It’s time for another menko.
This is post #2 about Minoru Murayama. The card below is for my Meikyukai collection. (Previous post
here.)
My previous post covers Murayama pretty well (and bio on thehanshintigers.com does it even better), so this one is just a few tidbits I uncovered, plus a card.
• The Giants offered him a signing bonus of 4x what the Tigers offered, but Hanshin also promised lifetime employment if the baseball thing didn’t work out, so he turned down the Giants’ money.
• He was the first professional Japanese athlete to sign a deal (as a member of their advisory staff) with a sporting goods company (SSK Baseball Products). He continued to help them develop baseball equipment into the 1970s.
• His #11 is one of only three numbers retired by the Tigers (Fujimura #10, Yoshida #23)
• He led the league in ERA three times – including his penultimate season, to go along with twice leading the league in wins, and three times each in CG, SHO and IP.
• Albright ranks him as the 64th best player in Japanese history. And while I haven’t gone though his list in detail, my initial reaction is that that seems low.
Meikyukai:
Yes – Hall of Fame:
Yes
My card is from the JCM 14g set. It was issued in 1964, so towards the end of the tobacco-menko era. There are a number of “families” of menko cards, and JCM 14 is one of the larger. It has a bunch of sets that were released between 1959 and 1964 that are very similar to each other. JCM 14f is one of the sets that was imported into the US; the primary difference between this set and that one (besides the checklist) is that 14f has the team name printed on the back of the card. Some of the sets in this family are hard to get ahold of, but this one isn’t.