The Nittaku Home Flyers

2003 BBM Fighters #102

The NPB subreddit today had a post about the seven different uniforms that the Nittaku Home Flyers wore during the second half of the 1973 season.  The post featured the above photo that was immortalized in the 2003 BBM Fighters team set.  I wrote a post about this topic some years ago but, to be quite honest, I really had no idea what I was talking about at the time.  I will point out that my assertion that they wore different uniforms based on what position the players were playing is completely wrong.  I also didn't have any baseball cards showing these uniforms when I did that post so I thought I'd take a second shot at it now.  

My original post included some scans of pages from "History Of Uniform" which I could not read at the time.  I can read them now - not because I've learned how to read Japanese but because Google Translate has greatly improved in the past 12 years.

Let's start with a little background - Nittaku Home was a real estate company that bought the Flyers from Toei in early February of 1973.  Since training camp had already started, there wasn't time to design new team uniforms from scratch, so instead there were just minor modifications made to the Toei uniforms used the previous year.  The away jerseys were modified to say "Nittaku Home" instead of "Toei" and the Toei logo on the sleeve was changed to the Nittaku Home one.  These were the uniforms that the team wore until the All Star break in mid-July.

The new uniforms were unveiled with the assertion that "the Flyers would confuse opponents with their uniform color strategy".  How exactly that would work was never explained.  1973 was the first year of the Pacific League's ten year experiment with a split season and the Flyers had finished the first half in fifth place with a 25-37-3 record.  They improved to fourth place and a 30-32-3 record in the second half but I suspect that replacing manager Kenjiro Tamiya with Masayuki Dobashi was probably more responsible for that improvement than the uniforms.  

The four uniforms with a white base were home uniforms while the solid blue, yellow and black with yellow sleeves were away uniforms.

There apparently were some stories that the players were confused at all the uniforms and sometimes brought the wrong one to games and had to play in the wrong one but (if I'm understanding the Google translation correctly) that doesn't appear to be accurate.  "History Of Uniform" quotes outfielder Mikio Sendo saying that he didn't remember that happening and that the team always had spare uniforms so it's possible someone played wearing a different number than usual but not a different uniform than the others.

Following the season there was talk of the Flyers and Lotte Orions merging.  Tokyo Stadium, Lotte's home ballpark, had gone bankrupt, leaving the team without a home.  I think the plan was to get two more teams to merge, reducing the number of teams to ten and having all ten teams play in the same league.  It didn't happen and Nittaku Home ended up selling the Flyers to Nippon-Ham in November of 1973.  (Lotte was essentially homeless for five years, playing the majority of their games in Sendai while also hosting games in a number of different parks across Japan.  Kawasaki Stadium became available when the Taiyo Whales moved to Yokohama in 1978 and the Orions played there for the next 15 years.)

I took a look today to see how many baseball cards I had that depicted members of the Nittaku Home Flyers.  I have eleven, not including the card shown above.  I was kind of amused to discover that those eleven cards only feature three different players.  What's more, two of those players only appear in the less interesting uniforms from the first half of the season.  Here are the cards in the order that they were published:

1973/74 Calbee #317 (Satoshi Niimi)

2012 BBM No-hitters #56

2013 Epoch Rookies Of The Year #29

2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #098 (Naoki Takahashi)

2019 BBM Fusion #44

2022 BBM Fusion #38

All three of the Naoki Takahashi cards commemorate the no-hitter he threw against the Kintetsu Buffaloes on June 16th.

The cards that I have that show the colorful uniforms from the second half of the season all feature Hall Of Famer Isao Harimoto.  Only four of the seven uniforms make an appearance on the cards (and two of the cards have the same photograph).  Again, these cards are presented in the order they were published:

1973/74 Calbee #316 (Isao Harimoto)

2004 BBM Baseball Magazine Insert #1-3/4

2015 BBM Memories Of Uniform #097

2017 BBM Fusion #050

2017 BBM Fusion #050 (Secret Version)

I am aware of additional four cards that show members of the team from the 1973/74 Calbee set.  I swiped the images of three of these from TCDB and the other from Mandarake.  Three of these cards show the same uniform that Harimoto is wearing in the Calbee card above while the other card shows Katsuo Ohsugi wearing the uniform from the first half of the season:

1973/74 Calbee #207 (Isao Harimoto)

1973/74 Calbee #208 (Katsuo Ohsugi)

1973/74 Calbee #209 (Mikio Sendo)

1973/74 Calbee #316 (Katsuo Ohsugi)

These sixteen cards are the only ones I know of that depict members of the Nittaku Home Flyers.  I'm not saying there aren't others, but I haven't seen them.

The players in the group photo at the top of this post are (from left to right) Isamu Nakahara (pitcher), Hideaki Watanabe (pitcher), Tsuyoshi Oshita (2b), Makoto Fujiwara (pitcher), Masatoshi Nakahara (SS-3b), Takeaki Yamazaki (pitcher) and Masaki Miura (pitcher).