I estimate that there is only a 46% change that today’s entry features a hall of famer. Even so, it’s worth writing about.
There have been several distinct eras in the history of Japanese baseball cards:
• Early 20th century – Postcards, usually featuring university teams and/or visiting American teams. Menko cards from this era are very rare.
• 1930s – First time that menkos and bromides featuring baseball players were widely available. Relatively few of these cards survive (I don’t have any), but you can still find them sometimes.
• WWII – no cards issued
• 1947 through early 1950s – golden age of baseball bromides. Round and pillar menkos common.
• Late 1950s through mid-1960s – “tobacco” menkos common. Throughout the postwar period game cards and cards packaged with candy and gum can be found. The former are common, the latter are not. (I own several game cards despite generally disliking them. I have only a single candy card.)
• 1973 through 1990 – Calbee era. Calbee cards are distributed 1-to-a-pack with potato chips. A few other companies produced cards during this period, but most were short-lived. Calbee was king.
• 1991 – current. BBM era. BBM cards are basically typical American-style baseball cards. Calbee still makes cards, and other companies sometimes put out a set, but BBM fundamentally changed the Japanese baseball card market.
The cards that have been posted to this thread have all been post war. (That’s why this thread is on this side of the board.) Time to change that. I recently picked up a couple early postcards. Today I’ll post the first one, and I’ll do a write-up for the other one later.
In 1872 an American teacher named Horace Wilson introduced Japan to baseball. In 1878 the first formal team was founded. By the turn of the century it was a popular sport in Japanese universities, and a handful of prominent universities had notable baseball teams. In the early days, Keio and Waseda Universities were the stand-outs. Baseball was, of course, already quite popular in the United States, and throughout the first few decades of the 20th century a number of American universities sent baseball teams to play their Japanese counterparts. Off hand, I know that Washington University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin sent teams across the Pacific.
The postcard below commemorates the 1909 University of Wisconsin tour. The inscription on the bottom of the card reads: “Scene of the fierce match between between United States, The baseball team of the University of Wisconsin & Keio University”.
The first game of the tour Keio won by a score of 3-2 in 11 innings on the 22nd of September. The two teams would have a rematch on the 26th, that Keio won 2-1 in 19 innings. Two days later Wisconsin trounced the Tokyo American Club 10-0, on the 29th they beat the Tokyo City Team 8-7. They beat Waseda 7-4 on Oct. 2, lost to Keio 5-4 on the 4th, beat Waseda 5-0 on the 7th, lost to Waseda 3-0 two days later, and beat Keio 8-0 on the 12th before returning to America.
Which game is pictured here? The postmark reads “26th September, Meiji 42”. The Japanese calendar tracks years since the beginning of the current emperor’s reign. 9/26 Meiji 42 = 9/26/1909. Given that the second game of the tour was played on the 26th, that must mean that the match pictured here was the inaugural game of the 22nd. (It must also mean that these postcards were printed in a hurry. The game pictured was played on four days before this card was mailed.)
One amazing thing about this tour, from the perspective of a (very) amateur historian studying it more than 100 years later, is that The Badger, a publication of the University of Wisconsin (it looks like a yearbook) recorded a detailed record of their trip. I will post the relevant pages from The Badger in the next post, but I will give some information from them here.
One Genkwan Shibata, class of 1909, arranged the trip and served as translator. Shibata had a local contact. Professor Matsuoka was a 1906 Wisconsin alum, and helped arrange the trip on the Japanese side. Matsuoka conscripted several hundred Keio students to act as designated Wisconsin fans during the tour. Keio put up $4000 to help fund the Americans’ visit. There are all sorts of problems with inflation calculators, but that’s something in the neighborhood of $100,000 today. Despite their hospitality, Keio wanted to win. As soon as the plans for the trip were finalized, the players from the Keio squad were sequestered away to spend six hours a day in training.
The Wisconsin team consisted of 13 players. They took a train to Seattle, where they spent a week practicing, and then about two weeks aboard ship headed to Japan. The Wisconsin players report that crowds of about 20,000 attended their games. They traveled to the first game by rickshaw. Although the American were impressed with the reception that they received, they also allege bias from the umpires, claiming that it cost them three games against Keio. Nobody ever likes an umpire. They note that there are not yet any professional players in Japan, but predict that there will be some. And of course they were right, although it would take another 27 years.
Now, who is pictured on this card? It’s hard to say, but I’ll give it my best shot. You can’t tell which team is at bat from the names on the uniforms. Even under 60x magnification I couldn’t even get a hint as to what it says on the jerseys.
That said, the batter is wearing white, and the catcher is wearing a light grey. Now, traditionally the home team wears white and the visitors wear grey or some other darker pattern. If the Japanese and American teams were both adhering to this tradition, then the Japanese team is at bat and the Americans are in the field. I have seen a number of other
postcards commemorating this trip. Some of them seem to confirm this conjecture.
There is one other factor that favors it. In the background of my postcard is what looks like a scoreboard. It’s very grainy, and no writing on it is visible, but it sure looks like a scoreboard to me. It contains many black rectangles on the right, and a few white rectangles on the left. My guess: the black rectangles are blank boxes reflecting innings yet to be played. The white boxes are placards displaying the runs scored in innings that have already been played. There are more white boxes on the top row than on the bottom. Usually the visiting team is displayed at the top of the scoreboard (they bat first). If that’s right, and I’m counting right, that would indicate that this photo is of the bottom of the fourth inning of the first game between Keio and Wisconsin, September 22nd, 1909.
I’ll admit to being somewhat disappointed that it is probably the Americans in the field. The only hall of famer to appear on the Keio squad is catcher
Zensuke Shimada. If Keio had been on defense, the would likely be Shimada you see waiting to receive the pitch. Alas, it’s probably not. I’ve decided that I’m 60% confident that it’s the Americans in the field. That gives me a 40% probability that it’s Shimada playing catcher. But there’s also a Keio player at bat. There’s no indication on the card of who it is, but even so there’s an 11% chance that it is, just by luck, Shimada who is batting. 40% + (60% x 11%) = 46%, hence my estimate at the top of this post. (N.B. Niese says that Konosuke Fukada was the Keio catcher. If he’s right, then my estimate is way off.)
If those are the Americans in the field then the catcher is either
Elmer Barlow (aka ‘Spike’, class of ’09), or Arthur Kleinpell (aka ‘Moose’, class of ’11). Barlow would go on to have a distinguished law career, eventually serving on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Less is known about Arthur Kleinpell. He graduated in 1911, and then completed a second degree at Wisconsin in 1917. He died in Michigan. The pitcher is Doug Knight. He pitched all 11 innings of the first game, and the first 16 innings of the second, before injuring his arm and sitting out the rest of the tour. Also visible are first baseman Micque Timbers, and either
John Messmer or Kenneth “Buck” Fellows at second. Messmer was Wisconsin’s most accomplished athlete. He won nine letters, later became an architect, and was inducted into the University of Wisconsin Athletics Hall of Fame.
If anyone can read the handwritten text on the card, please let me know. I would very much like to know what they were writing about on this card just after the first game of the tour. I've included a photo of the message with the contrast increased to make it easier to read.
Some of the information in this post was drawn from: Niese, Jon 2013. Voyage to the land of the rising sun: The Wisconsin Badger nine’s 1909 trip to Japan. Nine: A journal of baseball history and culture, 22:1, 11-19.