Tsuchiya was born in Hiroshima in October of 1924, which possibly makes him (and not Shigeru Sugishita) the last living former professional player born in the Taisho Era. His Japanese Wikipedia page doesn't list any military service during the war which seems unlikely but after the war he played baseball at Hosei University, leading the Tokyo Big Six in batting during the autumn season in 1947. He spent a couple years playing for Columbia of the corporate leagues before joining the Kokutetsu Swallows in their inaugural season in 1950. He played under the name "Goro Tsuchiya" with Kokutetsu. Besides hitting the first home run in Swallows history, his main claim to fame was leading the Central League in stolen bases with 52 despite not having accumulated enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. Those 52 steals are the most in NPB history by a player who did not qualify for the batting title - the only other such player with at least 50 steals was Ukyo Shuto who had 50 in 2020 (and also led his league).
Tsuchiya spent five years with the Swallows before moving on to the Carp (and reverting to "Masataka Tsuchiya") for the last two seasons of his career. He was a broadcaster and a contributor to Nikkan Sports after his playing days.
Tsuchiya didn't have a lot of baseball cards. From what I can tell, most of his cards were bromides from the early 1950's. (There was another Masataka Tsuchiya who played for the Giants, Swallows and Tigers between 1955 and 1965 who appears to have had more cards so it's a little confusing if you're just taking a quick look.) The only card I have of him from his professional playing days is this game card from the JBR 87 set from 1950:
Now you may be wondering why I phrased that like that. It's because I kind of have a card of him from his college days. He is identified as having a card in the 1947 JDM 11 set but I think it's a tough call to say it's a card of him. Let me start off with showing why Engel lists this as being a card of Tsuchiya. Take a look at the back:
The vertical text in the brown box has the "土屋" of Tsuchiya's name followed by his position (which I haven't been able to decipher). It looks to me like the brown box is superimposed over "法政大" which translates to "Hosei".
So all good so far. But let's take a look at the front of the card. See if you can see what's odd about it:
That's a Meiji player! I asked Gary Engel about this a while back and he said that all of the Tsuchiya cards were like that. I have one other card from the set but it's not completely clear if the front of that card matches the back either.
2 comments:
That is strange. He played for Hosei, so the back rather than the front is correct.
The position on the card back is first base. That is the old way to write the kanji for “base” in “first base”, which is now written as 一塁.
I wondered if it was archaic text. It should have dawned on me that the horizontal line meant "first" - I was thinking it was a divider between the name and position!
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