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| 2024 BBM Professional Baseball 90th Anniversary #130 |
The photo shows Michiyo Arito and Hiroyuki Yamazaki of the Lotte Orions posing in front of what looks like a palm tree in what looks like possibly an arid environment. The two players are wearing the uniforms that the Orions wore in the first four seasons they were owned by Lotte - 1969 to 1972. According to my research, Lotte did spring training in Casa Grande, Arizona from 1970 to 1972. So it looked like there's a pretty good chance the photo was from Arizona.
I got a email soon afterwards from a reader named Kevin who got curious about this and started doing some research. He found the original photo in Shukan Baseball's archives by doing a Google Lens search:
Unfortunately, the article on the web page this appears on appears to be an interview with Yamazaki from earlier this year and doesn't say where or when the photo was taken. But Kevin found some other, similar photos including the following cover from the March 23rd, 1970 issue of Shukan Baseball:
Again, the accompanying article doesn't say anything about the photo really - it's from 2020 and talks about some of the articles inside the issue.
Kevin found a couple other photos that appear to be taken at the same location. This first one is of Art Lopez:
Lopez spent four years with the Orions but only three when they were owned by Lotte (1969-71) which narrows down when this photo was taken - although there's no evidence it was taken at the same time as the other photos. Same with this group shot of (clockwise from the top left) Arito, Yamazaki, Fumio Narita and Masaaki Kitaru:
The text at the top says something about Lotte winning at Tokyo Stadium but I don't necessarily think the photo was taken there. There doesn't seem to be anything establishing the location of the photo in the other text either and it's not clear when the article is from.
Kevin mentioned that he'd been unable to establish that the Orions had done spring training in Arizona in 1970. To the best of his research, the Orions had only been there in 1971 and 1972. In fact, the only place saying they were there in 1970 was my blog.
I pointed out that I had seen an article in the March 23rd, 1970 issue of the Chicago Tribune entitled "Japanese Orions defeat Giants in 12 innings, 4-3" with the implications, of course, that the Tribune meant the San Francisco variety and not the Yomiuri ones. I had a link to the article on my blog post about Japanese teams doing spring training in the US but since I found the article (2017), the Tribune has moved their archives behind a paywall at Newspapers.com and I wasn't able to see it. But still, the Tribune article established that the Orions were in Arizona in the spring of 1970 and since a similar photo to the photo on the card was on the cover of a March, 1970 issue of Shukan Baseball, we've pretty much established that the photo was taken in Arizona. I mean, Q.E.D, right?
Well, no, actually. Kevin continued to be persistent in his investigation and ended up signing up for a week's free trial at Newspapers.com (which he says "is actually only 5 days to cancel and costs $75 every six months") and looked up the article in question. He noticed something about it that I missed almost eight years ago. See if you notice it:
I missed the dateline on the blurb from Reuters - that game was played in Tokyo! It was the Giants who were on foreign soil, not the Orions. San Francisco had done a tour of Japan in March of 1970, playing nine games in nine days between the 21st and 29th. They went 3-6 and had a miserable time of it. The details of the tour are available in Steven Treder's article on it in "Nichibei Yakyu: US Tours Of Japan 1960-2019 (Volume 2)". I've corrected the spring training web page to reflect the correct years that Lotte was in Arizona.
So the Orions were in Japan in March of 1970 when the photo was likely taken so it's almost certainly NOT from Arizona.
Special thanks to Kevin for doing all this research! This is great stuff and I'm really happy to get the story and history correct.
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