2020 Calbee Series 2 Complete! And Boring!

This is Taisei Makino's card from Series 2 of the 2020 Calbee set.  I just picked up the complete base set of 87 cards off of Yahoo Auctions.  Dave did a great write up of the set's details which you can read here so I won't repeat what he's already written there about it.

But I wanted to bring the Makino card to everyone's attention since its the only one (save the manager checklist cards) which deviates from the dreaded Three Rules of Contemporary Calbee Card Photos.  With every other card in the set, including the average leaders subset, every photo features a player either at bat (all position players except catchers), in his catchers gear (catchers) or on the mound (pitchers).  

The Makino card is the only one which shows a player doing something else, in this case fielding.  

This is a huge step back from Series 1, which featured a much better selection of photographs than usual.  I guess that was just an exception rather than the start of something new.

As I've complained about many times (and since Calbee is still doing it, I'll complain again) none of the photos on their own are bad, but when you've got the whole set in your hands the standardized photography gets extremely boring.  

This is made worse by the fact that the photos are almost all taken in the player's home stadium and from the exact same angle.  So for example here are all of the cards featuring Hiroshima Carp pitchers:

You really get nothing in the photos other than the same grass and dirt background because of the stupid angle.  Hiroshima has a really great stadium, I'd like to see more of it on the background of these cards!  Again, none of these cards looks bad on its own, but when you've got the whole set looking at you the monotonous repetition gets really boring.  With Hiroshima at least they are playing outdoors under natural sunlight which make the photos a bit brighter.  The cards of teams that play in domes, like the Nippon Ham Fighters, Yomiuri Giants and Orix Buffaloes look way darker and the players don't really stand out very well.  Its just awful all around.

The only kind of "interesting" thing that I have noticed is that the set contains some of the first cards of the Pandemic.  Years from now collectors will probably be able to tell the 2020 cards (and with the way things are going  I fear maybe also the 2021 cards) by the empty stands in the backgrounds of a lot of cards:

At the same time this of course also contributes to the general misery of looking at this set, so while interesting it isn't helpful!

On the plus side, the whole thing only cost me 900 Yen (about $9) with shipping.  Which is a kind of stupid thing to say I suppose after devoting the whole post to describing how much I dislike this thing.  But yeah, its way better to spend 900 Yen to discover I dislike it than to spend 10-20 times that much on bags of chips which I also don't like trying to put the thing together by hand.  And as a collector its not like I could just NOT buy it, right?  Its what we do after all. 

PS: This was my 300th post on this blog!

These are a fortune. Literally.

 I made a neat new "discovery purchase" the other day: Baseball pull fortunes (Yakyu Hikuji)..

I got a big pile of them, display backing and all!

This are a type of product that doesn't exist in North America but has a long history in Japan. Each of these packs contains ten strips of thin paper which stick out at the bottom (in the above photo the black and white player head shots at the bottom are the parts of the paper that sticks out).  Each strip has a fortune written on it, like you would find in a fortune cookie.  The best one you can get is "Daikichi" which is really good luck.  The worst is "Hazure" which means you are a loser.  And there are a few in between.  So each kid would get one of these packs, then with their friends they would each pull one of the strips out and see who would get good luck and who would get bad.

 If you ever visit a shinto shrine in Japan you'll probably come across something very similar as they sell similar fortunes there. The ones sold at shrines are called "Omikuji" and come in folded pieces of paper rather than being pulled off of tabs like these baseball ones are.

These are a couple that my wife and I got at the Hakozaki shrine in Fukuoka many years ago (the chocolate banana was also purchased there, it was a festival day).


My baseball ones feature colorful wrappers with six different players on them: Senichi Hoshino, Sadaharu Oh, Masahiro Doi (I think), Shigeo Nagashima, Koichi Tabuchi and Koji Yamamoto.   The players whose head shots are featured on the ten strips peaking out at the bottom don't necessarily match the player on the wrapper (The one with Senichi Hoshino for example has a picture of Isao Harimoto on the strips.  Though most of the others do match).

 The backs of the wrappers have some cool color images of various players.

Judging from the fact that Isao Harimoto is featured as a Giant and Masahiro Doi is featured in a Taiheiyo uniform I would date these to 1976.

 I decided to try my luck and pull one of them.  Instead of tearing them off as they were designed I decided to just unwind the wire at the top holding the bundle together so I could put it back without damaging it.  This is what I got:

"Losing pitcher with a 5-10 record, so sad!"  "HAZURE"

Oh no, I got the loser one!

Back in the day these sold for 10 Yen each.  Looking around the internet it seems these "pull fortunes" were pretty popular back in the 1970s as there were similar bundles with various anime characters also sold from around that time.  These seem to have been the only baseball ones made and they are pretty hard to find.  Or at least I think they are, these were the first I've ever seen though I hadn't even known they were something I should be looking for in the first place until I found them!

Kind of a neat thing to add to my collection, they have a strong "Showa retro" look to them which I find appealing!

The Covid Baseball Card Bubble?

The reaction of the baseball card market to the Covid 19 recession is weird.

A few months ago I thought for sure the card market would collapse along with employment levels and everything else in the US.  But I seem to have been proven wrong so far on that count.  Unemployment is sky high, companies are going bankrupt left right and center and the virus is spreading more or less out of control now in that country.  Yet anecdotally at least all I am hearing these days are stories about card prices going up rather than down.  Which is weird.

This is also happening here in Japan, albeit at a much smaller scale.  Back in March I thought that card prices would  go down and I could pick up some bargains.  That never materialized and the competition I face on Yahoo Auctions for cards if anything seems a bit more intense now than it was before the pandemic hit.  Public health and the economy here haven't been hit anywhere near as badly as in the US, but at the same time the country like everywhere is in a recession.

What did I miss?

There is of course a parallel debate going on about another disconnect with the real economy, which is the stock market.  Actually, that isn't really a debate, more just an observation that stock prices do not move in lockstep with broader economic indicators - when GDP goes up or down stock prices don't necessarily follow.  This is because the value of stocks are generally determined by how investors evaluate the future cash flows they expect from a company weighed against risks associated with it.  Since both of these are future variables, how the economy is doing today is not itself a major consideration.

Cards are different from stocks though and the disconnect between their value and the overall shape of the economy can't be explained in the same way.  They don't produce cash flows and risks associated with them (like the risk that a card you spent 100$ on is going to be worth only 10$ in five years) are impossible to quantify.

So what factors are driving collectors through their buys and sells to value a card today at $1,000 when they valued it at half that a year ago?  Despite all the chaos happening.  And why was I so wrong in my prediction?

My guess would be the following.

1) Wealthy collectors aren't getting hammered like everyone else.

Its self evident that the value of expensive cards is only determined by the people who have enough money to throw some of it away on a hobby centered on the mere ownership of stuff.  So understanding changes in card values really just requires you to understand how those wealthy collectors are doing.

Wealthier collectors, like wealthier people in general, haven't been hit as hard by this as people in the middle or lower income tiers.  Few of them have lost their jobs and even for those that have they are way more likely to have income from investments and other sources of income to tide them over.  They are called "wealthy" for a reason after all.  So even with 10s of millions left unemployed and at risk of eviction and so forth, the people with money still have money.

2) The spending habits of wealthy collectors have changed

Despite being way more financially secure than most, the recession hasn't left the wealthy entirely untouched and they are cutting back spending on a lot of stuff.  This is having a disastrous impact on people who provide services to them for a living.  They aren't getting manicures, aren't going on European vacations, aren't getting their yachts cleaned, aren't going out for expensive dinners at fancy restaurants.  A lot of these are things the Coronavirus itself, rather than economic limitations, have taken off their spending menu.

Cutting back on those things probably leaves a lot of wealthy collectors with more discretionary cash on hand than they would normally have.  So why not spend it on cards?  No risk involved, its a hobby they can pursue completely at home!  Which is where most of them are these days anyway.

