Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Nice Starffin. Thanks for letting us see that one. I don't have any of his cards yet.

But I do have Kenjiro Tamiya and he's the subject for today's post. He played 15 seasons, from 1949 to 1963, mostly with Osaka. He was a pitcher as a rookie, and a bad one. Surprisingly, it wasn't his terribleness that ended his pitching career, it was a shoulder injury. After that he converted to the outfield, although he still pitched a few innings here and there for the next several seasons. As a batter he had strong on-base skills and moderate power. From his stat line he looks like a "double into the gap" kind of guy, and he was reasonably fast, often among the league leaders in SB. Although he was a 7-time all-star and made five best-nine teams, his career totals are not especially impressive. If I needed an American player to compare him to, I come up with someone like Enos Slaughter, although that's probably not fair to Slaughter, as he missed what would have been some of his best seasons for the war.

The card obviously belongs to one of a bunch of very similar menko sets released in the late 1950s. This one is probably from 1959, but I'm not sure which set it's from. None of the candidate sets has Tamiya paired with 90001 as a menko number. My guess is that this is an uncatalogued card from one of those very similar and (as far as I can tell) very common late 50s sets. It has a back stamp, but I don't know why. Sets that were imported to the US often were stamped on the back, and some sets similar to this one were imported, but I had this card shipped directly from Japan, so that's not it. Sometimes back stamps were part of a contest - if you got a stamped card you would win a premium card. That could be what's going on here, but it's really impossible to know.