Sunday, August 1, 2021

I completed a set and its forced me to deal with a storage nightmare

 


I made an exciting purchase over the weekend - the 1978 Yamakatsu Isao Shibata!

This is exciting because it is the last card that I needed to complete that set.  I've been stuck on just needing Shibata for 3 or 4 years now after putting almost all of the set together from a couple lots I bought back in 2017 or 2018.  

I think the Shibata card might have been short printed because my friend and fellow 1978 Yamakatsu collector Jay was also stuck on just needing his card for a long time too.  And like I said it took me several years of searching to finally land my own.

Now that I have the Shibata I have a strange problem.  I can't find the rest of my 1978 set!

Its a small set (42 cards) and I don't have them in a binder.  They got put into a box with other random cards which then got mixed up with other boxes filled with random cards and then squirrelled away somewhere in the impenetrable labyrinth of boxes organized according to no known principles of geometry that constitutes my storage system. 

Basically its somewhere in here:


This is a problem I have with several sets that are kind of on the "back burner".  With my 1975-76-77 Calbee set I know exactly where it is because its an active collecting project.  But with other sets that have fallen to the wayside as collecting projects over the years.....I know that I still have them somewhere in my house but have no idea where.  The 1978 Yamakatsu set fell into that category since I got so frustrated with trying to find that Shibata I just stopped paying attention to where the set was because I never had the need to add anything to it for such a long time!  And now that I've suddenly landed a Shibata its the only card from the set I currently know the location of!

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Sadaharu Oh's 756 Home Run Ceremony Card

 


I picked this card up the other day. It is card #50 from a 1977 Calbee set dedicated to Sadaharu Oh in commemoration of his 756th home run.  I've written about this set before, its pretty scarce so I only had a couple of cards from it before adding this one.  I was pretty happy to win this one for a reasonable price given the apparent explosion in the price of some 1970s Calbee cards recently.

I liked the photo on the front of the card which according to the text on it is from the post-game ceremony held after he hit #756.  When I say "like" I don't necessarily mean that it is a great photo, but its an interesting one.  The player depicted, Oh, is dwarfed by the backs of four old guys in suits, who I assume to be Yomiuri executives.  Not many cards feature such an odd composition.  

The highlight though is the cool shot of that scoreboard with the message "Congratulations player Oh for #756" and a crude rendition of his head next to it.  There are a few Calbee cards from the 70s which prominently feature that scoreboard in the background commemorating some major milestone, usually of either Oh or Shigeo Nagashima, which would make for an interesting collecting sub-set.

The back of the card is kind of interesting.  It shows the 15 pitchers who Oh hit the most of his 756 home runs off of.  The most were 23 he hit off of  Hiroshima Carp pitcher Yoshiro Sotokoba (who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2013 (despite having a career record of 131-138).  This is only through home run #756, I'm not sure if Sotokoba maintained that lead through the rest of Oh's career.

Anyway, its a nice addition to my collection!

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

That Escalated Quickly: Unsettling Auction Result a Threat to My Quest?

 


My quest to complete the 1975-76-77 monster Calbee set has made some decent progress over the past month, I picked up a few additional cards last week which I'll have to do a post about.  At the same time however, I was blindsided by the results of an auction that ended yesterday for a card that I (thank god) already own.  

It was for the above card, #71 featuring Ron Woods.  I  did a post about this exact same card last year.  Its from a rare series that was only issued in the Tokai area (where the Dragons play) and is thus among the harder to find cards in the set (which is why I was watching the auction despite already having the card, since they are rare they only pop up for auction occasionally and I like to keep tabs on how much they go for).  

The copy of the card that I picked up last year is in really nice shape, like probably Ex or Exmt (which is rare for 1970s Calbee cards).  I don't remember exactly what I paid for it but I think it was in the 2,000- 3,000 Yen range which is (or was) typical for cards from that series.  

Since the card in yesterday's auction is in  lower grade - maybe a G or so due to those corner creases - I was expecting it to go for a bit less than what I got mine for.  Boy was I wrong, this was how high the auction went:

15,500 Yen (about $150 US)!  About 10 times more than I was expecting and at least 5 times more than I paid for a higher grade copy of the same card just last year!

I should be happy about this (and yay, a card I have is more valuable, I'm happy!)  but I'm also worried about what auction results like this might portend for my quest to finish the set.  

With the rare Tokai regional series that this card is a part of I am still missing 12 cards (one of which also features Ron Woods).  Until now I've been expecting they would set me back maybe 2-3,000 Yen each in mid-grade condition (less if in lower grade), but this makes me wonder if that will be feasible.  If they are going to cost me anywhere near 15,500 Yen each there is no way I'll be able to afford them.  So far as I can tell this auction result is a bit of an outlier, I've never seen a card from the set sell for more than 10,000 Yen and maybe the seller was just lucky to have two guys who desperately wanted that specific card right now bidding each other up over it.  But its also one of those things where once that line has been crossed, no doubt others will follow.

Even more worrisome is that there is another series in the set, the Red Helmet series (609-644) that was only released in Hiroshima and usually sells for even more than the cards from the Tokai series.  I'm only about half-way there on completing that series and was hoping to finish those without spending more than 3-4,000 Yen (30-40$ US) per card, but if a card from the Tokai series can go for over 10,000, then definitely cards from that series can too.  And, again, at those prices the set becomes unaffordable to me, barring some huge pile of cash unexpectedly falling from the sky into my back yard or something (one can always hope).

On the plus side, auction results like these do make me quite glad that I started my quest to build this set a few years ago and have already knocked a decent number of cards from the rare series off my want list!  If I was looking for a set to start working on today, prices like these would have discouraged me from even trying.

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Calbee Series 2: Let the Complaints Begin (strikes gong)!

 

Calbee Series 2 has arrived!  Or actually, wait, no it hasn't.  Its weird.  According to Calbee itself the set isn't supposed to appear in stores until June 28th.  And I can confirm that the local stores here still don't have them.

Yet as I sit here typing this I do so with the full 88 card regular set right in front of me, so obviously some of them have escaped from the Calbee factory early.  

This allows me to present the second 2021 installment of my thrice annual tradition I like to call "Complaining 'bout Calbee Photography".  So (cracks knuckles), let's begin.

First things first.  I bought this set off one of the re-sellers on Yahoo Auctions who buy up cases of Calbee chips to open them, hunt down the chase cards and sell them for major Yen.  They then offload everything else - the cards that are supposedly the main product -  for almost nothing.  So as a collector of just the regular cards when the new Series comes out its always a good time for me to pounce like a scavenger scoring the scraps leftover by an apex predator who feels his leftover scraps have no market value.    

I was a bit apprehensive about this purchase because the guy I bought it from has the most insanely bad feedback rating I have ever seen on Yahoo Auctions - 75.8% positive (out of 171 total so its not like he's new to this and one or two bad ones brought him down).   The average feedback scores on Yahoo Auctions are about the same as they are on Ebay, basically if anyone has less than a 99.5% positive rating its enough to make you look through their transactions to see if they are on the up and up.  Less than 99.0% is a huge red flag.  75.8% is just off the charts insane.  This guy is an absolute legend among low feedback Yahoo Auctions dudes, nobody can touch him.

I pulled the trigger anyway because the price for the entire set was just 300 Yen (plus 210 Yen shipping), meaning I could get the whole thing in hand for under 5$ US, which seemed worth the risk.

Much to my surprise, the cards were sent promptly after I paid for them and arrived within two days!  All of them.

I could kind of see where that 75.8% feedback was coming from though, the cards were literally just tossed loose into an envelope.  No wrapping or anything, and it wasn't even a bubble mailer.  But they survived the journey without damage so I'm not complaining and he can expect a positive feedback from me shortly (which might push him up into 76% range or so).

So let me talk about the cards themselves.  Usually when I do a post like this Dave has already done one on the set so I don't talk about the basics, but since I got these early I can beat him to it this time!

The regular set contains 72 cards (#73 to 144, continuing on from Series 1).  I got all of those.  There is also a four card checklist set and a 12 card Opening Pitcher set, which I also received (meaning my 300 Yen purchase netted me 88 cards).  Together these would constitute the "base" cards.

In addition there is a 24 card "Star Card" set, which I don' t have but assume its covered in shiny glittery stuff like usual, and a 12 card special box limited set which features the top hitter from each team, which I'm not sure how it is distributed but also likely has a bunch of shiny glittery stuff on it.  There is also a 24 card parrallel set of the Star Cards featuring embossed signatures of the player.  These can only be obtained by sending in "Lucky Cards" which are randomly inserted in packs and are the real money makers for the re-sellers like the guy I bought mine from.  

Anyway, now lets get on with what we've all been waiting for!  Me complaining about Calbee's photos!

Yup, they suck again this time around.  For those unfamiliar, I did a post a few years back highlighting the monotonous nature of Calbee photography which you can refer to.  The rules are that all position players except catchers are shown batting, all pitchers are shown hitting and catchers are the only position players sometimes shown actually in the field.  The photos are always framed the same way and are usually taken from the exact same vantage point in the team's home stadium.  Individually none of the cards have bad pictures on them, but collectively it makes for boring and repetitive looking sets.  

2021 Calbee sticks to precedent pretty strictly.  I could only find 4 cards in the regular set which deviated from those rules, these ones here:

None of these are particularly exciting and the close up framing perpetuates the monotony even with these. So once again we've got a thoroughly mediocre Calbee set which makes me value my vintage Calbee cards with their lovely and varied photography all the more!

Anyway, if you enjoyed reading me complain about Calbee photography (and who doesn't enjoy that?) be sure to tune in to the blog in September when I'll undoubtedly be devoting a post to complaining about Series 3!

Sunday, June 20, 2021

The Most Unusual Photo of a Professional Baseball Stadium Ever Taken

 

I Googled Osaka Stadium for no important reason just now.  Its the former home stadium of the Nankai Hawks until they moved to Fukuoka in 1988.  It was torn down in 1998 and the site is now the home of Namba Parks, a major shopping development (Dave visited on his trip a couple of years ago and did a great post about it). 

In my Google search the above photo popped up and really caught my eye.  That is literally a residential neighborhood built right in the outfield of a very large professional baseball stadium. You don't see that every day.

I thought it must be photo-shopped or something but on further looking into it I discovered that no, in fact that is a real photograph of Osaka Stadium.  In the ten years between the Hawks leaving Osaka in 1988 and it being torn down in 1998 they had to do something with the field.  One of those uses was as a showcase for model homes.  So the infield became a parking lot and the outfield became a neighborhood with about 20 homes in it, albeit one nobody ever lived in.

Its a shame they didn't keep it like that.  I think living in a house located in shallow left field of a really cool old baseball stadium would be hard to beat!  

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

I'm still alive!

 

I stepped away from the blog for three months there.  Everything is good!  Its just that my day job is one of those ones where after years of work your employer subjects you to a months long process the outcome of which is that you either end up with a guaranteed job for life on the one hand, or they let you go and your whole career is over in an instant on the other.  No pressure, ha! Anyway, I'm going through that now so I've stepped away from the blog because I'm too busy, but I've found a few spare minutes and thought I'd devote them to a little update post. 

Despite being busy, I'm still collecting, albeit at a lower rate than usual.  Here are a couple of updates on stuff with my collection.  

1975-76-77 Calbee Monster

Last week I picked up 7 more cards that I needed for my monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set, including the Sachio Kinugasa card (#510) pictured above.  These are the first additions I've made to that set all year and I'm really psyched about finally being able to fill in a few more pockets in those binders. 

My progress on the set has slowed to the crawl over the past couple years, something I've moaned about in previous posts.  The problem is that I've basically picked over what all the established dealers have for sale and so now I'm just waiting and pouncing on new listings, which only come up occasionally.  If you look on Yahoo Auctions at any given moment there are usually more than 2,000 listings for cards from this set so you might think it would be easier.  But that is for a set with 1472 cards, and most of those listings are of cards from a few of the easier to find series so there is heavy duplication of some cards and none for most of the others.  Within those 2,000 plus listings there are probably only 500-600 or so different cards available from that set, and the other 900 or so just don't come up for sale that often. 

