2021 Calbee Series 1 is here.

 

Series 1 of the 2021 Calbee set is out in stores this week.  It wouldn't feel like the start of spring without them.

This year there is exciting news about the new Calbee set.

Ha!  Just kidding, its the exact same schlock they've been putting out every year for decades without anything but minor cosmetic changes here and there.  Which I admire them for.

This bag containing two cards and a bunch of chips that I don't like set me back 88 Yen (like 80 cents US or so).  Lets see what I got.

Lions second baseman  Shuuta Tonosaki's regular card and an MVP card of Hawks slugger Yuki Yanagita from the Title Holder subset (which I had to glean from Calbee's website since the card itself doesn't actually say it is from a subset called "Title Holder").   Not bad I guess. 

The cards are pretty standard in design.  They went with Roman letters for the player names on the front of the regular cards instead of kanji, which is about the only thing they seem to vary much from year to year anymore.  Backs of the cards are about the same as usual too.

Judging from the photos on the two cards I got, I predict that sometime in the next month or so I'll buy the whole regular set off one of the case breakers on Yahoo Auctions solely for the purpose of writing a post complaining about the mundane photography here.  Its become an annual tradition for me.

On a side note, I've been posting a bit less than usual this month, work has been extremely busy so has been keeping me away from it, a situation that will likely last into April but I'll try to do a post whenever I can squeeze in a bit of time.  

The REAL Hall of Fame Collection Bottleneck

 

A few days ago I wrote a post about how certain hall of famers, particularly those with exclusively pre-war careers, have very few cards of them and thus present a major obstacle to anyone trying to put together a collection of career contemporary cards of Japanese Hall of Famers.

Excluding Eiji Sawamura (who has no known cards) probably the most difficult player to get is Tokichiro Ishii.  Ishii was a star hitter for Waseda University in the 1940s and was also later a manager of the team.  He was elected into the Hall of Fame in 1995 and is notable as only the second player to enter the hall without any professional baseball experience ( the first was former Meiji University star Kichiro Shimaoka in 1991).

Because he never played professionally, Ishii doesn't appear in any of the professional player card sets of the late 1940s.  University stars featured prominently in the menko sets of the 1929-1931 time period (which pre-dated the establishment of a professional league), but he was too young to appear in any of those either.

There is exactly ONE set of cards which he does feature in, which is the 1948 Big Six University set (JRM 44).  The above is his card in that set, the only card of him ever made.

Unfortunately for Hall of Fame collectors, its a rare one - Engel lists it as R4, meaning that fewer than 10 copies are known to exist.  One hasn't appeared in a Prestige Collectibles auction in over a decade!

So while I'm not actively pursuing a Hall of Fame collection, I'm glad to have this one in my collection!

The Only Copy of the Only Card of This Guy Ever Made

 

In my previous post I talked a bit about this pre war menko I recently acquired. I identified it as  Kenjiro Matsuki on the grounds that the card says "Matsuki" and he was the only player with that name which I could find from that era, and the the fact that he wore glasses and looks quite a bit like the player depicted in the image.

What confused me though was that the card also clearly says Waseda University (the kanji on the right hand side of it), which Kenjiro Matsuki never attended (he went to rival Meiji University). I chalked this up as an error.

Then Prestige Collectibles contacted me on Twitter and pointed out that there was actually another guy with the same last name, Yoshio Matsuki, who was recorded on Waseda's roster from the same period (these rosters aren't available online, he literally had to look that up in an old paper copy - old school research is the best!).  So in all likelihood the card was not an error, but simply featured a different Matsuki!

I appreciated the work that went into tracking him down since  unlike Kenjiro Matsuki (who went on to play professionally and ended up in the Hall of Fame) Yoshio Matsuki is a pretty anonymous guy.  He never played professionally and Google searches for anything about him in Japanese turn up zero information.  Other than the fact that he was a pitcher for Waseda University between 1929 and 1933 we don't know anything about this guy.  I can't even find out if he wore glasses!

In some ways this makes this card even neater - its got to be the only card of this guy in existence.  I mean that literally, there is just one known copy of this one card of this guy who we basically know nothing about!  This is not something you can say about many cards!

Also I like the fact that I have a 100% global monopoly on Yoshio Matsuki cards, so anyone trying to collect this guy has no choice but to go through me.  I'm both literally and figuratively holding all the cards in any negotiation with such person were they to ever exist.  Ha.  Makes me feel very special :)

The Pre War Hall of Famer Card Bottleneck

 

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about my big find of a menko from the 1931 Major League All Star tour of Japan.  In this post I'd like to introduce in more detail the other two big cards which I got in the same lot, which are pretty major finds on their own.

Both of these cards feature important pre-war Hall of Famers - Minoru Yamashita on the left, Kenjiro Matsuki on the right.  Nick, who has a really excellent player collection of Japanese Hall of Famers that he has detailed his collecting of here, commented on my earlier post  that the toughest hurdle for anyone trying to pursue such a collection is guys whose playing careers were entirely before the War.  For guys who started their careers before the war, then resumed them in the late 1940s (like Tadashi Wakabayashi) its not too hard to find cards of them since they appeared in menko sets from the late 40s and early 50s which, while not plentiful, can still be found.

With the exclusively pre-war guys though it becomes a big headache.  Famously Eiji Sawamura, Japan's most beloved pitcher from the early days and for whom NPB's version of the Cy Young Award is named, has no known surviving cards from his playing days (which were entirely before the War in which he died).  But even for the guys who have known cards they only exist in sets where maybe 4 or 5 copies of each card survive.  

None of the sets from the 1930s survive in any quantity today, so there is a huge bottleneck in terms of supply of cards of players who only played in that decade (or before).  I'm not sure why that is.  One explanation is that there simply weren't too many of them produced to begin with.  Cardboard menko were still relatively new back then and maybe they just didn't catch on much with kids.  Notable support for this explanation is to be found in the fact that there aren't any known sets from the mid to late 1930s, all of the known ones seem to have been made between 1929 and 1931, then there is a huge gap until after the War.  If the kids didn't buy them, then they wouldn't have made too many and given up on the idea.  

A second possibility is that lots of them were made, but most were destroyed during the firebombing of Japanese cities.  This explanation suffers from a couple of problems though.  One is that Japan wasn't anywhere near as urbanized in the 1940s as it is now, so most of the population back then lived in the countryside or smaller towns that weren't bombed.  So if the cards were roughly evenly distributed around the country according to where people lived, then only a fraction of them would have been destroyed in the bombing, unless they had only been distributed in major cities (which is possible, but not certain).  Another problem is that this explanation doesn't explain why only cards from prior to 1931 survive.

A third possibility is that a lot of cards were made, and few were destroyed by the bombing, but most were recycled.  During the War the government organized major recycling drives to suck up all the resources they could for the war effort.  This mainly focused on metal, but also included paper and cardboard.  Perhaps they were all turned into carboard boxes or something.  A problem with this explanation though is that lots of other things made of cardboard and paper (like books and postcards) survive from that era, so the recycling programs don't seem to have gobbled up too much (and menko are so small they likely wouldn' t have bothered). 

A fourth possibility is the American one - everyone's mom just threw them out!

A fifth possibility is that the government may have actively suppressed baseball menko specifically.  The main piece of evidence supporting this is the fact that the gap that exists in the baseball card archeological record between 1931 and 1947  is not replicated in the Sumo card record. This can be seen from the many examples of sumo menko sets from that time frame that SumoMenkoMan has recorded.  The gap in baseball menko notably coincides with the rise of nationalist fascism in Japan and the deterioration of its relations with the US which led to the war.  Being associated with America, the government may have discouraged the production of baseball menko while encouraging (or at least allowing) the production of sumo menko since that was a Japanese invention.  

A sixth possibility is that all five of these are correct to varying degrees and each of these factors contributed to the paucity of pre war cards.  I think this is the most likely explanation.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because one of these guys, Yamashita (above), had an exclusively pre-war playing career.  He was a star with Keio University in the Big Six league, where he led the league in batting average in 1929.  This card features him during his Keio days so probably dates to around then.  He played against both of the Major League All Star teams in 1931 and 1934, then joined the newly formed Hankyu team for the 1936 season.  He hit the first home run in Japanese professional baseball history that cleared an outfield fence in his first year.  He played with Hankyu until 1940, then played a single season with Nagoya in 1942, his last as a player.  He worked as an umpire after the War and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1987.  

Yamashita only appears in a handful of extremely rare pre-war sets (JRM 43, JCM 46, JCM 60, JCM 144) all of which have a rarity factor of R4 or R5 (meaning fewer than 5 or 10 copies of each are known to exist) so he is one of the hardest hall of famers to land a card of.  

