Florida Project Addendum

I wanted to do a quick coda to my post about completing the subset from the 1974/75 Calbee set showing the Yomiuri Giants at Vero Beach for spring training in 1975.  Calbee was not the only card company to include cards showing the Giants in Florida - NST did too.  Unfortunately I can't say for sure how many such cards there are in the set.

If you're not familiar with NST, they issued four sets of baseball cards between 1975 and 1983.  Although to be completely accurate, they issued four sets of baseball "stamps" that were intended to be pasted into books.  Their first set - the one from 1975 - was entitled "Mr. Baseball" and was centered on Shigeo Nagashima.  A large number of the cards in the set featured Nagashima's recently completed playing career as well as his first season as the Giants' manager.  Other cards featured the players on the 1975 Giants as well as stars (and managers) of other teams.

I haven't seen all the cards in the set but I think there are two sections of the checklist that include photos that were taken in Florida in the spring of 1975.  I don't have all of these cards but I found a number of them over at COMC.  It'll be pretty obvious which are which.

The first section is cards #182 to #191 which appear to mostly be photos of Nagashima during spring training both in Japan and Florida.  This card is one of the exceptions which shows the Giants players lined up on a baseline.  It resembles the photo on the 1974/75 Calbee card #694 which was taken at Daytona City Island Ballpark although I don't think this one was taken there.  The caption for this card in the stamp booklet for the set says that this photo is from Vero Beach although I don't think those captions are always accurate.

#186

This next card features Nagashima with Stan Wasiak, the manager of the Dodgers' Triple-A team in Albuquerque at the time.  The caption in the stamp book implies that this is Dodger manager Walt Alston but that's not correct - Alston wore #24 not #75.  That's Giants catcher Takashi Yoshida (#9) lurking in the background.

#188

This next card is one of my favorites.  It features Nagashima and Expos manager Gene Mauch starting to exchange hats.  The text in the stamp book again implies that this is Walt Alston again but it clearly is not.

#189

Gary Engel had labelled this as Gene Mauch in his checklist but I always wondered if it really was him.  But a few months back I was spelunking through SABR's photo archive and I came across this which confirmed it:

The final card from this section of the checklist shows Nagashima talking to uniformed person wearing a blue coat.  The stamp booklet does not identify the other person.  The card looks very similar to the 1974/75 Calbee card #713 although it is not the same photo.

#190

Engel lists the other person as Jack McKeon, who was the manager of the Kansas City Royals at the time, although he adds a "?" to indicate that he's not sure.  I don't know why Gary decided it was McKeon although I don't see anything obvious to confirm it one way or another.  It'd be kind of ironic if it turned out that the one time NST didn't claim it was Walt Alston with Nagashima, it turned out that he was.

The other section of the checklist that has photos taken in Florida is cards #224 to #239.  I'm fairly certain that not all of these cards do but here are the ones that I've seen that I think were.  The first one features an American player who is instantly recognizable to anyone who was a baseball fan in the 1970's (or reads the Night Owl regularly);

#224 Tsuneo Horiuchi/Ron Cey

BTW - I sent the Night Owl a copy of this card a few years ago so he's already aware it exists.

 

Here's the rest of the cards:

#226 Sadaharu Oh

#227 Toshimitsu Suetsugu

#229 Isao Shibata

#230 Shozo Doi

#234 Kazumi Takahashi

#235 Shigeru Kobayashi w/coach Yukinori Miyata

#236 Yoshimasa Takahashi

#239 Shitoshi Sekimoto

A couple of comments on these cards:

• If you look at the background of Shibata's card, you'll see a bunch of Atlanta Braves players in the dugout
• I briefly got excited that there was a Pittsurgh Pirates player in the background of Doi's card as it looked like there was a guy with an afro wearing a yellow hat on the far right of the card.  After closer examination I realized that what I thought was a hat on top of a bushy head of hair was actually the arm of a player just out of frame - you can see that player's shin in the bottom right of the photo.  Everything lined up just right that it looked like that arm made up the head of the player in the background.
• It was only while I was researching this post that I realized that the Shigeru Kobayashi card was from this set.  I had thought it was from the JCM 2003 set that I wrote about recently.

