Weekly Baseball Postcards

Lurking in the package that Ryan sent me a few weeks back were a bunch of postcards.  I wasn't sure what they were at first but a little investigation showed that they were published with issues of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball magazine.  A little more investigation showed that most of the cards were published in 2006 - it was the first year that the Swallows were the "Tokyo Yakult Swallows" and the last year Michihiro Ogasawara was with the Fighters.  Each of the 2006 postcards have a "60th Anniversary" logo on them - 2006 was the 60th Anniversary of Baseball Magazine Sha, the magazine publishing house responsible for BBM baseball cards and Weekly Baseball magazine.

Before I show you the fronts of the postcards, let me show you the back of one:

The line on the bottom right of the card says that the postcard was a Weekly Baseball issue and gives the cover date of the magazine that the postcard was published with (April 17th in this case).  I have two postcards for each date on the backs of the postcards I have but I don't know if they were issued in pairs - I've seen other postcards for sale on Yahoo! Japan Auctions that have similar designs to some of the ones I have so it may be that there were more than two published at a time.

The February 13-20th issue had these two postcards:

These were included in the April 17th issue:

The June 12th issue had these two postcards:

The September 11th issue had postcards for "stoppers":

These two postcards came out with the November 13th issue - Ogasawara was no longer a Fighter at this point, having signed with the Giants on November 5th:

Ryan also included a couple of post cards from the December 29th, 2008 issue, wishing all their readers Season's Greetings: