The New Holy Grail of my Collection: 1974 Calbee Frank Howard

With the new season underway my enthusiasm for collecting has been taken to a higher level, buoyed in part no doubt by how well the Dragons have been doing so far.

I have made quite a few acquisitions over the past couple of weeks, mostly Calbee cards from the 1970s, and I hope I`ll have the time to do a few posts about them (I have a 6 month old son bouncing on my knee as I try to type this so spare time for blogging is in short supply these days).

Today`s haul was the above card - Frank Howard`s 1974 Calbee #70!


This is by far the most valuable Japanese card in my collection.  Or perhaps I should say it is by far the card I have paid the most for, I`m not sure which card I own is the most `valuable` which is something hard to measure when there are so few sales out there to go on.

Anyway, NPB Card Guy did a post about Howard`s two cards from the 1974 set which is partially what got me interested in tracking one down.  1974 Calbee is one of the harder to find sets out there and it is the only one with Frank`s cards in it.  The other Howard card,#127, is the more valuable of the two and way out of my price range but this one, which Engel values at $300, was a bit more do-able.

My copy isn`t in the best of shape, which is why I was able to afford it.  I picked it up off of Yahoo Auction for about 3500 yen including shipping.  The front looks presentable but there is a heavy crease in it which you can notice on the back (which also has some tape remnants on it), which explains why I got it that cheap.  I`m not overly fussed about the condition of cards so long as the fronts look OK, so this was perfect for me.

Howard is of course one of the most famous major leaguers to ever play in NPB, having had an all star career in which he hit 382 homers.  In contrast, he may have the worst career numbers of any player in NPB history, having exactly one at-bat for the Lions in 1974 in which he struck out.  He injured himself while doing so and ended up retiring shortly thereafter.

Lights Out Meiji Jingu Stadium

I am not sure if this has made the English language news or not, but there is some extremely disappointing news for Japanese baseball fans out there.  Meiji Jingu Stadium, home of the Yakult Swallows and, along with Koshien Stadium, one of only two historical baseball stadiums still in use in NPB is slated to be demolished.

Built in 1926 it is the oldest baseball stadium in Tokyo and in addition to the Swallows it has also hosted countless high school and university tournaments in its long history.  To most baseball fans it is considered sacred ground (Robert Whiting in You Gotta Have Wa in fact uses that exact phrase to describe it).

According to the news report I saw, the stadium is going to be torn down as part of a larger plan to redevelop the area in the run up to the Tokyo Olympics.  The Stadium which hosted the 1964 Olympics, an important historical landmark in its own right, stands quite close to Jingu.  Or perhaps I should say stood, as the Olympic Stadium is in the process of being demolished to make way for a bicycle helmet that will host the 2020 games.

Jingu will remain in use until the 2020 season while a Rugby stadium located next door is demolished (in keeping with Tokyo`s apparent determination to obliterate its historical landmarks, that stadium is also historically valuable).  A new baseball stadium will be built on the site of the former Rugby Stadium and after it is completed in 2020, Jingu will be destroyed.

As someone with a love for Japanese baseball history I find this both sad and a bit angering.  I have never been to Jingu but it is the one stadium that I want to see a game played at. 

The news report didn`t include any artists conceptions or other description of what the new stadium will look like.  If it is a Dome like  we have here in Nagoya I will be immensely disappointed.  The design of the new Olympic Stadium fills me with dread that whatever they have in mind will be awful.  If they do, however, build something like HIroshima`s Mazda Stadium, I will be somewhat mollified as that actually looks like a fun place to watch a game.  Either way though, I am really upset about the upcoming loss of an important piece of Japanese baseball history.

2015 Calbees are here! And the set seems to consist of 2 cards.

Spring is here, the season has begun and the Dragons just swept a series against the Giants.  I am a happy camper.

And with the new season has come the annual ritual of visiting multiple convenience stores trying to get that first sighting of this year`s Calbee cards.  After taking in a few I finally found a 7-11 which had them last week at lunch so I bought a bag and brought it back to my desk at work.  I got Yamazaki and Higa.

The next day I bought another bag.  I got Yamazaki and Higa.

I wonder what the odds of this happening are. Probably pretty slim.  If only I had placed a bet on this happening beforehand, I could probably retire off the winnings.

Anyway, except for getting the exact same pack, which I assume is related to the way Calbee packs these (though it has never happened before to me), I kind of like the new set.  They made a slight change to the design this year, the player`s name is in a larger font and in black lettering with a thin white border.  While by no means a major change, it actually does give the cards a somewhat bolder look than previous sets with the solid white lettering, so I give them high marks for it. 

So I am looking forward to pack #3 and hoping it will have somebody - anybody - other than Yamazaki and Higa (though Ido  love the photograph on Yamazaki`s card).

