Googly Eyes Jiro Noguchi

 

This is Jiro Noguchi's card from Series 2 of the 1950 Google Eyes set  (JRM 48b).  I like this set a lot.  As its title suggests the cards feature caricatures of players with google eyes.  Or actually I think "googly" eyes is the correct nomenclature but close enough.  

The artwork on these cards reminds me a lot of Mr. Sparkle and I kind of wonder if the Simpsons' animators had seen them.

The card of Noguchi is also interesting because of the back:

If you can read Japanese you'll note that it says "Pirates" at the top.  Japan briefly had a team called the Pirates.  They were one of the founding teams of the Central League in 1950 and played in Fukuoka at Heiwadai Stadium.  They finished last lace and merged with another team to form what would be the ancestor of today's Saitama Seibu Lions.

Noguchi never played for the Pirates though, the team names on the card backs are unrelated to the player pictured on the front.  He played for the Braves in 1950.  He has one of the most insane statistical careers a pitcher has ever put up.   He only pitched as a regular in 10 seasons (plus parts of 2 more), but managed to compile 237 wins in that short a timespan.  He one 40 games once, and added two 30 win seasons to that, so in just those seasons alone he compiled more than 100 wins.  He posted a 1.96 career ERA and in two seasons (1940 and 1941) in which he pitched as a regular starter he actually had ERAs under 1.00.  It was definitely a pitcher's game in the early years of NPB but even taking that into account, he was one of the all time greats. 

Stuff on Cards: Oden Shops and Wood Shoes

 

I've decided to make "Stuff on cards" a regular series on my blog, highlighting odd things that have appeared on Japanese baseball cards over the years.  Today's post: Oden shops.

This is card 55 from the 1975 NST set.  NST issued a few sets between 1975 and 1983.  Their sets were intended to be glued into albums (sold separately) so they are printed on thinner card stock than normal cards and the backs just have the card number and instructions on how to paste them into the albums, which contained more info about the player.  Dave has a good write up with more info about the sets here.

One thing I like about the NST sets is that they have a lot of  interesting photos.  Probably about 80% feature in game action, while the remainder feature random candid shots, often of players off the field in oddball situations which you almost never see in sets from the 70s (or other decades).  

This one featuring Shigeo Nagashima is one of my favorites.  He is just walking out of an oden shop.  If you've never been to Japan, this is what oden is (photo courtesy of the Wikipedia page for Oden):

I have  strong dislike for oden.  Everything in there just runs afoul of too many of my "I won't eat that" red lines - texture, taste, smell, appearance - nope, nope, nope and nope.  But its very popular here. 7-11s and other convenience stores in Japan don't have Slurpee machines, but they do have oden vats very similar to the one pictured above where you can scoop out whatever you want.

You can tell Nagashima is leaving an oden shop because the noren curtain he is emerging from says "Oden", as does the writing on the chalkboard to his left.  So I guess Shigeo Nagashima likes oden, which is not surprising since, as I said, its popular here.

Also though you have to kind of scratch your head about this photo - when was this taken?  They don't have oden shops like that in stadiums, this looks like a shop on some random street.  But he is in uniform and ready to play....except.... look at his feet!  He isn't wearing cleats, he is wearing geta (a traditional type of sandal that is made of wood)!  How is this allowed?  The manager of the Giants is not properly dressed in his uniform!

I mean, when he went into the oden shop he likely would have had to remove his shoes, but normally he'd just put them back on again when he left.  Geta are not something you have to wear to an oden shop or anything so its really odd.  Maybe he forgot his cleats, or a fan stole them and he had to borrow these?  Or there was some special event going on which for some reason involved both visiting an oden shop, wearing his uniform and wearing geta.  But I can't imagine what that would have been. This is just odd all around!

Previous Stuff On Cards:

Beer

Girls in Kimonos

Vintage Cars

American Professional Wrestlers

Another New Discovery

 

Another recent card I picked up is this round menko which (I think) features Takashi Eda, a pitcher who played for a variety of teams in the 1940s and 1950s.  It came in a lot of 11 different round menko from various sets, some common and others rare.

