Japanese Baseball Cards: Vintage

Showing posts with label Vintage. Show all posts

Monday, April 28, 2025

Mel Bailey Postcards

I got an email a few weeks back from someone who was trying to put together a comprehensive list of Mel Bailey postcards. Mel Bailey was a US Air Force captain stationed in Japan in the mid to late 1960's who - along with Navy CPO Bud Ackerman - was responsible for importing a number of NPB card sets to the US. Bailey also took photos at baseball games in both Japan and the US and sold postcards featuring these photos on them. I had picked up ten of his postcards some time ago and was able to provide the person who contacted me with the list of what I had.

During our email exchange, he mentioned that there was a Mel Bailey postcard of Dick Stuart available on Ebay. I was sorely tempted by it since there aren't any known baseball cards of Stuart during his two years with the Taiyo Whales. But I was also trying to keep my vow of not buying anything that wasn't on my want list. I finally gave in and pulled the trigger right before the auction ended. Here's the postcard:

I found it interesting that there were some differences between this postcard and the ones I already had. For one thing, this one is slightly larger than the others - it's 3 3/4 inches wide and 5 1/2 inches high while the others are 3 1/2 inches wide and 5 7/16 inches high. The other obvious thing is that the other postcards I have seem to have a softer focus - although I'm not sure I'm really using the correct terminology. Here's the other ten postcards so you can maybe see what I'm trying to talk about:

Yukio Nishimoto

Minoru Murayama

Katsuya Nomura

Futoshi Nakanishi

Katsuo Ohsugi

Masaaki Koyama

Masaichi Kaneda

Tetsuharu Kawakami

One other significant difference is the backs of the postcards. My correspondent said that Bailey mostly printed his postcards on Kodak paper but also used EtchTone and Mitsubishi. All of the ones that I had already had were on Kodak paper:

I played with the contrast a little in that image to make the writing a little more visible. I believe that that's Bailey's handwriting identifying the player.

The Stuart card, however, used Mitsubishi paper:

It barely shows up in the scan but Bailey had stamped "Photo By Mel Bailey" just to the left of the line in the center. I don't know if Bailey wrote "1966" on this but it's not correct - Stuart spent 1966 with the Mets and Dodgers.

Since there were very few NPB baseball cards produced in the late 60's, Bailey's postcards are an intriguing way to maybe fill in some gaps.

Monday, October 28, 2024

The Mets Tour Japan

50 years ago this month, the New York Mets embarked on an 18 game, 12 city tour of Japan that lasted almost four weeks. In fact, 50 years ago this evening they were playing in their second game of the tour, a 10 inning 4-4 tie against the Yomiuri Giants at Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo. They played five games at Korakuen on the tour with the remaining games being in Sapporo, Sendai, Koriyama, Niigata, Toyama, Osaka (2 games), Matsuyama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Kokura, Nagoya and Shizuoka. The Mets would go 9-7-2 in Japan, putting up a 3-0 record against an "All Japan" all star team, a 3-1 record against teams that combined the Yomiuri Giants' roster with another teams (the Hawks in Osaka, the Carp in Hiroshima, the Lions in Fukuoka and the Dragons in Nagoya) but only 3-6-2 against Yomiuri.

You can read all the details about the series in Henry Tran's article on it in "Nichibei Yakyu: US Tours Of Japan 1960-2019 (Volume 2)" which was my primary source of information for this post. There's a couple pieces of trivia that I found interesting:

These were the final games that Shigeo Nagashima ever played in as he had retired less than two weeks before the Mets arrived
These were the final games that Tetsuharu Kawakami managed as he announced his retirement at the end of the tour
Joe Torre had been traded to the Mets about ten days before the tour started but insisted on coming with the team
There was a home run hitting contest between Henry Aaron and Sadaharu Oh held before the sixth game on November 2nd at Korakuen. Aaron won 10-9. This was commemorated on a Calbee card from the 1977 "Oh Series" (#93):

Speaking of baseball cards, the really interesting thing about the Mets tour is that there's a baseball card set for it! Ed Broder was stationed in Japan with the US Air Force in the 1970's and he published and sold six somewhat primitive sets of NPB baseball cards. These were all obviously unlicensed, home brew cards but, as Gary Engel has pointed out, "most pre-1973 Japanese cards of all types are unlicensed" so these cards don't carry the same sort of stigma as some of the more recent ones.

Broder's first set was a 20 card one for the Mets tour. It featured nine player cards for the Mets (including manager Yogi Berra), eight player cards for the Yomiuri Giants and three cards featuring multiple players. All the photos are in black and white and the card stock is pretty thin, more like a thick piece of paper than a baseball card. The cards are all about 1 7/8 inches wide and three inches high.

Meet the Mets:

Yogi Berra

Wayne Garrett

Ron Hodges

Jerry Koosman

Jon Matlack

Felix Millan

John Milner

Tom Seaver

George Theodore

The other members of the Mets who did not have cards include Torre, Ed Kranepool, Benny Ayala, Bruce Boisclair, Ike Hampton, Ted Martinez, Bob Apodaca, Harry Parker and Jack Aker, although Torre and Kranepool are on the multiple player cards. Some of the Mets more famous players at the time like Rusty Staub, Tug McGraw, Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson and Cleon Jones had decided not to make the trip.

