NPB will be announcing this season's award winners on Wednesday and I thought it'd be a good time to bring up something I noticed recently. Between 1961 and 1977 there were only three seasons in which the Central League's MVP was NOT Sadaharu Oh or Shigeo Nagashima. During that 17 year stretch, Oh won nine MVPs while Nagashima won five. The three other players were Minoru Murayama of the Tigers in 1962, Tsuneo Horiuchi of the Giants in 1972 and Koji Yamamoto of the Carp in 1975.
The Central League MVP voters usually vote for players on the pennant winning team and the Giants won 13 of the 17 CL pennants over that stretch so you'd have expected there to be four non-Giant MVPs. However Oh won the MVP in 1964 (when the Tigers won the pennant) and again in 1974 (when the Dragons won) so it's only the two. Here's cards of all three - I tried to get them from the years the players were MVP but I couldn't do it for Horiuchi:
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| 1962 JCM 141 (Murayama) |
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| 1974-75 Calbee #758 (Horiuchi) |
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| 1975-76-77 Calbee #250 (Yamamoto) |
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