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:)

Some random 1981 Calbees

 

I picked up a small lot of about 25 cards from the 1981 Calbee set the other day.  I hadn't noticed when I was bidding on them on Yahoo Auctions but they were all Giants players (ugh), but since I don't have many cards from that set yet I am happy with them. 

Flipping through this little pile really makes me wish Calbee would go back to using a more varied and interesting mix of images on their cards like they used to.  The closely cropped "Batters batting, pitchers pitching" photos they always use on their current sets, including this year's,  are just so boring.

Hey Calbee, how about showing us some guys sliding into base?  Like on Kazumasa Kono's card (#309)?

Or a close play at the plate, complete with the catcher holding up the ball and the umpire calling the runner out?  Like on this card of....oh, also Kazumasa Kono (#335):

Or how about a guy getting some high fives as he returns to the dugout?  Like this card of Roy White (#327)?  We can't even see his face but its a way more interesting card of him than that of any player card they've made in the past decade.

And if you are going to insist on showing us batters batting, why not make it a bit more interesting by using a horizontal layout and showing us a bit more of the background instead of rigidly cropping every photo so the player is all we can see?  Worked pretty well on this card of Koji Yamamoto (#311) I think.

Just some random musings that rattled around in my mind as I flipped through a small stack of 1981 Calbee cards.  

Best Card Collecting Week Ever

 

Being the father of two young kids has meant that most of my collecting since they were born has been done at night after they go to bed.  A little over a week ago I was going through my 1975-76-77 Calbee monster set one night in the living room after getting the kids to bed when my son came down to get a drink of water.  He came over and seemed really interested in my cards, asking me a lot of questions about them.  We have watched a couple of games on TV together and played catch at the park a few times so he is starting to get interested in baseball for the first time this year.  I asked him if he wanted to start a baseball card collection and he got very excited.  I gave him his drink of water, sent him back to bed, then started planning how to make that work.  

I decided that the best way to go about it was to get some bags of this year`s Calbee baseball chips, even though I had just posted on here less than two weeks ago that I was giving them up.  So I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work the next day and picked up three bags (one for my son, one for his little sister and one for me).  

I arrived home, asked `Who wants to start a baseball card collection?` and got an extremely enthusiastic response from both kids.  We sat down on the carpet, opened the three bags up and two new collectors were initiated into the world of baseball cards.  

Its a lot of fun getting your kids into baseball cards.  They liked them so much that every day for the past week they`ve asked me to get more and every day I`ve been happy to oblige.  

They have built up a nice little pile, so I got them an album to put them in and printed out a checklist from Calbee`s website which they eagerly check each time they open a new pack. 

We`ve been eating a lot of chips this week.  Since I had a pile of 1991 OPC Premier that I wasn`t doing much with I also gave those to them.  My son and I sat down and marked the checklist card with each one we had (all but 3 to complete the set) which was fun too, but the Calbees are getting a lot more traction since we can see the players on them on TV while we watch games.

Its really fun collecting with kids. I imagine in a while they`ll move on to other interests, as kids always do, but I`m going to enjoy it while it lasts. Hopefully we`ll be able to put the set together bag by bag as the season progresses, something I haven`t ever been able to do.  The old fashioned way is the best way.  

I found Tom Selleck's Apartment from Mr. Baseball Yesterday

 

I like the movie Mr. Baseball.  Its not a particularly great movie, but when you've got a very niche hobby (like following Japanese baseball) then you almost by default end up liking any movie that is related to it.

The main thing I like about the film - other than the baseball stuff - is that they filmed it all on location in Japan, and specifically in Nagoya, the city I live in.  A lot of Hollywood movies that purport to be set in contemporary Japan are mostly filmed on sets in the US and this is irritatingly obvious to people who live in Japan because they always make it look like "what people who have never been to Japan think Japan looks like" rather than "what Japan actually looks like".  Mr. Baseball is one of the few where the filmmakers actually went to the trouble of coming to Japan and filming everything (save for a few scenes set in the US) on the ground here and it makes it a much better movie for that reason.  The most obvious scenes where this pays off are the ones showing in game action shot in the actual stadium where the team depicted - our local Chunichi Dragons - played at the time.  But its also evident in the off-the-field scenes where Tom Selleck is doing his "new gaijin having trouble fitting in" routine at various places around town. I love it for that reason. 

I hadn't watched it in a few years but noticed it was on Amazon Prime a few days ago so I put it on.  One scene that I had never paid much attention to really caught my eye while I was doing so.  Its where Tom Selleck is in his apartment talking to his agent on the phone in the US.  Its a pretty boring scene, but at one point he walks in front of the balcony window of his apartment and you get a pretty good look outside.  I hit the pause button and said to myself, "Hey, I know where that is!"

There are three easily identifiable landmarks that you can see in the window, which I've labelled on the below image.  On the far left you can see the Higashiyama Sky Tower, which is a major landmark located in the Zoo.  I was kind of surprised to see that in there since I didn't think it was old enough to have been around 30 years ago when this movie was made, but on looking it up I discovered it was built in 1989, so would have been relatively new back then.  

To the right of Tom Selleck you can see a distinctively shaped building poking up from the wooded hillside, which is the Showa Jukudo, a historic landmark that used to be a school building.  And on the far right you can see a radio tower that to my knowledge has no name but is located in Yagoto. 