I can also tell that I'm not alone in this situation because I'm always getting into bidding wars on those cards when they pop up, even for common cards in common series which just coincidentally happen to not be in any other dealer's inventory.  

The Menko Collection

My menko collecting has kind of fallen off a cliff recently just because of a recent market trend that  economists refer to as "Holy crap when did everything get this damned expensive???"

Basically the market has exploded here like it has in the US.  I think there was a bit of a lag and vintage cards didn't really start skyrocketing in price until a few months after they had in the US, but its happenned here too.  So while I'm still bidding on stuff that I would have won easily a year or two ago, nowadays I find myself getting blown out of the water and not even coming close to the winning bid on anything.  Especially Sadaharu Oh stuff is just no longer attainable in my price range, so I'm glad I knocked a lot of his cards off my want list when they were (though there are still a lot out there I would like to own!)


Anyway, that is my update. In all honesty I'm probably not going to have enough time to resume blogging at my normal rate until the above mentioned work thing-y is resolved, which won't be until later this year.  I'll try to find a bit of time here and there to post updates though, I find that my collection doesn't really feel complete without it being  blogged about!  

Thursday, March 25, 2021

2021 Calbee Series 1 is here.

 


Series 1 of the 2021 Calbee set is out in stores this week.  It wouldn't feel like the start of spring without them.

This year there is exciting news about the new Calbee set.

Ha!  Just kidding, its the exact same schlock they've been putting out every year for decades without anything but minor cosmetic changes here and there.  Which I admire them for.

This bag containing two cards and a bunch of chips that I don't like set me back 88 Yen (like 80 cents US or so).  Lets see what I got.

Lions second baseman  Shuuta Tonosaki's regular card and an MVP card of Hawks slugger Yuki Yanagita from the Title Holder subset (which I had to glean from Calbee's website since the card itself doesn't actually say it is from a subset called "Title Holder").   Not bad I guess. 

The cards are pretty standard in design.  They went with Roman letters for the player names on the front of the regular cards instead of kanji, which is about the only thing they seem to vary much from year to year anymore.  Backs of the cards are about the same as usual too.

Judging from the photos on the two cards I got, I predict that sometime in the next month or so I'll buy the whole regular set off one of the case breakers on Yahoo Auctions solely for the purpose of writing a post complaining about the mundane photography here.  Its become an annual tradition for me.

On a side note, I've been posting a bit less than usual this month, work has been extremely busy so has been keeping me away from it, a situation that will likely last into April but I'll try to do a post whenever I can squeeze in a bit of time.  

Monday, March 8, 2021

The REAL Hall of Fame Collection Bottleneck

 

A few days ago I wrote a post about how certain hall of famers, particularly those with exclusively pre-war careers, have very few cards of them and thus present a major obstacle to anyone trying to put together a collection of career contemporary cards of Japanese Hall of Famers.

Excluding Eiji Sawamura (who has no known cards) probably the most difficult player to get is Tokichiro Ishii.  Ishii was a star hitter for Waseda University in the 1940s and was also later a manager of the team.  He was elected into the Hall of Fame in 1995 and is notable as only the second player to enter the hall without any professional baseball experience ( the first was former Meiji University star Kichiro Shimaoka in 1991).

Because he never played professionally, Ishii doesn't appear in any of the professional player card sets of the late 1940s.  University stars featured prominently in the menko sets of the 1929-1931 time period (which pre-dated the establishment of a professional league), but he was too young to appear in any of those either.

There is exactly ONE set of cards which he does feature in, which is the 1948 Big Six University set (JRM 44).  The above is his card in that set, the only card of him ever made.

Unfortunately for Hall of Fame collectors, its a rare one - Engel lists it as R4, meaning that fewer than 10 copies are known to exist.  One hasn't appeared in a Prestige Collectibles auction in over a decade!

So while I'm not actively pursuing a Hall of Fame collection, I'm glad to have this one in my collection!


Tuesday, March 2, 2021

1948 Baseball Source

These are ten cards from the 1948 set Engel calls "Baseball Source"  (JCM 103).  I think they are called that based on the text on top of the back, which means the same.  

Its a pretty colorful set with some simple artwork as you can see.  My cards aren't in the best of shape but its a pretty rare set (R3) so they are the best I've been able to find!

 The baseball source on the back is the floating head in the upper right hand corner who asks a trivia question, the answer to which is the player on the front of the card.  So for Toshio Kawanishi's card for example it asks who the Hawks fastest runner was on the back.

These cards were part of a small pile of menko I recently picked up and on sorting them out I discovered that Engel's checklist of the set is incomplete.  Three of my cards aren't on it: Hisanori Karita, Michio Nishizawa and Shigeru Chiba (all three of them Hall of Famers).  So you can add these to the 15 listed in the guide.

The key card to the set is Victor Starffin which, unfortunately, I don't have.  But with the addition of these three to the known checklist that means there are 18 cards in this set (possibly more), and with ten so far I'm more than halfway to completing it.  

Monday, March 1, 2021

The Only Copy of the Only Card of This Guy Ever Made

 

In my previous post I talked a bit about this pre war menko I recently acquired. I identified it as  Kenjiro Matsuki on the grounds that the card says "Matsuki" and he was the only player with that name which I could find from that era, and the the fact that he wore glasses and looks quite a bit like the player depicted in the image.

What confused me though was that the card also clearly says Waseda University (the kanji on the right hand side of it), which Kenjiro Matsuki never attended (he went to rival Meiji University). I chalked this up as an error.

Then Prestige Collectibles contacted me on Twitter and pointed out that there was actually another guy with the same last name, Yoshio Matsuki, who was recorded on Waseda's roster from the same period (these rosters aren't available online, he literally had to look that up in an old paper copy - old school research is the best!).  So in all likelihood the card was not an error, but simply featured a different Matsuki!

