Roberto Barbon: The Baseball Pioneer Who Accidentally Pissed off the Wrong Guy to be Pissing Off

Roberto Barbon appears in a lot of menko sets from the late 50s and early 60s and I'd like to write a bit about him because he has an interesting story.  

His most famous card unfortunately is this one below from the 1958 Doyusha set (JCM 30a), which I don't have but Dave wrote about it a couple of years ago and I'm borrowing his picture of it:

I feel bad that Barbon's most valuable card doesn't even feature him (that's Jackie Robinson if you haven't guessed, the menko makers accidentally used a photo of him).  

There is a certain irony in this unintentional slight since Barbon has a Jackie Robinson type story as a pioneering trailblazer.  He was the first Latino player to break into NPB. I'm not sure how he ended up here, but its been mentioned that Abe Saperstein, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, had something to do with it.   He arrived in Japan in 1955 after briefly playing in the Brooklyn Dodgers minor league system and was famously shocked to find players doing training in the snow in February (being from Cuba he had never seen the stuff before).

He had a breakout year, leading the league in hits, runs and triples in his rookie campaign.  He went on to have a very productive 11 year career in which he stole over 300 bases, with all but his final season being played with Hankyu.  

My favorite anecdote about him came from early in his Hankyu days, when he accidentally pissed off a famous pro wrestler named Rikidozan, a guy with a legendary temper:

In a conversation Barbon had with a sports reporter, he casually commented that Rikidozan's matches appeared to be fixed (using the term "yaocho" which is used to describe match fixing in sports, especially sumo).  This was then reported in the press the next day and Rikidozan is said to have exploded in anger when he read it.  Years later Barbon would recall that he was "afraid to go to Tokyo" as a result.  Barbon wrote a letter of apology which seemed to satisfy Rikidozan.

Rikidozan ended up being fatally stabbed in a bar fight with Yakuza member Katsushi Murata not long after, but fortunately Barbon's story has a much happier ending.  In fact, his story isn't over.  After retiring as a player in 1965 he decided to settle in Japan.  Initially he worked at a friend's restaurant called Capone in Kobe, but he quickly returned to baseball, first as a coach for the Braves and later as an interpreter when Roberto Marcano joined the Braves in 1975.  As of 2018 (the most recent info I could find) he was still  working for the same team, today known as the Orix Buffaloes.

This is him at a fan event alongside Boomer Wells in 2012. His Japanese is really good (well he's lived here longer than I've been alive so I suppose that goes without saying):

So anyway, next time you fish a card of Roberto Barbon out of a pile of Menko, know that 60 years later he is still here in Japan, working for the team that brought him over!

We need to have a word about Eiji Bandou

If you collect old Japanese baseball cards from the 60s you've probably got a fair number of cards of Eiji Bandou in your collection.  Bandou isn't a hall of famer and isn't really a hall of very-gooder either.  In an eleven year career with the Dragons from 1959 to 1969 he compiled a respectable 77-65 record and was a solid starter for a few years.  He never led the league in anything.  His best season was in 1967 when he went 14-6 with a 2.55 ERA and made the All Star team.

If you live outside of Japan you probably have no idea who this guy is and based on his career and his almost empty English Wikipedia page you'd probably consider him a common card.

But if you live in Japan, you know this guy probably as well as you know Sadaharu Oh.  Actually, probably better than Oh.  He is a household name whose face is instantly recognizable to almost everyone in the country.

If you take a look at almost any baseball card he appeared on, he has a huge smile on his face (like he does on the above, his rookie card from the 1959 Marukami JCM 31c Type 1 set).  I don't think I've ever seen a card of him without that huge smile.

He was able to parlay that smile into a post-retirement career as a TV celebrity ("talento").  Despite his modest pro-career, he was quite famous in Japan from his high school days.  In 1958 he set a record at the Koshien tournament by striking out 83 batters, a record which still stands and which made him a household name (high school baseball is big here, like college basketball in the US). This helped him break into showbiz after hanging up his spikes.

