Talking About Articles is Worth a Read

In my travels around the Japanese internet I recently discovered one of the most interesting blogs relating (partially) to baseball cards around.  I mention it here because it has an English version which as far as I can tell has yet to be discovered by the English language internet, but it is absolutely worth checking out.

It is called "Talking about Articles", a direct translation of its Japanese title　モノを語る, which is the perfectly awkward-sounding-in-English title for it.  It has a poetic charm to it, which is reflected in the writing used throughout the blog.

It is written by the wife of a collector who after surviving the devastating 3/11 earthquake decided to take a part time job at Mandarake, a chain of collectible stores across Japan.  I've visited a few of their locations (and convinced Dave to check out their Nagoya location on his recent trip here)  since they have, in addition to vintage Calbee baseball cards, a lot of other cool older stuff that I like to collect (notably retro video games).

Her self introduction starts off with the most devastating portrait of life as the wife of a collector I have ever, or will ever, encounter:

"I have lived as the wife of an enthusiast for many years.

I have been looked on by my parents and siblings with pity.

I have been looked down on because my lifestyle is eccentric.

Whenever we take a family trip, I must follow my husband to some collector's shop.

I continued eating a lot of potato chips which had been sold with cards for several months.

When I look back on it, I can surely assert that there were almost nothing but negatives in everyday life."

Its reads almost like a somber lament from the tragic hero of a medieval tale like the Genji Monogatari or something (in fact she later cites these in her intro).  The female protagonist who must stoically endure being partnered with a male who is indifferent to the fact that almost everything he does rains suffering down upon her in one form or another.

She later describes how, from this early state of misery, she came to understand the nature  of collecting:

"I noticed that the act of buying and selling articles includes the fight to make the articles survive in days to come."

And its darker side, noting that the collectors around her, including her husband "bet their life to believe in the value of the articles, create the value of articles, ruining their own lives in the process."

Very metal.

But the fascinating thing is that her blog is dedicated to her interviews with individual Japanese collectors, what it is that drives them to collect what they collect and how their lives have interacted with and been shaped by their collecting passion.  She interviews everyone from manga collectors, baseball card collectors, autograph collectors, even to Hot Wheels collectors.

You won't find any detailed info about baseball cards per se in her blog, it is all about the lives of collectors in general, which is a really interesting take, written from the perspective of a demographic whose voice is really lacking in the online world of collectors blogs (in both Japanese and English). This is important because her interviews are not from the perspective of a fellow collector like most "interview with a collector" type blog posts are, where both interviewer and interviewee tend to have the same understanding of the underlying topic.  She mercilessly prods her subjects in ways that often highlight the ludicrousness of their collecting endeavors. No punches are pulled.  Her interview with the proprietor of Kinkees, a shop in Osaka dedicated mostly to vintage Calbee cards is a must read for Calbee collectors though.  I HAVE to visit that shop someday, I only recently became aware of its existence.

Navigating the blog is a bit tricky at first (each post is broken up into several posts), but once you get the hang of it (click on the "categories" instead of trying to navigate it like standard blogs, that way you get the whole series of posts about a given person's interview), its quite neat.  I recommend taking a look at it.

Score! (Book)

This is a neat little thing I picked up a while ago, a Chunichi Dragons Scorebook with Satoru Sugiyama on the cover.

Sugiyama could be described as a "Hall of Very Gooder".  In a career lasting from 1948 to 1960 he was a 3 time all star, led the league in home runs in 1952 and had a few solid seasons in the 1950s where he was in the top ten in a number of offensive categories.  He spent most of his career with the Dragons here in Nagoya and was born and died here in Aichi prefecture - the prototypical home town player.

I love this scorebook - the colorful artwork on the cover is just amazing.  It looks like the same sort of art you see used on menko from the early 50s and I wondered if this might have been "borrowed" from one, but so far haven't found one that used this (though I haven't looked too hard).

Its not too big, its like a pocket sized booklet with dimensions a bit smaller than a postcard.  It has seven pages in it, each with a very simple scorecard printed on it.  The back looks like this:

It was published by the "King Company" according to the text on the bottom left.  Otherwise I guess its self explanatory.

Sugiyama's career with Chunichi lasted from 1948 to 1958, with his best years coming in the first half of his tenure so this was likely published in the early 50s.

Why Don't People Collect Vintage in Japan?

One  thing that has come up in the comments on some of my recent posts is that its kind of weird that vintage  Japanese cards are so underappreciated in Japan.  Unlike in the US collecting old cards is not a mainstream hobby activity.  Which is weird in a country with such a lovely and amazing history of old cards.  In this post I’m going to take a stab at unravelling the mystery of why that is.

Japan’s current apathy to its own lovely old pieces of cardboard is not without historical parallel.  In the 19^th century when Japan opened its borders to the world colorful woodblock prints were everywhere. The first Westerners who came absolutely fell in love with them.  The works of the masters were exported in huge quantities to America and Europe, where they were highly prized and significantly influenced the development of impressionist art.

In Japan itself though?  They were considered worthless.  Japanese at the time viewed them as a low form of art which they associated with advertising bills (which used the same printing technique).  So they ignored them.  Sound familiar?

A century later the old woodblock prints by masters like Hiroshige were highly valued in the international art market, which caused a reappraisal of their merits in Japan.  Wealthy Japanese collectors started buying them up overseas and repatriating them.   Eventually, their popularity internationally had a way of changing the way Japanese perceived them, and there is now a big market in Japan for them. They aren’t junk anymore.

Vintage Japanese baseball cards, particularly menko, have some obvious similarities with woodblock prints.  They are colorful and fall easily into that category of things which seem mundane to your average Japanese person but exotic to people everywhere else.  But unlike woodblock prints, Japan hasn’t (yet?) re-evaluated menko as a collectible: they (along with other types of vintage baseball cards) are still very much on the periphery of the card collecting world here.  


I think the reason why this is lies with three variables which distinguish the Japanese hobby from the American one.  They are: 1) the historical development of the Japanese baseball card hobby, 2) Sports Card Magazine and how awful it is, and 3) the nature of Japanese collectors themselves.  

This is admittedly kind of a long post, but I think its worth plugging through each of these in turn since collectively I think they do a good job of unraveling the mystery of Japan's missing vintage card market.

