I've mentioned numerous times that Hideo Nomo has not had a Japanese card - at least not one depicting him in an NPB uniform -
since he left Japan for the Dodgers after the 1994 season. Recently I learned that that's not completely true. I saw a seller on Ebay who had listed a 2018 BBM card of Nomo (I hesitate to say he's "selling" it as I don't want to give any credibility to the ridiculously high price he's asking for it - over $600!). I swiped the images of the front and the back of the card from the auction:
In fairness, this appears to be some sort of promotional card for a Meikyukai event at the Tokyo Dome in November of 2018 and not something that would have come out of a pack or a box. But still, this is the first Japanese card that I've seen of Nomo in a Buffaloes uniform since 1994.
UPDATE - I got several responses on Twitter to my tweet about this card from folks who attended the Meikyukai event which was essentially an old timers game. Apparently it was billed as a "Nomo vs Hiroki Kuroda" game.
RT_262 tweeted out a number of photos from the game which he was kind enough to give me permission to include in this update:
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| Nomo |
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| Kuroda (I think that's Makoto Matsubara in the background) |
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| Isao Harimoto |
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| Sadaharu Oh |
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| Kazuo Matsui (I think) |
RT_262 is a Marines fan and attended the game to see
Kazuya Fukuura who had just joined the Meikyukai two months earlier and was still an active player at the time.
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| Fukuura in the field |
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| Fukuura at the plate |
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| Fukuura, Matsui and Kazuhiro Wada (I think) |
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| Nomo and Fukuura (that might be Choji Murata to the left of Nomo) |
The Nomo card was not the only card for the event. RT_262 shared the card for Fukuura. He said that the cards were given away when you entered the Dome.
Kicks82 shared the card he got of Harimoto:
He also shared the promotional image for the event:
I really like how the cards look. I'd love to find some of these for myself.
Thanks to RT_262 and Kicks82 for sharing their photos!
4 comments:
Interesting. It does look like it was something distributed at that event rather than packs. 600$ is a hard pas!
The seller did offer me 10% off :-)
Surprised BBM hasn't produced any Nomo tribute sets over the years. Isn't he considered a huge superstar among Japanese baseball fans? Or were people upset that he chose to cross the Pacific and plan in the MLB?
He is still considered a huge superstar and he was inducted into the Hall Of Fame on the first ballot, only the third player ever to do so (besides Victor Starffin and Sadaharu Oh). I really don't know if he's not allowing cards of himself or if the card companies (really BBM or Epoch at this point) don't want to include him - perhaps for fear of offending NPB. Keep in mind that Nomo embarrassed NPB by exploiting a loophole that allowed him to become an international free agent by voluntarily "retiring".
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