Japanese HOF Project

[buymycards]

Hi, I am hoping that someone can help me identify these. I have 21 of these cards, which are approximately 1 5/8" x 2 1/16. They have the same fronts as the 1950 JCM21 Menko's, but the backs are blank. The ones that are listed on eBay have backs similar to the back of a playing card. The other Japanese cards that I have had over the years were thicker than American cards, but these are thinner.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks much! Rick

[nat]

Hi Rick!

I'm afraid that I don't have much insight to offer, but I'll do my best. Those sure do look like JCM21 cards, but I've never heard of them with blank backs before. It's possible that they are JCM21s that didn't get printed on the back. Quality control for Japanese baseball cards circa 1950 can't have been too good. There are lots of uncatalogued sets, but it seems weird to me that they would issue an identical set that's just missing the printing on the back.

As for the thickness, again I can offer only a guess. Menko cards from the early 50s tend to be relatively sturdy, a few of them are almost Goudey-like. Which makes sense, since they were intended to be thrown at the ground. They weren't baseball cards exactly, they were toys that had pictures of baseball players printed on them. Despite how it's catalogued, it's not clear to me that JCM21 is a menko set. They've got no menko numbers, and no rock-paper-scissors symbols. It seems to me that JCM21 is really just a deck of playing cards. Now, I don't have any cards from the set, so I can't say anything about it's thickness. But if JCM21s were meant to be used as playing cards and not menko cards, it's no surprise that they would be much thinner than is normal.

Sorry I can't be any more help than that. Hopefully some of our more knowledgeable collectors can chime in.

You know, I might as well include a card in this post. Here's an upgrade to my Futoshi Nakanishi. Or, well, 'upgrade' is the wrong word. On my other card he's sharing the spotlight with Takahiko Bessho, whereas here he has the whole card to himself. I'm not sure which set this card is from. It looks like it belongs to several of the JCM12 variations, but the only one that both has a border and pairs Nakanishi with this menko number is 12e, which Engel describes as "painted looking". This card doesn't look especially "painted" to me, but that's my best guess. In any case, it belongs to the JCM12 family.

[buymycards]

Thank you, I appreciate your help!

Rick

[nat]

Takeshi Koba was a middle infielder, mostly playing for Hiroshima, from 1958 to 1971. The leagues that he played in were very low offense affairs, but even by those standards he wasn’t a stand-out offensive player. Some years he was above average, some years he was below. His best season was clearly 1963, when he hit 339/380/441, but then in 1964 he “hit” 218/272/261, so it all balances out in the end. Eyeballing this, but I’d guess that he was, on the whole, a roughly league-average batter. Which of course would make him above average offensively for a shortstop/second baseman, but we’re not talking about Ernie Banks here or anything. His career totals are well-short of Meikyukai standards, in part because of his offensive troubles, in part because he career was a bit short for a hall of famer, and in part because he was a part-time player his last few seasons.

Presumably he was a strong gloveman. As befits a shortstop, he wore uniform number 1.

There may have been some degree of tragedy involved in Koba’s offensive ineptitude. His 1963 ended with getting hit in the face with a pitch, prompting a fear of inside pitches that apparently never abated. Not being able to protect in the inside corner is going to make being an adequate batter pretty difficult.

It’s common to see Japanese players, at least those who play at a hall of fame level, in NPB as teenagers, since Japan doesn’t have the same kind of minor league system that MLB does. (They have a B squad for each team, and those teams do play against each other, but it’s not nearly the same thing.) Koba was 22 as a rookie; B-R says that he spent the time playing the industrial leagues. Which, I gather, is more like playing Indy ball in the US than it is like playing in the affiliated minors. And while Indy players to, occasionally, make the big leagues, it’s not something that they should plan their careers around exactly. On the other hand, Wikipedia says that he had to get a job after his father died, and that working at a real job delayed the start of his baseball career. I suppose these two explanations aren’t entirely inconsistent. Perhaps he had a job with a firm and played on their baseball team on the side? (Is that how the industrial leagues work? Or is it more like, a firm sponsors a baseball club?)

After retiring as a player Koba turned to managing. From the mid 70s to the mid 80s he managed the Hiroshima team, having quite a bit of success with what has traditionally been something of a sad sack franchise. Three years managing Taiyo in the late 80s didn’t go as well. As a manager his trademarks were running and versatility. The Carp had base stealers who could play lots of positions and switch hit. Classic gritty small-ball stuff. Man, I bet MLB these days makes him roll his eyes. Joey Gallo is, like, the anti-Koba. Since leaving the Whales he has not returned to pro ball, but has gone to work in amateur baseball. Like Yoshio Yoshida (who is credited with developing baseball in France), Koba has spent his time working to spread baseball to countries in which it is not popular, and he is currently the manager for the baseball team at Tokyo International University. In 2002 he ran for mayor of Hiroshima, but lost to Tadoshi Akiba.

