Roberto Barbon appears in a lot of menko sets from the late 50s and early 60s and I'd like to write a bit about him because he has an interesting story.
His most famous card unfortunately is this one below from the 1958 Doyusha set (JCM 30a), which I don't have but Dave wrote about it a couple of years ago and I'm borrowing his picture of it:
I feel bad that Barbon's most valuable card doesn't even feature him (that's Jackie Robinson if you haven't guessed, the menko makers accidentally used a photo of him).
There is a certain irony in this unintentional slight since Barbon has a Jackie Robinson type story as a pioneering trailblazer. He was the first Latino player to break into NPB. I'm not sure how he ended up here, but its been mentioned that Abe Saperstein, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, had something to do with it. He arrived in Japan in 1955 after briefly playing in the Brooklyn Dodgers minor league system and was famously shocked to find players doing training in the snow in February (being from Cuba he had never seen the stuff before).
He had a breakout year, leading the league in hits, runs and triples in his rookie campaign. He went on to have a very productive 11 year career in which he stole over 300 bases, with all but his final season being played with Hankyu.
My favorite anecdote about him came from early in his Hankyu days, when he accidentally pissed off a famous pro wrestler named Rikidozan, a guy with a legendary temper:
In a conversation Barbon had with a sports reporter, he casually commented that Rikidozan's matches appeared to be fixed (using the term "yaocho" which is used to describe match fixing in sports, especially sumo). This was then reported in the press the next day and Rikidozan is said to have exploded in anger when he read it. Years later Barbon would recall that he was "afraid to go to Tokyo" as a result. Barbon wrote a letter of apology which seemed to satisfy Rikidozan.
Rikidozan ended up being fatally stabbed in a bar fight with Yakuza member Katsushi Murata not long after, but fortunately Barbon's story has a much happier ending. In fact, his story isn't over. After retiring as a player in 1965 he decided to settle in Japan. Initially he worked at a friend's restaurant called Capone in Kobe, but he quickly returned to baseball, first as a coach for the Braves and later as an interpreter when Roberto Marcano joined the Braves in 1975. As of 2018 (the most recent info I could find) he was still working for the same team, today known as the Orix Buffaloes.
This is him at a fan event alongside Boomer Wells in 2012. His Japanese is really good (well he's lived here longer than I've been alive so I suppose that goes without saying):
So anyway, next time you fish a card of Roberto Barbon out of a pile of Menko, know that 60 years later he is still here in Japan, working for the team that brought him over!
If you collect old Japanese baseball cards from the 60s you've probably got a fair number of cards of Eiji Bandou in your collection. Bandou isn't a hall of famer and isn't really a hall of very-gooder either. In an eleven year career with the Dragons from 1959 to 1969 he compiled a respectable 77-65 record and was a solid starter for a few years. He never led the league in anything. His best season was in 1967 when he went 14-6 with a 2.55 ERA and made the All Star team.
If you live outside of Japan you probably have no idea who this guy is and based on his career and his almost empty English Wikipedia page you'd probably consider him a common card.
But if you live in Japan, you know this guy probably as well as you know Sadaharu Oh. Actually, probably better than Oh. He is a household name whose face is instantly recognizable to almost everyone in the country.
If you take a look at almost any baseball card he appeared on, he has a huge smile on his face (like he does on the above, his rookie card from the 1959 Marukami JCM 31c Type 1 set). I don't think I've ever seen a card of him without that huge smile.
He was able to parlay that smile into a post-retirement career as a TV celebrity ("talento"). Despite his modest pro-career, he was quite famous in Japan from his high school days. In 1958 he set a record at the Koshien tournament by striking out 83 batters, a record which still stands and which made him a household name (high school baseball is big here, like college basketball in the US). This helped him break into showbiz after hanging up his spikes.
Over the years - until 2012 - he was the host or appeared in dozens of variety shows and TV dramas. He was the host of Sekai Fushigi Hakken (Discover the World's Mysteries), a weekly program that debuted in 1986, for more than 25 years. It is hard to under-state how prevalent he was on TV here, his Japanese Wikipedia page lists dozens of TV shows that he was a regular on, which is insane. Japanese TV isn't like American TV, most of the programming consists of a mix of variety or quasi-reality programming in which panels of random famous people sit and make amusing comments about whatever the topic of the show is. On pretty much any day of the week between the 1980s and 2012, you were likely to find Bandou either hosting or sitting on the panel of one of those types of shows (which usually have nothing to do with baseball). No other ballplayer has come close to matching him as a TV star.
Then 2012 happened. He was appearing on so many TV shows and splitting his time between Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka as he rushed between the cities to appear in various local programs that he....uh.....forgot to pay his taxes. Or something like that - the TLDR version is that the Nagoya tax office (his main residence is here) found that he had failed to declare about 75 million Yen in income.
