I have a lot of Sadaharu Oh cards.
This isn't a complaint, it's just a statement. According to my database, I have in the neighborhood of 200 cards of Oh. That includes probably something like 100 or so from during his playing career. I have so many cards of Oh that I really don't see the point in adding many more. I mean, sure, Oh was a great player but, at this point, I'd rather spend my money on cards of players that I don't have 200 cards of, especially since Oh's cards tend to carry a premium.
But every so often, I see a card of Oh that I can't resist and I saw one a while back on Ebay. Nippon-Ham had issued baseball cards in the mid to late 1970's and there was a guy on Ebay selling several Oh cards from their sets at not outrageous prices. I saw this card and decided I needed to grab it for the $25 "buy-it-now" price:
This card commemorates Oh hitting his 756 home run to pass Hank Aaron on September 3rd, 1977 and was from a special set of seven cards that Nippon-Ham issued for this event. I was amused that the back appears to reproduce the scoreboard at Korakuen Stadium when Oh hit the home run:
3 comments:
That is a pretty cool Oh card, I am a casual late 70s Nippon Ham collector and haven't come across that one yet.
I think I must have several hundred Oh cards in my collection too. I think the 1975-76-77 Calbee set that I'm working on must have in the neighborhood of 100 or so just by itself (someday I'll have to sit down and count them).
Okay that back design idea is worth remembering and stealing from.
@Sean - It was a separate set than the regular cards. There's several of them up on Ebay right now.
According to TCDB, Oh has 129 cards in the 1975/76/77 set. That doesn't count the multi-player cards like the Central League leaders card though. Surprisingly, Shigeo Nagashima "only" has 57 - I suppose considering he was a manager and not a player at that point that's actually quite a lot. (Nagashima has 141 cards in the 1974-75 set to Oh's 89.)
@Nick - I thought it was a pretty cool idea
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