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#1
05-09-2018, 12:27 AM
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Quote:
Ricky Y 
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#2
05-09-2018, 01:07 AM
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Hi,
I have been collecting Japanese cards since the late 1970s, and it is very enjoyable to learn about their players, teams and history. Ricky- if you need help with Calbee checklists just let me know, I have them all. Sean- thanks for getting me that 1976 Calbee Matty Alou "Lions vs. Braves" card and sending it to our friend Jay Shelton. Nat- your knowledge of Japanese cards and baseball sounds pretty good for someone just starting out. If any of you need help or information, just let me know. I love to share my knowledge and learn from others. Jeff
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#3
05-09-2018, 01:34 AM
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Quote:
I love that Alou card, glad you like it too!
__________________
My blog about collecting cards in Japan: https://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.jp/ Last edited by seanofjapan; 05-09-2018 at 01:36 AM.
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#4
05-09-2018, 10:24 AM
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Bessho and Nakanishi
First, I'd like to start by recommending Sean's blog. It was one of the first things that I encountered when I started getting interested in Japanese cards.
Second, do you folks read kanji? I took Japanese in high school years and years ago, but (1) it's pretty rusty at this point, and (2) I never did learn to read kanji. One of the most challenging things about collecting these cards has been trying to figure out who is on them. (Sometimes sellers will tell you, sometimes not. Often they just provide the last name.) I've been doing it through a combination of drawing kanji in google translate, checking baseball-reference to see if the player that I'm looking for was on the team he's shown with on the card, and checking Engel's book (which sometimes only lists last names). It's slow going, especially the google translate bit. Third, here's another card. Same set as the first two. Bessho is again on the left, next to him is Futoshi Nakanishi. I get the feeling that after they took the picture of Bessho with Inao the photographer just grabbed Nakanishi for another shot. Nakanishi played 1952 to 1969 with the Lions. He was a third baseman who, when he was young, looked like he was going to be one of the best ever. A slugging percentage over .600 for a 20 year old is pretty impressive. He led the league in home runs for four straight years. When this card was issued he was at the top of his game, a hugely successful slugging third baseman, his team had just won the Japan series, and he had just gotten married - to his manager's daughter. But it wasn't to last. In 1959 he suffered the first of a string of injuries from which he never recovered. He never played a full season again, although he did take over managing his team when he was just 29.
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#5
05-09-2018, 01:16 PM
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Quote:
Ricky Y
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#6
05-09-2018, 06:55 PM
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Takao Kajimoto
Moving on from menko cards for a while. This is a bromide. Bromides were sold as baseball cards, one at a time. It's printed on thin stock, and is, maddeningly, very slightly too large to fit into a binder page. The set is catalogued as JBR 16, and Engel says that it is fairly rare: only double digits of each card known to exist. The backs are blank, but mine has a stamp on it. Google translate tells me that the stamp says "one piece", which doesn't make any sense, so anyone with more insight is welcome to fill me in.
The player is Takao Kajimoto, who has got to be unique in that he both (1) is a pitcher in the hall of fame and (2) has a losing record for his career. Just barely, I grant, but 254-255 is still a losing record. He played for the Hankyu Braves from 1954 to 1973. He did win the pennant at one point, but, as you might expect, the Braves were pretty bad for much of his career. He was a 12-time all star, and the first Japanese pitcher to clear 2000 strike outs.
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#7
05-09-2018, 07:18 PM
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Masaki Saito
And now, as Monty Python would say, for something completely different.
