Two huge Quisenberry acquisitions: 1975 and 1976 TCMA Waterloo Royals

 I guess I'm not a very good Dan Quisenberry super-collector. I decided to start chasing all his cards almost three years ago, and I just have 45 of his 256 cards. And he played in the 1980s for goodness' sake - there's tons of low-hanging fruit. 

I started my quest with great intentions - I even started a separate blog for my collection of him (Collecting Quiz) which I posted on once after my introductory post. The problem is that my collection as a whole is geared to Topps/Bowman vintage set-collecting; I'm just not used to intentionally seeking out a single player's cards regardless of set. 

I did, however, acquire two of Quisenberry's earliest and most important cards this February: his 1975 and 1976 TCMA Waterloo Royals cards.

 They aren't too flashy, but they're his first cards, in superb condition, and not easy to find either. And they're sort of cute. I like their pictures, and it's kind of funny they misspell his name as Quinsenberry on his 1976 card. 

1975 and 1976 were Quiz's first pro seasons. With Waterloo he was 3-2 with a 2.45 ERA in 20 games in '75, and 2-1 with a 0.64 ERA and 11 saves in 34 games in '76. For the two seasons he struck out 50 batters and walked just 15 (5 of them intentionally) in 86 innings. 

I actually bought the entire team sets. An on-line auction house I occasionally buy from, The Collector Connection, was selling the sets in NM condition, and I decided to go after them. The 1975 set was $62 and the 1976 set was $45 - together they were $125 including the buyer's premium. That sounds like a lot - and it is a lot, much more than I usually spend - but it was a good deal. A 1975 full set alone recently sold for $100+s/h on eBay, and that's not atypical. 

The quality of the cards isn't super high - they're black-and-white, minimalist, and often miscut, and their sizes can vary significantly - but therein lies the quirky charm of odd-ball cards. They aren't processed and bland, even if it takes the loving eye of an obsessed collector to see their beauty. 

Both sets have similarly designed backs.  The only easy way to tell the two sets apart (I mean, apart from the stats listed on their bacsk) is by their front fonts: the 1975 fronts are in a serif font while the 1976 fronts are in a sans serif font. (Serifs are the decorative details on the edges of letters - I had to look that up.) Additionally, the 1975 fronts are all-caps while the 1976 fronts are not. 

The 1975 set has 35 cards while the 1976 set has 33. (The difference is that the 1975 set has a variation and both versions are counted towards the complete set, and the 1975 set also has a card of the GM and his wife.) 

The Waterloo Royals had the best record in the class A Midwest League both years, finishing 93-35 in 1975 and 78-52 in 1976, and they won the league championship in 1975. At the time the big league Royals were a good team on the cusp of being a very good team; they would lose three straight American League Championship series to the Yankees from 1976 to 1978 (heh, heh, heh) before making (and losing) the 1980 World Series. Four regular players on the 1980 Royals - Quisenberry, Willie Wilson, Rich Gale, and Clint Hurdle - were with Waterloo in 1975-1976. 

The biggest difference between the 1975 and 1976 Waterloo Royals was their decline in base stealing and in pitching. Fueled by Willie Wilson (76 stolen bases) and Joe Gates (55 stolen bases), Waterloo stole 188 bases in 1975 to lead the league. Without Wilson and Gates in 1976, Waterloo stole just 95 bases - 215 thieveries behind the league-leading Danville Dodgers. In 1975, Waterloo had a league-leading 2.61 ERA in a severe pitcher's league (the league average ERA was 3.28); in 1976, as the league ERA spiked to 3.93, Waterloo's ERA went up a full run to 3.61, fourth best in the league. 

Here are some of the key or otherwise entertaining cards from the two Waterloo sets: 

Soon-to-be Royals star Willie Wilson had his first card in the 1975 set. Willie, who was just 19 then, led the team with 76 stolen bases and 73 runs batted in. I love the sign behind him dictating where games of pepper may be played. 

I took this picture many moons ago and I'm unsure why I included Charlie Beamon in it. He did hit a team-high .305 in 1975, and would go on to hit .196 in 45 games over three seasons with the Mariners and Blue Jays. I do like how both Beamon and Wilson are wearing a batting glove on only one of their hands, a common custom in those days. 

Al Bartlinski looks like the platonic ideal of a 1970s trainer, and Dave and Brenda Brunk look... very young for people running a ball club. (Dave was the team's GM - together they are listed as the "front office team" on the card back.) I also don't normally think of general managers as wearing partly-unbuttoned shirts revealing voluminous chest hair, but what do I know? 

According to the card's back, the Brunks made their abode in Lafayette, Indiana, and were graduates of Ball State University. "Dave was named Midwest League GM of the year in 1974." Today, Dave Brunk is in his 17th year as commissioner of the Peach Belt Conference, a DII athletic conference with colleges in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. He and Brenda have two daughters and two grandkids. 

The 21-year-old Ken Phelps played only 24 games for Waterloo in 1976, his first year in pro ball. He homered just once, but walked 26 times and hit eight doubles. Phelps didn't break through in the big leagues until 1984, when he was 29, but for four years (1984 and 1986-88) he was a fearsome Mariner hitter. He was platooned at DH and first base so he just got 300-350 at-bats a year, but in those four years he hit about .250 with lots of power and walks. His consistency was incredible for a part-time player: he hit 24, 24, 27, and 24 homers in those years. His best year might have been 1982, when he hit .333/46/141 with 108 walks and 112 runs scored for the Expos' AAA affiliate, the Wichita Aeros. Ken Phelps may not have been much of a fielder, but I don't understand why the Royals and Expos never gave him a real chance; the man could rake. 

The 6'7" Rich Gale was 11-6 with a 3.47 ERA for Waterloo in 1976, and even threw a one-hitter. He was 14-8 with a 3.09 ERA in his rookie season with the 1978 Royals, but rarely was effective after that. By 1985 he was pitching for the Hanshin Tigers. His ERA was 4.30 that year, but he led the team with 13 wins. The Tigers won the Japanese Central League pennant (fueled by fellow gaijin Randy Bass's 54 home runs), and Gale won two games in the championship series to help the Tigers win their first ever championship.

Gale's ERA was about the same the next year - 4.56 - but his record declined to 5-10, which for a high-paid highly-pressured gaijin must have been a harrowing experience. He later said: "I would've been an alcoholic basket case if my family hadn't been there." Gale became a pitching coach after that, spending two years with the Boston Red Sox. 