Over the years - until 2012 -  he was the host or appeared in dozens of variety shows and TV dramas.  He was the host of Sekai Fushigi Hakken (Discover the World's Mysteries), a weekly program that debuted in 1986, for more than 25 years. It is hard to under-state how prevalent he was on TV here, his Japanese Wikipedia page lists dozens of TV shows that he was a regular on, which is insane. Japanese TV isn't like American TV, most of the programming consists of a mix of variety or quasi-reality  programming in which panels of random famous people sit and make amusing comments about whatever the topic of the show is.  On pretty much any day of the week between the 1980s and 2012, you were likely to find Bandou either hosting or sitting on the panel of one of those types of shows (which usually have nothing to do with baseball).  No other ballplayer has come close to matching him as a TV star.

Then 2012 happened.  He was appearing on so many TV shows and splitting his time between Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka as he rushed between the cities to appear in various local programs that he....uh.....forgot to pay his taxes.  Or something like that - the TLDR version is that the Nagoya tax office (his main residence is here) found that he had failed to declare about 75 million Yen in income.

He didn't go to jail or anything, but this was a big scandal.  This was made all the bigger by the fact that the...uh...PR posters used by the tax authorities to encourage people to go to the tax office to file their tax forms featured....uh.....a familiar smiling face:

Ha!  Irony, gotta love it.  (Incidentally these posters are kind of collector's items now, you can buy them on Yahoo Auctions).

This put a pretty huge dent in his TV career as most of the shows he was on dumped him.  In a familiar pattern that most celebrity scandals in Japan follow however, after about a year in exile it was deemed that he had showed proper contrition and was allowed back into the celebrity TV circuit, though he isn't as dominant as he was previously (of course he's also getting old, he turned 80 this year).

As part of his comeback he started a YouTube channel where he does stuff like have a pitching contest with a woman about 50 years younger than him:

He seems to have moved on from that though as the last upload was in 2017.  At any rate, you can see what he looks like now in it!

So anyway, next time you are flipping through a stack of menkos from the 60s, take a look out for that smiling face as its probably the most famous one in the bunch!

The Mean Managers Card

I like multi player cards that have a theme which wasn't intended at the time they were made. This is from the 1959 Marusho "Two Bat" set (JCM 38b), so named because of the two bats on the back.  This specific card I like to call the "mean managers" card for reasons I'll get into below (but as you can probably infer without much difficulty, its because both players depicted on it became mean mangers later in their careers).

This is actually a really rare set, Engel lists it as R4, meaning fewer than 10 copies of each card in it is known to exist.  I have only 3 cards from it, this is the only one featuring any Hall of Famers.

The two players are Hall of Famers Tetsuharu Kawakami and Tatsuro Hirooka.  Kawakami in particular is very famous for his playing days, he was the first Japanese player to collect 2,000 hits and is known as the "god of batting".  He was also the manager of the Giants from 1961 to 1974 which included an incredible 9 year run of consecutive Japan Series titles.

Kawakami had a reputation as a fiercely competitive manager who really drove his players.  He is the prototypical "mean manager" in Japan who runs a strict ship with lots of rules and intense training regimens and who demands total obedience from his players.

A few years after this card came out, in 1964, Kawakami was managing the Giants and Hirooka had become a player-coach.  The two didn't really get along well, Hirooka had a temper that led him to sometimes rebelling against Kawakami.  In one incident while Hirooka was at bat and Shigeo Nagashima was on third, Nagashima tried unsuccessfully to steal home.  Hirooka viewed this as a sign that Kawakami had no faith in his ability as a hitter and had a violent outburst when he returned to the bench, needing to be restrained by other coaches.  Kawakami wanted to trade Hirooka following this, but Hirooka appealed directly to Giants owner Matsutaro Shoriki, who vetoed Kawakami.  Kawakami nonetheless played Hirooka less the next year and by 1966 his playing days were over.

Their animosity carried over after Hirooka's retirement when he started working as a sports reporter.  He followed the Giants to Spring Trainging at Dodgers Town in Vero Beach Florida, but Kawakami refused to give him any access, and ordered every player on the team to not say a single word to him!

Ironically despite their differences, Hirooka would later go on to be a manager who is often cited as closely fitting Kawakami's disciplinarian mold.  From 1976 to 1979 he managed the Yakult Swallows, during which he led them to a Japan Series Title in 1978.  If you ever read Robert Whiting's You Gotta Have Wa (which you should), Hirooka is cast as the villain in one chapter focusing on Charlie Manuel's time with the Swallows under Hirooka.  Hirooka, who instituted strict rules on player behavior, didn't get along with Manuel and constantly berated him during his tenure, then traded him to the Buffaloes despite Manuel being the team's top hitter.  This contributed to a first-to-worst decline for the Swallows from 1978-1979 and Hirooka's own departure.

After that he famously built the dominant Seibu Lions team of the 1980s.  His strict regimen there is summarized by Whiting who described his "autumn camp" with the Lions thus:

"Lasting 59 days, from season's end to late December (a time when most American ballplayers are relaxing in front of television), it consisted of nine hours of daily drills, including 600 swings a day for each batter, 430 pitches a day for each pitcher, as well as swimming and aikido (martial arts) sessions. Last winter, he sent the Lions' star shortstop to any icy mountain river, hoping an act of self-immersion would strengthen the player's spirit and help make him a better leader." 

Hirooka would lead Seibu to three first place finishes in his four years as manager, but would be kind of ousted as manager following the 1985 season (in which Seibu finished first, but lost the Japan Series) after a confrontation with the team owner.  He wanted more control over the team and offered to resign as an apparent bargaining ploy, but his offer was unexpectedly immediately accepted.  Thus ended his career as a field manager, though he would later serve as GM for the Marines and again serve as a sort of minor villain in a  Whiting article about Bobby Valentine's tenure there.

So this is basically a card featuring two people who I would never in a million years want to work for. Which is kind of neat.

Sadaharu Oh Matchboxes

This is a kind of neat thing I picked up recently.  Sadaharu Oh gracing the front of a matchbox.

These matchboxes were distributed to advertise Meiji Gold Milk.  Meiji is one of the biggest makers of dairy products in Japan and you can see some of their stuff on the back.  Judging from the style of the bottles, and how Oh looks, I guess these date to sometime in the 1970s, though I can't say which year.

They are kind of neat, I like the photo of Oh and the way his bat is positioned.

I didn't get just one, but actually got a small pile of them all sold in one lot (none with any matches in them):

You can tell they are used since they all have a bit of discoloration along the right edge of the photo.  That is because the right side of the box has a rough surface for the matches to be struck on, and the heat of the lit matches slightly tinged that side of the box.

Matchbox collecting is a thing in Japan, lots of companies used to give them away as promotional items and many used distinctive photos or artwork.  There are a few with baseball players on them and I might try to collect some of those.  Fortunately they aren't too expensive.

My other Sadaharu Oh Rookie Card

I picked up my second Sadaharu Oh rookie card recently.  It was hidden in a lot of other beat up menko so I got it for a very cheap price.  I like that it is still possible in Japan to do that.  Like in the US its probably been 50 years since the last time someone bought a cheap random lot of 1950s cards with a Hank Aaron rookie casually tucked away in it.  But in Japan, you can still find the Japanese equivalent.

My card has an obvious condition issue with that teeny bit of wear on the right edge.  It looks like for some reason the kid just tore the card off the sheet on that side instead of using scissors.  Damn 50s kids.  Still though, this was a nice find.

Its from the 1959 Marusho JCM 39 set.  According to Engel there are two versions of his card from that set, this one with him fielding and another with him at bat.  This one shows him in the traditional blue cap, green sleeves and uniform lettering of the 1950s Giants (joke).

Car Card Solves a Mystery!

 I was browsing through Yahoo Auctions for Calbee cards from the 1980s the other day when I came across the above card (which I don't own).  Its from the 1983 Calbee set and features Hall of Famer Katsuo Osugi.  As the back of the card notes, he accumulated over a thousand hits in both the Pacific and Central Leagues over his career.

The thing that caught my eye of course was the photo on the card.  You don't see cards with players being driven around on Archie Andrew's Jalopy very often.  The back of the card doesn't tell us what the occasion was, though he did retire in 1983 so this may have had something to do with that.

 This card is #542 in the set, which is in one of the very rare short printed series.  How rare, you may ask.  I looked the card up in my old copy of Sports Card Magazine and was shocked to see that there was a blank space in their checklist next to card 542.  The compilers of it didn't know who was on that card.

I opened up Engel to see if he knew and sure enough, nope!  This is his listing for #542 in the 1983 set:

I was really interested in this card at first just for that photo but now I'm really intrigued that this is the first time anyone has seen what card 542 looks like and who is on it!

The price (5000 Yen starting bid) is a bit out of my range, and also the seller has zero feedback which is a bit fishy so I'll probably pass but I just wanted to do a post about it because I thought it was so neat: another little blank spot in the collecting world's checklists has been filled in!

A Sadaharu Oh for the Monster

 I made a key addition to my monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set yesterday with the addition of this card of Sadaharu Oh.

This is probably the hardest Sadaharu Oh card in the whole set to get.  It is card #1435, the second last in the whole thing, which means it is in the very hard to find final series (1400 to 1436).  I only have about 1/3 of the cards from that series so the last pages in my second binder (the set is so big you need two binders to hold it) are among the emptiest of all.

Oh doesn't appear in any of the scarce regional issues (which only feature Hiroshima Carp and Chunichi Dragons players).  The only other Oh cards which might match this one in scarcity therefore are card #474 (from series 14 which was short printed) and #943 (from series 27, also short printed).  I don't have either of those so this is the first of what I guess might be called the "Big 3" Oh cards from the set that I've obtained. Series 23 (cards 789 to 824) also tend to sell for a bit more than cards from the rest of the set and every one of them features Sadaharu Oh (its a series in commemoration of his 700th home run) but I think they just sell for more because they feature Oh and not because they are scarcer.  

This came up for auction last week and I was expecting it to sell for around 3000 Yen or so. I decided to bid high and break my self imposed 1,000 Yen spending limit since this card only comes up for auction rarely.  Much to my surprise and delight I won it for about 1,000 Yen with shipping, which was a steal.  It arrived in the mail yesterday and is now resting comfortably in the last page of binder #2 for this set.  I don't have card #1436 yet so for now this is the highest one I have.

The card is pretty cool.  It features a scene from a game played on July 23, 1976 against the Whales.  The text refers to him hitting his 700th home run during that game (though obviously not during the at bat depicted in which he has clearly hit a liner back to the pitcher) and notes that later in that season he reached 716, making him #2 in the world.

The Calbee Regionals Part 2: Tokai

 In this post we'll take a look at the Calbee regionals that were issued here in the Tokai region. Starting here makes sense both because I live in the Tokai region and because a lot of regional series were released by Calbee here over the years.

The Region

Tokai is centred on the city of Nagoya, home of the Chunichi Dragons.  With about 10 million people living in Nagoya and its suburbs its Japan's third largest urban area.

The city has kind of a bad wrap as an ugly, grey industrial blight on the landscape.  Actually its a fairly well earned wrap.  This for example is the type of scenery that accompanies your typical Nagoya wedding hall.

Its not all bad though.  The Osu area has some cool side streets with lots of neat shops that are fun to stroll through

The TV Tower is kind of a neat landmark too:

It was actually destroyed by Godzilla in 1964, a fact which very few landmarks can boast of:

Its also got a castle and the tallest train station in the world.  Its hard to believe but this city actually has a long history which has unfortunately mostly been bulldozed out of existence.  But the same can be said of pretty much any Japanese city so I wouldn't hold it against Nagoya too much. 

It is also the location where most of Mr. Baseball was filmed.  So Tom Selleck spent a bit of time here shortly after Magnum P.I. ended, which is sort of neat if you think about it.

The Calbee Tokai Series

As far as I can tell, Calbee released six series between 1973 and 1984 exclusively in the Tokai region.  Some of these are extremely hard to find.

1973 Calbee

Cards #210 to 236 of the 1973 Calbee set were only released in the Tokai area.  They feature Dragons players including Hall of Famers Morimichi Takagi and Senichi Hoshino.  It also features a manager card of Wally Yonomine, which I think is the only Calbee cards of his ever produced.