Variable 1. The Modern Hobby Evolved Differently Here


In America vintage cards were always at the heart of the organized hobby as it evolved from a niche interest in the 60s and 70s to a massive mainstream past time in the 80s and beyond.  The early pioneers in the hobby prior to it going mainstream were very much interested in tracking down and identifying all the old cards that existed, and their collective work formed the source material for early newsletters and catalogues.  When the hobby went mainstream in the 1980s, it thus already had a huge knowledge base about older cards built up, and the most experienced collectors were ones who mainly focused on vintage cards.  While all the hype in the 1980s was mostly about then current rookie cards, the vintage and contemporary halves of the collecting world were inextricably linked.  Values of modern cards were to a large extent tied to people’s knowledge of older cards and the (as it turns out erroneous) expectation that they would follow the same path.

In short, the modern hobby in the US grew organically from an already existing hobby mainly focused on vintage cards and smoothly retained and adopted the collecting knowledge, interests and norms developed by those earlier hobbyists.  


In Japan though the development of the modern hobby was completely different.  It didn’t grow out of a pre-existing hobby led by collectors pursuing vintage cards.  While such a hobby did exist, it was nowhere near as big or organized as the one developed by the pioneers of collecting in the United States (as evidenced by the complete lack of any sort of catalogue of older cards).  When the modern hobby arrived with the introduction of BBM’s first set in 1991, it therefore wasn’t an organic offshoot of something that already existed: it was something completely different.  It represented an attempt (ultimately successful) to take the business model of early 90s American card companies and transplant it to Japanese soil.

This creates a really radical shift in hobby history in Japan, to the extent that there is almost no continuity between the pre and post 1991 hobby.  In the US, the modern hobby didn’t just show up all of a sudden, it developed over the years with incremental changes that collectively over time caused drastic changes, but no one change in and of itself being as game-changing as the introduction of BBM in Japan was there.  Fleer and Donruss issuing their first sets in 1981?  They were just widening the existing field created by Topps.  Same even with Upper Deck in 1989.  Insert cards?  Autographed cards?  Third Party graders?  All of these were incremental shifts which may have expanded the pool of collectors and altered the way people collect, but fundamentally they were building upon rather than replacing things which the hobby itself had already created.

In Japan though the hobby in 1990 was basically just kids buying bags of Calbee chips to get the cards, then playing with them and trading with friends.  It was the way card collecting looked in the US back in the 1950s.  Then in 1991 you suddenly have a major company selling cards in foil packs with all the bells and whistles of  junk wax era American sets.  In other words they crammed a transition that took 40 years in the US hobby into a single year.  It completely obliterated everything that had gone before. 

BBM was able to import the business model of junk wax era American card makers to Japan, but it wasn’t able to import all the other elements of the hobby – the shared history, knowledge and interests of the collecting community there. Those things, which are key to the hobby, need to grow on their own.  That probably explains a lot about why vintage isn’t mainstream in Japan like it is in the US.  But it isn’t the only reason.  After all, even if an organized vintage hobby didn’t exist pre-1991, this doesn’t explain why one didn’t develop after the introduction of the modern hobby. To explore this, we now turn to variable #2: the shitty guide.

Variable 2. The Hobby’s Main Japanese Language Publication is a Conflicted Piece of Garbage

(Edit: It was pointed out in the comments that SCM has gone out of business and no longer produces its guides.  Good riddance I say!  I haven't bought an issue in so long I hadn't noticed that they had disappeared. I think what I say here still stands though, with the caveat that all references to SCM should be in the past tense).


In the United States hobbyists have a long history of producing detailed catalogues of cards going all the way back to the 19^th century.  There are almost no uncatalogued baseball cards out there in the US.  The work of early hobbyists made it a lot easier for the Beckett Guide to come into existence, allowing all collectors to at the very least have a good idea of what all the major sets are, and their relative values and scarcity, going back more than a century.

The nearest parallel to Beckett in Japan is Sports Card Magazine (SCM), which publishes a price guide of Japanese cards.  It is pathetic in comparison though.  They have invested nothing into researching pre-1973 cards and they haven’t even bothered to produce catalogues of most of the major sets of the 1970s either.  No other guides in Japanese exist to fill these gaps.

This creates a huge bottleneck in the information pipeline.  Beckett created a common information base for collectors in the US, allowing them to all know (or at least have a way of learning) what older sets existed and what their relative values were, without which many probably wouldn’t have gotten into the hobby.  Collectors in Japan lack this information about their own cards.  This is a massive hole in the Japanese hobby that continues to prevent it from developing.

The situation is so absurd that thanks to Engel’s excellent work on his guide, American collectors have way more knowledge about Japanese vintage cards than Japanese ones do. The common language that guide created, which allows me to describe a set as JCM 11, and then you to look that up in the guide and know exactly which cards I’m talking about, doesn’t exist in Japanese.  The collecting world here knows what menko are in general, but has no accepted vocabulary they use to describe specific sets. So when you see menko for sale on Yahoo Auctions, even specialist dealers just describe them as “Old menko” or something similarly vague.  


How do we explain this missing piece of the Japanese collecting puzzle?  Partly it is probably attributable to the above noted limited development of the vintage hobby itself – early pioneers in the Japanese hobby never organized themselves to the extent that they produced catalogues like their American counterparts did.

A more direct question though is why hasn’t Sports Card Magazine, as the main producer of guides, ever done the work.  And the answer clearly lies in a glaring conflict of interest they have:  Sports Card Magazine is published by BBM, the biggest card maker in Japan.

This is a bit like having the wolves guarding the sheep.  SCM is little more than a marketing tool to promote the latest BBM sets.  It is definitely not a neutral arbiter of card values, which explains why its pricing of contemporary BBM cards has always been so idiotic.  They list commons of all BBM sets, no matter how overproduced, at 50 Yen each (about 50 cents US).  These are sold in packs of 10 with a retail price of 200 Yen.  Do the math.

Beckett, for all its faults, never had a business model so compromised.  It would never have listed 1989 Topps commons at 50 cents each. But that is exactly what SCM does with BBM (and other) singles.  The reader may infer what you will from the fact that the same company telling collectors that cards which have almost no actual market value (you can buy them in large lots for about 1-2 Yen per card via Yahoo Auctions) are worth 50 Yen each also produces and sells those same cards.

