Its not just the photos, Calbee's promotions also suck

 

(Cracks knuckles) OK, sorry, I know I've been doing a lot of complaining about Japanese card sets as of late but I have a bit more to do.  We had some disappointment at our house this week which I'd like to talk about. 

Over the course of this year's baseball season, I've been collecting the Calbee set one bag at a time with my two kids.  Its been fun, though their enthusiasm sort of waned a bit as the season went on.

This week though I think it finally fell off a cliff.

One irritating thing about Calbee sets these days that I hadn't ever really paid much attention to before is that the "Lucky Cards" are insanely hard to pull.  My son got one in June from a bag of Series 1 which made him very excited.  I thought that was really cool, but we blew threw dozens and dozens of bags of Series 2 Chips without hitting one.  The guys who rip open cases of them suggest that the Lucky Cards are seeded  at a rate of about 1 per 150 bags.  Which is kind of weird given that the prizes you get (like a crummy plastic album that only holds 48 cards) aren't exactly valuable. 

My son however really wanted a Series 2 Lucky card because the promotion said it was redeemable for a special set of cards of the team of your choice and he wanted the Dragons one.  Not having pulled one form a pack, I went on Yahoo Auctions and bought one from a re-seller for 1500 Yen.  I then sort of surreptitiously slipped it into a pack that I pretended I was opening for my son, handed it to him and let him pull it out.  

That was so great!

When you pull a Lucky Card, you have to cut out a little tab on them, glue it to a postcard and mail it to Calbee.  Then they'll send you the prize.  For Series 1 we got a crummy little album.  But we were excited for the Series 2 prize since special cards were certain to be way better than that.

So we waited a whole month and finally they arrived on Wednesday!

My son opened the envelope and out plopped......a stack of cards that was mostly regular Dragons cards from the base set which are available in packs. There were 8 cards total, 6 were just the regular Dragons cards.  Only 2 of them were from the Star Card subset with gold embossed signatures.  

"I already have these" he said in disappointment, and just dumped them on the table and walked off.

This kind of laziness on the part of the makers of Japanese baseball card sets has really been pissing me off this month.  Last week my son opened a box of 2022 Topps NPB that is so bad they more or less forgot to put anything on the card backs, and now this.  

What particularly annoys me is that Calbee used to have really great Lucky Card promotions.  The first time I tried putting a set together bag by bag was in 2004.  The Lucky Cards were way easier to pull back then, I probably bought about 100 bags that year and I ended up getting 8 Lucky Cards, so it was about a 1:12 ratio rather than a 1:150 ratio like today and you could reasonably feel a bit of excitement that these were things you could expect to pull every once in a while (as opposed to almost never now).

And the prizes you could redeem them for were actually really awesome.  This is what I got from the Series 2 Lucky Cards:

A whole boxed set of cards that were not available in packs!  24 cards in total.  

Granted that to get these you had to send in three Lucky Card tabs rather than one, but given how much easier they were to find it was still way easier to get one of these than it is to get a 2022 team set of just 8 cards, most of which are just cards from the regular base set anyway.  Also, bags of Calbee chips cost about 60 Yen each in 2004 but are about 100 Yen today.

I really think Calbee is shooting itself in the foot by cheaping out so badly on these Lucky Card promotions.  My son was so excited when he pulled that first one back in June.  If they'd have made that pay off by actually sending him something fun like a card set similar to what they did in 2004 he'd probably have kept that enthusiasm level up.  But instead he's been burned twice with a lousy album that isn't even big enough to fit the set into, and now a pile of cards that are mostly worthless doubles to him. This crap isn't how you turn kids into lifelong collectors of your product, its how you encourage them to find other things to do.  Which is probably for the best I guess.

With the season over (from the perspective of a last place Dragons fan anyway) we've got a few months off now.  I'll give the 2023 Calbees a try when Series 1 comes out, but I'm not holding out much hope that the kids will be into it like they were this year.  And I'm putting most of the blame for that on Calbee's shoulders.  

1947 JRM 30 Menkos

 

For the first time in a very long time I was able to add some new vintage menko to my collection. These cards are from the set that Engel catalogues as JRM 30 and dates to 1947.  They are identifiable mainly by the little diamond with a triple K in it, and also by the way the text is contained in curved rectangles on the sides.

Engel has catalogued twenty cards in this set, which he rates an R4 (fewer than 10 known copies of each card in existence), so its possible there are more.  As you can see, I have eight of them, including some HOFers like Shigeru Chiba and Fujio Fujimura.

One thing I like about the set is that though crude the artwork is far superior to the photography in contemporary Calbee sets.  You've got players in a variety of poses, doing a variety of things against a variety of backgrounds.  Quite refreshing compared to the monotony of all photos on modern Calbee cards being more or less carbon copies of each other.  

The people who made this set were doing so in a Japan that was economically devastated, suffering from widespread malnutrition and whose cities had just been reduced to rubble by a massive bomber campaign just two years earlier.  If they could make an interesting set in those conditions, Calbee today really has no excuses.

