Thursday, June 18, 2015

1970's Giants Magazine Cards

There were a number of magazines in the 1970's that included uncut sheets of baseball cards, mostly for the Giants.  I picked up a few examples of these off of Ebay over the past year or so and thought I'd share some of them.

According the Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist And Price Guide - Vintage Edition", the magazine Elementary School issued at least eight sets of cards of Giants players between September 1976 and July 1978.  I have cards from two of these sets.

The October 1976 issue featured an uncut sheet of 10 baseball cards for Giants players.  Engel refers to this set as "1976 Elementary School 1st Year Yomiuri Giants" or JMC 2004. In his comments about the set, Engel says that they are white bordered - the ones I picked up actually have had their borders trimmed off.  Engel says that the cards are 2 1/2" by 3 3/8" - mine are a little smaller than that due to the missing borders.  The ten cards include pretty much everyone that you'd expect - Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Isao Harimoto, Isao Shibata and Tsuneo Horiuchi plus Dave Johnson, Shozo Doi, Shigeru Takada, Takeshi Yoshida and Yoshimitsu Tsuetsugu.  I only have Horiuchi and Yoshida - here's the front and back of Horiuchi's card:




Engel lists another set as "1977 Elementary School 2nd Year Giants V2 Cards" or JCM 2007.  He doesn't list the issue that these cards came from.  What's kind of odd about this set is there are two groups of cards in it that have different sizes.  There are three large ones (2 5/16" x 3 5/16") for the three biggest names on the Giants at the time - Oh, Nagashima and Harimoto.  There are 15 smaller cards (1 7/8" by 2 1/2") for the somewhat lesser players on the team - Kenji Awaguchi, Shozo Doi, Kazuaki Fujishiro, Tsuneo Horiuchi, Shigeru Kobayashi, Kazumasa Kono, Toshio Niura, Isao Shibata, Toshimitsu Suetsugu, Shigeru Takada, Masahiro Yanagita and Takeshi Yoshida.  The smaller cards have either blue or magenta borders.  I have nine of the smaller cards and none of the large ones.  Here's an example of each border (blue is Takada and magenta is Yoshida) and the back of Yoshida's card:





The last Giants magazine set that I have examples from is the set Engel refers to as "1979-80 Gekkan Giants" or JMC 128.  This 72 card set was issued as 12 six card sheets in (I assume) Gekkan Giants magazine  (Gekkan means monthly - and a hat tip to Redditer kndy-nt2099 for pointing that out for me).  Each card was 2 13/16" x 3 3/8".  I have two of the uncut sheets - numbers 4 and 6.  There's some text on the back of each that I suspect gives the month of the issue - sheet 4 may be from July of 1979 and sheet 6 may be from September - but I could be wrong.  Here's the front and back of sheet 4 - from left to right (on the front) and top to bottom, that's Toru Kinoshita, Akihito Kitano, Akira Kunimatsu (coach), Rick Krueger, Kazumasa Kohno and Kosho Sakomaru.



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