Kevin Maas of the Hanshin Tigers

 

This card is sort of an age test.  If you are old enough to have been collecting baseball cards in 1990 then you know that for a little while in the summer of that year this was one of the hottest cards in the hobby.  If you started collecting in 1991 or later, this is just some random common from the 1990 Upper Deck set.

I remember Kevin Maas very well since he got called up to the Yankees in the middle of the 1990 season to replace my favorite player at the time, Don Mattingly.  Maas went on a tear and made huge headlines for hitting his first 10 home runs in just 72 at bats, the fastest to do so in MLB history.  He kept up the pace and hit 21 home runs in just half a season, making him one of the most sought after rookie cards for collectors that year.

Then 1991 came around and he fell to Earth, never repeating his success in his rookie year and was out of the Majors by 1995.

An interesting post-script to his career though is that in the middle of the 1996 season he signed on with the Hanshin Tigers to replace Glenn Davis who left the team in June.  He came over with big expectations and owing to the phonetic similarity of his last name to that of Randy Bass Tigers fans were able to use their Randy Bass song to cheer for him (not an impressive fact per se, but a pretty neat piece of trivia nonetheless).

Despite the high expectations, Maas didn't hit much better in NPB than he had in MLB and after 68 games with the Tigers in which he just hit .245 with 8 home runs he retired from the game.

As far as I can tell (and anyone who knows otherwise please correct me: EDIT: Twitter came through, he does have a card in a BBM subset that I had missed), Maas doesn't have any baseball cards of him as a Hanshin Tiger, since he only played half a season and, as a late signing, missed out on being in any of the 1996 sets.  In fact even when I do a Google image search for him in Japanese the only photo I can find of him as a Tiger is this grainy black and white head shot:

So he's basically a guy without any cards.  But I discovered by accident the other day that he does appear as a Tiger in an alternative medium: on the Nintendo 64.

I've had one of these for years and since my son got interested in baseball a few months ago I pulled out an old game for it: Hyper Space Night Game: Pro Baseball King.  

If you haven't heard of it, it was a Japan only release.  It features all 12 NPB teams from the 1996 season (the year the game was released).  For a 26 year old baseball game, it holds up pretty well and we like to play it a lot.  Current Dragons manager Kazuyoshi Tatsunami appears as a player on it so we play the Dragons a lot.

The other day though we were playing a game with the Hanshin Tigers and I was surprised to see that the game has as the Tigers #3 batter none other than Kevin Maas!

Its a bit hard to see his face - and all the players in Hyperspace Night Game Pro Yakyu King look the same anyway - but that is his name in the lower left hand corner of the screen there:

He hits for pretty decent power in this game, which came out in December of 1996, by which time he had already left the Tigers but presumably they had actually made the game earlier than its release date. 

Anyway, I thought this was a kind of neat anomaly - a recognizable name player who doesn't have a baseball card of himself with a team but does appear in a video game as a member of that team.  So if you are a Kevin Maas collector and want something - anything - of him as a Hanshin Tiger, this game  might be your only option.