I appreciated the work that went into tracking him down since  unlike Kenjiro Matsuki (who went on to play professionally and ended up in the Hall of Fame) Yoshio Matsuki is a pretty anonymous guy.  He never played professionally and Google searches for anything about him in Japanese turn up zero information.  Other than the fact that he was a pitcher for Waseda University between 1929 and 1933 we don't know anything about this guy.  I can't even find out if he wore glasses!

In some ways this makes this card even neater - its got to be the only card of this guy in existence.  I mean that literally, there is just one known copy of this one card of this guy who we basically know nothing about!  This is not something you can say about many cards!

Also I like the fact that I have a 100% global monopoly on Yoshio Matsuki cards, so anyone trying to collect this guy has no choice but to go through me.  I'm both literally and figuratively holding all the cards in any negotiation with such person were they to ever exist.  Ha.  Makes me feel very special :)

Thursday, February 25, 2021

The Pre War Hall of Famer Card Bottleneck

 

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about my big find of a menko from the 1931 Major League All Star tour of Japan.  In this post I'd like to introduce in more detail the other two big cards which I got in the same lot, which are pretty major finds on their own.

Both of these cards feature important pre-war Hall of Famers - Minoru Yamashita on the left, Kenjiro Matsuki on the right.  Nick, who has a really excellent player collection of Japanese Hall of Famers that he has detailed his collecting of here, commented on my earlier post  that the toughest hurdle for anyone trying to pursue such a collection is guys whose playing careers were entirely before the War.  For guys who started their careers before the war, then resumed them in the late 1940s (like Tadashi Wakabayashi) its not too hard to find cards of them since they appeared in menko sets from the late 40s and early 50s which, while not plentiful, can still be found.

With the exclusively pre-war guys though it becomes a big headache.  Famously Eiji Sawamura, Japan's most beloved pitcher from the early days and for whom NPB's version of the Cy Young Award is named, has no known surviving cards from his playing days (which were entirely before the War in which he died).  But even for the guys who have known cards they only exist in sets where maybe 4 or 5 copies of each card survive.  

None of the sets from the 1930s survive in any quantity today, so there is a huge bottleneck in terms of supply of cards of players who only played in that decade (or before).  I'm not sure why that is.  One explanation is that there simply weren't too many of them produced to begin with.  Cardboard menko were still relatively new back then and maybe they just didn't catch on much with kids.  Notable support for this explanation is to be found in the fact that there aren't any known sets from the mid to late 1930s, all of the known ones seem to have been made between 1929 and 1931, then there is a huge gap until after the War.  If the kids didn't buy them, then they wouldn't have made too many and given up on the idea.  

A second possibility is that lots of them were made, but most were destroyed during the firebombing of Japanese cities.  This explanation suffers from a couple of problems though.  One is that Japan wasn't anywhere near as urbanized in the 1940s as it is now, so most of the population back then lived in the countryside or smaller towns that weren't bombed.  So if the cards were roughly evenly distributed around the country according to where people lived, then only a fraction of them would have been destroyed in the bombing, unless they had only been distributed in major cities (which is possible, but not certain).  Another problem is that this explanation doesn't explain why only cards from prior to 1931 survive.

A third possibility is that a lot of cards were made, and few were destroyed by the bombing, but most were recycled.  During the War the government organized major recycling drives to suck up all the resources they could for the war effort.  This mainly focused on metal, but also included paper and cardboard.  Perhaps they were all turned into carboard boxes or something.  A problem with this explanation though is that lots of other things made of cardboard and paper (like books and postcards) survive from that era, so the recycling programs don't seem to have gobbled up too much (and menko are so small they likely wouldn' t have bothered). 

A fourth possibility is the American one - everyone's mom just threw them out!

A fifth possibility is that the government may have actively suppressed baseball menko specifically.  The main piece of evidence supporting this is the fact that the gap that exists in the baseball card archeological record between 1931 and 1947  is not replicated in the Sumo card record. This can be seen from the many examples of sumo menko sets from that time frame that SumoMenkoMan has recorded.  The gap in baseball menko notably coincides with the rise of nationalist fascism in Japan and the deterioration of its relations with the US which led to the war.  Being associated with America, the government may have discouraged the production of baseball menko while encouraging (or at least allowing) the production of sumo menko since that was a Japanese invention.  

A sixth possibility is that all five of these are correct to varying degrees and each of these factors contributed to the paucity of pre war cards.  I think this is the most likely explanation.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because one of these guys, Yamashita (above), had an exclusively pre-war playing career.  He was a star with Keio University in the Big Six league, where he led the league in batting average in 1929.  This card features him during his Keio days so probably dates to around then.  He played against both of the Major League All Star teams in 1931 and 1934, then joined the newly formed Hankyu team for the 1936 season.  He hit the first home run in Japanese professional baseball history that cleared an outfield fence in his first year.  He played with Hankyu until 1940, then played a single season with Nagoya in 1942, his last as a player.  He worked as an umpire after the War and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1987.  

Yamashita only appears in a handful of extremely rare pre-war sets (JRM 43, JCM 46, JCM 60, JCM 144) all of which have a rarity factor of R4 or R5 (meaning fewer than 5 or 10 copies of each are known to exist) so he is one of the hardest hall of famers to land a card of.  

The other card features Kenjiro Matsuki, who was also a university star who went on to play  in the newly formed pro league from 1936.  His professional playing career with the Tigers was almost entirely pre-war, but he did very briefly appear in the 1950 and 1951 seasons (11 games combined between the two).  He doesn't appear in most of the post-war sets except one: the 1950 JCM 21 Babe Ruth set, which is a lucky break for Japanese Hall of Fame collectors.  This set is designed like playing cards and gets its name from the fact that it has a Babe Ruth card in it.  Its actually one of the easier to find sets from that era, with a sizeable number still existing as uncut sheets, so most people who want a Matsuki card can get one from that set without too much difficulty.  He also appears in some (though not all) of the same extremely rare pre-war sets that Yamashita does.  

This card of mine is really interesting as its actually an error card.  The kanji on the left definitely say "Matsuki" (松木)and the player image is definitely him (he was one of the first Japanese players to strike that signature look with glasses).  But the kanji on the right  (早大) denotes Waseda University.  Likewise the lettering on his uniform is a bit hard to read but seems consistent with "Waseda".  