This is one of the hardest series from one of the hardest sets out there to collect.  There are probably only a few dozen copies of each card still in existence and since this is probably the most popular set among vintage Calbee collectors, prices are quite high - even the common cards are worth over $100 each.  There is a copy of the Yonamine card for 56,500 Yen (about $500 US) on Yahoo auctions right now.

The high prices have kept me from going after the cards from this series, but they are pretty cool.

1974-75 Calbee

The 1974-75 Calbee set is one I don't write about too much since I'm not actively pursuing it, but I do have a small collection of them on the go which I add to from time to time.  Its a 935 card set so quite big, and two of the series in it were only issued in the Tokai area.

The first (which came out in 1974) runs from card #73 to 90, featuring Dragons players including Tagaki, Hoshino and Yazawa.  These are pretty rare too.  There are only two cards from this series available on Yahoo Auctions right now, which is even fewer than for the 1973 series.  But prices are way cheaper, singles seem to go for between $10 and $20 each or so.  I'm guessing the lower price is probably attributable to fewer collectors trying to piece this set together.

The second (which came out in 1975) runs from card #792 to 827 and basically has the same player selection.  These seem to be a bit less rare than the lower numbered series since there are more than a dozen singles from it available right now.  The price range is about the same, $10 to $20 each or so.

This is one of the things that makes the 1974-75 Calbee set a bit more do-able than the 1973 one, the regional issues haven't been priced into the stratosphere.

I have a couple of the higher number Tokai series in my collection, but I'm not actively adding them to my collection right now.

1975-76-77 Calbee

The "monster" set has one series from #37 to 72 which was released only in the Tokai region.  This is the only Tokai regional series that I have actually tried to collect since I'm working on the set, and I've written about it here before (here and here). At the moment I am just 14 cards short of finishing it up, and I have 2 of the 3 cards of Senischi Hoshino, which are the most valuable.

The cards from this series are about the same as the ones from 1974-75 in terms of rarity and price.  Actually the price may have gone up a bit as a direct result of me buying them.  When I started I was able to buy them in the $10 each range, but these days its hard to find them for under $20 and I think that is because of me.  When there are only a handful of cards available, one guy buying them up can have an outsized impact on the price.  Maybe when I'm finished the prices will go back down again!

1977 Calbee

In 1977 Calbee released a stand alone set (as opposed to a series within a larger set). This seems to have been released only in Nagoya city itself as opposed to the Tokai region as a whole as each card has the "Na" from "Nagoya" on it.  It is a 36 card set (Engel lists it as JC 5d) and unlike other Tokai area releases it features players from other teams as well as the Dragons.

This set is very rare and very expensive.  Prices on commons start at about $50 and there is a Willie Davis card which is going to set you back a lot (one is available on Yahoo Auctions right now for 30,000 Yen, about $300 US).

I don't have any of these cards and don't think I'll ever make a pass at that set!

1984 Calbee

After 1977 Calbee took a bit of a breather and didn't release another Tokai series until 1984.  That year cards numbered 641 to 690 in its main set were only released in the Tokai area and all feature Dragons players.

These cards are also pretty rare and expensive, there are a few available on Yahoo Auctions right now and the cheapest starting bid of any of them is 4,000 Yen (about $40).

The existence of this series and a significant number of other very expensive short printed series were a major factor in me putting aside my 1984 Calbee project.  I like the set with its distinctive look and I have about 200 cards from it, but there are about 200 or so short printed ones (of which the Tokai regionals represent about 1/4) which would set me back 50-100$ each for and there is no way I'm willing (or able) to spend that kind of money on it.  So I'm kind of debating whether to give it up completely or just go for the non-short printed ones, which are way more affordable.


Anyway, that concludes my summary of the Tokai regional issues.  Basically the ones from the 1974-75 and 1975-76-77 sets remain affordable (despite seeming to be about equally rare) while the ones from the other sets are all insanely expensive.

The Calbee Regionals Volume 1: Introduction

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll do looking at Calbee cards which were only issued in certain regions of the country.  I'll do these posts region by region rather than set by set to give some added local flavor to each post.  


The Calbee regional issues are a bit confusing to American collectors because there is no parallel in American baseball card collecting history.  These weren’t complete sets that were just issued in one region, but rather they were series within the main Calbee sets in some years which were.


The existence of these regional series explains a lot about why some vintage Calbee sets are nearly impossible to complete today.  An equivalent in North America would be if Topps had only issued cards numbered 120 to 190 in the 1972 Topps set in the Houston area.  And because they were only selling them in the Houston area, the print run was only about 5% of what the print run for the other series are.


So anybody wanting to complete that 1972 Topps set today would be faced with the difficulty that 70 of the cards in the set were insanely scarce compared to the rest, and almost all of them are in the hands of collectors in Houston.

Oh and also cards numbered 330 to 400 were only issued in Baltimore, so once you've dealt with the Houston card problem you have to head there.


This is exactly the situation that anyone trying to collect Calbee sets from the 1970s (and to a lesser extent some sets from the 80s and 90s) is faced with.


To understand the geography of the regionals, its helpful to take a look at a map of Japan divided by region. There are actually a lot of loose ways of categorizing Japan’s 47 prefecture by region, but I think for the highly specified purpose of understanding Calbee baseball card distribution, this one here from Wikipedia works pretty well, albeit imperfectly.

Six of these warrant mention since they overlap with regions Calbee issued its regional series in.


Starting from the lower left we have the grey island which is Kyushu. It consists of seven prefectures one of which, Fukuoka, has at varying times been home to an NPB team.  Today that team is the Softbank Hawks, who moved there from Osaka in 1992.  This marked the return of baseball to the region after the Lions relocated from Fukuoka to Saitama in 1979.  Kyushu hasn’t had many Calbee regional issues released there but it does have some so I’ll do a post about them.


Moving to the right onto the main island we have the orange Chugoku region.  This consists of five mostly rural prefectures, the most important of which being Hiroshima, home of the Carp and the region’s only major city, also called Hiroshima.  Despite its mainly rural character, Calbee issued a lot of regional series here which mostly feature Carp players so I’ll do a big post about them.


Moving further over we have the purple-blue Kansai region.  This is Japan’s second most densely populated area and contains the major cities of Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto.  Several baseball teams have been based here over the years, including the current Hanshin Tigers and Orix Buffaloes.  The latter is the successor to two previous teams, the Kintetsu Buffaloes and Orix Blue Wave, which also played here, as did the Hankyu Braves (the predecessor to the Blue Wave) and the Nankai Hawks (who now play in Fukuoka).  Despite being such a major baseball center, Kansai has had fewer regional issues than the Chugoku region.  But it still has had some so I’ll do a post about there too.


Next to the Kansai area we have the light blue Chubu region.  The map here is not so useful since that area actually includes three regions (Tokai, Koshinetsu and Hokuriku). Only one of these, the Tokai region, is one where Calbee issued regional series.  The Tokai region is centered on four prefectures and is the third largest urban center in Japan, lying between #1 and #2 (kind of like Chicago being in between New York and LA).  Nagoya is by far its biggest city and is home to the Chunichi Dragons.  Like Chugoku Calbee issued a lot of regional series here, mostly featuring Dragons players, so it gets a big post too.



Next to that is the green Kanto area, Japan’s biggest urban area.  Its basically Tokyo/Yokohama and their massive suburbs.  It has been the host of too many baseball teams over the years to count, and currently accounts for almost half the teams in NPB (the Giants, Swallows, BayStars, Lions and Marines).  Perhaps because of its size and significance it hasn’t been on the receiving end of as many regional Calbee issues as smaller areas like Chugoku and Tokai, but it has had some, so it also gets a post.


Next to Kanto you have the yellow Tohoku region, which is home to the Eagles in Sendai, but as far as I can tell hasn’t had any Calbee regional issues so I’ll skip it in this series.  Then up on the top right you’ve got Hokkaido, home of the Fighters in Sapporo, which hasn’t been a major receipient but has received some so I’ll do a quick post about them.     


I skipped over the purple island, Shikoku, which is the only region in Japan that has never had an NPB team, nor has it ever had a Calbee regional issue.  It’s a nice island but mostly rural and doesn’t have any major cities so I’ll skip it too.  

Next week I'll put up the first post looking at the Tokai regional issues because that is where I live!

