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Sunday, July 7, 2024

Card Of The Week July 7

I have a lot of Sadaharu Oh cards.

This isn't a complaint, it's just a statement.  According to my database, I have in the neighborhood of 200 cards of Oh.  That includes probably something like 100 or so from during his playing career.  I have so many cards of Oh that I really don't see the point in adding many more.  I mean, sure, Oh was a great player but, at this point, I'd rather spend my money on cards of players that I don't have 200 cards of, especially since Oh's cards tend to carry a premium.

But every so often, I see a card of Oh that I can't resist and I saw one a while back on Ebay.  Nippon-Ham had issued baseball cards in the mid to late 1970's and there was a guy on Ebay selling several Oh cards from their sets at not outrageous prices.  I saw this card and decided I needed to grab it for the $25 "buy-it-now" price:

This card commemorates Oh hitting his 756 home run to pass Hank Aaron on September 3rd, 1977 and was from a special set of seven cards that Nippon-Ham issued for this event.  I was amused that the back appears to reproduce the scoreboard at Korakuen Stadium when Oh hit the home run:

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3 comments:

  1. SeanJuly 9, 2024 at 9:52 PM

    That is a pretty cool Oh card, I am a casual late 70s Nippon Ham collector and haven't come across that one yet.

    I think I must have several hundred Oh cards in my collection too. I think the 1975-76-77 Calbee set that I'm working on must have in the neighborhood of 100 or so just by itself (someday I'll have to sit down and count them).

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  2. Nick VossbrinkJuly 10, 2024 at 12:58 AM

    Okay that back design idea is worth remembering and stealing from.

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  3. NPB Card GuyJuly 10, 2024 at 9:05 AM

    @Sean - It was a separate set than the regular cards. There's several of them up on Ebay right now.

    According to TCDB, Oh has 129 cards in the 1975/76/77 set. That doesn't count the multi-player cards like the Central League leaders card though. Surprisingly, Shigeo Nagashima "only" has 57 - I suppose considering he was a manager and not a player at that point that's actually quite a lot. (Nagashima has 141 cards in the 1974-75 set to Oh's 89.)

    @Nick - I thought it was a pretty cool idea

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