The problem is though that Matsuki never played for Waseda.  He went to school at rival Meiji University and played for them in the Big Six league.  

So that is kind of neat!

Given the similarity in art style, size, players depicted and inks used I would say these are both from the same set, which is not yet catalogued and thus these seem to be the only known copies of each. They are a pretty big addition to my collection even though I'm not actively working on a Hall of Famer player collection.  


Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Yoshio Tanaka has an Odd Story

 

I picked up a couple of cards of Yoshio Tanaka (from the 1958 JCM 54 set and  the1959 Yamakatsu set JCM 33g ).  Tanaka is an interesting figure in Japanese baseball history who I was surprised to find doesn't even have so much as an English language Wikipedia entry.  Which is odd because his story seems kind of really out there.  If you'll oblige me, I'd like to lay out the basics of what I've been able to glean about it from the Japanese internet here.  

He was an American, born and raised in Hawaii to parents who had immigrated from Hiroshima.  He played baseball in high school and at the University of Hawaii, but never professionally in the US.  After graduating from university he became a high school teacher in the early 1930s and it looked like he would just have a normal life as a high school teacher in Hawaii.

Then one day fellow Hawaiian and future Hall of Famer Tadashi Wakabayashi, who went to McKinley High School with Tanaka and had gone off to Japan to join the newly formed Tigers team in 1936, invited him to join  the team.  

According to his Japanese Wikipedia page there seems to be a bit of debate about what drove Tanaka to quit teaching and accept that invitation.  One  version of the story is that due to the deteriorating relationship between Japan and the US at the time Tanaka would have had to renounce his Japanese citizenship (he held dual nationality) in order to continue his teaching career, something his  mother was staunchly opposed to.  So he had to quit teaching to maintain his dual nationality, and playing baseball was just the job that came along.  The other version is that he wanted to marry a girl that his mother did not like at all and he came to Japan mainly so he could be with her, with baseball just being the gig that allowed him to do so.  

Either way, he came to Japan and joined the Tigers in 1937 and played with them through 1944.  

Talk about an awkward time for an American to be starting a career in Japan!  

Here is one thing I can't wrap my head around about his story.  His playing career ended in 1944 partly because the 1945 season was interrupted by the war and partly because he was drafted.  But what I can't figure out is into which country's military?  His Japanese Wikipedia page just says he was drafted into military service, so you'd assume that meant Japan's because he was in Japan at the time.  But this article from Monthly Hanshin Tigers says he was drafted into the American military!  

How was that even possible?  I figure this must be a mistake since it makes no sense at all, but still, wouldn't that have been a conversation stopper at the dinner table at the time if it really went down like that? (edited to note: per NPB Guys' comment below, he was definitely not drafted into the US military!)

His playing career wasn't really star calibre, though he was known for his nickname (Kaiser) and the fact that he was the only catcher in NPB until Atsuya Furuta came along decades later to wear glasses.

After the war he worked for the American military in Japan for a few years, before coming back to baseball in 1954 as a coach for the Tigers.

Then in 1958 he achieved his claim to fame: he became the Tigers manager and thus the first foreign manager in Japanese history.    He lasted two years in the role, in both of which the Tigers had winning records but did not make the Japan Series.  He was the manager of the Tigers during their legendary game against the Giants on June 25, 1959 which was the first ever attended by the Emperor (which his team lost).  

My two cards above come from his tenure as Tiger skipper.  He coached for a few other teams in the early 1960s and spent the rest of his life in Japan, passing away  in Tokyo in 1985.  


Thursday, February 18, 2021

The Golden Days of Japanese PItching

 
I picked up another pile of late 50s menko the other day.  I got a little over 50 cards including the five above, which each feature one of Japan's greatest all time pitchers.  It got me thinking that Japan's amazing pitchers from that era tend to get a bit overlooked relative to the dominant hitters like Sadaharu Oh who are more well known.  

In the same way that guys in MLB in the 19th or early 20th century put up insane stats (511 career wins, 40 plus wins per season, etc), NPB had some insanely dominant pitchers back in the 50s and 60s.  Back then the best pitchers basically threw until their arms fell off (as they sort of still do, though to a much lesser extent).  This meant that a lot of them suffered career ending injuries early on, but also that for the few who survived they amassed some incredible career and single season records.

Check these guys out:

Masaaki Koyama won 323 games (3rd all time) in a career lasting from 1953 to 1973.  His career ERA was 2.45. He won 20 or more games 7 times, and won 30 in 1964.  In addition to being 3rd on the career wins list he is also 3rd on the career strike outs list.
Masaichi Kaneda won 400 games in his career, the most of any NPB pitcher.  He compiled an amazing 14 consecutive seasons with at least 20 wins, including a 31 win campaign in 1958.  His career ERA was 2.34. He is also the NPB career strikeout leader with 4,490.
Minoru Murayama compiled a 222-147 career record with a miniscule 2.09 career ERA in a relatively short career between 1959 and 1972.  He won three Sawamura awards, including in his 1959 rookie season when he led the league with a remarkable 1.19 ERA
Shigeru Sugishita was a remarkably dominant pitcher for a 6 year stretch, kind of like Sandy Koufax in the US.  From 1950 to 1955 inclusive he never won fewer than 23 games, and broke the 30 win mark twice in that stretch.  He won 215 games in his career and finished with a 2,23 ERA.  
Tetsuya Yoneda doesn't get anywhere near enough attention.  He won 350 games in his career between 1956 and 1977, almost entirely with Hankyu.  He had eight seasons with more than 20 wins.  He never won 30 games, but came close in 1968 with 29.  Like Kaneda (and in fact, most of these guys) he played for some weak teams so he also ended up accumulating some bad stats - 285 career losses (2nd to Kaneda), and due to his lengthy career he also holds the record for most hits and runs surrendered.  And while his 2.91 career ERA would be insanely impressive in MLB, its noticeably higher than the other four guys in this post.  

I don't think any contemporary pitchers will approach what these guys did in NPB, partly because of the emergence of 5 man rotations and relief pitchers, but  more so because the best pitchers in Japan get skimmed off the top and sent to MLB for a few of their prime years, which dents their ability to come close to these guys.  Hideo Nomo, Yu Darvish, Kenta Maeda, Masahiro Tanaka and Daisuke Matsuzaka (to name a few) might have put up similar career numbers (albeit with higher career ERAs) had they stayed, but until NPB finds some way of retaining its top players rather than selling them off guys like that aren't going to stick around long enough.  

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Cards you can Wear

 

I think these are two of my favorite cards in my collection. They are from the 1949 set catalogued as JDM 2 in Engel and feature Hall of Famers Kaoru Betto and Hiroshi Oshita. 

They are die cut mask cards which kids could wear on their faces.  The eyes are perforated and can be punched out, and there are little notches on each side near the ears where you can attach a string.  These are a bit easier to see from the back:

The size of the cards are a bit bigger than standard so while these would be very small on me, they might fit OK onto the head of a five year old.

Mask cards were a thing for a brief time in Japanese baseball card history, 5 different sets including this one (which contains 8 cards total) are known and all were issued either in 1949 or 1950.  After that they seem to have fallen out of favor.

The artwork on the cards from this set in particular is quite impressive, the images are much more realistic than what you find on any menko cards issued from that era.  

Pretty much all of the mask cards are quite rare.  This set is listed as R3 (fewer than 100 copies known) while some of the others are harder still.  

This might relate either to them being less popular among kids, or them being very popular among kids but also very fragile for a mask (the thickness of these is about the same as a regular baseball card).  I can't imagine these would have lasted long if a kid actually put them on.

If you think about it though baseball players are kind of an odd choice for a mask.  Watching my own kids they love to dress up in costumes and pretend to be various characters (characters from the Super Mario universe are their favorites these days).  When they do so they like to engage in play that involves doing whatever those characters do.  

My kids aren't really into baseball, but if they were I couldn't see them putting player masks to the same use.  If they want to pretend to be a baseball player, they'll do that by playing baseball.  If they are playing baseball, a mask like this is going to be a major hindrance.  The two activities are mutually incompatible and thus the kids would have little use for these.  

So while not great as a toy from a kid's perspective, they are SUPER AWESOME AMAZING from the perspective of a baseball card collector 70 years after they were made.  

Sunday, February 14, 2021

Flying Bats

 
I have a few cards from the 1950 Kagome "Flying Bats" set (JCM 5).  It is so called thanks to the artwork on the card backs:

I'm not really sure where the idea to put wings on the bats came from, but for Japan its not too odd a thing to find.

The cards are kind of neat to look at.  They feature bright colors yet have an overall dark look thanks to the thick outlines used by the artist.  They also have some odd spellings for player names.  The guy named "ZA" for example is Atsuhi Aramaki. I have no idea why they call him Za.

This set is notable for featuring the rookie card of Masaichi Kaneda, probably Japan's all time greatest pitcher with 400 career wins.  I haven't been able to add that one to my collection yet though.  Its on the top of my want list though.  Unlike other big names like Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh, who had dozens of rookie cards, Kaneda didn't appear on many in his rookie season so this is probably his "key" card out there.  

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

This is a Truly Amazing Discovery

 

I made a really major find the other day.  Probably the biggest find I will ever make.

The above card featuring Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch is the only known surviving copy of a menko from the 1931 Major League All Star Tour of Japan

Until today nobody knew this existed (well, at least the internet did not know it existed).

In 1931 a group of Major League all stars did a 17 game tour of Japan.  It featured some of the biggest stars of the time - Lou Gehrig, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove, Al Simmons, Lefty O'Doul, Highpockets Kelly, Rabbit Maranville and Frankie Frisch to name a few.  The 1931 tour isn't quite as famous as the follow up 1934 tour which added Babe Ruth to the lineup, but still it was an impressive team.

Until now there were two known extremely rare bromide sets released to commemorate the tour, which Engel catalogues as JBR 105 (put out by a company called Yuasa) and JBR 106.  These feature some of the big name American players (JBR 106 also features some of the Japanese players who faced them).  There are fewer than 5 known copies of each card in both sets so for each of those the card is probably the player's rarest in the world.  I can't imagine what a Gehrig from one of those sets would go for if one ever came up.  Rob Fitts wrote a good article about them a few years ago which you can read about here.  

The thing is though, while those bromides have been known no menko sets from the tour (or the 1934 tour for that matter) had ever been discovered. 

That was the case until a few days ago when an antique dealer from Yamagata put up a small lot of four pre-war baseball menko for sale on Yahoo Auctions.  His father, who was born in 1925, had collected menko as a child in the 1930s and these had been in their possession ever since (most of the menko were non-sports, being sold in a seperate lot).  

This was the lot photo here:

Neither the title nor the description of the lot identified it as containing the card of an American Hall of Famer.  The dealer had no idea what they were and just listed them as rare pre-war menko featuring baseball players.  

When I first saw the image I ignored the Frisch since I had no idea what it was and instead focused my attention on the two on the bottom.  These feature two prominent Japanese Hall of Famers from the 1930s -  Kenjiro Matsuki and Minoru Yamashita - during their university days (the card in the upper right corner is a generic one and not of much value).   These were pretty decent finds in their own right- they don't seem to be in any catalogued set either.  I'll probably do a post about them in the future.

So I bid on the lot on the basis of those two.  But as the auction ran my attention turned to that menko in the upper left corner.  Who was that?  Looking at it more closely I realized that it was a foreigner, and after doing a bit of research I realized he was wearing what looked to be a uniform from the 1931 tour!

This really piqued my interest and I upped my bid accordingly.  This lot was not going to get away from me.

My first thought was "WHOA- is that a Lou Gehrig card?"  It was a bit hard to see his face in the scan, but I could tell enough to determine that it wasn't Gehrig.

I started combing the internet for pictures from the 1931 tour hoping to find the original so I could identify the player.  Eventually I discovered this:

Bingo! This is Frankie Frisch's card from the JBR 106 set which sold in a Prestige Collectibles auction 12 years ago.   The photo was identical, I had found the player!  And Frankie Frisch is, while not quite Gehrig, still a pretty damn good Hall of Famer if there ever was one.

