Card Of The Week May 21

I try not to celebrate arbitrary milestones of this blog but I couldn't help but note that this is the 800th "Card Of The Week" post.  I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to start doing them in the early days of the blog but I've only skipped two weeks since the first one for December 2, 2007 (which was the seventh post on the blog).  (In case you're wondering, the two weeks I've missed were August 31, 2008 and August 14, 2014.  I know I missed the latter because of my first back surgery - and I guess I hadn't learned how to write posts ahead of time and schedule them to be published - but I'm not quite sure why I missed the one in 2008.  I think we were away that weekend but I don't know why I didn't just do it later in the week.) 

I thought it'd be fun to celebrate by sharing one of the 1978 Calbee cards commemorating Sadaharu Oh's 800th home run.  There's just one problem with that plan - I don't have any of those cards.  So instead I'll share a couple cards from the 2009 BBM Sadaharu Oh Memorial set (which is kind of repetitive since I used a card from that set to celebrate the 700th "Card Of The Week" post almost two years ago).  Here's the front and back of card #05 and the front of card #49:

Oh won't be able to help me when I reach 900 but I have until April of 2025 to figure out what to do for it.

RIP Futoshi Nakanishi

The news broke today that Hall Of Famer Futoshi Nakanishi passed away from heart failure on May 11th.  He was 90 years old.  

Nakanishi was born in Takamatsu in Kagawa prefecture on Shikoku, the hometown of legendary managers (and rivals) Osamu Mihara and Shigeru Mizuhara.  Mihara in particular would be a major influence on Nakanishi as it was Mihara who signed him to his first professional contract with the Nishitetsu Lions after Nakanishi finished high school.  Nakanishi actually wanted to go to Tokyo and attend Waseda University (Mihara's alma mater) but his parents arranged for him to join the Lions without his knowledge.  

He joined the Lions (managed by Mihara) in 1952 and hit ..281 with 12 home runs as a 19 year old, good enough to win the Rookie Of The Year award.  He really burst out the following year, hitting .314 with 36 home runs and 86 RBIs.  The latter two values led the league that year.  He put up similar numbers over the next five seasons, helping the Lions win three consecutive Nippon Series championships over the Giants in 1956-58.  During this stretch he also married Mihara's oldest daughter Toshiko.

Unfortunately his career then took a turn for the worse.  He got spiked during the 1959 season and missed half the year.  In 1960 he developed tendonitis in his wrist and tried to strength it by playing through it which probably made it worse.  He bounced back somewhat in 1961, hitting .304 in 99 games with 21 home runs.

He was made player-manager of the Lions in 1962 and led them to the Pacific League pennant the following year, losing to the Giants in seven games in the Nippon Series.  That would be his last season as a semi-regular, hitting .282 with 11 home runs in 81 games.  His playing time diminished over the rest of the decade with him only getting seven plate appearances in 1969, his final season.  He both retired as a player and resigned as manager at the end of the season, taking some responsibility as the "Black Mist" scandal broke as the season ended.

After spending 1970 as a commentator on TBS, Nakanishi embarked on a remarkable coaching odyssey that would see him coach or manage for seven teams over the next 27 years.  He spent 1971 to 1973 with the Yakult Atoms and is credited with helping Tsutomu Wakamatsu developing as a hitter.  He was then the first manager of the Nippon-Ham Fighters in 1974-75.  He became a coach for Hanshin in 1979 and took over as manager in 1980 when Don Blasingame got fired.  He kept the job through the end of the 1981 season.  He went back to Yakult in 1983 and again took over the manager's job in 1984 when Shiro Takagami resigned in mid-season.  He resigned himself 18 games later and Masayuki Dobashi ran the team the rest of the year.

It was on to Kintetsu in 1986 and he'd spend six years there as just a coach.  He spent a year with the Giants in 1992 and then joined the Marines in 1994.  Lightning struck again in Chiba for him as he replaced Soroku Yagisawa as manager in mid-season and guided the team for the remainder of the season (before being replaced by Bobby Valentine for the 1995 season).  His last three years coaching were spent with the Orix BlueWave from 1995 to 1997.

