Pillbox Hats In NPB

I've been seeing some coverage lately of the pillbox hats that MLB teams wore for the 1976 All Star games (and some teams continued wearing afterwards) and thought it'd be fun to do a quick post about when NPB teams wore similar hats on a couple occasions.  Oddly enough, however, baseball cards showing these hats are almost non-existent.  I only know of two, and, bizarrely, they are both from the same set which was issued 30-ish years after the hats were used.

I'll be relying on my usual uniform references for this post - the book The History of Uniform (HOU) and the mook Professional Baseball Uniform Encyclopedia 1934-2013 (PBU).

Now, obviously, the bicentennial of the United States was not something that merited a major celebration in Japan, but NPB decided to adopt pillbox hats for the 1979 All Star games (there were three that year) to celebrate the league's 30th Anniversary - or, more accurately, the 30th season after the Japan Baseball League (JBL) reorganized itself into the two leagues (Central and Pacific) of Nippon Professional Baseball.  HOU does not appear to mention this anywhere but there's a small blurb on it in PBU's section called "How To Dress For The All-Star Game" (p. 86):

The text here mentions that most teams just added stripes to their regular hats but Kintetsu used a completely new design.

The only baseball card I've found that shows one of these hats is from the 2009 BBM Sadaharu Oh Memorial set.  Oh had hit his tenth All Star game home run in Game One in Osaka, setting a new record.  He took home the MVP award for that game: 

2009 BBM Sadaharu Oh Memorial #50

While there don't appear to be any other baseball cards that show these hats, the interior of one of Calbee's albums that were available as a giveaway in 1979 show a sequence of photos of Tigers pitcher Shigeru Kobayashi wearing it:

The Central League held a post-season East-West All Star game almost every year between 1979 and 1990 (with the exception of 1989).  For the first two years, the players wore special uniforms for this game that included pillbox caps.  Here's the page from HOU describing the uniforms:

The text here erroneously says that this was the first time a pillbox hat was worn in NPB.  The 1979 All Star Series would have been held about three and a half months earlier than the 1979 Central League East-West All Star game.

Here's the blurb from PBU about it:

The 1980 game, held in Nagoya Stadium, was treated as the retirement game for both Sadaharu Oh and Morimichi Takagi.  The photo of Oh's do-age (number three in the above scan) was used on another card in the 2009 BBM Sadaharu Oh Memorial set:

2009 BBM Sadaharu Oh Memorial #55

This is the only card I've ever seen depicting these uniforms although I did see some "Fuji Film Photos" of Oh on Ebay that included shots from this game.

The Pacific League held a similar game off and on between 1981 and 2006 but, as far as I've been able to tell, they never wore the pillbox hats.

The final occurrence that I know about with pillbox hats in NPB was for the 1980 "Junior All Star Game".  This is the minor league All Star game held between the then-two farm leagues - the Eastern and Western Leagues.  (This game is now known as the "Fresh All Star Game").  Normally the players in this game wear their team's uniform but for the 1980 game, they wore special uniforms that included pillbox hats.  Here's the writeup from HOU:

Here's the blurb from PBU:

As far as I know, there are no baseball cards that feature players wearing these uniforms and hats.  

Japanese MLB Players With No NPB Experience

Rikuu Nishida made his MB debut with the White Sox today.  Nishida was born in Osaka, Japan but played college baseball in Oregon for Mt. Hood Community College and the University of Oregon.  He was drafted by the White Sox in 2023 and has been working his way up their farm system ever since.

I think that Nishida is the seventh Japanese baseball player to make it to MLB without having played in NPB first but I'm not positive.  Part of the uncertainty is defining what "Japanese baseball player" means.  Does it mean being born in Japan?   That would mean that someone like Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was born in Okinawa to an American serviceman father and Japanese mother, or Lee Jung-hoo, who was born in Nagoya while his father Lee Jong-beom was playing for the Dragons, would count.  I'm not sure folks like that are what most people think about when thinking about "Japanese baseball players", however, so I'm going to go with "players who could reasonably be expected to hold a Japanese passport".

