Four cards for Three sets

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm getting back into baseball cards (TM!) this year via 1970s Calbees, which have been my favorite kind of cards since I got my first Japanese ones.....26 years ago? Holy crap I'm getting old.

Anyway. I bought four new ones which came in the mail yesterday. These are from three different sets which I have in binders which allowed me to do my favorite hobby related thing: flipping those binders open to the relevant page and filling in an empty pocket. I pity the graded card collectors out there who will never know how satisfying that feeling is!

Let me show off what I got and the pages they joined today.

The first card is the one pictured above, featuring Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto. It is from the1977 Calbee set, part of the famous scenes series at the start of the set (#72). I've actually made pretty good progress on this set (which has 216 cards) and am more than halfway there. The back of the card refers to them as the "OH" pair, which is kind of a play on the ON combination of Oh and Nagashima, and also a play on Oh's own name.

Speaking of the ON combination, my next card is from the ON series in the 1974 Calbee set, honoring the retirement of Nagashima and the end of that combo. I love this series for its awesome photos, like Oh standing in front of the mirror there. The new addition was card 403 which shows Oh awkwardly fielding a ball that might have taken a tricky hop, a contrast to most of his cards which show him swinging.

Next up is card 193 in the 1974 set, featuring Sachio Kinugasa. You can tell from the empty pockets in the photo that I don't have as many cards from this part of the set as I do from the ON series. I'm glad to have at least filled it up a bit, but obviously have some work to do.

Last but not least is card 1404 from the monster 1975-76 Calbee set. This is from the final series in the set which is one of the scarcer ones so it is a good addition. I now only have 112 remaining cards to track down to finish this one. That sounds like a lot, but the set has 1472 cards in it so I am well over 90% of the way there!

1970s Collisions at the plate with Shiro Mizunuma

 

It has been almost a year since my last post, which is a record setting hiatus for me.  When I'm busy and the Dragons are doing terribly the combination of the two usually depresses my blogging output.  Its been a banner year for both of these factors so far in 2026. 

I picked up a few 1970s Calbees recently that have given me a bit of motivation to start posting again, so I'm dusting the blog off for them.  These are two of them, both featuring Hiroshima Carp catcher Shiro Mizunuma defending home plate.  The one above is from the 1978 set and features him about to catch a tardy throw to the plate in an early season game against the Swallows.  The one below is from the 1979 set and shows him about to get knocked over during the Nippon Series against Kintetsu, which the Carp would go on to win that year.

I bought both of these mainly for the neat action photos, which modern Calbee cards just don't have.  I didn't even notice that Mizunuma was in both of them until after buying them.  He was a kind of journeyman catcher who played for the Carp throughout the 70s but was never an All Star or anything.  His main claim to fame is that he caught all 7 games in the above 1979 Nippon Series for them.  And that after retirement he opened a restaurant in Hiroshima which I think might still be open (?)

These were the first cards I've bought this year, with the exception of a few from bags of Calbee chips I've bought as snacks at work.  My kids aren't as interested in collecting them with me as they were in previous years, and the fact that the sets are just brutally awful (and now cost more) has turned me off trying to seriously put this year's together for the first time in many years.  But having these 70s cards in hand has got me a bit more enthusiastic about working on those sets, particularly the monster 1975-76 set that I'm getting tantalizingly close to finishing, so I'll probably try to set aside some more time for the collection for the rest of the season even as the Dragons continue to suck and I continue to be busy with  other things!