Nakanishi was a seven time All Star (1953-1955, 1957-1958, 1961, 1963) and a seven time Best 9 award winner (1953-1958, 1961).  He was Pacific League MVP in 1956.  He led the PL in batting twice (1955, 1958), home runs five times (1953-56, 1958) and RBIs three times (1953, 1956-57).  He narrowly missed winning the Triple Crown four times - missing the RBI titles in 1955 and 1958 by one each year and the batting titles by four points in 1953 and half a percentage point in 1956.  He was elected to the Hall Of Fame in 1999.

There were a lot of cards of Nakanishi issued during his playing career including menkos and bromides.  Here's a handful of them:

1958 Marumatsu JCM 32b (with Shigeo Nagashima)

1964 Marusan JCM 11

1964 Morinaga Standups

1967 Kabaya-Leaf #351

He's also appeared in a great many of BBM and Epoch's OB sets over the past 30 years or so.  Here's a couple cards:

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #T-07

2008 BBM Lions Memorial #06

2021 BBM Legendary Rookies #LR01

I was only able to track down cards of him as a coach or manager with four different teams and one of these is questionable - his 1975 Broder JA4 card identifies him as Fighters manager on the back but the photo shows him with the Yakult Atoms:

1975 Broder JA4

2003 BBM Fighters #087

2013 BBM Tigers Legends #51

1994 Marines Menko 

I swiped the image of his 1994 Marines Menko card from Jason.

I think my favorite one of his "modern" cards is this one from the 1999 BBM Nippon Series set.  He and Shigeru Sugishita took part in a "First Pitch Ceremony" to commemorate the 45th Anniversary of the 1954 Nippon Series between the Sugishita's Dragons and Nakanishi's Lions:

1999 BBM Nippon Series #S65

RIP Shoichi Busujima

Sad news out of Tokyo this week - former Toei Flyers outfielder Shoichi Busujima has passed away from prostate cancer.  He was 87 years old.

Busujima signed with the Flyers as a third baseman in 1954 after graduating from high school but was quickly converted to the outfield.  He spent 18 seasons with Toei, earning the nickname "Mr. Flyers".  He was an eight time All Star (1956-1958, 1960-1962, 1965-66) and three time Best 9 award winner (1957-58, 1966).  He played in one Nippon Series, going 3 for 29 with one RBI as the Flyers beat the Tigers in the 1962 Series although his one RBI came on a solo home run in Game 3.  His 106 triples were the most ever in NPB until Yutaka Fukumoto passed him in 1985 and are still the second most all time.  He became a player-coach in 1969 and a shoulder injury forced him to retire after only four games in 1971 - he was just 23 hits short of 2000 for his career.  He coached for the Flyers until they were bought by Nippon-Ham in 1974 and later coached and scouted for the Seibu Lions.  He was also a baseball commentator on J Sports.

Busujima had a number of baseball cards during his playing days, including various menko, bromide, game, candy and gum issues.  He appeared in three of BBM's OB sets from the oughts - the 2000 20th Century Best 9, the 2002 All Time Heroes and the 2006 Nostalgic Baseball sets - but as there's really never been a good OB team set for the Fighters there aren't as many "modern" cards of him as there could have been.  Here's what I have for him:

1959 Doyusha Game Set JGA 5

1959 Marusho Bat On Right JCM 39

1967 Kabaya-Leaf #410

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #095

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #215

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #335

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #455

2002 BBM All Time Heroes #151

2006 BBM Nostalgic Baseball #055

Topps 2023 NPB Set Preview - Are They Serious?

Do you remember a little over a month ago when I first reported that Topps would be releasing the 2023 version of their NPB set in mid-May?  I was guardedly optimistic about the set because it looked like Topps had actually made an effort to make their packaging attractive.  I guess I was hoping that that effort would carry over to the cards themselves.

