Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Shigeru Mizuhara

Some time ago Frank and I traded some cards. I’ve been meaning to do a write-up on them for, well, ever since the trade. But I’ve been busy with this and that and something else. Going to rectify that today though. Or, least, take one step towards it.

The biggest card in the trade was this: JRM 42 Shigeru Mizuhara.

This is my first pre-war hall of famer. With a few exceptions, post-war HOFers aren’t too hard to find. But pre-war are a different story. They turn up in Prestige auctions sometimes, and I put in a few bids on the last one, but didn’t win anything. So I’m happy to have this guy.

Now, this isn’t my first Mizuhara card. I wrote about the other one here. However, that card is from his days as a manager, in the post-war period. This JRM 42 card dates from c. 1930, when he was a star player for Keio University.

Mizuhara’s parents divorced when he was young, which doesn’t seem to have had any salutary effects on him. It seems that he started playing baseball as a distraction from an unhappy home life. He was high school teammates with Saburo Miyatake, and the two future hall of famers led Takamatsu Commercial High School to victory at Koshien twice. For many people, just participating at Koshien is the highlight of their lives, but Mizuhara and Miyatake actually won the thing more than once. After finishing high school, they both enrolled at Keio University, which had one of the stronger baseball programs at the time.

Although he was a great player – maybe the greatest amateur player in the days before the Japanese professional league was founded – his time with Keio was not free of drama, and ended early. The start of the trouble was a huge brawl during a game between Keio and their arch-rival Waseda University. The two schools played a tense back-and-forth game. Throughout the game there were many acrimonious calls, some of which were overturned on appeal (displeasing the team that benefited from the original call), along with much heckling. Mizuhara seems to have been at the center of many of the day’s incidents. Anyway. After the game concluded the Keio and Waseda cheering sections seem to have had enough of each other, someone from Waseda threw a half-eaten apple at Mizuhara, which he threw back at the Waseda fans, and the stadium descended into generalized combat. It was front-page news.

So, Mizuhara was already under something of a cloud. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested for illegal gambling while playing mahjong, and Keio had had enough. They cut their biggest star, and his college baseball career was over.

In 1936, when the Japanese professional league was founded, Mizuhara joined the Giants. He played pro ball through 1942. (Mostly at second base, but he also pitched a little bit.) Just as his college career was abbreviated, however, so was his pro career. After the 1942 season he joined the war effort, and eventually found himself as a prisoner of war in Siberia. (Rumor is that he taught the Russians how to play baseball.) When the war ended and he returned to Japan, the Giants welcomed him back, but extreme malnutrition during his time as a POW precluded a resumption of his baseball career. He transitioned, instead, to a managerial role, and led the Giants to their first stretch of postwar dominance. It’s for his work as a manager that Mizuhara is enshrined in the hall of fame.

(Most of the preceding comes from Mizuhara’s Japanese Wikipedia page.)

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As noted, this card is from the JRM 42 set, issued around 1930. The set has an R5 designation, and for a card that is that rare, I know of a surprisingly large number of these. Sean has one. Prestige sold one in 2016 (which is the same card that was used as the example in Engel’s guide), they sold a different one in 2018,
and then there’s mine.

There are two versions, one with the K over a solid red background, and one with the K over a yellow-and-red grid. Three of the four (all except the 2016 card) have the grid behind the K.

[John1941]

That's a very cool story, and a nice looking card.

I love how four known examples is relatively a lot.

[seanofjapan]

Hey awesome, I’m glad you found a copy of that Mizuhara too!

With at least four of them out there, I wonder if it might become an R4 in the near future!