I think this menko find is really exciting news not just because we have another Frisch card, but because of what else it indicates might be lurking out there.  Did they make menko for other big name players from that tour (like Gehrig and Cochrane) or from the 1934 tour (which had Ruth)?  If so, did any of them survive, or is this Frisch the last one in existence?

I'm very excited with this discovery and will be paying WAY more attention to every single card that shows up in a big lot of pre-war menko from now on to see if I can answer any of these questions. This is what I really love about collecting Japanese vintage cards, it makes you feel like an archeologist finding interesting new things sometimes.

Anyway, this Frisch card is now the new centrepiece of my collection.

Monday, February 8, 2021

Baseball Card Prices are Getting Crazy in Japan Too

 

I've been reading a lot about how baseball card prices in the US have exploded over the past year on various forums, blogs and social media.  It was kind of weird, as the economy crumbled and millions lost their jobs, the price of cards went up.  

The same thing has happened here in Japan as I've kind of alluded to in a few posts.  Prices just ain't what they used to be.  One auction I was following which ended yesterday really drove that point home.  It was for the above lot of 151 menko from the 1950s and early 60s.  

This was a pretty amazing lot actually.  Most of the cards weren't too hard to find, but the highlight was a big lot of 1962 Tachibana Seika (JF 31) cards, these ones here:

This is an extremely rare set, Engel lists it as R4, meaning that fewer than 10 copies of each card are known to exist.  I don't have any cards from it in my collection, they almost never turn up in auctions, let alone a lot this size.

There are three key cards in this set:  Sadaharu Oh, Larry Doby and Don Newcombe.  The Doby and Newcombe cards are of particular interest since they played only briefly in Japan and only appear on a couple of cards, and this set basically has their "key" Japanese cards.  The Newcombe in particular Engel says is even rarer than the rest, giving it an R5 designation (fewer than 5 copies known).

This lot had not one, but two copies of that Newcombe.  See if you can spot it in the picture.  It also had doubles of the Oh card, but no Doby.

There was an absolute feeding frenzy that played out last night. On Yahoo Auctions there is no sniping, if someone enters a new high bid on something with less than 10 minutes left on the clock the system automatically adds 10 minutes to the auction.  Several bidders kept outbidding each other which had the cumulative effect of adding hours to the auction. I was up late watching, its almost like a spectator sport.  It was way out of my price range so I wasn't in the race.

They ended up putting in 173 bids and driving the price up to 341,000 Yen, or about 3400$ US (plus 210 Yen for shipping). 

This was probably a good deal given how valuable just the Newcombe cards alone are, if I had that kind of money I might have even been tempted to push it a bit higher.  Probably to Americans this price seems pretty modest given the gobsmacking insane prices high end stuff there are going for these days, but for Japanese vintage this is a big deal.  341,000 Yen I think is a lot more than what this would have gone for a couple of years ago and a good piece of evidence that the same trend going on in the US is going on here too, albeit not to the same degree.  


Sunday, February 7, 2021

New Menko Discoveries

 


I added a couple of interesting new menko to my collection last week.  These are two cards from a previously unknown set featuring players from the Big Six University league in the late 1940s.  

On the left is Kouzou Goi, a pitcher for Rikkyo University.  He was a star in his university days, and followed that up with a brief four year pro career from 1950 to 1954 with the Kintetsu Pearls (a descendant of today's Buffaloes) in the Pacific League.  Interestingly he split his time as a pitcher and a third baseman, putting in significant time at both as an early version of today's Shohei Ohtani.  Unlike Ohtani though, Goi never really shined in pro ball, posting a lousy 17-31 career record on the mound and a .258 career batting average at the plate.  

The card on the right features Toshinobu Sueyoshi pitching for Waseda University.  Like Goi he was a university star who followed up with a short and not very impressive pro career, turning in three seasons with the Mainichi Orions (a descendant of today's Chiba Lotte Marines) from 1952 to 1954, posting an 8-12 career record (though he did make the All Star team in his first season).  As you can see from the picture, he threw side arm.  

Its actually quite refreshing to find old menko of guys like this who were basically "commons".  Since most of the menko sets from the late 40s/early 50s contained maybe 20 cards tops, their checklists tended to be made up of guys who were future Hall of Famers (or at least Hall of Very Gooders) and you almost never find cards of journeymen pitchers with losing career records.  These guys squeeked into one on the basis of their university days, which is pretty cool. 

It goes without saying that this set is rare, the copies I own of these two cards seem to be the only ones known.  So now we have a checklist of 2, I'm assuming there were more made.  Given the overlap of their university careers, the set would have to date from between 1947 and 1949.  

And as with most sets from this era, I love the artwork on them.

Monday, February 1, 2021

Hideki Matsui Home Run Cards

 


I picked up a pile of cards from a set I've found kind of intriguing: the NTV Hideki Matsui Home Run set.

The set features one card for every home run Matsui hit in his career.  The photos aren't generic, but rather are photos from the actual home run that they record.  

Also interesting is that these weren't released as some sort of retrospective set after his career wrapped up.  Rather they were issued throughout his career as he hit more home runs.  I'm not sure how they were distributed, it seems they came out as sets each year rather than being sold one by one as he hit each homer (though I'm not sure on this point).  There are a lot of commemorative card binders floating around out there designed to hold cards from various years of this set, but I'm not super into special binders.

We should acknowledge how much of a gutsy move proposing this set must have been way back at the beginning of Matsui's career. For all anyone knew then he could have suffered a career ending injury or something early on and we'd have been left with this weird set of cards honoring a guy that only hit 64 career home runs that nobody remembers.  Fortunately that didn't happen and he actually hit 507 home runs between NPB and MLB combined.  When he moved to the Yankees the cards continued, only they had to be produced by Upper Deck which had the necessary licenses.  

The cards I have all feature home runs from his 2000 and 2001 seasons, in which he hit career home runs #205 to #271.  The set also commemorates post season home runs, so I've got some cards featuring his home runs in the 2000 Nippon Series as well (this also means the full set is bigger than 507 cards).  