Anyway, the reason I haven't added many vintage menko to my collection these days is simply that the explosion in prices in the US card market has spread to Japan and I've been priced out of the market on most of the stuff that comes up on Yahoo Auctions for the past 18 months or so.  Its been frustrating because there has been a lot of stuff come up for sale that I would have been able to snap up back in 2020, but which these days easily sell for 5 times more than what they used to, sometimes more.  These ones somehow slipped through the cracks and didn't get much attention, so I was able to pay 2020 prices for them.  This might be the last addition to my menko collection for a while, barring either a complete collapse in the market or me winning a lottery (which is a particular long shot since I don't buy lottery tickets).

Also, since I mentioned Engel's guide I should mention that he recently put out a 3rd edition which I recently purchased.  If you collect vintage Japanese cards I'd say it is worth picking up the new edition, he's added a fair number of new cards to it (and if you don't have the old edition you absolutely should get it). 

2022 Topps NPB Sucks, Don't Ever Buy It

 

There is no stronger motivation to return to blogging after a couple of months hiatus than the desire to complain about something.  Fortuitously the purchase of a box of 2022 Topps NPB has provided me with a very good opportunity to validate that hypothesis.

It was my son's birthday this week and having almost completed the Calbee set this year one bag of chips at a time together I thought I'd get him a box of cards we could rip and try to put the set together in one go.  I found boxes of both Topps and BBM on Yahoo Auctions and decided to give the Topps one a try.  I picked it up almost a month ago and set it aside until the big day.

My son had fun opening the packs.  That is almost the only nice thing that I can say about this set.  I could say the same about packs of 1991 Donruss or pretty much any other set for that matter so....yeah.

This set just sucks so bad I don't know where to start.  So I'll start with the box itself.  That is an ugly, unimaginatively designed box.  The packs inside, which I don't have a photo of handy, are even more boring to look at.  I remember what Topps boxes were like in the 80s - very colorful designs with pictures of cards of the stars on them.  They made you really want to buy the packs.  To further entice you they even made the boxes themselves out of cards, which was an ingenious idea.  

2022 Topps NPB basically looks like a carton of cigarettes sold in a country with very strict plain packaging laws.  I almost expected to see a giant warning about lung cancer with a scary picture of a damaged lung on the side.  This is just as god awful a package design as you can get.

But what about the cards themselves?  Well....

They almost exactly copied the 2022 MLB Topps design except that they didn't put the team logo where the team logo is supposed to go.  Kind of dull but not awful.  I give them points for having slightly better photography than Calbee, which is not a high standard.

The backs though just make my blood boil:

What the F is this?  Is this a joke?  This is a joke right?  Tell me this is a joke.  This can't not be a joke, so it must be a joke. 

My favorite part of the joke is where they could only fit two lines of stats (2021 and career) at the very bottom because they needed to devote the rest of the card back to....nothing!  Literally empty space with nothing but a tiny team logo taking up about 15% of it.  

This is so gratuitously awful I almost have to ask if mischievous vandals might have broken into the Topps offices and replaced whatever the real design for the card backs was with this....this....this.....this..... (voice from the guy sitting next to me as I type this: "Tomfoolery"?) TOMFOOLERY, yes, thank you.

Oh and you know what the insert cards are?  These same garbage cards but with different colored borders!  And a retro throwback subset using the 1958 Topps design, perhaps chosen because that is the dullest one that could be copied with the least amount of effort possible.  No autographed cards or anything like that of course.

This set just sucks so bad I actually feel kind of guilty about having insulted my first born child by having made a gift of these to him.  I hope one day when he is old enough to appreciate how bad these cards are that he will forgive me.  

Anyway, I guess I got what I paid for.  This set was released last month with a suggested retail price of 13,200 Yen per box.  I paid 8,000 for this one on Yahoo Auctions, and there are plenty available to be had at around that price.  Word seems to be getting around about how much these suck.  Good.  I hope this post will contribute to that.  Be forewarned: 2022 Topps NPB is the worst set of baseball cards I've seen in......I don't know how long but a while.

For Christmas, I'll be getting my son a box of 2022 BBM.  

1991 Calbee Uncut Proof Sheet

 
I missed out on winning a pretty cool thing on Yahoo Auctions yesterday.  It is an uncut proof sheet of 1991 Calbee baseball cards.  I've never seen anything like this before.

This isn't an uncut sheet of 1991 Calbee cards that were released in packs, but rather a test sheet that was used in their development.  

According to the seller (I haven't checked) some of the cards were not actually released, including Tsunemi Tsuda's (which has a photo of someone else on it) and also Takeshi Kobayakawa, whose name is mis-spelled Kobaykawa on the front:

This was one of those "things I didn't even know I wanted until I saw it, then I wanted it a lot".  I put a bid on really having no idea what this thing was worth or if it would get much traction.  In the end it sold for 36,500 Yen, which at today's exchange rate I think works out to about $2.47 US.  That was about triple my high bid, so I had to drop out.  I thought it was  a pretty neat thing though.  I'd say I was now looking for more, but this might have been a one of a kind thing so perhaps that boat has sailed!

