Recently I picked up a small collection of Avalon Hill’s excellent All-Star Replay magazine. This was published for several years to support the company’s line of Sports Illustrated games and is a treasure trove of experimental rules, and add-ons, many of which would later be integrated into future editions of each game.

This issue – Vol 3. No. 2 – included Statis Pro baseball cards from the Japanese leagues. Two teams, Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants and Yokohama’s Taiyo Whales, were provided with a full set of cards based on the 1978 version of the teams.

There was also a two page article about baseball in Japan at the time (see below) which included observations on the differences between American and Japanese baseball (for example, the Japanese players would arrive at the ground five hours before a game for hours of batting and fielding practice).

It is possible to download low resolution copies of all of the All-Star Replay magazines here, but below I have included higher definition versions of the cards and the articles and some other pages from the magazine. Of particular interest is a full page colour ad advertising all of the Sport Illustrated Games available at that point in time.

Enjoy.

Download Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants and Yokohama’s Taiyo Whales – sheet 1, sheet 2 and sheet 3.