As I was flipping through them it occurred to me that the photo selection in this set is really good.  Unlike the awful photo selection in contemporary sets hey don't just continuously throw pictures of Matsui swinging at the plate and connecting for the home run.  Rather you get a good assortment of interesting shots.  Some of him taking a swing.  Some of him rounding the bases.  Some of him high fiving his team mates. All of them taken from different angles, some quite interesting.  

It ironically means that a set which features only pictures of the exact same player is actually more engaging and less repetitive to flip through than any recent Calbee set featuring hundreds of different players.

I might try to track down a few more of these even though I'm neither a Matsui nor a Giants fan.  For  much older write ups (as in so old that Matsui was still hitting home runs at the time they were composed) on these cards you can see Dave's post here or Jason's post here


Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Uncut Sheet of 1963 Marusho

 

This is an uncut sheet of 16 cards from the 1963 Marusho Flag Back set (JRM 13c).  The complete set is 40 cards so this sheet has almost half of them.  It looks miscut in the above image but that is just because my scanner was slightly too small and cut the top and bottom edges off.

This set is one of the few vintage menko baseball sets that is easier to find in the United States than it is in Japan.  Back in the 1960s Americans Bud Ackerman and Mel Bailey imported a lot of Japanese cards to the US and this set was among them.  You can read about it more on Dave's excellent post about the history here.  

So in the US its quite a bit easier to find than other menko sets.  In Japan in contrast its not really noticeably easier or harder to find than most other sets from the same era.

This sheet never left Japan.  The ones that were imported to the US (by Buck Ackerman with this set) had numbers stamped on the backs.  This one doesn't have any numbers stamped on it which, along with the fact that I bought it in Japan, means it wasn't among those exported:

Another point of interest about the backs of this one is that it is printed in green ink.  According to Engel this set is most commonly found with brown ink backs, while green ink backs are rarer.  I'm a bit curious if all of the exported ones were brown ink backs, while the green ink backs like this were never exported, which might explain why they are rarer.

This sheet is missing the key card from this set - Sadaharu Oh - but it has two of the other big names.  Isao Harimoto, Japan's all time hits leader and all around amazing guy, is on the lower right card while Katsuya Nomura, #2 on NPB's career home run list is on the top right one.  

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Piles of 1940s Menko are so awesome

 

I pulled the trigger on a big lot of old menko a few days ago.  I got insanely lucky actually.  An antique dealer in Shizuoka prefecture had happened across a hoard of about 1,000 vintage menko from the late 1940s.  Most of them were non-sports but about 1/3 were baseball.  He broke them up into four lots with a mix of about 280 menko in each and put them up for auction.  The baseball ones were scattered evenly across all four lots.

I put place holder bids in on all four of them.  The bidding went up quite high on three of them, once they went over 100$ I dropped out and they ended up going for prices between 160$ and 260$ per lot.

But the fourth one for some reason didn't get the same love and I ended up winning it for about 80$, which was crazy.  Looking at the baseball menko I couldn't figure out why the one I won went so cheaply since it had some amazing stuff in it which was comparable to the ones that went for double or triple the price. Possibly there were two bidders who were so focused on the other three, which ended at about the same time, that they forgot about the fourth lot.  

Anyway, their loss, my gain!

My lot had nearly 100 baseball menko from the late 1940s in it and let me tell you - sorting through a lot of 100 1940s baseball menko featuring a solid mix of hall of famers is a collecting joy like no other.

I think the highlight of the lot were cards from the 1949 Kagome Die Cut set (catalogued as JD4 in the Engel guide), pictured above.  This set is really beautiful - the artwork features realistic images of the players done in some extremely vibrant colors.  It has some of the biggest name stars of the era like Tetsuharu Kawakami, Noburo Aota, Hiroshi Oshita and Michihiro Nishizawa.    

The set has 16 cards and I found.....15 of them in the lot!  Everybody except for Kaoru Betto, whose card has shot up to the top of my menko want list as a result.

There are quite a few cards from other sets which I'll have to organize, though this was the only "near set" in the pile.

In addition to the hundred or so baseball menko, I now also own about 180 non sports menko from the same era, which I'll have to sort through and find some way of appreciating too.  It'll be nice winter / Covid induced downtime project!


Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Big News For Vintage Calbee Collectors

 

There was some big news in the vintage Calbee collecting world last week: Somebody bought a complete set of the 1975-76 Calbee "monster" on Yahoo Auctions.

This is the same set that I have been working on for years and devoting a lot of posts on here to. At 1472 cards, many of them extremely rare, it is easily one of the most difficult sets of baseball cards in the world to complete.  

As far as I know, only two complete sets exist.  One is in the hands of a long time collector who has been collecting Calbee cards since the 1970s who was featured in an article in the Asahi Shinbun about a decade ago which seems to have disappeared from the internet because I can no longer find it.  The other one was this one, which has been listed on Yahoo Auctions for the past three years ( I wrote about it when it was first listed here).  

The starting bid on it has been set at 880,000 Yen (about $8,500 US) and somebody finally pulled the trigger!


This sale isn't surprising. When it was first listed I thought the price might have been a bit on the high side since the price of cards from the set was still pretty reasonable and I figured I could put the whole thing together for less than that.  In the intervening 3 yeas I have been disabused of that quaint idea.  The price of cards from this set has increased significantly and the cards from the rarer series in particular have become much harder to find (not that they were ever easy).  

It got to the point that for the past year or so I'd gone from thinking it was a bit overpriced to thinking it was one of the best bargains out there and was wondering why nobody was pouncing on it.  Of course my baseball card collecting budget isn't anywhere near big enough for me to be dropping that kind of money on cards, but if I was rich I would have bought this thing ages ago.

Anyway, now it is gone, in the hands of some lucky collector who with the click of a button has accomplished something that I have been slaving away at for 7 years and am still only about 70% of the way to finishing!  Probably the next time the world will see one of these available for sale will be 40 years from now when my kids inherit my estate and start dumping all the crap I collect that they aren't interested in, assuming I live that long and that 40 years is enough time for me to finish this monster!