Japan's Greatest Pitcher's only Calbee Card isn't even his own Card

 

I picked up this card on Yahoo Auctions this week.  Its Shigeo Nagashima's manager card from one of the 1977 Calbee sets.

Nagashima appears on a ton of 1970s Calbee cards as a manager.  The other guy, who is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the card front or back, is what makes this card way more interesting.  

That is Masaichi Kaneda, arguably Japan's all time greatest pitcher who racked up 400 career wins.

Kaneda retired as a pitcher after the 1969 season, which was four years before Calbee started making baseball cards and thus he doesn't have any Calbee cards from his playing days.  He started managing the Orions in 1973, the same year as Calbee's debut, but owing to the legendary Calbee/Lotte feud Calbee didn't produce any cards of Orions players until 1985.

Thus Calbee never produced a card featuring Japan's all time wins leader.  Except this one.  Its only a cameo appearance, but its a prominent enough one to I think describe this as a Nagashima/Kaneda card rather than just a Nagashima card.  

Dave picked up a copy of this card a couple of years ago on his trip to Japan and it intrigued me, so I am glad to add it to the collection.  In addition to Kaneda, this is one of the very few cards to feature anything related to the Lotte Orions in a Calbee set from the 70s so its interesting on that account to.

This 1977 set is kind of the "main" one from that year, featuring 216 cards.  With this one I have about 60 of them, so I'm mulling over whether to add this to my list of sets to start actively trying to complete.  Its a nice one.  

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.  

Oh My! (Or should I say "My Oh"?)

 This is my 1963 Marusho Flag Back (JCM 13C) card of Sadaharu Oh.  Its a beauty.

This set is one of the ones that were imported to the US in the 1960s by Bud Ackerman, an American sailor stationed in Japan.  I highly recommend Dave's excellent post on the history behind that, its a really interesting read.

Ackerman and his young son, after buying a lot of 10,200 of these cards, went to work stamping numbers on the back to help American collectors with player identification. So a lot of the ones floating around in the American market today (though not all) have a number from 1 to 40 stamped on the card back.  Oh was given number 30 by Ackerman's son.

In Japan on the other hand its way more common to find them without a stamped number and my Oh doesn't have one.

I have a few cards from this set and none of them have the stamped number.  I was curious if maybe some of Ackerman's cards had found their way into the Japanese market, either back in the 60s or maybe more recently, but my own collection shows no signs of this.  My Masaichi Kaneda also lacks a number.

I guess this set must be one of the easier menko issues to find in the US, in Japan its about on par with the other tobacco era menko sets.  Because its easier to find in the US, prices seem to be a bit cheaper though, so its one of the easier to complete sets from that era.

Four cards, four Hall of Famers

This is a block of four uncut cards from the 1960 JCM 162 set I picked up recently.  There are only 8 cards in the whole set so this sheet has half of them, and its got a pretty impressive player selection, all four of these guys are Hall of Famers!

On the top left you've got Tatsuro Hirooka, the 1954 Central League Rookie of the Year.  His playing career was not particularly impressive for a Hall of Famer, but after retiring he had a lot of success as the manager of the dominant Lions teams of the early 80s. Next to him you've got Masaichi Kaneda, Japan's only 400 game winner.  Bottom left you have Tadashi Sugiura who in 1959 had possibly the most statistically impressive single season in baseball history, going 38-4 with a 1.40 ERA.  And next to him you have Yoshio Yoshida,  a very popular short stop and 9 time Best Nine award winner for the Tigers.

The backs of these cards are playing cards, which seem to be randomly assigned so the backs on mine aren't going to be the same as the backs on others with the same player.  Engel rates the set as R3, fewer than 100 copies of each card known, so its hard to find.  It wasn't really even on my radar until I found these and as usual the colorful backgrounds won me over!

1964 Morinagas!

I finally got me some 1964 Morinagas!

