Shukan Baseball Cover Baseball Cards

I got inspired - as I often do - by a post Night Owl Cards did a while back.  This particular post had to do with baseball cards featuring magazine covers - specifically some Fleer issues from the late 90's that had cards showing covers from Sports Card Digest and Sports Illustrated.  I thought to myself "Hey, it might be fun to do a post of Japanese cards showing covers of Japanese baseball magazines."  The problem, though, is that there aren't very many of these and they all feature "Shukan Baseball" (or Weekly Baseball), a magazine published...uh...weekly by Baseball Magazine SHA (the parent company of BBM) since 1958.  The other problem is what's out there pretty heavily features Shigeo Nagashima.  But I still thought this might be interesting so let's dig in...

The earliest appearances of any Shukan Baseball covers on baseball cards appear to be from the 1975 NST set.  This set was dedicated to Nagashima's career and includes sixteen cards that show him on the cover of the magazine.  I only have five of these (I'm going to include the cover date of the magazine when possible but some of these cut the date off):

#260 (January 14, 1959)

#267 (1966)

#268 (1967)

#270 (January 4-11, 1971)

#275 (January 7-14, 1974)

It would another 23 years before Shukan Baseball covers would make it onto baseball cards again.  In 1998, BBM included a nine card subset in their flagship set to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the magazine.  The nine covers featured included the first ever issue from April 16th, 1958.  Each card features a "40 years of Shukan Baseball" logo superimposed over the cover.  Here are the cards:

#556 (April 16,  1958 Shigeo Nagashima/Tatsuro Hirooka)

#557 (April 6, 1960 Kazuhisa Inao)

#558 (August 21, 1967 Shigeo Nagashima)

#559 (May 8, 1972 Sadaharu Oh)

#560 (March 13, 1978 Yutaka Fukumoto)

#561 (June 28, 1982 Hisashi Yamada)

#562 (May 6, 1985 Masayuki Kakefu)

#563 (March 17, 1986 Kazuhiro Kiyohara)

#564 (October 28, 1996 Hideki Matsui/Ichiro)

The next card to feature a Shukan Baseball cover was kind of an oddball - it was a card included with Sports Card Magazine (SCM) #9 which was published in May of 1998.  It reproduces the cover of the October 9, 1961 issue featuring Hiroshi Gondoh of the Dragons and Nagashima.  It's a little unclear to me why BBM created this card as it does not appear to be a promotional card for any other BBM product.  My best guess is that since Gondoh was in his first year as Baystars manager they wanted to highlight the history between him and Nagashina, who was managing the Giants at the time.  The back of the card shows a current photo of both men along with Nagashima's career batting statistics against Gondoh.  Here's the front and back of the card:

Nagashima may have batted .362 for his career against Gondoh but Gondoh had the last laugh in 1998, leading the Baystars to the Nippon Series championship, the first for the franchise in 28 years and so far their only championship in Yokohama.

The last cards that I know of featuring Shukan Baseball covers came out the following year in 1999 in another set dedicated to Nagashima.  The "Mr. Giants" set from BBM included five cards showing him on the cover of the magazine.  I have four of these - I'm missing card #G47 which showed off the cover of the August 20, 1958 issue.  Here are the other four cards - the cover date for each issue can be found in the lower left:

#G48

#G49

#G50

#G51

As far as I know, the 1999 cards were the last cards done that show off Shukan Baseball covers (although there was yet another Shigeo Nagashima BBM set in 2001 that I don't have that could have had some).  I think it'd be an interesting theme for BBM to revisit sometime, although they could probably lower the amount of Nagashima cards they include.