The six previous players by my definition are Mac Suzuki, Michael Nakamura, Kazuhito Tadano, Junichi Tazawa, Gosuke Katoh and Lars Nootbaar.  I'm a little iffy on whether or not Nootbaar has a Japanese passport but obviously he meets the definition of "Japanese" for the purposes of the World Baseball Classic.  I suspect Nootbaar would probably not want to let anyone know he's got a Japanese passport if he ever decided to play in NPB as he would then be subject to their draft rather than being a free agent (which is why Katoh was drafted by the Fighters despite being born in California to Japanese parents).

Four of these six players eventually played in NPB with Tazawa and Nootbaar (so far) being the exceptions.  Three of those four joined the Fighters oddly enough.  Tazawa had wanted to join NPB but was pretty much blackballed after spurning the league for MLB in the late 00's.  He had made himself available for the 2020 NPB draft but wasn't taken by anyone.

Here are NPB cards of the four plus a Japanese WBC card of Nootbaar:

2003 Calbee Series One #082

2006 BBM Nippon Series #S08

2013 BBM 1st Version #171

2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition #29

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #10

There have been a number of Japanese baseball players who started their professional careers in North America (but didn't necessarily make it to MLB) before ending up back in Japan with NPB.  I did a post on a bunch of them some years back (which included Suzuki, Nakamura and Tadano) but I don't know if I missed anyone or if there's anyone that's come in the years since then.

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).

Series MVP And Winning Manager

A year ago, I went down a rabbit hole based on something that NPB on Reddit had posted about how Daisuke Miura was the 25th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.  This year, NPB on Reddit has provided a new rabbit hole to go down by reporting that Hiroki Kokubo of the Hawks was the the sixth person to win the Nippon Series MVP award as a player and the Nippon Series as a manager.  I, of course, had to go research this and figure out who the other five were.  Here they are, in order of when they achieved the feat (i.e. when they won their first Nippon Series as manager) along with a card of them as a player and as a manager.  Like last year's post, I tried to get cards from the years they won the MVP or managed the champions but it wasn't possible in a couple cases:

Tetsuharu Kawakami: Series MVP - 1953; Series Winning Manager - 1961, 1963, 1965-73

1958 "Who Am I?" JCM 54

1997 BBM Giants #89

Masahiko/Masaaki Mori: Series MVP - 1967; Series Winning Manager - 1986-88, 1990-92

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G21

1991 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Shigeo Nagashima: Series MVP - 1963, 1965, 1969, 1970;  Series Winning Manager 1994, 2000

1964 Marukami JCM 14g

1994 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Koji Akiyama: Series MVP - 1991, 1999; Series Winning Manager - 2011, 2014

1999 BBM Nippon Series #S64

2014 BBM 1st Version #082

Kimiyasu Kudoh: Series MVP - 1986, 1987; Series Winning Manager - 2015, 2017-20

1987 Calbee #130

2020 Epoch NPB #037

Hiroki Kokubo: Series MVP - 2011; Series Winning Manager - 2025

2011 BBM Nippon Series #S58

2024 BBM Hawks #H01

Kokubo, of course, has become the 26th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.

I was a little surprised to discover that Sadaharu Oh never won a Nippon Series MVP award.

I got curious to see if anyone had ever done the equivalent in MLB - win a World Series MVP award as a player and the World Series as a manager.  Nope, it's never been done.  In fact, I could only find six World Series MVP winners who went onto manage in MLB at all - Frank Robinson, Pete Rose, Bucky Dent, Alan Trammell, Ray Knight and Paul Molitor.  And I could only come up with two league MVP award winners who had ever managed a World Series champion - Mickey Cochrane and Joe Torre - while the list of NPB MVPs who managed Nippon Series champions is quite long (not that I've made a list.  Yet).  The reason for this, of course, is that a star player in MUCH more likely to become a manager in NPB than MLB.

I was a little surprised to discover that the Nippon Series MVP Award predates the World Series MVP award.  The Nippon Series MVP has been award for every Nippon Series which started in 1950.  The World Series MVP award was first awarded in 1955, which means there's 50-ish World Series that do not have an MVP.

Hideki Irabu's Hanshin Tigers Cards

In December of 2002, the Hanshin Tigers made an announcement.  After spending the previous six seasons in MLB, Hideki Irabu would be returning to Japan and NPB for the 2003 season.