I couldn't find anything like this in the Engel catalogue so I think it is a "new discovery".  I really love the multicolored diamond pattern background.  It looks a bit like a stain glassed window.  The back of the card is blank, save for some numbers hand written on it.

In terms of date, Eda's cap with the "G" on it looks like that of the Goldstars, who Eda played for in 1946 so I guess it probably came out around then.  The Goldstars actually only played one year with that name, changing it to Kinsei the next year (which means "gold star" in Japanese, so really they were just translating the name back into Japanese).  

Eda had a pretty mediocre career, finishing with a 97-147 record, though he also played for bad teams which hurt him (he had a respectable 3.61 career ERA).  He had one brilliant season in 1950 in which he went 23-8 record with a 2.83 ERA.  That was the only season is his 15 year career that he managed a winning record!

Cataloguing One of the World's Rarest Sets

 

I made a pretty awesome find last week.  Actually "finds".  There were a few lots of random old menko that were put up on Yahoo Auctions by an antique dealer.  I think there were at least a dozen lots, each containing about 30 cards.  When perusing them I noticed in the photos that sprinkled throughout were a few that had backs featuring spaceships and aliens, which I had never seen before. Like these:

I looked them up in Engel and found them catalogued as set JCM 134 "1958 B&W Space Fantasy".  This here is the entire listing:

 

Wow, not enough of these cards have been discovered to create a checklist? That got my attention, so I put bids in on all of the lots that had at least one of the cards with these backs in them.  The bidding went really high on some of them so I wasn't able to win them all, but when the dust settled I had won several of the lots which cumulatively included the above 8 cards.  

So here we go, the world's first attempt at creating a checklist of this set.  Here are the ones I have, listed in numerical order according to the number on the back (some cards have the same number).  I got a couple of Hall of Famers in there but mostly commons:

120057 Hiromasa Ariyoshi (Lions)

163055 Youji Tamatsukuri (Lions)

206350 Tadashi Higaki (Carp)

630225 Hirofumi Naito (Giants) 

643001 Sho Horiuchi (Giants)

643001 Katsuya Morinaga (Carp)

740321 Tatsuro Hirooka (Giants, HOF)

918205 Tokuji Iida (Swallows, HOF)

This is definitely an incomplete checklist and whoever won the other lots would probably be able to add to this (I couldn't get a good enough look at the photos to get the player names in those ones).

I'm pretty happy to add these to the collection!

Indoctrinating Children

I have two little kids.  I'm a bit torn about whether I want to encourage them to collect baseball cards like I do.  I mean, why would I?  Kids will pursue whatever interests they like and  my role is just to encourage them in whatever that is, rather than trying to steer it to what I like.

But I'm kind of psyched that my kids have taken an interest in collecting cards recently, particularly kid #1 (the elder).    Supermarkets here are now stocked with "Super Mario Bros. History Card Wafers", a snack produced by Bandai. Each of them comes with one card from a 22 card set, featuring the cover art from various Mario Bros. games from the 1980s to the present.  

I bought one for him a few weeks back just because he likes Mario and not really thinking about the card.  He ate the snack pretty quickly, and then I noticed that he was really excited about the card too.  He carried it around with him all day.  He brought it to the table with him at dinner.  He even brought it to bed with him when he went to sleep.  

Neat, my kid likes cards too.

So since then we've made a point of buying one every time we go to the super market.  I also sometimes stop on my way home to pick one up for him.  And I bought him a little album to put them in.  He's got about half the set.  He gives me his doubles.  Its fun.  It actually reminds me a lot of my own experience as a kid getting interested in baseball cards and my dad sometimes stopping on his way home from work to get some for me.  I now appreciate why he did that for me way more than I used to.