The other card features Kenjiro Matsuki, who was also a university star who went on to play  in the newly formed pro league from 1936.  His professional playing career with the Tigers was almost entirely pre-war, but he did very briefly appear in the 1950 and 1951 seasons (11 games combined between the two).  He doesn't appear in most of the post-war sets except one: the 1950 JCM 21 Babe Ruth set, which is a lucky break for Japanese Hall of Fame collectors.  This set is designed like playing cards and gets its name from the fact that it has a Babe Ruth card in it.  Its actually one of the easier to find sets from that era, with a sizeable number still existing as uncut sheets, so most people who want a Matsuki card can get one from that set without too much difficulty.  He also appears in some (though not all) of the same extremely rare pre-war sets that Yamashita does.  

This card of mine is really interesting as its actually an error card.  The kanji on the left definitely say "Matsuki" (松木）and the player image is definitely him (he was one of the first Japanese players to strike that signature look with glasses).  But the kanji on the right  (早大)　denotes Waseda University.  Likewise the lettering on his uniform is a bit hard to read but seems consistent with "Waseda".  

The problem is though that Matsuki never played for Waseda.  He went to school at rival Meiji University and played for them in the Big Six league.  

So that is kind of neat!

Given the similarity in art style, size, players depicted and inks used I would say these are both from the same set, which is not yet catalogued and thus these seem to be the only known copies of each. They are a pretty big addition to my collection even though I'm not actively working on a Hall of Famer player collection.  

The Golden Days of Japanese PItching

 
I picked up another pile of late 50s menko the other day.  I got a little over 50 cards including the five above, which each feature one of Japan's greatest all time pitchers.  It got me thinking that Japan's amazing pitchers from that era tend to get a bit overlooked relative to the dominant hitters like Sadaharu Oh who are more well known.  

In the same way that guys in MLB in the 19th or early 20th century put up insane stats (511 career wins, 40 plus wins per season, etc), NPB had some insanely dominant pitchers back in the 50s and 60s.  Back then the best pitchers basically threw until their arms fell off (as they sort of still do, though to a much lesser extent).  This meant that a lot of them suffered career ending injuries early on, but also that for the few who survived they amassed some incredible career and single season records.

Check these guys out:

Masaaki Koyama won 323 games (3rd all time) in a career lasting from 1953 to 1973.  His career ERA was 2.45. He won 20 or more games 7 times, and won 30 in 1964.  In addition to being 3rd on the career wins list he is also 3rd on the career strike outs list.

Masaichi Kaneda won 400 games in his career, the most of any NPB pitcher.  He compiled an amazing 14 consecutive seasons with at least 20 wins, including a 31 win campaign in 1958.  His career ERA was 2.34. He is also the NPB career strikeout leader with 4,490.

Minoru Murayama compiled a 222-147 career record with a miniscule 2.09 career ERA in a relatively short career between 1959 and 1972.  He won three Sawamura awards, including in his 1959 rookie season when he led the league with a remarkable 1.19 ERA

Shigeru Sugishita was a remarkably dominant pitcher for a 6 year stretch, kind of like Sandy Koufax in the US.  From 1950 to 1955 inclusive he never won fewer than 23 games, and broke the 30 win mark twice in that stretch.  He won 215 games in his career and finished with a 2,23 ERA.  

Tetsuya Yoneda doesn't get anywhere near enough attention.  He won 350 games in his career between 1956 and 1977, almost entirely with Hankyu.  He had eight seasons with more than 20 wins.  He never won 30 games, but came close in 1968 with 29.  Like Kaneda (and in fact, most of these guys) he played for some weak teams so he also ended up accumulating some bad stats - 285 career losses (2nd to Kaneda), and due to his lengthy career he also holds the record for most hits and runs surrendered.  And while his 2.91 career ERA would be insanely impressive in MLB, its noticeably higher than the other four guys in this post.  

I don't think any contemporary pitchers will approach what these guys did in NPB, partly because of the emergence of 5 man rotations and relief pitchers, but  more so because the best pitchers in Japan get skimmed off the top and sent to MLB for a few of their prime years, which dents their ability to come close to these guys.  Hideo Nomo, Yu Darvish, Kenta Maeda, Masahiro Tanaka and Daisuke Matsuzaka (to name a few) might have put up similar career numbers (albeit with higher career ERAs) had they stayed, but until NPB finds some way of retaining its top players rather than selling them off guys like that aren't going to stick around long enough.  

Cards you can Wear

 

I think these are two of my favorite cards in my collection. They are from the 1949 set catalogued as JDM 2 in Engel and feature Hall of Famers Kaoru Betto and Hiroshi Oshita. 

