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.