1956 Brooklyn Dodgers Good Will Tour of Japan Schedule

 This is my third post in a row covering a piece of memorabilia from a US team`s goodwill tour of Japan. You can probably tell from that how I have been focusing my recent shopping/collecting activity!

I hadn`t been aware of it until I found this, but in October and November of1956 the Brooklyn Dodgers made a goodwill tour to Japan in which they played 11 games against four different teams (the Giants, an "All Japan" team, a Central League team (I assume this was an all star squad), and an "All Kanto" team).  This is a schedule featuring team rosters from that tour.

According to this detailed write up on Walter O`Malley`s (spits on ground in disgust at mention of name) website about the tour, the Dodgers were invited by Yomiuri owner Matsutaro Shoriki and O`Malley (spits on ground again) accepted.  They played to huge crowds everywhere they went and the same site has some cool photos of the tour (I like this one, I think that is Carl Furillo in the foreground and you can see Jackie Robinson next to the photographer, check out the rest at their site, which also has some amazing looking posters from the tour that probably sell for a billion dollars these days):

My schedule/ roster doesn`t have any interesting artwork on it, but it does have the 1956 Dodgers` roster with each player`s name written in katakana, which is pretty cool.  Most of the big names like Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges made the trip.  A young Don Drysdale, who I guess would have been in his rookie season that year also appeared, though the Dodgers other future ace Sandy Koufax doesn`t seem to have tagged along.  If I recall correctly I think he was a university student at Columbia at the time when he wasn`t pitching and maybe he didn`t want to miss class or something.

The other four team`s lineups are also included:

 And in the centre is the schedule.  They opened against the Giants on October 19 at Korakuen, and closed it up on November 11 against the All Japan team, also at Korakuen.

Anyway, this is a kind of cool thing to stumble upon so I`m glad to add it to the collection :)

1934 Yomiuri Shinbun American All Star Tour of Japan Photo Insert

 Recently I have been getting into the vintage stuff a lot and last week I picked up a really cool centerpiece for my pre-war collection.  It is a 1934 newspaper bonus insert featuring a picture of the members of the American and Japanese teams that played in the American League all star tour of Japan that year.

It is so awesome.

Its a pretty good sized picture, about the size of a B4 sheet of paper, and printed on cardstock.  According to the text along the bottom edge it was taken at Jingu Stadium on November 25, 1934.  It was distributed by the Yomiuri Shinbun, the paper that organized the tour and shortly shortly thereafter would form the first NPB team, the Giants.

  The American team is full of big name Hall of Famers, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx and Connie Mack. 

The photo features facsimile autographs of each player.  Interestingly there is currently an auction for the same photo up on Yahoo Auctions here which rather dishonestly suggests that the autographs are real, but they are clearly not.  Bidding on that one is up over 54,000 Yen as I write this (about $500 US) with 4 days remaining, whoever wins it will likely be disappointed when they actually have it in their hands. As I have mentioned before, Yahoo Auctions Japan is a bit of a haven for rip off artists selling fake autographs, though at least in this case the photo itself appears to be genuine.  Its an amazing piece and definitely worth something, but nowhere near as much as a photo actually signed by all those guys (one copy, which formed the basis for this photo, must exist somewhere out there assuming it wasn`t burned in the war....wow, what a find that would be).

Anyway, back to the photo.  Moe Berg`s signature stands out among the Americans since he signed his in English and Japanese katakana, which is kind of neat.  Despite being a relatively minor player, his exploits on the tour are best known since he engaged in some spying for the US government while there, taking some photos that would be useful during the War a few years later.

At some point I`ll try to make a list of the Japanese players.  Unfortunately their signatures are pretty difficult to read so I am having trouble identifying the individuals based on that alone.

I should add that this doesn`t seem to have been a stand-alone insert.  I actually bought it as part of a 3 piece collection of Yomiuri Shinbun inserts. One of these features the cabinet of then Prime Minister of Japan Keisuke Okada.  Okada is a really interesting figure in pre-war Japan and his inclusion in a set with the American all stars is kind of fitting.  He was staunchly opposed to any war with the United States and the rising militarism of Japan at the time.  He was the subject of numerous assassination attempts as a result, one of which killed his brother in law and led to his resigning from office in 1936.  He retained this position even after the war began and was part of the faction that wanted to negotiate peace with the US.

The other photo is a bit less fitting, featuring military leaders some of whom probably led the fight against the Americans during the war!

I`m probably going to have the baseball photo framed at some point, its size makes it perfect for a display piece.

Lefty O`Doul and the 1949 San Francisco Seals Good Will Tour of Japan

 I made another interesting find on Yahoo Auctions the other day.  It is  an uncut sheet of playing cards featuring players from the 1949 Goodwill tour of Japan by the San Francisco Seals.

The tour was led by Lefty O`Doul, who had also organized the more famous pre-war tours by American all stars like Gehrig and Ruth in the 1930s.  The 1949 tour is considered quite important in Japan though since it was the first such tour after the war and in fact occurred while General MacArthur was still in charge of the country.

The Seals played 11 games, including exhibition games, during the tour against a variety of teams including the Giants, an all star team from pro yakyuu, American military teams and college all star teams, winning all but one game.  The games were played in Tokyo, Nagoya and the Kansai region in Korakuen stadium (Tokyo), Koshien Stadium (Kansai), Jingu Stadium (Tokyo), Chunichi Stadium (Nagoya) and Nishinomiya Stadium (Kansai). The cards in this set feature players from the Seals and the Giants, who played only one game against each other during the tour (on October 15, 1949, won by the Seals 13-4).

Each player has two cards, one featuring a fairly crude likeness of the player and the other some random close up of the player`s uniform, glove, bat, throwing arm, etc.  Below are the two cards of each team`s manager, Osamu Mihara of the Giants (upper row, two cards with yellow background) and O`Doul (next to Mihara, two cards with blue background). 

Another interesting fact about the above image is the card on the lower left, featuring the scoreboard.  The inning numbers don`t make any sense, they run 7-7-8-9-6-1.  I can`t figure out any interpretation of that order which makes sense, I assume the person who did the artwork probably wasn`t a baseball fan.  Also the Seals` pitcher Dempsey, featured on the cards immediately below O`Doul, is rendered as having a fairly hideous looking 3 fingered set of claws for a pitching hand. 

Its hard to find lineup information for these games on the internet (at least from my 15 minutes of Googling, which turned up lots of generic articles about the series but none that offered any details).  The Japanese Wikipedia page does offer some more information though, so I thought I`d try to translate the lineup of each team featured just so that it would exist in English on the internet somewhere (my transcription of the Seals player names is probably wrong in a few places, its hard to convert katakana accurately back into the original language. If anyone can, please correct these. The Japanese player names I am confident in).

Seals:
1. Tobin
2. Holder
3. Briskey
4. Steinhower
5. Shoffner
6. Roddijohnny (definitely I am getting that name wrong)
 (pinch hitter: O`Doul, replaced at second by Morin)
7. Westlake
8. Jarvis
9.Dempsey
(pinch hitter:O`Teague, replaced as pitcher by Wall)

Giants:
1. Chiba
2. Shiraishi
3. Aoda
4. Kawakami
5. Hirayama
6. Akihara
(pinch hitter: Yamakawa, replaced in right field by Komatsubara)
7. Tetsuka
8. Fujiwara
(pinch hitter: Nagashima, replaced at catcher by Takemiya
9. Kawasaki
(pinch hitter: Bessho, replaced as pitcher by Fujimoto)

Dempsey got the win for the Seals, while Kawasaki took the loss for the Giants.  Westlake and Bessho each connected for a home run.  The game was played in front of a crowd of 45,000 at Korakuen Stadium. 

Sadaharu Oh 700 Home Run Subset

One of the cooler subsets from the 1975-76 Calbee set is the Sadharu Oh 700th home run cards.  Each card commemorates one of his home runs in the lead up to hitting #700, a feat he accomplished in 1976.  I have several of the cards from this subset, but they don`t appear to be sequentially numbered as some fall in the 700s, 800s and 900s.

The series culminates with the above card, #927 in the set which commemorates home run #700, the back noting that he joins Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as the only two in the 700 club.  Its a kind of cool scene, Oh getting interviewed while holding the typical bouquet of flowers.

These are a few of the other 700 Home Run cards of Oh.  I particularly like the one on the lower right, with him swinging away with all his might, eyes closed (card #800 in the set).  It is from a 2 home run game in which he hit his 12th and 13th of the season against Taiyo on May 22, 1976.

Mystery wrapped in a riddle: How is this card supposed to have been centred?

Another week, another 1970s Calbee pickup, in this case card #17 from the 1977 set (famous scenes series).  It features members of the Yomiuri Giants taken on October 16 at Korakuen Stadium singing a "song of victory" after going from worst to first under Shigeo Nagashima`s management.

The card carries a huge mystery to it which I am having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around. It seems to have been miscut on both the top and bottom, yet on both sides the nature of the miscut precludes the possibility of the other side`s miscut.

Look at the top of the card.  The heads of Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto are cut off from above the eyebrows.  It seems the card should end a bit higher than that, so at least you get the entire faces of the two main players in the centre, right?

But then look at the bottom of the card. The lower, smaller bottom line of text says "巨人Ｖ１” but it has clearly been cut in half, with the lower part of the text completely off the card.

The miscut on the top suggests the card was cut too low, while the miscut on the bottom suggests it was cut too high.  Under the laws of physics currently in force in the known universe it is not possible for these to both be simultaneously correct, yet they both exist.  What gives?

In case you are wondering, the card has not been trimmed at all, it is identical in size to a standard card from that set.  I can`t make heads or tails of this.  The only explanation I can come up with is that the image on the card itself was somehow accidentally printed at 1.1 or 1.2 times magnification, making it too big to fit on the card.  But I`ve never seen a card with that before.

Kind of a mystery, I almost feel like I am looking at an MC Escher painting or something.  Anyone else come across similarly weird card cuts?

UPDATE:

Raz in the comments made a pretty good find, locating the above image which seems to show how the card was intended to look when correctly centred.

This just really opens up a whole new can of "what?" worms.  Calbee actually intended this card to have Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto`s faces cut clean out of the photo?  In order to provide more room on the bottom for that lovely image of....the backs of photographers?

I`m guessing there were a few quality control issues related to how images were centred on printing plates with Calbee cards in the 70s, there are a couple of other cards I have with questionably centred images.  On most it isn`t noticeable since moving the centre of the image a bit only crops out a bit of random background, but on cards where some key element (like say the faces of the NPB all time home run king and hit king) is close to the edge, errors like this become really hard to miss.

Busting Japan Post Smart Letter Packs: Better than Busting Wax

For the past couple of years I have minimized my purchases of bags of Calbee chip bags to just a few per series.  This is partly because of a desire to avoid eating potato chips (screw you, salt) and also because of the impracticality of putting together Calbee sets one bag at a time.  I tried that once in 2011 and ended up with less than half a set and so many bags of chips that I didn`t know what to do with them (and it cost quite a bit too).

So these days I try to put my sets together via the purchase of large lots of singles off of Yahoo Auctions, which seem to be getting easier to find (at least for recent stuff).  I like it because getting one of the lots in the mail in a Japan Post Smart Letter Pack is sort of like getting a huge wax pack to open. I picked up one 72 card lot of 2016 Series 1 cards which arrived in the mail yesterday and just cracked it open:

The seller used part of the cardboard box that the bags originally came in as packing material, which is kind of a neat touch (actually the box is from series 2, so maybe the same seller will have some of those soon....):

And the cards are all nicely stored, the seller even inserted them individually into their own flimsies (not necessary but still a nice touch):

Voila.  72 different cards including some from the base set, Title Holders subset and Star Cards subset.  Best of all: no doubles!

With current Calbee cards I like those featuring Hiroshima, Hanshin, Yakult, Rakuten, Lotte and Yokohama the best.  Photos of the players are almost all (in fact, maybe all) taken at their home stadiums (kudos) and those are the teams that don`t play in domes, so the photos don`t have that ugly flourescent sheen/fake grass backdrop like ones of Dragons, Giants, Hawks and other Dome teams do.