Card Rich, Cash Poor

 

I suspect that over the course of the last two years a new major class of baseball card collector has emerged: the Card Rich, Cash Poor collector.  I am one of them.

This is kind of a lucky thing to be, though it also has its drawbacks.  Basically this is the collector who is not wealthy and does not have a high paying job (cash poor) but prior to the explosion in prices had been able to build up a decent collection of old cards when they were cheap and is now sitting on a collection worth many times what was originally paid for it (card rich).

In retrospect I now realize that I was pretty lucky to get back into baseball cards at the time I did, because I have a pretty decent vintage American card collection (which I don't talk about much on here) which I was fortunate enough to put together at exactly the right moment, allowing me to boast of being card rich and cash poor today.

For about a six year period between 2009 and 2015 I dabbled a bit in selling old Japanese video games that I scoured from junk bins in second hand shops.  This generated a couple hundred bucks or so a month, sometimes more, which I treated as kind of "found money".Since it was accumulating in a Paypal account, I decided to find out what that whole Ebay thing everyone was talking about was and I ended up going down the vintage baseball card listing rabbit hole.

I was pretty amazed to find that vintage cards which had been so crazily in demand back in the late 80s/ early 90s when I had previously collected were so plentiful and cheap.  It was like I was a kid in a candy store, I basically started converting most of my video game sales money into old baseball cards every month, month after month for six years.

Around 2015 or so my supply of old video games started to dry up, and with it my baseball card budget, so my six year spending spree came to an end, but not before I had built up a pretty decent collection.  Which is now worth several times more than what I paid for it back then.

On the one hand, this is great.  The "I hope my wife doesn't find out how much I'm spending on baseball cards" stress that I felt back in 2009-2015 has been replaced with a much better "How do I tell my wife that my baseball card collection is worth enough to cover a significant portion of our kids' university tuition in the future?" feeling.  Its way better than if the reverse had happened, I can tell you.

On the other hand though, its also destroyed the collecting goals I used to have.  For example, one thing I had dreamed of doing was putting together a 1956 Topps set, which I've always thought was the most beautiful.  I was able to piece together all of the major stars in the set (pictured above) except Williams and Mantle.  I didn't pay more than 100$ for any of those cards (PSA 4 Jackie Robinson was the most expensive at 95$) and the Williams would have easily been in my budget and even the Mantle would have been feasible.  

But the run up in prices over the past two years has crushed that idea - I wouldn't be able to afford any of those cards today. While the value of my collection has soared my regular income has stayed the same.  So while I'm happy to have this really amazing partial 1956 set, I'm also frustrated to know that it is one I'll never be able to complete.  There are a few others that fall into the same category.

I suspect that there are a lot of collectors out there in a similar situation.  What do we do with these cards?  Hold onto them even though they are part of collecting goals that are no longer feasible?  Sell them to raise money for things we actually need even though we really like them?  

Its not a bad situation to be in and I'm not complaining about it, but I'm curious if the scale of collectors in this situation might result in new hobby trends.  

Kevin Maas of the Hanshin Tigers

 

This card is sort of an age test.  If you are old enough to have been collecting baseball cards in 1990 then you know that for a little while in the summer of that year this was one of the hottest cards in the hobby.  If you started collecting in 1991 or later, this is just some random common from the 1990 Upper Deck set.

I remember Kevin Maas very well since he got called up to the Yankees in the middle of the 1990 season to replace my favorite player at the time, Don Mattingly.  Maas went on a tear and made huge headlines for hitting his first 10 home runs in just 72 at bats, the fastest to do so in MLB history.  He kept up the pace and hit 21 home runs in just half a season, making him one of the most sought after rookie cards for collectors that year.

Then 1991 came around and he fell to Earth, never repeating his success in his rookie year and was out of the Majors by 1995.

An interesting post-script to his career though is that in the middle of the 1996 season he signed on with the Hanshin Tigers to replace Glenn Davis who left the team in June.  He came over with big expectations and owing to the phonetic similarity of his last name to that of Randy Bass Tigers fans were able to use their Randy Bass song to cheer for him (not an impressive fact per se, but a pretty neat piece of trivia nonetheless).

Despite the high expectations, Maas didn't hit much better in NPB than he had in MLB and after 68 games with the Tigers in which he just hit .245 with 8 home runs he retired from the game.

As far as I can tell (and anyone who knows otherwise please correct me: EDIT: Twitter came through, he does have a card in a BBM subset that I had missed), Maas doesn't have any baseball cards of him as a Hanshin Tiger, since he only played half a season and, as a late signing, missed out on being in any of the 1996 sets.  In fact even when I do a Google image search for him in Japanese the only photo I can find of him as a Tiger is this grainy black and white head shot:

So he's basically a guy without any cards.  But I discovered by accident the other day that he does appear as a Tiger in an alternative medium: on the Nintendo 64.

I've had one of these for years and since my son got interested in baseball a few months ago I pulled out an old game for it: Hyper Space Night Game: Pro Baseball King.  

If you haven't heard of it, it was a Japan only release.  It features all 12 NPB teams from the 1996 season (the year the game was released).  For a 26 year old baseball game, it holds up pretty well and we like to play it a lot.  Current Dragons manager Kazuyoshi Tatsunami appears as a player on it so we play the Dragons a lot.

The other day though we were playing a game with the Hanshin Tigers and I was surprised to see that the game has as the Tigers #3 batter none other than Kevin Maas!

Its a bit hard to see his face - and all the players in Hyperspace Night Game Pro Yakyu King look the same anyway - but that is his name in the lower left hand corner of the screen there:

He hits for pretty decent power in this game, which came out in December of 1996, by which time he had already left the Tigers but presumably they had actually made the game earlier than its release date. 

Anyway, I thought this was a kind of neat anomaly - a recognizable name player who doesn't have a baseball card of himself with a team but does appear in a video game as a member of that team.  So if you are a Kevin Maas collector and want something - anything - of him as a Hanshin Tiger, this game  might be your only option. 

Not a condition sensitive country, the one I live in.

 

I bought a lot of 1984 Calbee cards on Yahoo Auctions the other day.  The seller was quite nice and even gave me a refund on the shipping since the lot sold for more than he thought it would.  I was pretty excited about this one since I've recently decided that its a set I want to concentrate on - I find the little hats on them just really drawing me to them.

Anyway, the lot (129 cards) arrived in the mail the other day in a Japan Post Yupack mailer (like a cardboard envelope) and when I opened it up, out poured 129 1984 Calbee cards in stacks, each with a rubber band wrapped around it. No protection of any sort to, you know, try to keep the condition of a bunch of vintage cards I had just paid a fair bit of money for in presentable condition or anything like that.

This is not an unusual experience here.  I've bought thousands of cards over the past decade on Yahoo Auctions, mostly vintage, but I could count on one hand the number of those which came packed in a rigid card holder.  At best maybe 1/5 of the time they'll come in penny sleeves.  But most of the time they come in some version of the above - loose and without much care being taken to protect them from damage (and sometimes with packing - like rubber bands - that itself might damage them).

I guess this doesn't happen too much in the US on Ebay since so many collectors are so insanely sensitive about condition there.  I've read posts on various forums where people express outrage about being sent a card that came enclosed in a solid PSA holder that was "only" packed in a single bubble wrapped envelope and I just laugh out loud at that stuff.

While I do appreciate the dealers here who do go to some effort to protect the cards I buy from them, I also love the fact that I still get so many experiences like this - opening envelopes and having raw old cards wrapped in rubber bands fall into my hands.  Its just so laid back that its hard not to like it. 

Anyway, with this lot my 1984 Calbee set has made some progress, I'm actually a bit over half-way there to the 713 cards in it.  This is a bit of an overstatement though as there are a couple of hundred expensive short printed cards in the set and I only have 6 of them, so I've basically just gotten the low hanging fruit so far (including this lot - 129 cards and only 1 of them was a short print).

Fastest Card Bubble To Burst in History

 

Well, that didn't last long!

On Monday I did a post about how the above card  of Shinjo with his name as "Big Boss" from the just released Calbee Series 2 had sold on Yahoo Auctions for a whopping 33,500 Yen (about $300 US).  This didn't make much sense to me since its just a Shinjo card and, while its a "chase" card its not a particularly rare one.

Out of curiosity I started watching other auctions for the same card.  The first two ended last night (here and here).  Exact same card, exact same condition.  How much did they sell for?

Ouch.  One copy for about $40 US, the other about $30.  So in other words the card fell to 1/10th the price it went for on Monday by Wednesday of the same week.

This is really weird.  I mean, the auctions in the 30-40$ range that ended yesterday feel a lot closer to what this card should be worth than the ridiculous 300$ auction price of just a couple days before.

I'm a bit puzzled, but I'll try to throw a theory out here to see if it sticks.  There is a kind of norm in Japan, amongst those who have lots of money, that being the first to own a new thing brings a great deal of prestige to you.  Thus the market value for being the "first" owner of something is way higher than it is for being the second owner of the exact same thing.  

The most famous example of this are the prices that are paid for the first tuna to go on sale at the Tsukiji market each  year.  In 2019 for example a single tuna sold for about 3 million US$ at Tsukiji because it was the first.  There are less dramatic examples out there too.

I wonder if the $300 Big Boss card might have only achieved that price because it was the very first copy of that card to appear on Yahoo Auctions and so some rich/vain collectors bid each other up on it in order to have braggging rights for being the first to land it.  

Edited to Add: I've been having a back and forth with Prestige Collectibles on Twitter and he pointed out that the seller on that 300$ sale earlier this week has a ridiculously low feedback rate, and also that the underbidder seems to have had his account suspended.  So this raises the likelihood that the 300$ sale was a bogus one to begin with, thus rendering a lot of what I wrote in this post moot!  