He didn't go to jail or anything, but this was a big scandal. This was made all the bigger by the fact that the...uh...PR posters used by the tax authorities to encourage people to go to the tax office to file their tax forms featured....uh.....a familiar smiling face:
Ha! Irony, gotta love it. (Incidentally these posters are kind of collector's items now, you can buy them on Yahoo Auctions).
This put a pretty huge dent in his TV career as most of the shows he was on dumped him. In a familiar pattern that most celebrity scandals in Japan follow however, after about a year in exile it was deemed that he had showed proper contrition and was allowed back into the celebrity TV circuit, though he isn't as dominant as he was previously (of course he's also getting old, he turned 80 this year).
As part of his comeback he started a YouTube channel where he does stuff like have a pitching contest with a woman about 50 years younger than him:
He seems to have moved on from that though as the last upload was in 2017. At any rate, you can see what he looks like now in it!
So anyway, next time you are flipping through a stack of menkos from the 60s, take a look out for that smiling face as its probably the most famous one in the bunch!
I like multi player cards that have a theme which wasn't intended at the time they were made. This is from the 1959 Marusho "Two Bat" set (JCM 38b), so named because of the two bats on the back. This specific card I like to call the "mean managers" card for reasons I'll get into below (but as you can probably infer without much difficulty, its because both players depicted on it became mean mangers later in their careers).
This is actually a really rare set, Engel lists it as R4, meaning fewer than 10 copies of each card in it is known to exist. I have only 3 cards from it, this is the only one featuring any Hall of Famers.
The two players are Hall of Famers Tetsuharu Kawakami and Tatsuro Hirooka. Kawakami in particular is very famous for his playing days, he was the first Japanese player to collect 2,000 hits and is known as the "god of batting". He was also the manager of the Giants from 1961 to 1974 which included an incredible 9 year run of consecutive Japan Series titles.
Kawakami had a reputation as a fiercely competitive manager who really drove his players. He is the prototypical "mean manager" in Japan who runs a strict ship with lots of rules and intense training regimens and who demands total obedience from his players.
A few years after this card came out, in 1964, Kawakami was managing the Giants and Hirooka had become a player-coach. The two didn't really get along well, Hirooka had a temper that led him to sometimes rebelling against Kawakami. In one incident while Hirooka was at bat and Shigeo Nagashima was on third, Nagashima tried unsuccessfully to steal home. Hirooka viewed this as a sign that Kawakami had no faith in his ability as a hitter and had a violent outburst when he returned to the bench, needing to be restrained by other coaches. Kawakami wanted to trade Hirooka following this, but Hirooka appealed directly to Giants owner Matsutaro Shoriki, who vetoed Kawakami. Kawakami nonetheless played Hirooka less the next year and by 1966 his playing days were over.
Their animosity carried over after Hirooka's retirement when he started working as a sports reporter. He followed the Giants to Spring Trainging at Dodgers Town in Vero Beach Florida, but Kawakami refused to give him any access, and ordered every player on the team to not say a single word to him!
Ironically despite their differences, Hirooka would later go on to be a manager who is often cited as closely fitting Kawakami's disciplinarian mold. From 1976 to 1979 he managed the Yakult Swallows, during which he led them to a Japan Series Title in 1978. If you ever read Robert Whiting's You Gotta Have Wa (which you should), Hirooka is cast as the villain in one chapter focusing on Charlie Manuel's time with the Swallows under Hirooka. Hirooka, who instituted strict rules on player behavior, didn't get along with Manuel and constantly berated him during his tenure, then traded him to the Buffaloes despite Manuel being the team's top hitter. This contributed to a first-to-worst decline for the Swallows from 1978-1979 and Hirooka's own departure.
After that he famously built the dominant Seibu Lions team of the 1980s. His strict regimen there is summarized by Whiting who described his "autumn camp" with the Lions thus:
"Lasting 59 days, from season's end to late
December (a time when most American ballplayers are relaxing in front
of television), it consisted of nine hours of daily drills, including
600 swings a day for each batter, 430 pitches a day for each pitcher,
as well as swimming and aikido (martial arts) sessions. Last
winter, he sent the Lions' star shortstop to any icy mountain river,
hoping an act of self-immersion would strengthen the player's spirit
and help make him a better leader."
Hirooka would lead Seibu to three first place finishes in his four years as manager, but would be kind of ousted as manager following the 1985 season (in which Seibu finished first, but lost the Japan Series) after a confrontation with the team owner. He wanted more control over the team and offered to resign as an apparent bargaining ploy, but his offer was unexpectedly immediately accepted. Thus ended his career as a field manager, though he would later serve as GM for the Marines and again serve as a sort of minor villain in a Whiting article about Bobby Valentine's tenure there.
