The Moment Before the Camera Broke

This recently acquired card of Carp pitcher Souhachi Aniya from the 1973 Calbee set (#131) is a cool addition to my collection.

It might not be in the best of shape, but that photo is a classic. That ball looks like it must have hit the camera (or at least nearly missed it) the second after this photo was taken. The blurry form at the bottom of the image suggests this was not planned and might indicate a cameraman rapidly moving to get out of the way.

Calbee sets from the 70s are hard to beat with photos like this.

Mystery Kids

 

I’ve been focusing a bit of my recent collecting attention on the 1975-76-77 monster Calbee set’s slightly smaller but equally appealing older cousin, the 1974-75 Calbee set. I’ll devote a more elaborate post to it at a later date, but I thought I’d do a post about card #754 from it which I picked up a few days ago.

It features a scene from the opening day game between the Giants and Whales played on April 5, 1975. What I love about the card is that the pitcher and catcher are both Elementary School kids. According to the card back, the two kids were chosen to throw out the first pitch. This is pretty common at games, but rare to see on a regular baseball card.

What I find really intriguing s the question of who those kids are and if they ever knew that they appeared on a baseball card. The card itself doesn’t name them or their school and I don’t know if anyone would have told them. The Calbee photographer might have just been snapping photos all day and weeks later some guy at Calbee might have just grabbed this one to make a card out of, not knowing who the kids were.

Or maybe they were told right away that they would be on a card, who knows? 

If its the former though….man, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than being a ten year old who got to be on a baseball card. To have done that and never known about it is  just…..hard to get your head around.

Those kids must be about 60 years old now, I’m deeply curious about who they are and whether they know that half a century ago they made it onto a baseball card.

Stuff on Cards: Sadaharu Oh Giving Flowers

 

October 14, 1974 was the last day that Shigeo Nagashima played a baseball game. The Calbee set that year produced a few cards in the Oh/Nagashima (ON) series which commemorated the occasion since it also marked the end of  Sadahauru Oh and Nagashima appearing in the same lineup. The end on an era.

Card 426 in the set is one of the more interesting ones. It shows Oh presenting flowers to Nagashima at the end of the game (the Dragons Yasunori Oshima is on the right, having also given Nagashima some flowers) Its a kind of neat picture, with all those 70s photographers in the background.

The back of the card says;

“At last the time for Mister to put down his bat. Everyone knew that this day would come, but hoped that it would last another year or two. At the end of the game on October 14, 1974 at Korakuen, Oh presented him with flowers on behalf of the Giants, Oshima on behalf of the Dragons.”