Clint Hurdle was just 18 in 1976, but he hit 19 homers, walked 118 times, and held enough tobacco in each cheek to make a chipmunk proud. He hit .328 the next year in AAA, and by 1978 he was as much of a hyped super-prospect as it was possible to be in 1978.

He never panned out. He hit .264 in 1978, and in 1980, at 22, he hit .294 with some power, but he never had more than 154 at-bats in a year after that. Whitey Herzog, the Royals' manager in the late 1970s, had called Hurdle "the best player in the minors [in 1977]", and that was pretty tame; in 1986, when Hurdle was 28, he hit .195 for Whitey Herzog's Cardinals. Hurdle later became a successful manager, leading the Rockies to their only NL pennant in 2007 and the Pirates to the best seasons they've had since the early 90s from 2013-15. 

Fernando Llodrat has a piece of gum sticking out of his mouth.
                                          
At first I thought that was all I was going to say about Llodrat, who played just five games for Waterloo: the terseness of that comment would prove a powerful contrast to my screeds on the previous three players.

But then I noticed that in 1979 Llodrat played in a strange and short-lived minor league, classified as AAA but probably not AAA in quality, called the Inter-American League. The league had six teams: two in Venezuela (Zulia and Caracas,) one in Panama, one in Puerto Rico (San Juan), one in the Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo), and a sixth in Miami. Llodrat divided his season between the Puerto Rico Boricuas (a Boricua is a Puerto Rican) and the Santo Domingo Azucareros (azucarero = sugar bowl). With the Boricuas, Llodrat was a teammate of former Reds star Bobby Tolan and former Waterloo Royal Mark Souza, and with the Azucareros was teammates with former Padres shortstop Tito Fuentes, future Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston, and former Red Sox pitcher Dick Pole. (The notorious Mike Kekich managed.) It was an absolutely fascinating idea for a league - six teams from five countries?! - but it fizzled out half-way through the season, with the Miami Amigos in 1st with a 51-21 record. 

The 1975 Waterloo set contains a variation considered necessary for a complete 35-card set. The two cards of German Barranca may seem identical on the front, but on the back of one error lurks. (Sound familiar?)

The card on the right has the back design belonging to the Dubuque Packers, an Astros affiliate at the time. I dig the slugging swine. 

Barranca didn't knock anyone's socks off with his play at Waterloo. He had no power, an unimpressive batting average, and didn't steal bases. He did show excellent plate discipline for a teenager, walking 102 times in 157 games over 1975-76, but that was it. But he started stealing bases with Jacksonville in 1977, stole 75 bases for Omaha in 1979, and ended up spending parts of four seasons as a pinch-runner and pinch-hitter for the Royals and Reds. In 1979 he was 3 for 5; the next season he played in seven games without batting. 

Barranca, a native of Vera Cruz, had a similarly slight career in the Mexican League: He was 8 for 28 for Campeche in 1988, 2 for 5 for Monclova in 1990, and 1 for 4 in 1994 for Industriales. 

He had a much more substantial career in the Mexican Pacific Winter League (AKA the Liga Mexicana del Pacifico).  He hit .244 with 138 stolen bases and 235 walks in 551 games over ten seasons for Mazatlán, Hermosillo, Tijuana, and Guasave. He set a record during his time with the Naranjeros de Hermosillo by stealing six bases in one game, and is 3rd all-time in career triples with 31. His 7 triples in 1977-78 tied a since-broken LMP single-season record. 

Earlier I said I'd show you the key or otherwise entertaining cards from the sets, but I've decided I just want to show them all. Because they're minor league cards and reasonably rare, there isn't much out there on either the set or the players. TCDB currently only has pictures of four of the 1976 cards; I'd just like to get everything in one place for posterity.

(In other words, I got carried away and started finding everything about the cards and players interesting. This happens to me sometimes.)

Here's a trio of future big-leaguers.

Craig Eaton was a pedestrian 3-3 with a 4.85 ERA in 1976. He appeared in five games in relief for the 1979 Royals.

Danny Garcia hit .292 with 2 homers, 73 walks, and 26 stolen bases in 1976; he was 2-for-14 in 12 games for the 1981 Royals. In 1982, his final year in pro ball, he hit .393 in 83 games: .424 in 26 games (39 for 92) for the Mexico City Reds, and .378 in 57 games (73 for 193) for the Buffalo Bisons, AA affiliate of the Pirates. Now that's what I call going out with a bang. 

In 1975 Roy Branch was 21 but already in his fifth pro season. He had a 6-1 record with a 1.93 ERA with Waterloo before moving up to AA Jacksonville. He had a 7.94 ERA in two starts with the 1979 Seattle Mariners. 

These four endeared themselves to me in miscellaneous ways. 

Gary Williams, just 20 years old in 1975, was the ace of Waterloo's pitching staff, going 12-2 with a 2.17 ERA and 112 strikeouts in 116 innings. He spent the next two seasons with Jacksonville but didn't have much success. Gary played in the Mexican League from 1978 to 1981. He was great for Tampico in 1978, going 10-6 with a 2.02 ERA and 127 strikeouts in 116 innings, but it looks like he hurt his arm in 1979, and he didn't do well after that. For his Mexican League career he was 23-17 with a 3.63 ERA for Tampico, Leon, Aguascalientes, Toluca, Tigres, and Chihuahua. 

Joe Gates, also 20 years old, was probably Waterloo's best player in 1975 - even better than Willie Wilson. His average, .270, was just as good, and he stole 55 stolen bases. His power was less but he walked 122 times - 96 more times than Wilson - and so scored 115 runs with a .443 OBP. But Wilson developed from there and Gates didn't. Gates made the majors with the Chicago White Sox, batting .175 in 24 games in 1978 and 1979 while Willie Wilson became a star. 

Bobby Edmonson, 18 years old in 1975, hit .170 with 9 homers and 16 runs scored in 89 games. I think there's a weird beauty to those numbers. Sadly, Bobby never played again in pro ball.

Willie Clark was drafted in the 11th round of the 1973 draft from Jackson State University. For his pro career he had a 31-11 record and 2.49 ERA, but he never made it above Waterloo. 

                

I love how the low-budget quality of old minor league cards can show you views of stadiums you would never think of seeing on a baseball card. These pitchers pictured in the midst of the stands are excellent examples. 

I will now show the players who appeared in both team sets, an exercise I hope you will find as instructive and oddly fascinating as I do. 