Big Boss is Commanding Big Prices

 

This is the first time in years that I've tried putting a Calbee set together bag by bag (or more accurately its the first time ever that my kids have done so).  One result of this is that I've been paying more attention to the shiny, glittery cards that Calbee puts in them  than usual.

In terms of "chase" cards, Calbee basically operates in an early 90s American cardmaker mindset.  In addition to "Lucky Cards" redeemable for prizes, the main cards people go after are basically just parrallel versions of cards from some subsets that have gold signatures embossed on them.  

All the other stuff that cardmakers in the US started doing after the early 90s - auto cards, memorabilia cards, buy-back cards, etc etc - none of these have ever been adopted by Calbee.

Series 2 of Calbee just came out and my kids and I are excited to start putting that one together (we are very close to finishing Series 1, which is kind of an impressive feat if I do say so myself).  The card that is getting the most hype in that one by far is.....a card of the manager of the team with the worst record in NPB by far, who as a player was a .254 career hitter.  

Tsuyoshi Shinjo became the Fighters' manager this year and on taking the job changed his name to "Big Boss".  Calbee gave him a card in their Star Cards subset with the name "Big Boss" and everyone thinks that is super neat here.  So much so that a copy of the gold parrallel version of that card just  sold for about $300 US on Yahoo Auctions over the weekend.

Yikes!  Its not hard to predict that once the hype fades away and there are a million other "Big Boss" cards out there, this card will not be worth anywhere near that much.  

In the meantime though I'm kind of wondering what I should do if my kids pull one of those out of a pack.  Thus far I haven't really been trying to get them to pay attention to the condition of the cards too much since that sort of grown-up anal retentiveness can really kill the fun of collecting for young kids.  But at the same time....300$ is 300$ so maybe I'll slip that one into a card saver if they get it.

1980s Calbee Unopened Packs

I picked up something new the other day - a lot of three unopened packs of Calbee cards from the 1980s.  I've seen auctions for these come up from time to time and had always wanted to get one (or three).

Its easy to tell that the packs are from the 1980s owing to the size of the cards - all Calbee cards from 1981 to 1989 were mini card sized.  Somewhat confusingly some series from both the 1980 and 1990 sets, but not all of them, were also the same size.  So if you get a pack of mini cards you know its from no earlier than 1980 and no later than 1990.

But what specific year in that range do you have if you get one?  That is a bit harder to determine, since the packs themselves do not state a year (except in 1989).  The easiest way of course is to just open them up and have a look, but then you won't have an unopened pack anymore.

I did a bit of looking around and discovered that a Japanese blog called the "Calbee Card Research Centre", which is great for really detailed info on some Calbee cards, recently did a series of posts on the subject of identifying 1980s Calbee packs.  

To simplify what is written there over the course of several posts, Calbee changed the color of the packs each year and also varied the design slightly. By color it breaks down like this (click on the link for each year to see his post with pictures of what the design of each looks like. Years without a link are ones which I included based on Dave's comment on this post).

Green packs: 1984, 1985 and 1987

Blue Packs: 1980, 1981, 1982, 1986 , 1989, and 1990

Red Packs: 1983

This isn't quite a full list since they don't have posts about the 1981, 1984, 1988 or 1990 packs (whcih I've included above based on Dave's comment below) but its a pretty useful resource so far despite that.  For some years there is a bit of variation in the design (but not the color) of the packs from series to series and the posts contain information about that too.

Looking through those, I was able to determine that the three packs I bought were from 1985, which is pretty cool . I'm very tempted to open them, but I'm going to try to resist that temptation and keep them as they are since they are one of those things where the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.  

Major Excitement at My House Last Night

Had some major excitement at my house last night.  I brought home three bags of Calbee baseball chips from work.  The kids and I have been putting the set together bag by bag this year which has been great fun.  One thing that I have discovered  in the process is that putting a set of Calbee cards together that way is made massively easier if you have three mouths to eat the chips rather than just one.   I've tried putting sets together on my own a few times in the past and it always ended up with my house overflowing with bags of potato chips that I just couldn't eat because there were too many of them.  We've actually got about 3/4 of the base set put together now, which is pretty good.

The excitement of opening bags has been waning recently though as we inevitably are getting mostly doubles now.  But there was one thing that was keeping our enthusiasm up - the chase for a Lucky Card.

As I've written about on here before, Lucky Cards are cards that you can redeem for prizes.  This year's Lucky Card will get you a card album, which is an extremely enticing prize for a seven or four year old kid.  They've been wanting one of these ever since we opened the first bag but so far we've been out of luck.

Until last night that is.  After dinner and after my son did his homework, I gave him one of the bags to open.  He opened up the cards and immediately started bouncing off the walls screaming "I got a Lucky Card!!!!!!" in excitement.  Seeing a kid get a card he really wanted like that is an impressive thing to behold.  It reminded me of my own childhood when I'd get a Don Mattingly in a pack.  I had my camera handy so I snapped some pictures of his moment of victory.

