Card Of The Week February 9

I found out a couple interesting pieces of trivia a while back while I was researching my post about BBM's cards for the previous year's Best 9 and Golden Glove award winners.  The first was that the Golden Glove awards weren't always called the Golden Glove awards.  When they were first introduced in 1972, they were called the "Diamond Glove" awards.  It wasn't until 1986 that the name changed to "Golden Glove".  I think it had something to do with a change in who sponsored the awards but the machine translation of the Japanese wikipedia page on the award is unclear.

The second and perhaps more interesting thing is that there have been four players to win both a Gold Glove in MLB and a Diamond/Golden Glove in NPB.  Clete Boyer was the first, having won the MLB award with the Atlanta Braves in 1969 and the NPB award with the Taiyo Whales in 1973 and 1974 (he shared the 1973 award with Shigeo Nagashima).  

1975/76/77 Calbee #374 (w/Daisuke Yamashita)

Wes Parker won six Gold Gloves between 1967 and 1972 with the Los Angeles Dodgers.  He sat out the 1973 season before joining the Nankai Hawks for 1974.  He won a Diamond Glove award for his one NPB season which gave him seven consecutive awards across the two leagues (with a gap for the one year he didn't play).  

1975 Broder JA4

Davey Johnson was another player with multiple Gold Glove awards, having won them in three consecutive years as a member of the Baltimore Orioles between 1969 and 1971.  He won a Diamond Glove award in 1976, his second and final year with the Yomiuri Giants.

1975/76/77 Calbee #1067

It'd be 25 years before another player joined this club.  Ichiro won Golden Gloves his last seven years in NPB with the Orix BlueWave between 1994 and 2000 and then won Gold Gloves in each of his first ten seasons in MLB with the Seattle Mariners.  He's the only player on the list with multiple NPB awards and he basically won one or the other award every year for seventeen years.

2000 BBM #G7