I've been meaning to sit down and do a post about the history of collectible game cards for NPB for over a year now and I've realized that a comprehensive history is much bigger than I really want to do. There are game card sets featuring pro baseball players going back to the late 1940's. The third edition of Gary Engel's Vintage "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist And Price Guide" has 30-ish pages of listings of game card sets, including ten pages for Karuta card sets.
I'm going to tackle a slightly less ambitious goal - listing the major Collectible Card Games for NPB for the past 40-50 years. There's basically been five different manufacturers - Takara, Konami, Future Bee, Bandai and Bushiroad. Konami actually did cards over two separate time periods.
I've been working on this subject for a while now and I was originally intending to do it all in one post. I realized, however, that the amount of cards I want to show will make it way too big of a post so I'm going to break it up into three posts - one for Takara, one for Konami and one for the other three companies.
I do need to be up front that I'm not really a big fan of most of these cards. I generally find the cards to be ugly with the fronts of the cards getting cluttered with the game features. The checklists of a lot of the sets (especially the Konami ones) are very confusing as well. I've also never learned to play any of these games. So these probably won't be as informative posts than than they could have been. But let's get started...
From 1978 to 1998, Takara produced 30 card team sets in boxes that also included a team logo card, a pair of dice and a paper playing field to be used as a game board. They only produced sets for the six Central League teams for their first three years but they expanded to do all twelve teams starting in 1981. The photos on the cards were pretty much all portraits (or "mug shots" as I usually call them) up until 1991 when they started adding a variety of photos (probably in response to BBM starting up).
I should point out that the 30 cards were of 30 distinct players which meant that many more players were represented in the Takara sets than any other baseball card set in Japan in the pre-BBM years. This means that there's a number of reasonably big players like Hideki Irabu, Motonobu Tanishige, Satoshi Nakajima and Hideo Nomo whose first baseball cards were in Takara sets. Actually since Calbee didn't have any cards of Lotte players until 1985, the 1981 Lotte Orions set contains the very first card of Hiromitsu Ochiai. Takara sets from the 1980's also contain the only contemporary cards of a number of American players including Don Money, Rich Duran, Steve Shirley and Danny Goodwin (only player ever taken as the overall number one pick twice).
The sets in 1997 and 1998 also included the team's managers so there were 31 cards in those sets.
One interesting thing about the cards is that from 1979 to 1987, they displayed the Showa Era year rather than the Western year. It's kind of odd that they started displaying the Western year in 1988, the final year of the Showa Era (although they didn't know that then). The birthdates of the players on the front of the cards give the year in the Showa Era, even on the cards from 1988 and later. (And in case you're wondering, the 1978 cards didn't display a year at all.)
Engel's listings for these sets group all the sets for a year as a single set with a one "Set Value" for the full group of all 12 (or 6) teams. My gut feeling is that nobody thinks of Takara as a 360 card set but rather 12 30 card sets and a "Set Value" for each team set would probably be more useful.
Takara also issued smaller, 20 card boxed sets in 1984 that featured a simpler version of the game, apparently aimed at children. The sets are referred to as the "Takara Kids" sets and the cards are smaller then the regular Takara cards and were printed on a thicker card stock, making them resemble menko cards in some ways.
I did a post a LONG time ago (before I learned how to lay out photos properly) about these cards that included a post from the old Yahoo Japanese Baseball group from 2001 describing how to play the game. I would refer you to that post if you want more information on game play but basically you rolled the dice for each at bat for the player and you looked up the result of the dice roll on the back of the player's card to see what the outcome was.
I don't have cards from every year that Takara did sets but here's a card from every year that I have at least one (plus a Takara Kids card):
 |
| 1978 Takara Tigers #31 Masayuki Kakefu |
 |
| 1979 Takara Giants #24 Kiyoshi Nakahata |
 |
| 1981 Takara Orions #29 Choji Murata |
 |
| 1982 Takara Lions #27 Tsutomu Itoh |
 |
| 1984 Takara Carp #3 Sachio Kinugasa |
 |
| 1984 Takara Kids Giants #7 Reggie Smith |
 |
| 1986 Takara Hawks #60 Hiromitsu Kadota |
 |
| 1987 Takara Tigers #44 Randy Bass |
 |
| 1988 Takara Dragons #6 Hiromitsu Ochiai |
 |
| 1989 Takara Whales #1 Motonobu Tanishige |
 |
| 1990 Takara Buffaloes #11 Hideo Nomo |
 |
| 1991 Takara Swallows #27 Atsuya Furuta |
 |
| 1992 Takara Carp #33 Akira Etoh |
 |
| 1993 Takara BlueWave #51 Ichiro Suzuki |
 |
| 1994 Takara Marines #18 Hideki Irabu |
 |
| 1996 Takara Lions #32 Kazuo Matsui |
 |
| 1997 Takara Giants #55 Hideki Matsui |
You've probably noticed that the front design on a lot of these cards look similar to each other. Takara used roughly the same design from 1984 to 1995 with the exception of 1988. The 1981 to 1983 sets also used a similar design, as did the 1997 and 1998 sets.
