Contrary to what I said last week, there was another another managerial change in NPB last week. With the Eagles' late season drive to make the playoffs coming up short, Rakuten's GM/manager Kazuhisa Ishii resigned from the managerial job. Batting coach Toshiaki Imae will lead the team next season.
Imae was a longtime star for the Chiba Lotte Marines between 2002 and 2015 before spending the last four years of his career with the Eagles. He was the MVP of both Nippon Series that the Marines have won in the last 20 years - 2005 and 2010. He's been a coach in the Eagles system ever since he retired after 2019.
I came across something odd when I was looking for a card of his to share this week - there are three cards of Imae from 2016 which all use the same photo! Here they are:
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| 2016 Calbee #033 |
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #149 |
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| 2016 Eagles Team Set #46 |
(I don't actually have that last card - I swiped the image from Jambalaya,)
I first noticed an image being used on two different cards late last year and since then I've noticed that it's a little more common than I thought. But I'm pretty sure this the first time I've seen the same photo used on THREE different cards.*
*I should probably clarify here that I'm talking about cards of active players. I've seen many instances where cards of retired players reused the same photos, especially since there are fewer and fewer phoios available for players as you get earlier and earlier in Japanese professional baseball history, as this post I did about Eiji Sawamura's cards will attest.
2 comments:
What is really interesting is that all three of those cards are from different makers.
I guess that means that BBM and Calbee and BBM don't have their own photographers but rather just buy photos from some service. That might help to explain the boring, repetitive photo selection every year from both of them....
I thought your research into that player's lawsuit from the mid-00's established that the card companies got their photos from the teams? So in this case the Eagles might have given the same photo to BBM, Calbee and whoever does their cards. Maybe they gave several photos of Imae but all three outfits decided independently that this was the best shot of the bunch.
I suspect this happens more than we realize but I don't know any easy way to figure out how often. I could brute force check all the cards for 800+ NPB players but I'm not THAT interested in the answer.
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