1934 All American Tour 90th Anniversary - Shizuoka

2023 BBM Fusion #86

On November 20th, 1934 - 90 years ago today - the All American tour reached Kusanagi Baseball Stadium in Shizuoka.  The ballpark was just four years old, having opened in 1930.

17 year old Eiji Sawamura was the starting pitcher that day for All Nippon.  He was making his third appearance of the tour - the All Americans had hit him hard both times he had previously faced them and there was no reason to expect that this day's game would go any different.  The MLB All Stars were coming off of their most lopsided victory of the tour two days previously in Yokohama and had scored at least 14 runs in each of the previous three games.  And Babe Ruth had hit ten home runs in the previous six games.

But for whatever reason - maybe it was the afternoon sun over the right field stands that was glaring directly into the eyes of the batters - Sawamura pitched the best game that any All Nippon pitcher would throw on the tour.  He retired the first eleven batters including striking out future Hall Of Famers Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmy Foxx in succession in the first and second innings.

Unfortunately for Sawamura, his teammates were unable to generate any offense against All American starter Earl Whitehill.  The game remained scoreless into the bottom of the seventh inning when Gehrig hit a solo home run over the right field wall.  That would be the only run of the game and the All Americans would come away with a tight 1-0 victory.

Kusanagi Baseball Stadium still stands, although it went through some major renovations in the 1970's.  It has been used over the years for various high school, collegiate and corporate league baseball games as well as serving as a host for "countryside" games for several NPB teams as well as their farm teams.  This past year, the ballpark served as one of the home ballparks for the Kufu Hayate Ventures, the new independent farm team added to NPB's Western League.  It's usually left out when people list the ballparks that still exist that Babe Ruth once played in but it should be mentioned along with Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Meiji Jingu Stadium and Koshien Stadium.

In 1991, statues of Sawamura and Ruth were erected in the plaza outside the park.  I've visited this park twice - I stopped by in 2019 just to see the statues and in 2024 to see Hayate play.  Here are pictures I took of the statues during both visits:

Once again I heavily relied upon Rob Fitts' Banzai Babe Ruth for the information in this post.

Misleading And/Or Fake Ohtani Items On Ebay

Ohtani items continue to sell briskly on Ebay.  Besides the myriad of BBM, Epoch, Calbee and Topps issues, I've seen a couple home brew cards that people are attempting to claim are legitimate issues.  I thought I'd highlight a couple of the more egragious items I've seen along with an outright fraudulent listing.  I've reported all of these to Ebay but they don't seem to be interested in doing anything about them.

The first card is something that purports to be Ohtani's "2013 FIRST JAPANESE HIGH SCHOOL Rookie Card".  Here's the front and back of it:

The auction description says that "This is a rare opportunity for collectors to own a 2013 high school rookie card of Shohei Ohtani, the first Japanese high school player to receive such recognition. The card is made of 20 Pt. card stock and features the player's image, team name, and card number #. The card is part of the original high school insert set and is licensed by the manufacturer."

I'm not sure where to begin with this.  Let's start with the fact that Shohei Ohtani wasn't in high school in 2013, he was playing for the Fighters.  Remember the NPB draft is in October so he was drafted in 2012.  It's not clear to me whether the seller is claiming the card is Japanese but obviously the vast majority of Japanese cards actually have, you know, Japanese text on them and aren't printed in the USA.  The big thing is that the weight on the back of the card doesn't match Ohtani's weight from 2013 - according to his legitimate baseball cards from 2013, he weighed 86 kg or about 190.  He's bulked up a bit since then.

I'm also amused that the description says that the card has a number but it doesn't.

The second card is supposedly his "2017 Ham Fighters Unique Japanese Card Already A Legend Superstar", whatever that means:

The auction description says "This Shohei Ohtani 2017 Japanese card is unique and it totally rocks!! Featuring Ohtani in his Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters uniform!The reverse his personal info and some of his amazing fears! Card is older than any American card company!"

The first couple things I notice about this card are more issues with the description and not the authenticity.  That's obviously NOT his Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters uniform, it's his Samurai Japan one.  And I'll point out that Ohtani's first American card was from 2017 - it's the Chrome Prospects Mojo Refractor card from that year's Bowman set.

Again, wouldn't a Japanese card have Japanese text on it?  I mean, I've seen more than a few Japanese cards in my day and the only ones that only had English on them were the Broder, TCMA and Play Ball issues - all made by Americans.  