Some Thoughts on the Unfortunate Demise of Kanji on the Front of Japanese Baseball Cards

The first time I ever visited a baseball card store in Japan was in 2002.  It was a shop in Himeji which has long since gone out of business.  I didn`t know much about Japanese cards at the time and I remember going over to have a peak in the glass case where they had all their valuable single cards on display.  In addition to the usual suspects – 1993 BBM Ichiro and the like – they had a fair number of older Calbee cards from the 1970s of players like Nagashima and Oh in there.  It was the first time I had ever seen older Japanese cards.  In my eye the thing that set them apart the most from contemporary cards wasn`t their smaller size or the lack of glossy foil borders.  It was the use of kanji on the fronts of the cards to indicate the player`s name and team.

This I found to be immensely appealing.  This was something that no American card ever had.  It harkened back to a pre-globalization era when countries actually mattered and products were designed for local tastes rather than for generic international markets.  The kanji on the fronts of the cards just screamed “These are Japanese cards intended for Japanese people who happen to like baseball. Nothing more, nothing less.”

I loved them.

I long wondered why Japanese card companies abandoned that practice and started using the Roman alphabet to display information on the front of the card.  Today pretty much all sets with a few exceptions like the odd Calbee Star Card subset don’t have kanji anywhere on the front of the card (the card backs, of course, are still written in Japanese).  If we look back at the development of cards year by year, it is easy to spot an exact point at which this transition happened – 1990.  The 1990 Calbee set started pretty much like any other that had preceded it – the first series was mini-card sized and featured the names on the front written in Japanese.  Then suddenly BLAMMO!  Series 2 comes out and not only are the cards much bigger in size, but the player names are now displayed in alphabetical form on the front.  A few months later the 1991 BBM set was released, also with alphabetized names on the front, and kanji card fronts basically died out.

If you haven’t read this excellent post on Japanese Baseball Cards about Larry Fuhrmann and the development of that first BBM set, I highly recommend doing so. In part I suggest it because it is an engaging and thoroughly well-researched article, but I also do so because it sheds some light on this very question that I have long grappled with.  Apparently the idea of using the Roman alphabet originated with Furhmann, who suggested that Calbee put player names in roman letters on the backs of the 1989 Calbee cards as a way of making the cards appeal not only to Japanese collectors but also to American ones.  His relationship with Calbee ultimately went sour, but the timing of the radical changes to the design of Calbee cards which occurred midway through the 1990 run, which seemed to presage many of the features of the 1991 BBM set that Fuhrmann had a big role in creating (larger cards, alphabetized names on front) seem likely to have been a result of his contact with Calbee (though the article does not explicitly state this).

Aside from this rather intriguing question, I find the abandonment of kanji on Japanese cards to be a bit of a lamentable development even when viewed from the standpoint of a foreign collector.  From a functional point of view, it is fair to say, having the names in alphabetical form makes them much more accessible and easy to read.  Kanji are hard to learn, especially those used in first names, which are often quite obscure.   From an aesthetic point of view, though, removing kanji from the fronts of Japanese baseball cards really robs them of their most appealing quality when seen through foreign eyes: their exotic nature. The kanji tell us something in addition to just the player`s name – they tell us that NPB isn’t just an independent minor league. Rather it is the Japanese league which is embedded within a completely different culture that uses a completely different form of writing to express itself.  Hey, isn’t that neat?  It kind of has the same appeal that the Dude’s T-shirt of Kaoru Betto in the Big Lebowski does:

That t-shirt would have been way less cool without those kanji.

Its not just the aesthetics though. Collecting cards where all the information is written in another language adds another challenge to collecting, which is kind of unique.  It forces the collector to actually learn something about the cards which they don`t have to with American cards - how to read basic stuff.  I have learned a lot of baseball related kanji, including a lot of player names, from having to read the info on their cards.  Having the basic stuff written in English feels like its adding a shortcut - dumbing down the challenge and enjoyment of collecting Japanese cards.It just sort of feels....wrong to me for some reason.

Post 1990 cards just don`t have the same kind of appeal that earlier ones do and I think a lot of that is attributable to this change.  They are incapable of impressing the way those 1970s Calbees did to me back in 2002.    They look just a bit blander and a bit too generic without those lovely kanji on them.

Nippon Ham Sausage Cards

I picked up a couple of new cards for the collection this week, Nippon Ham Sausage cards of Isao Shibata and Kenji Awaguchi. According to Rob Fitts these were released in 1975 with...well, sausages I guess.

I have been trying to find some cards from this set for the longest time, mainly because I love the design on them, it kind of reminds me of the 1963 Topps set only better.  The color border on the bottom with the team name looks pretty cool, as does the full bleed photos on the top. The backs are pretty mundane but about par for the course for a Japanese set from the 1970s.

One problem in collecting these is that they are extremely difficult to find, even in Japan.  There are only about half a dozen singles available on Yahoo Auctions at the moment (compared to thousands of BBM and Calbee cards).  I`m guessing they almost never turn up on Ebay. I lucked out on these two, one seller had an auction with about 10 of them and I put bids in on most.  I lost some of them by a wide margin but these two for some reason only attracted moderate interest and I was able to score them for only a few bucks each, which is surprising since they are both in really nice shape (exmt-nrmt or so).

