The Rarest Sadaharu Oh Cards

Going through my Engel guide I can only find four cards of Sadaharu Oh that are ranked as "R5" on the rarity scale, meaning less than 5 copies of each are known to exist.

One is his card in the 1959 Maruten Black and white Menko set JCM 135, which is a very hard one to find.  The other is a variation of his 1959 Yamakatsu card (JRM 33e) which they say has darker color than his regular 1959 Yamakatsu card, which is less scarce.

The other two are from the 1965 Giants Furikake Menko sets (JRM 39a and 39b), which are basically identical except one is slightly larger than the other.

I now have both of those 1965 Giants Furikake cards, pictured above!

These were part of a 6 card lot featuring three cards from each set

As you can see I also scored Shigeo Nagashima, two cards of Kunio Jonouchi and Akira Takahashi.

Both the "big" and "small" ones are on the small size, about the size of a quarter for the small ones and a bit bigger for the larger ones.  The  backs of the cards are baseballs with the players number in the middle, name underneath and "Giants Furikake" written across the top.

Furikake is a kind of seasoning that you sprinkle on rice to give it some flavor.  I have some in my house, my kids both demand it whenever they eat rice. It seems this was some sort of promotional giveaway with furikake back in the 1960s.  I did a Google search and discovered that there is today a product called "Giants Furikake" which you can buy on Amazon:

I'm not sure if this is the descendant of the original Giants Furikake from the 60s that these menko came with, though it certainly seems to be a possibility!  The cards are about the right size and shape to have fit into the bottle cap, so I wonder if that might be how they were originally distributed (possibly one set in smaller bottles, the other in bigger ones?)

Anyway, I'm really psyched that I can now say that my collection has not one but two of the rarest vintage Sadaharu Oh cards ever made in it.  Also I'm glad that Japanese collectors don't seem to value this sort of thing at all since I paid almost nothing for them (well, relative to what they are anyway, they cost about what a PSA 10 1976 Topps common or something like that would cost in the US, which also puts the insanity of the US card market into focus).

Bullseye!

 Here are a couple of cards from the set Engel catalogues as JRM 52, noteable for their bullseye background!

Issued in 1949 they are quite rare (Engel classifies them as R4, less than 10 copies known) and I have two of them, Tigers slugger Kaoru Betto and Giants star Noburo Aota!

The Aota one is particularly interesting since its a previously unknown "new discovery" that isn't listed in the guide.  I really love finding stuff like this,  maybe this is the only copy of this card which still exists (though its unlikely)!

I really love the design of these, the colorized portraits which show most of the player's body instead of just a headshot look great against the colorful background.

Both these guys are in the Hall of Fame.  I've written about Betto before, but Aota is also interesting. He was a five time home run leader and at the time he retired in 1959 he held the career record for most home runs with a grand total of ......265.  So slightly more career home runs than Pete Incaviglia?  Well, the league was still pretty new at the time and his reign only lasted 4 years!

1978 Yakult Swallows Victory Cards are Selling Well, if anyone was wondering

One auction I was watching that just ended was for five cards from the 1978 Calbee Yakult Swallows Victory set.

The cards are easily distinguishable from other Calbee cards thanks to their colorful border designs, one of the few from the 70s that didn't just go with a full bleed photo look.  The Swallows won their first Championship that year, helped along by American slugger Charlie Manuel, and this set seems to have been released shortly thereafter.

I'm not sure if it was only released regionally, but it is definitely one of the hardest to find series of Calbee cards from the 70s out there and prices reflect this.  These five cards went for 82,100 Yen (almost 800$ US), so they are way out of my price range!

I've often wondered about who it is who lays out these huge wads of cash on relatively obscure Calbee cards from the 70s.  There are definitely some old set builders out there like me, but unlike me they have the money to throw around to actually build them (the sets I'm actively working on generally don't have any single card that is going to cost me more than 50-100$ max, otherwise I don't even bother trying to start the set!)

Two of these things are not like the others

The 1948 JCM 26 "Pinwheel" menko set is a bit of an odd and well known one.  It consists of just 6 cards and as you can tell from the above photo I am one short of the set (Noboru Aota, where are you?)

You'll note that there are two sizes, half the set are fairly big (3.5 inches diameter, the one I'm missing is also that size) compared to the other three. This is not uncommon with menko sets from the late 40s and 50s which sometimes came in sets of different sizes.

But the main distinction between the larger and smaller cards isn't their size but rather their rarity.  The smaller ones are quite easy to find, and I got all three of them a while ago.  According to Engel someone found a large lot of them in mint condition a few years back.  This is very easy to believe since they (along with cards from JRM 19 and 20, which were apparently found in the same horde) are constantly popping up on Yahoo Auctions with low prices on them.  They are among the very few vintage menko out there where if you want them, you can easily find them available for sale at any given time.