More importantly though in terms of explaining why the vintage hobby hasn’t developed here is the fact that neither BBM nor SCM has any financial interest in allowing it to do so.  They don’t make menko so they don’t have anything to gain from collector’s developing an interest in them. Moreover, by keeping the hobby firmly focused on contemporary cards they also keep collector’s money firmly within the part of the hobby they do make money off of.  Any money collectors spend on older cards from their perspective is money they aren’t spending on new BBM stuff, so they actually have a financial incentive to quash interest in older stuff rather than facilitate the spread of knowledge about it like the custodians of an actual guide should.

Obviously I’m not a BBM or SCM insider and I know nothing about what conversations drive their decision making, but having a so-called guide with such an obvious conflict of interest at the heart of the hobby is probably doing more to keep the Japanese vintage hobby under-developed than anything else.  This relates to variable #1 in the sense that SCM and BBM can get away with this because there was no pre-existing base of ardent collecting enthusiasts to oppose them when they set all this up.  In the US Topps was never powerful enough to pull a fast one like that because the collecting community there would have laughed any price guide to their own cards they produced out of business (Topps did produce a magazine promoting its own cards at one point, but it never had a price guide in it).  


Much in the same way that powerful team owners like Yomiuri have doomed NPB to a dysfunctional business model that has caught the league in a downward spiral in comparison with MLB, SCM has done the same for the Japanese hobby.  I hope that someday a third party publisher will put out a Japanese version of Engel’s guide, because until that happens vintage card collecting has a hard ceiling on how much it can develop in Japan.

Variable 3. Collectors are Different


I think the lack of a pre existing organized vintage hobby prior to 1991, and the lack of interest in SCM in doing anything that might promote one since, gets us a long way to understanding why vintage is so under appreciated in Japan.  But I don’t think they alone tell us the whole story.  We also have to ask why Japanese collectors themselves haven’t developed an interest independently.  If they did, maybe SCM wouldn’t get away with their shenanigans.

I’m going to throw out a few theories here, with the caveat that I’m not 100% comfortable with any of them but I’ll go for it anyway.

i) Japanese Super Fans May Distort the Market


From my interactions with Japanese shops and collectors, which I admit are limited, its obvious that a lot of the hobby base here is made up of intense fans of specific players or teams.  You might say that a lot of American collectors are also fans of specific players or teams, so aren’t they the same?  And my answer is no, they aren’t, at least in terms of degree.  Most American collectors I know are indeed fans of a specific team and probably collect that team more than others.  But few take their fanhood to the same level that Japanese super fans do.  By “super fan” I mean being so obsessed with something that you devote every aspect of your life to it.  That you cry when something bad happens to them.  That you follow them around the country, spending your life savings on them.  That you can be made to feel intense personal shame when something bad happens to them.

American fans, possibly with a few oddball exceptions, aren’t like this.  A significant number of Japanese fans on the other hand are like this. Not all of course, but enough that being a super fan isn’t considered fringe in Japan like it is in the US. This applies not just to baseball teams but to fans of anything here.  


Understanding this allows you to understand why weird things like pop idol culture exists and is so popular in Japan.  This is a bit of a tangent (though not an irrelevant one), but the idol industry in this country is a cesspool of greed which bases its business model on fans obsessed to the point that they will irrationally throw their money away on it hand over fist.  This is sometimes literal: in order to vote in AKB48 popularity contests fans have to buy their CDs.  In order to vote in a meaningless contest, those fans spend thousands of Yen on CDs which mostly end up in the trash.  It looks completely nuts when viewed from the outside.

Baseball fans aren’t quite at the same level, but those who join Ouendan (semi-official team fan groups) are pretty close.  I’ve spoken to these people on occasion and they take fandom to a level I’ve never seen in North America.  Being a fan of their team is their whole identity.  Its hard to ignore the similarities they have with far-right groups who take their role as kind of “Emperor fans” over the top.  Baseball fans aren’t associated with a political ideology like that, but the social expectation in the group is very similar: if you are going to be accepted as a fan in the group, then you have to devote yourself to it completely.  And this requires demonstrations of loyalty all the time.

Now I really want to make clear that I’m not saying that all Japanese baseball collectors are insane super fans.  But it seems that a not insignificant number are, and these people may have an oversized impact on the business end of the hobby relative to their make up of the population given their devotion to it.  Buying BBM team sets of their team, or whatever, may be the equivalent to them of AKB48 fans buying CDs they immediately throw away.  It’s a way of demonstrating devotion to your team by pumping money into a business that tells you this is the way you are supposed to support your team. American fans are susceptible to the same impulses, but I think Japanese fans on average are much more so.  


The influence of these fans might be serving to skew the hobby away from vintage, since buying cards of long retired players, many of whom played on now defunct teams, doesn’t translate to a showing of loyalty to your current team.  How much so I can’t say because I don’t have any way of measuring how much they spend or even identifying who is an isn’t a super fan.  But I think the behavior demonstrated by that mindset generally leads a sizeable amount of the market towards buying new stuff and away from buying old stuff and that this is a bigger force in Japan than it is in the United States.  


ii: Collecting in Japan does NOT equal amassing


 An additional observation to be made about Japanese collectors is that almost all of them live in really really small apartments or houses.  This is because basically everyone in Japan lives in really really small apartments or houses.  This definitely has an effect on people’s collecting habits.

In the US if a collector lives in an average sized suburban home, they have loads of space to store a collection.  A 50,000 card collection in monster boxes can be tucked away somewhat discreetly on a shelf in the corner of a rec room without causing much in the way of marital strife with a spouse who does not share the hobby.

In Japan if a collector lives in an average sized suburban home, a 50,000 card collection in monster boxes is going to take up like 25% of the whole house’s floor space.  Try that and see how your spouse likes it (Note: don’t ever try that.) My collection now probably has about 10,000 cards in it and I’m already taking up too much space with them.

So Japanese card collections have to be small, which means they have to be focused.  The extra space that American collectors can play with allows them to indulge a lot of collecting impulses that Japanese collectors can’t.  Collecting vintage cards might be one of them.


iii: Old stuff?  Ew, gross.


This is probably a very minor contributor at best, but its often observed that Japanese consumers have a strong preference for new stuff over old, which may also be working against the uptake of vintage card collecting.  You can see this throughout society as a whole.  Old Japanese houses are routinely torn down to make way for new ones rather than remodeled, old cars here get replaced much earlier in their life cycles than they do in other countries, and perfectly good but not new electronics are routinely thrown away to name just a few examples.