Nope.

I had been getting some hints from what I saw up for auction on Yahoo! Japan Auctions the last week or so but it wasn't until just now when Jambalaya put the entire set online that my fears about the set were confirmed - it's really bad.  How bad is it?  Let me count the ways:

1. One of the causes of my misplaced optimism was that the set was coming out earlier in the year than the previous two incarnations (November of 2021 and September of 2022).  What hadn't occurred to me is that by pushing their publication date up until May it would make it next to impossible for Topps to use any photographs that were actually taken in 2023.  I mean, obviously I'm being unreasonable in expecting Topps to have gotten photographs from this year since the players have only been in uniform for...checks notes...four and a half months now.  The fact that BBM is using photos from this year in a set that came out last month is apparently miraculous.

2. The only photos that aren't from last season are for the 2022 draft picks - all of those cards are posed shots either from the team's introductory press conference or some sort of photo day where the players had their photo taken in front of a blank screen (some of which had a background superimposed on the screen) - and the four "new" managers.  Akinobu Okada, Kazuo Matsui and Takahiro Arai all have posed shots in front of screens while I think the photo on Masato Yoshii's card was taken at the Marines Fan Fest last November (and I actually like that photo).

3. One of the results of there being no photos taken this year is that there are no cards of any players who changed teams over the winter.  So no Kosuke Kondoh, no Tomoya Mori, no Yota Kyoda, no Nobuhiro Matsuda and no Hideaki Wakui.  Also obviously no new foreign players so no Lewis Brinson, David MacKinnon, Sheldon Neuse or Maikel Franco.

4. Bizarrely Topps DID include a card for Yariel Rodriguez who defected from Cuba in late March.  Maybe this set went to press earlier than you'd think with a May release.

5. The front design resembles the 2023 Topps MLB set but lacks the head shot in the lower left of the card.  Probably a good thing as the rookie cards would have most likely had the same photo used again for the head shot.  I think the cards would have been a bit more attractive using the same design as the MLB cards though.

6. The backs once again are terrible.  Here's the back of Roki Sasaki's card.  It's got his height, weight, bats right, throws right, year drafted, uniform number, last year's stats and his career stats and that's it.  Well, all that, a team logo and a lot of empty space.

7. The "Heritage" or "Retro" insert cards using the 2001 Topps design have white borders instead of green ones.  I have no idea why.  Maybe it's some tribute to Gandalf or Starbuck.

I bought my copy of this set yesterday and I'm kind of wishing I hadn't now.  I really don't understand what Topps is thinking with this crap.  BBM, Epoch and even Calbee do so much of a better job with their baseball cards.  These are just lousy.  And I'm sure we're going to be subjected again to an overpriced ugly Chrome version of these lousy cards in a few months followed by a Bowman set featuring a bunch of guys on development contracts that we'll never hear from again.

I feel like Topps is trying to be Epoch but doing a half assed job of it.  I'd really rather see Topps embrace their Topps-ness for NPB.  Decide on an All Star Rookie team - it'd have been cool to have had a little trophy on Taisei's card.  Do hero numbers - card #100 in this set should have been Munetaka Murakami, not Tatsunori Hara.  And for the love of God, do a "Heritage" or "Archives" style set!  The best thing Topps has going for it and the one thing that no other company in Japan can bring to the table is 70 plus years of card designs.  I can't imagine that a half active player, half OB player set using old designs wouldn't end up doing better than this nonsense.

Card Of The Week May 14

Shoki Murakami of the Tigers has had a pretty good season so far.  He threw seven perfect innings in his first start of the year back on April 12th before being pulled for a pinch hitter in a controversial move by manager Akinobu Okada.   In his next start ten days later he threw a complete game shutout of the Dragons.  A week later he threw eight scoreless innings as the Tigers beat the Swallows 7-0.  Last Tuesday he had thrown six scoreless innings against Yakult which (when including the scoreless inning in relief he had in his first appearance of the year on April 1st) put his streak of innings without giving up a run to start the season at 31, which tied him for the record with Etsuo Nakai, who did it in 1963.  Murakami gave up a home run to Domingo Santana in the seventh inning though which ended the streak.  To add insult to injury, Santana's home run was the only scoring in the game by either team so Murakami took the 1-0 loss.

