Japanese Baseball Cards

Heaven help me (and please don't tell my wife), but I think I'm developing more than a passing interest in Nippon baseball and its sports cards. I'm not exactly sure I can point to any one thing that propelled me down this particular rabbit hole, but in hindsight, I probably should have seen the signs coming.

1) It may very well have begun with the odd black and white card I found while digging through some of my old boxes of cards. I'm not sure how I got it in the first place, but it was in one of those boxes.

2) There's some great blogs on Japanese cards I've been reading lately, such as Dave's Japanese Baseball Cards (featuring his collection of more than 60,000 Japanese baseball cards), and Sean's Getting Back into Baseball Cards...in Japan. Both blogs provide a great education on these sports cards and I've been learning something new every time I read them.

3) A few weeks ago, I was invited to attend a "Chatter Up" Zoom event by JapanBall. I was among the approximately 60 participants who got to listen to Matt Winters (Kansas City Royals, Nippon Ham Fighters), Carlos Mirabel (Nippon Ham Fighters) and Kevin Beirne, (White Sox, Blue Jays, Dodgers, Orix Buffaloes and Chiba Lotte Marines) share their experiences of playing professional baseball in Japan.

Winters remains involved with the Nippon Baseball League, serving as a scout for the Fighters, while Mirabel serves as director for the Japan Retired Foreign Players Association. Beirne is now a pitching coach for a Houston-based baseball academy.

One of the comments Winters made which apparently struck a cord, was the fact there were a few Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tiger hats. "Maybe we can get a few of you to become a Fighter fan after all this," he said with a grin.

4) And then there was this 2015 article I found from Graveyard Baseball, which brings "commentary on the Seibu Lions and NPB one shift at a time." They had a 12-part post on "Your Guide to adopting an NPB team." It gives a brief history of each team, where they play, their uniforms, their cheer songs, who they compare to in the MLB, and ends up with "Why you root for them," and "Why you don't root for them."

5) What may have been the final straw was when I recently PM'd a high school friend who's currently living in Japan. You guessed it, he's a Nippon Ham Fighter fan, and get this, the Fighter home stadium is less than a block away from his in-law's apartment in SW Sapporo.

I know, it's Karma, right?

So, the prognosis is, I'm certainly digging Japanese baseball cards, despite the fact I can't read kanji. However, while card collecting can prove to be expensive enough on its own, I'm definitely not going to break the bank trying to put together those massive BBM or Calbee sets, and there's no way I'd ever match Dave's extensive collection.

Instead, I'll pick up a few cards here and there, or perhaps a few packs or boxes as they pop up on E-Bay.

As an example, here's a 2000 Broccoli Seibu Lions pack I won on E-Bay from Robert Fitts, an author of five books on Japanese baseball who also sells Japanese baseball cards on E-Bay.

And just to show that I haven't totally gone around the bend (yet), here's an on-card autograph of the Chicken, from the 2020 Donruss set, I won off E-Bay. 

We've been fans of his ever since he began as the "KGB Chicken," re-hatched as the "San Diego  Chicken," and then finally, "The Chicken," and we've crossed paths with him on several occasions. Each time, he's been extremely friendly and actually talks to us, once he finds out we knew him in San Diego.

Here's a photo of my wife getting a peck from the Chicken at an Iowa Cubs game. note her Chicken doll, circa 1976, in her hand. He always gets a kick out of seeing it. One year, he took it from her and cuddled it, before tossing it back to her, and waving his arms like it wasn't his and he had nothing to do with it.

And while we've gotten his autograph before, this is the first time I've actually seen him sign something with his actual name on it. Usually, it's just been "The Chicken," so I was especially happy to win this. Next on my list, is one of those game-used pieces from his costume from Donruss.

By the way, the black and white card near the start of my blog is a 1975 Broder Japan Top Star, Wes Parker. In 1974, he played for the Nankai Hawks, batting .301, with 14 homers. 

Stay safe and healthy out there.