1973 Calbee: Japan's Most Valuable Set?

 The above is a 1973 Calbee card of Carp second baseman Mickey McGuire.  McGuire had a short career with the Baltimore Orioles in the 60s, recording only 4 major league hits (4 more than me of course), and later played a couple of decent seasons in Japan with the Hiroshima Carp in 1973 and 1974 where he hit .265.

The card is low grade, with pretty heavy wear on the corners and some discoloration on the back.  Probably it would grade about "Good" or so at best.

So anyway this is a beat up card of a guy with "common card guy" written all over him. But this card just sold for 101,950 Yen (about $1,000 US).

This is why I am not actively collecting the 1973 Calbee set, the prices are out of this world.  The McGuire card is part of a short printed series running from #261 to 297 where every card is hyper valuable like this.

And that ain't all, there is another equally rare series (210 to 237) and numerous other high demand cards that will sell for thousands of dollars even in lower grade.  The set is just littered with them.

I think the 1973 Calbee set is emerging as the most valuable one in Japan.  You could be looking at shelling out  $100,000 US if you were to try to put the set together in decent grade. And even then it would take you many years to do so since cards like this one don't show up for auction very often.

The only other set I can think of which might approach it is the 1967 Kabaya Leaf, but I don't think it comes close.  That set has four hyper rare cards that will set you back several thousand dollars each, and five other short printed cards that will probably run you close to a thousand.  But that is just 9 expensive cards, the 1973 Calbee has close to 100 that will cost you in the $500 plus range and quite a few that would be in the thousand dollar plus range.  The non short printed 67 Kabaya Leaf generally sell for more than the non short printed 1973 Calbee, but again there are way fewer of them (119 cards in the 67 Kabaya Leaf set verses 368 cards in the 1973 Calbee set).

This is also one of those sets where you can basically ignore what the Engel guide says in terms of price (though it is still quite useful as a checklist and for figuring out which ones are more expensive relative to others in the set).  Prices really seem to have taken off over the past couple of years and the prices in the guide are completely out of date.  The McGuire is listed at $400 for a near mint copy and yet here we have a very low grade copy selling for $1000.  This is by no means the only example, across the board the harder to find 1973 Calbees are exploding in price.

Its kind of crazy, but 1973 Calbee isn't just one of the most expensive sets in Japan, but in the world.  For comparable American sets you'd have to go back to the rare early 20th century Tobacco ones.  Post war, the 1952 Topps set makes for an awkward comparison.  On the one hand it has the Mickey Mantle card which has gone into the stratosphere in terms of price. No card from the 1973 Calbee set comes close to selling for the same as that Mantle. On the other hand, except for the Mantle the other cards in that set are way cheaper and easier to find than the harder to find 1973 Calbees, so its a bit of a toss up.

I'm holding out hope that this price explosion won't affect Calbee sets from subsequent years, particularly the 1975-76-77 set I'm working on, at least until after I've finished it (which is going to take a while).  For the moment at least none of the cards in that one sell for anywhere near this much.

Mike Solomko Doubles

Back in the 1960s Japanese makers of baseball menko used to re-use photos a lot.  Topps did that in the US too back then, but menko makers had the advantage of being able to hide their tracks a bit better.  Since they used colorized black and white photos they could just change the colors on the same photo from year to year.

The above cards of Hanshin Tigers slugger Mike Solomko put out by Doyusha in 1961 and 1962 (JCM 35 and JCM 55) provide a good illustration of this.  Same photo, different colors.  Actually the colors make no sense on either - the outfield grass at Koshien is neither red nor blue!  But it does kind of look cool so I give them a pass on that.

Solomko is  an interesting guy.  He  came to Japan while serving in the United States Army, he arrived on a destroyer by chance after getting switched from one destined for Korea.   He got a tryout with the Tigers towards the end of his service, and ended up playing in NPB for six seasons (four with Hanshin, two with the Orions).  I don't know of any other player who came to Japan via that route!

He is also one of the few Americans to settle down in Japan after his playing days ended.  60 years after arriving, he is still here! From that perspective, he is one of the godfathers of us "long term foreign residents of Japan" and I collect his cards partly out of respect for that!

