Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

The fourth player down is Takehiko Bessho, hall of famer and star pitcher for the Giants.

As near as I can tell the guy below him his Michinori Tsubochi, a hall of fame middle infielder. I'm not 100% sure on this one though.

I think the next guy down is named 'Shibata'. There have been a bunch of Japanese players with that name, but none of them look like a match for a late 1940s pitcher. I might have mis-translated this one.

The next guy is Hideo Shimizu. He was a pitcher, mostly playing for the Dragons. Sometimes he was good, sometimes he wasn't.

The last player is Testuharu Kawakami. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese baseball. He was a star first baseman (nicknamed "The God of Batting") for the Giants, from 1938 to 1958. Probably the second or third greatest Japanese first baseman of all time. After that he became Japan's most successful manager, and the most notable advocate of the extremely harsh training and disciplinary program that Japanese baseball is famous for.

The numbers on the back are menko numbers. They don't mean anything. These are menko cards; it's a game (sort of like pogs) where kids throw their cards at piles of other cards on the ground and tried to flip them over. Keeping ones that they managed to flip over. Menko cards often have stuff on them that they thought kids would like: cartoons, rock-paper-scissors symbols, math problems (apparently menko card makers were a bit optimistic about kids' tastes), and really big numbers.

What menko numbers are useful for, from the perspective of a collector, is that in most sets card backs and card fronts are paired, so if you know which menko number corresponds to which player (Gary Engel's book will tell you for a lot of sets) you can identify players based on their menko numbers. For example, Engel says that the card whose back you displayed is "Kyuei Player (generic)".

Given that you've got one of them, it's worth mentioning that some menko cards - especially early ones - don't have specific players on them, but have representative images of a player on a team.

Thanks for sharing these cards, I'd love to see the rest of the lot that you got!

[nat]

I’ve got a couple more players to write up. Thanks to Sean for this one: I sent him a few spare Calbees and he hooked me up with a couple missing hall of famers. My first baseball card trade since I was ~13, and by far my longest-distance trade.

Senichi Hoshino pitched for the Dragons from 1969 to 1982. He compiled a 146-121 W/L record to go with a 3.60 career ERA. Of his 500 career appearances, slightly more than half of them were in relief. It was fairly common for Japanese starters to pitch out of the bullpen on some of their days off, but this is pretty extreme. In fact, there were some years in which he was almost entirely (or just entirely entirely) a relief pitcher. I’d say that 1974 (the year he took home the Sawamura award) and 1975 were his best years. He posted ERAs of 2.84 and 2.77 in those seasons, against league averages of about 3.50 and 3.30, respectively. That’s not Sandy Koufax exactly, but it’s pretty good. In addition, he was a pretty good hitter. Sort of an all-or-nothing guy at the plate, but there were a few years in which he had a better-than-league-average slugging percentage.

Probably as important to his hall of fame case as his pitching was his career as a manager. Hoshino managed Chunichi from 1987 through 1991, and then again from 1996 through 2001. After that he jumped ship, helming the Tigers for two years. Following his retirement from professional managing he took over the Japanese team in the Asian games (at which they were victorious) and the 2008 Olympics, at which they finished in fourth place. In 2011 he returned to the professional leagues, leading Ratuken through 2014. His teams made it to the Japan Series four times, but only won once. His career record is .529 – good, but not exceptional – but the raw number of wins puts him up amongst the winningest managers in Japanese history. As a manager he was… intense. He was known to beat his players and occasionally hit an umpire.

During his career Hoshino was known as the “Giant Killer”. Probably in part because the Dragons finally stopped the ON-Cannon’s run at nine consecutive championships, but also because he was a vocal critic of the Giants. (Apparently they had agreed to draft him after he graduated from Meiji and they went back on the deal.) The feelings seemed to be mutual: "I also held a burning desire to hit when I faced him because of that spirit of his”, Nagashima is reported to have said.

Finding a comparable American player it tough, if only because so few successful pitchers become managers. Maybe this is the way to do it: imagine a pitcher sort of like Orel Hershiser, and then also make him a reasonably successful manager. Still not perfect, because Hoshino spent so much time in the bullpen and Hershiser’s stretch of dominance was longer. But that’s as close as I’m going to get.