The big ones though weren't included in that find and they are actually quite scarce (Engel rates them R2 which seems about right).  I'd been wanting to find them for a while and pounced when this lot came up for auction a few weeks back.  It was entirely the two big ones I was bidding on (featuring Noboru Aota/Tetsuharu Kawakami and Fumio Fujimura), the other three were basically just bonus add ons.

I do like these ones since the colorful pinwheel background is just perfect.

One more of the big ones and I'll have this set complete!

Walker is in!!

This is a slight detour from the usual Japanese baseball focus of the blog, but as a Canadian I felt I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to acknowledge the induction of a fellow Canadian to Cooperstown!

I'm super psyched about this.  Back in the early 90s when he was playing in Montreal we used to take a lot of family trips there to visit my grandma and during those my dad would take us to a few games at the Big O each summer.  Tim Raines left the team after the 1990 season and Walker and other rookies that year like Marquis Grissom and Delino Deshields quickly filled his shoes as the team's stars.

Walker was extremely popular as one of the only Canadian stars to ever actually play in Montreal and I remember, working at the family card store at the time, anything Walker related would just sell itself, everyone was collecting his cards.  The Blue Jays were the more popular Canadian team in the early 1990s since they were way more competitive and building the team that would win back to back World Series.  But they didn't have a Canadian star like Walker, and such was his impact that his presence alone allowed the Expos to at least  compete with the World Series champs in the Canadian popularity contest.

Of course, the end of Walker's tenure with Montreal came  as part of the team's post-strike implosion, and he went on to have his most dominant seasons with the Rockies, but I prefer to remember the 1990-1993 Larry Walker. The guy who only became one of baseball's all time greats because he wasn't a good enough hockey player to make the NHL - such a Canadian origin story!

The beginning of his career with the Expos also coincided with the only other Canadian - Fergie Jenkins - being inducted to the Hall of Fame in 1991, and my dad also took 14 year old me, and the whole family,down to Cooperstown to see him inducted.  Hard to believe that was almost 30 years ago now and we're finally seeing Canadian guy #2 inducted.  Wish I could be there!

Way to go, eh!

Oh and I think some other guy also got in, but who cares about him.

Can Gum Wrappers be Baseball Cards?

Here is a really interesting addendum to my post last month about the 1964 Morinaga set. In addition to producing baseball cards, Morinaga also produced "Top Star Gum" featuring packs that had baseball players on them!

I've never heard of or seen these before, they must be incredibly rare.  They are up on Yahoo Auction right now.  I put a bid on them early on but was quickly outbid and they are up to about 4500 Yen as I write this with four more days to go.  I kind of had a long think about whether I wanted to go higher than that.  On the one hand, these look really cool and there probably aren't many copies of them out there, meaning this could be the only time in my life that I get the chance to add them to my collection.  And there are some big name players like Sadahaur Oh and Shigeo Nagashima in there.

On the other hand, did I really want to spend serious money on old gum wrappers?

This kind of brings up a definitional question of where we draw the line as to what is and isn't a baseball card, which Japan is always doing with its kites and cards shaped like airplanes and all these other wild things it used to put out!

These gum wrappers are definitely cool.  I suspect they were released at around the same time their card sets were in 1964 since they use the same name (Top Star) with the same font and everything, and the players are correct for that time period.

But gum wrappers are garbage, everyone knows that, right?  They aren't baseball cards, right?  And therefore I don't have to collect them, right?

Right?

I don't know.  I think I am going to reluctantly pass on putting any more bids in on them unless someone in the comments provides me with a convincing argument for why I should pay a lot of money for gum wrappers!

(Postscript: the auction for these ultimately ended for 12,833 Yen).

Some more 1976 Pepsi Round Menko

My 1976 Pepsi Round Menko collection took a pretty good step forward the other day with the addition of these babies.

I really do love the mid-70s Pepsi sets since they are quite colorful and just look pretty cool.  The cards are kind of hard to find (Engel rates them R2 on his rarity scale) and, being menko, most of them that still exist are in pretty rough shape (though this lot is in decent condition).

I'm really curious about these cards and how they were distributed back in the 1970s.  Pepsi issued several sets in the mid-1970s that all had one thing in common: the Chunichi Dragons.  For some reason all of their sets seem to have only been issued in Nagoya (home of the Dragons, and me!) since, with the exception of a few Sadaharu Oh cards.

