 20 years ago before I ever came to Japan! On the one hand its nice that at least he is getting known and that might spur people to have some interest in learning about him. But on the other hand its a shame if, as you say, he basically becomes known just as "that guy on the T shirt".
I would really like to know what the origin of that shirt is. Why is there a shirt with a drawing of Karou Betto on it?
ReplyDeleteMe too. I've seen lots of copies of it for sale, but those are all ones based on Jeff Bridges' one. Where did he get the original is what I'd like to know! Maybe he visited Japan or something?
DeleteI heard somewhere that it was a gift from his brother. Which really just pushes the question back a step.
DeleteHe must have a pretty cool brother.
DeleteI have to see this shirt now. Never even knew it was a think.
ReplyDeleteI’m not a fan of Engel’s rating system tied to known qnatity, but I get what he was trying to do. Definitely pre-internet days there was no way he had that info. Aside from the quantity skepticism, the scale is useful as a gauge in rarity. R5s will hardly ever show up and R1s are everywhere like Nick was saying.
Awesome card and congrats on the pick up!
Oh its a thing! He wore it in 3 different movies!
DeleteI do agree that Engel's scale is quite useful as a rough guide for anything lower than about R3 or so.