The card is from JCM 14c, issued in 1960.

[nat]

Shunichi Amachi was a manager for the Dragons. He piloted the team from 1949 to 1951, again in 1954, and then in 1957-8. It was under his guidance that they won their first Japan Series, and their last for another half century. Oddly, he never played baseball professionally. At Meiji University he was a catcher, but he never did make it to NPB as a player. Albright ranks him as Japan’s 18th most successful manager, but his methodology leaves something to be desired. (It’s a system of the “assign X points for Y” type, where there’s no reason that X is worth Y points, and so nothing that the system actually measures.)

In addition to serving as a manager, he had a decent career as an umpire. He was an umpire for a league of six universities based in Tokyo from 1929 to 1947. In addition to college umpiring he put in some work umpiring high school matches, most notably in the Koshien tournament. Following his career as an umpire he took over managing Teikyo Commercial School baseball club, for whom his future ace with the Dragons, Shigeru Sugishita, pitched. Their careers would be fairly well intertwined, as it was on the back of Sugishita’s forkball that Amachi’s Dragons won their Japan Series.

Amachi was not on my original list of hall of famers to acquire. I set out to get cards of professional hall of fame players, and while I’ve made exceptions for players who were inducted as managers but who had long and successful playing careers (Hara comes to mind as an example), Amachi definitely doesn’t fall into that category. (Given that he didn’t play baseball post-college.) However, this is the only Amachi card that I’ve ever seen for sale (outside of uncut JCM21 sheets), this particular card is from JGA16, a set that I’d never encountered before. Indeed, Engel gives is rarity level R4 – indicating only 5-10 of each card known to exist. And while I think that Engel’s rarity levels should probably taken with a grain of salt, it surely at least indicates that there aren’t many of these floating around. So I picked up Amachi-san. JGA16 was issued in 1949, making this Amachi’s rookie card, if that’s what you call a manager’s first card.

[nat]

The first post in this thread featured Kazuhisa Inao, sharing a card with Takehiko Bessho. That was almost 11 months ago. My early write-ups about Japanese players were pretty skimpy (just five lines for Inao), and given that I’ve picked up a new Inao card, I’d like to take this opportunity to do a better job.

So:

Kazuhisa Inao pitched for the Nishitetsu Lions from 1956 to 1969. Inao did not begin his baseball career as a pitcher – when he was in high school he was a catcher with a famously strong arm. Strong enough that taking up a role on the other side of the battery was the obvious move as soon as he went pro. As a 19 year old rookie he posted a 1.06 ERA in a league with a 2.60 ERA as a whole. Put that in the 2018 National League and you get a 1.65 ERA, AKA, a little bit better than DeGrom, who led the league by 70 points and won the Cy Young Award. He was never again quite that good, but he was pretty close through his mid 20s. Both the 1957 and 1958 seasons concluded with MVP awards for Inao. As was standard in the 1950s and 60s, he pitched an insane number of innings, topping 400 in two different years. Then he pitched 11 innings in 1964. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what happened there. From there on out his innings pitched were severely limited (although still healthy by contemporary MLB standards). Shoulder injuries were the main problem in 1964, and a training program that involved throwing an iron baseball didn’t help.

Despite the late career injuries, Inao was obviously one of Japan's greatest starters. In a league in which 200 wins is a notable achievement (it’s the bar for the Golden Player’s Club), Inao won 273, along with an ERA that is third-lowest all-time. (Behind Hideo Fujimura and Jiro Noguchi. And, yes, it was in a low-run environment.) Albright has him ninth all-time, and third among pitchers.

A curious thing about Inao is that, despite being one of Japan’s greatest starting pitchers, he actually made more appearances out of the bullpen than he did as a starter. It was common for starting pitchers to frequently make relief appearances, but Inao did a lot of it. He appeared in 754 games, but started only 304 of them. Along the way he put up a career 276-137 record, good for a .668 winning percentage. (Including 42 wins in 1961.) Now a pitcher has only limited control over their wins and losses, but it goes without saying that that is an impressive record.

And the Lions were good. They won the Japan Series from 1956-1958. But of course their goodness was due in no small part to Inao himself. In the 1958 Series he won four consecutive games. It’s like Randy Johnson from 2001, but, like, times two. In all he appeared in games 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Game five concluded with Inao hitting a walk-off home run in the 10th inning.

