JMC 2003

Last week when I did my memorial post for Toshio Kanbe, I included a card that I thought was probably Kanbe from what I described as a set "of uncataloged, blank backed cards from around 1975".  I got curious about these cards since I don't think I'd ever paid a whole lot of attention to them since I got them.  What really surprised me is that I must not have made much of an effort to identify the players on them - although in my defense, I probably got them before I was aware of some of the uniform number references on line and before I could use the Google Translate app on my phone to translate text on baseball cards.  I have 20 cards from this set (assuming they're all from the same set) and I had only identified maybe half of the people appearing on the cards.  I sat down and worked through the cards again and was able to increase the number of identifications.

It then occurred to me that I should check to see if this was still an uncataloged set.  After all, Gary Engel has published several updates to the Vintage Edition of his "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist and Price Guide" since I got these cards (not that I remember when I got them but it was a while ago).  As it turns out, these cards are most likely from a set that Gary has dubbed "JMC 2003:  1976 Blank Backs".  Gary has identified 29 cards but acknowledges that there are likely more cards.  The JMC 2003 cards are 2" x 2 3/4" in size which match the cards I have.  The set has a scarcity rating of "R3", meaning there's "between 11 and 99 copies known of most cards."

Gary's description of the set is "Pure cards with white borders. Blank backed. Several picture-in-picture cards. A few cards have text in the background that is cut-off in the middle of phrases. Most likely, these cards used pictures cropped from various sources without license".  As we'll see in a minute, that description definitely applies to the cards that I have as well.  I think about half the cards I have are in Gary's list.

I had given these cards a date of 1975 but it's entirely possible that they are really from 1976.  Or it's possible they're from both years - I suspect that these cards were being randomly printed up by some outfit somewhere in Japan and they probably weren't concerned with making sure the cards made any sense to collectors 50 years later.

OK, enough back story.  Let's look at the cards.

 This first card shows a right handed hitter for the Dragons.  I have no idea who it is.

Based on the uniform number, I'm pretty certain that this is Takashi Yamaguchi of the Hankyu Braves

This is the first card I've shown that I think appears in Gary's list of cards for the set.  He lists a card for "Toshiharu Ueda wearing Braves jacket".  It does look like Ueda to me, who was the Braves manager at the time.

I'm pretty confident that both of these cards are Koichi Tabuchi of the Tigers.  Gary lists both cards with the top one being described as "full body/mid swing" and the lower one being "head & shoulders".  I'm not sure which ballpark he's superimposed on in the top card - I don't think it's Koshien.

This is one of the cards that I had not previously identified but I should have been able to.  For one thing, it looks like the player's uniform number is #8.  For another, while the text on the right is cut off a little, the top four kanji characters are still pretty obviously "山本 浩二" which is Koji Yamamoto (who wore #8 for the Carp).  Gary lists this card as well as "Koji Yamamoto - Ca RHB swinging"

Another Carp player but I don't know who it is.  Gary doesn't have anything listed that matches it.

This is the card of Toshio Kanbe that kicked this whole thing off.  Gary does not list this card either.

This is a very intriguing card.  I don't know the left handed Lotte Orions pitcher is, but given the mix of uniforms in the background, I suspect the photo was taken at an All Star game.  I think there's a Nankai Hawk to the left of the player and that may be Yutaka Fukumoto of the Braves (#7) to the immediate right.  If it IS from an All Star game, and one of the 1975 All Star games and the player is, in fact, a pitcher, then it's most likely Norihiro Mizutani who was the only left handed pitcher from Lotte on the 1975 Pacific League All Stars.

The inset photo is also interesting.  Just looking at it, I was pretty sure the guy on the left was Hiroshi Arakawa, who was managing the Swallows at this time.  But who's the guy on the right?  The text running down the side of the photo may give a clue as it says "Chatting with my mentor, coach Arakawa" (translation from Google translate so it might not be fully accurate).  Given who Arakawa's most famous pupil was, it's not unreasonable to assume the guy on the right is Sadaharu Oh.  

Gary lists a card of Arakawa as "H. Arakawa - Sw w/unknown Lotte LHP" which could be this card but it might not be.

This is Katsuya Nomura of the Hawks.  Gary has a card listed as "Katsuya Nomura - Ha #18[sic] at bat" that I assume is this one.

This is Isao Harimoto of the Nippon-Ham Fighters.  Gary has a card of Harimoto listed but he says he's with the Giants.  Harimoto was traded from the Fighters to the Giants after the 1975 season which is why I tagged these cards as a 1975 set.  I'm sure the card of Harimoto with the Giants is why Gary tagged the set as being from 1976.

This is another card that I didn't identify before but, through the wonders of Google translate, I can now tell is Swallows pitcher Hiromu Matsuoka.  The text on the left side of the card says something like "pitcher Hiromu Matsuoka's blazing fastball!".  Gary has this card listed as well (with a description of "RHP full body EOD [end of delivery]"

I'm fairly confident that this is Tsuneo Horiuchi of the Giants.  The number is obscured but Horiuchi wore #18 and that's possibly the number.  Other possibilities would be Takaaki Taniyama (#12) and Shigeru Kobayashi (#19) but Horiuchi was the biggest name of those three at the time (or pretty much anytime, really, although Kobayashi had a few good seasons with the Giants a little later than this before being dealt to the Tigers in the Suguru Egawa affair).  That's coach Yukinori Miyata (#83) in the background.  Engel does not list this card.

These are both Shigeo Nagashima, who was in his first two seasons managing the Giants in 1975-76.  Engel lists one Nagashima card which he describes as "portrait".  That could describe either one of these.

This is Shoji Sadaoka who was the Giants first round draft pick in the 1974 draft.  Gary has a card of Sadaoka listed that's simply described as "pitching" which may or not correspond to this card.

I'm pretty confident the guy on the right is Masaichi Kaneda who was managing Lotte at this time.  I don't know who the Swallows player on the left is (could also be a coach although I'm pretty sure it's not manager Arakawa).  Once again, this may be from an All Star game (since there was no interleague play in 1975).  The light standard in the background looks like the ones at Koshien which hosted Game One of the All Star series that year.  IF that's the case, the only Swallows on the Central League team that year were pitchers Matsuoka and Takeshi Yasuda, catcher Akihiro Oya and outfielder Tsutomu Wakamatsu.  Engel lists a card for Kaneda with the description "arm out to the right" which doesn't really fit this card.

This is obviously two Giants players but I don't know who they are.  If the orange text on the guy on the left's sleeve is his uniform number - it looks like #11 - then he's Yoshimasa Takahashi.  But that might not be a uniform number.  Gary lists a card with both Sadaoka and Horiuchi on it which might be this one but, then again, it might not be.  I could buy that that's Sadaoka on the left and Horiuchi on the right though.

This is another intriguing card.  I'm fairly certain that the guy on the left is Senichi Hoshino but I don't know who the guy on the right is.  Gary lists a card that shows both Hoshino and Wally Yonamine, who was the Dragons manager at the time.  While I'd love for this to be that card, I'm kind of skeptical that the guy on the right of this card is Yonamine, simply because I haven't seen any photos of Yonamine as Chunichi manager where he's not wearing glasses.

This last card is not listed in Engel but the players are easy to identify.  From left to right are Masakatsu Tsuchiya (#16) of the Dragons, Kazuhiko Kudo (#19) of the Tigers and Sadaoka (#20).  The three players were the top high school picks for each team in the 1974 draft with Tsuchiya and Sadaoka both being first round picks - Kudo was the Tigers second pick after Masaaki Koga (who ultimately didn't sign with the Tigers).  I suspect this photo was from the farm team All Star game (now called the "Fresh All Star Game" but was then called the "Junior All Star Game") that was held at Koshien in 1975 although I don't have any rosters from the game so I can't confirm that.

If anyone has any idea who the handful of guys that I haven't identified are, I'd be happy to hear suggestions.