So this morning I stopped off at the post office to buy a pre-paid postcard.  We have to cut out a tab on the Lucky Card, glue it to the postcard and mail it to Calbee, and within a month they say they'll have our card album at the door.  That is so great since it means the excitement of the chase for a Lucky Card is now replaced by the excitement of the wait for a package to arrive in the mail.  He'll be checking that mailbox every day when he comes home from school for the next few weeks until the day it arrives.

This makes me really psyched about Calbee Series 2, which should be hitting the stores later this month and will mean a whole new chance to chase the Lucky Card in that one for whatever prize they'll be giving out that time.  

1929 Shonen Club Babe Ruth with the rest of the Set

An interesting item sold on Yahoo Auctions yesterday (not to me unfortunately!).  

It was a 1929 Shonen Club Babe Ruth. which I have written about on here before.  I was fortunate enough to pick up a copy of this card a few years ago before the recent price explosion.  I don't think I could afford to buy one now.  

What interested me in this particular auction was that it wasn't just for the Ruth, but rather for the complete set of postcards it was originally sold with, complete with the box and everything.

I had long been curious about that.  While I've seen several Shonen Club Ruth listings on Yahoo Auctions over the years, I had never seen what the complete set of cards it came with looked like until now.  

As you can see from these highlights, it was a pretty eclectic set in terms of subject matter.  There are 40 cards total and the Ruth is the only sports figure.  The rest are a mix of historical events, famous places, animals, historical figures and that sort of thing.  

This ended up selling for about ten times what my own Ruth set me back:

The cards other than Ruth aren't really worth anything more than what an old postcard is worth, but taken as a set with the box they probably add some value to it (and certainly make it more interesting).  Also that Ruth looks like it is in "fresh from the box" condition so its not surprising it sold for so much. 

1985 Calbee Contest Badge

 

I discovered something really neat on a Yahoo Auction that ended yesterday and I'm racked with doubt about whether I should have stayed in the bidding (I dropped out and didn't win it).

This is a badge that was issued by Calbee in 1985.  As I've written about on here before that year Calbee had a contest in which kids could send in drawings of their favorite players and, if they were selected, they would be featured on the back of a Calbee card of that player.  As a result, about 100 cards in the 1985 Calbee set feature artwork by children on the backs of them, which makes them one of my favorite Calbee series ever.

I had never seen one of these badges before, but the "Contest 1985" that it refers to is this one (the kanji 似顔絵 that you can see on it means drawing of a face).  

These badges seem to have been sent out to kids who sent in drawings.  I'm not sure if these were sent out to everyone who entered the contest, or only those whose drawings were chosen.  This is a pretty big distinction from a collector's standpoint since if it was the former there were likely thousands of these sent out, while if it were the latter there would only have been about one hundred.

Either way, they are a neat piece of baseball card ephemera, especially for a Calbee collector like myself. That is why I have some regrets about having dropped out of the bidding.  It went for 3641 Yen (about 30$ US) and I was the second highest bidder.  I was of two minds about whether to bid more.  On the one side, this is a really neat find and not one that is likely to come along again any time soon (ten years of scouring YJA and this is the first I've ever seen).  On the other hand, its not a Calbee baseball card and I'm not a badge collector so it would have been an awkward fit with my collection.  And 30$ is a lot to pay for a badge.  The latter argument won out in the end and I let it go, but I would have liked to have added this to my collection so I'm a bit disappointed.

I really wish Calbee would do a contest like this again.  I say this as the father of a 7 year old who loves both baseball and drawing, and has even started to sketch pictures of his favorite players.  He would go absolutely bonkers with excitement at the idea of getting a drawing of his on a real baseball card.  But its 2022 and this hobby of ours is now dominated by grown ups who aren't into that sort of thing, which sucks (and yes, I realize as I say it that I too am a grown up collector.....).  

Spurious Correlation? Japanese Potato Production and Calbee Baseball Cards

 

One thing that you sometimes see get mentioned in discussion about the relative scarcity of certain Calbee baseball card sets in Japan is that there was a poor potato harvest in a given year which in turn led Calbee to reduce sales of its baseball cards in that year.  This seems logical since the two are inextricably linked - all Calbee cards have for years only been sold with potato chips, so if there are fewer potatoes to make those chips its not entirely inconceivable that this would result in fewer baseball cards as well.  

This has always intrigued me since it suggests the existence of a potential correlation between two variables - potato and baseball card production - that would be unique to Japan and to the hobby.  And it would add a neat piece of hobby trivia to all the other bits floating around out there.

So I decided to try to statistically prove or disprove the existence of this correlation.

To do so I gathered data on both variables: potatoes and cards.  For data on annual potato production in Japan I consulted the Potato Pro website's Japan page which allows you to search official figures on potato production.  I hand collated the annual data from 1997 to 2013.

For data on Calbee baseball cards I could not locate official figures on annual production from Calbee, so I had to use a proxy.  Yahoo Auctions listings in its baseball card category for Calbee cards are broken down on a year by year basis and may be a useful substitute for official figures in this regard, subject to certain limitations.  Yahoo Auctions is the biggest auction site in Japan, effectively its equivalent to Ebay,  and is one where a large volume of baseball cards are bought and sold. At the time of writing there were 69,997 Calbee cards listed for sale so it represents a relatively large pool of data.  The number of Calbee cards available for sale on Yahoo Auctions in a given year category is not a perfect proxy for the number of cards produced in that year but the numbers are large enough to suggest that differences in the number of cards originally produced would show up as differences in the number available on Yahoo Auctions today.  I thus hand collated the data on the number of listings for cards available each year from 1997 to 2013.

I chose to set the year range from 1997 to 2013 for two reasons.  1997 was chosen as a cut off point since it marked the beginning of the "modern" style of Calbee card, and the availability of cards on Yahoo Auctions is likely to be a better reflection of the number of cards originally produced for cards after that year since the surviving population is less likely to have been affected by events like moms throwing them away, as cards from the 1970s to early 90s were (in Japan the collecting hobby developed a couple of decades later than its American counterpart).  2013 was selected as the upper limit simply because from 2014 onwards Yahoo Auctions stopped breaking listings down by year (for some reason).  One other oddity worth noting is that for the years 2000 and 2001 for reasons that are unclear Yahoo Auctions lumped both years into a single category, so I assigned half to each year in my data. Another limitation to note is that while most of the listings are for single cards, some are for lots, something I haven't taken the time to weed out. 

What do the data tell us?  I tried to present it in the line chart at the top of this post.  The orange line tells you the number of Calbee cards from a given year available on Yahoo Auctions, while the blue line tells you the domestic potato production that year (expressed in 10s of thousands of tons).  

On the card side you can see there is a huge spike in 1999, then a massive drop in 2002 which recovered in 2003 and 2004, since when there has been a general declining trend though marked by fluctuations from year to year.

On the potato side  there has been a decline in potato production between 1997 (3,390,000 tons) and 2013 (2,400,000 tons), though there is a fair bit of fluctuation year on year in there too (less pronounced however).  

When I run a simple linear regression analysis with the baseball cards set as the dependent variable and potato production as the independent, the results suggest there is no significant correlation between the two (R squared = 0.050602).  In other words, potato production has no effect on baseball card availability.

After running that though I realized that there was one factor which I had to adjust for.  In the years 2007 and 2009-2013 Calbee distributed their cards two per bag.  In the other years, they only distributed one per bag.  This would suggest that the "two cards per bag" years were being over-represented in the Yahoo Auctions data since every two cards would represent one bag of potato chips in those years.  To correct for this, I divided the number of Yahoo Auctions listings for those years in half.

Running the same regression using that data, the R-squared jumps to 0.328352.  That is still low - especially given the small sample size involved (just 16 years of data) - and suggests that a lot of other factors which this simple two-variable model isn't capturing are more important than potato production in determining how many Calbee cards get made. But its at least big enough that the relevance of potato production might be a bit more than background noise and could have some effect on Calbee card availability.

From a statistical point of view I haven't exactly put this question to a very rigorous analysis here, but I think it was kind of an interesting exercise.  In terms of its limitations, if you look at the data from individual years its quite easy  to see that potato production isn't always a major determinant of Calbee baseball card production in a given year. 2002 illustrates this point well - as you can see from the chart there was a huge drop in baseball card production that year, but at the same time potato production reached the second highest level in the data set (tied with 1998).  This was an outlier though - 2002 was the year Japan co-hosted the World Cup and the greater interest in soccer that year reduced demand for baseball cards.  For other years its worth noting that a lot of the correlation comes from the period between 2004 and 2013 in which both baseball card availability and potato production slowly declined in tandem.  Its entirely possible that this is pure coincidence and the two have nothing to do with each other. Or not, who knows?  We need more data on other variables to try to untangle this mess.   

Willie Davis 1977 Calbee

 

I picked up another nice card the other day, this is Willie Davis' card from the 1977 Calbee set that Engel refers to as the "Pro Series" (JC 5c) (keeping track of 1977 Calbee sets is difficult as Dave recently noted in his write up on late 70s Calbee sets).  

I've been wanting to get this card for a while, I have a a couple of Yamakatsu cards of Davis that I got a few years ago but they both depict him as a member of the Crown Lighter Lions. As a Dragons fan I wanted one of him in that awesome 70s Dragons uniform, and this one displays it perfectly.  The Coke billboard in the background is a nice added touch.

This particular 1977 Calbee set (out of the eleven that were made that year, which Dave has also recently written about) is somewhat harder to find singles for than most, so this one took a while to find.  A dealer on Yahoo Auctions had listed it for 5,000 Yen and last week he suddenly had a 40% off sale and I knew I had to pounce.  I'm quite happy with it, its in very nice condition by the standards of 1970s Calbees.

The back of the card shows us Willie's MLB career totals (batting average, RBI and stolen bases) which reminds us that he was one of the elite group of MLB "Hall of Very Gooders" to play in Japan.  The career totals on the back are not his final totals though, since he played 43 games for the Angels in 1979 after his stint in NPB and nudged his totals up a bit (and brought his career batting average down a point).

Davis features prominently in Robert Whitings "You Gotta Have Wa", mostly about how his Buddhist chanting annoyed his teammates on the Dragons, which is one of those pieces of Dragons history that I just love.  

Baseball Cards at a Dragons Game

 

I took my kids to a game at the Nagoya Dome yesterday.  It was an interleague game - Dragons vs. Hawks.  

My son has really gotten into baseball this year so there was a lot of excitement building up to the big day.  He made the above sign, which says "Dragons" and features the Calbee cards of some of this year's players (basically all the ones that appear in Series 1 that he has gotten so far - he's been getting lots of doubles of Yohei Oshima for some reason).  So it was pretty cool to get out there and hold that up for the first time.

The Dome was a sell out crowd (Sunday plus interleague play = everyone wants to go).  We had seats on the first base side, near the outfield.  

The Hawks scored once in the top of the 1st inning, so I was a bit concerned the game would end in disappointment.  But the Dragons came back to score three in the bottom half, including an RBI double by Dayan Viciedo who is my son's favorite player so we got to do a lot of excited cheering from that point on.

They went on to win 7-3, which was a great outcome.  The Dragons season had been collapsing prior to the start of interleague play - they dropped 9 out of 10 going into it, but the've picked up the pace now and took 2 out of 3 from both the Eagles and the Hawks and have crawled their way back to near .500.  

It was a pretty awesome day - I got to smother my kids in Dragons merch and except for my daughter falling asleep on my lap in the fifth (very difficult balancing act when you are squeezed into those tiny seats) everything went well and the kids were quite happy when we went to the train station for the ride home afterwards.  

Japan's Greatest Pitcher's only Calbee Card isn't even his own Card

 

I picked up this card on Yahoo Auctions this week.  Its Shigeo Nagashima's manager card from one of the 1977 Calbee sets.

Nagashima appears on a ton of 1970s Calbee cards as a manager.  The other guy, who is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the card front or back, is what makes this card way more interesting.  

That is Masaichi Kaneda, arguably Japan's all time greatest pitcher who racked up 400 career wins.

Kaneda retired as a pitcher after the 1969 season, which was four years before Calbee started making baseball cards and thus he doesn't have any Calbee cards from his playing days.  He started managing the Orions in 1973, the same year as Calbee's debut, but owing to the legendary Calbee/Lotte feud Calbee didn't produce any cards of Orions players until 1985.

Thus Calbee never produced a card featuring Japan's all time wins leader.  Except this one.  Its only a cameo appearance, but its a prominent enough one to I think describe this as a Nagashima/Kaneda card rather than just a Nagashima card.  

Dave picked up a copy of this card a couple of years ago on his trip to Japan and it intrigued me, so I am glad to add it to the collection.  In addition to Kaneda, this is one of the very few cards to feature anything related to the Lotte Orions in a Calbee set from the 70s so its interesting on that account to.

This 1977 set is kind of the "main" one from that year, featuring 216 cards.  With this one I have about 60 of them, so I'm mulling over whether to add this to my list of sets to start actively trying to complete.  Its a nice one.  

Calbee Home Run Cards

I picked up this card on Yahoo Auctions the other day and I'm really pleased with it.

Its from one of the extraordinarily difficult to keep track of sets that Calbee put out in 1978.  Its difficult because the cards are not numbered and were issued in ten series that have slightly differing designs.  There still does not exist a complete checklist of all of them (Engel's guide explicitly states that all of the cards are not known, and in Japanese Sports Card Magazine never even bothered trying).  

This card I picked up is from the "Pennant Race" series and features Dragon's Hall of Famer Morimichi Takagi sliding into home in a game on April 2nd of 1978 (given how early in the season one wonders why they would include it in a series about a supposed pennant race, but I digress). 

I love the action photo, with Morimichi's grimaced face captured in perfect detail, and the umpire looking on about to call him safe (presumably).  

The back of the card is also quite neat though.  Its not the normal back of this card, but rather a Home Run card back:

In the 1970s, like today, Calbee would run contests to give away prizes.  Today these come in the form of "Lucky Cards" which you can send in to redeem for a prize.  Back then, they would just change the backs of some cards from the regular design to a Home Run card design, which you could send in to redeem for the prize.  The prize you could win for this one would be either a mascot bat with a printed signature, a card album, a baseball fan book or, if you collected three of them, a ball with a printed signature on it.

Since only a small number of any given card had a Home Run card back, and most of those were sent in to be redeemed as prizes back in the day, its really rare to find cards with Home Run Card backs today and they are highly sought after by Japanese collectors.  I was only able to score this one by chance, the seller wasn't a card dealer and hadn't noted the fact that it was a home run card in the description so it flew under everyone else's radar.  Score for me:)