Meiji Jingu Stadium At 100

1992 BBM #482

 Last Friday marked the 100th Anniversary of the opening of Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo.  The ballpark was "formally opened" by the Prince Regent - who would become the Showa Emperor a little over two months later - on October 23rd, 1926, and the first ballgame was played between two All Star teams of middle school students from Tokyo and Yokohama.  

While most people know the ballpark as the home field of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, the team did not start playing there until 1964.  The first NPB team to call the ballpark home was the Toei Flyers, who played there in 1962 and 1963 after they had been displaced from their original home, Komazawa Baseball Stadium, due to that venue being demolished to make way for a facility for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  The Swallows had shared Korakuen Stadium with the Giants through the 1963 season and the Flyers and Swallows basically switched ballparks after that year.  

Before the professional teams played there, the ballpark was mostly used for college baseball.  It was considered "holy ground for amateur baseball" and Matsutarō Shōriki suffered an assassination attempt for allowing professional baseball players from America to play on the field in the 1934 All American tour.  The ballpark was appropriated by the occupying US forces after the war and dubbed "Stateside Park" although Japanese teams were allowed to resume using it by the end of 1945.  The park reverted to Japan after the Treaty of San Francisco formally ended the US occupation in 1952.

The ballpark is supposedly slated for destruction as part of a renovation of the area but I'm not sure what the current time frame for that is.  I made it a point to go to games there on each of my three trips to Japan, just in case the ballpark is torn down before I get back there.  I've attended seven games there - two Swallows games, four Tokyo Bis Six games and one corporate league game - which is tied with Tokyo Dome for the most games I've seen at a ballpark in Japan.

I thought it might be fun to find some baseball cards that featured photos of the stadium.  The earliest ones I have are from the 1974/75 Calbee set when the ballpark was already almost 50 years old:

1974/75 Calbee #733

1974/75 Calbee #748

Both cards commemorate the Opening Day matchup between the Swallows and the Hiroshima Toyo Carp on April 5th, 1975.  The first card shows the smoke lingering from the pregame fireworks while the second one shows the two teams lined up on the field.

Obviously the ballpark doesn't look much like this anymore.  A series of renovations starting in the late 70's and continuing over the next ten years or so changed it into what we're now more familiar with.  The card at the top of this post - despite being 34 years old - shows the ballpark looking very similar to how it does now.  

I went through BBM's Nippon Series sets, looking for cards that had photos taken at Jingu.  While there were a number that were obviously taken there, I decided to only select the photos that showed the scoreboard as there wasn't anything distinctive about the other photos - you mostly knew they were taken at Jingu because the Swallows player was wearing the home uniform.  Most of these were the team photos for the victorious team but there were a couple cards for the award winners from the 1992 set that also had the scoreboard in the background:

1992 BBM Nippon Series #S52

1992 BBM Nippon Series #S53

1992 BBM Nippon Series #S56

1995 BBM Nippon Series #S64

1997 BBM Nippon Series #S63

The second game of the 1997 All Star series was held at Jingu and the 1998 BBM All Stars set included a card showing all the award winners from the game:

1998 BBM All Stars #A64

I think that's Kazuo Matsui (Lions) on the far left and Shinjiro Hiyama (Tigers) on the far right.  I'm much more confident of the other five players - from left to right is Ichiro (Orix), Dwayne Hosey (Swallows), Kazuhiro Kiyohara (Giants), Hideki Matsui (Giants) and Masahiro Yamamoto (Dragons).

Almost all the player cards in the sets that BBM did for the Tokyo Big Six college league between 2008 and 2013 feature photos taken at Jingu, but, like the Nippon Series cards, they really don't show anything distinctive about the ballpark.  The only ones that did were the team cards from the 2008, 2009, and 2010 Autumn Version sets.  All six team cards in each set show the scoreboard but I'm only showing one card from each set:

2008 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #06

2009 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #36

2010 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #06

The other Tokyo Big Six sets either did not include team cards or had ones with photos taken at the team's training fields.

BBM has twice in recent years had an insert set in their 2nd Version set that showed off all twelve primary ballparks in NPB - "Franchise Builder" in 2019 and "Show Man" in 2021.  Tetsuto Yamada was the featured player on both of the cards for Jingu Stadium:

2019 BBM 2nd Version "Franchise Builder" #FB08

2021 BBM 2nd Version "Show Man" #SM12

I saved what's perhaps the best card for last.  This 2022 Epoch One card of Munetaka Murakami commemorates his 41st home run of that season and has the sky lit up with the sunset behind the Docomo Tower in Shinjuku:

2022 Epoch One #667