I didn't know much about Nakai until I sat down to write this.  He was kind of an odd fellow.  His 31 consecutive scoreless inning streak not only started his 1963 season, it started his career.  He had been attending Kansai University but decided to drop out and sign with Hanshin in 1963.  He dominated the Western League, going 13-1 and leading the league in ERA (although I don't know what his ERA actually was) before being called up to the ichi-gun team in September.  His streak ran from September 7th to October 17th.  His final stats with the top team that year was 4-1 with an ERA of 1.22.  He threw three complete game shutouts in five starts.  Expectations for him were high the following year but he got hurt in a car accident in May of 1964 and he was slow in recovering from it - in fact arguably he never did.  He went 1-2 with a 3.69 ERA in 11 games in 1964 but only made one appearance in 1965, giving up one run in one inning of work for a 9.00 ERA.  He appears to have sat out the 1966 season altogether and then returned to the Tigers for two seasons entirely on the farm.  He joined the Nishitetsu Lions after 1968 and spent three solid seasons with them, mostly in middle relief.  He retired following the 1971 season at age 28 and was apparently a salaryman for some corporation for several years after that.  He joined Hanshin's coaching staff in 1979 but tragically passed away in August of that year from heart failure.  He was just 36 years old.

Here's cards of both Murakami (2022 BBM Tigers #T20) and Nakai (1964 Murakami JCM 14g "Bat On Right") - I think this is Nakai's only catalogued card:

2023 Calbee Series One

I got my copy of Calbee's Series One set for this year earlier this week.  It's an 82 card base set split between 60 "regular" player cards (5 per team), 18 "Title Holder" cards and four checklist cards.  The 60 "regular" player cards is a drop from the 72 that's been a standard for Calbee for the last seven or eight years.

The drop of in cards notwithstanding, the set's pretty much what we've come to expect from a Calbee set which is good and bad.  The good is that the cards have the usual simple design without much distractions.  The design actually is pretty much what Calbee cards have looked like since roughly 1997.  And since it's an odd numbered year this year the player names on the front of the cards are in English.  The bad is that the photos are somewhat predictable although they're slightly better than last year's photos.

It's always hard to judge player selection for a Calbee set since this is really only a third of this year's set.  I always feel that Series One is a little short on the big names, at least when it comes to the "regular" player cards, because usually Calbee doesn't like to have multiple cards of a player in an individual series and there's a bunch of stars in the "Title Holder" subset.  This one does have Masahiro Tanaka, Tetsuto Yamada, Hayato Sakamoto, Kazuma Okamoto, Yudai Ohno and Yutaro Sugimoto.  There are no rookies in the set and no players who changed teams over the winter.  In fact, all the photos appear to be from last year - the Baystars players are in their old uniforms.  

As I mentioned earlier, I think the photos are a little better than last year but that's not saying much - I really felt like Calbee was mailing it in last year.  There's a little more variety of poses beyond the standard "pitchers pitching, batters batting and catchers catching" - several "fielders fielding" and one "runner running".  There's only one card that uses a horizontal format but that again is a welcome change from last year where there were none in all three sets combined.  Here's some examples:

#024

#039

#054

#010

#030

#020

#047

The "Title Holder" subset is Calbee's version of BBM's Leader subset from the Fusion set.  It has cards for last year's MVP and Rookie Of The Year awards as well as the major statistical categories - batting average, home runs, wins, ERA, etc.  As I mentioned before, this subset includes several of the bigger stars in NPB right now - Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami and Hotoka Yamakawa.  It's missing the Pacific League OBP Leader from last year since Masataka Yoshida is not in NPB this year.  Oddly enough, the subset includes the Central League Holds Leader Yariel Rodriguez from the Dragons who will also not be playing in NPB this year - he defected from Cuba in late March after the set went to press.  It will likely be his only Japanese baseball card this year.  Here's an example card of Yamamoto - you can see the front of the card lists the categories he led the PL in last year (wins, ERA and strikeouts) as well as his MVP award:

