Some more 1997 Calbees

 

I picked up 15 singles from the 1997 Calbee set this week.  Nobody particularly exciting, the whole  lot only cost me about 4$, but they were all cards I needed for the set.  

These get me to 202 out of 237, just 35 to go.  Unfortunately 19 of those are from the rare high number series, but I'm very close to finished with the low numbers.  

Thus far my Calbee collection has been mainly focused on cards from the 70s and 80s, as well as the obligatory purchase of contemporary sets as they come out each year. This has left the 90s as the decade with the biggest holes in my collection.  I am pretty close to finished with the 1999 Calbee set, which is by far the easiest to complete.  I also have a decent start on the 1998 set, which is also fairly easy to do.  And the 1995 Choco Snack set I  was lucky enough to pick up as a set a year and a half ago ( in retrospect that was an incredible deal, prices on those have gone up a lot since then and there is no way I could replicate that find today).

But most of the other sets from that decade (particularly the 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996 sets) I only have a smattering of cards each for.  Except for 1991 those are really hard sets to find cards for.  The  1994 and 1996 sets in particular have fewer than 100 listings each on Yahoo Auctions right now, indicating how rare they are.  Once I've finished the 1997s I might move on to one of them, but for now those years don't really exist in "set" form in my collection yet.  

Dogs Wearing Caps

 

This is one of the new key pieces of my collection.  Its an uncut sheet from the 1948 set Engel catalogues as JBR 118.  The set was issued in sheets like this, each featuring 10 cards from a team.  Mine features members of the Yomiuri Giants and has a few Hall of Famers like Tetsuharu Kawakami, Shigeru Chiba, Noburo Aota and manager Osamu Mihara.

Engel only lists the sheets for four teams (Braves, Flyers, Hawks and Giants) in the guide and states that only one copy of each is known to exist.  So my Giants sheet is either that one known copy, or it is a newly discovered second copy.  I'm leaning towards the second as being more likely, given that I bought it from an antique dealer located in Kobe who probably dug it up locally.  Either way, these are pretty hard cards to find.  

The backs of the cards have pictures of dogs wearing baseball caps in red.  Hence Engel gave this set the nickname "Dog Wearing Baseball Cap".  Which is pretty cool.  

I've Waited Years To Find This Card

 

My 1975-76 Calbee set made a massive jump towards completion yesterday with the addition of The Most Valuable Card In The Set (TMVCITS)!

This is card #630 featuring Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium during a night game from the 1976 season.  As I wrote in a post last year about a different card I got (#157 which coincidentally also features Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium)  this is basically the key card in the entire set.  It comes from the extremely rare "Red Helmet" series  which runs from card #609 to 644.  It was only released in limited numbers in the Hiroshima area and is very rare today.  I'm not sure exactly why, but of all the cards in that series, the one featuring the stadium has long been recognized as the most valuable by Japanese collectors.

I have been waiting for one of these to come up at auction for a long time and when this showed up (alongside two other cards from the same series that I need) I pounced.  I ended up winning it for 7500 Yen (about $70 US) which is more than I usually pay for a card (and way more than my 1000 Yen per card limit that I tried to impose on myself earlier this year but have failed miserably at adhering to).  But its the key card in the set, and this basically means that I now know that I won't have to pay more than that for any other card in the set.  The downside of the bidding getting that high was that I had to let the other two cards from the series up in the same auction go, and they sold for about half what this one did.

This is actually a really nice copy of the card, probably in ExMt condition or so with a tiny speck of fluff on two of the corners being the only blemish.  And that makes me happy since I had figured for this card I would have to accept a lower grade copy since higher grade ones would be way too hard to find.  But nope, the marquee card in my set is a looker!  Yee haw!

I'm still not close to finishing the whole set, I'm about 400 cards short right now (out of 1472 total), but this is another milestone crossed!

Fake Ichiros and Weird Bidders

 
There is a seller on Yahoo Auctions who I've been watching for a few years now.  A few years ago I bought one of the rare 1994 Calbee Ichiro cards off of him.  This was relatively early in my Japanese baseball card collecting days and I wasn't aware of how prevalent fakes of those cards (there are three of them) were.  Of course mine turned out to be a fake as I discovered later.  Fortunately I only paid about 25$ so it wasn't a huge write-off.

If you click on the guy's Yahoo Auctions page you'll see a huge list of naked lady cards (very NSFW, proceed with caution).  Those are his specialty.  But about once every month or so he'll put out a few baseball cards for sale.  And almost every time he does so, he has one copy of each of the three 1994 Calbee Ichiros.

Over the years I've been watching his auctions (er...just his baseball card auctions) he's probably put up dozens of those Ichiro cards.  Bear in mind that those cards are so rare that there are probably only a few dozen legit copies of them in existence in the first place.  So this should be a huge red flag screaming "FAKE" to anyone out there paying attention.

Yet every time he puts them out, people bid on them and buy them.  This post was inspired by me watching three more end last night, all getting multiple bids (the one in the picture at the top got 14 bids and sold for 4501 Yen, about $40).  

It really doesn't make much sense.  They always sell, but they also usually sell in that 30-50$ price range, which is about 1/10th of what a legit copy would probably be worth.  

Its kind of hard to figure out what is going on with the bidders.  If they think the things are real, they should be bidding them up to much higher prices than that.  If on the other hand they think the things are fake, they shouldn't be bidding at all.  Yet everytime they manage to bid it up to a price that is way too high for a fake and way too cheap for a real one.  What do these bidders think these cards are?

In my case when I bid I thought it was real and I put in a higher bid than what I ended up winning it for with that expectation in mind.  Other bidders pushed it up to about the 25$ level, then jumped ship.  Perhaps there are shill bidders, but looking at the one I linked to above it got bids from 4 separate bidders, two of whom have a ton of feedback and are likely legit bidders, and two of whom have less than 100 feedback and might be shill bidders.  It was won by one of the two with high feedback, and one of the two with low feedback placed the second highest bid, consistent with what you would expect if shill bidding was going on.  But at the same time the other "real" bidder came close to winning it and the "shill" bid only bumped it up a couple hundred Yen.  So even if the two suspect accounts hadn't bid, the card would have sold for almost the same price and therefore shill bidding alone can't account for this irrational pricing.

So I kind of wonder if these real bidders are just suckers like me being taken in?  You'd think they would have caught on by now though, this guy has been at it for years now (though he does have near perfect feedback).  On the other hand, maybe they know and don't care - perhaps they are planning to flip these fakes themselves? 

I don't know exactly what is going on but it sure does stink anyway you look at it.  

The 1977 Oh Series

 

One of the hardest Calbee sets from the 70s to find is the 96 card set dedicated entirely to Sadaharu Oh on the occasion of him passing Hank Aaron's 755 career home run total.  

I only have 2 cards from this set, number 38 and 42.  The card above (#42) features a photo taken at exactly 7:10 PM (and 7 seconds!) on September 3, 1977 as the text on the card front tells us.  It shows him high fiving Giants coach Akira Kunimatsu while rounding the bases after hitting #756.

The back of the card is kind of interesting.  It shows some stats on each of his milestone home runs over his career that you don't often see.  For each, in addition to the date, it also tells you how many other players had hit that many (at the time),  the pitcher he hit it off and the number of games it took to get there.  So we can see for example that when he hit his 100th career home run on July 28, 1963 off a Hiroshima pitcher named Ooishi there were only 32 other players in the NPB "100 home run club". When he hit #200 a mere 2 years later there were only 12 other players with as many.  Two years later he joined the 300 home run club, which only consisted of 3 players.  And when he clobbered #550  five years after that he was in a club all by himself.  There seems to be an error in the last two entries of the number of games played column, it seems highly unlikely that it took him 2318 career games to reach 715 home runs, but didn't reach #755 until career game 10,145 (which would take about 70 seasons).  

Card #39 is also pretty neat.  It shows him on August 31, 1977 being interviewed after tying Aaron with his 755th home run.

The back of this card is also pretty cool, it shows a side by side comparison of the careers of Oh and Aaron from 1954 to 1977. The first few years are blank for Oh since he didn't play his first game until 1959, while 1977 is blank for Aaron since he retired after the 1976 season.  Its actually quite impressive that Oh accomplished his feat in four fewer seasons than Aaron, especially given the shorter season in NPB.  

The most famous, and valuable, card from this set is #93, which features Oh with Hank Aaron on the front.  I don't have that card, its pretty expensive (Engel lists it for $750 and I think that is about right, there is a graded copy in EM condition with a BIN price of 78,000 Yen available right now).  Even the regular Oh cards like these two cost a fair bit. Engel lists them at $200 which also seems to be in the right ballpark for the cards in high grade.  Some seem to sell for more, card #29 (which just features Oh, no Aaron) is currently the subject of a bidding war on Yahoo Auctions which currently stands at 36,000 Yen (about $350 US) with 3 days to go.   As you can see from the scans, mine have some condition issues which made them affordable enough to be in my price range!

Missing Noses, Chins, Eyebrows and Foreheads: The Worst Baseball Card Photo Cropping in History

 

I recently added the above card, #177 from the 1975 NST set featuring Shigeo Nagashima, to my collection.  

Its notable for the fact that although it depicts Shigeo Nagashima it does not depict all of Shigeo Nagashima's nose.  Or his left eye.  Or his left eyebrow.  Or the top and back of his hair.

You can really see those beads of sweat running down his face though.

This is the 1970s Japanese baseball card paradox.  On the one hand they feature some of the best photography in baseball card history and completely blow away the boring posed spring training shots that appeared on most Topps cards in the US from that period.  They are loaded with interesting shots, some candid, some in action, almost all taken during the regular season during games in the player's home stadium.

On the other hand they also feature some of the worst photos ever, mostly due to really bad photo cropping like the one above.  For all its faults, I've never seen a Topps card which cut the tip of the depicted player's nose off.

I have a small type collection of these on the go now.  They include:

Card: 1977 Calbee #17

You wouldn't know it but this card features all time home run leader Sadaharu Oh and all time hit leader Isao Harimoto singing a victory song after winning the pennant.  You can't see the top half of Oh and Harimoto's head.  They cropped it out in order to create more space at the bottom of the card for.....the backs of some photographers.

Card: 1976 Calbee #646

This card features 1975 PL MVP award winner Hideji Kato.  All of him except the top of his head.

Card: 1987 Calbee Tatsuo Komatsu

Ever wondered what former Dragons' pitcher Tatsuo Komatsu's chin looks like?  To this day I still don't know.  

Are there any examples out there of American cards (or other Japanese cards) cropped this badly?

Billboards on Cards

 

One thing I like to see on older cards is billboards in the background.  They give cards a distinctive period look when they are fortunate enough to have them.  

Grass today looks the same as grass 60 years ago.  Blue sky today looks the same as blue sky 60 years ago.  Human faces today look the same as human faces 60 years ago (save for hair and moustache styles).  Even baseball uniforms today look very similar to baseball uniforms 60 years ago.  These elements that you often see on a baseball card don't change much over time.  But billboards do.  Since advertising is constantly evolving to develop new ways of grabbing our attention billboards likewise constantly evolve and don't look the same from one decade to the next.