I don't know why my 1976 set came with two copies of the wonderfully named Karel deLeeuw - there's no variation that I can see - but I'm not complaining. Karel spent three years with Waterloo from 1974 to 1976, hitting .268, .281, and .260 with plenty of power. He played in just 171 at-bats over 74 games in 1975, for whatever reason, but he was the team's most productive batter by far, with a .413 OBP and .521 SLG - his SLG being 86 points higher than anyone else with significant playing time. 1976 was his last season in pro ball -  like Willie Clark, he never made it past Waterloo despite playing well. 
                                              
Clint Hurdle was not the only Waterloo player sporting chaw in his cheek.

Dale (not Dave) Hrovat provided low-volume but high-quality relief pitching for Waterloo for two years: he had a 2.09 ERA in 23 games in 1975 and a 6-0 record with 9 saves and a 0.51 ERA in 25 games in 1976. Hrovat made it as far as Spokane (AAA) in 1978 and finished his pro career with a 2.59 ERA. 

                        
                                                                     
Tom Laseter looks kind of like a 1970s superhero: he has that clean WASP look, cool hair, and a batting glove that is strangely reminiscent of Iron Man. He presumably was a pinch-runner foremost in 1975, going 4 for 34 with 16 runs scored in 32 games, but in 1976 he really did hit like a superhero with Waterloo, hitting .333/5/18 with 22 runs scored in 19 games. But he hit just .242 after being called up to Jacksonville, and the next year, again in AA, he hit .242 with a whopping two home runs in 121 games. 

Steve Lacy's card has print lines on the top, left, and bottom. Lacy hit .174 in 1975 and .285 in 1976. Way to improve, Lacy. 

                  

Darrell Parker was one of Waterloo's best batsmen both years, hitting .304 and .314 with fair power. He never made it past AAA Omaha. 

Manuel Moreta was a back-up infielder and pinch-runner in 1975, going 10-for-40 with 13 runs scored . He was a part-time regular the next year but hit just .172 with a .181 SLG. They should've left him on the bench.                                                                                                                                                                 

I don't know who the man staring over Mike Williams' right shoulder is but he sure is creepy. Williams had a good to start to his pro career, showing good control in his first two seasons and going 11-6 with a 3.18 ERA in 1975. But he was just 7-6 in 1976 and, possibly cursed by the ominous man behind him, began losing his control. It just got worse after that season. He walked 84 batters in 92 innings in 1977 and 75 batters in 82 innings in 1979, but did manage to spend three years in the Pacific Coast League. (He had ERAs of 7.02, 4.54, and 7.28 in those seasons.)

Mike Williams carefully wrote "Mike Williams" on his glove in 1975, presumably to distinguish his gear from Gary Williams'. 

Hal Thomasson, who has print lines on both his cards, was okay. 

Mark Souza had a 7.71 ERA in five relief appearances for the 1980 Billy Martin-led Oakland A's. He was a teammate of German Barranca with the 1979 Inter-American League Puerto Rico Boricuas; he had a 1-6 record but a 2.40 ERA. 

Luis Silverio retired with a career major league batting average of .545. (He was 6-for-11 in eight games for the 1978 Royals. ) Silverio was just 3-for-26 in 12 games for 1975 Waterloo, but hit .272/14/82 in 1976. I like how he's visibly older in his 1976 picture; his baby fat seems to have dissipated. 

               

Roy Tanner didn't do much of anything on the field in 1975 or 1976, but he must have showed plenty of leadership because he earned the coveted player-coach designation at age 25. He managed four years in the low minors for the Royals from 1980 to 1983.

The harried-looking John Sullivan caught 116 games for the Tigers, Mets, and Phillies between 1963 and 1968, hitting .228 and scoring the grand total of 9 runs. He had a 434-288 managerial record in the minors. After managing Waterloo from 1974-1976, he helmed Omaha in 1977 and 1978. He became the Royals' co-batting instructor in 1979, helping replace Charlie Lau, and was the Atlanta Braves' bullpen coach in 1980 and 1981. He served as Blue Jay bullpen coach from 1982 to 1993, and caught the Joe Carter walk-off home run that ended the 1993 World Series. 

The most significant moment of Sullivan's career from my perspective was when he converted Dan Quisenberry from a starter to a reliever at Waterloo in 1975. 

Sullivan and Silverio had identical strange cuts on their top-right corners in 1975, though you can't see Sullivan's very well from this angle. I'm not retaking the picture.

Well, there you have it: my titanic analysis of the 1975 and 1976 Waterloo Royals cards and players.

This is a timely post, as the Royals of today are currently battling my Yankees in the ALDS, just as the two teams battled in days of yore. The series is tied up 1-1; I hope it will be the beginning of a new chapter in the Yankees-Royals rivalry. And I hope the Yankees will get the best of it, just as they did in the 1970s. 

As I wrap up this post, here's a fitting song: Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks. 

                                              

For the sake of comprehensiveness, here are the pictures of the rank and file Waterloo warriors for whom I have no words.

Is 1953 Bowman the most error-filled card set in history?

1953 Bowman is the perfect set on its front: beautiful and pure.

But error lurks within its backs. 

Can you see the monstrous mistake? 

 If you look online for "1953 Bowman errors," you won't find much. PSA's article on 1953 Bowman Color mentions a few fumbled birthdates, a picture of one player used for someone else's card, and one mediocre pitcher (Al Corwin) with two cards. That's it. 

Al Corwin, #126

Al Corwin, #149

If you look further on the web, you won't find any errors in the set more substantial than a few misspelled names. 

As far as I can tell, no one has ever pointed out that almost every single card in both the Color and Black and White sets has some kind of statistical error. For example, Allie Reynolds' career ERA was 3.30, not 2.76, going into 1953. 

Most of the cards have miscalculated career batting averages or ERAs, just like Reynolds. Many of the errors are small - a 5.04 ERA instead of 5.02 - but some, like Reynolds, are kind of obscene. And if the batting average isn't wrong, some fielding stat probably is, and some cards even have seasons missing from the career totals. (The most flagrant of these even mention the missing season in the write-up. Al Corwin is a good example. His bio mentions his 5-1 1951 season, but his career stats only show his 1952 season. The backs of his two cards are identical except for the card numbers, so this holds true for #149 too.)

When you put all these different types of errors together, only 29 of the 224 cards Bowman released in 1953 do not have a statistical error. If there's any set with a higher percentage of error cards, I'm unaware of it.

Some back-story: 

I noticed a few cards with truly flagrant errors long before I realized that they were part of a theme. I noticed the mistake in Allie Reynolds' career ERA not too long after I got the card for Christmas, 2019. (An Ode to 1953 Bowman: Christmas Edition) 

If I remember correctly, the card that made me realize that the error was not an isolated event, that 1953 Bowman was rife with the iniquity of incorrectness, was a card I got in a lot this spring: Matt Batts, B&W #22. 

My mathematical mind writhed when I saw a man with 268 hits in 979 at-bats listed as having a batting average of .260. 

When I began noticing all these blatant errors, I wondered whether there might be subtle errors in other cards. I started checking and behold: errors were here, there, everywhere. I began checking every card sometime this summer, and worked on the project off and on until I finally finished yesterday. 

Disclaimer, required by law: The same love of statistics that led me to notice these errors in the first place, and then check every single card for more, also prompts me to provide various statistical breakdowns about aforesaid errors. You have been forewarned.

A preliminary note on my method: My goal was to see how many cards had errors, not to exhaustively determine every single error. For that reason, I only checked a player's fielding stats if his batting stats were squeaky-clean, which means that there may be significantly more fielding stat errors than I found. 

Acknowledgments: I used TCDB's pictures both for my statistical sleuthing and for this post, and Baseball Reference for the players' career totals up to 1952. I used Since I Left You by The Avalanches for musical distraction as I checked and rechecked; stats become banal even to the most hardened stat junkie after a while. 

In Bowman Color, out of 160 cards, 13 are errorless. Of these, three of the cards have no stats listed (44, 69, 93), five are of rookies with just one year of stats (83, 97, 98, 112,153), and one is a coach (95, Wally Moses). Only four cards of players with more than one season in the majors are errorless: 16, Bob Friend; 47, Ned Garver; 53, Del Rice; and 78, Carl Furillo.  

Out of 94 batters, 73 have incorrect batting averages, nine (at least) have incorrect fielding stats, two have incorrect batting counting stats, and five have one or more seasons not included in their career stats. (George Shuba was missing three.)

Out of 53 pitchers, 48 have incorrect ERAs and five have a season not included in their career stats. (Two of the five are Al Corwin.)

Out of eleven coaches and managers, six have incorrect fielding stats, two have incorrect batting counting stats, one is errorless (95, Wally Moses), one has no stats (Charlie Grimm), and one has both incorrect fielding and incorrect batting counting stats: 57, Lou Boudreau. Notice that they all have correct batting averages. 

For Black and White:

Out of 64 cards, 16 are errorless. Of these, eight are rookies with only one year beneath their belts: five pitchers and three batters. The other eight are all pitchers. 

Out of 33 batters, 29 have incorrect batting averages, and one (36, Jim Piersall) has a season missing from his career stats. Only three are errorless, and they're all rookies. 

Out of 29 pitchers, only 14 have incorrect ERAs. Another one has a counting stat error and another one has a season missing from his career stats. Of the thirteen errorless cards, eight are veterans - a relatively impressive number. 

You can actually pinpoint the place where Bowman suddenly started getting their ERAs right. Every pitcher who'd pitched in more than two seasons received incorrect ERAs up to card #40, which gives Larry Jansen's correct career ERA. After that point, Bowman got 7 ERAs correct out of 11 non-rookie pitchers, including five in a row from #40 through #52. 

There were only two managers - Casey Stengel and Bucky Harris. They both have incorrect RBI totals, and Bucky is shorted a game from his career total. 

A clear pattern emerges from the batting averages: In both Color and B&W, a clear majority of the batting averages are too low. In Color,  26 of the listed batting averages are too high while 47 are too low. In B&W, 8 are too high while 21 are too low.

There isn't strong evidence of a pattern in the mistaken ERAs. In Bowman Color, 22 of the listed ERAs are too high while 24 are too low. In Bowman Black and White, four are too high while ten are too low. 

For your possible delectation, I will list the most egregious errors:

#22 Color - Bob Porterfield's ERA should be 3.56, not 4.66
#53 B&W - Morrie Martin's ERA should be 4.64, not 5.67
#114 Color - Bob Feller's ERA should be 3.21, not 3.93
#68 Color - Allie Reynolds' ERA should be 3.30, not 2.76
#88 Color - Joe Dobson's ERA should be 3.62, not 3.13
#29 B&W - Sid Hudson's ERA should be 4.33, not 3.89
#66 Color - Mel Parnell's ERA should be 3.38, not 3.79

#58 B&W, Jim Konstanty, lists 76 career strikeouts instead of the correct 177. 

#8 Color - Al Rosen's AVG should be .280, not .221
#134 Color - Johnny Pesky's AVG should be .310, not .270
#18 Color - Nellie Fox's AVG should be .284, not .253
#7 Color - Harry Chiti's AVG should be .293, not .321
#24 Color - Jackie Jensen's AVG should be .275, not .250
#6 Color - Joe Ginsberg's AVG should be .245, not .269
#30 B&W - Walker Cooper's AVG should be .288, not .264
#34 Color - Gil Coan's AVG should be .258, not .281
#29 Color - Bobby Avila's AVG should be .301, not .280

I'm not sure what it means for three of the worst batting average errors to take place on three consecutive cards. 

I'm bugged by the question of why exactly Bowman made so many errors - was whoever calculated the career averages and ERAs just really bad at using a slide rule? And how could a baseball fan have not seen the implausibility of some of these figures? Al Rosen had been a big major league star for three years; how could his career batting average have been listed as .221!? My summer job this year (okay, my first summer job ever) was as a proofreader. I really wish I could have been there for Bowman.

And why did they make the specific errors they did: why were averages and ERAs wrong for career stats and right for 1952 stats? Why are the career batting averages correct for managers? Why do the career ERAs become way more accurate two-ways through the B&W set? If the statistician discovered his error, why didn't he go back and change his prior mistakes? I can't think of any plausible hypothesis to account for these mysteries. 

I will leave you with a spreadsheet instead of a solution. Here's a Google Sheets file with the details on every card in both sets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vU10-rGByr7aXHSZdzNrQve1-RMUumK8M5TgMDTa2_g/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Update: CardBoredom pointed out that a number of the batting averages were calculated by adding up the player's season batting averages and averaging them out. That method seems to work all the way for batting averages all through card #121 of the Color set but not afterwards.

