2021 Calbee Series 1 is here.

 

Series 1 of the 2021 Calbee set is out in stores this week.  It wouldn't feel like the start of spring without them.

This year there is exciting news about the new Calbee set.

Ha!  Just kidding, its the exact same schlock they've been putting out every year for decades without anything but minor cosmetic changes here and there.  Which I admire them for.

This bag containing two cards and a bunch of chips that I don't like set me back 88 Yen (like 80 cents US or so).  Lets see what I got.

Lions second baseman  Shuuta Tonosaki's regular card and an MVP card of Hawks slugger Yuki Yanagita from the Title Holder subset (which I had to glean from Calbee's website since the card itself doesn't actually say it is from a subset called "Title Holder").   Not bad I guess. 

The cards are pretty standard in design.  They went with Roman letters for the player names on the front of the regular cards instead of kanji, which is about the only thing they seem to vary much from year to year anymore.  Backs of the cards are about the same as usual too.

Judging from the photos on the two cards I got, I predict that sometime in the next month or so I'll buy the whole regular set off one of the case breakers on Yahoo Auctions solely for the purpose of writing a post complaining about the mundane photography here.  Its become an annual tradition for me.

On a side note, I've been posting a bit less than usual this month, work has been extremely busy so has been keeping me away from it, a situation that will likely last into April but I'll try to do a post whenever I can squeeze in a bit of time.  

The REAL Hall of Fame Collection Bottleneck

 

A few days ago I wrote a post about how certain hall of famers, particularly those with exclusively pre-war careers, have very few cards of them and thus present a major obstacle to anyone trying to put together a collection of career contemporary cards of Japanese Hall of Famers.

Excluding Eiji Sawamura (who has no known cards) probably the most difficult player to get is Tokichiro Ishii.  Ishii was a star hitter for Waseda University in the 1940s and was also later a manager of the team.  He was elected into the Hall of Fame in 1995 and is notable as only the second player to enter the hall without any professional baseball experience ( the first was former Meiji University star Kichiro Shimaoka in 1991).

Because he never played professionally, Ishii doesn't appear in any of the professional player card sets of the late 1940s.  University stars featured prominently in the menko sets of the 1929-1931 time period (which pre-dated the establishment of a professional league), but he was too young to appear in any of those either.

There is exactly ONE set of cards which he does feature in, which is the 1948 Big Six University set (JRM 44).  The above is his card in that set, the only card of him ever made.

Unfortunately for Hall of Fame collectors, its a rare one - Engel lists it as R4, meaning that fewer than 10 copies are known to exist.  One hasn't appeared in a Prestige Collectibles auction in over a decade!

So while I'm not actively pursuing a Hall of Fame collection, I'm glad to have this one in my collection!

1948 Baseball Source

These are ten cards from the 1948 set Engel calls "Baseball Source"  (JCM 103).  I think they are called that based on the text on top of the back, which means the same.  

Its a pretty colorful set with some simple artwork as you can see.  My cards aren't in the best of shape but its a pretty rare set (R3) so they are the best I've been able to find!

 The baseball source on the back is the floating head in the upper right hand corner who asks a trivia question, the answer to which is the player on the front of the card.  So for Toshio Kawanishi's card for example it asks who the Hawks fastest runner was on the back.

These cards were part of a small pile of menko I recently picked up and on sorting them out I discovered that Engel's checklist of the set is incomplete.  Three of my cards aren't on it: Hisanori Karita, Michio Nishizawa and Shigeru Chiba (all three of them Hall of Famers).  So you can add these to the 15 listed in the guide.

The key card to the set is Victor Starffin which, unfortunately, I don't have.  But with the addition of these three to the known checklist that means there are 18 cards in this set (possibly more), and with ten so far I'm more than halfway to completing it.  

The Only Copy of the Only Card of This Guy Ever Made

 

In my previous post I talked a bit about this pre war menko I recently acquired. I identified it as  Kenjiro Matsuki on the grounds that the card says "Matsuki" and he was the only player with that name which I could find from that era, and the the fact that he wore glasses and looks quite a bit like the player depicted in the image.

What confused me though was that the card also clearly says Waseda University (the kanji on the right hand side of it), which Kenjiro Matsuki never attended (he went to rival Meiji University). I chalked this up as an error.

Then Prestige Collectibles contacted me on Twitter and pointed out that there was actually another guy with the same last name, Yoshio Matsuki, who was recorded on Waseda's roster from the same period (these rosters aren't available online, he literally had to look that up in an old paper copy - old school research is the best!).  So in all likelihood the card was not an error, but simply featured a different Matsuki!

I appreciated the work that went into tracking him down since  unlike Kenjiro Matsuki (who went on to play professionally and ended up in the Hall of Fame) Yoshio Matsuki is a pretty anonymous guy.  He never played professionally and Google searches for anything about him in Japanese turn up zero information.  Other than the fact that he was a pitcher for Waseda University between 1929 and 1933 we don't know anything about this guy.  I can't even find out if he wore glasses!

In some ways this makes this card even neater - its got to be the only card of this guy in existence.  I mean that literally, there is just one known copy of this one card of this guy who we basically know nothing about!  This is not something you can say about many cards!

Also I like the fact that I have a 100% global monopoly on Yoshio Matsuki cards, so anyone trying to collect this guy has no choice but to go through me.  I'm both literally and figuratively holding all the cards in any negotiation with such person were they to ever exist.  Ha.  Makes me feel very special :)