Here are the cards for the Giants:

Tsuneo Horiuchi

Kazumasa Kono

Shigeo Nagashima

Sadaharu Oh

Shitoshi Sekimoto

Toshimitsu Suetsugu

Kazumi Takahashi

Yoshimasa Takahashi

Some of the Giants players are misidentified on the backs of the cards. For example, Suetsugu is identified as "Tamio Suetsugu" on his card.

Here are the three multi-player cards:

Kazuyoshi Yamamoto & Joe Torre

Kazuyoshi Yamamoto & Tetsuharu Kawakami

Ed Kranepool, John Milner, Sachio Kinugasa & Joe Torre

Here's what the backs of the cards look like. As you can see, they're pretty primitive as well with the team logo having that "photo copier" reproduction quality that I was familiar with as a kid when I copied a photo from a book in the Xerox copier at the library:

Four members of the Mets would eventually play in Japan. Millan played for the Yokohama Taiyo Whales from 1978 to 1980; Garrett played for the Chunichi Dragons in 1979 and 1980 (his brother Adrian played for the Carp from 1977 to 1979); Boisclair played for the Hanshin Tigers in 1980 and Hampton played for the Kintetsu Buffaloes in 1981. I do not know of any Japanese baseball cards for Boisclair or Hampton but both Millan and Garrett have Calbee and Takara cards. The only NPB cards I have for either of them, however, is from another unlicensed set made by Americans - the 1979 TCMA set:

1979 TCMA #77

1979 TCMA #52

Thursday, April 4, 2024

Another Zippy Zapping!

On Monday of this week, I got home from work to discover I had received another large box of goodies from Kenny, better known in the collecting community as Zippy Zappy. Kenny has been downsizing his card collection recently and there's been several other card bloggers who've done posts about the care packages they've received from him. And you need to read Kenny's post about the absolutely incredible way he disposed of his largest player collection.

My box contained a couple binders and 800 count box of cards that was only partly full. I was able to immediately put the binders to good use. It's like Kenny was reading my mind because I was getting ready to order a couple small ones and now I don't have to.

Off hand, I'm not sure how many cards were in the box but it was probably in the neighborhood of 500 or 600. What was amazing was that there were around 110 or so that I didn't already have. I mean, I have a LOT of Japanese baseball cards so it's really hard for someone to gift me cards that I don't already have. But once again, Kenny did it!

I'm not going to go over all the cards he sent but I do want to try to give a pretty good overview of what he sent that I didn't already have. Kenny is a Dragons fan (like me) so a lot of the cards were Dragons related. He is (or was) a fan of Hiroki Kuroda and (to a lesser extent) Masahiro Tanaka so you'll see all that reflected in the cards I'm going to show.

Let's start off with a couple vintage 1970's menko cards:

1975 Pepsi Menko (Osamu Hirose)

1976 Mitsuya Round Menko JRM 12 (Hiroaki Inoue)

There was also some Calbee's from the 20th Century:

1987 Calbee #166 (Sadaaki Yoshimura)

1997 Calbee #141

And a bunch of 21st Century Calbee - heavy on the Kurodas:

2001 Calbee #169

2001 Calbee #091

2002 Calbee #030

2002 Calbee #AS-04

2003 Calbee #OP-03

2004 Calbee #064

2005 Calbee #062

2005 Calbee #IL-17

2006 Calbee #188

2007 Calbee #IL-11

2007 Calbee #T-15

2009 Calbee #239

2009 Calbee #142

2010 Calbee #TP-15

2012 Calbee #S-49

2014 Calbee #S-20

2015 Calbee #S-19

2016 Calbee #L-08

2018 Calbee #S-22

2019 Calbee #S-37

2020 Calbee #S-21

There were a bunch of cards from various BBM Dragons team sets over the years. First up a card from the 1997 set:

1997 BBM Dragons #D36

A couple cards from the 2012 BBM The Master Of Dragons set - that's a /100 "Printed Autograph" card of Yudai Kawai:

2012 BBM The Master Of Dragons #18

A handful of cards from the 2014 Dragons set:

2014 BBM Dragons #D72

2014 BBM Dragons #D75

2014 BBM Dragons #D83

2014 BBM Dragons #D78 (Koji Fukutani)

A bunch of inserts from BBM Dragons sets between 2014 and 2019. Most of these don't scan well and the ones that REALLY don't scan well are serially numbered:

2014 BBM Dragons #KR6

2015 BBM Dragons #RD03

2016 BBM Dragons #FS1

2017 BBM Dragons #AC1

2017 BBM Dragons #SM3

2017 BBM Dragons #HB2

2017 BBM Dragons #NM1

2017 BBM Dragons #TP2

2018 BBM Dragons #UN3

2019 BBM Dragons #BL1

There were some cards from some other BBM team sets as well (the Tigers card is a foil parallel):

2008 BBM Hawks #H18

2008 BBM Tigers #T-021

2007 BBM Card #C94,C95&C96

2007 BBM Carp Koibumi #15

2007 BBm Giants #G049

There were two "Rivals" insert cards from the 1997 BBM set. These were diecut cards that paired two players from each team and could be put together to form a full photo of the team's ballpark: