Here is something you don't see everyday: a baseball card with a bunch of beers dead centre in the photo!
This is card 11 from the 1977 Calbee set (Jc 5(a-j)). And I love it.
If anyone out there is pursuing an "odd stuff to find on cards" type collection, I'm finding that Japanese cards, especially Calbees from the 70s, are a gold mine. You've got everything from cards with girls in kimonos on them to cards with vintage cars on them to cards with American pro wrestlers on them. And now a card with beers.
My casual Google search for "beer baseball cards" doesn't turn up any other baseball cards with beer visible on them. I see a lot of 1958 Hires Root Beer cards, and cards of some rookie prospect named Seth Beer and a bunch of doctored fun cards people have made over the years (Rob Deer gets a lot of these since the D in his last name can easily be rendered a B). But no baseball cards with a beer just casually sitting in the background or anything, let alone three of them prominently featured in the foreground. So unless somebody corrects me (and please do if you find something I've missed) I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is the only baseball card from a regular set in history to ever feature guys drinking beer on it.
This makes sense of course, its definitely not a good idea for a product for kids to feature alcohol on it. I mean, there must be rules somewhere about that sort of thing. Right? Anyway, obviously those rules didn't apply to Calbee back in 1977 as this card's existence attests to.
The reason for the beers and smiles all around is that this picture features members of the Hankyu Braves celebrating their victory over the Giants in the 1976 Japan Series. Pictured are star pitcher Mitsuhiro Adachi who won the series clinching 7th game, Braves manager Toshiharu Ueda, and series MVP Yutaka Fukumoto.
I am starting to work on this set, so this card is going with the rest of them, but if I can ever track down another copy (these are not easy to find) I'll put the other one in my new "stuff on baseball cards" type collection!
I like this card. Its probably one of the most famous Calbee cards from the 70s.
This is card 178 from the 1977 Calbee set which Engel catalogues as JC 5(a-j). As I noted in an earlier post there are eleven different Calbee sets from that year, so its pretty hard to keep track of which is which. This series has the weeds on the back border.
This was another one of those white whales that I've been chasing around for a while. One seller on Yahoo Auctions has had a copy of it for a while with a BIN price of about 800$ which is insanely overpriced (Engel lists it at 80$). Its a very popular card so that has been the only copy of it I've seen for sale for the past couple of years, but recently somebody put a lot of a couple dozen Calbee cards from the 70s up which included this and I put a high bid in and won (for less than the 80$ this card alone lists for). I was so excited.
The card features Sadaharu Oh on the left and Dick Beyer, AKA the Destroyer, on the right.
The Destroyer is a really interesting guy. He was a wrestling star in the US in the 50s and 60s, going by various identities before settling on his mask wearing Destroyer persona.
He has an interesting connection with the post I wrote last month about Hankyu Braves star Roberto Barbon, who as I mentioned had a run in with a Japanese wrestler named Rikidozan who was later stabbed to death by a Yakuza gangster.
After a match with Giant Baba in Los Angeles in 1963 the Destroyer came to Japan to go head to head with the same Rikidozan. You can watch their match here:
Incredibly that match took place on December 2, 1963, just 6 days before Rikidozan received his fatal stab wound. I'm not sure but it was probably his last time in the ring.
After that, the Destroyer went back to the US for a few years. But in 1973 he returned to Japan and spent most of the 1970s here, both as a wrestler and as a major TV personality. Definitely WAY more interesting than his wrestling is his output as a TV talento. Here you can see him freaking out Wada Akiko and contributing to the general chaos and mayhem of a 1970s Japanese variety show, which is.....hard to describe in words but definitely worth watching:
My card of him with Sadaharu Oh would have come out at the height of his fame on Japanese TV and I assume he was at Korakuen for some sort of TV event.
One weird thing about this card is that it is a straight up normal Sadaharu Oh card. The text on the front and back just mention Oh, but doesn't say anything about the guy he is standing next to. Its basically a cameo appearance by the Destroyer on an otherwise normal Sadaharu Oh card. Even in Engel card #178 is just listed as "Sadaharu Oh". I get that this is a baseball set, but come on ,there are hundreds of Sadaharu Oh baseball cards out there, but only one with the Destroyer on it! This deserves some sort of mention.
Anyway, after retiring from wrestling in 1984 he went back to his regular job as a high school PE teacher in Akron New York. Before becoming a pro wrestler in the early 50s he had trained as a teacher, and in fact had a Masters in Education from Syracuse University. That must have been pretty cool for Akron high school students in the 80s and 90s to have a guy with such an interesting background as a teacher. Well, maybe, I could also see how having a teacher called "Destroyer" would be somewhat intimidating.
In 2017 he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun for his contributions to cultural exchange between Japan and the US. He passed away last year at the age of 88.
Bags of 2020 Calbee Series 2 have hit supermarket shelves here and I picked up my first bag yesterday.
I like how Calbee sets have been released in 3 series at regular intervals over the year pretty much ever since I first arrived in Japan over 20 years ago. The release of each series has become a ritualized means of marking the passing of the seasons for me. Series 1 is Spring, Series 2 is Summer and Series 3 is Fall. Winter is the only one that doesn't get a series, which adds to my dislike of that season.