In 1991 Baseball Magazine decided to issue American-style baseball cards. Their sets would be of a design and composition familiar to Americans, and sold in packs, like American cards. They were (and are) a hit. I'm not usually a fan of shiny modern cards - check out my avatar for my favorite era of American cards - but there's no way to get around it for modern players. Kids just don't play menko like they used to. This is a Masaki Saito from the 1993 BBM set. Unlike the earlier cards that I've posted, these are very very very common. This one cost me $1. Saito was a first-round draft pick, pitching for the Giants from 1984 to 2001. He was inducted into the hall of fame in 2016. He began his career as a reliever/swing-man, but over time transitioned into one of the great pitchers of the 1990s. He won the Sawamura award three times, tying a record. (The Sawamura award is given to the best pitcher in the league, although they reserve the right to not award it in any given year if they think that no one is up to their standards that year - which has happened a couple times.) He was also, apparently, a very good fielder, winning several gold gloves. You wouldn't think that pitcher fielding matters a whole lot, but ask the 2006 Tigers about that. Just looking at his career numbers, Saito looks like an odd hall of fame choice. 2300 innings isn't much. Roy Halladay, who will probably get elected but who is an interesting test-case for short-career pitchers in America, got up to 2700 innings. I suspect that I need to spend more time with Japanese record books to get a better feel for the context. Maybe in the modern Japanese game 2300 innings isn't so bad.
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#8
05-09-2018, 07:26 PM
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Quote:
I can read kanji, but I've lived here for almost 20 years and it took some work. With player name recognition it is best to concentrate on the learning the kanji in last names since (with some exceptions) they tend to use more common ones (中、山、西 etc) while first names are way more idiosyncratic and use a lot of obscure ones with weird readings. I can definitely help with reading names if anyone has questions about them. One potential shortcut which I have found helpful (sometimes I don't know how to read the kanji on a player's name since they have multiple readings) is to use the Japanese wikipedia page which has the list of players for each team. So if you get a card of a player from the Hawks for example (https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/福岡ソフトバンクホークスの選手一覧 ) , you can scroll through and look for the kanji (easiest way is to just look for the first kanji in the name), click on the player's name when you find it, then click over to the English Wikipedia page and you've found your guy!
__________________
My blog about collecting cards in Japan: https://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.jp/
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#9
06-09-2018, 08:05 PM
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Wow! This is a spectacular collection interest.
Curious if there are any cards of Victor Starffin? Starffin (1916-1957) was an ethnic Russian baseball player in Japan and the first professional pitcher in Japan to win three hundred games. With 83 career shutouts, he ranks number one all-time in Japanese professional baseball. In 1960, he became the first player elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. In 1940, as xenophobia increased in Japan, Starffin was forced to change his name to Suda Hiroshi. Later, during World War II, wartime paranoia resulted in Starffin being placed in a detention camp at Karuizawa with diplomats and other foreign residents. 1957, Starffin was killed in a traffic accident when the car he was driving was struck by a tram in Setagaya, Tokyo. The exact circumstances of the incident are debated to this day, with speculation ranging from a simple accident to suicide or drunk driving. 
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#11
12-09-2018, 08:14 PM
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Juzo Sanada
Juzo Sanada played 11 seasons, mostly for the Robins and the Tigers. He was a pitcher who played a non-trivial number of games at 3B late in his career. 1943 was his rookie year, spent with Asahi. As a 20 year old pitcher he was just about average, posting a 1.97 ERA in a league with a 1.94 ERA. (Yes, that’s how low-scoring early pro ball was in Japan. The league as a whole had an ERA below two.) Then the war interrupted his career. In 1946 he was back with Pacific, posting an ERA slightly better than league average. This would continue for the next few years. He was never more than 50 points better than league average, and never more than about 20 points worse.