 Nippon Ham is, of course, the owner of the Nippon Ham Fighters so this set was actually put out by a company which owns an NPB team, an interesting conflict of interest.  I haven`t seen a checklist so I`m not sure if there are more Fighters cards than those of other teams or if they went the Calbee route and drowned the selection in Giants players (the fact that my randomly acquired cards are both of Giants players suggests this might be the case).  Another interesting question arises from the fact that these cards were released just a couple of years after Nippon Ham purchased the Fighters (previously the Nittaku Flyers).  I wonder if there was some sort of connection there?  Seems logical, perhaps there were some baseball fans on Nippon Ham`s Board of Directors back in the 1970s.

Anyway, I love these cards and will be keeping my eyes peeled for more....

1991 Calbee Hideo Nomo and Some Others

 I made another Yahoo Auction purchase the other day.  It was a bit of a splurge item, a large lot of 55 1991 Calbee cards, along with an album.

I only had a couple of 1991 Calbees before getting these so I guess this can be added to my list of Calbee sets that I am working on.  The 91 set is pretty cool, its design is simple and looks the same as the higher number cards from the 1990 set.  Among the highlghts are this card of current Chunichi Dragons catcher/manager Motonobu Tanishige back in his younger days:

 Of course the main highlight of the 1991 set are the rookie cards of Hideo Nomo.  I think there are 4 cards of Nomo in the 1991 set and this lot contained three of them, which was pretty awesome (though one did have a dinged corner, the only card with any damage out of the whole lot!)

55 cards still leaves me pretty far from a complete set so this will be another work in progress probably for another 20 or 30 years!

2002 Calbee: Tough Set, Nearing Completeion

 I picked up a large lot of about 500 Calbee cards on Yahoo Auction last week.  It was a mixed lot and I didn`t know what cards would be in it until they arrived (the photos were pretty grainy and the seller`s description was pretty vague). I kind of like buying cards that way, it builds anticipation in me that is similar to opening a wax pack.  Sometimes you get screwed with a bunch of damaged cards, but sometimes it pays off.

This one actually did pay off.  There was a pretty wide selection of cards, including about a dozen from the 1975-76 Calbee set which were alone probably worth almost as much as I paid for the whole lot.  The thing that got me most excited though was that about 100 of them were 2002 Calbees. 

I think the 2002 Calbee set is probably the most difficult to find out of the post-1998 Calbee sets.  Word on the street has it that the reason for this is Japan`s co-hosting of the World Cup that year with Korea, which diverted everyone`s attention away from baseball.  This resulted in Calbee printing way fewer baseball cards (and presumably way more soccer cards) that year, making the 2002 Calbees harder to find than most.

This story generally squares with my own experience in buying these lots, which almost never include any 2002 Calbee cards (the 1999 and 2000 sets on the other hand are usually over-represented, making me think they were printed in greater quantities.  Those were Ichiro`s last 2 years in Japan, which makes me wonder if his popularity transferred into greater baseball chip sales in those years, followed by a steep decline after his departure in 2001).

As somebody actively trying to complete most Calbee sets, my 2002 set up until now had been way less developed than any other set of the past 16 years, with only a few dozen cards mostly from the regular set.  With the additions from this big lot, I now suddenly find myself about 75% of the way to a complete regular set and well on my way with most of the subsets too.

The design of these cards is slightly different from most Calbee sets in that it has a 30th anniversary logo on the front, but otherwise they are about the same.  I think this must have been Hideki Matsui`s last Calbee baseball card before singing with the Yankees.

 The lot even included an un-used Challenge card from that year.  The 2002 set had a pretty sucky prize system, you had to collect and mail in two of these, which didn`t actually guarantee you a prize, but just put you in a draw for one of 3000 card binders they were giving out.  I much prefer it when Calbee gives special card sets as prizes rather than these stupid binders that don`t even have enough space for the whole set and generally look terrible (at least the recent ones).

 To commemorate the 30th anniverary of their baseball cards they issued a special memorial card subset whcih featured reprints of various cards from previous years.  I now have almost all of this set.  I have to say it is really really poorly designed, with just horrible looking beige or grey borders and a very uninspiring `Memorial Card` band along the bottom.  Do they really need to tell us in such big letters that this is, in fact, a memorial card?  Also I think the use of the word "memorial" is a bit misplaced, it sounds like the set is dedicated to players who have died in the past year or something.  Anyway, they did something similar in the 2012 set when they commemorated the 40th anniversary with reprints of cards from previous sets, but the subset from that year was much better, dispensing with the borders and just making a straight-up reprint of the cards. 

Anyway, thats my 2002 Calbee set so far, I`m down to about 30 cards for the regular set which I need.