Card Of The Week September 11

Yesterday's post about the first baseball game I ever went to mentioned Bernie Williams, the San Francisco Giants outfielder who ended up spending six years playing for the Hankyu Braves in the late 70's.  I had decided to do this week's Card Of The Week post about him and when I was looking up his cards over at the Trading Card Database something struck me about the above card (1972 Topps #761) - I have Japanese cards depicting all three of these players.  (I feel compelled to point out that while this is Oglivie and Cey's rookie card, this is not actually Williams' rookie card - he also appeared on multi-player "Rookie Stars" cards in both 1970 and 1971.)

Williams played for the Braves from 1975 to 1980.  Engel lists 18 "vintage" cards for him - mostly Calbee but he's in one of the NST sets and a couple of the Broder sets.  Here's a card of him from the 1974/75 Calbee set (#932):

Ben Oglivie sent 1987 and 1988 as a member of the Kintetsu Buffaloes.  Engel lists eight vintage cards for him including four Calbee cards and two Takara cards.  Here's his 1987 Takara card:

Now I'm sure you've been scratching your head about me having a Japanese card of Ron Cey since he never played for a Japanese team.  In fact as far as I know, he never went to Japan as part of an MLB All Star team.  However Japan - in the guise of the Yomiuri Giants - came to him.  The Giants did spring training at Vero Beach, Florida in 1975 as the guests of the Dodgers.  Photos from this appear in both the 1974/75 Calbee set and the 1975 NST set.  There's a card of Tsuneo Horiuchi from the NST set (#224) that shows him pitching to the unmistakable image of the Penguin:

So while it's not an "official" card of Cey, he does make a cameo appearance on it.