Basically cards are part of a broader category of discretionary purchases which are completely safe from the virus and therefore it makes sense that more would be spent on them now than before among the people who are insulated from worries about job losses, etc.  Money they would normally be spending at the golf course is now finding its way into the card market instead.

3) Cards are seen as a safe haven asset

I mentioned earlier that the stock market hasn't moved in tandem with the broader economy, which is true, but its also true that there has been a ton of volatility in the markets and there is a huge amount of unquantified risk hanging over all of it.  Investors don't know how long this pandemic related chaos is going to last, what systemic risks in the economy it is going to lay bare, and who the winners and losers are going to be 5 years, or even 6 months, from now.  Basically, stocks are a huge risk and other types of investment with a fixed return (bonds) aren't paying out much.

So they've got a lot of "dumb" money sitting around and aren't sure where to put it, they see cards going up in value and think "why not?" and throw more of their money into that simply because it seems the best out of a list of bad options that they have.  It becomes a bit of a self reinforcing cycle as more money enters the market the signal it sends becomes stronger and more money follows.  This becomes easier to justify for people who have cut back on other hobbies, since money spent on baseball cards is money they expect to get back at some point in the future, unlike money spent on the golf course or getting a manicure which is gone the second you spend it.

Where it Goes from Here?

The problem with all of these factors,  particularly the latter two, is that they are temporary situations which are only going to last as long as the pandemic is with us.  When a vaccine or treatment comes along, the motivation to return to old spending habits is going to be pretty high.  And the attractiveness of cards as a place to park your money is going to diminish.  Ironically while the recession has been good for cards, the recovery might be really bad for them. We might just be seeing a bubble in the market that will burst as quickly as it has inflated.

Or not, I have to admit my confidence in making predictions about this stuff has been shattered by how wrong I was in March.  I do think its an interesting thing to speculate about though, hence this post.

Stuff on Cards: Beer

 Here is something you don't see everyday: a baseball card with a bunch of beers dead centre in the photo!

This is card 11 from the 1977 Calbee set (Jc 5(a-j)).  And I love it.

If anyone out there is pursuing an "odd stuff to find on cards" type collection, I'm finding that Japanese cards, especially Calbees from the 70s, are a gold mine.  You've got everything from cards with girls in kimonos on them to cards with vintage cars on them to cards with American pro wrestlers on them.  And now a card with beers.

My casual Google search for "beer baseball cards" doesn't turn up any other baseball cards with beer visible on them.  I see a lot of 1958 Hires Root Beer cards, and cards of some rookie prospect named Seth Beer and a bunch of doctored fun cards people have made over the years (Rob Deer gets a lot of these since the D in his last name can easily be rendered a B).  But no baseball cards with a beer just casually sitting in the background or anything, let alone three of them prominently featured in the foreground. So unless somebody corrects me (and please do if you find something I've missed) I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is the only baseball card from a regular set in history to ever feature guys drinking beer on it.

This makes sense of course, its definitely not a good idea for a product for kids to feature alcohol on it.  I mean, there must be rules somewhere about that sort of thing.  Right? Anyway, obviously those rules didn't apply to Calbee back in 1977 as this card's existence attests to.

The reason for the beers and smiles all around is that this picture features members of the Hankyu Braves celebrating their victory over the Giants in the 1976 Japan Series.  Pictured are star pitcher Mitsuhiro Adachi  who won the series clinching 7th game, Braves manager Toshiharu Ueda, and series MVP Yutaka Fukumoto.

I am starting to work on this set, so this card is going with the rest of them, but if I can ever track down another copy (these are not easy to find) I'll put the other one in my new "stuff on baseball cards" type collection!

The Destroyer!!!!

I like this card.  Its probably one of the most famous Calbee cards from the 70s.

This is card 178 from the 1977 Calbee set which Engel catalogues as JC 5(a-j).  As I noted in an earlier post there are eleven different Calbee sets from that year, so its pretty hard to keep track of which is which.  This series has the weeds on the back border.

This was another one of those white whales that I've been chasing around for a while.  One seller on Yahoo Auctions has had a copy of it for a while with a BIN price of about 800$ which is insanely overpriced (Engel lists it at 80$).  Its a very popular card so that has been the only copy of it I've seen for sale for the past couple of years, but recently somebody put a lot of a couple dozen Calbee cards from the 70s up which included this and I put a high bid in and won (for less than the 80$ this card alone lists for).  I was so excited.

The card features Sadaharu Oh on the left and Dick Beyer, AKA the Destroyer, on the right.

The Destroyer is a really interesting guy.  He was a wrestling star in the US in the 50s and 60s, going by various identities before settling on his mask wearing Destroyer persona.

He has an interesting connection with the post I wrote last month about Hankyu Braves star Roberto Barbon, who as I mentioned had a run in with a Japanese wrestler named Rikidozan who was later stabbed to death by a Yakuza gangster.

After a match with Giant Baba in Los Angeles in 1963 the Destroyer came to Japan to go head to head with the same Rikidozan.  You can watch their match here:

Incredibly that match took place on December 2, 1963, just 6 days before Rikidozan received his fatal stab wound.  I'm not sure but it was probably his last time in the ring.

After that, the Destroyer went back to the US for a few years.  But in 1973 he returned to Japan and spent most of the 1970s here, both as a wrestler and as a major TV personality.  Definitely WAY more interesting than his wrestling is his output as a TV talento.  Here you can see him freaking out Wada Akiko and contributing to the general chaos and mayhem of a 1970s Japanese variety show, which is.....hard to describe in words but definitely worth watching:

My card of him with Sadaharu Oh would have come out at the height of his fame on Japanese TV and I assume he was at Korakuen for some sort of TV event.

One weird thing about this card is that it is a straight up normal Sadaharu Oh card.  The text on the front and back just mention Oh, but doesn't say anything about the guy he is standing next to.  Its basically a cameo appearance by the Destroyer on an otherwise normal Sadaharu Oh card.  Even in Engel card #178 is just listed as "Sadaharu Oh".  I get that this is a baseball set, but come on ,there are hundreds of Sadaharu Oh baseball cards out there, but only one with the Destroyer on it!  This deserves some sort of mention.

Anyway, after retiring from wrestling in 1984 he went back to his regular job as a high school PE teacher in Akron New York.  Before becoming a pro wrestler in the early 50s he had trained as a teacher, and in fact had a Masters in Education from Syracuse University.  That must have been pretty cool for Akron high school students in the 80s and 90s to have a guy with such an interesting background as a teacher.  Well, maybe, I could also see how having a teacher called "Destroyer" would be somewhat intimidating.

In 2017 he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun for his contributions to cultural exchange between Japan and the US.  He passed away last year at the age of 88.

All in all, a great card.

2020 Calbee Series 2 Has Hit the Shelves

 

Bags of 2020 Calbee Series 2 have hit supermarket shelves here and I picked up my first bag yesterday. 

I like how Calbee sets have been released in 3 series at regular intervals over the year pretty much ever since I first arrived in Japan over 20 years ago.  The release of each series has become a ritualized means of marking the passing of the seasons for me.  Series 1 is Spring, Series 2 is Summer and Series 3 is Fall.  Winter is the only one that doesn't get a series, which adds to my dislike of that season. 

Normally the arrival of a new series is a happy event, but this year its just hard to work up the usual amount of enthusiasm. Look at how the world has changed since series 1 came out just a few months ago.  Or maybe not so much, at least here in Japan.  In March infections were rising in Tokyo and I was worried we'd have a major outbreak here.  Thankfully that didn't happen.  This week infections are rising in Tokyo again and we're worried we're going to have a major outbreak.  Again.  Hopefully we won't.  Again. 

Of course, when I say "cases are rising" I mean there have been about 200 cases in a city of 30 million people.  I think there are small towns in Florida right now getting more cases.  So I do feel incredibly lucky to be riding this pandemic out in Japan.  Which is another odd reversal since Series 1 came out, back when the NPB season opener was postponed but MLB was still set to go because Japan got hit with this first.  At the time I thought we'd get crushed while the US might get lucky and avoid it.  Man, that has changed. Sorry to my fellow bloggers out there in the US going through all that right now. 

These are the cards I got in my first bag of the year.  Adam Jones, a bona fide MLB star who was fortunate enough to sign a 2 year $8 million contract with the Orix Buffaloes just days before the virus arrived.  That card is from the Star Card subset, which is a pretty decent pull.

The other is of Dragons pitcher Kodai Umetsu, who had a pretty good rookie season last year with a 4-1 record and 2.34 ERA. 

Otherwise there doesn't seem to be much to note, the set looks pretty much the same as it does every year, which is nice.  Good old stable Calbee sets, the one thing that never changes!

Shigeo Nagashima Menko Find

 I picked up this menko recently.  Its not in the best of shape but it features Giants star Shigeo Nagashima (the centering isn't as bad as it looks, my scanner cut off the left edge for some reason).

The card is a bit of a mystery to me.  I haven't been able to find a set that looks like this in Engel.  The back has a picture of a gun wielding hero, with "General" written on it, a rock/paper/scissors symbol and a long menko number.  I've never seen baseball menko with the same back:

I bought it from a seller as a single along with menko from two other sets (JCM 138 and 139) which were issued in 1960 and 1962.  The size and general look and feel of this card is very similar to the cards from those sets, and those years fall in the right ballpark given how young Nagashima looks on this one.  So I guess this is an uncatalogued early 60s menko of his. It might come from a set that featured non-sports subjects as well, the seller seemed to have a big pile of random menko and only the three that I bought featured baseball players.

Mister Whales

 Another card I recently picked up (in the same transaction that got me the cards in my previous post) is this one featuring Taiyo Whales star Makoto Matsubara from the 1973 Calbee set.

Matsubara was a long time star for the Whales (predecessor to today's Baystars), playing nineteen seasons with them between 1962 and 1980 before a swan song with the Giants in 1981.

He was an eleven time all star and led the league in hits twice (1974 and 1978).  He could hit for both average and power, ending his career in both the 2,000 hit club and the 300 home run club.  For reasons that I do not understand at all, despite his impressive career resume he still isn't in the Hall of Fame (though his 2,000 hits did earn him membership in the Meikyukai).

The title on the back of this card (198 in the set) refers to him as "Mister Whales", and the text describes in general terms why he is so known (in short: he is a good player, he is a male, and he plays for the Whales).  It also notes that he is a 10 million Yen player, which would likely have made him one of the better paid players in NPB at that time.

I like this card a lot.  I believe the picture came from Kawasaki Stadium, which was home to the Whales back in the 70s.  It was torn down in 1998 and a soccer field now occupies the property.  I love the way he is framed in the photo with the stands adorned with 1970s advertisements all over them in the background.

1973 Calbee Fierce Fight Series is Awesome

 There is a really neat series of cards from the 1973 Calbee set that I've long been fascinated by.  Its from the "Nessen" (fierce fight or maybe "tight game") series and it depicts scenes from a game played on October 20, 1973 between the Chunichi Dragons and the Hanshin Tigers.  I'm not sure how big that series is but it comes towards the end of the set in cards numbered in the 300s.  The cards depicting that game in particular seem to run from 328 to 335.

They fortunately aren't from the hyper rare thousand dollar a pop short printed series, but these cards are still pretty hard to find and usually run about 20$ each when they show up.  I was able to win two of them - card 330 and 332 - in an auction the other day for about 8$ each which was a really good deal.

 Card 332, pictured at the top of this post, features Dragons star Kenichi Yazawa in the foreground. With runners on second and third, he has just connected off of Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu for a base hit to right field which drove both runners in and put the Tigers in the lead (in the 3rd inning).

The other card (330) pictured below also shows Yazawa, only this time in the first inning.  He was a runner on first base when Jimmy Williams got a base hit to center field.  Yazawa tried to make third on the play and as you can see, he didn't quite beat the tag!

