Wednesday, September 16, 2015

RIP Yoshio Bizen

Former Carp pitcher Yoshio Bizen passed away last week at age 81.  Bizen pitched for the Carp from 1952 to 1962, going 115-149 with an ERA of 2.96 while generally playing for terrible teams.  The Carp were only over .500 once during his career (and that was by one game in 1960).  He lost 20 games in a season twice but somehow managed to go 20-13 in 1957 for a team that only went 54-75-1 that year.  He coached and was the ni-gun manager for the Carp after he retired as a player and then went on to be a scout for the team, eventually becoming the chief scout in 1987 and established the Carp's Dominican Academy that produced future MLB players Timo Perez and Alfonso Soriano.  (Source: Bizen's Japanese Wikipedia page)

I have a (blurry) menko card of him from the 1959 Doyusha JCM 30b set but I'm not sure what other cards were produced of him during his career:


I think Bizen's only modern card is from the 2009 BBM Carp 60th Anniversary set (#09):

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