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.

18 comments:

  1. Holy cow! Absolutely epic! Congrats and what a find.

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    1. Thanks! I'm really happy to have found this!

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  2. Congratulations! It's one thing to add a really cool card to your collection. But when it's the last surviving copy of a card out there... that's definitely taking things to the next level.

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    1. Thanks! I have a few cards in my collection that are possibly the last surviving copies, but this is the only one featuring an MLB hall of famer so its pretty neat.

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  3. Incredible find, even better detective work! I think this blog post is the early contender for your post of the year.

    Also, maybe we should start calling you "The Indiana Jones of Menko". (Well, without the narrow escapes from certain doom at every turn, but you get the idea.)

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    1. Thanks!

      Someday I would really like to find a pile of old baseball cards in a cave perched on a rock that is rigged to a booby trap and the only way I can get them is by quickly replacing them with a properly weighted bag of sand to prevent it from going off.

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  4. Wow, good work! Even without the Frisch this would be an epic find. A Yamashita card sold on ebay a while ago (the first and last time I've seen one there), and I got blown out of the water on the bidding. With another pre-war HOF and Frisch, this is just off the charts amazing.

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    1. Yeah, I think cards of Yamashita must be pretty hard to come by since he didn't play after the War, do you have one of him in your HOF collection?

      The Matsuki card is also interesting since it has a major error on it, which I think I'll describe in a future post!

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    2. No, I don't have any Yamashita cards. Outside of Prestige auctions, pre-war hall of famers are pretty much impossible to find in the US. Prestige will usually have a couple in each auction, but even those are often people like Nakajima, who are also available in post-war cards if you look hard enough. I had originally intended to get all of the Japanese hall of famers, but given how hard it is to find the pre-war guys, eventually settled on a post-war collection.

      On a somewhat-related note, the election results this year were really disappointing. They've got plenty of good candidates, but passed on everybody. What's Masahiro Doi got to do to get elected? (To say nothing of Kazuhiro Kiyohara, but of course he's got other issues holding him back.)

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    3. Ah I can see how the solely pre-war guys would be a significant bottleneck.

      I was a bit disappointed with this year's HOF announcement too.

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  5. That's an amazing find - you must feel like Indiana Jones or something!

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    1. Thanks! ITs a bit like that, just with much less shooting and jumping over chasms.

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  6. Amazing. And now you've preserved the knowledge of the existence of this card for history.

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  7. Wow! That's a pretty incredible find. Have you sent Gary Engel an email about these yet?

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    1. I haven't, but I will. I'm trying to find the time to put all my finds together into a coherent form to make it simple, but I never get around to it!

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