After retiring from the mound, Inao took up managing. He found a difficult time to do it. In the late 60s and early 70s Japan was rocked by a series of game-fixing scandals that collectively became known as the ‘Black Mist Scandal’. (B-R has a nice summary here.) It first broke with the Nishitetsu team, so Inao was at the center of the storm immediately. He managed the Lions to five sub-500 seasons before retiring. A decade later he took up the top spot for the Lotte Orions, managing them to a mixed record over three seasons.

My new Inao card is from the JCM41 set, which was issued in 1959. It's a couple years more recent than my other Inao card, but still early in his career.

[nat]

Takehiko Bessho was, like Inao, featured in the first post in this thread, and, like Inao, did not get the write-up that he deserves. My biographical efforts today represent an attempt to remedy this situation.

Bessho began his career before WWII, playing for Nankai. He would continue playing for them when he returned from the war, but soon found himself with the Giants. As best I can make out from the Japanese Wikipedia page, there was no uniform player contract at the time, and the reserve clause was something more like a tradition than a legally enforceable contractual provision. In any case, it seems that substantial bonuses (Wiki mentions cars and houses) were used to ensure that players did not seek employment elsewhere. But Bessho was dissatisfied with the skimpy renumeration offered by Nankai, and had long wanted to play for the Giants, so he bucked tradition and declared himself a free agent.

However – however – it also seems that the Giants were writing checks and making promises (viz. for a house in Tokyo) while he was still under contract with Nankai. There may have been some extra-contractual inducements for Bessho to seek free agency. The Giants were ultimately fined for tampering with Nankai’s property, and Bessho was suspended for the start of the season, but the contract with the Giants was deemed legal. (How you can be fined for entering into a legal contract is beyond me. You’d think either everything is okay, or the fines are imposed and the contract voided.) The reserve clause was formally incorporated into Japanese contracts starting in 1951.

Anyway, it worked out well for the Giants. Bessho would go on to the be greatest pitcher in Giants’ history. In total he pitched 4350 innings at a 2.18 ERA, to garner 310 wins (against 178 losses). He was consistently excellent. In 1952 (a year that I picked literally at random) he had an ERA half of the league average. In the 2018 AL you’d need a 2.13 ERA to cut the league rate in half. Blake Snell was the only pitcher with a mark better than that, and he won the Cy Young Award. (Wow, the leaders ran away from the pack in the AL last year. Mike Fiers with 10th in the league in ERA with a 3.56 mark.) To eyes accustomed to modern MLB numbers, his strikeout-to-walk rates don’t look good (below 2:1 for the first half of his career), but in context they were terrific. The Central League in the 40s and 50s drew lots of walks and didn’t strike out much.

Due to variation in league context it’s hard to pin down Bessho’s best season. It might actually have been 1952. That wasn’t the year in which he had the lowest ERA, but some of those early seasons of Japanese ball didn’t see many runs scored. And anyway, he was regularly far better than average. As with many starting pitchers of his day, Bessho made plenty of appearances out of the bullpen on his days off, although he wasn’t as extreme about it as was Inao. Twice he cleared 30 wins in a season, which has got to be hard to do in a season that’s only 120 games long.

He was a pretty good hitter too. But unlike lots of his contemporaries (Fujimura, Nishizawa, Sekine) he didn’t get a lot of playing time at other positions, at least not after his rookie year. He played 36 games at 1B and 27 in the outfield, putting up a .254 batting average to go with 35 career home runs in about 2100 at bats.

Bessho’s fame in baseball started before his professional career did. As a high schooler in the Koshien tournament he pitched 14 innings despite having broken his non-pitching arm. He had it in a sling and the catcher rolled the ball back to him. After failing to get in to Keio he briefly attended a vocational school and pitched for Great Ring before being drafted. Initially he was sent to Manchuria. At the time it was controlled by Manchuckuo, a monarchy that was a de facto puppet of Japan. I’ve tried to figure out if he would have seen combat there. It seems unlikely. The territory was seized by Japan in the early 1930s, and the Soviets didn’t invade until 1945, by which point Bessho was gone.

For his career Bessho was a 2x MVP, 2x Japan Series MVP, 2x Sawamura Award winner, and 6x Best Nine. Albright ranks him 11th all-time.

I picked up this card in the same lot as the Amachi card posted above. It’s also from the rare JGA16 set, issued in 1949. (And I’ve got a Kazuto Yamamoto from the same set if any type collectors need one.)

The JGA16 set must have been released rather late in the year. 1949 was Bessho's first season with the Giants (and there was a legal kerfluffle at the beginning of the season), but he's already pictured as a member of the Giants on this card.