If you live in Japan today you might know Morinaga mainly as the food maker responsible for making powdered milk for coffee which for some reason they called "Creap".  I have a jar of it right next to me as I type this in fact:

If you lived here in 1964 on the other hand you'd probably know them as....well actually even then you'd know them as the company that made Creap.  But you'd also know them as the company which put out probably the best baseball card sets of the 60s, next to Kabaya Leaf.

They issued two sets that year: "Top Star" and "Color Stand" (called "Standups" in Engel).  On the front they are basically the same, a color photo with a glossy finish and white border on a postcard sized card.  The backs differ quite a bit though.  The "Top Star" cards have a pretty simple back which gives some biographical information about the player depicted:

The "Color Stand" cards on the other hand have punch out tabs on them that allow you to fold them out into a little display stand, which is great.  It reminds me a bit of the 1988 Donruss All Star punch out stand ups I used to collect like 30 years ago.

 I picked up a lot of three of these on Yahoo Auctions a few days ago, two Top Stars and one Color Stand.  All three were pretty big names - Sadaharu Oh and Katsuya Nomura were my Top Stars (pictured at the top of this post) and Masaichi Kaneda was my Color Stand:

The three are in great shape and I'm really psyched to finally have some cards from those sets.  The Kaneda card I discovered might be an uncorrected error card.  If you look closely it spells his first name as "Shouichi" on the back instead of "Masaichi".  Both are correct readings for the kanji he uses for his name and its not uncommon for people to make mistakes like that, perhaps the guy editing it just didn't know the correct reading of his name (Japanese is hard because of stuff like this BTW).

Perhaps as interesting as the cards themselves are who I bought them from.  Larry Fuhrmann is kind of a legend among Japanese baseball card collectors since he is one of the most important pioneers in the modern hobby, he even played an important role in the creation of the first BBM set back in 1991.  You can read all about his history on Dave's excellent post here which I highly recommend.  I kind of like the fact that he got his start in Japan as an English teacher in Kobe since that is exactly how I got my start too, only I arrived in Kobe in December of 1999 (hit my twentieth anniversary just 3 days ago!) quite a bit later than him.  

Anyway, he is still in the hobby and runs a great business on Yahoo Auctions as dealer_Larry and I've bought a few things off him before, he is a good source for vintage stuff and I totally recommend keeping him on your watch list as he puts up some really interesting stuff sometimes.  I think he also sells on Ebay too, though I'm not really an Ebay guy anymore so I haven't checked!

Also, and this is something only people who collect cards via Yahoo Auctions Japan can appreciate - the cards arrived all stored in top holders which no Japanese dealer ever does no matter how expensive the cards.  Every other card I've purchased on Yahoo auctions (and there are a lot by now) has come sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard taped together, which is obviously cheaper for the seller but very annoying for the buyer since they never put any thought into the question of whether it will be easy for the buyer to extract the card from the wad of cardboard and tape they encase it in (its never easy to get them out!). 

Some Extremely Colorful 1958 Uncut Sheets of Menko

I just picked up a couple of sheets of very colorful menko!

The above are two sheets of 8 cards each from the 1958 Mitsuwa set (JCM 129) which, as you can see, have a pretty distinctive look to them.  

I like these a lot.  The set has 16 cards and I thought I would get the whole set when I first saw the two sheets for sale, but actually there are three cards which are duplicated on both sheets.  Strangely the duplicate cards appear at completely different positions with completely different neighboring cards on each sheet so I'm not sure how they organized the printing of these, but its an interesting observation.

The card backs have both a playing card and a military themed image on them.  According to Engel the ink used to print the backs varied and as you can see, my two sheets use different shades of brown.

The key cards in the set are two featuring Giants slugger Shigeo Nagashima and Tigers hall of famer Yoshio Yoshida.  A lot of the cards in the set feature odd pairings of players from different teams like this.  Being issued in 1958 these cards would count among Nagashima's rookie cards (though I'm not sure what Yoshida being on them might do to that status).  Luckily for me one of them is among the three cards that were duplicated across both sheets, so I have doubles of a Shigeo Nagashima rookie card now!

