Card Of The Week January 10

A little late this week. Deanna had a post up last week where she talked about going to the Pro Yakyu OB All-Star Athletes Cup game at the Tokyo Dome (which is replacing the Masters League this years). At the game, she was impressed by 60 year old Choji Murata, who was still reaching 83 miles per hour on his pitches. She had some pictures up of him and I thought it would be instructive to put up a card of him showing him from his playing days as a comparision. Here's his 2002 BBM All Time Heroes card (#181):


Looks pretty much the same to me!

Like Katsuya Nomura, Murata is curiously absent from recent OB sets. He doesn't appear in either the 2008 "Back To The 70's" or 2009 "Back To The 80's" sets or the Lotte 40th Anniversary set, although he was in the 2004 "Golden Arms" set.