Nine Men Out

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole regarding the "Black Mist Scandal" last week while researching Masaaki Ikenaga for my post on the two 1968 Shonen Book cards I'd picked up.  The "Black Mist Scandal" was a really a series of scandals between 1969 and 1971 that involved the yakuza, game fixing in NPB and the fixing of auto races.  I'm not going to get too deep into the details here - you can read the Wikipedia article for a decent overview although I suspect the Japanese version is more accurate.  Instead I want to concentrate on the guys who were permanently banned from NPB because of the scandal and if I had any baseball cards of them.

There were nine players who effectively were made permanently ineligible to play or coach in NPB - Masayuki Nagayasu, Ikenaga, Yoshinobu Yoda, Akio Masuda, Kentaro Ogawa, Toshiaki Moriyasu, Isao Takayama, Tsutomu Tanaka and Kmihiro Sato.  Takayama, Tanaka and Sato had already retired as the scandal broke so I don't think they were ever officially banned - but all three have effectively been persona non grata in NPB since then.  (There's a discrepancy between the English and Japanese Wikipedia pages on the scandal - the English one lists Shoji Sakai, Takashi Suzuki and Akira Yano as having been banned instead of Sato and Takayama.  I don't think this is correct - Suzuki and Sakai served "indefinite suspensions" that only lasted about five months and Yano is never mentioned in the Japanese article.)

I went looking to see who I had cards from (other than Ikenaga).  I wasn't too surprised to discover I only had cards for three of the players - Yoda, Tanaka and Ogawa.  The scandal fell smack in the middle of the eight year stretch between the end of menko in 1964 and the start of Calbee in 1973 where there weren't many baseball cards produced in Japan.  But a couple of the players had started their careers early enough to show up on menko cards and at least one of the players (besides Ikenaga) was in the 1967 Kabaya-Leaf set.

1962 Marusho JCM 13b

Tsutomu Tanaka signed with the Nishitetsu Lions in 1961 after spending a few years in the corporate leagues.  His best season was 1966, when he went 23-12 with a Pacific League leading 217 strikeouts.  He also threw a perfect game that season and was named to the Best 9 team.  He was traded to Chunichi after 1967 and retired after 1969.  Because of his unofficial banning, he (and his perfect game) did not appear in either the 1994 BBM Perfect Pitching or the 2012 BBM No-Hitters sets.
 

1962 Marukami JCM 14e

Yoshinobu Yoda signed with the Lions in 1962 out of Yatsushiro Commercial High School.  He played for them until he was banished in 1970.

1967 Kabaya-Leaf #52

Kentaro Ogawa had a very odd career.  He originally signed with the Toei Flyers in 1954 after leaving Meizen High School but hurt his shoulder and never pitched for them.  After leaving the Flyers in 1955 he spent the next eight years in and out of the corporate leagues before signing with the Dragons in 1964 at age 30.  He had five solid years in the Dragons' rotation from 1965 to 1969, going 17-9 in 1965, 17-11 in 1966, 29-12 in 1967, 10-20 in 1968 and 20-12 in 1969.  1967 was obviously his best season - he led the Central League in wins and won both the Sawamura Award and a Best 9 Award.  He was a four time All Star also (1966-69).  He passed away in 1995 at age 61.

The odd thing about Ogawa is that BBM has actually issued cards of him!  He's in both the 2005 Dragons 70th Anniversary and the 2010 Dragons 75th Anniversary sets:

2005 BBM Dragons 70th Anniversary #35

2010 BBM Dragons 75th Anniversary #29

I'd have thought that BBM would have avoided doing cards of anyone on the permanently ineligible list but apparently I'm wrong.