Card Of The Week July 21

It was the 65th Anniversary of The Emperor's Game a few weeks back.  If you're not familiar with this event, I'll give a quick synopsis - it was the first professional baseball game that the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) attended and Shigeo Nagashima won the game with a sayonara home run that was hit just before the Emperor was going to have to leave the ballpark.  I was kind of surprised to see an article about it on the Hall Of Fame's website.  That's the National Baseball Hall Of Fame - the Cooperstown, New York one.  The article appears to rely heavily on Robert Whiting's account of the game from "The Chrysanthemum And The Bat" as it repeats some of the incorrect details of the game such as the time the Emperor planned to leave the game - the article has it as 9:30 when it actually was 9:15.  I cut Robert Whiting a lot of slack for this - besides the fact that he's forgotten much more about Japanese baseball than I'll ever know, he wrote that particular book in the mid-70's and I think he at least partially did it from the US so he didn't have access to a lot of resources at the time.  I'm less forgiving of Luke McDonald, the author of the article, as he has no such excuse.

The particularly egregious thing in the article is the following passage:  

Although the Emperor’s Game was momentous for Japanese baseball history, sources vary about the details. The date of the game, for example, is a topic of contention. Various historians describe it as taking place on June 19, June 26, or an unspecified date in May.

Um...no.  There is no contention about the date of the game.  The game was played on June 25, 1959.  This isn't some event two thousand years ago with the only available information a Sanskrit tablet of dubious authenticity - it's a major event from just 65 years ago, with contemporaneous reports in newspapers and magazines.  Several of the participants in the game - most notably Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh - are still alive.

I only know of three English language books that reference the game and only one of them has the right date.  Whiting has it occurring on an unspecified day in May of 1959.  "Sadaharu Oh - A Zen Way of Baseball" by Oh and David Falkner, published in 1984, has the date as June 26th, 1959.  Only Rob Fitts' biography of Wally Yonamine, published in 2008, has the correct date of June 25th.

However, the on-line Japanese sources are unanimous that the game was on the 25th.  The Japanese Wikipedia page for "Sporting Events Attended By The Showa Emperor" has the game occurring on the 25th.  The "Nippon Professional Baseball Records" website, which is the closest thing to Baseball-Reference for NPB, has the game on June 25th.  This video clip on YouTube shows the date as June 25th:

It's also correctly referenced on a couple baseball cards.  One of the cards I brought home from this trip commemorates this game - it's from the 1999 BBM Mr. Giants set (#G30):

While the front of the card doesn't mention the date, the back does:

I replied to the Hall Of Fame's tweet of the article with references that showed that the game was definitively on June 25th but they have not updated it.