They are die cut mask cards which kids could wear on their faces.  The eyes are perforated and can be punched out, and there are little notches on each side near the ears where you can attach a string.  These are a bit easier to see from the back:

The size of the cards are a bit bigger than standard so while these would be very small on me, they might fit OK onto the head of a five year old.

Mask cards were a thing for a brief time in Japanese baseball card history, 5 different sets including this one (which contains 8 cards total) are known and all were issued either in 1949 or 1950.  After that they seem to have fallen out of favor.

The artwork on the cards from this set in particular is quite impressive, the images are much more realistic than what you find on any menko cards issued from that era.  

Pretty much all of the mask cards are quite rare.  This set is listed as R3 (fewer than 100 copies known) while some of the others are harder still.  

This might relate either to them being less popular among kids, or them being very popular among kids but also very fragile for a mask (the thickness of these is about the same as a regular baseball card).  I can't imagine these would have lasted long if a kid actually put them on.

If you think about it though baseball players are kind of an odd choice for a mask.  Watching my own kids they love to dress up in costumes and pretend to be various characters (characters from the Super Mario universe are their favorites these days).  When they do so they like to engage in play that involves doing whatever those characters do.  

My kids aren't really into baseball, but if they were I couldn't see them putting player masks to the same use.  If they want to pretend to be a baseball player, they'll do that by playing baseball.  If they are playing baseball, a mask like this is going to be a major hindrance.  The two activities are mutually incompatible and thus the kids would have little use for these.  

So while not great as a toy from a kid's perspective, they are SUPER AWESOME AMAZING from the perspective of a baseball card collector 70 years after they were made.  

Flying Bats

 
I have a few cards from the 1950 Kagome "Flying Bats" set (JCM 5).  It is so called thanks to the artwork on the card backs:

I'm not really sure where the idea to put wings on the bats came from, but for Japan its not too odd a thing to find.

The cards are kind of neat to look at.  They feature bright colors yet have an overall dark look thanks to the thick outlines used by the artist.  They also have some odd spellings for player names.  The guy named "ZA" for example is Atsuhi Aramaki. I have no idea why they call him Za.

This set is notable for featuring the rookie card of Masaichi Kaneda, probably Japan's all time greatest pitcher with 400 career wins.  I haven't been able to add that one to my collection yet though.  Its on the top of my want list though.  Unlike other big names like Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh, who had dozens of rookie cards, Kaneda didn't appear on many in his rookie season so this is probably his "key" card out there.  

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.

Baseball Card Prices are Getting Crazy in Japan Too

 

I've been reading a lot about how baseball card prices in the US have exploded over the past year on various forums, blogs and social media.  It was kind of weird, as the economy crumbled and millions lost their jobs, the price of cards went up.  

The same thing has happened here in Japan as I've kind of alluded to in a few posts.  Prices just ain't what they used to be.  One auction I was following which ended yesterday really drove that point home.  It was for the above lot of 151 menko from the 1950s and early 60s.  

This was a pretty amazing lot actually.  Most of the cards weren't too hard to find, but the highlight was a big lot of 1962 Tachibana Seika (JF 31) cards, these ones here:

This is an extremely rare set, Engel lists it as R4, meaning that fewer than 10 copies of each card are known to exist.  I don't have any cards from it in my collection, they almost never turn up in auctions, let alone a lot this size.

There are three key cards in this set:  Sadaharu Oh, Larry Doby and Don Newcombe.  The Doby and Newcombe cards are of particular interest since they played only briefly in Japan and only appear on a couple of cards, and this set basically has their "key" Japanese cards.  The Newcombe in particular Engel says is even rarer than the rest, giving it an R5 designation (fewer than 5 copies known).

This lot had not one, but two copies of that Newcombe.  See if you can spot it in the picture.  It also had doubles of the Oh card, but no Doby.

There was an absolute feeding frenzy that played out last night. On Yahoo Auctions there is no sniping, if someone enters a new high bid on something with less than 10 minutes left on the clock the system automatically adds 10 minutes to the auction.  Several bidders kept outbidding each other which had the cumulative effect of adding hours to the auction. I was up late watching, its almost like a spectator sport.  It was way out of my price range so I wasn't in the race.

They ended up putting in 173 bids and driving the price up to 341,000 Yen, or about 3400$ US (plus 210 Yen for shipping). 