During his time with the Robins Sanada was usually his staff ace. They usually had Sanada pitching far more innings than anyone else on the team. I looked at the other teams in 1948 and this arraignment seems to have been unusual. Nobody was doing a strict rotation the way that they do now, but only the Stars had one pitcher (Starfin) whom they rode the way that the Robins were doing with Sanada. Everyone else split up pitching duties much more evenly. This went on until 1951, when Sanada had a very poor year. His ERA was well over five, in a league that averaged 4.41. By the start of the next season he was on the Tigers. I tried to figure out what happened. Baseball-Reference doesn’t give transaction information for foreign leagues, so I tried to reconstruct it. But it turns out that no one else played for both the Robins and Osaka between 1951 and 1952. I had hoped to find someone who went Tigers-Robins at the same time that Sanada went Robins-Tigers and so figure out who he was traded for. But it looks like he wasn’t traded at all. Maybe he was sold, maybe he was simply released. Anyway, the Robins’ lack of faith came back to bite them. In 1952 he posted a 1.97 ERA against a league average of 3.28. Pretty good. Although his innings pitched were down a long ways from what he’d been doing in the mid-to-late 1940s, by some measures it was his best year. At any rate, it was the year in which he was most effective. Things unraveled quickly after that. His innings pitched dropped further, he spent 1954 mostly pitching out of the bullpen, and he retired after 1956. Although Sanada was primarily a pitcher, he also played third base in 1954 and 56. Throughout his career he’d been a decent hitter – sometimes below average, sometimes above average, but the dude was a pitcher, so we can forgive him his below average years. In total he appeared in 65 games at third base. I think that his offensive performance can best be characterized as “okay”. Probably good enough to hold down a starting job, although he never got a chance. In 54 he played backup to Shinsuki Yogi at third (in addition to pitching). They were about equally good hitters. Yogi was out of the league the following year, but oddly Sanada didn’t appear in the infield in 1955. He returned in 1956, this time playing second fiddle to Hideshi Miyake. By this point Sanada was right at the end of his career and Miyake, who would go on to have a substantial career as an infielder, was just starting his. So that was that for Sanada. The high points of Sanada’s career were a pair of no hitters. In addition, he was named to two best-nines and won a Sawamura award. Albright ranks him as the 76th greatest player of all time, right behind Yoneda. This ranking seems to me to be… aggressive. Sanada was an adequate pitcher, and for one season a very good one. He threw a lot of innings per year, but (1) not all that many more than his competition, and (2) his career was short. It’s true that he was good enough with the bat to spend the equivalent of about a half season playing the infield. But he wasn’t that good with the bat, about average, so let’s not get carried away, and, moreover, there were a lot of good hitting pitchers in his day. Probably most notably his teammate Fujimura. As discussed in a previous post, this is probably an indication not that the baseball Gods walked the Earth in Japan in the late 1940s, but that the level of play was pretty low, and so guys who were generally good athletes were able to perform at a high level in multiple roles. Sanada looks like a rather poor choice for the hall of fame to me. The card is from the JCM 124 set, issued in 1950.
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#12
12-17-2018, 09:45 PM
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The early days of Japanese baseball were a very low offense affair. I've often wondered why. Now, I was watching this video of Starfin pitching. Check out the stadium that you can see starting at 0:08. It has HUGE amounts of foul territory in the infield. Just unbelievably enormous, the fans were sitting miles away from the action. It looks like the stadium wasn't originally designed for baseball.
Anyway, if that was anything close to normal then it would go at least some distance towards explaining the low run scoring environment. Having distant fences decreases home runs, but it increases doubles and triples, so it doesn't necessarily reduce scoring. But large amounts of foul territory does: all that leads to is more foul outs. I tried to figure out which stadium this is. Google tells me that the caption at the top says "All Japan vs. Tools, 1949", but I'm pretty sure that should be "Seals" and that this is footage from the Seals' 1949 tour. Unfortunately they played games all over the place for that tour. There's probably records of which games Starfin pitched somewhere, but I'm not up for finding them at the moment. Any other theories (or maybe someone actually knows) about why no one was scoring any runs in early Japanese baseball?
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#13
01-06-2019, 09:44 PM
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Keishi Suzuki
Santa was good to me this year, so I have a few more cards to post.