So this is basically a card featuring two people who I would never in a million years want to work for. Which is kind of neat.
This is a kind of neat thing I picked up recently. Sadaharu Oh gracing the front of a matchbox.
These matchboxes were distributed to advertise Meiji Gold Milk. Meiji is one of the biggest makers of dairy products in Japan and you can see some of their stuff on the back. Judging from the style of the bottles, and how Oh looks, I guess these date to sometime in the 1970s, though I can't say which year.
They are kind of neat, I like the photo of Oh and the way his bat is positioned.
I didn't get just one, but actually got a small pile of them all sold in one lot (none with any matches in them):
You can tell they are used since they all have a bit of discoloration along the right edge of the photo. That is because the right side of the box has a rough surface for the matches to be struck on, and the heat of the lit matches slightly tinged that side of the box.
Matchbox collecting is a thing in Japan, lots of companies used to give them away as promotional items and many used distinctive photos or artwork. There are a few with baseball players on them and I might try to collect some of those. Fortunately they aren't too expensive.
I picked up my second Sadaharu Oh rookie card recently. It was hidden in a lot of other beat up menko so I got it for a very cheap price. I like that it is still possible in Japan to do that. Like in the US its probably been 50 years since the last time someone bought a cheap random lot of 1950s cards with a Hank Aaron rookie casually tucked away in it. But in Japan, you can still find the Japanese equivalent.
My card has an obvious condition issue with that teeny bit of wear on the right edge. It looks like for some reason the kid just tore the card off the sheet on that side instead of using scissors. Damn 50s kids. Still though, this was a nice find.
Its from the 1959 Marusho JCM 39 set. According to Engel there are two versions of his card from that set, this one with him fielding and another with him at bat. This one shows him in the traditional blue cap, green sleeves and uniform lettering of the 1950s Giants (joke).
I was browsing through Yahoo Auctions for Calbee cards from the 1980s the other day when I came across the above card (which I don't own). Its from the 1983 Calbee set and features Hall of Famer Katsuo Osugi. As the back of the card notes, he accumulated over a thousand hits in both the Pacific and Central Leagues over his career.
The thing that caught my eye of course was the photo on the card. You don't see cards with players being driven around on Archie Andrew's Jalopy very often. The back of the card doesn't tell us what the occasion was, though he did retire in 1983 so this may have had something to do with that.
This card is #542 in the set, which is in one of the very rare short printed series. How rare, you may ask. I looked the card up in my old copy of Sports Card Magazine and was shocked to see that there was a blank space in their checklist next to card 542. The compilers of it didn't know who was on that card.
I opened up Engel to see if he knew and sure enough, nope! This is his listing for #542 in the 1983 set:
I was really interested in this card at first just for that photo but now I'm really intrigued that this is the first time anyone has seen what card 542 looks like and who is on it!
The price (5000 Yen starting bid) is a bit out of my range, and also the seller has zero feedback which is a bit fishy so I'll probably pass but I just wanted to do a post about it because I thought it was so neat: another little blank spot in the collecting world's checklists has been filled in!
This is probably the hardest Sadaharu Oh card in the whole set to get. It is card #1435, the second last in the whole thing, which means it is in the very hard to find final series (1400 to 1436). I only have about 1/3 of the cards from that series so the last pages in my second binder (the set is so big you need two binders to hold it) are among the emptiest of all.
Oh doesn't appear in any of the scarce regional issues (which only feature Hiroshima Carp and Chunichi Dragons players). The only other Oh cards which might match this one in scarcity therefore are card #474 (from series 14 which was short printed) and #943 (from series 27, also short printed). I don't have either of those so this is the first of what I guess might be called the "Big 3" Oh cards from the set that I've obtained. Series 23 (cards 789 to 824) also tend to sell for a bit more than cards from the rest of the set and every one of them features Sadaharu Oh (its a series in commemoration of his 700th home run) but I think they just sell for more because they feature Oh and not because they are scarcer.
This came up for auction last week and I was expecting it to sell for around 3000 Yen or so. I decided to bid high and break my self imposed 1,000 Yen spending limit since this card only comes up for auction rarely. Much to my surprise and delight I won it for about 1,000 Yen with shipping, which was a steal. It arrived in the mail yesterday and is now resting comfortably in the last page of binder #2 for this set. I don't have card #1436 yet so for now this is the highest one I have.
The card is pretty cool. It features a scene from a game played on July 23, 1976 against the Whales. The text refers to him hitting his 700th home run during that game (though obviously not during the at bat depicted in which he has clearly hit a liner back to the pitcher) and notes that later in that season he reached 716, making him #2 in the world.
