Brooks Robinson will save us all

 

I have this card from the 1975 NST set which I kind of like.  That is Brooks Robinson on the right and I think Earl Weaver on the left.  Shigeo Nagashima is the Giant and I don't know who the suit is.  

I like Brooks Robinson a lot.  Everybody does.  He's just a great all round guy that everyone can agree on.  Looking at the US from the outside these days it looks so violently divided along political, racial and economic lines I often wonder why Americans don't talk about Brooks Robinson more, because EVERY conversation I've ever had about him always ends up with me and the people I'm talking to smiling and feeling much more friendly towards each other, even if we didn't like each other much before we started talking about Brooks.  It seems to me Americans could use a lot more Brooks Robinson related chats. 

Such is the power of Brooks.  Watching the violence in Washington DC yesterday I wondered if they shouldn't have just flashed a big picture of Brooks Robinson where everybody could see it, then all the rampaging idiots would have been "Oh hey Brooks Robinson, he was so nice to me that time I asked him for an autograph" then they'd all drop their crap and leave.  Kind of like that scene at the end of the Naked Gun where Frank Dreben's speech has the same effect on the brawling Seattle Mariners and California Angels:

I met Brooks Robinson back in 1992 during my awkward teenage phase (which is to say during the entirety of my teenage years) at a card show in Toronto.  

He was just so damn nice.  He signed a photo of mine and a ball that my best friend Mike (on the right) had brought, both with personal inscriptions.  Then since the line wasn't long he chatted  with us, invited us behind the table to pose for pictures.  I'm pretty sure that if we had said we were hungry he would have said "Oh I make the best Rueben sandwiches.  You guys like Rueben sandwiches?  Wait here, I'll be right back, you are going to love these."  Then he would have gone off, somehow found the ingredients necessary to make Rueben sandwiches in the middle of a card show and a kitchen to make them in, made them for us, brought them back and then had lunch with us right there.  And his Rueben sandwiches would have been out of this world.  

Anyway, I'm glad that Brooks appears on Japanese cards too!

Train Menko are so Awesome

 

Its a bit off the baseball theme of this blog, but I scored a really cool uncut sheet of train menko the other day and I feel obliged to post about them because they are so awesome.

The sheet, which doesn't quite fully fit into my scanner, has 25 cards, though 3 are duplicated.  All but one of them feature real passenger trains which were in service in the 1950s and 1960s (the other one featuring a JAL airliner).  It has an 0 Series Shinkansen which entered service in 1964, so it probably came out no earlier than that, while also having a number of steam engines which were removed from service around the same time so it probably came out pretty close to that year.  

Each of them has the name of the train (trains all have names here) in the rectangular box text, while the circular boxes all have the kanji for "Tokkyu", which means "express" in them.  That seems to be the unifying feature of this set, the trains are all high speed express ones rather than local commuter ones.  

This is a really beautiful set, the cards are vibrantly colored and the images jump out at you, which is what caught my eye when I found them while browsing Yahoo Auctions.  

The backs feature old school Yen notes and rock/paper/scissors symbols:

While all of the engines featured on these cards are retired, a lot of the train lines (and thus the names) still exist.  Several of the ones featuring what look like regular passenger trains are now Shinkansen lines running the same routes and using the same names (like the Kodama, top row, centre column on the sheet). 

I think I might get this thing framed and put on a wall, I like trains:) 

Modern Menko: Daiei Hawks Style

 

Happy New Year everyone.

I've often wished that somebody would put out some modern menko sets done old school style.  My wish came true the other day when I discovered this set on Yahoo Auctions. Its a set of 10 round menko featuring players from the Daiei Hawks (who became the Softbank Hawks in 2005).  

These were issued to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Nishi Nihon Sports, a sports newspaper published in Fukuoka.  The company was founded in 1955 which would suggest that these came out in 2005, but the backs contain the player's statistics from the 2003 season so I suspect these were released sometime in late 2003 or early 2004.  

The Hawks were a fairly dominant team then (as now) so this set features a lot of star players.  This is the complete checklist :

Tsuyoshi Wada

Kazumi Saitou

Hiroshi Shibahara

Kouji Mise

Takahiro Mahara

Nobuhiko Matsunaka

Munenori Kawasaki

Kenji Jojima

Tadahito Iguchi

Four of those guys (Wada, Kawasaki, Jojima and Iguchi) would later play in MLB while a fifth, Matsunaka, would win a Pacific League triple crown and probably could have played in the majors.  

The lot I bought actually had a couple of loose sets and also one still in its original packaging:

The top line of text on the pack says it is to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Nishi Nihon Sports, while the second line says it is a pack of menko to support the "Wakataka Yakyu Dan", which is a nickname for the Hawks.  The nickname, which is mentioned in the Hawks song, applies to the Hawks regardless of their corporate owner, so the current Softbank Hawks also use it. 

 I am a bit of a Hawks fan, which also motivated this purchase, though its kind of awkward.  I've spent a significant amount of my life in three different regions of Japan, each of which has a baseball team that I've supported basically on the principle of rooting for the home team wherever I live.  I spent four years living in Fukuoka and became a big Hawks fan during that time, and a lot of the players on these cards were still with them when I was there (from 2008 to 2012).  While I now root more for the Dragons simply because I live in Nagoya, I've never been able to get behind them as much as I did the Hawks (or the Tigers, who I rooted for in my five years in the Kansai area).  

In addition to liking the Hawks I really like the fact that these cards look very much like "true" menko despite being quite modern.  The artwork is very reminiscent of old school menko, and the cardboard itself also looks like the old stuff. No shiny gloss or anything.  I love these.  It would be awesome if a maker did a whole proper NPB set of cards just like these.  For now though I'm satisfied with these 10, my first additions to the collection for 2021.

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.