The great baseball writer Roger Angell passed away a few months ago at age 101 and I've been rereading his collections of essays as kind of my personal tribute to him. I was a little amused at a passage I came across recently. His essay "Sunny Side Of The Street" in the "Five Seasons" collection is a report about spring training in 1975. In it he talks about Walt Williams, the former White Sox outfielder who's trying to make the Yankees as an infielder. Williams says that "Truthfully, after last year [1974 when he hit .113 in 43 games with New York] I was going to go and play in Japan. I planned on winning the batting championship there." He goes on to say that he got fan letters urging him to stay with the Yankees so he proposed to Gabe Paul, the team's GM, that he play second base.
Williams did make the club in 1975, hitting .281 in 82 games - although only six of them were at second base. He then made the jump to Japan, spending two seasons with the Nippon-Ham Fighters. He hit .285 in 1976 and .269 in 1977. Neither value was enough to lead the Pacific League - he was sixth overall in 1976 and 15th in 1977. He spent two years after that playing in Mexico before he retired.
As far as I can tell, he had a number of Japanese cards in the 1975/76/77 Calbee set and the two Nippon-Ham sets (1975-76 and 1977-79). I only have one of these cards - #1002 from the 1975/76/77 Calbee set:
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