Vintage Baseball Cards

Potato chips. Four bags down and all I've got to show for it are two Nippon Hams, a Daiei Hawk and a Chiba Lotte Marine. I'm 34 grams fatter, the roof of my mouth hurts and I still haven't found the Tuffy Rhodes card I want. But this is the price you pay for collecting baseball cards in Japan.

That's how it has been since 1973, anyway, when the Calbee Co. first began including a single baseball card with its snack chips. Over the years, others have joined Calbee in the baseball card business, but only Baseball Magazine (BBM) has made a lasting impression. Unlike Calbee, however, BBM's attractive, high-quality cards are aimed directly at the collector's market, and are sold in flashy foil packs in sets of five and ten. The beauty of the Calbee card is that it's essentially free. It's the chips you pay for; the card is an extra treat. If only Nippon Ham would renew its sausage card campaign of 1975 and Pino Ice Cream its Frozen Choco Ball card set of 1978, then you could enjoy a free baseball card with every meal.

Of course, not everyone collects cards one at a time or even one pack at a time. In New York City, archaeologist Dr. Rob Fitts buys his Japanese baseball cards by the collection. And while Fitts has more than a few Calbees and BBMs, a cyber trip to an online Japanese baseball card website reveals an extraordinary array of vintage Japanese cards, spanning a century of baseball and featuring greats of the game like Oh Sadaharu, Nagashima Shigeo, Betto Kaoru, and foreign stars like Chico Barbon and Victor Starfin.

Fitts, who is one of the foremost experts on Japanese baseball cards, started his collection in the early 1990s while writing his archaeology dissertation in Tokyo. A trip to the Tokyo Dome was enough to make Fitts a fan of the Japanese game, and a decade on, he makes a living not as an archaeologist, but by collecting Japanese baseball cards and selling off the doubles on his web site.

As a collector, Fitts has a special interest in Oh Sadaharu cards. Fitts recently published a checklist of Oh cards (available from his website) and has over 500 of the home-run king's cards in his collection. But as Fitts says, collecting by player is only one way to approach baseball cards. Collections can also be built based on teams, years, manufacturer and card type.

Vintage Japanese baseball cards come in a variety of types. Pre-WWII, cards were generally bookmarks or postcards, often of generic players and teams. But despite the popularity of the sport, few cards were made and they are now extremely rare. After the war, however, two types of cards came to dominate, bromides and menko.

"Bromides" (black-and-white photos on thin card stock) are interesting enough for the variety of players presented; as artifacts, however, they pale in comparison to the colorful menko. Menko are round, rectangular or die-cut cards, usually used by boys in sumo-inspired games in which the contestants try to knock each other's menko out of a ring in a kind of menko-to-menko combat. According to Japanese Baseball Card Quarterly's brief history, the menko dates back over 250 years to the mid-Edo Period. Made from a variety of materials - clay, lead, tile and eventually cardboard - menko were an important socializing toy for boys, who used them for friendly competition and training for life's challenges. Typically, menko featured heroic Japanese figures, such as samurai and soldiers, but during the Occupation, when the glorification of traditional national heroes was prohibited, baseball players filled the void, becoming the new menko warriors.

In his handbook, An Introduction to Japanese Baseball Cards, Fitts describes the die-cut menko of the late 1940s as "some of the most beautiful baseball cards ever made." An airplane-shaped Betto Kaoru (Hanshin's gentleman of baseball), a face mask of Bessho Takehiko (the Hawks and Giants pitching ace) and a bottle-shaped Fujimura Fumio (Hanshin's Hall of Fame 3rd baseman) confirm that die-cut menko are fascinating pop-art objects.

Because Japanese baseball cards haven't been catalogued like their American counterparts - a major part of Fitts' project - it's difficult to know with any certainty what cards were manufactured. Fitts is searching, in particular, for one card, though he's doubtful he'll ever find it. "The card I'm looking for," he says, "is a mythical card, really, though it occasionally shows up on lists. It's a card of Sawamura [Eiji], who pitched consecutive strike outs against Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx in a 1934 exhibition game against the Major League all-star team."

Finding the mythical Sawamura card, or any other pre-1973 cards, is not so easy, even in Japan. Most sports card shops carry a large selection of post-73 Calbee and BBM cards, but little of an older vintage. Card Dynasty in Osaka, is an exception. The small shop offers a good selection of bromides and rectangular menko, as well as some rare postcard-style cards.

If you're hunting for vintage cards, antique shops and collectible hobby shops are probably the best bet, or, of course, at Rob's on the web. But if you want tomorrow's hall of famers today, there's always Calbee. My last pack contained Seibu Lions slugger Matsui Kazuo: Great batting average, plenty of home-run power and a good-tasting chip.

This article was written by Brad Quinn for Konsai Time Out Magazine.