#TH-01

Lastly there are the four checklist cards that show action from late last season.  I feel kind of silly that after all these years, I had never noticed before that Calbee's twelve checklist cards (four per Series) show a scene from each of the twelve teams.  The Series One cards always feature last year's first and second place finishers from each league so this time around they have the Buffaloes (celebrating winning the Nippon Series), the Swallows (Murakami's 56th home run), the Hawks (Tsuyoshi Wada getting his 150th NPB victory) and the Baystars (Masaya Kyoyama doing something in August).  Here's the Swallows one (which means Murakami actually has two cards in the set):

#C-02

To sum it up - it's a Calbee set.  There aren't any real surprises but it's a nice looking (if a little bland) set.  You can see all the cards (including the "Star" and "Legend" inserts) over at Jambalaya.

Classic Calbees and More From COMC

After picking up some mid-70's Calbees at decent prices on COMC a few months back, I decided to take another look and came up with a few more good ones to pick up.  Here's two from the 1973/74 set:

1973/74 Calbee #324 Masahiro Doi

1973/74 Calbee #192 Hiromu Matsuoka

I am always a sucker for Yakult Atoms cards.

These two are from the 1974/75 set (although COMC had mislabeled the Kinugasa card as being from the 1975/76 set):

1974/75 Calbee #243 Sachio Kinugasa

1974/75 Calbee #392 Kiyoshi Morimoto

The Morimoto card is from the "shootout" cards from Series Eight which featured scenes from particular games.  This is from a game between the Fighters and Braves on August 8th, 1974 at Jingu Stadium.  The Braves won the game 6-0.

COMC also mislabeled this next card as being Koji Yamamoto since he was card #7 in the 1975/76 set.  See if you can see why that's not right:

For starters, Yamamoto was right handed and never played for the Braves.  But I'm being a little too hard on COMC as it can be extremely difficult to tell the difference between different Calbee sets from the 70's, especially when those sets don't have consistent back designs.  The backs of the first series from the 1975/76 set look more like the backs from the 1974/75 set than the rest of the set and the first series from 1977 (well, first series of what we call the "1977 set" which aren't the first,...you know what, nevermind) look very much like the other cards from the 1975/76 set.  Anyway, this is really a card showing Clyde Wright of the Giants pitching to Yutaka Fukumoto of the Braves in the 1976 Nippon Series.  It's card #7 from the 1977 "Gray Back" set.

Here's the last Calbee card I picked up:

1977 Calbee Gray Back #66

In addition to the Calbees, I picked up a couple more recent cards of interest.  A couple years back, Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) of "Torren' Up Cards" gifted me with a ton of cards, including a partial 2019 BBM Brilliant Dragons set.  The set was missing three cards - Akira Neo, Raidel Martinez and Joely Rodriguez.  I hadn't really though much about completing it but I came across the Neo card a few months back for $1 so I picked it up.  Similarly I found the Martinez card on COMC for $1 so I picked it up as well.  Now I just need to find the Rodriguez cheap.  

2019 BBM Brilliant Dragons #13

Along similar lines, Ryan had picked me up a bunch of cards from the 1999 BBM Giants/Yomiuri Shinbum set a while.  My base set was two cards short and I had 11 of the 18 "special" cards (basically cards with gold facsimile signatures).  COMC had a "special" card for Daisuke Motoki so I picked it up.  I don't know how serious I am about trying to complete this set but I do not it not being complete offends my OCD.

1999 BBM Giants/Yomiuri Shinbum #S12

The last thing I picked up was the "Baseball's Best" insert card of Ichiro from the 1998 BBM set:

1998 BBM "Baseball's Best" #R2