These and the Calbee cards are all the ones I know of from the Giants' visit to Vero Beach in 1975.  I don't know of any from their 1981 visit - I had previously thought some of the cards from the 1983 NST set were from Florida but they're actually from Guam, where the team did spring training that year.

Wes Westrum In Tokyo

I came across an interesting item on Ebay recently - a set of seven photographs of Wes Westrum in Tokyo.  Westrum had been a catcher for the New York Giants from the late 40's to the late 50's and then had coached for them for a few years after they moved to San Francisco.  He then moved to the Mets and took over as manager after Casey Stengel, the Mets' original manager, broke his hip.  After the Mets dismissed him a few years later, he returned to the Giants, working as both a coach and a scout (not sure if he did that at the same time).  He had a second shot at being a manager when the Giants had him replace Charlie Fox in the middle of the 1974 season but his tenure only lasted until the end of 1975.

So what was Westrum doing in Tokyo?  He was a coach with the Giants when the team spent part of March, 1970, in Japan as the spring training guests of the Lotte Orions.  It was not a particularly good experience for the team as they experienced a packed schedule spread across Japan (nine games in nine days from Shimonoseki at the western end of Honshu along with Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo) and bad weather (including snow in Osaka).  The Giants went 3-6 on their trip and started the regular season back in the States poorly enough that they fired manager Clyde King in late May.  (Lotte, on the other hand, won the Pacific League pennant that season before falling to the Yomiuri Giants in the Series - becoming the sixth of the Giants' nine vanquished teams on their V9 run.)

Six of the seven photos in the auction appear to have been taken at Tokyo Stadium, the then-home of the Orions.  The remaining one was taken at a dinner somewhere - it's not entirely clear that the photo was from the Japan trip.  These are among the very few color photos I've ever seen of Tokyo Stadium.

I will confess to feeling a little guilty that I've swiped the images from the auction but the asking price of $100 is a bit steep.  I'm feeling less guilty by at least including the link to the auction above.

I thought I'd take a shot at trying to identify everyone in the photos but, to be honest, I don't think I've done a very good job.

The "70" on the sleeve of the guy on the right indicates that Westrum is posing with Hall of Famer Hiroshi Nakao, who was the Giants' farm team manager that year.

I'm guessing that this is Orions' manager Wataru Nonin with Westrum.  I've only been able to track down one photo of Nonin (from a 2014 Baseball Magazine mook about NPB managers) but I think it's him:

Their relative heights support this guess.  Westrum was 5-11 while Nonin was 5-6.  I can buy that there's five inches between the tops of their heads.

It's kind of amazing how there can be ten players in a photo and almost all of them are positioned in just the right way that their uniform numbers and faces can't be seen.  The one exception is the guy on the right side who's partially obscured by the guy in street clothes.  It looks like the name on the uniform starts with "Sato" and his uniform number starts with "3".  I think this is Susumu Satomi, a back up catcher who wore number 39.  There were two players on the team with the surname "Sato" - both pitchers - but Motohiko wore #17 and Keiji wore #41 so I don't think it's either of them.

The catcher on the left appears to have a name that ends in "A" and a uniform number that ends in "6".  Not positive but I think he's Yasuo Otsuka who wore number 26.

That's clearly Otsuka on the far right.  Not sure who anyone else in the photo (other than Westrum and Nonin) are.

Of the ten players visible or at least partially visible in this photo, there's only one whose uniform number is visible.  Problem is that there's no #83 on the roster for the team on Japanese Wikipedia and the listing for #83 for Lotte at the "Player Number History" website starts with a pitcher named Masao Nara in 1971, a year after this.  I'm going to guess that this was a batting practice pitcher but I don't know who it is - especially since there doesn't appear to be a name on the back of the uniform.  It's also entirely possible that someone decided to change their number during spring training.

Of a little more interest is who the guy next to Nonin is.  I'm guessing it's one of the coaches for the team as opposed to a player.  If I have to pick someone, I'd go with Hall of Famer Sadao Kondo, who was the Orion's pitching coach.  He wore glasses and was almost as tall as Westrum (5-9).

Of course, I could be wrong about any of these identifications.  If anyone has any better guesses, let me know.

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

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.