The thing that really stands out on the card, though, and kind of proves that it's not really from 2017 is the Fighter's team logo.  That's the one they started using in 2022 when Tsuyoshi Shinjyo became manager and redesigned the team's uniform and logo.  QED, mother-f*ckers.

I wouldn't have any real issue with either of these cards if the sellers were upfront that they were "art cards" but both of them appear to be trying to muddy the waters and imply that they're legitimate.  The "2013" card is selling for $9.99 and the "2017" card is selling for $19.99.  To be honest, I can see the attraction of the "2013" card as there's no legitimate cards of Ohtani in his high school uniform.  Just don't buy it as an investment.

The last item I want to talk about is outright fraud or, at the very least, intentionally misleading.  Here's a screenshot of the auction:

This is an auction for the 2016 BBM 1st Version Fighters team checklist.  Now, Shohei Ohtani's name appears ont the back of the card since, you know, it's a listing of all the Fighters cards in 1st Version that year and Ohtani was one of them.  But the implication of the listing is that that's Ohtani pitching on the card and it's not - it's Yuki Saitoh.  

The photo on that card was taken in Peoria, Arizona when the Fighters were doing their training camp there.  There were several photos in the 1st Version set that were taken in Arizona that year.  That particular photo appeared on the Fighter's web site.  It's not there any more but both the photo and the webpage that it appeared on are preserved in the Wayback Machine.  I suppose it's possible that Ohtani's the guy standing in the bullpen in the background but that's a long shot as he was batting third in the lineup as the DH in this game.  

The game the photo is from was played on February 8th, 2016 and, as you can see from the box score (well, half box score since it has no stats from the Lotte Giants, the Fighters' opponent that day), Ohtani didn't pitch.  I believe the only game he pitched in Arizona that spring was on February 10th, a game I happened to be at.  He wore the away uniform for that game while the card shows Saitoh in the team's home uniform.

I guess I'm going WAY out of my way to attempt to prove it's not Ohtani on the mound on the card.  But Ebay didn't care when I pointed it out and someone bought the card for $16.75 so what do I know.  I've bought from this particular seller before but I don't think I'll do it again in the future.

1934 All American Tour 90th Anniversary - Yokohama

After returning to Tokyo following their games in Hakodate and Sendai, the All Americans played two more games at Jingu Stadium before venturing north to Toyama on November 13th.  They returned to Tokyo to play their fifth and final game at Jingu on the 17th and on the 18th, they traveled to Yokohama to play at what was then called Yokohama Park Sports Field.

While Yokohama Park Sports Field was relatively new in 1934, the park the ballpark resided in, Yokohama Park (also known as Soga Park), had been around for a number of years.  It was here in in 1896 in which "a team from Tokyo's Ichikō high school convincingly defeated a team of resident foreigners from the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club".  This was the first time a Japanese team had defeated a team of foreigners and it greatly contributed to the popularity of baseball in Japan.  There was a ballpark built in the park in the 1910's but it was damaged in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.  The new ballpark opened in 1929 so it was just five years old when the All Americans played here.

The ballpark did not present any obstacles to the All Americans as they defeated the All Nippon team 21-4, the most victory of the nine games on the tour so far.  The MLB stars hit five home runs with Babe Ruth hitting two and Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and Earl Averill each hitting one.  It was the sixth straight game that Ruth homered in - he'd hit ten over those six games.  The All Americans weren't the only home run hitters that day - Toshiharu Inokawa hit the All Nippon team's first home run of the tour in the ninth inning.  The two teams would next head west to Shizuoka.

Yokohama Park Sports Field would stand for another 40 years after the tour.  It was briefly used as a POW camp during the war and was renamed "Lou Gehrig Memorial Stadium" by the occupying Allied forces after the war.  It was the site of the first night game in NPB in August 17th, 1948 between the Giants and the Dragons.  After the Allied occupation ended in the early 1950's, the park's name was changed again to "Yokohama Park Peace Baseball Stadium" although it was generally referred to as "Heiwa Stadium".  While it would host NPB games on occasion, it was not the home park for any team.