This is especially the case in Japan.  This is not a land of peaceful Zen gardens and picturesque Shinto shrines.  It is a land of billboards.  They are one thing that really distinguishes Japanese cities from those in most other countries.  Its standard practice in central urban areas for commercial buildings with good lines of sight to have giant structures on top of them which are sold for advertising.  This is what the Nakasu area in Fukuoka, just up the road from where I used to live, looks like for example:

This is what it looks like after dark:

There is an American writer named Alex Kerr who wrote a couple of famous books about Japan back in the 90s.  Mainly these books lament the loss of Japan's physical and aesthetic cultural heritage -  you don't see much traditional architecture in Japan which is a real shame.  I agree with him on a lot of points, but he also devotes some time to slamming the dominance of billboards in the urban environment, which he finds tacky.  This is where our opinions diverge, I love the billboards.  Look at the above photos and imagine how dreary and grey that location would look without all the vibrant color provided by the billboards, both during the day and at night.  They are the only thing that give these cityscapes some life.  

The billboard aesthetic of Japan in general is copied in the confines of Japanese baseball stadiums, where pretty much every piece of wall space is covered with them. 

 I really like the look of billboards on old cards, especially menko.  The artists who worked on them basically just splashed whatever color they want on the backgrounds of black and white photos.  Some of them look pretty cool. 

Calbee cards from the 70s are also pretty awesome and display some good 70s billboards.  

That is one thing I've always disliked about American cards from the late 50s onwards.  Since the photos were almost always taken at spring training facilities you'd rarely get billboards and if you did they would be for hyper local stuff in small Florida or Arizona cities.  On Japanese cards though you get a lot of them, which is pretty cool.  

Green Menko are a Sight to Behold

 

One menko set that I've recently been taken with is the 1958 Doyusha borderless set (JCM 30a).  

The set is famous for having an accidental Jackie Robinson card that was supposed to feature Roberto Barbon.  I don't have that card and its not my favorite (nothing against Jackie or Barbon, its just that it has a kind of boring head and shoulders photo).  What I really like are the cards that have a bit of action in them. They really are quite beautiful.

There is something about the hand colorization they used in this set that really has a nice artistic quality to it.  They gave a uniform color to most of the background - green in the cards I've chosen to highlight in this post.  It does such a good job of framing the action in the foreground.

These three cards are my favorite.  They are all commons (featuring Kokutetsu catcher Iwasaki in the top card, Giants catcher Fujio and Nishitetsu batter Takakura in the second one, and Nankai pitcher Kimura in the lower one).  Tetsuro Iwasaki is a particularly interesting card, he never played a full season in NPB and in very limited playing time across 3 seasons he accumulated a grand total of one hit in his entire career (career batting average: .059).  Its odd to see someone with such limited playing time, and for a less popular team at that, in a menko set, where they usually reserved most cards for star players on popular teams like the Giants.    

But I like them mainly because of how they look.  That green in the background looks so nice with the action in the foreground.  It also helps that they lack a border, I'm very partial to the menko sets without one.  

New Betto and Kawakami Menkos

 

I got these two cards a couple of weeks ago.  They came in the same lot of round menkos as my Takashi Eda card that I posted about last week.  

They really jump out at you with those vibrant colors and vivid patterns in the background.  They remind me a bit of 1935 Diamond Stars, at least in the impression they leave.

On the left is Tetsuharu Kawakami and on the right is Kaoru Betto, both pretty big name Hall of Famers from the 40s and 50s.  

I've never seen cards from this set before and they don't appear in Engel so I think they count as "new discoveries".

The only identification mark they have is the kanji 天　("heaven") in a circle.  I'm not sure what the significance of that is (and would appreciate if anyone knows!).  It might be a maker's mark.  There is one card/toy company called Amada which uses that kanji in its name (天田) and these might have been put out by them, though I didn't know they made menko back then.  They put out a set of baseball cards in the 1980s featuring Giants players which Dave did a write up about a few years ago.  They are a bit more well known for non sports cards which they put out in the 80s and I think they were responsible for some Famicom (the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System) related menko that were released that decade too. 

Another possibility is that it isn't a maker's mark, but some sort of game related symbol, though I don't know of any games that use that kanji for that purpose.  The cards don't have the usual paper/rock/scissors symbols or number associated with menko games either, which is a bit odd too.

Anyway, I like these cards a lot :)