It’s been over two months since I’ve written anything in this Old Sport Shorts category. Without I.U. basketball to get me riled up, there’s been little to report. I had all but given up on the Cubs and the White Sox have been cursed with injuries. I did do a Sports Card show a month ago and began to think about the increasing value of my Shohei Ohtani baseball card collection. Plus, my great niece is in Japan playing in the Pony League World Series – they lost the championship game to the Japanese girls – I watched via You Tube. They are baseball crazy over there!

Since I’m a lazy researcher, I often rely on Wikipedia for information. “Baseball was first introduced to Japan as a school sport in 1872 by American Horace Wilson, an English professor at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo. It is currently Japan’s most popular participatory and spectator sport. Nippon Professional Baseball players such as Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh are regarded as national stars, and their exceptional performances have boosted baseball’s popularity in the country.”

Shohei Ohtani has already proven to be one of the best baseball players of all time with Babe Ruth like statistics. I went to see him play in Anaheim back in April of 2018, his MLB rookie season. “He previously played for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball’s (NPB). Following an injury-plagued 2019 and 2020, Ohtani would go on to have a 2021 season widely considered to be historic, as he became the first in the history of MLB with 10+ home runs and 20+ stolen bases as a hitter and 100+ strikeouts and 10+ pitching appearances as a pitcher in the same season while also holding at least a share of the major league lead in home runs in 14 starts. For his efforts, he was awarded the 2021 American League Most Valuable Player Award. He followed this in 2022 by becoming the first player in the modern era to qualify for both the hitting and pitching leaderboards in one season, reaching the thresholds of 3.1 plate appearances and one inning pitched per game with 586 at bats and 166 innings pitched.”

The 29-year-old Ohtani then went on to lead his Japanese team over the USA in the 2023 World Baseball Classic and currently tops the majors with 40 home runs, coupled with a .310 batting average, a 3.32 ERA, and 9 pitching victories. I have documented his career with Topps Now cards, accounting for most of his significant highlights. These cards are released for only a 24-hour period and currently sold for $10.69 including shipping and tax. I currently own about 93 of these cards (22 labeled RC – Rookie). He’s made three consecutive All-Star appearances, so I also have the starting player line-up cards for each of these years. The rarest of the collection is probably a parallel (alternative version #1 of 10 total printed) card of his 2-HR game 6/25/2021 against the Rays. 

I will continue to collect these Ohtani highlight cards for the rest of this year, along with some Cubs and hot up-and-comers. Ohtani will probably be walked a lot down the stretch since Mike Trout is injured. For this reason, it will be tough for him to top Ruth’s HR mark. As the Angels continue to struggle, from a pitching standpoint, it will also be a challenge to earn wins without run support. Hopefully, once the season is over he’ll be traded to a contender. At that point, I will sell my card collection. As for the surprising Cubbies, they are currently only two games behind the Brewers, so I will continue to ignore them for fear of jinxing their chances.