I got an email a few weeks back from someone who was trying to put together a comprehensive list of Mel Bailey postcards. Mel Bailey was a US Air Force captain stationed in Japan in the mid to late 1960's who - along with Navy CPO Bud Ackerman - was responsible for importing a number of NPB card sets to the US. Bailey also took photos at baseball games in both Japan and the US and sold postcards featuring these photos on them. I had picked up ten of his postcards some time ago and was able to provide the person who contacted me with the list of what I had.
During our email exchange, he mentioned that there was a Mel Bailey postcard of Dick Stuart available on Ebay. I was sorely tempted by it since there aren't any known baseball cards of Stuart during his two years with the Taiyo Whales. But I was also trying to keep my vow of not buying anything that wasn't on my want list. I finally gave in and pulled the trigger right before the auction ended. Here's the postcard:
I found it interesting that there were some differences between this postcard and the ones I already had. For one thing, this one is slightly larger than the others - it's 3 3/4 inches wide and 5 1/2 inches high while the others are 3 1/2 inches wide and 5 7/16 inches high. The other obvious thing is that the other postcards I have seem to have a softer focus - although I'm not sure I'm really using the correct terminology. Here's the other ten postcards so you can maybe see what I'm trying to talk about:
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| Yukio Nishimoto |
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| Minoru Murayama |
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| Katsuya Nomura |
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| Futoshi Nakanishi |
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| Katsuo Ohsugi |
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| Katsuo Ohsugi |
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| Masaaki Koyama |
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| Masaichi Kaneda |
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| Masaichi Kaneda |
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| Tetsuharu Kawakami |
One other significant difference is the backs of the postcards. My correspondent said that Bailey mostly printed his postcards on Kodak paper but also used EtchTone and Mitsubishi. All of the ones that I had already had were on Kodak paper:
I played with the contrast a little in that image to make the writing a little more visible. I believe that that's Bailey's handwriting identifying the player.
The Stuart card, however, used Mitsubishi paper:
It barely shows up in the scan but Bailey had stamped "Photo By Mel Bailey" just to the left of the line in the center. I don't know if Bailey wrote "1966" on this but it's not correct - Stuart spent 1966 with the Mets and Dodgers.
Since there were very few NPB baseball cards produced in the late 60's, Bailey's postcards are an intriguing way to maybe fill in some gaps.
3 comments:
These are very cool thanks for sharing! I was actually just reading the post of yours from a few years back about Bailey and Ackerman. Fascinating read! The '64 Morinaga Shigeru Mizuhara is actually one of the more available cards in the set here in Japan; I see them pretty frequently, actually. So it's interesting to me that Bailey didn't have as many of them when he imported them leading it to be listed in Engel as super rare and pricey.
Thanks!
Yeah, it's kind of weird what they ended up with. For the Morinaga cards, Bailey had gotten them direct from the company so you wonder if there was a decollation issue - especially since there were five cards in the set that he didn't get any of.
That is pretty cool, I hadn't known that he produced postcards like that (actually all my knowledge about Bailey comes from your blog to begin with!) Its cool that they partly fill in that gap in the baseball card record from the mid 60s for players like Stuart.
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