The Dragons nonetheless went on to win the game 4-2.

I love the way these cards let you follow the play by play action.  The card sandwiched between these two (331) I unfortunately don't have, but I looked it up and found that it features Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu  conferring with catcher Koichiro Tabuchi after getting Yazawa out at third.

I really want to get the rest of the cards from this specific 8 card run, its very neat to be able to follow a game in progress on baseball cards, another way in which these 1970s Calbee sets were light years ahead of their time.  This would have been a very important game too, the Dragons, Tigers and Giants were caught in a very fierce pennant race and this was (I think) the last game between the Tigers and Dragons.  In the end the Giants won the pennant with a razor thin 0.5 game lead over the Tigers and 1.5 game lead over the Dragons!

A Checklist for the Yamakatsu Blue Train Set

A couple of years ago I picked up an unopened box of Yamakatsu Blue Train Cards from the 1970s. I love trains, especially in Japan where pretty much every trip I've taken for the past 20 years has been by train.

I didn't open that box, but last week I found another one for a good price and decided to crack it open.  There is basically zero information about this set on the internet - no checklist, no year of release no nothing (including stuff in Japanese) so I thought doing so might provide a good opportunity to fill that void.  So this will be my first box-break post. And unlike most box breaks this one will serve the purpose of actually figuring out a bit more about what is in this set.

To begin, this is what the box looks like:

 Open it up and you've got 30 packs of cards with 2 cards per pack for 60 total.

 There are 3 prizes that also come with the box.  One is a little album that can hold 14 cards.  The other two are giant erasers shaped like trains.  There are 3 cards randomly inserted in packs which have a little red stamp on the back entitling anyone who pulls them to claim one of these prizes from the store where they bought them.

Then comes the fun part, opening the packs! As an added service to posterity, I have decided not to video myself opening the packs and will simply cut to the chase.

I got 60 cards, consisting of 37 different cards and 23 doubles. Since no checklist exists I have no idea how close this gets me to the set, but at least we now know there are no fewer than 37 cards in the set.

These are the cards I got:




This is what the backs of some of the cards look like (note the one in the lower right, which has the red prize stamp on it):

These are not just cards of random passenger trains.  All of them are long distance sleeper trains (called "Blue Trains" since the first one was Blue, but over the years they came in a variety of colors).  These trains have since been replaced by the Shinkansen, the last of them retired in 2015, but in the late 1970s when the Shinkansen network was a lot more limited they were at the peak of their popularity.  Each card depicts a different train which ran a different route and the back features each trains logo (which appears on a plate on the front of the engine).  Some train lines appear on more than one card (three of the ones I got appear on two different cards).  The cards aren't numbered but I think it makes sense to create a checklist based on the train names, so here goes in alphabetical order

Aizu
Amagi
Ariake
Asakaze
Akatsuki
Azusa
Fuji
Ginga
Hakuchou
Hakutsuru
Hayabusa
Hitachi
Hokuriku
Izumo
Kamome
Kii
Kinboshi (2)
Michinoku
Midori
Mizuho
Myoujou (2)
Nichirin
Okhotsk
Sakura (2)
Sazanami
Seto
Shinsetsu
Shiosai
Shirane
Shirasagi
Suisei
Toki
Tsurugi
Yamabiko

(the ones with a (2) after the name appear on two cards with different photos)

I really like these cards, the photography on some of them is really great and makes me want to go on a train trip.

I really wish there were more sets out there like this from that period.  As I said above, these are just long distance sleeper trains, which represent a tiny fraction of the overall variety of passenger trains in Japan.  There were a lot (and still are a lot) of local commuter trains done up in very vibrant colors which would have looked great on cards, but it seems such cards were never produced.

Anyway, there you go internet, your first stab at a checklist for the Yamakatsu Blue Train set.  I might try to pick up another box if I can find one cheap and break it open to see if I get closer to a set.  I'll update this checklist if I do!