Yahoo Auctions Japan is a lot Busier Now than it was in 2013

I was browsing through some of my old blog posts the other day when I stumbled onto this one from 2013.  In that post I compared the number of Calbee cards from the 1970s which were available on Yahoo Auctions to how many Topps cards from the 1950s were available on Ebay in an attempt to get a rough idea of the relative abundance of each.

Looking back at the post seven years later what really caught my attention were how few listings there were for 1970s Calbee cards back then compared to now.  I hadn't really sensed any trend towards more Calbee cards being available, but perhaps that is because it happened too gradually to be noticeable.

To compare, I just made this table with the listings I found for Calbee cards from 1973 to 1977 back in 2013, and then how many I could find today (June 1st 2020).  The numbers have gone up a lot.

Calbee Year	Listings in Sept 2013	Listings in June 2020	Percent increase
1973	126	508	403%
1974	171	489	286%
1975	252	1045	415%
1976	264	1994	755%
1977	123	811	659%

I have to mention an important caveat though.  To check the numbers today I just took the shortcut of looking at how many listings there were under the category for that year (which has problems that I've written about before).   Back in 2013 according to what I wrote I manually searched through the whole site using keyword searches. I don't remember why I chose that cumbersome method, its possible they just didn't have the categories back then since I think if they had them I would have used them (I don't remember when they introduced categories for individual card years, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 2014 since there are no categories from 2015 onward).  Anyway, the different methodology I used creates a problem since my 2013 method might have undercounted  (by missing cards that didn't turn up in my keyword searches) while my current method might overcount (by including cards erroneously categorized), which could mean the changes aren't as drastic as they look in the above table.

That noted, I think its probable that a large part of the change is due to more cards actually being available rather than just the result of methodological error.  And it is quite a bit.  Calbee cards from 1976 and 1977 (which are comprised of more than one set) in particular seem to be way more abundant on Yahoo Auctions now than they were then.

I'm kind of curious about why this is.  Yahoo Auctions wasn't new in 2013, it had been around for years and was well established at that point, so it wasn't like it was a brand new market that had just jumped onto the scene and there were fewer cards simply because people hadn't taken it up yet.

One possibility (which I like) is that collecting vintage Calbee baseball cards has become more popular in Japan over that time and this is a result of that.  I do get the feeling this is the case, while I hadn't noticed the trend towards more cards being listed, I have noticed a trend towards more people bidding on cards (and bidding them higher) than they used to.  The higher prices may also be attracting more people to putting cards up for sale than used to be the case.

Another related possibility is that brick and mortar store dealers are putting more cards up than they used to.  The number of such shops has thinned out a bit (at least here in Nagoya) in recent years, and probably Yahoo Auctions has played a big role in that.

Anyway, whatever the reason its kind of cool to see that there are more vintage Calbee cards available now than there used to be.  If I'm still maintaining this blog in 5 years I'll probably revisit this post to see what the numbers are like then!

1953 Kobai Caramel Wally Yonamine

 This is another one of my Wally Yonamine cards.  Its from the 1953 Kobai Caramel "Red Square Corners" set (JF 18).  The cards from this set are very similar to the JF 11 set also issued by Kobai Caramel which I wrote about here.

My Yonamine card has probably seen better days.  These things are small and fragile and its amazing any of them survived the years though, so I can't complain!

There are 27 known cards in the set, Yonamine is one of the "key" cards along with Dick Kishiwada, Tetsuharu Kawakami and Jun Hirota. Everyone played for the Giants, which is a problem with the Kobai Caramel cards in particular - they never put players from other teams in their sets (though other makers like Kawakami Caramel did).

So its not a set I'll ever try to collect but I do like having this in my Yonamine player collection!

1977 Calbee is Confusing

 1977 Calbee is very confusing.  They put out about a dozen sets that year, many of them rare regional issues that are too expensive for me to even contemplate going after.  The only ones I'm actively collecting are the series at the end of the 1975-76-77 Calbee set which just happen to have been issued in 1977  but are really part of that monster (as opposed to the other sets which were released solely within the 1977 calender year).

I did, however, accidentally get a decent start on one of the 1977 Calbee sets, the "Grey Border Star Back" set of 216 cards of which the above, featuring Isao Harimoto, is an example.

When I first started work on the 1975-76-77 Monster, I just knew that the backs of the cards had a star patterned border, like this:

So my early collecting strategy was to just buy up as many cards like that as I could find. When I finally accumulated enough to start organizing them in a binder and getting serious about completing the thing, I realized that for some of the low numbered cards I had (up to 144) there were two cards with the same number.

It took me a while but I eventually learned that the extra cards were actually from the 1977 Grey Border Star Back set which is visually almost identical to most of the 1975-76-77 Calbee card backs.

To add to the confusion, about half of the 1977 Calbee Grey Border Star Back set cards do not have grey border star backs.  From 144 to 216, the borders have more of a vine like border that looks like this:

OK, as I am writing this I realize it is making no sense because no matter what explaining these sets in an easy to follow manner is just impossible.

TLDR version: I accidentally collected cards from the wrong set because they looked the same as cards from a set I was collecting.

I'm actually thinking though that maybe this one 1977 Calbee set might be another project for me to work on.  I already have about 40 cards from it so I have a bit of a start.  And unlike the super rare regional issued sets from that year (where single cards go for hundreds of dollars each) they aren't too scarce (at least by 1970s Calbee standards) and you can sometimes find them for a couple hundred Yen each.

There is also a certain sunk cost that I'm looking to put to use here.  While these sets are extraordinarily confusing at first, once you've spent some time learning about them it actually is possible to gain a full understanding of what they contain and how they are different from each other.  With this set in particular I have already made that investment when I had to disentangle them from my 1975-76-77 set, so my brain has been trained to identify them on sight. And they are pretty cool cards, like any Calbees from that era.  So why not?  1977 Calbee, here I come.

The Patient Collector: My 1975-76 Calbee Set Proceeds at a Snail's Pace, but it Does Proceed

I am still plugging away at the 1975-76 Calbee monster set.  A dealer put four cards from the rare series that was only issued in Nagoya  (which runs from card #37 to #72 in the set) up for auction last week.  I put bids on three of them which I needed but only walked away with one, card #43 featuring Dragons slugger Tatsuhiko Kimata.  Kimata isn't a Hall of Famer but is a pretty decent Hall of Very Gooder, in a 19 year career, all with the Dragons, he made eight all star teams and finished up just 124 hits shy of the 2,000 mark.

The addition of Kimata gives me 22 cards from the Nagoya series, which is more than half of them, so I am making progress.  It was a bit disappointing to lose the auction for the other two though as the cards from this series (and the other two rare Hiroshima only regional issues in the set) are getting harder to find and almost never seem to pop up in auctions anymore.

Its also challenging to be working on a 1472 card set in which every card remaining on my checklist is one I have to devote a lot of time and effort to tracking down. The 1987 Calbee set, which has about 1/3 as many cards and is less scarce took me seven years of solid effort to finish.  I think the most realistic timeline for me to finish this one, barring some miracle, is about 15 more years.  Which is not a timescale most set collectors are willing to contemplate.  But this is Japan, where perseverance is a trait valued above all others.  So onward I go with this! A snail's pace is still a pace.

Card about a guy's hair and also a guy is looking at the hair guy's butt and the hair guy is kind of floating and its a weird card and you need to buy this card

You want my advice?  You need this card in your collection.

This is a 1975 Calbee card of Takenori Emoto, ace pitcher for the Nankai Hawks.

The card isn't so much about Emoto as it is about his hair.  The title on the back of the card says "With adequate resolve, he cuts his long hair!"

Emoto is a man who likes his hair.  And can you blame him?

But it almost cost him his career in 1975.  Japanese baseball teams have pretty strict rules on haircuts.  These days a lot of NPB teams have relaxed them, but on high school or college teams its like being in the military: everyone gets a buzz cut.

So back in the 1970s Katsuya Nomura was managing the Hawks and banned long hair.  Emoto wasn't about to let go of his splendid hair and rebelled (nobody else on the team joined him).  I did some looking around and found this archival footage of Emoto giving a press conference to explain the reasons for his rebellion.

The long and the short of it is that Nomura threatened to fine him 500,000 Yen, a massive sum back then, and Emoto backed down and got a hair cut.  The scandal that it caused rocked the nation (well not really but it made the news) and elicited a lot of commentary.  This baseball card is devoted to that incident.

The text on the back says:

"With Adequate Resolve, He Cuts His Long Hair!

Nankai's ace pitcher Emoto.  His long hair became the subject of much discussion and attention even as he was breaking records.  He announced that he would cut this long hair into a new short cut and devote himself completely to baseball, making his manager and team mates say "Ah".  He hussles in the middle of training camp in Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture."

Inspiring stuff.  I guess. The record it (probably) refers to is perhaps a backhanded compliment, he set the NPB record for balks in 1973.

I like the fact that this card once again demonstrates how ahead of their time these Calbee sets from the 1970s were.  Remember in 1991 when George Steinbrenner and Don Mattingly got into that big public argument over Mattingly's hair?

And then do you remember how Topps, Donruss, Fleer and Upper Deck all made cards about that in their 1992 sets?

Me neither.  Because they didn't.  Because American baseball cards kind of suck in that regard.  Actually Japanese cards kind of suck in that regard today too, no way they would make a card about a similar hair scandal today.  But back in the 70s it was anything goes!  The most glorious card sets ever made.

Also I like this card because there is a guy on it who seems to be totally checking out Emoto's butt, which is also  not something you often see on a baseball card:

Also, if you look at the card photo you have to wonder what is Emoto doing exactly?  He seems to be levitating, with a crowd of people surrounding him.  He is in a baseball pose, but he is standing in front of a hill and I don't think he is on a pitching mound since it is too high relative to the guy looking at his butt.

Anyway, this card has a lot going on in it, all of it fascinating.  Even though Emoto's hair didn't cost him his career, his mouth eventually did.  In 1981 after getting yanked early from a game he publicly suggested that his manager was stupid.  The blowback he received from that (Rule #1 in Japan: Never insult your boss.  Rule #2: no matter how awful something tastes, always say its Oishii even as you are gagging on it) caused his forced retirement shortly thereafter.

Kids and Scissors

This is my 1961 Maruya (JCM 57a) card of Sadaharu Oh.  Its a pretty scarce card from early in his career.  It has a book value of $450.

One of the downsides of menko is that their condition today is highly dependent on the skill level of a 7 year old kid with scissors 60 years ago.  The sheet my Oh was on fell into the hands of a kid with very very low scissors skills.  So low that it is hard to figure - this must have been done by a 4 year old who hadn't yet developed the hand-eye coordination thing.

The downside is that my Oh card is kind of ridiculously miscut.  The upside is that this is my Oh card. If it was cut correctly I probably wouldn't have bought it, but with this cutting I picked it up for almost nothing :)

Confusing the Kids: What Color Uniform do the Giants Wear Anyway?

One of the cool things about Japanese baseball menko cards from the late 50s to early 60s is that most of them featured black and white photographs that had been colorized.  I like this because whoever was doing the colorizing in most cases either didn't know what color the player uniforms of a given team were supposed to be, or they knew and just decided to make up their own anyway.

I have a stack of about 40 menko from that period sitting next to me right now and I just pulled out all of the cards featuring Yomiuri Giants players, which are in the scan above.  They all come from either Marusho or Marukami sets from the early 1960s.  The Giants uniform colors were (and are) black and orange. But you wouldn't know that from these cards.

Just look at the headwear.  Everybody has different color schemes.   Basically a kid with these cards who had never been to a Giants game could imagine them having hats with:

Black hat, green bill
Blue hat, red bill
Brown hat, brown bill
Blue hat, blue bill
Green hat, green bill

And the color scheme on the rest of the uniform is equally confused.  Its important to note that some of these cards come from the exact same set (all three cards on the top row are from the Marukami JCM 14 sets).

