I wanted to do a quick post about a couple home brew cards I recently acquired. The "When Topps Had Balls" blog creates a lot of custom cards using Topps designs from the 1970's and earlier and Gio, the site's proprietor, actually prints up some of his customs and makes them available for purchase. I recently came across one of his creations on Twitter - a Shigeo Nagashima card using the 1971 Topps design. I loved the card and asked him if I could buy one and if he had any other NPB cards available. He said he had one - Sadaharu Oh using the 1977 Topps design - and he'd sell both cards to me for $5 total. I sent him the money, he sent me the cards and I got them earlier this week. Here's the front and back of both cards:
I really feel like both of these cards really look like they could have been from the original sets. The 1977 set was the first Topps set I ever completed so I have a lot of fond memories of it and the Oh card just seems to fit right in. As I've said ever since Topps started doing NPB cards in 2021 - this is the kind of thing that they should be doing!
Gio let me know that he's planning on doing cards of Isao Harimoto and Katsuya Nomura later this year. His blog has a post for Nomura showing a card of him using the 1979 Topps design. I'm somewhat astonished that Gio found a photo of Nomura in a Lotte Orions uniform - Nomura only played one season for Lotte (1978) and for the longest time I had never seen a card of him with Lotte. Now I've seen two.
4 comments:
Very, very cool!
These are great. Not a Japanese player but I've wanted Gio to make 76 and 77 Davey Johnson Japanese cards to fill in the missing holes in his Topps run as well.
Those look quite nice.
I agree about wishing Topps itself would do something similar.
Slightly off topic, but actually what these really make me wish is that there was a card set in Japan that was printed on something recognizable as cardboard like that for a change. I’ve gotten pretty tired of the same glossy finishing on every card set made in this country since about 2005 (for Calbee, way earlier for BBM).
Its not that the shiny glossy stuff is bad per se, its just that it gets boring after a while and some variety would be nice. My main complaint with the Epoch set I started collecting recently is that its seems to have been printed using the exact same materials and process as BBM cards are, so when I’ve got the cards in my hand I feel like I’m holding a bunch of BBM cards (this is especially noticeable when I’m sorting them and looking at the card backs, which very much look like generic BBM card backs).
@Sean - BBM has done a couple sets over the last ten years or so using the more traditional cardboard. There were the "Achievement" OB team sets for the Braves (2014), Hawks (2014), Buffaloes (2015) and Whales (2015) as well as the four "Time Travel" sets from 2017 to 2020. And I don't see much in the way of MLB cards these days but I'm guessing beyond Heritage there's not many cards over here using the classic cardboard either.
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