Nippon Ham Sausage Home Run Card Mystery

 

Over the past couple of years I've been slowly adding cards to my 1975-76 Nippon Ham Sausage set.  I like this set a lot, the colorful band along the bottom with the team names and rock/paper/scissors game look really cool.

This is a really tough set to collect though since pretty much every card in it is scarce and even mid grade commons will generally set you back at least 1000 Yen each.  Add to that the fact that the cards aren't numbered and we don't even know how many of them were even made.  The latest version of Engel's guide lists 397 different known cards, which is up from 351 in the 2018 edition, indicating that new ones are still being discovered.  There are multiple cards of star players so way fewer than 397 players appear in it, something Dave noted in his write up about it.

I've got 35 cards, less than 10% of the set, after years of collecting so this is not a realistic set build for me, but I still like to pick them up every once in a while and add them to my miscellaneous 1970s album (which also holds a near complete 1973 Calbee first series set and a complete 1978 Yamakatsu set which I finally found). 

There is one thing about this set which I don't think the Engel guide captures which is the relative scarcity of some of the cards.  Engel rates the set at R2 (fewer than 250 copies of each card exist), which seems about right for the easier to find ones. Having followed prices a lot on Yahoo Auctions though I suspect that some of them are short printed and much harder to find than the others.  

For example, this card of Keiji Osawa, manager of the Fighters, is listed on YJA now for 29,800 Yen.  Osawa is not a Hall of Famer and its hard to figure the rationale for that price.  That dealer knows his stuff, I've bought from him before and he has good prices. If you browse his listings you'll find other cards from the same Nippon Ham Sausage set featuring big name Hall of Famers in similar condition for a fraction of that price.  So its not like its some random guy listing stuff for ridiculous prices or anything.

There are quite a few other examples out there, like this card of Yutaka Enatsu for 100,000 Yen from a dealer who I've also bought from numerous times before (including some of the cards pictured in this post) and has much more reasonable prices on other cards from the set.

The only thing I can think of that would explain these cards being so expensive is that they are known rarities to Japanese collectors.  Engel lists the Osawa as a common, and the Enatsu at what you could call the "medium level star" price, but this doesn't seem to jive with what those and some other cards go for in Japan.

The mystery to me though is how do collectors here know which ones are extremely high value and which ones aren't?  There is no Japanese guide that catalogues these, Engel is the only one out there and his guide doesn't note any difference in rarity or value.  SCM during its day never even tried to tackle this set.  And there is nothing distinctive about the cards themselves either that would indicate they came from a given series or anything (something which the lack of card numbers also complicates).

One possibility that I am toying with is that the cards might have been regionally distributed according to team or possibly league.  If you look at the 35 cards I have you'll notice there is an extreme imbalance.  I have:

32 cards of Central League players

3 cards of Pacific League players (1 Hawks, 2 Orions)

Looking at Engel's checklist guys from teams of the two leagues look roughly evenly represented, yet the number of Pacific League cards in circulation seem to be quite a bit lower than Central League cards.

My collection isn't really big enough to draw any conclusions from of course, but when I look at YJA there is further evidence to support this.  When I do a search for Nippon Ham Sausage cards, then organize the results from highest price to lowest, its really noticable that almost all of the high priced cards from this set (excluding the other Nippon Ham Sausage set from 1977 and the more recent ones) are of players from Pacific League teams (particularly the Fighters and Lions it seems), with only a smattering of Central League players (mostly Sadaharu Oh, whose cards are expensive because hey, he's Sadaharu Oh).  

The Yutaka Enatsu card seems to be the only outlier as it pictures him with the Tigers, but there may be an explanation for that.  Enatsu switched teams to the Hawks while this set was being made and is also featured as a Hawk on other, presumably later, cards in the set, so that card of him with the Tigers was likely short printed.  

I'm not too sure what this means in terms of how the cards were originally distributed (I know they came in paper packs sold with sausages, I have one of the wrappers), but it seems the end result is that most (possibly not all?) cards featuring Pacific League players are harder to find than most (all?) cards of Central League players.  But even that doesn't perfectly explain the evidence, since there are also some cards of Pacfic League players that aren't too expensive out there.  Its still a mystery to me, but something is definitely going on with this set.   

Oh, and OH MY GOD WHAT A GAME!  Yay Ohtani!!

The Emperor is Watching

 

I decided to pull the trigger on one of the most famous Calbee cards from the 1970s this week.

Actually, that isn't quite accurate.  It would be more accurate to say that I put a bid on a card that was way out of my normal budget expecting the bidding to go way higher, and then it didn't and I ended up accidentally winning the card.  

The card is #433 from the 1974 Calbee set and features Shigeo Nagashima at the plate having just connected for what would be a game winning sayonara home run in a game against the Tigers that was played on June 25th, 1959. 

You'll note that Nagashima is oddly framed in the photo, appearing as a little figure at the bottom while most of the photo is taken up by people sitting in the stands at Korakuen Stadium.  

The reason for this is the people sitting in the box seats at the very top of the card.  One of them is the Emperor of Japan.

This is from one of the most famous games in pro Japanese baseball history, the "Tenranshiai" ("Game the Emperor Watched" - my inelegant translation).  Japanese Emperors had previously viewed Sumo tournaments and some amateur sporting events, but had never attended a pro baseball game until that day.  Getting the proverbial imperial seal of approval was a pretty big endorsement for NPB and so everyone has made a huge deal about it ever since over here. The fact that it was actually a good, close game that ended very dramatically with Shigeo Nagashima, in his second season, hitting a sayonara home run contributed to making it a legendary game.  You can see highlights of it on this contemporary news clip.