This holds true not just for Giants players, but also for those of other teams.

This gives these sets a lot more "oomph" than they otherwise would - the actual Giants color scheme is fairly drab and boring.  A lot of these ones look way better - green hats with orange letters?  Love it!  Everybody wearing maroon long sleeved shirts under their jerseys?  Great!

Stamps on Baseball Cards

Here is something you don't see every day: a baseball card with a big red stamp with some archaic Chinese characters on it obscuring the player's image.

This is a card of Tetsuharu Kawakami, Japan's "God of Hitting" and first member of the 2,000 hit club.  It is from one of the 1953 Kobai Caramel sets (catalogued as JF 11, noted for the L shaped border) which is pretty rare (R3).

Kobai was the biggest maker of caramel cards in the 1950s, putting out dozens of sets.  Like my Kawakami caramel card, Kobai ones were small and printed on paper.

According to the back, they were meant to be collected and then sent in to the company to be redeemed for a set of bromides signed by the players.

Not all of the cards had the big red stamp (which I think is the company's official seal), so there are versions of this Kawakami card out there which don't have it.  I think the idea was that you would collect the cards with the stamps on them and send those in to be redeemed.  You had to collect ten of them which consisted of at least the manager (Shigeru Mizuhara), a pitcher a catcher, an infielder and an outfielder and then send those in.

Engel has identified only four cards from this set (Kawakemi, Takehiko Bessho, Shigeru Chiba and Wally Yonamine) but likely there were quite a few more out there back in the day, including Mizuhara who is mentioned on the back but does not appear in Engel.  Their fragility and the fact that they were meant to be redeemed probably contributed to there being so few left in existence.

I kind of like having the seal on this one, it gives the card such a unique and archaic look.  No mistaking this for a modern card, or an American one!

Some Wally Yonamine Baseball Cards

I am not a player collector, but if I was I think I would be a Wally Yonamine collector.

He is just such a cool figure.  He was the first American baseball player to come to Japan after the war, arriving so early that the post war occupation hadn't finished yet (edited to note: first American player to arrive after the war, but not the first American to play in NPB).  His feats have been described elsewhere numerous times so no need for me to go much into them.  But they are impressive.


Perhaps less than his playing accomplishments I like the fact that he was a nice guy.  Sadaharu Oh recalled a story about when he was a kid going to Korakuen Stadium and being in a crowd of kids trying to get autographs of Giants players.  The other kids had placards and regular baseballs, but Oh was a poor kid and all he had was a rubber ball, which the players ignored.  Yonamine noticed this, came over and signed Oh's ball.  Years later when Oh was a rookie team mate of Yonamine he mentioned this to him and Yonamine said he remembered.  He couldn't figure out why all the Japanese players weren't signing.  Because nobody else would, he gave the big eyed kid, who he of course didn't know was Oh at that point, an autograph.

These cards, from the 1958 Marukami set (JCM 31b) and the 1958 Marumatsu set (JCM 32a) which feature him as a Giant.  He also played for and later managed the Dragons here in Nagoya, which gives me another level of interest in him.

I'm not sure how many cards are out there of him, being a star for the Giants he appears on a lot of the tobacco card style sets from the late 50s and early 60s.  But he doesn't appear in as many of the more colorful menko sets from the early 50s, which is a shame because those are awesome.

When I see his name in a Yahoo Auction search for old cards, I usually buy them.  This has become a bit more difficult recently though.  Yonamine is not a common name in Japan. In fact its not a name used in the Japanese main islands, Yonamine's father was Okinawan and the name uses kanji characters that are more commonly used there (my mother in law is from Okinawa so I know this from that half of the family).

So until a couple of years ago if you put the kanji for his name into a Yahoo Auction search it would only turn up stuff related to him.  Now unfortunately there is a garbage J-Pop boy band of some sort that has a member named Yonamine, so when you do a Yahoo Auction search its about 95% J-Pop boy band merchandise, which is a hellish thing to have to browse through.

Just a word for the wise!

Man Cave Confessions: Mine Sucks

There is a pretty long thread over at Net54 in which people share pictures of their baseball card man caves.  Its impressive stuff, guys have whole rooms in their houses devoted to displaying some great collections of cards and other memorabilia.  Its the sort of stuff that would make for a good special issue of Home and Garden.

The above is my man cave.  Its our extra room.  Actually its not really "extra" anymore now that we have two kids, sometime in the near future this will be my daughter's room.  But since we moved into the house almost 4 years ago, its been the room where all my hobby stuff goes.

Um, yeah.  Its.....well, it is what it is.  A random mess of boxes and junk piled up everywhere.  There are actually some good pieces in there, basically every vintage card I've ever posted on this blog is somewhere in this picture, probably in one of those 800 card boxes.  You can kind of see a baseball in a ball holder in there too, roughly in the middle of the photo, that has my Hank Aaron autograph that is nearly faded to nothing after 28 years, which I think still counts for something.

I really like the concept of a man cave and I also like interior decorating, but since I've always known that I would have to give this room up at some point, I've never bothered to try to spruce it up into a neat cave.  Thus, my man cave room sucks.

This is also kind of a problem with Japanese housing: its way too small for man caves to begin with.  They don't have basements or studies, they come with exactly as many bedrooms as you have people and no extra space for anything at all.  This is a problem not just with residences but also work spaces, if you've ever been to any kind of Japanese office you've probably been overwhelmed by the sense of clutter since the people using it just don't have the space to properly store stuff.

Which isn't to say this is just a Japan thing, I'm sure a lot of people are pressed for space in North America too. I'm curious if anyone else out has a man cave like mine that by all rights they should be ashamed of due to its complete and absolute lack of any sort of attempt to make it presentable?  I suspect we may be the silent majority in the collecting community.

Warren Cromartie and Bill Gullickson: A Card From Another Era

I have a few international baseball card trading relationships which usually involve Americans sending me American cards (mostly of the Montreal Expos, my favorite team) in exchange for Japanese ones.  Jay, who doesn't have a blog I can link to, is one of them and he sent me an envelope recently that included this 1982 Topps card featuring Warren Cromartie and Bill Gullickson, the Expos' leaders in batting average and ERA in 1981.

This card has a pretty strong Japan connection since both of these guys would be re-united as team mates with the Yomiuri Giants a few years later.  Cromartie played for the Giants from 1984 until 1990, and was joined by Gullickson in two of those years (1988 and 1989).

I had a thought when I saw this card that it was possible that not only were they team mates, but perhaps they both also led the Giants in batting average and ERA together, thus recreating their performance with the 1981 Expos depicted on this card.

Sure enough, Cromartie led the Giants in average (in fact he led the entire league in average with a .378 mark) in 1989.  He probably would have in 1988 too (.333), but injury limited him to just 201 at bats that year.

Gullickson had a really solid year in 1988 and finished 8th in the Central League in ERA, but unfortunately didn't lead the Giants, finishing second to Masumi Kuwata.  In 1989 he fared far worse, with his 3.65 ERA not coming even close.

So while they came really close to re-creating their 1981 team leading combination, they weren't quite able to pull it off.

Despite that unfortunate near-miss, the card is also interesting because both of these guys bucked the stereotypes of American baseball players who made it big in Japan, which usually follow one of two models:

1) Washed up former big leaguer nearing the end of his career who wants to extend his playing days (and paydays) a bit longer.  Guys like Willie Davis, Frank Howard, Reggie Smith and Bill Madlock come to mind.

2) Really promising younger guy who tore it up in Triple A but was never able to break in to a regular spot on an MLB team.  Guys like Randy Bass, Boomer Wells or Tuffy Rhodes.

Neither Cromartie nor Gullickson fit either of these.  They were both established major leaguers who were still in their prime when they came to Japan.

Cromartie had been a solid and consistent starter in Montreal for seven seasons when he signed with Yomiuri and would hit over .300 in a part time role for the Kansas City Royals after leaving the Giants in 1991.

Gullickson had double digit win totals in each of the six seasons preceding his arrival in Japan. In fact, Gullickson was so "in his prime" that his best MLB season came after, rather than before, his time in Japan.  Two years after returning to the US he led  the American League with 20 wins while playing in Detroit alongside fellow returnee Cecil Fielder.

Such was the 80s.  Its easy to forget that  for a short moment back in that decade it looked like Japan might actually catch up to the US in terms of economic power (despite its much smaller population) and this was reflected in the fact that NPB teams were actually able to competitively poach MLB players still in the prime of their careers.

The Japanese economy tanked in the early 1990s and NPB stopped doing that, and the trend reversed itself with MLB starting to poach NPB players in their prime.  Today the salary imbalance between the two leagues makes it all but impossible for Japanese teams to do anything like that, so they've reverted to getting American players more closely resembling the above two stereotypes which, tough stereotypes, are pretty accurate.

But this one card from the 1982 Topps set does hark back to an era when NPB was able to get the best two players of a competitive MLB franchise while still in their prime!

1952 Kawakami Caramel Yoshiyuki Iwamoto

 In addition to Menko I've been getting interested in some of the caramel baseball cards that were released in Japan, mostly in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  This is a card of Hall of Famer Yoshiyuki Iwamoto from the 1952 Kawakami Caramel set (JF 38 in Engel).

Iwamoto was one of the Japanese game's earliest power hitting stars, though like most of his generation the war robbed him of several years during his prime - after he left for the war following the 1942 season he didn't return until 1949, a 7 year gap.  On his return though he did accomplish two things for the record books. When baseball was reorganized into the modern NPB for the 1950 season, on opening day he hit the first home run (a grand slam) in Central League history.  He also became the first player to hit four home runs in a single game that season.

These caramel cards are super rare, this set is rated as R4 in Engel (fewer than 10 copies of each card known to exist) and most of the dozens of sets issued by caramel makers during that time period are about the same.  Another copy of this Iwamoto card sold at Prestige Collectibles in 2011.  When you have the cards in hand its not hard to understand why there are so few of them.  They are small (a bit smaller than 1950 Bowmans for comparison) and printed on extremely thin cardboard (it would be more accurate to describe it as thick paper really).

Another reason they are so scarce can be seen on the back.  The front of each card from this set has either a 1, 2 or 3 in a round circle with "Catcher", "Batter" or "Pitcher" written in Japanese katakana on it (my Iwamoto is a "3 Batter" card).  The back says that if you collect all of these and send them in to the company, they will send you a commemorative present of some sort.  So probably a lot of these were redeemed back in the day and disposed of by the company rather than saved.

In relation to that I should note that there might be an error in the Engel catalogue on this.  It says that there are 3 cards in the set and they come with either a "2 Catcher" or "3 Batter" designation on the front.  But the text on the back of the cards also clearly refers to a "1 Pitcher" type of card which Engel doesn't mention.  It also refers to a "Hit Ticket" card which doesn't have a number.  So there might be more cards from this set out there which exist, unless I am missing something.

I think this is a pretty good looking set.  Kawakami wasn't one of the major makers of caramel cards (Kobai made the most) but it did a good job with these!

Set Complete! 2012 Georgia Coffee Pro Baseball Foreigner Helpers

 I got the remaining 5 figures I needed to complete my 2012 Georgia Coffee Pro Baseball Foreigner Helpers set!  Ralph Bryant, Orestes Destrade, Randy Bass, Bobby Rose and Alonzo Powell arrived in the mail from a Yahoo Auction seller to finish them up.

I really do like these guys.  They just cheer me up in a way that I need in the middle of a pandemic.

 The player selection is pretty good, all these guys were all stars. Everyone played during the 1980s or 1990s.  Randy Bass and Boomer Wells with their 1983 debuts are the earliest, while Bobby Rose, who played his last season in 2000, is the latest.  Rose was the only guy still playing when I arrived in Japan in 1999 and thus is the only one I remember as an active player here.

