Something I ran across today: the two Pete Hill baseball cards issued in his lifetime, both in Cuba, one in 1910 for Punch Cigars, the other in 1909 as part of the Cabañas set. The sets were issued to commemorate the American Series appearances of the Detroit Tigers (1909 and 1910) and Philadelphia A’s (1910).
By the way: this guy (“Ramon Herrara”) is Ramón Herrera. Herrera actually started the 1922 season on the Bridgeport Americans, also of the Eastern League, alongside Cuban Hall of Famer Joseíto Rodríguez, though it evidently didn’t show up in the guides. He must have played very little with Bridgeport (fewer than ten games) before moving to Springfield.
Herrera and Claudio Manela thus joined the Eastern League from the Negro National League at the same time, though Manela didn’t stick. Both were nicknamed “Mike,” for whatever reason. (At least Mike González was actually named Miguel.)
Image of Herrera comes via Ryan Christoff’s Cuban Baseball Cards site.
Sayonara Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card
By John Gall and Gary Engel (Chronicle Books)
This is a truly beautiful book that introduces a world of baseball art only rarely glimpsed in the United States. Japanese baseball cards mostly evolved out of cards manufactured for a children’s game called menko (the name has become attached to the cards themselves, also). Colorful, sometimes crude, other times finely detailed and nuanced, drawn in styles ranging from the cartoonish to the realistic, these cards came in different sizes and shapes (some are round, some in the shapes of airplanes, some are masks). Cards from the pre-World War II era and from the 1950s and 60s evoke a technicolor alternate universe of baseball superheroes; after that, Japanese cards unfortunately began to imitate their blander American counterparts.
Most pre-war cards seem to have depicted the popular university teams like Waseda and Keio, but there were amateur clubs, too, like the Mita Club, a team made up of Keio University graduates (shown in the round menko below). In 1922 Mita won a famous 9 to 3 victory over a touring team of American professionals that included Casey Stengel, George Kelly, Luke Sewell, and Waite Hoyt on the mound. Lefthander Michimaro Ono gave up only five hits for Mita, and his battery mate Zensuke Shimada hit a key home run off Hoyt to seal the victory.
On the subject of Japanese baseball: I’m always interested in origins and obscure prehistories, so I was interested to discover (not in this book, actually) that professional baseball in Japan actually predates the 1934 founding of the team that became the Yomiuri Giants. I scoured the paltry information on Japanese baseball history available in English on the web, and came up with the following, combining several different sources:
In 1920, Kiyoshi Oshikawa founded the Nihon Undo Kyokai, a.k.a. Shibaura Undo Kyokai (Shibaura Association), with the help of Atsushi Kono, a former pitcher at Waseda University who had captained that team on a tour of the U.S. in 1905. (Shibaura is a district in Tokyo.) By 1921, according to one source, there were four professional clubs in Japan. I’ve only found the name of one other professional club for certain, Tensho Yakyudan. Apparently most of them disbanded in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Shibaura club’s ballpark being confiscated by the government to use for relief efforts. After this, the club moved to the Takarazuka prefecture in the west, where it became the Takarazuka Undo Kyokai. It lasted until 1929, when it disbanded due to the Depression. One source says there was actually a professional league that played, off and on, from 1920 to 1929.
Some useful links:
I’m not a card collector (or
any kind of collector), but the idea of Negro League baseball cards is very
intriguing, and I thought this
was cool (from Old Cardboard eNews):
Thanks!
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