I've only checked the method for a few pitchers' ERAs. It works for #66 and #87, but it can't explain Bob Feller (#114.)  More research is required.

Green seats wasteland (Requiem for a Coliseum)

 The Athletics played their last game in the Oakland Coliseum yesterday, beating the Texas Rangers 3-2 before 46,889 fans. J.T. Ginn, the A's rookie starter, gave up two runs in 5.1 innings to receive the win, his first in the majors. The epically named Kumar Rocker, the Rangers' rookie starter, received the loss. The A's rookie closer Mason Miller pitched 1.1 perfect innings to become the last man to pitch in the Coliseum in a major league game. Travis Jankowski of the Nordic locks was the last man to face him. 

The Athletics have played in the Coliseum for fifty-seven years. In that time, they won four World Series and lost two more. They made the play-offs twenty-one times, and won 229 more games than they lost.

In that same time, they finished in the top half of the AL in attendance just eleven times. They finished fourth or higher five times, and four of those times were from 1989 to 1992. When they won three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974, their highest annual attendance was 1,001,000. 

Oakland got a raw deal from their owners both at the beginning and end of their Athletics era. Charlie Finley, who built the A's dynasty of the 1970s working as his own GM, was as much of a genius of obnoxiousness as he was a baseball genius. In his time as owner he alienated the fans, the players, the press, his employees, his wife... pretty much everyone. The A's hit their Finley nadir in 1979. That year, they lost 108 games and drew 3,787 fans a game. A grand total of 653 fans attended their game versus the Mariners in April. (653 was a generous number.) The Oakland Coliseum, just a dozen years old at the time, was prematurely old; A's players publicly called it the worst stadium in the majors as early as 1973. It was dubbed the Oakland Mausoleum by both fans and players. 

Charlie Finley (Getty Images)

Things started looking up a little in 1980. Finley hired Billy Martin as manager, 21-year-old Rickey Henderson stole 100 bases, and the A's finished 2nd in the AL West. But Finley's wife filed for divorce that summer, and wouldn't accept a stake in the team. Finley was forced to sell the team to Walter A. Haas Jr., president and chairman of Levi Strauss of jeans fame. 

Fans turned out in droves to see the Finley-less A's in 1981. (Ding-dong, the witch is dead about sums up their attitude.) After the A's had never drawn better than 1,075,000 fans in a year in 20 years of Finley, they drew 1,304,000 in 1981 - a year with a strike-shortened 110-game schedule. 

The Oakland Athletics' fifteen years of Haas ownership turned out to be their glory years. Their farm system was rebuilt and yielded stars like Canseco and McGwire, they hired Tony LaRussa as their manager, transformed Dennis Eckersley from washed-up starter into MVP closer, and built a fantastic starting rotation around free-agent signing Bob Welch and other teams' castoffs. 

They were in the World Series every year from 1988 to 1990, winning it all in 1989. After having slumped in attendance in their mediocre mid-1980s years, they finished 2nd, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in attendance from 1989 to 1992. 

But they started losing again in 1993 despite having Rickey, Eckersley, a 41-year-old Goose Gossage, and three bench players named Scott, and attendance began to decline. 

Haas died in 1995, and the team was sold to a group led by two Bay Area real estate developers. The developers didn't believe in throwing around money, so they got rid of their stars and invested in their farm system. And they hired Billy Beane as their GM. Thus began the Moneyball years.

Photo from "Where has the old Billy Beane gone?" (Athletics Nation, 2017)

The Moneyball years were (famously) characterized by analytics, homegrown stars, and stingy spending. They would have plenty of success - until the postseason began. They lost four straight American League Division Series three games to two from 2000 to 2003. Attendance was middling. 

The A's were sold again in 2005, this time to a group fronted by a real estate developer, Lewis Wolff, with John J. Fisher Jr., son of The Gap's founder, as majority owner. Under this new consortium the A's have had some good teams and some bad teams, but they've never spent much money and attendance has always been bad. 

These last four years in Oakland have been particularly grim. The stadium, for one thing, has been left to molder.  

"The concrete behemoth was never the warmest stadium, but its character was unmistakable. In recent years, it hasn’t exactly fallen into disrepair; rather, it’s been deliberately pushed. Like the team on the field, it’s been allowed to atrophy in order to demonstrate how badly the organization needs (never wants) out of Oakland." - Davy Andrews, from Fangraphs' tribute to the Coliseum: Memories of the Oakland Coliseum. A good read. 

The A's payroll went from $95 million in 2021 to $50 million in 2022 after they gutted their team, and it has remained at that level since. Their payroll this year of $56 million was less than their payroll in 2004 - and in 2004 their payroll was less than a third of the Yankees'. 

The A's drew 1,671,000 fans in 2019 - and less than half of that, 701,430, in 2021. They drew 4,068 fans to a September game that year against one of their rivals in a tight Wild Card race. Some of the blame for low attendance that year was due to lingering concern over COVID, but raised ticket prices, $30 parking, minimal promotions, the aging Coliseum, and rumors of a move didn't help either. 

(From the San Jose Mercury News, 2021-9-23)

Since then, the team has turned from good to ugly, and attendance has remained rock-bottom. The A's set their plan to move to Las Vegas in motion last year, and by December 16 the move was official. Until their new stadium in Sin City is finished, they'll play in Sacramento's AAA ballpark. 

This will be the fourth time the A's have moved. 

The Oakland Athletics and their Coliseum deserve a requiem. There's a song I love that talks about death and the Coliseum: Dead Dogs Two by cLOUDDEAD. I think it's a fitting epitaph.

The first verse of lyrics (some of my favorite from any song):

From the height of the highway on-ramp we saw
Two dogs a-dead in a field
Glowing on the Oakland Coliseum green seats wasteland
Dogs, dogs we thought were dead
They rose up, rose up when whistled at
Their rib cages inflating
Like men on the beach being photographed
A guard dog (guard dog) for what? (for what?)
Against overzealous penniless Athletics fanatics
Getting into games through a hole in the fence
For the owner of the blue tarp tent
Pitched by a creek beneath the on-ramp
In the privacy of the last three
Skin-and-bony trees, devoid of leaves
And us undeceased, and with our new CDs
Zipping on dead east, Oakland

The original version of the song is pretty good, but the definitive version is Boards of Canada's remix of it. I'm a huge Boards of Canada fan, and they do a great job with this song. (It's also one of their more accessible songs, in my opinion.)

If you're interested in listening:

More menkos from COMC!

 I have some more lovely menkos to share today. A few of these are cards I got in my last COMC order and forgot to include in my Japanese post, but I got most of them in a 2022 COMC order. 

This is a 1948 Blue Baseball Back Menko of Takeshi Doigaki I bought for $3.00 in 2022. It was my first Japanese card. 

I love the catcher's mask, blue background, and colorful lettering. Doigaki was an excellent hitter, batting .283 in his twelve-year career. In 1946 he was third in batting with a .325 mark, two points ahead of his Osaka Tiger teammate Fumio Fujimura who was highlighted in my last Japanese card post, and was also tied for third in RBIs with 70 - one ahead of Fujimura. He also hit .328 (fourth in the league) with 16 home runs for Osaka in 1949, and .322 (fifth in the league) with 15 home runs for the Mainichi Orions in 1950.

Round menko are really cute looking. This is a 1948 menko of Noboru Aota I got for $2.18. Aota was a power-hitting outfielder for the Tokyo Kyojin, Hankyu Braves, Yomiuri Giants, Taiyo-Shochiku Robins, and Taiyo Whales in a career that listed from 1942 to 1959. He was with the Yomiuri Giants in 1948, when this card was made, and spent his best seasons with them. He hit .306 with a league-leading 25 home runs in 1948 -  many home runs as his former team, the Hankyu Braves, hit. Over the next three years he hit .275/28/102, .332/33/134, and .312/32/105. He hit 265 career home runs.

(I'm not sure where my copy of this card is currently located, so here's the COMC picture. I'm working on organizing my collection currently.)

This is a 1949 "Fan Round Menko" of Hiroshi Nakahara, who pitched with Hanshin in 1943 and with the Nankai Hawks from 1948 to 1955. He was a fairly reliable spot starter and reliever, winning 66 games and losing 51 for the Hawks over his eight seasons with them. His best seasons were 1948 (13-7, 2.28) and 1952 (11-5, 2.82). 

Epic striped background.

These are 1959 Doyusha Card Game cards. I spent $8 on the Roberto Barbon on the left - the most I've spent on a Japanese card - but it was worth every penny. Barbon was born in Cuba, and was a shortstop in the Dodgers system before signing with the Hankyu Braves in 1955. He actually signed with Hankyu through Abe Saperstein, who had owned several Negro League teams and was the founder and owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. Saperstein had an an arrangement with the Hanyku Braves; other black players who played for Hanyku through his intercession are Larry Raines (Cleveland Indians 1957-58),  pitcher Jimmie Newberry (Negro Leagues 1943-48), pitcher Jonas Gaines (Negro Leagues 1937-48), and third baseman John Britton (Negro Leagues 1942 to 1948). 

Barbon became the first gaijin to compile 1,000 hits and the last to steal 50 bases, He played for Hankyu until 1964 and with the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes in 1965; for his Japanese career he hit .241 with 33 homers and 308 stolen bases in 1353 games. According to IMDB he even acted in a few Japanese movies in the 1960s. 

After his career ended Barbon married a local woman and stayed with the Hanyku Braves as a coach and interpreter. In recent years he was the Orix Buffaloes.

He died just last March, one day short of 90 years old. 

For a fuller account read: https://japanball.com/articles-features/japanese-baseball-historical-profiles/roberto-barbon-japans-first-latin-ballplayer/

The other guy I got a 1959 Doyusha of, Tetsuya Yoneda, was no slouch either. An incredibly durable pitcher, he won 350 games, lost 285, and struck out 3388 batters in 949 games in a career spanning from 1956 to 1977. His first nineteen seasons were spent with the Hanyku Braves, and in nine of those he was a teammate of Barbon. He won 10 games or more in nineteen consecutive seasons.

He holds the career record for most hits and runs allowed. 

On the left is a 1958 Marusho Two Bat Menko I bought last May of Toru Mori. Mori was a 5'8" 209 lb. outfielder from Manchuria with some power; he hit .247 with 23 homers as a rookie in 1958, .282 with 31 homers the next year, and for his career hit .251 with 189 homers in 1177 games. He played with the Chunichi Dragons from 1958 to 1961, the Taiyo Whales from 1962 to 1965, and the Tokyo Orions from 1966 to 1968. 

On the right is a 1958 Doyusha I got in a time travel trade from Matt of Diamond Jesters of Nankai Hawks first baseman Shigeo Hasegawa. Hasegawa was solid as semi-regular from 1956 to 1963; he never cleared 400 at-bats, but hit .269 with a little power. In 1958, his best season, he hit .277 with 16 homers in 387 at-bats. 

These are from my last COMC order. Left is a 1949 Starburst Roud Menko of second baseman Shigeru Chiba, who hit .284 with 96 homers and 913 walks in 1512 games from 1938 to 1956. He spent his whole career with the Tokyo Kyojin/Yomiuri Giants. 

The card on the right is not actually a menko - it is a 1949 Team Emblem Karuta of Juzo Sanada. In 1950 Sanada won 39 games for the Shochiku Robins; for his career he had a record of 178-128. He had some incredibly hard-working seasons early in his career: in 1946 he was 25-26, completed 43 games, and pitched 464.2 innings, while in 1947 he was 23-21, completed 42 games, and pitched 424 innings. 

In addition to his stupendous work-loads he was also a third baseman and pitch hitter. 1950, the year he won 39 games, he appeared in an additional twelve games as a pinch-hitter, and overall hit .314 with two homers and 36 RBIs. He hit .255 for his career, and he spent his last year, 1956, exclusively as a third-baseman - pinch-hitter. 

So - thank you COMC and Matt for the menkos!

Time Travel Trading

 I recently made my third time-travel card trade with Matt of Diamond Jesters - as always, it was an easy and enjoyable way for me to add a few vintage needs to my collection. 

These two were new to my 1959 set. I had never heard of Dick Drott or Charlie Secrest before.

 Dick Drott came up in 1957 as a 20-year-old flamethrower with Cubs, and won 15 games while striking out 170 batters and walking 129. He finished third in the Rookie of the year voting, but was 7-11 with a 5.43 ERA in 1958  and never found success again. He lingered on for five more years in the major leagues after that, but was atrocious, winning 5 games and losing 24 with a 5.34 ERA. He was 2-12 in his final season, with the Colt 45s.

