Card about a guy's hair and also a guy is looking at the hair guy's butt and the hair guy is kind of floating and its a weird card and you need to buy this card

You want my advice?  You need this card in your collection.

This is a 1975 Calbee card of Takenori Emoto, ace pitcher for the Nankai Hawks.

The card isn't so much about Emoto as it is about his hair.  The title on the back of the card says "With adequate resolve, he cuts his long hair!"

Emoto is a man who likes his hair.  And can you blame him?

But it almost cost him his career in 1975.  Japanese baseball teams have pretty strict rules on haircuts.  These days a lot of NPB teams have relaxed them, but on high school or college teams its like being in the military: everyone gets a buzz cut.

So back in the 1970s Katsuya Nomura was managing the Hawks and banned long hair.  Emoto wasn't about to let go of his splendid hair and rebelled (nobody else on the team joined him).  I did some looking around and found this archival footage of Emoto giving a press conference to explain the reasons for his rebellion.

The long and the short of it is that Nomura threatened to fine him 500,000 Yen, a massive sum back then, and Emoto backed down and got a hair cut.  The scandal that it caused rocked the nation (well not really but it made the news) and elicited a lot of commentary.  This baseball card is devoted to that incident.

The text on the back says:

"With Adequate Resolve, He Cuts His Long Hair!

Nankai's ace pitcher Emoto.  His long hair became the subject of much discussion and attention even as he was breaking records.  He announced that he would cut this long hair into a new short cut and devote himself completely to baseball, making his manager and team mates say "Ah".  He hussles in the middle of training camp in Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture."

Inspiring stuff.  I guess. The record it (probably) refers to is perhaps a backhanded compliment, he set the NPB record for balks in 1973.

I like the fact that this card once again demonstrates how ahead of their time these Calbee sets from the 1970s were.  Remember in 1991 when George Steinbrenner and Don Mattingly got into that big public argument over Mattingly's hair?

And then do you remember how Topps, Donruss, Fleer and Upper Deck all made cards about that in their 1992 sets?

Me neither.  Because they didn't.  Because American baseball cards kind of suck in that regard.  Actually Japanese cards kind of suck in that regard today too, no way they would make a card about a similar hair scandal today.  But back in the 70s it was anything goes!  The most glorious card sets ever made.

Also I like this card because there is a guy on it who seems to be totally checking out Emoto's butt, which is also  not something you often see on a baseball card:

Also, if you look at the card photo you have to wonder what is Emoto doing exactly?  He seems to be levitating, with a crowd of people surrounding him.  He is in a baseball pose, but he is standing in front of a hill and I don't think he is on a pitching mound since it is too high relative to the guy looking at his butt.

Anyway, this card has a lot going on in it, all of it fascinating.  Even though Emoto's hair didn't cost him his career, his mouth eventually did.  In 1981 after getting yanked early from a game he publicly suggested that his manager was stupid.  The blowback he received from that (Rule #1 in Japan: Never insult your boss.  Rule #2: no matter how awful something tastes, always say its Oishii even as you are gagging on it) caused his forced retirement shortly thereafter.

Stuff I found at my parent's house 1: The oldest card in my collection.

I just got back from a 3 week trip to Canada (hence the lack of recent posts) to visit family.  It was a great time, its been almost 3 years since my last visit which is way too long.

As always, while at my parent's place I got the chance to rummage through my old stuff that they have in storage (a tradition that will end next year, I've been given a "we don't want to store your crap anymore" ultimatum which I'll be complying with).  This year I made a particular focus on salvaging some stuff from my old baseball card collection that I amassed in the late 80s/ early 90s.  I already thinned it out a few years back by dumping a few monster boxes full of 1989 Donruss commons and the like, but still found a lot, some of which I brought back to Japan with me for the purposes of doing blog posts about them.

I decided to kick off the "stuff I found at my parent's house" series with this 1987 Topps Don Mattingly that would probably get a PSA grade of about negative 3 if they went that far down.  Despite it having no collector value, its one of the most important cards in my collection - its the "oldest" card in my collection in the sense that it was one of the first cards I ever got.

