Sunday, February 7, 2021

Card Of The Week February 7


I picked up this odd card of Eiji Sawamura from Rob Fitts on Ebay recently.  I wasn't quite sure what to make of it.  It's contemporaneous with the 2004 BBM Giants 70th Anniversary set but I'm pretty sure it's not associated that set (at least not directly).  Rob didn't know much about it and he also didn't remember where he got it from.

The back of the card offers some clues.  The "1/5" in the lower right corner reminds me of the backs of the cards given away with Shukan Baseball during the 00's.  The text on the lower left translates to something like "70 Years Of Giants".   So what I think is that this was a giveaway inserted into some magazine BBM issued for the 70th Anniversary of the Giants back in 2004 - possibly this one.  The "1/5" implies there were five cards given away with the magazine - I wonder who the other four cards are.  The obvious suspects would include Tetsuharu Kawakami, Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh but I can't decide on the last one.  It'll be quite a challenge to find the others - for now I'm just pleased I've got a card with a photo of Sawamura that hasn't been used on any of his other cards.

UPDATE - So maybe it wasn't so much of a challenge - I found an auction for the magazine last night on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and Ryan picked it up for me.  The four other cards are Kawakami, Nagashima, Oh and...Tatsunori Hara!  I also got tweet from TroutSalmon34 letting me know that this picture was also used on an insert card for Sawamura from the 2005 BBM Glorious Stars set (which came out in late 2004).

1 comment:

SumoMenkoMan said...

Interesting. The first thing that came to mine was it was issued in SCM. Hope you find the answer!!