Japanese Baseball Hall Of Fame

I decided to take in the Japanese Baseball Hall Of Fame when it opened at 10 on the morning of my first full day in Tokyo.  I was a little concerned that I wouldn't have enough time to go through it before the first WBC game that day (at noon).  It turned out that I was needlessly worried.

The Hall Of Fame is located on the outside of the Tokyo Dome, between Gate 21 and the To-Do Baseball Shop (where I bought a Chunichi Dragons hat).

Hall Of Fame Entrance

Admission is extremely cheap - only 500 yen.  And you can actually save 100 yen by using a coupon from the museum's web site.

I walked in and paid my fee and was rewarded with a small guide for the museum and a postcard featuring the latest inductees to the Hall Of Fame:

The Hall Of Fame is actually located beneath the entrance area, so I went downstairs and saw at the foot of the stairs a small display on the 2013 WBC:

I went to the left into the exhibition area for professional baseball.  This area is split into two rooms.  The first room has "lockers" made up for each of the 12 teams in NBP.  Each locker contains a uniform and hat along with bats, gloves, shoes and other items for players for those teams:

Central League lockers

Pacific League lockers

More Pacific League lockers

Dragons locker

Lions locker - I think it's Hiroyuki Nakajima's uniform

The second room had more historical stuff.  There were displays in the center of the room dedicated to specific players:

Sadaharu Oh's display

Yutaka Fukumoto's display

Sachio Kinugasa's display

Masaichi Kaneda's display

I want to stress that these were the only four players who had displays in this section.  I don't know if they rotate memorabilia from different players through these or if they always just have these four players (a book I have from 1999 that shows pictures from the Hall Of Fame shows these four players' displays as well so maybe they always have them out).  Perhaps it's because they are the all time home run leader (Oh), stolen base leader (Fukumoto), consecutive games played leader (Kinugasa) and victory leader (Kaneda).

The rest of the room had other displays on the wall.  Not being able to read Japanese was a major drawback here.  I'm not quite sure what this display was for:

On the other hand, I didn't need to understand Japanese to know what this was:

Sadaharu Oh's sword

Or this:

Commemorative "slab" for Oh passing Aaron

The next section in the museum was dedicated to the "history of baseball".  Honestly, I don't really remember much from this room.  I don't think I took any pictures.  Again, there were a lot of displays in Japanese that I couldn't read.  But it was in either the previous room or this one that I found a display of baseball cards:

I think these are 1958 Fujiya Carmel cards

1949 Karuta "Dreaming Of Baseball" cards

There was also a display case showing American cards of Japanese players.  I was very disappointed to not see any Calbee or BBM cards displayed anywhere.

The next section was dedicated to amateur baseball.  Lots of high school and college stuff.  I was surprised to see this there:

Cal Ripken World Series trophies

I go all the way to Tokyo and see trophies that were originally awarded about five miles from my house.

There was also a display on the Olympic teams (including the teams made of professionals):

The final room of the "permanent exhibits" was the actual Hall Of Fame - the room containing all the plaques of players.  For some reason, I didn't take a picture of the entire room (probably because of my jet lag), but I took lots of pictures of individual plaques.  Here's a couple:

Sadaharu Oh

Katsuya Nomura

When I came out of the room with the plaques, I was back where I started at the foot of the stairs.  When I had come down the stairs originally I had gone to my left.  I now went to the right.  There was a small area with a wall frieze and a video display (don't remember what it was showing) and several sections of seats.  I assume that these are seats from different ballparks but I don't know which ones:

A little further along was an area where you could swing a bat against an NBP pitcher.  There was a group of high school kids in the museum and they pretty much were monopolizing it:

I think the machine was throwing wiffle balls.  I don't think they'd have displays set up on either side otherwise.  I think the displays had something to do with stadiums but I didn't get a good look.

The final room in the museum was a special exhibit dedicated to the World Baseball Classic.  It had a lot of memorabilia from the 2006 and 2009 tournaments, including the trophies:

There was also a small display of autographed baseball cards (all US cards of non-Japanese players):

There's also a small library at the Hall Of Fame.  Ralph Pearce had suggested that I ask for a particular person that he knew who worked there, but the museum was busy enough that I didn't really want to try.  I was thinking that I might make it back there later in the trip but it didn't happen.

I was kind of surprised at how small the museum was.  I probably didn't spend any more than about 20 minutes there.  I was severely jet lagged so I had limited patience to try to figure anything out much.  I'd hoped to come back again later in the trip and give it another try but time ran out.

I was also surprised that there really wasn't a museum shop.  There were a couple items in display cases upstairs in the entrance hall that you could buy if the person running admissions wasn't busy.  I think everything they had to offer is on this web page.

To summarize - I think the Hall Of Fame is worth taking a look at if you're going to Tokyo anyway, but unlike Cooperstown it's not a place that's worth going way out of your way for.    It's a great way to kill an hour before a game at the Tokyo Dome.

Free Shipping from Rakuten Global Market

Rakuten Global Market has got a free shipping deal going on with some of the stores that sell through it.  They'll pay up to 5000 yen of your shipping costs if you spend 10000 yen at one of the stores.  The deal is good through 10 AM Japan Time on Friday morning (9 PM Thursday on the East Coast of the US).  Items must be shipped by the end of June to get the free shipping, so you may be able to preorder boxes of cards and take advantage of this deal.

I haven't done a thorough look to see what card shops are participating, but I did see that Niki is.

Card Of The Week May 12

Hitoshi Tamura of the Baystars hit two home runs Friday night against Yomiuri, including a three run sayonora shot in the bottom of the ninth, turning a 10-9 Giant lead into a 12-10 Baystar victory.

Tamura is back in Yokohama (the team he was originally drafted by) after a six year stint with the Hawks.  Here's a card of his from 2007, his first year in Fukuoka:

2007 Calbee #020

2000 Upper Deck Japanese Olympic Team Set

A couple months back Ryan posted what I thought was a very interesting card that he'd found in a shop in Nagoya - a card of 2000 Japanese Olympic Baseball Team member Yoshikazu Doi.  This card was apparently from a larger set that Upper Deck did for the entire Japanese delegation to the Sydney games.

I am a sucker for National Team sets but I had never heard of this one so I was very intrigued.  Unlike the previous Olympic teams that were mostly made up of college and/or industrial league players and later Olympic teams that were exclusively NBP players, the 2000 Japanese Olympic baseball team was a hybrid of 10 NBP players, 13 industrial league players and one college player.  Several of the industrial league players have since gone on to NBP and become stars, including Norihiro Akahoshi, Toshiya Sugiuchi and especially Shinnosuke Abe.  Up to now, the only cards I knew of for this team were an eight card subset in the 2001 Calbee set that didn't even include all of the NBP players.

Ryan had only seen the one baseball player along with a bunch of other sports.  Doi's card was #222 but he had no idea how many other baseball cards there were (or even if there were any others).  I started looking around.  I found a lot of 100 or so cards from the set on Yahoo! Auctions Japan that I picked up via kuboTEN.  I also found singles from the set at Wrappers in Tokyo.  (I don't know if other stores had singles or not because I didn't think to look until I was at Wrappers.)  Between these two sources, I've managed to locate 14 cards for the team.  What I don't know is how many cards there are and if there are actually cards for all 24 team members.

The cards I have so far are numbered between 214 and 230.  So that's 17 cards right there.  But obviously there could be cards before 214 and after 230, couldn't there?  I took a look at the lot of cards I got from the auction and saw that the last number I have before the baseball cards is #207 and the first number after the baseball cards is #232.  So the entire subset COULD start at #208 and go to #231.  And that would give us 24 cards, enough for the entire team.  UPDATE - yeah, it COULD have started at #208, but it doesn't.  According to what Jason's found on the web, the subset starts at #213 and goes to #231.  So 19 cards in all.

If only the lot I won had included the checklist card for that part of the set...

So here's what I do know exists (UPDATED with what Jason found):

213 Daisuke Matsuzaka
214 Tomohiro Kuroki
215 Nobuhiko Matsunaka
216 So Taguchi
217 Yukio Tanaka
218 Norihiro Nakamura
219 Masato Kawano
220 Fumihiro Suzuki
221 Toshiya Sugiuchi
222 Yoshikazu Doi
223 Masanori Sugiura
224 Kosuke Noda
225 Yoshinori Okihara
226 Jun Heima
227 Osamu Nogami
228 Yoshihiko Kajiyama
229 Norihiro Akahoshi
230 Tomohiro Iizuka

231 Shunsuke Watanabe

And here's the list of guys on the roster who are not accounted for so far do not have cards:

Shinnosuke Abe

Jun Hirose

Masanori Ishikawa

Akichika Yamada

Yuji Yoshima

Here's a couple sample cards.  Upper Deck reused their design from the 1999 Victory set for these:

#215

#221

#217

It's very hard to find any "pre-rookie" cards of any NBP players (unless they went to one of the Tokyo Big Six schools since 2008) so the idea of being able to find an Abe card from before he was drafted by the Giants is pretty cool.  UPDATE - Unfortunately, he doesn't have a card in the set.  But "pre-rookie" cards of Sugiuchi and Akahoshi are pretty cool too.

Many thanks to Jason for filling in the empty spaces.

Motonobu Tanishige

Ho-hum, another day, another 2000 hit milestone reached.  Today it was Motonobu Tanishige of the Dragons getting hits 1999 and 2000.  If it seems like there's a lot of guys reaching 2000 hits lately, you're right.  This is the third one this season and there were three guys last season.  And we're probably not done for the year - Tadahito Iguchi is currently at 1931 hits between NPB (1437) and MLB (494).

Tanishige was a 1st round pick of the Whales in the 1989 draft (same round as Kenjiro Nomura).  He debuted in 1989 and remained with Yokohama through the 2001 season, winning a championship in 1998.

The earliest card of Tanishige is from the Takara Whales set in 1989.  His first Calbee card is #42 of the "small" sized 1990 cards (plus a premium "Big" card).  His first BBM card is #200 of the inaugural 1991 set - I believe that he is the only player to have a card in every "flagship" BBM set so far including all of the 1st and 2nd Version sets but I could be wrong.

1989 Takara Whales #1

1990 Calbee "Small" #42

1992 BBM #476

1998 BBM Nippon Series #S14

2000 Epoch "Pro Baseball Sticker" #148

That 1992 card is the only one I've seen with him sporting a mustache.

After 13 seasons with the BayStars, Tanishige headed west for Nagoya for the 2002 season.  He has remained with the Dragons ever since.  He won another Nippon Series in 2007 and played on the losing side in 2004, 2006, 2010 and 2011.

2002 BBM 1st Version #131

2003 Chunichi Sports #7

2007 BBM 2nd Version #599

2012 BBM 1st Version #387

In addition to his NBP career, Tanishige has also been a member of the Japanese National Team twice - in 2003 for the Asian Championship (a qualifier for the 2004 Olympics) and in 2006 for the first World Baseball Classic.  He does not appear on any WBC cards, but he does appear in BBM's 2003 Japan National Team set:

2003 BBM Japan National Team #14

Other Sets

I wanted to talk briefly about a couple other sets I picked up in Japan.  There were three older sets that I bought, so they didn't really fit in with the post I did a few weeks back about the opened box sets I got.

1999 Calbee Series Four Gold Signature Parallel

I picked this up at G-Freak as part of the trade I made with the store owner.  In 1999 and 2000, Calbee produced a gold signature parallel version.  The complete parallel version of each Calbee series was available in a box that could be obtained through some sort of mail order premium (I think there was some sort of "winner" card randomly inserted in the packs).  The box I got was for the fourth series of the 1999 Calbee set (#217 to #270), which included the All Star subset (#252 to #270).  I actually didn't end up with a complete series - the box I got was missing four cards - all members of the Chiba Lotte Marines.  Given that the set included cards of Ichiro and Hideki Matsui, I didn't think it was that big of deal that it was missing Tomohiro Kuroki.  Here's the box and some sample cards:

#244

#230

#265

#256

Box

2005 BBM Tigers 70th Anniversary

I picked this set up at Mint Kanda for 1000 yen.  I had opened a couple packs of it back when it had come out but I decided that I'd buy the complete set if I could find it at a reasonable price.  1000 yen was extremely reasonable.

The set was the first to really establish the "standard pattern" for BBM's team anniversary sets.  It''s the now standard 99 cards (the 2004 Giants 70th Anniversary set was 104 cards).  The first seven cards in the set are "team history" cards featuring some significant events in team history.  There are 65 cards of OB players and 24 cards of "current" (2005) Tigers players (including then manager Akinobu Okada). There are also three "Memorial Shot" cards that each feature two of the following players - Yutaka Enatsu, Minoru Murayama and Koichi Tabuchi.  The OB players include who you'd expect - Enatsu, Murayama, Tabuchi, Randy Bass, Yoshio Yoshida, Masayuki Kakefu, etc.  I haven't noticed anyone obviously missing.  As is kind of standard for BBM's OB sets, the player selection is heavy on guys from the 1960's and later.

Here's a couple example cards:

#02

#53

#49

#73

#89

2011 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 1987 parallel set

I was not a fan of the set Epoch put out for the All Japan Baseball Foundation in 2011 that featured the year 1987.  I thought the player selection was kind of poor and I just wasn't terribly impressed with the set (it was one of the things that made me stop buying the AJBF sets).  I was intrigued, however, when Ryan mentioned last fall that there was a parallel issue to the set that looked like Calbee cards from 1987.  I decided that if I saw some of them, I'd pick them up.

Well, at Quad Sports, the very first card shop I went to in Japan, I saw that they had the entire parallel set available for 2500 yen.  I was pretty excited to finally be in a store where I could find Japanese baseball cards so I kind of got caught up in the moment and bought it.  In retrospect, I think I overpaid for it.  Don't get me wrong - it's a cool little set.  I just think I paid too much for it.

The regular set contains 59 cards, of which 48 are player cards.  The parallel set features 50 cards - one for each of the 48 player cards plus parallel versions of the "1987 Highlight" cards of the pennant winning managers Sadaharu Oh and Masaaki Mori.  The pictures on the parallel cards are identical to the ones on the original cards (which is obvious I guess - otherwise they wouldn't be a parallel then, would they?).  The backs are completely different and vaguely Calbee-ish.  There are two different versions - blue backs and brown backs.  I have the blue backs.  Ryan says that he thinks the blue backs are more rare but I don't know if that's really the case.  

Ryan also shows that there were similar parallel issues for Epoch's 1977 set as well.  I didn't see any of those while I was in Japan.

You can see many of the 1987 parallels here.  Here's an example showing Hideo Furuya's regular and parallel cards as well as an actual 1987 Calbee card of him:

#34

#RP34

#48

Since the scans get resized when they get displayed, it's not immediately obvious that the parallel is exactly the same size as the Calbee card and both are somewhat smaller than the regular card.