Tigers manager Senichi Hoshino had originally intended to use Irabu as his closer but Irabu convinced him to put him in the starting rotation.  It looked like a great move when the former Orion went 9-2 in the first half of the season and was one of the Central League's Monthly MVP in May.  He made the All Star team for the fourth time in his career (and first time since 1996, his last season with Lotte before signing with the Yankees).  He faltered some in the second half of the season, going 4-6, but his overall record was 13-8 with an ERA of 3.85.  He made 27 starts and threw 173 innings, striking out 164 while walking only 47.  The Tigers won the Central League pennant that year, their first one since their first Nippon Series championship in 1985.  His season ended on a sour note, however, as he was slapped around pretty well by the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in two starts in the Nippon Series.  He gave up five runs in three innings (which included a solo home run by Kenji Johjima) in Game 2 and three runs in two innings (although I think only two of those were earned - both on a two run homer by Tadahito Iguchi) in Game 6.  He lost both games and the Tigers lost the Series in seven games.  Still, it had been a pretty good season for the 34 year old after several up-and-down seasons in MLB.

2004, however, was a disaster for him.  His performance against Daiei in the previous year's Series had revealed a couple of his weaknesses - lack of mobility in defending his position and an inability to hold runners on - and the other teams took advantage of it.  Hoshino had stepped down as manager due to health issues and new manager Akinobu Okada had a very short leash for Irabu.  He only made three starts with the top team, going 0-2 while only pitching 11 innings.  His ERA was a robust 13.11.  The Tigers released him at the end of the season and he announced his retirement due to a chronic knee issue shortly afterward.  He made a comeback with two independent league teams in 2009 - the Long Beach Armada of the Golden Baseball League and the Kochi Fighting Dogs of the Shikoku Island League - but that was the end of his playing days.  He tragically took his own life in 2011.

With that background, I want to talk about the baseball cards issued for Irabu during his two years with Hanshin because they're a bit odd.  Despite signing with the Tigers in plenty of time before training camp, he does not appear in the 2003 BBM 1st Version set.  Nor does he appear in the 2nd Version set.  Nor does he appear in BBM's "comprehensive" team set for the Tigers (which is not quite "comprehensive" without him in it).  He's also not in any Calbee set for 2003.  

What's weird is that he does appear in some BBM card sets for 2003.  He's got five cards across four different sets.  His first appearance is in BBM's All Star set - what was then an annual set that included cards of everyone who made the All Star teams.  He appears in two different box sets celebrating the Tigers championship run - one card in the "Victory Road Prologue" set and two cards in the "Victory Road" set.  His last 2003 card was in BBM's Nippon Series set - another then-annual set that featured all the players who appeared in each year's Nippon Series.  Here's all five of these cards (I don't have one of the "Victory Road" cards so I used an image of it I found on the internet):

2003 BBM All Stars #A19

2003 BBM Victory Road Prologue #14

2003 BBM Victory Road #17

2003 BBM Victory Road #49

2003 BBM Nippon Series #33

There were at least two oddball Tigers sets issued in 2003 that are listed in the older editions of Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide".  Irabu is not in either of them.  The "Top Foods Hanshin Tigers Championship" set (JMC 516) appears to be a "comprehensive" team set in that it contains cards for all the players on the 70 man roster (except Irabu) plus the coaching staff.  The "Glico Chocolate Hanshin Tigers 1st Half Photo" set features highlights of the first half of the Tigers' season.  Both of these sets are ones that you'd expect Irabu to appear in but he doesn't.

Things improved a little bit in 2004.  He still didn't appear in the 1st Version set but he had two cards in the base set for the BBM Tigers set (and had a "Tigers Nine" insert card as well).  He also appeared in a subset in the 2004 Calbee Series One set that celebrated the monthly MVPs for the previous year.  Those would be his only 2004 cards, however.  I think being banished to the farm team after only three starts prevented him from appearing in BBM's 2nd Version set or any of the later Calbee sets.  Here's his 2004 cards (with the exception of the insert card):

2004 Calbee Series One #M-07

2004 BBM Tigers #T30

2004 BBM Tigers #T83

This is unusual but not completely unheard of.  Cuban legend Omar Linares spent three seasons with the Chunichi Dragons from 2002 to 2004 but almost all his NPB baseball cards are from 2004.  I'm not sure if there's another Japanese player of significance, however, who would have been expected to appear in BBM flagship sets when he was an active player but didn't.