Charlie Secrest never even made it to the majors. After he had hit 21 home runs with a .281 average, 33 doubles, 8 triples, 83 walks, and 99 runs batted for the Little Rock Travelers, Topps decided he was a rising star worthy of a card. They were wrong. His 21 home runs had been a fluke: he had never hit more than six home runs in a season before and never would again. He played 149 career games in AAA, most with the Portland Beavers, and was pretty mediocre.

Harvey "Kitten" Haddix looks rather woebegone in this card. Haddix is, of course, most famous for his 1959 game against the Milwaukee Braves in which he pitched 12 perfect innings to start the game and then lost 1-0, but he was a good pitcher with a long career.

He was a lefty, a small man, generously listed as 5'9", and after his first few seasons he was never much of a workhorse. But he was an effective pitcher, doing surprisingly well in rate stats: he led the league in K/9 in 1954, FIP in 1957, SO/W in 1957 and 1958, and WHIP and H/9 in 1959. 

He was originally a left-handed shortstop in high-school, and put his fielding and batting abilities to good use in the major leagues. He won three straight gold gloves from 1958 to 1960, and had a solid .212 career batting average; he was used occasionally as both a pinch-hitter and pinch-runner up to 1958.

He was the winning pitcher of game seven in the 1960 World Series, aided by Bill Mazeroski's walk-off blast.

This is a picture of Roy Face, Maz, and Haddix from the 1960 World Series which I "borrowed" from Getty Images. As my grandpa wrote for the New York Daily News for decades I feel no compunction. 

But all this talking about The Kitten has overshadowed another favorite of mine, Stu Miller.

Though I wish it were true that Stu Miller was blown off the pitching mound of Candlestick Park in the 1961 All-Star game, he was not. What really happened was that a blast of wind nearly knocked him over as he came set to face his first batter; he managed to keep his footing, but a balk was called on him. (Which is funny enough in itself.)

But when legend becomes fact, print the legend. As Stu Miller later said: "I wasn’t blown off that mound. I just waved a little. But I’ll always be the guy who was blown away, no matter what I say. There were 44,000 people in the park that day, but over the years I bet I’ve had at least 100,000 people tell me they saw me flying in the air. You’d think I’d been blown out into the Bay."

Stu was unimposing enough that the idea of him being blown off the mound in a game just felt right. He was small for a righty, 5'11" and 165 lb., and his nickname was "Little Stu." He wasn't exactly throwing smoke out there like Dick Drott, either; as Jim Murray put it, he had "three speeds of pitches - slow, slower, and reverse." 

In a similar spirit, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book said:

"Stu Miller threw the ultimate banana ball. You had time for a Coke and a sandwich while waiting for his fastball to arrive. His pitches took so long to get up to the plate in fact that they occasionally even appeared to be going backward. Watching him from behind the third base dugout was guaranteed to make your palms itch and your seat squirm. You wanted to hightail it on down to the bat rack and have a rip at the little guy yourself. It was all an optical illusion of course. You couldn't have hit him and neither could very many real ball players. His pitches may have looked like custard pies on the way up to the plate but they had a tendency to disappear when they arrived."

The owner of the ultimate banana ball won the 1958 NL ERA title and came within 0.02 of repeating as ERA king in 1959, but finished 2nd to teammate Toothpick Sam Jones.

This was my first card from the 1969 Globe Imports set. I'll describe it as minimalist and call it a day. Nacht. 

I love Japanese baseball and baseball cards!

 I've been fascinated with Japanese baseball for years. I remember spending hours in 2019 or 2020 looking through Japanese leagues and teams and players from the 1930s-70s on Baseball Reference, and marveling over the insane stats: the years in the 1940s when the league batting average was .200; the 1940s pitchers who would win 40 games and pitch 450 innings; the guy who threw 19 shutouts in a season (Jiro Noguchi), and the OTHER guy who threw 19 shutouts in a season while also posting an ERA of 0.73 (Hideo Fujimoto).

And then there was the insane dominance of the Yomiuri Giants, who in the 23 seasons from 1951 to 1973 won 19 Central League pennants and 15 Japan Series championships, including nine consecutive Japan Series wins from 1965 to 1973. Sadaharu Oh, the star of the Giants, hit 868 home runs in a league with 130 game seasons. How is that even possible? 

Into the 1960s, Japanese star pitchers would start 40 games a year and relieve in another 20. Unsurprisingly, not many of them lasted long. Here's one completely normal example: in 1961, the 22-year-old rookie Hiroshi Gondo had a 35-19 record with a 1.70 ERA, 44 starts, 69 games, and 310 strikeouts in 429 innings for the Chunichi Dragons. In 1964, he was 6-11 with a 4.19 ERA. He had 82 career wins. 

Everything about the early years of Japanese baseball has always fascinated me by how different and strange it is. I delight in the strange savor of the statistics and the sweet sounds of the players' names: Tetsuharu Kawakami, Eiji Sawamura, Victor Starffin, Shozo Watanabe, Fumio Fujimura, Shozo Doi, etc. 

The only trouble was that until last year, I had no good way of getting any of their cards. Most Japanese cards, understandably, are located in Japan. Whenever I was able to find any for sale they were too expensive for me to justify buying them. 

Which is why I was so excited when last year reasonably-priced Calbee & menko cards began appearing in quantity for sale on COMC! Finally - finally! - I could buy cards of the players I had so long loved, and not kill my budget.

Because they still weren't that cheap I mostly stuck to the names I knew. I was able to get a fair percentage of my favorites.

Masaichi Kaneda (left) was one of the greatest Japanese pitchers of all-time. He became a regular pitcher for the Koketsu Swallows at 16 - a year younger than me. From 1951 (age 17) to 1964 (age 30) he threw between 300 and 400 innings, won between 20 and 31 games, and struck out between 229 and 350 batters every single year.

Over the next five seasons, from 1965 to the end of his career, he won 47 games and struck out 425 batters.

He retired with a record of 400-298 and 4490 strikeouts over 20 seasons.

Katsuya Nomura was one of the greatest catchers of all-time, MLB included. In a career that lasted 26 seasons, most of them spent with the Nankai Hawks, he hit 657 home runs, drove in 1988 runs, collected 2901 hits, and played in 3017 games. He caught 2921 games - 494 more than Ivan Rodriguez, the MLB record holder. He was incredible - and I mean that almost literally.

These cards were from the "1960 Thin Paper/Scissors/Rock in Center Menko JCM138" set. The Nomura was $2.95 and the Kaneda was $1.95. 

