I just finished reading Rob Fitts' new book
Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer this past week. Once again Rob has written an excellent book that is well worth reading.
I got curious
again over what cards are out there for Murakami. There still only appear to be four cards of him from his playing days - 1967 Kabaya-Leaf #302, 1979 TCMA #37 and #37 in both the 1981 and 1982 Takara Fighters sets (along with his
1965 Topps #282 rookie card). I haven't seen any evidence that he ever had a Calbee card. The only one of these cards that I have is the TCMA one:
He's had more than twice that many card in the past 25 years. BBM did a "Murakami Memories" subset in 1993 (maybe for the 30th Anniversary of his NPB debut in 1963) that contained four cards - one for each team he played for (Nankai Hawks, San Francisco Giants, Hanshin Tigers and Nippon Ham Fighters):
 |
| 1993 BBM #476 |
 |
| 1993 BBM #477 |
 |
| 1993 BBM #478 |
 |
| 1993 BBM #479 |
He appeared in two 2005 BBM issues - the Fighters team set (#F94) and 2nd Version:
 |
| 2005 BBM 2nd Version #817 |
More recently he's appeared in a couple different OB sets, both from BBM and from Epoch:
 |
| 2008 BBM Hawks 70th Anniversary #24 |
 |
| 2009 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 15th Anniversary #47 |
 |
| 2013 BBM Hawks 75th Anniversary #15 |
He also appeared in the
2012 Epoch Geneology Of The Aces set (#22) which features what looks like the same photo as #476 from the 1993 BBM set.
2 comments:
There's also the O-Pee-Chee version of the Topps rookie card, and Giants team cards in the 1965 (#379) and 1966(#19) sets.
Thanks for the post. I thought I had a Murakami card since I spent so much buying the 75th anniversary BBM packs but I wonder if his card must have had the least number in production, because I have like 4 to 6 #10-#18 but zero for #15 (Murakami). So, I was a bit disappointed, I didn't own a Murakami card.
Post a Comment