I'm also encouraged that he likes to play baseball with me.  Well, he likes to go to the park with a bat, glove and balls with me and mess around with them.  I'm really on the fence about encouraging him to join a team though.  In Japan, baseball is not played by kids for fun, its an extremely rigid and intense activity which (to me at least) seems to suck all the fun out of it.  If he decides that he wants to join a team, I'll be all in and support him all the way. But if not, I'm not going to pressure him. Anyway, if he ends up getting interested in baseball, he might get interested in baseball cards at some point.  If not, I'm sure he'll find something else cool to be interested in. 

Anyway, anybody else out there have kids who they are gently nudging towards an interest in baseball cards?

The Most Valuable Card is a Lucky One

This is the most valuable card by far that you can get in packs of 2020 Calbee Series 2.    It is a "Lucky Card".  

Calbee Lucky Cards have been around for a while.  Back in 2004 I tried putting the Calbee set together the old fashioned way: buying lots of bags of chips.  I didn't get anywhere near to finishing it (and 16 years later I am still short), but one thing I did get that year was a few lucky cards.  In 2004 you had to collect three of them, then cut the tabs off the top of them and glue them to a postcard which you would mail to Calbee.  In exchange, Calbee would send you a pretty cool boxed set of "Star Cards" featuring gold embossed signatures on them.  There were 3 of those boxed sets for each series and I was able to get the first two, but fell one Lucky Card short of being able to get the Series 3 one.  

It was fun though, slowly accumulating them over the course of the summer, then sending the envelope off and waiting by the mailbox until my sets arrived.

The Lucky Cards work roughly the same way this year, when you get one you cut the green tab off the upper left hand corner of the back, glue it to a postcard and mail it in.  In fact, the card looks almost identical to the ones I remember pulling back in 2004, with the colors changed a bit.  

This year instead of collecting three you just have to get one.  But also instead of getting a box set you just get two cards out of a 24 card set featuring various stars ("Kira Cards"), so there is a bit of a tradeoff there.  You would need at least 12 of these cards to finish that set.  You are allowed to designate which of the 24 cards you want, so you don't receive random cards and can avoid getting doubles, though they actually ask you to nominate two alternative card choices in case they run out of certain players, so it isn't guaranteed that you will receive the ones you want. 

Back in 2004 there wasn't much of an online market for Japanese cards so I had no idea how much they were worth.  But these things are really "Hot" on Yahoo Auctions, I've been following auctions of them and they always sell for over 3,000 Yen each (about 30$ US).  The photos I'm using here come from an auction that just ended at 3400 Yen.  There are dozens of them up at any given time and they don't seem to be having trouble finding buyers.  

At that price, factoring in shipping and also the cost of sending the postcards, you'd be looking at spending about 43,000 Yen (430$ US) to complete that 24 card set.  Which is way too much for me to be interested.

Happily though this also explains why I can buy complete base sets of Calbee for  900 Yen including shipping.   The Calbee case breakers basically make all their money off the Lucky Cards and everything else is just leftovers.  

I've bought a few bags of Calbee chips this year despite having purchased the base sets, in part just to see if I could land a Lucky Card, but I've come up empty so far.  I'd like to land one just so I can mail in the postcard and wait by the mailbox for the cards to come.  Actually, that is another thing that makes 2020 much different from 2004.  Back in 2004 getting baseball cards in the mail was a huge novelty since I didn't have a Yahoo Auctions or even Ebay account back then and made all my purchases in person at stores.  Now I get cards in the mail all the time so the novelty value is kind of lost.  But it would be cool nonetheless.

Incidentally another interesting thing about these cards is that they are ticking time bombs.  They expire on March 31, 2021 after which they can no longer be redeemed and basically become worthless.  Yahoo Auctions has a ton of 2020 Lucky Cards being bid on like crazy, but any remaining Lucky Cards from 2019 or earlier are basically worthless and very few sellers even bother to list them for sale.  I still have my two unredeemed 2004 Calbee Lucky Cards sitting around somewhere, I held onto them for sentimental reasons!