All of these phenomena are not necessarily driven by cultural preferences.  They all have financial or institutional factors driving them: tax incentives encourage building new homes over renovating old ones and inspection requirements increase the costs to owners of maintaining older cars for example.  But they do at least have to co-exist with a culture in which new things are prized more than old ones, otherwise the policies which encourage them would have been abandoned long ago.  


The reason that I’m a bit reluctant to give this factor much weight is that obviously some old things do have value here – the woodblock prints I mentioned at the start of the post being a prime example. But in order to have value, these things generally need some sort of social stamp of approval – an indication that they are respected as items of importance by people.  Menko and other old Japanese cards haven’t achieved that yet, which I think allows them to still be viewed as “old junk” rather than “valuable collectible” by most people.

Conclusion


So these are my three reasons why I think the growth of the vintage baseball card hobby in Japan has been so stunted.  I’m not sure if I’m right about all of them, and probably there are some things I’m missing (feel free to comment if you have suggestions), I thought this post might be useful more as a conversation starter than anything else.

The one thing I am convinced of though is that in order for the hobby to actually grow someone needs to break SCM’s incompetent and conflicted stranglehold on the price guide monopoly.  Its totally abused its position there and is really the main thing holding the hobby back in Japan.  If a Japanese language version of Engel ever took root here I think that would really change things quickly. 

I have the Rarest Cards in the World and they are Freaking me out.

 The title of this post is not just click bait hyperbole.  I made a splashy purchase on Yahoo Auctions last week and I'm kind of freaked out about it.

The above are four cards from the 1952 Osato Gangu Game set (catalogued by Engel as JGA 38).  The players are Mitsuo Uno (Giants), Kazuhiro Kuroda (Hawks), Yoshio Yuasa (Orions) and Shigeru Tokuami (Tigers).

These are far and away the rarest cards I have in my collection now.  In fact they are among the rarest cards that exist period.  Engel categorizes them as "R5", which means five or fewer copies of each card is known to exist.  In fact in his description of the set (of 48) he states "Many cards listed are the only examples known in the hobby."

Some of the cards from this set came up for auction at Prestige earlier this year, like this one of Jun Hirota which notes that there are only three copies of the card (and the one they were auctioning was the nicest).

Neat, eh?

This is one of the quirks with collecting older Japanese cards: some of the sets are so scarce its absolutely insane.  These aren't contrived rarities like modern 1/1 inserts - these cards are rare because for some odd reason few were made back in the day of which only a handful have survived to the present.

And yet despite being way rarer than even the hardest to find American pre-war tobacco cards these remain surprisingly affordable.  The Hirota card in the Prestige auction - of which there are just three in the world - sold for just $100, and I paid less than that for all four of mine (all of which are commons I should note, Hirota is Hawaiian and thus a bit more interesting).

Now that I have them, I'm not sure what to do with them (hence my use of the term "freaking out").  I've never owned cards before where simply possessing one meant that I was responsible for like 25% of the entire stock of the cards in existence.  But now I do.

I feel a kind of responsibility that goes beyond the way I feel about the rest of my cards.  If I put a few 2014 Calbee commons in my shirt pocket and then put that shirt in the laundry forgetting that they were there (as I have done before) its not a big deal since there are a huge number of those cards out there. If I do the same with these, I've wiped out a significant proportion of them.  Its like I've got an endangered species in my house and the survival of the population in part depends on me not accidentally destroying them even though I have an established track record of sometimes doing so.

But at least I can say that I am a slight step up from their previous owner.  The guy I bought them from isn't  a card dealer, but rather an antique dealer who mainly specializes in old books and postcards.  So he didn't exactly pack them like a card dealer sending insanely rare cards would. Like, you know, in card holders of some sort.  He just put them in a plastic baggy, taped it to a piece of cardboard and tossed them in an envelope.

This gave me a  "Yegads, man, what have ye done?" reaction, complete with 19th century English accent, when I opened them, but fortunately they survived without damage.

So I've put them into card savers now and am trying to make them comfortable in their new home, which contains two young children who are both A) curious about everything I own, and B) have fingers that almost constantly have the remnants of about six different types of sticky, sugary snacks stuck to them.

So in other words, they are currently in hiding along with the rest of my expensive cards.

I'm not sure if I'll ever go for the entire set.  I mean, I'm having enough trouble putting together even the 1987 Calbee set which are way easier to find. So I'm thinking that trying to do a set which contains some cards that only one guy in the world owns is going to be a challenge beyond what I'm capable of.  Still, its kind of cool to have a start on it if I ever decide to go down that route.

I do like these cards too, the colorful backgrounds (which are team specific) make them look really nice.  There is another version of this set, JGA 11, which was issued in 1951 and has the same design except it is in black and white.  That set according to Engel is way easier to find than these ones are.  I'm not sure, but would be interested in finding out why so few of this set were made. They seem to have been sold in sets so that you could play a game with them, though its hard to tell what that would have been (they don't have the usual hallmarks of a playing game on them, like junken symbols or "Double", etc written on them).  The backs are printed in blue and have a picture of a lion in the middle:

Anyway, I'm kind of into this set now so I think I'll try to find more, but I'm not holding out much hope!

Michio Nishizawa: The Original Shohei Ohtani

I picked up the above card a few months ago as part of a lot of post-war bromides.  They used to sit in the showcase of Caps, one of Nagoya's big four baseball card stores, but it closed down earlier this year and I got the chance to pick over some stuff like this while they liquidated their remaining stock on Yahoo Auctions (I also picked up my Pepsi Menko during the same sale, sadly even their account on Yahoo Auctions is now inactive so the business is truly gone).

This card, which is from the set Engel catalogues as the JBR 9 1950 Marutoku Narrow B&W, was one of the main ones in the lot I was interested in.  It came in a topholder which still had a 2000 Yen price tag on it, though I paid about 5000 Yen or so for the whole lot, which had a few other good post-war bromides in it so the pro-rata cost of this card was probably just a few hundred yen to me.

It depicts Michio Nishizawa, who is one of the more interesting players in Japanese history.  He broke into professional ball early - at 16 years and 4 months when he made his debut he set the record (which still stands) for the youngest player in Japanese history.  He played right here in Nagoya from 1937 to 1958 and, like Shohei Ohtani (and, of course, Babe Ruth), was one of the exceptionally rare players who was a star both as a pitcher and as a batter.  As a pitcher his best season was 1940, when he posted a 20-9 record and a 1.92 ERA.  In one game in 1942 he performed the remarkable feat of pitching a 28 inning complete game (which ended in a tie!)

