The fronts of the cards have the player names written in English, though (as Engel also notes) they are often misspelled. Dragons pitcher Masakatsu Tsuchiya's name is misspelled "Tuciya" in the card on the lower left for example.
One cool thing about putting someone who doesn't know how to spell in charge of typesetting your card fronts though is what they'll do with Sadaharu Oh's name. Just "O" with a little accent thing on top (not sure what that thing is called).
Using just the one letter for a name does make his card look a lot bolder than it would with the more conventional "Oh" spelling.
The four cards I have are all in about Ex-mt condition except for....O! There is some kind of gunk stuck to the front which you can see and it really annoys me - three commons and the all time home run leader and of course its the all time home run leader's card who somebody decided to put gunk on.
The backs of the cards are a bit more subdued, with several games to play. Junken (paper rock scissors), or a baseball play in the centre (O's appropriately is a home run) and playing cards in the lower right.
The cards are pretty hard to come by, Engel lists them as R3 (less than 100 copies of each) which seems about right, the four I have are the only four I've ever seen come up for sale.
These are gorgeous! Being super rare is a nice plus.
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed :)
DeleteThat is what I am talking about. These are really cool! How thick is the paper stock?
ReplyDeleteThe thickness is about that of a standard baseball card. Size wise they are about like 1951 or 1952 Bowmans, but a bit wider.
DeleteThey look somewhat like mini cards. How many are in the set?
DeleteYeah, they are just slightly bigger than mini cards from the 80s. There are 16 cards in the set.
DeleteI don't think I'd ever seen these before. I'm not big on artwork cards but these are pretty neat.
ReplyDeleteFor years I've seen the "h" randomly appear or disappear in the transliterations of Japanese names on baseball cards - "Kohji" vs "Koji", "Etoh" vs "Eto", "Ohtsuka" vs "Otsuka", etc. - and I've always wondered why Oh was always Oh. But now I see that Oh can be "O" as well.
Yeah, its confusing. Japanese has kind of two different "o" sounds, a short and a long O, and they've never really figured out how to distinguish the two when writing words in English. If its an "oh" then that means its a long O.
DeleteSince we don't have this in English I'm always getting words mixed up based on that long o/short o sound difference.
That Takada card is my favorite. The color lines and angle of his name make it seem like he just pummeled a ball way out into left field. And I wonder if that's his baseball cap tucked into his back pocket.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the way they've aligned it really makes his card stand out! I think that might be a cap in there, good call!
DeleteCards of the best players always seem to be the one's that have some sort of condition issue!
ReplyDeleteCard collector's rule #1 unfortunately!
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