This was probably a good deal given how valuable just the Newcombe cards alone are, if I had that kind of money I might have even been tempted to push it a bit higher.  Probably to Americans this price seems pretty modest given the gobsmacking insane prices high end stuff there are going for these days, but for Japanese vintage this is a big deal.  341,000 Yen I think is a lot more than what this would have gone for a couple of years ago and a good piece of evidence that the same trend going on in the US is going on here too, albeit not to the same degree.  

New Menko Discoveries

 

I added a couple of interesting new menko to my collection last week.  These are two cards from a previously unknown set featuring players from the Big Six University league in the late 1940s.  

On the left is Kouzou Goi, a pitcher for Rikkyo University.  He was a star in his university days, and followed that up with a brief four year pro career from 1950 to 1954 with the Kintetsu Pearls (a descendant of today's Buffaloes) in the Pacific League.  Interestingly he split his time as a pitcher and a third baseman, putting in significant time at both as an early version of today's Shohei Ohtani.  Unlike Ohtani though, Goi never really shined in pro ball, posting a lousy 17-31 career record on the mound and a .258 career batting average at the plate.  

The card on the right features Toshinobu Sueyoshi pitching for Waseda University.  Like Goi he was a university star who followed up with a short and not very impressive pro career, turning in three seasons with the Mainichi Orions (a descendant of today's Chiba Lotte Marines) from 1952 to 1954, posting an 8-12 career record (though he did make the All Star team in his first season).  As you can see from the picture, he threw side arm.  

Its actually quite refreshing to find old menko of guys like this who were basically "commons".  Since most of the menko sets from the late 40s/early 50s contained maybe 20 cards tops, their checklists tended to be made up of guys who were future Hall of Famers (or at least Hall of Very Gooders) and you almost never find cards of journeymen pitchers with losing career records.  These guys squeeked into one on the basis of their university days, which is pretty cool. 

It goes without saying that this set is rare, the copies I own of these two cards seem to be the only ones known.  So now we have a checklist of 2, I'm assuming there were more made.  Given the overlap of their university careers, the set would have to date from between 1947 and 1949.  

And as with most sets from this era, I love the artwork on them.

Uncut Sheet of 1963 Marusho

 

This is an uncut sheet of 16 cards from the 1963 Marusho Flag Back set (JRM 13c).  The complete set is 40 cards so this sheet has almost half of them.  It looks miscut in the above image but that is just because my scanner was slightly too small and cut the top and bottom edges off.

This set is one of the few vintage menko baseball sets that is easier to find in the United States than it is in Japan.  Back in the 1960s Americans Bud Ackerman and Mel Bailey imported a lot of Japanese cards to the US and this set was among them.  You can read about it more on Dave's excellent post about the history here.  

So in the US its quite a bit easier to find than other menko sets.  In Japan in contrast its not really noticeably easier or harder to find than most other sets from the same era.

This sheet never left Japan.  The ones that were imported to the US (by Buck Ackerman with this set) had numbers stamped on the backs.  This one doesn't have any numbers stamped on it which, along with the fact that I bought it in Japan, means it wasn't among those exported:

Another point of interest about the backs of this one is that it is printed in green ink.  According to Engel this set is most commonly found with brown ink backs, while green ink backs are rarer.  I'm a bit curious if all of the exported ones were brown ink backs, while the green ink backs like this were never exported, which might explain why they are rarer.

This sheet is missing the key card from this set - Sadaharu Oh - but it has two of the other big names.  Isao Harimoto, Japan's all time hits leader and all around amazing guy, is on the lower right card while Katsuya Nomura, #2 on NPB's career home run list is on the top right one.  

Piles of 1940s Menko are so awesome

 

I pulled the trigger on a big lot of old menko a few days ago.  I got insanely lucky actually.  An antique dealer in Shizuoka prefecture had happened across a hoard of about 1,000 vintage menko from the late 1940s.  Most of them were non-sports but about 1/3 were baseball.  He broke them up into four lots with a mix of about 280 menko in each and put them up for auction.  The baseball ones were scattered evenly across all four lots.

I put place holder bids in on all four of them.  The bidding went up quite high on three of them, once they went over 100$ I dropped out and they ended up going for prices between 160$ and 260$ per lot.

But the fourth one for some reason didn't get the same love and I ended up winning it for about 80$, which was crazy.  Looking at the baseball menko I couldn't figure out why the one I won went so cheaply since it had some amazing stuff in it which was comparable to the ones that went for double or triple the price. Possibly there were two bidders who were so focused on the other three, which ended at about the same time, that they forgot about the fourth lot.  

