Rob Fitts is a member of OBC who is one of the US's leading experts on Japanese baseball, having published several books on Japanese baseball and Japanese baseball cards. He was starting a PC of Matt Murton, who played in the US in the late 2000s before becoming a big star in Japan. I sent him a few Murton cards I had, as well as some 1980s oddballs for his type card collection. In return he sent me some interesting cards.
Starting off with some standard vintage, nine '61s and a '62.
He also threw in some interesting modern cards. I knew Topps had started making NPB cards but I didn't know they also had Topps 206 versions. Seiya Inoue has played ten seasons in the NPB, all for Lotte. The Marines uniforms look a lot like Marlins uniforms. The other card is a promotional card for one of his books. The other card is a custom promotional card for one of Rob's books, about early Japanese ballplayers in the US. Tom Uyeda played on the first Japanese team in the US in 1906, and was later unjustly arrested as a spy during WWII. You can see
more about him on Rob's website. If you look at the photo in the link you can see that the photo for the card was altered in an important way.
Here are the backs of the cards. The Topps card is mostly in Japanese. The custom card has an interesting synopsys of Uyeda.
Very cool to pull off a trade with a famous author. Had the opportunity to meet Fitts a few years ago when he did his book tour with Masanori Murakami. Very nice guy and very knowledgable.
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of neat that people like him are members of that group. Although, I suppose that there's folks from all ways of life on there, probably even with a few more recognizable names among them.
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