The backs:

(peace out)

Menko cards are interesting in themselves. They're used for a game in which, according to the renowned authority Wikipedia, "A player's card is placed on the hardwood or concrete floor and the other player throws down his card, trying to flip the other player's card with a gust of wind or by striking his card against the other card. If he succeeds, he takes both cards. The player who takes all the cards, or the one with the most cards at the game's end, wins the game." 

So menko is similar to the game of flipping played by American youths from the 1950s to 1970s, but with cards specially designed for the purpose.

Here we have two Yomiuri Giants, with a "1962 Marusho Flag Menko" of Isao Shibata on the left, and a "1972 Kankan Thick Menko" of Shigeo Nagashima on the right. The Nagashima is incredibly thick - as thick as three of my other menko cards stacked upon each other, and no menko cards are thin. The Shibata was $1.15 and the Nagashima was $1.95.

Isao Shibata is shown here as a teenage rookie. He came up with the Yomiuri Giants as a pitcher in 1962, but switched to the outfield after giving up 5 home runs in 11 innings. He was a regular sight in the Giants' outfield for the next eighteen seasons. He was a decent hitter, with a .267 batting average and 194 home runs (Japan has always been a pitchers' league), but was best-known for his base-stealing: he stole 579 bases in 2208 games for his career, with a high of 70 in 1967.

Shigeo Nagashima is the most popular historical player in Japan, even surpassing Sadaharu Oh in the hearts of Japanese fans. Why this is, I cannot say. Though he didn't hit 868 home runs, Nagashima-san was a super-star 3rd baseman for 17 years from 1958 to 1974. He hit .305 with 444 home runs and 1522 RBIs. He was 36 years-old and near the end of his career by 1972, but he had still hit .320 with 26 home runs just the year before.

He would go on to manage the Giants for 15 seasons. 

I love the bug-eyed man and random writing on the back of Nagashima.                           

This is a menko from 1958, showing the great Fumio Fujimura with the Osaka Tigers at the tail-end of his career. By 1958 Fujimura-san was 42 years old, and was only able to manage three singles in 26 at-bats, but in his glory days he was one of the most feared batters in all Japan.

His pro career began in 1936, the first year of professional baseball in Japan. He was a semi-regular pitcher from 1936 to 1948, and had a 34-11 record for his career. He was a consistently great batter from the beginning, but due to the extreme pitcher-favoring conditions he labored under, his stats didn't really look that amazing until 1949. That year, he hit .332 with 46 home runs and 142 RBIs. Before 1949, no Japanese player had hit more than 25 home runs in a season. 

His 1950 stats were even more impressive-looking - so jaw-dropping across the board, in fact, that I shall reproduce them in full:

AVG HR RBI  H  AB 2B 3B G    R    BB SO SB CS
.362   39 146 191 527  41  3 140 130 100 36  21  2

But honestly, a lot of that was due to the increased hitting seen in 1950. He was as good or better in 1946, when he hit .323 with 5 home runs in 96 games (and won 13 games against 2 losses.) 

Again from Wikipedia: "A superstitious player, Fujimura never hurt insects or shaved before games." Wikipedia also informs me that he was an actor in a 1979 movie called "Aftermath of Battles Without Honor or Humanity." 

These three are 1985 Calbees. The players' stories don't quite measure up to Fujimura/Kaneda et al., but they were cheap - between 75 and 88 cents each. And they weren't scrubs, either.

From left to right:

Kazuyuki Yamamoto was primarily a relief pitcher in a career spanning 17 seasons, all spent with the Hanshin Tigers. (The Hanshin Tigers are the same team as the Osaka Tigers, Fumio Fujimura's team.) He had very good control in his later years; in 1987 he issued only one unintentional walk in 48 innings (but did allow 13 home runs.) He finished second in the league in saves in both 1982 and 1984, with marks of 24 and 26. 

Kiyoyuki Nagashima hit .271 with 107 home runs in 1477 games spread thin over an eighteen-year career. 1985 was his best season.

Masayuki Kakefu was a slugger. He played 3rd base for the Hanshin Tigers for 15 years, and had some absolutely fearsome seasons at the plate. In 1979 he hit .327 with 48 home runs in 122 games, and for his career he had a slash-line of .292/.381/.532 with 349 home runs in 1625 games. 1985 was his last great season - in it he hit .300 with 40 home runs, 108 RBIs, and 94 walks. 

And no, I don't know why all three of these guys' first names end in -yuki. 

These are mid-70s Calbees - the Oh is from the 1974-75 set while the other three are from 1975-76. From left to right/ top to bottom, we have Isao Shibata, Clyde Wright, Tsuneo Horiuchi, and Sadaharu Oh.

We already went over Isao Shibata's career. I absolutely love the photo used on this card.

Clyde Wright is familiar to many of us for pitching in the major leagues from 1966 to 1975, and even winning 22 games in 1970. He pitched for the Yomiuri Giants from 1976 to 1978 and was rather mediocre, winning 22 games and losing 18. Overpaid gaijin. 

Tsuneo Horiuchi had a quite respectable 18-year-career for the Yomiuri Giants, winning 203 games and losing 139. He had a 28-4 record as a teenager, with a 16-2 record and 1.39 ERA in his 1966 rookie season and a 12-2 record and 2.17 ERA in 1967. He won 26 games in 1972. 

I was very excited to get my first card of Sadaharu Oh, the all-time pro-baseball home run king. It has tape all around it but I don't really mind - I'm just happy because it was $4. 

If you haven't done so before, I recommend you spend a few minutes staring at Sadaharu Oh's page on Baseball Reference. It's insane. I'll even make it easy and provide a link:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=oh----000sad

All four of these Calbees were Yomiuri Giants, and that's not a coincidence. The Calbee sets of the 1970s were monstrously large - 1974-75 Calbee was 936 cards, and 1975-77 Calbee was 1472 cards. The cards weren't distributed equally, either; the Yomiuri Giants had way more cards made of them than any other team, and Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima had way more cards made of them than any other players. (See http://japanesebaseballcards.blogspot.com/2022/05/history-of-calbee-part-1-1973-to-1977.html)

If you were left wanting to see more Japanese cards and facts after this post - I am, if no one else is -  here are two sites which have taught me a TON about Japanese baseball cards: Getting Back to Baseball Cards... in Japan and Japanese Baseball Cards. 

A third interesting site is JapaneseMenkoArchive, which has a lot of pictures of Japanese baseball menko cards.