1995 Densho Ichiro "Big Card"

I got a message from someone recently, asking me if I could identify a card he had.  He said he'd picked the card up in the early 2000s from someone who frequently traveled to Japan.  He included the following two photos showing the front and back of the card:

To be clear, the "card" is embedded in the upper center part of the larger sheet.  It has perforated edges, clearly intended to be punched out of the sheet.

The card owner included a few more details about the card:

• The card itself measured 6.75" x 4.75" with the full sheet being 9" x 7"
• The card stock is thinner than a normal baseball card but thicker than a typical magazine page

I had never seen anything like this before but my first impression was that this had been issued in a magazine of some sort.  The fact that there was something that looked suspiciously like page numbers on it ("13" in the lower left corner of the front and "14" in the lower right corner of the back) supported that theory.

I reached out to Gary Engel to see what he had to say about it.  Gary had never seen it before either but he was able to quickly figure out several things:

According to what it says on the card, it must have been an insert in a 1995 issue of Dengeki Shonen Magazine.  According to Japanese Wikipedia, Dengeki Shonen Magazine was produced from September 1994 through September 1996.  It was a Nintendo Gaming Magazine, but also contained comics having nothing to do with gaming.  According to Wikipedia, the concept of combining comics with Nintendo was a failure, and publication ceased after only two years.  I have the idea it was a monthly magazine, but I couldn't find out for sure.

The back of the card mentions that this card is the first of a series of Big Cards and that the series will continue in future issues.  The card is related to a contest in which those who can answer the four trivia questions about Ichiro on the back can receive free 10 card packs of 1995 BBM Baseball.  

I looked on Yahoo Japan and there aren't any copies of any issue of Dengeki Shonen Magazine for sale.  Therefore, maybe it is a rare magazine and thus the Ichiro is a rare card.  Apparently, most Nintendo gamers of the era weren't baseball fans. 

Gary also expressed surprised to continuously discover cards he'd never seen before.  "Even after being closely involved with Japanese baseball cards for nearly 40 years, I keep finding additional issues that were unknown to me on a weekly basis!"

I want to thank the owner of the card for reaching out to me about this and Gary for figuring out where it was from.

2004 BBM Chiba Lotte Marines Toppo set

I got an email the other day from Dan.  Well actually it was a group email sent to myself, Jason and Ryan.  Dan had picked up a BBM card of Seung-Yeop Lee from 2004 and was having difficulty identifying the set.  To complicate matters, Dan not only wanted to know what set the card was from but he wanted a complete checklist for the set to add to The Trading Card Database so that he could get the card graded.  He sent along the following scan of the front and back of the card:

Jason, Ryan and I were all stumped.  My first thought was that it was an insert card from the 2004 BBM Marines set but it didn't match what was in Engel.  Not only was the numbering prefix wrong but Lee wasn't card #10 in any of the insert sets.  Ryan and I both postulated that it could be some sort of related promotional set, especially since the image on the card resembled the one on Lee's bat card from the set:

Image Swiped From Yahoo! Japan Auctions

But typically BBM's promo sets are clearly marked as promo sets so this didn't seem all that likely.

Ryan came up with the breakthrough today.  He somehow discovered the set was called "千葉ロッテマリーンズチョコ付録カード" which translates roughly to "Chiba Lotte Marines Choco Appendix Card".  Doing a Google search on this gives you a link to an old website of a collector looking to trade for Marines cards.  He had one extra card from the set and was looking for two others.  As it turned out, I know the collector - he's a Marines fan named Takashi that I've done a couple trades with, most recently about a month ago.  I sent Takashi an email asking about the card and he provided a wealth of information about the set.

The set is actually a 10 card food-issued set printed up by BBM.  The cards were given away with packages of a chocolate candy called "Toppo" that was (and apparently still is) made by Lotte.  The cards were only given away in AM/PM convenience stores in the Kanto region.  Takashi pointed out that because it was a limited distribution the cards are difficult to find.  He provided the complete checklist for the set that Dan has already uploaded to Trading Card DB as well as another image of a card from the set (#MP9):

This set was not in either Engel or Sports Card Magazine so thanks to Dan, Ryan and Takashi, there's a previously unknown set that's now cataloged.