I"m not sure which, but I like cards like this with oddball photos. This one gets bonus points for having a kei truck in the shot too, something you rarely see on baseball cards these days. Also there are very few cards which feature pictures of one player sitting on another.
This is cared #135 from the 1977 Calbee set (or I should say one of the 1977 Calbee sets, the one with the star borders on the back that makes it easy to confuse with the 1975-76-77 set). I picked it up the other day mainly on the strength of the photo.
Yamaguchi had a short-but-decent career mostly as a relief pitcher between 1975 and 1982 (50-43, 3.18 career ERA) and won a few honors in that time (ROY, Nippon Series MVP, All Star).
I'm curious who the guy he is sitting on is.
The first thing that popped into my head was "reverse" CPR.
ReplyDeleteIt does look like that doesn't it?
DeleteGlad to see you're back Sean! I have no idea what's going on in that photo, but I also like the fact that there's a random fan in the background with a camera of his own. Somewhere there's probably a picture of a Calbee photographer taking a picture of Yamaguchi sitting on some guy.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I was busy with other hobbies over the off season! I do wonder about that fan's photograph of a Calbee photographer taking this photo.....
DeleteSo it looks like the uniform number of the guy on the ground starts with "1" and the second digit is probably either "0", "8" or "9". There was no 19 on the 1977 Braves but 10 was Hideji Kato and 18 was Mitsuo Inaba. Since Inaba was also a pitcher, I'd guess that it's him.
ReplyDeleteI looked in Engel to see if he listed both players and he doesn't even have Yamaguchi! He lists this card as "Masayuki Yamamoto" and there's never been an NPB player with that name. Someone probably put it in the list wrong 30+ years ago and the mistake's never been noticed before.