I've mentioned before that there's usually some surprises in the boxes that Ryan sends me and this latest one was no exception. I found these three foil envelopes in the box:
I'd never seen these before. Obviously, they were some sort of team issued cards by the Swallows in celebration of the 55th Anniversary of their acquisition by Yakult but I had no idea beyond that. I opened the first pack and discovered that it only had one card in it:
There's no name on the front of the card but I was pretty sure I knew who it was - Hall Of Famer Atsuya Furuta. The back of the card confirmed it:
The other two packs contained cards of Yoshinori Satoh and Junji Ogawa:
The QR code on the back of the cards is still valid and brings up a webpage with details about how the team celebrated the anniversary last year. It turns out the cards were giveaways on days that the player pictured participated in a first pitch ceremony before the game. Furuta's card was given away on July 16th (along with Kenjiro Kawasaki and Tetsuya Iida), Satoh's card was given away on September 19th and Ogawa's card was given away on September 21st (along with Tsutomu Wakamatsu). It looks like there were 15 cards in all. I think each player's blurb on the website is the same as the text on the back of their card.
While this is a rare team issued set where I know how the cards were distributed and how many there are, I am disappointed with one thing I learned from the website - there was a display of historic Yakult uniforms at the JR Shinanomachi station when I was in Japan last year. Ryan and I actually caught trains at this station after the Swallows game we went to but we didn't know about the jersey display.
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