I have to admit to still not understanding how the business models of sellers who put these lots up on Yahoo Auctions works.  I paid only 300 Yen for the lot (not including shipping), which works out to less than 5 Yen per card.  Purchased retail at 98 Yen per bag with 2 cards would work out to more than 10 times that much. 

Obviously if you buy bags wholesale in quantity you would pay a lot less, but it would still work out to way more than 5 Yen per card.  The seller seems to make it up by selling the insert and parrallel cards (gold signature  and Wins Leaders) at a premium, but even those don`t seem to sell for too high (250-600 Yen each on the same seller`s listings).  Given the amount of work that would go into it I can`t imagine it being a particularly profitable venture, but I do thank them for making these things available to me!  I am not quite close to finishing the Series 1 base set this year.

Yahoo Auction Scams: Watch out for "sign1114306"

 

If you have ever looked for Japanese baseball player autographs on Yahoo Auctions you may have run into one prominent seller, sign1114306, who literally has thousands of signed cards up for auction at any given moment.

I`m going to recommend that you don`t buy from him.  At all. Unless you really like fake autographs, in which case bid away.

A lot of his autographed cards are sold in lots of 9 based on team (ie 9 autographed cards of Tigers players in one lot, etc). In the description of each lot he makes clear that he is only the consignor, the cards themselves were collected by an acquaintance who got the signatures from various sources including trips to ballparks and auction purchases.

The lots start with a starting bid of 3000 Yen.  If they don`t sell he relists them at a reduced price and keeps cutting the prices until they get down to ridiculous levels - 300 Yen per 9 card lot seems to be the minimum.

A few years ago when I was new to buying cards off of Yahoo Auctions one of his auctions popped up in a search I did and I was intrigued. It was a bunch of Tigers player autographs, including a signed card of Randy Bass. He has really good feedback on Yahoo Auction, 99.9% positive on (at the time of writing) over 38,000 transactions (only 9 of which were negative and only one of those raised any issue with regard to the authenticity of the autographs).  The price was cheap so I thought "why not?" and bid. And won.

My suspicions were aroused not by the cards themselves (I am not an autograph expert and they looked plausibly genuine) but by the sheer unlikelihood of one person being able to amass so many signatures - literally thousands and thousands of them in a never-ending stream of new listings - and sell them for so little. 

Suspicion turned to certainty when I noticed the impossibility of some of the signatures.  In mid 2013 he put up one lot of Hankyu Braves players that included a 2013 BBM Foreign legends card of Brad "Animal" Lesley.  Animal passed away shortly after that card was released and had been living in a nursing home receiving treatment for the kidney ailment that (sadly) claimed his life for the entire time that card had been in existence. The likelihood of someone in Japan having taken that card, travelled all the way to the US, somehow getting access to the dying Animal Lesley and asking him to sign it, then returning to Japan and throwing into a random lot to be auctioned off for a few hundred yen was about zero.

Looking around the internet at the time, I discovered a massive thread (in Japanese) on 2 Channel devoted specifically to this guy. Its been up there for over 5 years now, has hundreds of replies and the bottom line is that this guy is well known as a faker (and has been for a long time).

The weird thing is, this guy has been running this blatantly obvious scam in the same way under the same account and with everyone being aware of it for years now, but Yahoo Auctions continues to blithely turn a blind eye to it.  After buying my cards and realizing I had been scammed (but only out of a few hundred yen) I just thought "lesson learned" and assumed he would be banned or arrested (the messages on 2 Channel indicate complaints have been raised).  So I was surprised to notice today, a couple of years after the last time I looked him up, that he is still in business with the exact same con running.

Yahoo Auctions is a pretty good place for some cards, but it is also well known to have a much weaker system of fraud prevention, weaker buyer protection, a weaker feedback system and weaker means of weeding out criminal activity than Ebay. So its worth bearing in mind that at least for player autographs it is rip-off city on that platform and buyer beware.