This is kind of weird for a big corporation like Pepsi that does business nationwide.  Nagoya and the surrounding suburbs (the Chubu Metropolitan area) has about 9 million people and is Japan's third largest urban centre, so its not a rural backwater.  But at the same time, back in the 70s and even today it paled in comparison to Japan's two baseball centres in the Kanto (Tokyo) and Kansai (Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto) regions which combined had about 2/3 of all the team in Japan (less today but still considerable).

So its kind of a mystery, why lavish Nagoya baseball fans with these awesome sets but not Tokyo or Osaka, which would have been more logical choices?  My main guess is simple convenience: the Dragons might have been way more willing partners in business and might have sold the rights to produce the cards to Pepsi cheaply (free?) while the more popular Giants and Tigers in Tokyo and Osaka might not have been interested.

Its also probably a by product of the weakness of NPB as an organization back in the 70s (and today) - card makers would negotiate with teams rather than NPB for licenses, which would have made creating a team set like these ones a lot easier and cheaper than making a league wide one (though oddly there aren't a lot of team sets from the 70s, at least relative to other types of sets).

Of course the downside though is that you create a big promotion that is only going to be used in one city, so I'm not sure if this actually spurred sales of Pepsi (and Mirinda and Patio, two other drinks sold by Pepsi which were also in the promotion).

Another thing I remain curious about is how these things were distributed.  I've never seen any sort of ephemera related to them - no packs or boxes or advertising signs or anything.  Which leads me to suspect that they were simply distributed to Nagoya area stores that sold Pepsi and cashiers would hand them out to customers.  But did they give them out on a one bottle/one menko basis?  Or were these prizes that only some bottle purchasers got?

So much we don't know about these, I hope to one day solve some of these riddles but in the meantime I'm satisfied to just add these to my collection!

The "Other Guy" Finally Gets his Due

 As Dave just reported, the 2020 Japan Hall of Fame class consists of one guy: former Tigers and Lions catcher Koichi Tabuchi.

Tabuchi was one of Japan's biggest stars in the 1970s and for a few years I had just assumed he was already in the Hall of Fame until I looked it up and was surprised to find that he wasn't.  So I'm happy that he is in.  He clobbered 474 career home runs, which (I think) would have put him in the top 5 all time at the time he retired in 1984.  His home run rate (ratio of home runs to at bats) is second all time to Sadaharu Oh.

Since his career peaked in the  mid to late 70s (his best season was 1975 when he led the Central League in home runs, the first time in a over decade that Oh didn't win the title) he appears on a lot of Calbee cards from the classic sets of the 70s, including one of my favorites of all time.

What is really interesting about him from a 1970s Calbee collector perspective though is that he appears on a massive number of cards in which he is not the featured player.  The sets from the 1970s were heavily weighted with players from the Central League in which Tabuchi played, and specifically with the Giants, the most popular team by far.  Tabuchi didn't play for the Giants but rather for their main rivals the Hanshin Tigers.  The Calbee photographers seem to have taken a lot of their photos of Giants players in games they were playing against the Tigers and as the Tigers catcher this meant that Tabuchi features prominently on a huge number of cards of Giants batters in photos taken during their at bats.

So if you collect cards of Sadaharu Oh from the 70s, chances are that a lot of your cards have Koichi Tabuchi on them too, like these ones I've put in this post. There are a ton more out there, not just Oh cards but with other Giants cards and the odd one here or there of players from other Central League teams.  Its super noticeable when you are flipping through a stack of cards from the monster 75-76-77 set that Tabuchi probably features on more cards than any other player in the set (except maybe Oh) but with the caveat that on most of them he is just the "other guy" on the card and not its main focus. When I'm finally finished collecting that set, I'm going to go through it and count how many cards there are of Tabuchi in the background, I'm positive that he holds the world record for most appearances in a card set of someone appearing as an "other guy" in the background.

Anyway, I'm glad this other guy finally got into the Hall!

Go fly a Kite!

 My first post of 2020 is about kites.

I have a couple of these Japanese baseball kites that I bought a few months back.  They are pretty cool.  I think the players are generic but they are quite colorful.

 I don't know when these were made or by who, they look about 1950s vintage but who knows.  Rob Fitts has one of them for sale on Ebay but he doesn't seem to know too much about them either.

They are quite small for kites, way too small to be flown (or at least flown higher than a couple metres).  Also the paper is very fragile so I doubt they would survive long in the wind even if they were big enough.  They do make cool display pieces though.  The lot I bought included the above two baseball player ones and a Santa Clause one.

Flying kites I should note is a traditional new years activity in Japan, the winter is when you get the best wind here.  We got kites (real kites!) for our kids for New Year and took them to the park a few days ago, they got theirs up pretty high!

I've seen a few other baseball kites out there but I think my collection will be "full" with these two!