Keishi Suzuki pitched for Kintetsu from 1966 to 1985. In total he pitched 4600 innings and won 317 games. During his career league ERA appears to have averaged around the mid-3s, although with significant variation. I’m just eyeballing this, so that number could be off. But anyway, some years it was down around 3.20 and others up around 4.20. For his career Suzuki had a 3.11 ERA, so he was good for a really long time. 1978 was his best season. He was 30 years old, and posted a 2.02 ERA to go along with 25 wins in just shy of 300 innings, against a league average ERA of 3.68. Suzuki’s stats look a lot like those of a bunch of American pitchers of the same generation (although his innings pitched totals are more impressive, given the shorter season). If you took his career numbers and shuffled them up with those of Gaylord Perry, Bert Blyleven, Phil Niekro and a handful of other guys, I’m not entirely certain that I could tell you which one is Suzuki. In a way, Nolan Ryan isn’t the worst comp. Suzuki barely cleared 3000 strikeouts, but led the league in K’s eight times (vs. 11 for Ryan). Blyleven is pretty good, but he led the league in strikeouts only once. Maybe I’ll go with Steve Carlton as a compromise. Lefty was a five-time K champ, and, like Suzuki but unlike Ryan and Blyleven, left handed. (Or, well, sort of. Suzuki was naturally right handed but learned, at his father’s behest, to throw from the port side.) Also, the Phillies and the Buffaloes were both pretty bad teams. Albright doesn’t like him as much, comparing him to Jim Bunning and Vida Blue. As with most strikeout-friendly pitchers, he relied on a mean fastball (at least early in his career). And like most pitchers who rely on a mean fastball, he was homer-prone, giving up 560 for his career. The MLB record is 522. That Jamie Moyer holds the record doesn’t help my claim about fastball pitchers being homer prone, but I’m pretty sure it’s true anyway. Elevating the bat takes time, so a high pitch is going to give you a little extra “effective speed” (if you will). So if you’re relying on your speed it’s a good idea to throw high fastballs, i.e., one’s that batters can get under and hit in the air. This is why Max Scherzer (for example) is such an extreme flyball pitcher. Suzuki was the same kind of guy. Albright ranks Suzuki was the 79th greatest player of all time. He was a 3x best nine and a 15x all star. Post playing, Suzuki managed the Buffaloes for a few years. He is “credited” with “helping” Nomo come to the US. Apparently (I’m getting this from Albright who is getting it from “The Meaning of Ichiro” so hopefully nothing is getting lost here) Suzuki favored the traditional intense Japanese training program, and didn’t pay any attention to pitchers’ workloads. Albright reports that he had Nomo throw a 191 pitch game once, which would probably get an American manager burned at the stake. Whiting reports that Suzuki was of the opinion that the best way to cure a hurt arm was to pitch even more. Nomo realized that his arm was getting shredded and wanted to get out. Hence, the Dodgers. The Suzuki card is from the 1976 Calbee set.
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#14
01-08-2019, 08:54 PM
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Quote:
That was probably from Game 2 of the Seals 1949 tour, in which Starfin was the starting pitcher. The stadium still has pretty big foul territory!
__________________
My blog about collecting cards in Japan: https://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.jp/
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#15
05-09-2018, 01:32 AM
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Thanks! If you register on Sports Card Forum (https://www.sportscardforum.com/private.php) some of the complete Calbee checklists from the 70s are available there, the guy who does Clyde's Stale cards did all the work on those a while ago (https://clydes-stalecards.blogspot.jp/) And yeah, the sets from the mid-70s are huge. I'm working on the 1975-76 Calbee set right now and it has 1472 cards! And some series of it were only issued in single cities (two series in Hiroshima, one in Nagoya) so they are extremely hard to find, (kind of like if part of the 1972 Topps set was only sold in Cleveland and another only sold in Denver). Its got to be one of the most difficult sets in the world to put together (though fortunately prices don't reflect this for the most part).
__________________
My blog about collecting cards in Japan: https://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.jp/ Last edited by seanofjapan; 05-09-2018 at 01:41 AM.
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#16
05-09-2018, 01:15 PM
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Quote:
Ricky Y
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