- There's a guy claiming to be selling a card of "Sadaharu Oh All Time Home Run King" except that he isn't - he's selling a 1981 Calbee card of Masayuki Kakefu of the Hanshin Tigers. So he doesn't even have the right team. I sent the seller a message two weeks ago and he hasn't changed the listing, so I don't feel TOO bad mocking him here. I realize that he's probably unfamiliar with Japanese baseball and that Oh is probably the only Japanese player prior to Hideo Nomo that he'd ever heard of, but if I were to put a 1977 card of Dave Parker up on eBay and claim it was Henry Aaron, people would think I was an idiot. Sure, there's a superficial similarity between Parker and Aaron, but they don't look that much alike. Same with Oh and Kakefu.
- There's another guy out there selling three "Ichiro Suzuki 1992 Japanese Rookie Graded Gem Mint 10" cards. The links are here, here and here. The seller is selling a bunch of "blank back rookie cards" and notes that "All have the same design (just a photo on the front) and I assume the same manufacturing date is of one recently and not what is on the labels as those are just the years the player was on that team as some are pretty old dates." So in other words, the cards were printed more recently that the year listed on the grading slab. So why call them "rookie" cards then, when you know they aren't? Anyway, it's clear to me that at least one of the pictures is from later than 1992. This card shows some Japanese characters above the "KOBE" patch on his right sleeve - that text did not appear on Orix uniforms until the 1995 or 1996 seasons - it could be in commemoration of the Great Hanshin Earthquake which devastated Kobe in January, 1995. One of the other pictures looks a lot like the one used for Ichiro's 1993 Tomy card (#102):
3 comments:
Browsing around eBay, you'll find hundreds of homebrew cards from someone's personal "grading company". And annoyingly, it seems more common than not for sellers to label ANY Japanese card of a Japanese player as a "rookie". Doesn't seem to matter to them that the card was printed, and is clearly labeled as being some 5-10 years AFTER the player's actual rookie card was issued.
Another one to watch out for are the 1950 Babe Ruth menko cards (cataloged JCM21). There are a ton of them, many graded and somewhat safe. However there are some that are not graded- some look OK, but others claim to be 'blank backed', or do not show the back. These are all fake- the cards are cut from a sheet that has 52 cards plus a Joker (Ruth), like playing cards, with blue printed playing-card-type designs. Below is a link to one Ruth claimed to be 'blank backed'- it is a fake:
http://cgi.ebay.com/1950-Japan-Menko-JCM-21-Babe-Ruth-MINT-60-Yr-Old-RARE_W0QQitemZ360230048256QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUS_Baseball?hash=item53df625200
It's struck me in the past that some of the older bromide and menko cards as well as the Broder issues of the 1970's might be easy to fake, but figured it was unlikely as there wasn't much money to made from it. I guess this would be the exception.
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