In 1943 he was called up for military service and missed the rest of the war years.  When he came back in the 1946 season, a shoulder injury put an end to his career as a pitcher, as he put up a lackluster 5-8 record with a 4.52 ERA.  The next season he came back as a first baseman and never pitched another game except for a single appearance in 1947.  He developed into one of the Central League's top hitters, his best campaign coming in 1950 when he clobbered 46 home runs, knocked in 135 RBI and batted .311.

Since his career was split effectively into two he didn't reach any of the big statistical milestones later associated with the Meikyukai (2,000 hits, 200 wins as a pitcher), but he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977.  Sadly he died of heart failure later the same year at the relatively young age of 56.

I really love the photo of him on this card.  Unlike the US, in the 1950s the concept of a "baseball card" hadn't fully appeared yet in Japan and instead you had either bromides like this one, game cards of various sorts (like Karuta) or Menko to choose from.  Menko are a lot flashier and more colorful, which attracts me to them, but they also have the disadvantage of mostly featuring hand drawn caricatures of players rather than photos (at least with the ones issued in the early 50s or earlier).  So collecting both kind of makes sense: menko for the colorful artwork, and bromides for the real photos.

Yamakatsu: The Most Remarkable Card Maker You've Probably Never Heard of

 In addition to Calbee cards from the 70s and 80s, recently I've been focusing my collecting efforts on Yamakatsu cards from the 70s.  They are a nice compliment to a Calbee collection since they are so.....unpredictable.  Yamakatsu only produced baseball cards for a six year stretch between 1975 and 1981 and in that time period they produced 19 sets (according to Engel).  Do you know how many of those 19 sets are standard sized baseball cards?  One! The JY 6 set issued in 1978 is their only set made up of cards with anything close to standard card dimensions, an occurrence so unusual for Yamakatsu that Engel actually makes note of it in his description of the set.

The other 18 sets?  Well you've got:

Huge postcard size sets like this one.

Even Bigger card sets the size of 8 by 10 photos like these beauties.

Yet bigger still  sets whose card size is comparable to the landmass of some of the mid-sized 19th century pre-unification German principalities, like these which are probably the biggest regular baseball cards ever made.

Cards with metal badges in them like this baby that my scanner had a bit of trouble handling but I can assure you is totally awesome:

Then you've also got the tiny cards like the 1979 and 1980 sets where they made the unusual choice of going from making the largest cards in history to the smallest almost overnight.

There really is no parallel for a card maker experimenting with such a wide range of card sizes and designs in such a short period (or over a long period for that matter).

This also gives anyone collecting Yamakatsu an interesting point to brag about: These are the most difficult cards in the world to collect by far.

That isn't to say that they are the rarest or most expensive: they aren't.  But they are the most difficult in terms of the one thing card collectors fret more about than any other: how to store them!

Its so cute to see American card collectors constantly struggling to figure out how to store their pre-1957 cards because they are a fraction of an inch larger than post-1957 cards.  Ha!  The Yamakatsu collector has to worry about how to store cards so widely varied in size that the largest is about 40 times bigger than the smallest, and many sets fall somewhere between those.  Also some of them have jagged metal badges protruding from them which will damage any cards placed next to them in a stack or box.

Its the perfect collector's storage nightmare really.  Which is why I haven't jumped into Yamakatsu collecting with both feet yet.  In terms of set collecting I'm focused on the "Post card sized or smaller" end of things, with a smattering of the larger stuff as part of a type collection.

I just picked up the card at the top of this post, which is a 1978 Choji Murata from the set Engel catalogues as JY10.  Its postcard sized and I've decided to start working on this set because its actually quite beautiful - there are some really great photos in it and the bigger size and glossy surface of them gives them a striking appearance that my beloved Calbees of the same era don't quite match.

The fact that it is Choji Murata is also significant.  He was a popular pitcher (inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2005) who famously was the first Japanese player to have Tommy John surgery.  The story is recounted in Robert Whiting's excellent book You Gotta Have Wa.  From a card collector's perspective though its important because Murata played for the Lotte Orions.  Calbee refused to feature players from the Orions in its sets in the 1970s and early 1980s because their owners, Lotte, were a competitor with Calbee in the food and snack industry.  Murata, who debuted in 1968, thus didn' t have his Calbee rookie card until 1985!  So if you want cards of Murata and other Orions players from the 70s, you have to turn to Yamakatsu or some of the other short term makers of the era like Nippon Ham.

The backs of the cards from this set are also kind of cool.  They feature a little write up about the player and the bottom half is then some sort of a baseball lesson, Murata's demonstrating the difference between pitching over arm, side arm and under arm.

For more info on Yamakatsu sets you can check out Dave's excellent overview post on his blog here.  I'm going to try doing some more posts on my recent Yamakatsu pick ups in the near future.

PSA's Japan Problem

If you've been following certain baseball card forums like Net54 recently, you'll be familiar with the current round of PSA related scandals.   Some of these revolve around sloppiness, like grading reprints as the real deal, while others involve inadvertently  grading high value trimmed cards as though they were unaltered.  The latter in particular is a serious problem as the apparent flaws in PSA's grading process that let trimmed cards skate through created the perfect environment for a cottage industry of fraudsters to spring up. The result is that lots of people have spent money on trimmed cards, particularly through PWCC auctions, which are only worth a fraction of what they paid for them.

This has obviously strained the trustworthiness of the PSA brand with some collectors.  And from a Japanese perspective these scandals probably couldn't come at a worse time since just last November they opened an office in Tokyo and started to offer their services in Japanese.  This expansion makes sense from PSA's perspective as Japan is probably the world's #2 market for sports cards and, as I've talked about before, PSA and other graders until now have had almost no presence in this country, where the hobby is significantly less obsessed with minor differences in condition compared to the US. So the Japanese market represented a pretty sizeable piece of unpicked fruit for PSA and its not surprising they've come ashore here to try to convince the Japanese collecting world of the value of a PSA holder.

The scandals themselves are probably not going to dent PSA's expansion into Japan since almost nobody here  follows Net54 or other US forums.  But they do bring up something which might be way more problematic for PSA, which is that the quality control issues which the current scandals have raised in the US also apply to their grading of Japanese cards.  And one of these might be too big for the Japanese hobby to ignore.

The problem is that even though PSA only recently opened an office here in Japan, they've been grading Japanese cards for years.  And while I'm sure they made the best use of the expertise on Japanese cards available in the US while they did so, that expertise wasn't always deep enough to get stuff right.  And the mistakes they made are in some ways more embarrassing than the ones that have landed them in hot water among American collectors recently.

A prominent example of this is the 1929 Shonen Kurabu Babe Ruth.  This is a well known card among Babe Ruth collectors since its actually one of the more affordable cards issued during his playing days out there.  Its probably more famous outside of Japan than it is in.

PSA used to grade that card as a "1928 Shonen Kulubu."  They got just about everything about that card wrong. I did a post about it 3 years ago and made a list of the things PSA screwed up on it:

"Year: PSA says 1928, actual year is 1929;
Name: PSA says Shonen Kulubu, actual is either Shonen Club or Shonen Kurabu;
Set: PSA says it was a "multi-sport premium", actual set was not sport specific and contained a variety of other subjects.
Photo: PSA says without qualification that it is Babe Ruth hitting his first home run of the 1926 season, Old Cardboard notes that while this is what it is commonly described as it has not been confirmed.  Not sure which is correct but given how error-riddled the PSA entry is and how accurate everything else in the Old Cardboard one is I give greater weight to the latter until evidence confirming it surfaces.
Organization: PSA seems to imply that this was the magazine of an organization called "Youth Club".  "Youth Club" is an accurate English translation of "Shonen Kurabu", but as far as I can tell that is just the title of a magazine and not necessarily the name of an actual club."

While they now get the information correct, there are still copies of this card floating around in older PSA holders with all of these basic mistakes - wrong year, wrong name of set - right on the holder like this:

That mis-step could probably be overlooked though, since that card is very much on the perhiphery of the Japanese collecting world's radar.  Also, as I mentioned in my earlier post on it, even here many collectors aren't certain about the details like the year it was printed  (though the incorrect name is immediately recognizable).

The much more serious miscue for PSA is that they stepped on a huge landmine with the 1994 Calbee Ichiros.  In 1994 Calbee issued their first ever cards of Ichiro - three of them in (#37 to 39) in a rare set only distributed in the Hokkaido, Kyushu and Sanyo regions.  While all the cards from that set are hard to come by, the Ichiros are even harder, they seem to have been added to the set late in its print run and are short printed cards in a set that was rare to begin with. There probably aren't more than a few dozen, maybe a hundred,  of each of them out there.

These three cards are among the most famous and sought after in the Japanese hobby.  Technically they aren't his rookie card (BBM issued a card of him the previous year) but they are his earliest and rarest Calbee cards of (arguably) the most famous player in Japanese history.  Its hard to come up with an analogous card from the US hobby that would evoke the same recognition, but imagine a cross between a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr (recognizable iconic card of superstar from same generation) and a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle (most coveted and valuable "modern" card).  Now imagine if only a hundred copies of that card existed.  That is roughly where the 1994 Ichiros exist in the Japanese hobby:  cards that are instantly recognizable to all serious collectors.

Unfortunately for PSA, back in the 1990s a forger flooded the market with fake 1994 Ichiros.  The fakes are really convincing, I even got suckered on one myself a while back.  And so did PSA.  There are a huge number of fake 1994 Ichiro Calbees in PSA holders out there available for sale.  As with the Ruth, PSA has learned from that mistake.  They no longer slab fake Ichiros, so one in a recent holder is likely the real deal.  But the damage is already done.  Go on Yahoo Auctions, the Japanese equivalent of Ebay, and you'll find several copies of these cards in PSA 9 or 10 slabs.  All fake (identifiable from the coloration on the backs, see this guide here) .  This is a fake in a PSA 10 slab available right now.

This is a huge issue for PSA since the existence of these slabbed fake Ichiros is hard to ignore.  It'd be like if in their early days in the US they had slabbed a bunch of fake 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles which were still floating around on Ebay, easily identifiable as fakes by anyone who knew what to look for.  How would any serious collector trust a grader that could make such a basic mistake on such a key card?  This is super serious in an industry like grading, where consumer trust in the brand is absolutely paramount.

I should note that these two examples are not alone, PSA has improved a lot in their knowledge of Japanese cards in recent years but there are other examples of older PSA slabs containing incorrect information on Japanese cards (though I should also note that as far as I know the Ichiros are the only examples of outright fakes finding their way into PSA holders).

I'm not sure if this is necessarily fatal to PSA's success in Japan, but it means that they are going to be swimming upstream against a legacy of grading Japanese cards based on less than perfect information which might significantly complicate their efforts to gain acceptance here.

The Oddest Key card in a set: Doug Decinces Edition

Ever wonder what the weirdest card to be considered the "key" card to a regular set is?

For most regular sets in the US, at least until the 90s, it was either a big rookie, or a Mickey Mantle or some other star.

In Japan, with Calbee sets, its almost never a big rookie or even a star.  As I mentioned in a previous post, sometimes its just a boring card of a stadium.  Rarity of certain cards always trumps star or rookie power in determining the key card in older Japanese sets.

The 1988 Calbee set is an example of a set with an odd key card.  I'm about 70% of the way to completing that set, but the remaining 30% are all short prints which are really expensive and hard to find.

Probably the hardest and most expensive to find is this one: Doug Decinces (card #110).  Its from one of the hardest to find short printed series in the set AND its one of the only cards of Decinces' brief time in Japan with the Yakult Swallows (he also appears on card #74 in the set, but that was not short printed and is much easier to come across).  Combined these make it expensive, a copy of it (from which I cribbed the above photo) is currently being auctioned on Yahoo Auctions with the bidding now at 5250 Yen and counting.  And they don't show up for sale that often. There are a couple of other cards from the same series which probably sell for about the same (notably Choji Murata) but I think at the very least this DeCinces card is tied for first spot in this set.

The card is also notable for almost certainly being one of the infamous 1988 Calbees with a picture that was taken by a guy literally just pointing a camera at the TV during the broadcast of a game.  Legend has it that for some reason that year Calbee didn't have photos of a lot of players and, instead of just sending a photographer to the stadium, they took a shortcut by just taking pictures of a TV during games.  There are some legendarily bad photos that came out of that experiment (Bill Gullickson's is a favorite of mine), you can always spot them by how grainy the picture looks and Decinces' card is no exception.  There are a few cards in the 1987 set that look suspiciously like they may also have photos taken by the same method, but otherwise this wasn't a normal way for Calbee to get pictures (thank god).