Anyway, their loss, my gain!

My lot had nearly 100 baseball menko from the late 1940s in it and let me tell you - sorting through a lot of 100 1940s baseball menko featuring a solid mix of hall of famers is a collecting joy like no other.

I think the highlight of the lot were cards from the 1949 Kagome Die Cut set (catalogued as JD4 in the Engel guide), pictured above.  This set is really beautiful - the artwork features realistic images of the players done in some extremely vibrant colors.  It has some of the biggest name stars of the era like Tetsuharu Kawakami, Noburo Aota, Hiroshi Oshita and Michihiro Nishizawa.    

The set has 16 cards and I found.....15 of them in the lot!  Everybody except for Kaoru Betto, whose card has shot up to the top of my menko want list as a result.

There are quite a few cards from other sets which I'll have to organize, though this was the only "near set" in the pile.

In addition to the hundred or so baseball menko, I now also own about 180 non sports menko from the same era, which I'll have to sort through and find some way of appreciating too.  It'll be nice winter / Covid induced downtime project!

Early Christmas Present to Me

 

I picked up the above lot of baseball menko off of Yahoo Auctions last week.  Its an early Christmas present for myself.  I haven't been posting much lately since work has been extremely busy, but thought I'd do at least one last post for 2020 before it finally comes to an end.

Most of these cards are from the 1947 JRM 22 set.  There are 16 cards in that set and this lot I bought contains 13 of them.  Adding those to the ones I already have, I now have that set completed!  Its the first hard to find 1940s menko set I've completed by hand so its a cool accomplishment (if I do say so myself).

One of the other three cards is this one, featuring Masumi Isegawa of the Kinsei Stars who had a long (1940 to 1957) if unspectacular career as a catcher for several teams.

The card is interesting because I think it is from an uncatalogued set and thus constitutes another new discovery.  I haven't seen any other sets with the number in blocks as it is on the left side of this card before, or with the team name written in Romaji in that style.  The Stars only went by the name "Kinsei" (which means "gold star") for two years, so this card was likely released in either 1947 or 1948.  

In case this does end up being my last post of the year, hope you all have a Merry Christmas and happy new year.  May 2021 be a better year than 2020!

Why so Glum?

 

I picked up this menko recently, it features Hall of Famers Shigeru Mizuhara and Kaoru Betto.  I don't know what set it is from, it might be an uncatalogued one (anyone out there know?)

What struck me about the card is just how glum and sad the artist made both players look.  They both seem to be frowning and have eyes that look like they are about to well up with tears.  

This seems odd to me.  This is not a photo, somebody deliberately drew them that way.  Why not put a smile on their faces?  Maybe the artist  was feeling a bit down and put a bit of himself into his work? Or maybe he was trying to give them a more stoic look and it just turned out looking sad and he didn't feel like doing it over again?

Anyway, has anybody out there ever done a card collection based on the emotions being displayed by the players depicted?  Happy faces, sad faces, bored faces, irritated faces - seems like there is a lot out there you could work with. 

New Menko Finds

 

I have a couple of recent menko pick ups which seem to be from an uncatalogued set (or sets).

The card on the left features Tigers star and HOFer Fumio Fujimura.  He is one of several Babe Ruth type players who was a star both on the mound and at the plate in his early career, then mainly at the plate later in his career.  As a pitcher he posted a career 34-11 record.  His best pitching season was in 1946 when he went 13-2 with a 2.44 ERA.  Four years later, in 1950, at the plate he set the single season hit record in Japan with 191 (in a 140 game season).  That record would last until 1994 when Ichiro Suzuki broke it.

The card on the right is Takehiko Bessho, another HOFer who I've written about before so won't repeat his biography.

I'm not sure if these cards belong to the same set or not.  The team names are written in katakana on both, which is unlike any set listed in Engel's catalogue.  The style of artwork is also similar, and the rock/paper/scissor symbol is the same.  But the player names are written in different styles as are the menko numbers, so these might be from different sets.  Bessho is pictured as a member of the Nankai Hawks who he played for between 1946 and 1948 so likely the set (or sets) dates to one of those years (Fujimura played his entire career for the Tigers so his card doesn't help with the date).

As you can see, neither of my cards is exactly what you would call high grade.  Anybody know how PSA treats massive vertical gouges across the entire length of a card that are so deep they nearly cut it in half?  I'm guessing they would ding me for that if I were to ever submit them. 

