Card Of The Week May 4

2004 BBM Golden Arms #008

I came across the above card of Masaaki Koyama when I was preparing the memorial post I did for him last week and I found it very intriguing.  I've had this card for years but I had just now noticed that the batter was a Swallows player.  I had assumed that Koyama was with the Orions when this photo was taken since the logo on his hat was "TO" which had to be for "Tokyo Orions", right?  Since the Orions and Swallows were in separate leagues and there was no inter-league play until 2005, I figured the photo had to either be from an exhibition game or, perhaps, an All Star game.  I had gone so far as to look at which All Star games Koyama had appeared in for the 1964 and 1965 seasons and see which position players for the Swallows had been on the Central League teams in those years to try to identify the batter - my prime candidate was catcher Hiromitsu Negoro.  I figured I would add another bullet point to the list of "quick notes" at the end of the post to include my research.  But there turned out to be one little problem.

That's NOT a Tokyo Orions hat.

As a sanity check, I looked at my copy of History Of Uniform to see what years the Orions wore that hat.  They didn't list it.  It wouldn't be the first time that History Of Uniform didn't list something, though, so I wasn't too deterred by this.  I assumed it was a hat that they had worn in 1964 and 1965 since the team changed the name from Daimai to Tokyo Orions in 1964 and there was a somewhat significant uniform change starting in 1966.  But after doing all the All Star roster research I mentioned above, I had a sudden thought - what if that's a Tigers hat?  I grabbed History Of Uniform again and flipped to the Tigers section and, sure enough, the Tigers wore that hat in 1960, the final year they were known as the "Osaka Tigers".   That "TO" is really an "OT".

In the end I pulled the card from the Memorial post, figuring it was less attractive without the photo being from an All Star game.  But I thought the whole story might be interesting enough for a Card Of The Week post on a weekend when I'm away from home and can't do a post related to something timely.