So you've probably guessed by now that since Shigeo Nagashima never played for the Chunichi Dragons that neither player here is Shigeo Nagashima. The top card (#516) is Tatsuhiko Kimata while the bottom card (#564) is Hiroaki Inoue (with a Gene Martin cameo appearance).
I was kind of curious about how this mistake got made so I did some checking. Engel lists Inoue as card #564 in the 1974 Calbee set but does actually list Nagashima as card #516. I asked Sean of "Getting Back Into Baseball Cards...In Japan" (who knows much more about Calbee - especially 70's Calbee - than I do) if there were any weird variants with the 1974 Calbee set and he said that there weren't. He also mentioned that the SportsCard Magazine listing for the 1974 Calbee set had Kimata listed as card #516. His and my best guess is that it's a typo in Engel's listing - understandable since there are thousands of cards listed in his catalog and it'd be next to impossible to validate every entry. But neither of us have any idea why the Inoue card got labeled as a Nagashima card.
Getting cards graded has never been something I've been interested in and I've freed the one graded card I had (which really was a Nagashima). This sloppiness on PSA's part doesn't make me more interested in it.
4 comments:
This has got to be the worst PSA screw up of Japanese cards that I've seen.
They have a Japanese language website now and are actively trying to break into the market here, but not even knowing who Shigeo Nagashima is will not help their cause.
In fairness I don't know how long ago these got slabbed. Maybe it was a while ago and PSA has gotten better with Japanese cards since then.
Unless Engel's book was wrong, there is no excuse for this. And if they weren't at least using Engel's book for identifications, what were they doing?
Yeah, I kind of assume these must have been graded a while ago and now they probably have somebody who knows what Shigeo Nagashima looks like on staff!
Still though, there are so many PSA graded Japanese cards out there with big blunders in them from a few years back (like the fake 1994 Calbee Ichiros) that it can't be good for building collector confidence in the brand here.
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