One of these cards is not like the others

 

There has been so little of note happening in the news over the past three days that I thought I'd distract you all with another blog post to help you deal with the unrelenting boredom of nothing of any interest or consequence whatsoever consuming everyone's attention day in and day out since Tuesday.  

So let me try to dazzle you out of your complete and utter state of boredom.  I have a little collection of cards from the 1947 set Engel catalogues as JRM 1a.  There are only 8 cards total in the set and I have 6, so I'm close to completing it, though mine are pretty low grade.  It contains several Hall of Famers from the early post war period like Tetsuharu Kawakami and Michio Nishizawa, both of which I have.

Interestingly though of the six cards I have featuring baseball players, one of them does not feature a baseball player. The card in the lower left is of Michitaro Mizushima, a very famous actor who, as far as I can tell, never played baseball (or at least never professionally).

I'm impressed with Engel's work in figuring out who that was, all he had to go on was the name "Mizushima" which is a fairly common one in Japan.  

During Mizushima's career, which began in 1925 and lasted into the 1990s (he passed away in 1999), he appeared in a lot of movies.  I've been trying to figure out where the image for this card came from but am drawing a blank.  He appeared in a few movies in the 1940s but none of them seem to have featured baseball (though on a lot there isn't much info available).  Later in his career he also appeared on TV, but in 1947 there weren't any TV shows to appear on.  

So it remains a bit of a mystery why he appears on this card in a baseball uniform.  

Sorry, that is all I got, and I may have oversold it by saying I would "dazzle" you, but I hope it has at least helped to distract you from the overwhelming boredom and tedium of nothing at all of interest being played out in agonizingly slow motion on every TV channel the world over for the past three days. 

Tatsunori Hara's first Calbee card is a Sadaharu Oh card.

 

I've been AWOL from the blog for the past few weeks.  October is kind of "hell month" for me at work so its been hard to squeeze time in for blogging.

Despite that, the flow of card purchases by me has continued more or less at its normal pace.  One card I picked up this month was the above, #354 from the 1981 Calbee set.  It is basically Sadaharu Oh's regular card.  His name is the one in pink lettering on the lower right of the photo, and the text on the back just gives some general biographical information about him, unconnected to the photo.

This card is really neat though.  From left to right you have Motoshi Fujita, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  Those three guys have three big things in common:

1) They were all star players for the Giants;

2) They all became managers of the Giants after their playing days (Hara is in fact their current manager)

3) They all ended up in the Hall of Fame.

I'm not sure but I think the photo was probably taken during the 1981 Japan Series, which the Giants won (Fujita was the manager, Oh was assistant manager that year and would take over as regular manager the following season).

A second, and more important, neat thing about it specifically relates to Tatsunori Hara, the guy on the right.  1981 was his first year in pro ball and he was THE hot rookie that year.  He was supposed to be the Giants' next Shigeo Nagashima or Sadaharu Oh. His playing career, which ended in 1995, didn't quite live up to that hype, though he did bang out 382 career home runs and was one of the better players in NPB throughout the 1980s.

The thing is though, Tatsunori Hara doesn't have a card of his own in the 1981 Calbee set.  His first "solo" appearance on a card came in the 1982 Calbee set, which is generally regarded as his rookie (he appears on a few cards in that set, my old Sports Card Magazine designates the first one, card #51, as his true "rookie card").  

His cameo appearance on my 1981 Calbee card though seems to be his first appearance in a Calbee set.  Which leads me to the question: what is this card?  I guess its not a "rookie card" since its not his card, its Sadaharu Oh's. But at the same time, Hara is pretty prominently featured on there so its a bit more than just a card of some other player where he coincidentally appears in the background or something, like Ryne Sandberg's cameo on Reggie Smith's 1983 Topps card:

Also, Sandberg of course had a card of his own in the 1983 Topps set, so the question of whether his appearance on the Smith meant something special didn't really come up.  

So this card falls into a weird limbo in terms of what the hobby might designate it as since I don't think there is a precedent for this.  Its definitely not a true rookie card, but also definitely not nothing either.  "Pre" rookie card?  No, thats not right.  I can't really decide what to call it.  Anyway, its neat.

Calbee's Awesome 1985 Art Contest for Kids

 

Here is a little pile of 1985 Calbees that I recently picked up.  I have about 200 cards from the 1985 Calbee set which puts me almost halfway to the 465 it has in total, but I'm not seriously chasing it since the vast majority of the remainder are from hyper rare series that are way out of my budget.  

