Monday, May 18, 2020

Stamps on Baseball Cards


Here is something you don't see every day: a baseball card with a big red stamp with some archaic Chinese characters on it obscuring the player's image.

This is a card of Tetsuharu Kawakami, Japan's "God of Hitting" and first member of the 2,000 hit club.  It is from one of the 1953 Kobai Caramel sets (catalogued as JF 11, noted for the L shaped border) which is pretty rare (R3).

Kobai was the biggest maker of caramel cards in the 1950s, putting out dozens of sets.  Like my Kawakami caramel card, Kobai ones were small and printed on paper.


According to the back, they were meant to be collected and then sent in to the company to be redeemed for a set of bromides signed by the players.

Not all of the cards had the big red stamp (which I think is the company's official seal), so there are versions of this Kawakami card out there which don't have it.  I think the idea was that you would collect the cards with the stamps on them and send those in to be redeemed.  You had to collect ten of them which consisted of at least the manager (Shigeru Mizuhara), a pitcher a catcher, an infielder and an outfielder and then send those in.

Engel has identified only four cards from this set (Kawakemi, Takehiko Bessho, Shigeru Chiba and Wally Yonamine) but likely there were quite a few more out there back in the day, including Mizuhara who is mentioned on the back but does not appear in Engel.  Their fragility and the fact that they were meant to be redeemed probably contributed to there being so few left in existence.

I kind of like having the seal on this one, it gives the card such a unique and archaic look.  No mistaking this for a modern card, or an American one!


11 comments:

  1. Awesome! Cool design and I can’t imagine a complete checklist will be uncovered anytime soon. Wonder what the stamp says??!

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    1. I'm pretty sure its Kobai's corporate name, spelled using ancient Chinese characters (which is sometimes the case with formal seals, though these days most use simplified modern characters). Its 紅梅製菓株式会社 in modern Japanese kanji, and the characters have some rough resemblance to those.

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  2. I've always found those stamps fascinating... although I usually see it on pieces of art instead of cards ;D

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    1. Yeah, they are pretty cool. Everyone in Japan (including me) has one, you need it for official documents (it acts like your signature).

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    2. Oh... that's really cool. Lol... maybe one day I'll have one made.

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  3. I could be way off, but I'd always assumed that the stamps were cancellations for redeemed cards. Sort of like how some American sets with a redemption scheme would punch holes in the cards and then return them to the kids. It would also explain why sometimes cards show up without the stamps.

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    1. I thought so too at first. But when you get them in hand you realize that isn't the case. This wasn't stamped on the card using a seal, its printed directly on it. Its basically how the card came like from the factory.

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    2. Wow, that's really weird. It means at some point there was a discussion like this in Kobai's marketing department:

      A: ...and then the card will have a picture of Kawakami in the center.
      B: Nice design, but how about we obscure his face with our corporate seal.
      A: Brilliant! Kids would definitely prefer that over being able to actually see thier favorite baseball players!

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    3. Yeah, and there would be a timid guy in the back too shy to ask if they might not just put the stamp on the back of the card instead!

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  4. Do you by chance know if there are any of those autographed sets out there?

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    1. They do exist, they are listed in the Engel guide, but they are insanely rare and I've never actually seen one with my own eyes!

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