One of the things I've lamented about Japanese baseball cards over the year is the lack of cards depicting stadiums. Besides the subset in the 1992 BBM set depicting all eleven stadiums then in use, there's only been a handful of Calbee cards over the years that show a somewhat random collection - a couple showing Korakuen Stadium in the 1974/75 and 1975/76/77 sets, a rare card showing Hiroshima Municipal Stadium in the 1975/76/77 set and seven cards in the 1988 set showing the newly opened Tokyo Dome.
And it turns out that there's a card of Meiji Jingu Stadium in the 1974/75 set! I recently came across this card on COMC by way of Ebay and bought it. It shows the pregame ceremonies at the ballpark for the Opening Day game on April 5th, 1975 between the Carp and the Swallows:
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| 1974/75 Calbee #748 |
The Carp won the game 5-1, a good start to a season that would see them win their first ever Central League pennant. The announced attendance was 26,000 which seems a lot considering how few people appear in the stands. This was also the first NPB game ever managed by an American who was not of Japanese descent - Joe Lutz, who would only last 14 games as Carp manager before being replaced by Takeshi Koba.
I'd kind of hoped that there several cards in the 1974/75 Calbee set showing stadiums on Opening Day of 1975 but it appears that the only other one is of the Giants/Whales game at Korakuen Stadium (#728).
This photo is somewhat striking if you're at all familiar with Jingu Stadium in that it doesn't look anything like what Jingu Stadium looks like today. You can see what the ballpark looks like now either in the image in the background of my blog (photo taken in 2013) or this card from the 1992 BBM stadium subset (despite being over 30 years old):
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| 1992 BBM #482 |
The big changes are that there are now seats in the outfield, the scoreboard has been completely redone and the dominant color of the park is now blue rather than green. It's also not obvious from the photos but the grass was real in 1975 and it's fake now. I did a little dive into the Japanese Wikipedia page for the ballpark to see when the changes occurred. The outfield seats were installed in 1978, the new scoreboard* was installed in 1980 and the outfield walls became blue in 1982. The grass was replaced with artificial turf in foul territory in 1980 and in the rest of the field in 1982.
*To be completely accurate, the scoreboard installed in 1980 is not the current scoreboard. It's been updated at least twice since then in 1995 and 2008.
1 comment:
Those are both great cards, especially that 74-75 one (which I don’t have yet).
While there aren’t many cards devoted specifically to stadiums in the 70s Calbee sets, one thing I like about them is that the photos they use are usually long shots that aren’t zoomed in on the player, so in most of them you get some really good views of stadium backgrounds. It also helps that they took photos in most of the stadiums, rather than Topps doing everything in spring training facilities or Yankee Stadium.
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