Given that these came out in 2012, I'm curious why they didn't have any stars from the 00s in the set.  Tuffy Rhodes would look pretty cool on one of these. 

I got two of the booklets (for Bobby Rose and Orestes Destrade) that came with the figures.  They are pretty cool, featuring a picture of the figure, a player bio and an ad for a Georgia brand battery charger on the front.

 And the back has a checklist of the whole set, along with an illustrated diagram showing how to assemble the figure for those who may have difficulty with whole the "round peg goes in round hole" thing.

This means I still "need" the booklets for the other 6 in order to have the things really complete, but I'm pretty satisfied to go without.  The figures themselves are enough for me.

Old Baseball Cards from a Dead Card Shop

Last year one of the baseball card stores in Nagoya, Caps, went out of business.  Unfortunately I had never actually visited the shop (it was a bit out of the way for me to get there) but I wish I had since it was the only one in town (except Mandarake) which had vintage stuff.  Zippy Zappy at Torren' Up Cards I think knew the shop way better than I did and his post about a couple Shigeru Sugishita Bromides he recently got reminded me of some cards that I have which originally came from Caps.

After Caps closed the owner liquidated most of his stock on Yahoo Auctions and I ended up picking some of it up.  The best thing I got was a big stack of old bromides from the late 40s/early 50s featuring a lot of Japanese Hall of Famers, mostly players from the Giants, Dragons and Tigers.

I could tell he had just shoveled up what was in his showcase and put it all in one lot.  The cards were all still in top loaders and still had price tags on them.

This gave them a real poignant look when I received them and laid them out.  I know from personal experience how gut wrenching it is to run a card shop - every collector's dream business - and then lose it.  We closed down ours 27 years ago and for decades after (as recently as 2015) I was still finding cards in top loaders with price tags on them like these in boxes at my parent's place, serving as a visual reminder of both the happy days of old and also the sadness that they are gone.

So I bought these cards over a year ago and I haven't been able to bring myself to take them out of their top loaders with the price tags still on them.  I don't usually store cards in top loaders and I have a binder for my vintage bromides where these should go.  But no, I can't do it.  These cards in these holders are one of the few physical reminders that a shop called Caps which was run by a guy who I never met but who probably really loved baseball cards and having a baseball card shop existed.  So I'm keeping them in there.  They actually look kind of nice this way.  Like if I ever want to play a make believe game of "card shop owner" all I have to do is break these out and voila - pretend card shop!

Cans of Coffee that Come with Baseball Players Attached are Best Cans of Coffee

I made another great discovery at the second hand shop that sells Pokémon figures which I get for my kids.  More baseball figures!

These are from a specific set: the Georgia Pro Yakyu Suketto Gaikokujin set, which translates into the somewhat awkward and maybe a little offensive English title "Georgia Pro Baseball Foreigner Helper Set".

These are one of the things I used to love about living in Japan in the 2000s and early 2010s: free high quality stuff with canned beverages.  These were released in 2012 and came with cans of Georgia coffee.

In Japan, coffee comes in cans, like soft drinks.  People often drink it cold, and you can get them out of vending machines or from fridges in convenience stores.  Tommy Lee Jones is famous here mainly for the surreal ads he used to appear in for canned coffee, like this one:

Back in 2012 if you bought a can of Georgia Coffee you'd get one out of 8 figures of famous foreign ballplayers.  They came in little orange bags attached directly to the cans, you can see a contemporary blog post of what they looked like here.

I was living in Japan in 2012 but wasn't aware of this promotion at the time, probably because I'm not a canned coffee drinker (I am a major coffee drinker, just not from cans).  It used to be really common for drink makers to attach little toys to their products to encourage people to buy them and I used to get really excited about them.  In the early 2000s I remember Pepsi did this quite a bit with various tie ins (Star Wars figures, Gundam figures, model cars, etc - really good stuff considering it was free with a bottle that only cost like 140 Yen).   Since the early 2010s they've become way less common, possibly because they were so expensive to run, which is a shame.

Anyway, I found these figures at the second hand shop for 100 Yen (about 1$ US) each and decided to buy the three they had, featuring Boomer Wells, Warren Cromartie and Brad "Animal" Lesley.

Cromartie is featured just after completing a swing:

Animal is doing his thing:


And Boomer looks like he is about to hit a long ball.


The checklist is pretty good.  The set features:

Boomer Wells
Warren Cromartie
Animal Lesley
Bobby Rose
Randy Bass
Alonzo Powell
Ralph Bryant
Orestes Destrade

In addition to the figure you also got a little full color booklet featuring your player on the cover and an illustrated checklist of the set inside.

That is pretty insane value for the 130 Yen (about $1.20 US) that each of these cans of coffee cost.  And you got coffee with it too.

I was so enamored with these that I went on Yahoo Auctions last night and tracked down the other five that I needed for the set and bought them.  So when they arrive in the mail I'll have the whole thing.

I'm not a huge fan of figurines in general, but these little ones featuring charicatures of the players (rather than attempts at more realistic depictions of them) have really caught my fancy.  They are just so....so....."cute"  I guess is the word I am looking for.  Which isn't a feature I normally weight highly in making baseball collectible purchase decisions but with these (and my earlier Hanshin Tigers purchase) I think that is exactly what attracts me to them (as well as my being a fan of the players themselves of course).  Their small size also helps since they don't take up much space.

Georgia also released another similar set of baseball figures in 2006 featuring stars of the 1980s (not limited to foreigners) which I think I'm also going to go after.  If I get it, I'll do a post about them too!

1949 Kagome Kazuto Tsuruoka: a Happy Card with a Sad Story

This is a pretty cool card from the 1949 Kagome Color Playing Card Game set which is catalogued as JGA 16.

This card has been around the world at least once. I didn't get it in Japan, but rather got it from Nat over at Net54 who recently put together a full set of cards of Japanese Hall of Famers (at least those who had cards during their careers).  His thread chronicling his collection which I just linked to is really worth a read.  I sent him a few that he needed for that project and he sent me this and a few Expos cards for my collection.

So this card originated in Japan, at some point made its way over to the US where he got it, then made its way back over to Japan and into my hands.  Funny how things like that work out.  If this card were a sentient being, it might have thought it would never see its homeland again when it first left for the US.  Maybe its happy to be back?  I don't know. It kind of looks like a happy card but that might be for unrelated reasons.

The card is interesting since it features the manager of the Nankai Hawks, identified as "Yamamoto".  There is a sad story behind that name. He was born with the name Kazuto Tsuruoka and went by that name throughout his youth.  In World War II he spent five years in the military as a fighter pilot where he saw combat and was assigned to a Kamikaze squadron in August of 1945 just before the war ended (and like Hiroshi Ohshita was saved from almost certain death by Japan's surrender). Throughout that experience, he went by the name Tsuroka.

Then shortly after the war ended he got married, in 1946.  Under Japanese law, when a couple get married they must both adopt the same family name (no use of maiden names permitted) but they are free to choose either the husband or wife's name.  Tsuruoka chose to go by his wife's name, which is rare but not unheard of.  Generally its done when the husband "joins" the wife's family, which for whatever reason (usually economic) is more powerful and wants someone to continue the family name but lack a male heir to do so.

So he went by the name of Yamamoto for 11 years while managing the Hawks (as player/manager through 1953) until in 1957 his still young wife suddenly passed away.  He reverted back to his former name, Tsuruoka, after that and it is the name he is mainly known by.

After his wife passed away, he told a magazine reporter that he wanted to manage the Hawks to a Nippon Series win and dedicate the victory parade along  Midosuji Avenue in Osaka to her.  In 1959, just two years later,  he fulfilled that promise.

He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1965, which is a bit odd since he was still managing the Hawks at that time (he retired after the 1968 season).  His playing career was extremely short, mostly due to his missing several years to the War, but in his 8 year career he managed to win an astonishing 3 MVP awards, which is just one shy of winning the MVP in half the seasons he played!