Wednesday, March 25, 2020

More Morinagas! With Ghosts.

Fortunately my recent decision to put a 1000 Yen cap on my baseball card purchases has not actually prevented me from buying stuff.  Yesterday's mail included two cards from the 1964 Morinaga Top Star set which, it seems, I have decided to try to complete.

Its a 12 card set and I already had two of them, so now I'm up to four!  These set me back 500 Yen each, so combined they just squeaked under my self-imposed spending limit!

And the card on the left is Shigeo Nagashima , an A-list Hall of Famer if there ever was one, so it was a good purchase even though both are in a bit lower condition than my previous two.  The one on the right is Isao Shibata.

One odd thing I noticed is that the cards are slightly different color, the Nagashima card is a lot darker than the Shibata.  This is noticable on the border on the card fronts and especially on the card backs.  This isn't the result of anything getting spilled on the Nagashima, I think they've just aged differently.

A much weirder and spookier thing I noticed is that if you look in the background of the Shibata card, there seems to be a ghost sitting in the stands:

I'm pretty sure this was an actual person sitting there which for some reason Morinaga decided to obscure.  They chose a very odd way of doing so, the dots they use really do make it look like a ghostly apparition, or some sort of alien super hero.

The Nagashima card also has a couple of spots that look like this, but its not as pronounced. I'm going to give my other Morinagas a check to see if they have ghosts too.

While the addition of Nagashima to the cards of Sadaharu Oh and Katsuya Nomura which I already had gives me most of the key stars in the set, according to Engel there are two short printed cards (Shigeru Mizuhara and Yasumitsu Toyoda) which are way harder to find than the rest and way more expensive (like 300$ expensive).  So for the time being I might satisfy myself with trying to complete the 10 cards of the set that weren't short printed!

8 comments:

  1. Very cool! Are there different back variations? Ones that stand up and ones that don’t?

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    1. Yeah, the Morinaga Stand Up set was issued in the same year. Its got 17 cards in it and is a bit harder to find than these ones (Engel rates the Stand Ups as R2, and these ones as R1).

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  2. That's a really good price for Morinagas. The standups sell for more, but even the regular ones go for a lot more than four bucks each!

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    1. Yeah, I got lucky with these, they usually go for quite a bit more on Yahoo Auctions. The Standup ones are quite a bit harder to find, I have one (Kaneda) but almost never find them on Yahoo Auctions.

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  3. Obviously the person in the Shibata card is getting beamed up to the Enterprise

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    1. These cards were released in 1964. The following year the pilot for Star Trek premiered and the concept of beaming up was first visually represented on TV.

      Coincidence? I think not.

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  4. Interesting the blurred that person out... but nobody else. I wonder who it was.

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  5. Maybe it really was a ghost?

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