The card is a 1976 Calbee.

[Northviewcats]

Originally Posted by nat

The fourth player down is Takehiko Bessho, hall of famer and star pitcher for the Giants.

As near as I can tell the guy below him his Michinori Tsubochi, a hall of fame middle infielder. I'm not 100% sure on this one though.

I think the next guy down is named 'Shibata'. There have been a bunch of Japanese players with that name, but none of them look like a match for a late 1940s pitcher. I might have mis-translated this one.

The next guy is Hideo Shimizu. He was a pitcher, mostly playing for the Dragons. Sometimes he was good, sometimes he wasn't.

The last player is Testuharu Kawakami. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese baseball. He was a star first baseman (nicknamed "The God of Batting") for the Giants, from 1938 to 1958. Probably the second or third greatest Japanese first baseman of all time. After that he became Japan's most successful manager, and the most notable advocate of the extremely harsh training and disciplinary program that Japanese baseball is famous for.

The numbers on the back are menko numbers. They don't mean anything. These are menko cards; it's a game (sort of like pogs) where kids throw their cards at piles of other cards on the ground and tried to flip them over. Keeping ones that they managed to flip over. Menko cards often have stuff on them that they thought kids would like: cartoons, rock-paper-scissors symbols, math problems (apparently menko card makers were a bit optimistic about kids' tastes), and really big numbers.

What menko numbers are useful for, from the perspective of a collector, is that in most sets card backs and card fronts are paired, so if you know which menko number corresponds to which player (Gary Engel's book will tell you for a lot of sets) you can identify players based on their menko numbers. For example, Engel says that the card whose back you displayed is "Kyuei Player (generic)".

Given that you've got one of them, it's worth mentioning that some menko cards - especially early ones - don't have specific players on them, but have representative images of a player on a team.

Thanks for sharing these cards, I'd love to see the rest of the lot that you got!

Thanks. I really appreciate your help and all of the information. Here are a couple of JCM8 Red Border strip cards. I believe from 1952. The first card is Micho Nishizawa, I don't know the player in the second card.

I will try to post some more of the cards in the lot tomorrow.

Best regards,

Joe

[seanofjapan]

Glad to see the Hoshino made it safe and sound into your collection! As an anti-Giant myself I've always had a soft spot for him and felt bad when he passed on last year.

Maybe he is the equivalent of Orel Hersheiser and Tommy Lasorda combined?

[nat]

The other player must be Kawakami. He's wearing a Giants hat, and Kawakami is the only Giant that Engel lists as being in the set. (And Engel definitely knows about this card: it's the one that he uses to illustrate the set.)

Now, the kanji for 'Kawakami' is 川上. If you sort of squint you can kind of make the second character on the card look like 'kami'. The first character looks like the hiragana for 'i', but I guess if it's super stylized it sort of maybe could possibly be 川?

Anyways, the Giants hat is what seals the deal. The baseball players in the set are Nishizawa (whom you've got), Kawakami, Kaoru Betto - who was on the Mainichi Orions at the time, and Fumio Fujimura, who spent his whole career with Osaka. So just by process of elimination it must be Kawakami.

And yeah, I like a Hershiser/Lasorda hybrid as a match for Hoshino. In fact, it works on all sorts of levels. The Dodgers have traditionally been the American Giants' nemesis. Heck, the Dragons' uniforms even look like Dodger blue!

[Northviewcats]

Originally Posted by nat

The other player must be Kawakami. He's wearing a Giants hat, and Kawakami is the only Giant that Engel lists as being in the set. (And Engel definitely knows about this card: it's the one that he uses to illustrate the set.)

Now, the kanji for 'Kawakami' is 川上. If you sort of squint you can kind of make the second character on the card look like 'kami'. The first character looks like the hiragana for 'i', but I guess if it's super stylized it sort of maybe could possibly be 川?