400 game winner Masaichi Kaneda also appears on a couple of cards. One of them is his alone, the other he shares with Dragons pitcher Tsutomu Ina.

All in all a very colorful and neat set.  I need three more cards to complete it and I'm hoping to find them in an uncut sheet someday since it would be kind of awkward to have most of the set in uncut sheets and the rest in singles, though we'll see how that works out!

Masaichi Kaneda Menko: The Last Surviving Copy?

I've decided to get back into blogging a bit.  It really does help with the grieving process, mainly because Japanese baseball cards are one of the few areas in my life where I have no memories associated with my sister.  She didn't even know this blog existed.  Right now pretty much anything - like just listening to a song that she liked - gets me crying, everything is too new and I'm not emotionally adapted to life without her yet.  So Japanese baseball cards are kind of a mental safe haven, something I can distract myself with and not worry about that stuff.  I also really appreciated the friendly comments everyone made on my previous post, they do help!

Anyway, back to the business of this blog.  This is a menko of Masaichi Kaneda that I'd been wanting to post about for a while (even though I just posted about another one of him a few days ago).  Its from the set Engel lists as JCM 133.  They are identified by the backs, which have a picture of an animal (a mouse on Kaneda's) and a three digit number.

The set is kind of an enigma since so little is known about it.  Engel's guide identifies it as a set, but doesn't actually provide a checklist of it since "not enough of these cards have been discovered."  It was likely issued in either 1956 or 1957 and other than that there isn't much known about it.  A couple of other  sets (JCM 131c and JCM 132), which seem to have been issued by the same maker around the same time are also so hard to find that their existence is known but not enough have been found to create a checklist.

I love finding cards from sets like this where the card I have might be the only one left - its not clear if Engel or anybody else has seen a copy of this Kaneda.  They certainly might have, but the mere possibility that they haven't is kind of neat.   Its gives you that "Hey, this might actually be an important card I discovered" feeling.  And this card came in a lot of 5 cards that I only paid 1000 Yen (about 10$ US) for.  It was the only card from this set in the lot and the others aren't as rare, but I was pretty psyched at finding out what this one was.  Again demonstrating the ways in which collecting vintage Japanese baseball cards offers excitement that the US hobby hasn't been able to in about 40 years!

As a parting shot I just want to mention that I'll probably be putting the blog on hold again for a couple of weeks as I go home for the funeral and helping out my parents (and them helping me out too).  I'll probably be back towards the end of October though.

Masaichi Kaneda 1958 Marukami With a Weird Back

 This is Masaichi Kaneda's card from the 1958 Marukami black and white borderless set (JCM 31D).

Kaneda is Japan's winningest pitcher by far, with 400 career victories (in a league where 200 rather than 300 wins is a de facto ticket to the Hall of Fame, a standard that Kaneda himself established for entry into his own version of the Hall of Fame, the Meikyukai).  Along with Oh, Nagashima and a few others, his cards are among the keys to the tobacco era menko card sets of the late 50s and early 60s.

The card is a hand cut menko and as you can see from the scan its got a bit of the card next to it on it. The miscut carries over onto the back, which has some additional odd things of its own:

First off, the back is for the Lions, while Kaneda played for the Kokutetsu Swallows as correctly noted on the card front.  When I bought it I thought it must be a wrongback, but in his guide Engel notes that this is not unusual for this set, as the team name on the back rarely correpsonds to the player's actual team.

So its not a wrong back.  But then I looked up that number, 639712, which is how Engel lists cards in this set.  That number doesn't belong to Kaneda, whose cardback number is 333333. Rather it belongs to Yoshitaka Kosaka of the Hiroshima Carp.

So that means this is either a wrongback, or a variation, or perhaps cards from this set were issued with random backs not just in terms of team but also in terms of number. Engel lists this set as being quite rare (R3) and doesn't seem to have a complete checklist (he lists 45+ cards, indicating there are unknown ones out there) so he likely didn't have a huge number of examples to draw from when cataloging it.

Anyway, its kind of an interesting thing to find so I thought I'd put it out there!