Card Of The Week May 5

Do you know who the first Western player to hit 40 home runs in a season in Japan was?  The answer is Dave Roberts, who did it with the Sankei Atoms in 1968.  If your response to that is "who?", well, you're not alone.  I think Roberts is one of the least known foreign stars in NPB history.  He played for the Sankei/Yakult Atoms from 1967 to 1973 and hit over 30 home runs in three seasons, won two Best 9 Awards and made the All Star team four times.  He departed the team under odd circumstances although not because he did anything wrong.  The Swallows signed Joe Pepitone a month or so into the 1973 season.  Since the roster rules at the time only allowed teams to have two foreign players and Yakult wanted to keep Art Lopez around, they parted ways with the 40-year old Roberts.  He signed with the Kintetsu Buffaloes but only played for them for about a month before a chronic issue with bone spurs ended his career.

What's odd about Roberts is that he has almost no Japanese baseball cards!  He had the misfortune to play at a time when there were very few baseball cards printed in Japan so as far as I can tell, he only had two cards.  Both of the cards were from a kind of oddball menko from roughly 1972 that Engel lists as "JCM 15a".  One of the cards shows him wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat which is kind of odd seeing as he hadn't been part of the Pirates organization since 1966.  The other card depicts him hatless in a Yakult uniform.  I just picked up the latter card this past week off of Ebay:

The other player on the card is Hall Of Famer Taturo Hirooka.  If you had not realized that Hirooka had ever been with the Carp, well, join the club.  He spent two years coaching for his hometown-ish Carp (he was born in Kure, Hiroshima-prefecture) in 1970-71, apparently having been recruited by Rikuo Nemoto.  He would go on to manage the Swallows to their first ever Nippon Series championship in 1978, then go on to succeed Nemoto as Lions manager in the early 80's and lead the team to two Nippon Series titles.