The God Of Forkballs, Vintage Edition

For the past four years (at least) I've had a quasi-goal of obtaining a vintage card of Shigeru Sugishita. Preferably from his playing days. Because while the modern cards featuring cards of him from his prime are cool and everything, I do admit that the charm of vintage is that nothing can really beat something that was made in the moment.

This is something that was pretty difficult to do in Japan. For whatever reason baseball card shops don't really deal with vintage too much and even longtime card dealers say they never saw Sugishita's vintage stuff in the flesh in all of their years in the profession. And they live in Nagoya! I've got my own theories on why but that doesn't matter.

Instead they're a lot easier to find in America apparently. I don't know why or how, but they are. Or rather they must be because, well, look!

Yes friends, that is a vintage Shigeru Sugishita card from 1950. Sent to me by NPBCardGuy who runs Japanese Baseball Cards.

The card in question is from the 1950 JBR set (according to NPBCG's blog). A name I have to assume some gaijin collector bestowed upon the set (probably an acronym or something) because none of my Japanese sources recollected any type of name of that nature. Also looking it un in Japanese produced bupkis.

The design reminds me of 1947 Bowman, what with the black and white photography and the white border around it. Also the two are pretty much the same in terms of size.

NPBCardGuy didn't stop there. There was also this second vintage Sugishita card. One I like even more because the full-bleed, no border-ness of it is absolutely fantastic to me.

Trying to look up information on this card was tough. I couldn't just ask NPBCG what it was because that'd be too easy and convenient. I had to do stupid roundabout shit like spending well north of two hours looking far and wide throughout the internet in both English and Japanese. Which produced bupkis too. My educated guess is that this is something along the lines of a bromide from the 1950s because a lot of vintage bromides at that time were done in this black and white photography format with the players' name and/or the team name (and/or occasionally the position) written somewhere around the player.

I didn't scan the backs of these because they were both blanks (a sure sign that both of these are bromides for sure). But rest assured that they also reek of vintage character.

Accompanying the two cards were a crisp $20 bill that I only meant as a joke but NPBCG actually followed through on it. As well as a business card.

NPBCG alerted me to this package/PWE a few days before it actually arrived and by that point I had all but forgotten that he even owed me anything. Mainly because the biggest benefit I got from our trade (which you can read here, here and here) is that I got to dump a bunch of stuff on him. In return he sends back two vintage bromides of a Japanese baseball God and cold hard cash before a recession. Now that's nothing short of awesome.

Of course now the issue is "I have the vintage stuff, do I dare attempt a TTM?".

I want to but currently I've got three issues.

1). I lost Sugishita's address

Back in 2017 I got Sugishita's address through a Japanese TTM collector. That collector has been offline for years now and I never properly recorded the address. I did manage to find another address for Mr. Sugishita but I'm not 100% sure it's accurate.

2). Japan Post isn't accepting any international mail

I'm not sure if Japan isn't taking any mail that's been sent from overseas (aka outside Japan), but as of right now it isn't accepting any mail headed overseas (aka from Japan to elsewhere). Which is to say that even if I were to get my letter to Mr. Sugishita (assuming the address I found is correct), there's no guarantee it's coming back until the Japan Post decides to ship things outside of Japan again.

3). Sugishita is 94 years old

The last thing I want to do is absentmindedly transmit the virus to Mr. Sugishita through something as stupid as a TTM request. On one hand I'm not super knowledgable on if the virus is transmittable through mail (doesn't look like it's likely but it's not entirely impossible either), on the other hand it's much better to be safe than sorry.

We'll see what happens here I guess. It'd be a shame if the bromides went unsigned for the rest of their existences, but if nothing else I absolutely love that I'm in a position to wonder about the optics of possibly doing something.

So big thanks to NPB Card Guy for the two awesome bromides in exchange for taking a huge load of stuff off of my hands.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).