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.

Crazy Rare Stuff and the Guy who Almost Broke up Gehrig's Streak (I think)

The above is card from the 1930 Big Six University menko set (JCM 144 in Engel).  It features Rikkyo University pitcher Takeshi Tsuji, a guy nobody has ever heard of but maybe should have, for reasons I'll lay out below.

Before I do, its worth mentioning a bit about Japanese baseball history here.  This card was made prior to the establishment of the first professional baseball league in Japan (the predecessor to today's NPB) in 1936.  Prior to that the Big Six University League (featuring Rikkyo, Waseda, Keio, Hosei, Todai and Meiji) was the highest level of organized baseball in Japan.  So the few baseball cards issued before the War usually feature Big 6 players.

I did a bit of online research about Tsuji, he graduated from Rikkyo in 1932 and would later manage the team in the 1950s.  I don't think he ever played in NPB.  But he seems to have a really huge claim to fame that I am a bit reluctant to state as the god's honest truth since I've only found one source saying this, but I'll put it out there anyway (with that caveat noted).

His claim to fame is that he is the guy who almost ended Lou Gehrig's consecutive games played streak!

In 1931 an American team did one of their barnstorming tours of Japan.  This tour is less well known than the famous 1934 tour, but did feature some big names, including Gehrig.  The American team played apanese teams from the Big 6 league and absolutely demolished them, winning all 17 games.

During one game in the tour (see this contemporary news account) Gehrig was hit by a pitch on the hand.  He was rushed to hospital and given treatment, but when he returned to the US in December his hand was still swollen and an X-ray revealed that it "wasn't by any means well."

In Gehrig's own words: "Two of those Jap(anese) pitchers were big fellows with a lot on the ball and American baseball methods.  I came up with the bases full and one of them dusted me off.  They play on skin diamonds and the ball is always roughed up. It didn't break anything but it was a bad bruise I guess."

By the time spring training came around, his hand had healed and so the incident didn't mess with his consecutive games streak and the panic died away.  Looking at English accounts I haven't been able to find anyone identifying the pitcher that plonked Gehrig, but according to this article (in Japanese) the culrpit was... Rikkyo pitcher Takeshi Tsuji!  The guy on my card!

I want to try to do a bit more research on this since its just the one source saying that, but its a pretty neat historical footnote to have dug up (and I don't have anything suggesting it isn't accurate)!

This card is crazy rare I should add.  Engel lists the set as R5, which means fewer than 5 copies of each card are known to exist.  And I got one! Holy crap, as I mentioned in an earlier post owning a card from a set this old with so few surviving copies does make you feel some pressure to not let anything happen to it!

This is what the back looks like.  The purple stamp is the kanji for the number 7, I'm not sure what that is but it isn't uncommon for old menko to have stamps like that on the back which usually meant they were redeemable for some sort of prize.  Given how rare these are mine might be the only surviving copy of this card with a 7 on the back, which is neat.

I can also point out a small error in Engel's description of this set.  He notes he isn't sure if these should be considered menko since they lack some of the indicia of menko, like paper/rock/scissors symbols.  But if you look at the back, this clearly does have a paper/rock scissors symbol on it, the hand making the "rock" sign just below the bats!