By the 1970's, the park was in bad shape.  Concerns about the stability of the stands caused the capacity of the park to be restricted to less than 10,000, much too small to host an NPB team regularly.  Meanwhile, the Taiyo Whales were growing dissatisfied with their home ballpark in Kawasaki, just to the north of Yokohama.   They and Yokohama eventually entered into agreement for the Whales to move to Yokohama when Heiwa Stadium was either renovated or replaced.  The old ballpark was finally torn down in 1977 to make way for Yokohama Stadium.  The new ballpark opened in 1978 as the home for the newly renamed Yokohama Taiyo Whales.

There's a display on the concourse of Yokohama Stadium that details the history of the ballparks on the site.  I took pictures of it on my first visit to the Stadium in 2013 but I didn't really understand what I was looking at at the time:

At some point, there were plaques installed in the outfield corners for Ruth and Gehrig.  Ruth's was at the left field foul pole while Gehrig's was at the right field pole.  In recent years, the plaques have been moved to the afore-mentioned history section.  I suspect that this was due to the recent renovations that were done to the ballpark but I don't know that for sure.  I had not known about the plaques when I visited the ballpark the first time in 2013 and wasn't able to get to them when I returned in 2019.  But when I visited there six months ago, I was able to see both of them in their new resting place:

Once again, I drew on Banzai Babe Ruth by Rob Fitts for source material for this post.

New Panini Cards of Japanese Players

There's some recent releases by Panini that have included cards of Japanese players and I wanted to do a quick post about them.

There's yet another Tomoyuki Sugano Panini card.  The Crusade set includes a card of him along with something like seven different parallels.  There's also a autographed card for him as well.  I picked up the base set card off of Ebay last week - here's the front and back of it.

2024 Panini Crusade #174

Pretty sure this is the same photo that Panini used on a couple of his cards from last year.

Panini has released a box set version of their USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set.  Each box contains a 94 card base set, four autographed Team USA cards, a Chinese Taipei National Team game-worn jersey card and a Japanese Collegiate All Stars game-worn jersey card.  The Japanese Collegiate All Stars game-worn jersey cards appear to be exactly the same as the autographed memorabilia cards that were released back in July except that they (1) don't have autographs and (2) are not serially numbered.  This is a much cheaper option for getting all the team members than the autographed cards.  I picked up two of them last week off of Ebay:

To be honest, these look a little odd with the empty space on the right where the sticker autographs went.

Card Of The Week November 17

Today's Premier 12 game between Japan and Cuba in Taiwan was quite the nail-biter although it didn't look like it was going to be at first.  Japan led 2-0 after three innings and appeared in command with a 5-1 lead after five.  But Cuba rallied to put three runs on the board in the sixth to make it 5-4.  Japan scored a run to increase their lead to two in the bottom of the inning but Cuba scored two in top of the seventh (on a throwing error by pitcher Tatsuya Shimizu) to tie the game up at six.  Japan went back ahead in the bottom of the eighth without benefit of a hit.   Kaito Kozono reached base on an error by shortstop Erisbel Arruebarruena and was pinch run for by Ryota Isobata.  Ryosuke Tatumi was hit by a pitch, putting runners on first and second with nobody out.  A Shota Morishita fielders choice moved Isobata to third and he scored on a Ryoya Kurihara sacrifice fly to kinda-shallow left field.

Taisei, Samurai Japan's closer, wasn't available for this game so Shoma Fujihira came in to pitch the top of the ninth and it got hairy.  With one out, Cuba loaded the bases on back-to-back singles by NPB veterans Alfredo Despaigne and Ariel Martinez and Arruebarruena getting hit by a pitch.  But Fujihira bore down in the rain in Taipei and struck out Yoan Moncada and Andi Cosme to save the 7-6 victory for Japan.

With the victory, Japan is now 4-0 in the tournament and has clinched the top spot in Group B.  Taiwan also won today, giving them a 3-1 record and clinching second place in the group so those two teams will be joining Venezuela and the US in the Super Round starting on Thursday in Tokyo.  Japan has now won 19 straight games in the top three international tournaments - their last loss came at the hands of Team USA in the Super Round of the 2019 Premier 12 on November 12, 2019.  They won their remaining three games in that tournament, went 5-0 in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (played in Yokohama in 2021), 8-0 in the 2023 World Baseball Classic and 4-0 so far in this tournament.

I thought I'd share cards of the two heroes of the game for Samurai Japan - Isobata and Fujihira:

2023 BBM Fighters #F65

2017 BBM Icons - Japan Pride #13

Who?