Decinces is an interesting and kind of overlooked member of that class of really good (but not HOF caliber) MLB player who came over to Japan in the twilight of their careers.  He only played part of the 1988 season, missing the last half due to a back injury which led to his retirement.  He did however parlay his experience with the Swallows into getting hired as a consultant on every Japanese baseball fan's favorite movie: Mr. Baseball.

At the moment he is  waiting to see if he will be spending most of the rest of his life behind bars.  He was convicted a little while ago on multiple charges related to insider trading that had been brought by the SEC and is currently awaiting sentencing.  I'm hoping he doesn't spend too much time behind bars partly because insider trading is mostly a victimless crime which doesn't really warrant the lengthy prison sentences that can accompany it under American law and partly because its just too much of a bummer to think that is how the Doug DeCinces story is going to end.

The Damn Guides are Messing Up a Lot

I'm getting a little frustrated with the two guides I have to Japanese baseball cards: Engel and Sports Card Magazine (SCM).

These both have their upsides and are useful resources, but as someone collecting vintage Calbee I can say they are both quite a bit off on a few things.  I already noted in an earlier post that they often get prices wrong, but in this post I'd like to note how they don't accurately reflect the scarcity of some cards either.

I've been documenting on this blog my ongoing attempt to put together the entire 1975-76-77 Calbee "monster" set of 1472 cards.  I am over 70% of the way there, with more than 1,000 of them in my collection.

I recently took a bit of time to review my checklist (pictured above, I use my copy of SCM to keep track of what I have.  Analogue, baby).  In doing so I've become aware of some patterns in the cards I am missing that seem to coincide with scarcities rather than just random chance.  Some of these are reflected in both guides, some are reflected in neither.

The set was issued in 40 series.  According to the guides, 4 of these series are short printed (I'll refer to them as the "known scarce series"). These are:

Chunichi Dragons Defending the Lead Series (#37 to 72, issued only in Nagoya area)
Hiroshima Carp Defending the Lead Series (#145 to 180, issued only in Hiroshima area)
Hiroshima Red Helmet Series (#609 to 644, issued only in Hiroshima area)
High numbered final series (#1400 to 1436, not regionally issued but harder to find and more expensive)

So I've been paying more money for cards from those known scarce series and still have quite a ways to go on completing them (about half way there overall with these 4 series, but the Red Helmet Series in particular I need a lot of and they are the most expensive).

This leaves 36 other series which both guides view as "common" and don't note any distinction in price or rarity with respect to.

At this stage after years of collecting and scouring auctions for anything and everything I could lay my hands on, the remaining holes in my collection should therefore be more or less randomly scattered throughout these remaining 36 series.

But they aren't.

With 33 out of the 36 remaining "common" series I can describe my collection of them as almost complete, with just a few stragglers that I have yet to round up.  These 33 series I feel confident in saying are the easiest to find (relatively at least) and I am at least 80% complete on all of them, with many exceeding the 90% complete level.

But that leaves 3 outliers which I have noticeably fewer cards of. Instead of having 80% or more like I am with all the other series except the four known scarce series, with these three I only have between 30 and 40% of the cards.  They are:

Series 14: 76 Pennant Race Opening Game Series  (#465 to 500, I have just 11 out of 35)
Series 23: Sadaharu Oh 700th Home Run Series (#789 to 824, I have just 14 out of 35)
Series 27: Defending the Lead Series (#933 to 968, I have just 10 out of 35)

Looking around Yahoo Auctions, the pickings for these three series are extremely limited compared to common series and they seem a lot closer to the 4 known rare series.  Prices reflect this: these cards sell for more.

Looking at the guides, the only one of these series which are priced higher are the Sadaharu Oh 700 Home Run ones, and that is because the cards feature Sadaharu Oh (both guides list his cards at the same premium in this series as they do for his cards in others).

With Series 14 and 27 I'm fairly confident that they are short printed and quite a bit harder to find than the others (maybe the same ballpark as the 4 known scarce series).  With the Sadaharu Oh 700 home run series its possible that they are simply more popular because of Oh, which would explain why they are harder to find and more expensive, though I'm not sure I buy that  (the number I have are suspiciously similar to the other two, and Oh's cards in other series aren't particularly hard to find despite his personal popularity, which leans towards these being short printed too).

So there is another problem with the guides:  relying on them you would only think there were four expensive, rarer series in this set when in fact there are seven.

While frustrating, its actually also kind of fun to discover this sort of stuff on my own.  On the downside though I now realize that I'll have to shell out more money on those other three series if I am to have any chance at completing this thing!

An Album Full of 70s Goodies

 One unique thing about collecting Calbee cards is that sometimes they show up in Calbee albums.

In most (perhaps all?  Not sure) of the 46 years since Calbee started selling cards, they've also produced albums which were usually given away as mail-in redemptions.  So in addition to all the vintage cards floating around there are also a lot of old albums.  I don't collect the albums themselves, but sometimes a non-card dealer, usually antique dealers, will come across old collections stored in them and put them up for sale.  These are so awesome when you can find them.

And recently I did find one.  Or more accurately I found ten of them up for sale individually by the same seller.  Each album was from the 1970s and was stuffed full with 1970s Calbee cards from various years.  You can cram 72 cards into one of these albums if you put two cards per pocket, which is what these contained.

 My recent post lamenting the fact that auctions almost always end exactly as I am in the middle of putting my kids to sleep was partly inspired by these.  I put bids in on all ten of them.  I didn't expect to win all ten (in fact, couldn't afford to really) but was hoping to win three or four.  But while I was happily telling them the story of an epic battle between Pokémon and dinosaurs (I let them decide the topic of each night's story), the auctions ended and I was outbid on all but one of them.  When I looked at the final prices the ones I got outbid on went for I kicked myself since I definitely would have bid higher on a few of them had I been there to do so.

But I was also happy that I did win one!  And it was a great one.  The albums were sorted by team and mine contained cards of Hiroshima Carp and Hanshin Tigers players from Calbee sets issued between 1973 and 1979.  I paid around 7000 Yen total with shipping, so the cards cost  me about 100 Yen each, which is a good deal, especially for what I got.

 Look at those beauties!

There were quite a few cards from the 1975-76-77 Calbee set that I am working on, but most of them turned out to be doubles unfortunately (though expected).  The real highlights for me were the cards from the 1973 and 1974 sets, which I have way fewer of.

The Hiroshima Carp cards are especially distinct in the 1973 set since they still had their blue helmets and hats back then.  This makes it super easy to distinguish cards from the 1973 set from later ones after they switched to their red and white only uniforms. There were some really great Hiroshima Carp cards of Sachio Kinugasa and Yoshiro Sotokoba:

 Some cool action shots too:

 This card here though was the highlight.  Yutaka Enatsu (See Dave's great write up about his cards here and a great write up of his career here on Eye of the Tiger) is one of the most interesting players in modern Japanese history.  He holds the record for most strikeouts in a season (401!) and had a resume that should have made him a no-brainer as a hall of famer.  But he was involved in one of the most famous gambling scandals in Japanese history (the black mist scandal, kind of Japan's version of the Black Sox) early in his career, and then arrested for drug use after he retired, so he's been left on the outside looking in.

I have a few cards of him, but this one is now my favorite.  Its from the 1973 Calbee set and its one of those great 1970s Calbee cards that shows you a wonderful glimpse of stands full of spectators and colorful advertising billboards.

 I was surprised to find it in there because this is one of his most expensive cards.  SCM lists it at 20,000 Yen and it rarely shows up on Yahoo Auctions.  Its a bit lower grade (there is a crease to the right of his head) but this card alone made the purchase price worthwhile.

There were a lot of other beauties in there which were fun to flip through.

I'm not sure if these cards were actually put in this album a long time ago by their original owner, which would be neat, or if the seller just shoved them in there for the purposes of selling them.  Either way, except for the smattering of 75-76-77 Calbee singles I needed for my set, I've decided to keep these as they are in the album.  Its kind of neat to flip through them the way they were intended to be back in the day.

Which is the Most Valuable Card from the Monster?

 Behold!  Hiroshima Municipal Stadium at Night, as depicted on card #157 from the Monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set!

I just picked this up and am quite excited about it because the card has a very dubious claim to being the most valuable from the set, and thus the key card to my years long quest to finish this 1472 card monster.

Why is the card's claim dubious?  Lets review the merits of the case.

Basically the claim lies with its value in my copy of SCM from 2010 (admittedly out of date but its the most recent I have).  It lists this card, which was from one of the two rare Hiroshima regionally issued series in the set, at 15,000 Yen. That puts it in a tie with the Senichi Hoshino cards from the Nagoya regionally issued series, also rare.  So perhaps its better to describe its claim as being tied for first place rather than solely occupying the position.

But the tie isn't what makes its claim dubious.  Engel lists it at $150, about the same as SCM, but it lists several other cards at $200 which is obviously higher.  The cards Engel lists are mostly those of foreign players (like Richie Schienblum's card #155 from the same series) or big stars (like Sachio Kinugasa's card in the same series).  So according to Engel, this is one of the higher priced cards, but not #1 in the set.

But even that isn't what makes the claim dubious.  I like the Engel guide and admire the work that went into it, but the prices for Calbee cards from the 1970s listed in it are completely out of whack with what the market for these cards is.  No way is the Schienblum card worth more than this one, at auction this one will easily fetch 2-3 times more than Scheinblum (or even Kinugasa), which is considered a common in the series (worth a lot by virtue of being in the rare series, but not the key card in the series).  So I prefer SCM to Engel on that point.

But....in reality neither of these is right.  The real most valuable card is, ironically, a different card featuring Hiroshima Municipal Stadium that has a photo almost identical to this one.  It is card #630 in the set, from the other rare Hiroshima regional issue (the "Red Helmet" series).

You wouldn't know this by looking at either guide.  Engel lists #630 at just $40, while my old SCM lists it at just 5,000 Yen, so both seem to agree that it is worth just about 1/3 of what #157 is.  But both are way wrong on that point.

Having followed Yahoo Auctions sale prices on the big cards in this set for a few years now, the big trend I've noticed is that the Red Helmet series that card #630 is in  is considered by far the most valuable of the entire set (which is comprised of 40 series).  Cards from it almost never sell for less than 3,000-5,000 Yen each, compared to cards in the other Hiroshima regional series which #157 is in, which usually sell in 1,000-2,000 range.  This is the reverse of SCM and Engel, which price the Red Helmet series much lower.

I'm not sure why the market is working like this, just looking at availability there usually are about the same number of cards from both Hiroshima series available (which is to say not many of either, I don't think one is noticeably rarer than the other), but the Red Helmet ones are definitely hotter and sell for higher prices. This is reflected in my own collection, I've been having more difficulty and am paying more money for the cards in the Red Helmet series than for any other.

So whatever the reason, the Red Helmet series are definitely now the most valuable series in the entire set, and #630 is considered the key card from that series, which likely makes it the key card of the entire set.  I'm still looking for it and expect it will be the card I have to shell out the most for in the entire set.

 But anyway, back to the card I actually do have.  While #157 isn't the key card to the set, it is the key card to what is probably the second hardest to complete series in the set, which means it still has a place in the pantheon of major cards in the set.

Its a bit of an odd one, it is dedicated not to the game depicted on it but rather to the general topic of stadium manners.  The back says:

Baseball Stadium Manners

When Rooting for you team, throwing objects or jumping down onto the field of play is not right.  Even when a player from an opposing team makes a fine play we should all clap.

I'm not sure that Japanese fans need to be admonished like this given that their stadium etiquette is legendary around the world, but there you have it.  Come to think of it, perhaps their etiquette is so legendary because they get reminded to be polite so often that they even dedicate baseball cards to it.  So maybe all those nicely-tidied-up-after-the-game-in-which-a-Japanese-team-played World Cup and Olympic Stadiums over the years have this card to thank for that.  

I got a pretty decent bargain on this, I only paid about $20 with shipping for it.  The cheap price is explained by the back, which has a little pen mark if you look closely.  Otherwise it probably would have sold for quite a bit more.  

This also demonstrates why the 1975-76-77 set is do-able despite its size.  You will never find the key cards from the other Calbee sets from the 1970s for $20 no matter how hard you look.  The key cards from those sets will run you into the hundreds or thousands of dollars even in lower grade condition.  But the 75-76-77 set are still kind of obtainable!