Third of its Kind: 1930 Shigeru Mizuhara Menko

I picked this card up a while ago and have been meaning to do a post about it.  This is a Menko featuring Hall of Famer Shigeru Mizuhara as a pitcher for Keio University.  Its from the 1930 Round Menko set catalogued as JRM 41, which is one of the rarest sets out there.

Another copy of this card appeared in a 2013 auction on Prestige which listed their copy as only the second one ever discovered.  No other copies have shown up there since, so I think I can say that my copy is the third copy known to exist.

Unfortunately mine is probably the worst of the three in terms of condition.  It actually doesn't have much wear, but somebody has gone and poked a bunch of holes in it for some reason!  Damn 1930s kids!

This is actually my second find of a rare pre war Mizuhara menko, so I've got a decent little collection of his going!

The 1997 Calbee Set

 I made a pretty great score on Yahoo Auctions the other day, a 300 card lot of cards from the 1997 Calbee set.

The 1997 Calbee set is an important one.  It is the grandfather of all Calbee sets that have been issued in the 23 years since it came out.  For the 1997 set they went with a simple design - full bleed photo with the player name, number and team name and logo being the only design elements on the front.  Pretty much every Calbee set since 1997 has followed that look with only minor variations.

Likewise, the 1997 set was the first to have a full color back with a player photo,  another design element that every set since has emulated. 

Its got a lot of big stars of the 90s like Ichiro and Hideki Matsui.  It also has one of the first Japanese cards of Tuffy Rhodes, a young Kenji Johjima and a very old Hiormitsu Ochiai.

This 300 card lot was a major score for me because the 1997s are pretty hard to find.  I only had a couple dozen cards from this set before getting these.

In terms of scarcity there is a huge difference between 1997 and 1998 onwards.  You can see this in Yahoo Auctions listings, the below table shows how many cards from each Calbee set from 1990 to 1999 are currently available.  As you can see, from 1990 to 1997 its pretty consistently in the 100 to 300 listings range.  Then in 1998 it jumps to 873 and in 1999 it absolutely explodes to 1916.  Though not in the table, its pretty much remained high like that ever since (with 2002 being one exception, it has only 358 listings which is more in line with pre 1997 numbers)..

This is of course also reflected in the price.  Pre 1997 cards sell for significantly more than what post 1998, and especially post 1999, cards go for.

I've often kind of wondered about that - why did Calbee card production take off in 1998?  Maybe baseball got more popular that year?  Or they just decided to market and distribute their chips more aggressively?  I've never seen anyone answer this question.

Anyway, this scarcity explains why I pounced all over this lot.  Its not uncommon to see post 1998 Calbee cards in big lots like that, but you almost never find 1997 Calbees or anything earlier than that in lots that size.  In fact, I've never seen a 1997 Calbee lot with more than a few dozen cards before.  And since I didn't have many cards in it, this presented the perfect opportunity to get to work on that set.

The set, I should mention, contains 237 cards.  It was issued in four series and the last one (cards 217 to 237) just has 20 cards but was a short printed series in a set that was already fairly scarce so they are almost impossible to find.  I couldn't tell from the listing how many I would get, obviously there would be doubles, but I decided to take a chance.

The cards when they arrived were all pack fresh in the near mint to mint range, which was a nice surprise since a lot of Calbee cards even from the 90s often come with a lot of wear (its usually more like buying a lot of 60s or 70s cards in the US, from a time before people seriously collected).

I was kind of shocked  though that the seller had just thrown them into an envelope with no bubble wrap or anything to protect them, with the cards divided into stacks held together with rubber bands.

So I was a bit like:

But then I was able to take the rubber bands off and found that the cards were all OK, so then I was like:

Its all good.

On the plus side, I was able to put together about 80% of the first three series (1 to 216) including the Ichiro and other star cards (update September 28, 2020: picked some more up, am now over 90% of the way there).  On the downside, the lot didn't contain any of the short prints from 217 to 237, so I'll probably have to shell out serious money for those at some point.

I'm pretty happy with these though and can now add 1997 Calbee to the list of sets I'm getting close to finishing!  The cards I still need are:

 51,  89,  217-221, 223-237.