One good thing about the 1985 set though is that there is a pretty big series in it, which also happens to be one of the easier (and thus more affordable) series, that has awesome artwork on the back.  

Calbee had a contest that year in which kids would send in pictures they had drawn of baseball players.  If they won, their picture (along with their name and home prefecture) would go on the back of the player's card.  These are the backs of the 16 cards featured above:

I think there are about 100 cards in the set which have this artwork, these are just a few examples.  

Boomer Wells is looking cheerful:

Kiyoshi Nakahata looks like he is trapped in a Picasso:

Jose Cruz looks like he is grinding his teeth:

Akinobu Mayumi is daringly rendered in profile without any features:

The late Nobuyuki Kagawa's legendary chubbiness is very well captured:

An interesting thing is that at the bottom of all these cards there is a comment from someone called "Yoshimura Sensei" about the artwork.  On Kagawa's for example he/she says "Kagawa is cute. This is a very pleasant picture."

I'm kind of curious about who Yoshimura Sensei was - probably an art teacher of some sort.

These cards are another aspect I like about older Japanese baseball cards in general -  I don't remember Topps or any other US maker having contests like this in 1985.  It must have been so thrilling for these kids to see their pictures on actual baseball cards.

Ron Woods: Who is this Guy?

 

I picked up card #71 from the monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set this week.  This is from the rare series that was only issued in the Tokai area and is thus a key addition to my set.  

This gives me 23 out of 36 cards in that series, more than halfway there!

The card depicts Ron Woods. He is kind of an intriguing player about which we know very little.  He played parts of several MLB seasons between 1969 and 1974, getting the most playing time with the Montreal Expos between 1971 and 1974.  He then went to Japan for two years with the Chunichi Dragons in 1975 and 1976.

Beyond the numbers: silence.  Nobody has bothered to write a biography of him on his Wikipedia page, or on his Baseball Reference Page, or on his SABR page.  

This is frustrating because there are two intriguing facts about the Ron Woods story that I've been able to glean just from 1) this card, and 2) Googling him, that suggest stories of human interest at work.

The first is from the back of this card.

Japanese baseball likes players who sacrifice everything for the game and their team.  A lot of these Calbee cards from the 70s have write ups on the back which extoll this virtue.  This card, titled "Big league Pride" tells us that Ron Woods is a player who forgets everything else in the world when playing.  To illustrate, it states that he recently got tragic news from his family back in America. While he made a short visit back to the US as a result, he was so serious about the game that (on getting the news) he considered waiting until the off season to go back.

So this tells us that Woods experienced a serious personal tragedy during his stay in Japan and faced a difficult decision about whether to go back home to deal with it or not.  This is a recurring theme that shows up in the stories of many American players here - Randy Bass was famously criticized for returning to the US during the season to be with his son who was having major surgery.  So Woods had one of those too, but we don't know anything about it.

The other interesting thing I learned from a Google search is that in September of 1975, probably shortly after this card was made, Woods was among four members of the Dragons who were injured in Hiroshima after being attacked by fans.  This was mentioned in a very brief article in the New York Times at the time, but I haven't been able to find any more info on what happened.

So anyway, it seems like Woods' two year stay in Japan featured some drama, yet we know very little about him.  

Some more 1997 Calbees

 

I picked up 15 singles from the 1997 Calbee set this week.  Nobody particularly exciting, the whole  lot only cost me about 4$, but they were all cards I needed for the set.  

These get me to 202 out of 237, just 35 to go.  Unfortunately 19 of those are from the rare high number series, but I'm very close to finished with the low numbers.  

Thus far my Calbee collection has been mainly focused on cards from the 70s and 80s, as well as the obligatory purchase of contemporary sets as they come out each year. This has left the 90s as the decade with the biggest holes in my collection.  I am pretty close to finished with the 1999 Calbee set, which is by far the easiest to complete.  I also have a decent start on the 1998 set, which is also fairly easy to do.  And the 1995 Choco Snack set I  was lucky enough to pick up as a set a year and a half ago ( in retrospect that was an incredible deal, prices on those have gone up a lot since then and there is no way I could replicate that find today).

But most of the other sets from that decade (particularly the 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996 sets) I only have a smattering of cards each for.  Except for 1991 those are really hard sets to find cards for.  The  1994 and 1996 sets in particular have fewer than 100 listings each on Yahoo Auctions right now, indicating how rare they are.  Once I've finished the 1997s I might move on to one of them, but for now those years don't really exist in "set" form in my collection yet.