Card Of The Week March 6

I had noticed something interesting a few weeks back.  Every manager of the Hawks since they moved to Fukuoka from Osaka after the 1988 season has been a Hall Of Famer until this season.  Of course, of the six of them, only Sadaharu Oh was a Hall Of Famer when he took the job while Koji Akiyama and Kimiyasu Kudoh were elected during their tenure with the team.  The other three - Tadashi Sugiura, Koichi Tabuchi and Rikuo Nemoto - weren't elected until after they were no longer managing the team - in Tabuchi's case it was 28 years after!  So maybe Hiroshi Fujimoto will someday keep the tradition going.

Funny thing though - I started looking around at other teams to see if this was unusual.  And what I realized is that there's one team that has had a Hall Of Fame manager for all but three years in their history.  That team, of course, is the Yomiuri Giants.  The Giants have had twelve men manage them (although several had multiple stints as manager including Tatsunori Hara's three) and eleven of them are in the Hall Of Fame - Sadayoshi Fujimoto, Hideo Fujimoto, Haruyasu Nakajima, Osamu Mihara, Shigeru Mizuhara, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Shigeo Nagashima, Motoshi Fujita, Oh, Hara and Tsuneo Horiuchi.  So who's the odd man out?  Yoshinobu Takahashi, who managed the team from 2016 to 2018 (in between Hara's second and third stints).  Takahashi may eventually make the Hall Of Fame but he only got 6.4 % of the vote in 2021 and 3.9% this year so he may be in danger of dropping off the Players ballot if that trend continues - you need to get more than 2.5% of the vote to remain on the ballot.

Here's a card I picked up of Takahashi a few months back from the 2021 BBM Masterpiece set.  It's from the "Fantastic 3D" insert set (#FD4) and looks better in person than it does in this scan: