I did it!!!!

 2020 sucks so far, but finally an event worth having a beer on the carpet has come along.

After seven years of toil, I have finally completed my 1987 Calbee set! The last four cards, all of them from the short printed series (#75-100) arrived in the mail after I won them in an auction over the weekend.

 I have been looking forward to this day since I bought a 60 card lot of them back in 2013 and began piecing it together.  I made rapid progress during the first three years, putting together about 90% of it, but then progress slowed to a crawl.  In 2017 I was 31 short of completing it. In 2018 I was down to just 18.  And by 2019 I was down to just missing these last four.  And in 2020, I finally laid it to rest.

The cards are in a binder with 12 pocket pages that nicely display Calbee cards from the 1980s.

 

Its crazy how long this took.  When I started I was in my mid thirties, now I'm entering my mid 40s.  I didn't have any kids when I started, now I'm a father of two.  My sister was a healthy young woman when I started, now she is gone.  My wife and I were living in a small apartment when I started, now we have a house that we own.

Completing a difficult set a good way of recording important events in your life.  2013-2020 I will remember as the "1987 Calbee years".

This is far and away the most difficult set I've ever built.  There are probably only a handful of other people who have ever finished it - piecing together a 33 year old set of 382 cards that was distributed one by one in bags of potato chips is no easy task - and I might be the first non-Japanese person to have done it (though I don't know that for a fact).

Now that this is done, I've still got the 1975-76-77 Monster set which makes this one look easy in comparison, and the more modest 1986 Calbee set, along with my various menko interests, to keep me busy!

For tonight though I enjoy a beer to celebrate the completion of my 7 year quest!

My 1976 Yamakatsu Purchase is Confusing the Hell out of Me

 The above is a box of Pro Yakyu "DX" cards produced by Yamakatsu in 1976.  As the red numbers near the bottom indicate, it contains 20 cards which sold for 50 Yen back in the day.  The cards are pretty big so its not a bad deal.

Open it up and you find a couple of bonuses.  There is an extra card, of Sadaharu Oh no less, pasted to the inside flap, so you've got 21 instead of just 20 cards.  Plus there are two albums.

The albums (they are the same) hold three cards each and are specifially "Oh Albums" for storing your Sadaharu Oh cards in.  As is so often the case with cards from the late 70s, recent HOF inductee Koichi Tabuchi makes a prominent cameo behind the plate in the photo.
Spill it all out and this is what you've got!

Its pretty easy to date the set to 1976 thanks to this card, which shows him celebrating his 715th home run (note Tabuchi again making a cameo appearance), which he hit that year.

 There are some other cool cards of hall of famers in the set, like Sachio Kinugasa:

 And Katsuya Nomura:

I like this set a lot, but I'm very confused about what set it is.  Looking at the Engel guide, I'm pretty sure it is the set he catalogues as JY1.  The checklist matches up nicely with the cards I have, the description matches them perfect and the Oh card Engel uses a picture of as an example is identical to the one glued to the flap of the box.

But Engel gives this set the nickname "Blue Box". Because it came in a blue box.  My box is green.

There is another set, JY1c, which is similar and Engel says it came in a green box.  But the checklist for that one is definitely different from mine (the 715 home run Oh card only appears in the checklist for JY1 for example).

There are a few other Yamakatsu sets listed but none of them match this one either. It has to be JY1, but again - green box!

In writing about the late 70s Yamakatsu issues Engel notes, accurately, that "these sets are among the most confusing issues in history" and also acknowledges that there may be some mistakes in the way they were catalogues owing to limited information.  I think my confusion over these would be resolved by recognizing that the JY1 "Blue Box" set was also released in green boxes.

Anyway, this is a cool set either way!

1975 Calbee Snack Bag

One interesting thing that is up for auction now is a bag of 1975 Calbee Pro Yakyu Snacks.  These were the snacks that the early series of the Monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set were originally sold in.

The text on the back says:

- Calbee Snack Pro Baseball comes with new 1975 edition pro baseball cards

-If you get a Home Run card you can receive either an "Album" (for putting cards in) or a "Pro Baseball Book".

- The Pro Baseball Book contains an introduction to all the players on both Central and Pacific League teams in 1975, a game schedule, stories about major records and famous players, baseball history and its rules.

Its neat to see how the cards were sold back in the day.  They were "snacks" rather than chips like they have been for as long as I've been collecting.  They also didn't come attached to the bags then like they do now, you'd get them separately at the cashier when you bought a bag.  That means that this one unfortunately doesn't come with any cards for the 9500 Yen (almost 100$ US) price tag, so I think I'm going to pass on it.

The seller helpfully reminds potential purchasers that these 45 year old snacks are not for eating, just for collecting.

Still Plugging Away at the Monster

I haven't posted about it in a few months, but I'm still plugging away at my 1975-76-77 Calbee "Monster" set.  By "plugging away" I mean adding to it at a rate of 1-2 cards per month.  I'm a little over 400 short of completing the 1472 card set, so that puts me on a pace to finish it in about 2035 or so.

I added a couple worthy of note the other day though, the above cards of hall of famer Koji Yamamoto and Gail Hopkins.  Both cards are from the rare regional series ("Defending the Lead") which was only released in Hiroshima and feature images from Hiroshima Carp games during the 1975 season.  Both of these (cards 167 and 176) were from the same game, played August 26, 1975 against the Yakult Swallows in Okayama Stadium which the Carp won 3-2.  Yamamoto's card shows him after hitting a home run in the 7th inning to give the Carp the lead, while Hopkins' card back describes him making a fine defensive play that allowed the Carp to keep the lead.

The cards are in near mint condition which is pretty rare for this set and this series.  They had been available from a seller on Yahoo Auctions for months but with a price tag of 2,000 Yen each which was just a bit too high for me to pull the trigger so they had been on my watch list for a while.  Then last week the seller knocked 50% off the price of each and I decided to jump on them!  This leaves me just 4 cards short of completing that rare series, which means I am almost done with one of the biggest challenges of completing the set (though the other Hiroshima only series is harder to complete and I'm still a long way from finishing that one).

Gail Hopkins is kind of an interesting person.  He played in the majors for a few teams in the 60s and early 70s, then finished his career in Japan with the Carp and Nankai Hawks.  He was a key player on the Carp team in 1975, hitting 33 home runs and being named an All Star.  After retiring from baseball he went to medical school and went on to have a very successful career as an orthopedic surgeon, a path very few big leaguers have followed.

2020 Calbee Photography is less mediocre than usual

I decided to do my usual thing this year and buy the Calbee set off a re-seller on Yahoo Auctions rather than try to put one together by hand.  This is not a hard decision to make, as I've calculated on here before it could set you back about $2,000 to complete a series of Calbee cards if you do it bag by bag.  These cost me $4 plus $3 shipping.  The economic logic herein is that the re-sellers only break cases of these to get the rare inserts and treat the base set as more or less junk, so its great for those of us who don't care about the inserts.

This wasn't actually a complete set though, it was a near set of 78 different cards from the base set and various subsets (League Winners, Japan Series, The Record and checklists) so I'm still a few short of the set, which keeps it interesting (I still need 5, 15, 24,35, 39, 42, 46, LC-1, Tr-9 and C-02 to complete the set if anyone has doubles!)

One thing I was happy to see is that Calbee's photography wasn't as horrible as usual this year.  Dave had mentioned this to me earlier and I was happy to see it with my own eyes: there are actually a few pictures in this set of players doing something other than batting or pitching.

Its really refreshing to see some pictures of guys running the bases, playing the field or just messing around with the mascot or whatever. I put 8 cards from the base set which have pictures like that up above.  The subsets, which Calbee has always generally used better photographs for, also have a lot of good shots in them, here are a few:

Looking at these cards makes me hope they are able to salvage at least part of the season this year, but it doesn't look good. They indefinitely postponed the opener this week and don't plan on having one until June at the earliest, so at best we might get a very shortened season, much of which will probably be played in empty stadiums.

This leads to an interesting question for 2021 baseball sets both here and in the US: if there is no season this year, what are the pictures on next year's cards going to look like?  Are they going to use photos from 2019?  Or maybe push back the releases so they can get some photos in spring training in 2021 (assuming that goes ahead)?  Are we going to see the return of some 70s style airbrushing of old photos to replace logos on cards of players who have been traded?  Or if we do get at least a partial season this year, are the cards next year going to have a lot of photos of players taken in front of empty stands?  Or wearing face masks?

I guess we'll find out next year.

The Hanshin Tigers take the field to brighten your spring!

Doesn't that sight cheer you up?

It just doesn't feel like spring without baseball players on the field.  So I thought we needed some.

Let me back this up a bit because I have an amazing shopping experience to share at a time when amazing shopping experiences that don't involve spending two hours in line to buy face masks are in short supply.

With my kids home I've taken to giving them little Pokémon figures every day as a reward for being good.  I have a stash of them that I keep in my office. The other day I was getting low on Pokémons so I stopped at a big second hand store which sells huge bags of them very cheaply to re-stock.  While grabbing a bag of Pokémon I noticed this on the rack next to it.

 That is a package jam packed with Hanshin Tigers figurines, several dozen of them. Look at how tightly squeezed they are in there:

 I don't normally collect figures but this was a bargain I couldn't pass up: the whole thing only cost 380 Yen!  That is about 3$ US.  Don't tell me you would have walked out of that store without these guys if it had been you!

So I've had this bag of Hanshin Tigers sitting unopened in a cupboard for a few days.  Today is a really nice spring day, sunny and warm.  The day you want to see baseball.  I ride my bike my work now to avoid the trains and I decided kind of on a whim this morning to take them with me and do a location photo shoot at a baseball field that I ride past during my commute.

Behold the splendor of baseball played before a backdrop of Nagoya's suburban sprawl!

 I didn't know exactly what I had until I sat down at the ball field and opened the bag up, which made for a bit of fun.  Turns out there are figures from 3 different sets in there, without doubles which is a real plus.  The ones pictured above with the green bases are the "Hanshin Tigers Chibi Pro Figures" which seem to have been released in 2007.  There are a few of them up for auction on Yahoo Auctions right now, it looks like they were sold individually back then.  It looks like there were 26 in the set, I think I am a couple short (the photos don't have all the ones I got though).

 

Next up are these awesome guys:

I was able to find an old Amazon listing for these ones. It looks like they were sold as a set of 16 back in 2007.  I have all 16 of them!

They look like they are having a great time on that bench.

They are pretty easy to identify by the yellow and black bases they have.

The third set were the only ones that were bobbleheads.  Yay, bobbleheads!

I haven't actually been able to find any information about these guys.  My Google searches for Hanshin Tigers figures or bobbleheads in both English and Japanese don't produce any results that match them.  They are pretty decent quality and from the player selection were likely sold in the early 2000s (Trey Moore, who played for the Tigers from 2002-2003 is among them for example).  That really brings back good memories for me since I was living in the Kansai region back in the early 2000s and was a Tigers fan at the time (still am really, but feel obliged to root for the Dragons now that I live in Nagoya).

Anyway, this kind of illustrates why second hand shops in Japan are so awesome, you can find treasures like this for insanely low prices sometimes - these probably set the guy who originally collected them back a couple of hundred bucks, but are now mine for only 3!

My photo shoot also resulted in an unexpected bonus, I actually found some baseball cards!  Like literally just lying there on the ground right next to the bench where I took the above photos.


That is two cards from Series 1 of the 2020 Calbee set which I happen to be working on!  What are the odds?

I picked them up and found Shohei Takahashi and Yoshiyuki Kamei staring back at me.  They were a bit damp with morning dew on them but the coating on the cards prevented that from seeping into them. I guess somebody ate a bag of chips there, opened the cards and thought "Not interested" and just left them there. I need both of them so I dried them off and put them in my bag.  This is the weirdest way I've ever been able to knock cards off a checklist, but I'll take them.

So anyway, this was my morning attempt to bring some baseball into spring.  Looks like we might need some follow ups in the summer with the way things are going unfortunately.  Stay safe!

Solving a Historic Puzzle about Pre-War Menko

I have been a bit inspired by Ryan's recent post about uncatalogued menko to do some more of mine.  These are three which I think are from the 1930s and feature generic players.  They use  archaic English spellings of the positions which, along with the uniform style and another thing I will detail below, helps to date them. "Sentaa" is center fielder, "Pitsuchia" is pitcher and "Rannaa" is runner.

The backs feature guys in yukata  sitting docilely both with and without firearm.

One really interesting riddle that has been bothering me, which it turns out also helps to date these as pre-war, is the characters 庄屋 ("Shouya") which appear on the front of all three cards.  This is an old word that doesn't get used in contemporary Japanese and refers to the position of village headman during the Edo period (1600-1868).  You see it sometimes on pre-war menko (for example, the set Engel catalogues as JRM 41 also has them), but almost never on post-war ones.  This got me curious so I did some digging around on the Japanese internet to find out what was up with that.

At first I thought it might be the name of the company that made them, but no. Its actually part of a game.  People used to play a game called Kitsuneken which is very similar to today's Janken, better known as paper-rock-scissors in English.

In Kitsuneken you have three different plays:  Fox, Village Headman and Hunter. Fox beats village headman, who beats hunter, who beats fox.  Just like the circular paper/rock/scissors hierarchy of plays.

Cards from pre-war sets often have the kanji for those three plays:  庄屋 for village headman, 狐 for fox or 鉄砲 for hunter (literally gun).  Coincidentally all three of the ones I have feature the village headman, but looking through my collection I have cards from other pre-war sets with the other two as well.

The game has a long history, this is an 1820 woodblock print by Kikukawa Eizan of some geisha playing it.  As you can see, the hand gestures for each play differ significantly from modern Janken.

Image Source: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/狐拳 

Kitsuneken and Janken (paper/rock/scissors) were originally merely two variants out of a large number of similar games that developed in Japan during the Edo period.  But most of them, including Kitsuneken, were quite formal and required the players to sit seiza style (a very uncomfortable Japanese way of sitting, especially for those of us with bad knees, Japan. Just sayin.).  After the war all of them died out except for Janken, whose survival is likely attributable to the fact that it can be played casually with simple gestures and thus it became quite popular with children.  

So menko makers in the post-war period stopped using Kitsuneken symbols and started using the much more familiar Janken rock/paper/scissor symbols!  

And now you know that if you find a menko with one of those characters on it, it almost certainly dates to the pre-war (or possibly very early post-war) period.  

More Baseball Card Collecting Memes

Some more baseball card collecting memes to help distract you from the chaos we are all living through!

A Cool Shigeru Mizuhara Find

 The above card features Hall of Famer Shigeru Mizuhara from the 1930 JRM 42 Menko set.

This is the second card I have from that set, after my Saburo Miyatake which I wrote about a few weeks back.  Its an extremely rare set, one of the first baseball menko card sets ever made in Japan, and Engel gives it a rarity factor of R5 (less than 5 copies of each card known to exist).

As with my Miyatake, this Mizuhara seems to have a couple of variations.  The one I have features a "K" (for Keio University, where he played at the time) against an orange stripe, with a red background on the top and bottom.

In Engel though they have a picture of the same card which is identical except that it has a solid red background.

Looking on Prestige they've auctioned off two copies of the card before. One which sold in 2016 has the solid red background, and another which sold in 2018 which has the orange stripe like mine.  According to their listings there were only 3 copies of the card known, now there are four!

Mizuhara is a pretty interesting guy (who, strangely, doesn't even have an English wikipedia page).  He was a star pitcher for Keio University in the late 1920s. He also played against the MLB all stars that toured Japan in 1931 and 1934, then joined the Giants, as a third baseman, in 1936 and became one of the first star players in Japanese pro baseball.

The war disrupted his career more than most, he went to fight as a member of the Japanese Imperial Army on the Asian mainland after the 1942 season (in which he won the League MVP award but it seems wasn't able to actually receive it) where he was later captured by the Soviet army and ended up spending several years as a prisoner in Siberia.  He didn't return to Japan until 1949 by which time he was too old to resume his career.  The following year though he took over as manager of the Yomiuri Giants and led the team throughout the entire decade, winning four pennants and becoming the first pro manager of Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima towards the end of his tenure.  He had later stints as manager of the Flyers and Dragons before retiring in 1971 with 1586 career victories.  He was selected to the Hall of Fame in 1977 and passed away in 1982.

One interesting thing I'm interested in researching is that he was married to Junko Matsui, who was a very famous movie actress from the 1930s.  Menko makers also used to put out a lot of sets featuring film stars and I'm curious if there are any of her (haven't been able to find any so far, but haven't looked much either, non-sports menko are basically all completely uncatalogued).  It would be kind of neat if both husband and wife appeared on cards from this vintage!

OK, I'll Bite

This is actually a good card. Someday in the future internet archeologists will no doubt be puzzled by the spike in interest in 1988 Score Phil Niekro cards that coincided with the Coronavirus pandemic, which they'll trace to here.

I guess posting 88 Score Niekros is becoming for baseball card bloggers cooped up at home what singing from the balconies is for Italians under lockdown.

Glad to have my blog play its part in it..