In 1987 I was a 10 year old living in Hutchenhausen West Germany and attending an American school on Ramstein Air Force base nearby.  All the boys in my grade were super into baseball cards that year but I didn't have any and couldn't get any (not a huge hobby in Germany back then...or today I guess).  So I had to acquire them from other kids on the playground who had brought their collections over from the US (being Canadian I didn't collect baseball cards before entering the American system so I didn't have one to bring over with me).  I did this either through bartering other things of value, or outright buying them from other kids by skimping on lunch and using the spare change I saved.  I don't remember which card was the first I ever got, but this 1987 Mattingly was one of them, and along with a 1987 Fleer Dwight Gooden (now lost) it was the centerpiece of my collection (which only had about 40 cards in it in its German peak).

Mattingly was my favorite player and I carried this one with me every day to school that year, which is how it came to have so many creases in it.  This was a bit irrational since at the time I had never even seen him play (we couldn't watch games over there), but everyone else liked him and he appeared in an issue of Boy's Life that I had, so he was my favorite.

So whenever I see this card it reminds me of the playground at Ramstein Elementary School in 1987, which was a pretty fun place to be a kid.

Anyone else fish anything out of their parents' place which brought back memories?

OMFG Don Mattingly is here! And I can't see him!

Don Mattingly was my favorite player when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s.  This is an understatement.  He was like a god to me.  My walls were covered with Mattingly posters and cards, my whole room circa 1989 was like a shrine to the man.  It was infectious.  I even became a devoted Magnum P.I. fan because Tom Selleck had a very Mattingly-like moustache.  That's how much I liked Mattingly.

But I never got to see him play live.  I watched Yankees games on TV all the time (even though as a Canadian my favorite team since I was 4 years old was the Expos) but that was as close as I got.

The year he retired (1995) was also the year that I graduated from High School and by then I wasn't into baseball cards anymore and, though I still followed the game and Mattingly, he had been reduced to something approaching mortal in my pantheon (largely replaced by a spiritual void that most former Mattingly fans carry to this day).  

23 years later I'm on the other side of the Earth in a city, Nagoya, that nobody in their right mind ever comes to and I realize while reading the news about the 2018 MLB All Star tour of Japan something that blows me away:  The great one is COMING TO NAGOYA TOMORROW!

I hadn't really been paying much attention to the tour, but Mattingly is the manager of the team and tomorrow they are playing at the Nagoya Dome.  The Dome is just a couple of kilometres from where I am sitting right now as I type this.  I pass near it on my way to and from work everyday. Tomorrow, my former idol is going to be in that really ugly building that I mostly ignore as I ride past it.

My brain isn't really capable of processing this information right now.  I can't go to the game - no tickets and no time (got a baby at home and ton of work to do....) and I just feel like I'm missing something that was meant to happen.  I mean, how often are Don Mattingly and I going to be in Nagoya at the same time together?  Like except for the next couple of days, never.  Its weird.  I'm a grown up adult but the fact that this guy I thought was a god 30 years ago is going to be in the same city as I am has me thinking like an 11 year old again.  I mean:  Holy crap, Don Mattingly is going to be breathing the same polluted Nagoya air that I am for the next two days!  I can't go see him, but I'll take that any day!

Nobody else in the world could actually get me excited about simply being in the same city at the same time as I am but Mattingly.  And really I don't know anything about the guy except that he was a really good first basemen for about 6 years, and he was in a particularly good episode of the Simpsons.  OK, even that isn't true.  I have retained a TON of Don Mattingly trivia in my stupid head that I learned as a kid (like he used to own a restaurant called "Mattingly's 23"), but none of it really tells me anything of substance about what kind of person he is.  But who says you have to be rational about your favorite player when you were a kid? It is f'in Don Mattingly I am talking about!

Sorry, this post is a rambling mess.  I can't think straight. Don Mattingly is here!!!  Probably some other guys too but who cares about them?  DON MATTINGLY IS HERE IN NAGOYA!  Whoa!!