I was scrolling through BlueSky the other day and I came across a post (skeet?) from someone whose son was going to Japan to participate in the JET program.  They'd included a picture showing a bunch of baseball cards of Americans who'd played in Japan like Davey Johnson, Charlie Manuel, Roger Repoz, Warren Cromartie and Miles Mikolas.  I was taken aback by the inclusion of John Werhas, who'd spent a couple seasons with the Dodgers in the 1960's and also played for the Taiyo Whales in 1971.  I'd never heard of this guy and I was kind of surprised.  I guess I had an unrealistic assumption that I'd heard of every Westerner to play in Japan.  

I was disabused of this notion when I checked out the list of gaijin from one of the late Wayne Graczyk's annual "Japan Pro Baseball Fan Handbook & Media Guides".  When I looked up Werhas, I saw a whole bunch of other names I'd never heard of either - Jarvis Tatum, Thad Tillotson, Elijah Johnson, Terry Hankins and Bill Sorrell, for example, who were all on the same page in the guide as Werhas:

I consoled myself by thinking that, well, none of these guys had baseball cards because they played in Japan before Calbee started doing cards, so why would I have heard of them?  And these guys were all playing before I got interested in baseball in the mid-70's so it's not surprising that I hadn't heard of them.

Then I went on Ebay and found listings for Japanese cards of two more gaijin that I'd never heard of.  Both cards were from the 1980's so I theoretically could have heard of either player but I really hadn't.  I picked up both cards and they arrived in the mail yesterday.

The first player is Art Gardner, who played in the Astros, Giants and Expos organization in the 1970's, including 86 games at the major league level over three seasons with Houston and San Francisco.  He spent 1981 and 1982 in Japan with the Carp.  It's not really surprising that I hadn't heard of him as he wasn't in any Topps sets in the 70's.  Here's his 1981 Calbee card:

1981 Calbee #90

He only had one Calbee card in 1981 but he had three in 1982.  He also appeared in the Takara Carp set for both seasons.

The second player was Richard (or Rich) Duran who spent part of 1984 with the Kintetsu Buffaloes.  He had a surprisingly short minor league career so it's very odd that he ended up in Japan.  He had signed with the Brewers organization as a undrafted free agent in 1979 where he split time between Double-A Holyoke and Single-A Stockton.  He apparently didn't play in 1980 but returned to Stockton in 1981.  He spent 1982 and 1983 in Mexico with Ciudad Juarez, hitting what I think was a league leading .377 in 1983.  He parlayed that average into a contract with the Buffaloes for 1984 but it didn't go well.  He was only hitting .188 in mid-May when he decided to follow Kintetsu's other foreign player - Don Money - back to the US, forcing the team to replace them with Dick Davis and Mark Corey (who, like Money,  I had actually heard of).  Here's Duran's 1984 Takara Kids card:

1984 Takara Kids Buffaloes #44

Duran only had three baseball cards and two of them are Takara issues from Japan.  The other card is a 1979 TCMA Holyoke Millers card which I actually had owned when I was in high school, although I think I can be forgiven for not remembering everyone in a set I owned 40 years ago.

Stadium Mug Shots

I poke fun at Topps' NPB offerings all the time so it's kind of surprising when I occasionally end up trying to finish some oddball Topps related item.  One such item was in last year's 206 set.  I had mocked this set as a mug shot set but I did like the parallels that showed the player's image in front of the outside of their home ballpark.  I eventually got one of these for each team and stadium - I think I got the last couple I needed at Coletre last May but I can't remember now which ones they were.

I decided before I left for Japan than I was going to try to do my own version of these cards at each ballpark I went to on the trip.  So without further ado, here's one of the "stadium background" parallels for each ballpark along with a selfie I took at the same ballpark:

#43

#134

#62

#197

#175

#107

#176

#102

#130

#165

#121

I attempted to get a similar shot as the card but I usually hadn't looked at the card recently and I didn't always have a lot of time to take the selfie.  Plus I'm really bad at taking selfies.

I didn't make it up to Hokkaido so I wasn't able to recreate this one outside the Fighters ballpark:

#54

I did, however, take selfies outside the two non-NPB ballparks I went to.  First was Kusanagi Stadium in Shizuoka:

The second was Ota Stadium in Tokyo:

And with that, my posts about my trip to Japan last May are finally done.  It only took me nearly six months to finish!