I'm not a huge fan of royalty but I can still appreciate the importance of the game and Nagashima's home run.  

Of course I have to say that now that I own an expensive card featuring it.  

This card is from the "famous scenes" series in the 1974 Calbee set which is somewhat hard to come by.  Its the only card that commemorates this event (or at least the only vintage card that commemorates it, I would be surprised if BBM hasn't produced a ton of cards based on it over the years) so it is one of those cards that is very highly sought after by Japanese collectors, though probably of a bit less interest to international ones. 

I've been vaguely interested in it for a long time, but because copies usually sell for high prices (over 100$ US usually) I had never put a serious bid on one.  But its also one of those cards that every decent 1970s Calbee collection needs so I've been entering kind of teaser bids on copies over the years which never came close to winning until I ended up unexpectedly winning this one.  Which is cool, its a nice addition to my collection.  

Celebrating my 10th Year of Trying to Finish the 75-76-77 Calbee Set

 

With spring weather having arrived this week and the season just around the corner, I've re-started the engine on a baseball card collection that has lay dormant since November.  The first project I dusted off over the weekend was the 1975-76-77 Calbee set.

I realized as I did so that I've been working on this set for a full decade now, having gotten my first cards for it back in 2013.  At 1472 regular cards its probably the biggest set ever made, and having been originally sold one at a time in bags of chips almost half a century ago they aren't super easy to find.  Thus this has been a decade long collecting project, which is not yet complete.

Doing a bit of stock taking though I realize that I am finally nearing the "home stretch".  I picked up five new cards that I need this week off of Yahoo Auctions, which brings me to a grand total of (drum roll):

1273 cards.

That puts me at 86.5% complete!  Not bad. Just 199 cards to go.  

I've got the set in two binders.  The first binder holds the first 900 cards, the other one everything above that. At some point I'll splurge on a proper second binder, but for now it is sufficient.

Binder #1 is pretty thick:

I love opening the first binder and being greeted by the lovely All Star cards that begin the set.

There are three regional series in the set which are fairly scarce and hard to track down, two issued in the Hiroshima area and one in the Nagoya area.  I've made pretty good progress with the Nagoya ones (pictured below) and am almost finished with one of the Hiroshima ones.

That said, the second Hiroshima regional issue (the "red helmet" series from 609 to 644) seems to be the rarest in the whole set and I'm still less than half of the way to completing it.  This creates an aesthetically displeasing run of pages near the middle of the first binder which still have a lot of empty pockets in them.

Fortunately one of the five cards I picked up this week was from that series, the very last card (644) featuring Sachio Kinugasa which now satisfyingly sits in its place.  It was a bit expensive (5250 Yen), but I decided to treat myself.

Another thing that really stands out in the first binder are the pink bordered series cards, which have clear 1975 Topps influence in their design.  I've got almost all of those now and just need to round up a few stragglers to finish them off.

The last series in the set, from 1400 to 1432, is also pretty hard to find.  I have about 2/3 of them but still need quite a few.  This is the last page of the entire set:

Nothing is more satisfying to me as a collector than the feeling of flipping through pages of cards that you have painstakingly spent an entire decade of your life putting into their little places.

In related news, a complete set of these has recently been listed on Yahoo Auctions, with a starting bid of 980,000 Yen or a BIN price of 1,200,000 Yen (about 8900$ US at today's exchange rate).

This is the second time I've seen a complete set for sale, one sold a little over two years ago for 880,000 Yen.  This is definitely not the same set being re-sold as I know where that previous set ended up (er...not with me, but they buyer, who requested I not disclose his identity, and I had a little back and forth email discussion about it).  Between these two and a third that I read about in an Asahi News article back in 2012 when Calbee was marking its 40th anniversary that makes three complete sets that are known to exist (in addition to one, cough cough, almost complete one).  Not bad, and I think that the price of the above is a pretty decent deal (though as the owner of a near complete set I have an obvious incentive to talk the value of this thing up now, so take what I say with a grain of salt).  

These are the remaining cards that I need to complete my set, hopefully when 2023 comes to a close I'll have whittled this list down a bit further!

40, 44, 45, 47, 58, 61, 63, 67, 72, 83, 106, 113, 124, 190, 193, 196, 203, 209, 213, 271, 311, 312,  (star he no ayumi), 289, 295, 306, 321, 322 (Hiroshima series), 377, 477, 478, 481, 482, 483, 491, 499, 500, 525, 610, 611, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 620, 621, 622, 624, 625, 626, 628, 629, 632, 634, 637, 638, 641, 643, 691, 701, 707,  728, 742, 766, 770, 790, 793, 794, 796, 801,803, 805, 807, 811, 815, 824, 827, 828, 829, 830, 833, 838, 840, 843, 847, 848, 850, 852, 855, 872, 894, 920, 923, 933, 936, 938, 939, 942, 943, 945, 946, 950, 951, 954, 955, 958, 959, 961, 963, 974,  1041, 1044, 1056, 1114, 1116, 1117, 1122, 1127, 1130, 1132,1169, 1207,  1293, 1298, 1312, 1320, 1329, 1357, 1359, 1361, 1363, 1365, 1374, 1378, 1379, 1383, 1384, 1388, 1393, 1394, 1396, 1401, 1403, 1404, 1405, 1408, 1414, 1426, 1428, 1430, 1433, 1434