As I sat on the sofa I grabbed my iPad and pulled up Google maps to see if I could triangulate the position of Tom based on where one would have to be located in order for those landmarks to be visible like that.  I figured he had to be somewhere in the Kakuozan neighborhood which, coincidentally, is quite close to where I work.  The scene had two further clues that let me narrow the search down even more.  The first was that whatever building he was in had white railings on its balconies.  The second was that there was a somewhat distinctive looking building in the foreground which was across a busy street from it, which you can see on the far right.  This one:

It was pretty easy from there to just use Google Street view to try to locate it, and I did.  So yesterday on my way to work I took a slight detour to visit Tom Selleck's Apartment from Mr. Baseball, which is in a complex called the Tsukimigaoka Mansion. 

The apartment is unfortunately not directly on the street but rather on a small hill located behind a drug store with a multi level parking lot on top of it so I couldn't get any good close up pictures of it, but this is what you can see of it from the street.  

I could confirm this was it by simply looking at the buildings which are visible in the scene.  The one visible on the right of the scene which I mentioned earlier still exists and is across the street and a few doors down:

The old Showa Jukudo is also not far away;

I could get a slightly closer shot  of the building from this angle, which unfortunately shows you the back of the building (the balconies are on the other side).  

Behind the trees in the foreground of the above picture is the driveway that leads to the front entrance.  That is featured in one scene from the movie where Aya Takanashi drops Tom Selleck off.

So there you go - Tom Selleck's apartment from Mr. Baseball is near my work!  I realized after going to all that trouble that someone else has already located the apartment which reminds me of the importance of always Googling stuff like that BEFORE you do a bunch of unnecessary detective work but still, I had fun tracking it down.

Incidentally, Tom Selleck's apartment building is NOT the actual apartment building that the Dragons would use to house their foreign players back then.  I am told that it was actually an apartment complex not far from there called Yagumo Mansion, which looks like this:

I have a couple of friends who used to live in there which are the source of that info.  The Dragons don't put players there anymore, the complex is more than 40 years old and way too shabby for high flying ball players, but back in the 80s its the place they used (if my sources are accurate at least).  Having personally visited the inside of an apartment in it a few times I can say that the one in the movie is a reasonably accurate approximation of the kind of apartment foreign players for the Dragons used to live in.  Not bad by middle class Japanese standards but not the kind of thing a guy sitting on a huge pile of Magnum P.I. money would likely be impressed by.

I'm Giving Up on New Calbee Sets

 

I'm a bit late with this annual traditional post, but bags of 2022 Calbee chips are now in stores and I bought my first bag a couple of weeks ago.  I scored regular cards of Tomoya Mori and Ryouga Tomiyama, pictured here.

Since buying that bag I've had these two cards sitting on my desk next to my computer.  They've been staring at me for a while now and each time I look at them I feel a distinct lack of motivation to get any more.

For the past few years I've been in the habit of buying complete sets of the regular Calbee cards by series from resellers on Yahoo Auctions (see for example these posts from 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021). Its just way cheaper that way compared to trying to piece the sets together bag by bag.

The repetitive nature of the card design though has finally driven me to give up on that habit and I've decided I won't be doing the same thing this year.  The sets are just too boring to bother with anymore.

I've complained a lot about the predictable and boring photography on Calbee sets in recent years, but its really the card design that is making me quit.  The fronts of Calbee cards haven't really changed much in 25 years (starting with the 1997 set), with only minor fiddling on the margins (such as switching from Roman letters to kanji to write player names from year to year).  I don't really mind that too much, since its a clean and simple design which I like (bland photography notwithstanding), but what I find more irritating is that they stopped changing the design on the backs of the regular cards as well.  

This is a more recent development but has been going on for a while too.  The current back design has been in use since 2010 with only very slight changes from year to year.  Prior to that between 1997 (when they first started using color backs with player photos) and 2009 the back designs went through a few different iterations which, while none were really fantastic it at least allowed you to distinguish the sets by year simply by looking at the backs (though the 2007-2009 sets all have similar back designs which make this a bit difficult).

But since then?  If you pick up any Calbee regular card printed in the last 12 years its almost impossible to tell which year it is from just by looking at the design of the card itself, front or back.  So you've got a 12 year print run of more or less identical cards. This is laziness on a scale without historical precedent I think.  

This also makes it very hard to develop any sort of attachment to these cards.  I've been collecting long enough that there are some card designs which stir memories in me just by looking at them.  Like if I see a 1990 Donruss card it immediately takes me back to ripping open packs of those as a 14 year old back in 1990.  Or the backs of the 2004 Calbee set remind me of going to the supermarket near our old apartment to buy bags of those as I tried to put the set together.  And so on and so forth.

When you lose those distinguishing features that allow you to put a set design to a year, and thus a time in your own life that you might think back fondly of, you lose a lot of what gives those cards some of their emotional appeal.  

So instead of adding another generic block of uninspired cards to the unending pile of monotonous crap that Calbee has been producing since 2010 I've decided to give it a miss this year. And next year.  And all the years until Calbee puts out a set worth collecting again.

In the meantime I'll be focusing my efforts mainly on older Calbee sets which I'm still quite fond of.