Anyways, the Giants hat is what seals the deal. The baseball players in the set are Nishizawa (whom you've got), Kawakami, Kaoru Betto - who was on the Mainichi Orions at the time, and Fumio Fujimura, who spent his whole career with Osaka. So just by process of elimination it must be Kawakami.

And yeah, I like a Hershiser/Lasorda hybrid as a match for Hoshino. In fact, it works on all sorts of levels. The Dodgers have traditionally been the American Giants' nemesis. Heck, the Dragons' uniforms even look like Dodger blue!

Thanks for the information. I appreciate it. You really have a passion for Japanese cards. Here are scans of four other cards that I received in the lot. Huggins and Scott listed them as 1958 JCM23 Playing Card Backs. Not sure if this is correct. The cards are thicker than the other cards and have a glossy finish. I didn't find any matching listings on eBay. Any help identifying the players is appreciated.

Best regards,

Joe

[seanofjapan]

The players are:

Masaichi Kaneda
Yoshio Yoshida
Kazuhiro Yamauchi
Shigeo Nagashima

All four are hall of famers!

[nat]

Tsunemi Tsuda pitched for the Hiroshima Carp from 1982 to 1991. Early in his career he was a starting pitcher. As a 21 year old rookie he pitched 166 innings and was not good exactly, but good enough to take home the rookie of the year award. The following year he appeared in 19 games (17 starts) and was actually quite good. In his third year he made ten starts and four relief appearances, totaling only 54 innings, and he went back to being bad. After that he was converted into a relief pitcher. The Japanese Hall of Fame says that his conversion was necessitated by a ‘disrupture of blood in the middle finger’. I don’t have any idea what that is. But anyway, his first season out of the bullpen, 1985, did not go as planned. Tsuda was terrible: 50% worse than league average. His ERA that year was 6.64, and league-wide scoring was about the same as in 2018’s American League, so that doesn’t require any adjustment. His fame really rests on three of the following four seasons. In 1986, 87, and 89 he was terrific.

But then tragedy struck.

In the spring of 1990 he needed surgery because he was suffering from cerebral edema. That is, excess fluid built up in his brain. Cerebral edema can result from traumatic injury, but it can also result from cancer. In Tsuda’s case, it was the latter. He pitched six innings in 1990, one in 1991, and then he died of brain cancer.

The man nicknamed “the flaming stopper” remains as popular as ever. His son wanted to build a museum to his father, and crowd sourced funds for it. His goal was to raise four million yen (something like $40,000) to renovate Tsuda’s old house. The Yomiuri Shimbun (the newspaper that owns the Giants) reports that he hit his initial target in five hours, and eventually raised twenty-six million yen, for a much nicer museum.

The American hall of fame has been known to cut some slack for players who died suddenly and tragically. Ross Youngs comes to mind. Addie Joss didn’t even meet the 10 year requirement, but they put him in anyway. The Japanese voters did the same for Tsuda, but on the merits he’s even less deserving than Youngs or Joss. Joss was legitimately an all-time great, even if his career was short. (For what it’s worth, and yes he was a deadball pitcher, but he still holds the all-time record for WHIP.) Youngs, eh, had half of a hall of fame career. If he’d lived he probably wouldn’t have made it, but he might have. Tsuda is a different animal. Imagine if, instead of retiring at 32, Eric Gagne had died. That would be the American version of Tsuda.

This is a 1987 Calbee card.

[Northviewcats]

Originally Posted by seanofjapan

The players are:

Masaichi Kaneda
Yoshio Yoshida
Kazuhiro Yamauchi
Shigeo Nagashima

All four are hall of famers!

Thanks Sean and Nat for all of your help identifying the players on my cards. I wish that I could add more to the discussion than just show pictures.

Here are four more thick cardboard cards that were in with a group labeled miscellaneous Japanese cards in the Huggins and Scott lot. I know the first two are of famous Home Run King Sadaharu Oh, but can you tell me anything about the other two players? Also any information on the year of manufacture and type of card?

I love the cheesy artwork on the back of the cards. The little girl in card 3 looks like she is about to murder her mom.

Best regards,

Joe