Normally the arrival of a new series is a happy event, but this year its just hard to work up the usual amount of enthusiasm. Look at how the world has changed since series 1 came out just a few months ago. Or maybe not so much, at least here in Japan. In March infections were rising in Tokyo and I was worried we'd have a major outbreak here. Thankfully that didn't happen. This week infections are rising in Tokyo again and we're worried we're going to have a major outbreak. Again. Hopefully we won't. Again.
Of course, when I say "cases are rising" I mean there have been about 200 cases in a city of 30 million people. I think there are small towns in Florida right now getting more cases. So I do feel incredibly lucky to be riding this pandemic out in Japan. Which is another odd reversal since Series 1 came out, back when the NPB season opener was postponed but MLB was still set to go because Japan got hit with this first. At the time I thought we'd get crushed while the US might get lucky and avoid it. Man, that has changed. Sorry to my fellow bloggers out there in the US going through all that right now.
These are the cards I got in my first bag of the year. Adam Jones, a bona fide MLB star who was fortunate enough to sign a 2 year $8 million contract with the Orix Buffaloes just days before the virus arrived. That card is from the Star Card subset, which is a pretty decent pull.
The other is of Dragons pitcher Kodai Umetsu, who had a pretty good rookie season last year with a 4-1 record and 2.34 ERA.
Otherwise there doesn't seem to be much to note, the set looks pretty much the same as it does every year, which is nice. Good old stable Calbee sets, the one thing that never changes!
I picked up this menko recently. Its not in the best of shape but it features Giants star Shigeo Nagashima (the centering isn't as bad as it looks, my scanner cut off the left edge for some reason).
The card is a bit of a mystery to me. I haven't been able to find a set that looks like this in Engel. The back has a picture of a gun wielding hero, with "General" written on it, a rock/paper/scissors symbol and a long menko number. I've never seen baseball menko with the same back:
I bought it from a seller as a single along with menko from two other sets (JCM 138 and 139) which were issued in 1960 and 1962. The size and general look and feel of this card is very similar to the cards from those sets, and those years fall in the right ballpark given how young Nagashima looks on this one. So I guess this is an uncatalogued early 60s menko of his. It might come from a set that featured non-sports subjects as well, the seller seemed to have a big pile of random menko and only the three that I bought featured baseball players.
Another card I recently picked up (in the same transaction that got me the cards in my previous post) is this one featuring Taiyo Whales star Makoto Matsubara from the 1973 Calbee set.
Matsubara was a long time star for the Whales (predecessor to today's Baystars), playing nineteen seasons with them between 1962 and 1980 before a swan song with the Giants in 1981.
He was an eleven time all star and led the league in hits twice (1974 and 1978). He could hit for both average and power, ending his career in both the 2,000 hit club and the 300 home run club. For reasons that I do not understand at all, despite his impressive career resume he still isn't in the Hall of Fame (though his 2,000 hits did earn him membership in the Meikyukai).
The title on the back of this card (198 in the set) refers to him as "Mister Whales", and the text describes in general terms why he is so known (in short: he is a good player, he is a male, and he plays for the Whales). It also notes that he is a 10 million Yen player, which would likely have made him one of the better paid players in NPB at that time.
I like this card a lot. I believe the picture came from Kawasaki Stadium, which was home to the Whales back in the 70s. It was torn down in 1998 and a soccer field now occupies the property. I love the way he is framed in the photo with the stands adorned with 1970s advertisements all over them in the background.
There is a really neat series of cards from the 1973 Calbee set that I've long been fascinated by. Its from the "Nessen" (fierce fight or maybe "tight game") series and it depicts scenes from a game played on October 20, 1973 between the Chunichi Dragons and the Hanshin Tigers. I'm not sure how big that series is but it comes towards the end of the set in cards numbered in the 300s. The cards depicting that game in particular seem to run from 328 to 335.
They fortunately aren't from the hyper rare thousand dollar a pop short printed series, but these cards are still pretty hard to find and usually run about 20$ each when they show up. I was able to win two of them - card 330 and 332 - in an auction the other day for about 8$ each which was a really good deal.
Card 332, pictured at the top of this post, features Dragons star Kenichi Yazawa in the foreground. With runners on second and third, he has just connected off of Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu for a base hit to right field which drove both runners in and put the Tigers in the lead (in the 3rd inning).
The other card (330) pictured below also shows Yazawa, only this time in the first inning. He was a runner on first base when Jimmy Williams got a base hit to center field. Yazawa tried to make third on the play and as you can see, he didn't quite beat the tag!
The Dragons nonetheless went on to win the game 4-2.
I love the way these cards let you follow the play by play action. The card sandwiched between these two (331) I unfortunately don't have, but I looked it up and found that it features Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu conferring with catcher Koichiro Tabuchi after getting Yazawa out at third.
I really want to get the rest of the cards from this specific 8 card run, its very neat to be able to follow a game in progress on baseball cards, another way in which these 1970s Calbee sets were light years ahead of their time. This would have been a very important game too, the Dragons, Tigers and Giants were caught in a very fierce pennant race and this was (I think) the last game between the Tigers and Dragons. In the end the Giants won the pennant with a razor thin 0.5 game lead over the Tigers and 1.5 game lead over the Dragons!
A couple of years ago I picked up an unopened box of Yamakatsu Blue Train Cards from the 1970s. I love trains, especially in Japan where pretty much every trip I've taken for the past 20 years has been by train.
I didn't open that box, but last week I found another one for a good price and decided to crack it open. There is basically zero information about this set on the internet - no checklist, no year of release no nothing (including stuff in Japanese) so I thought doing so might provide a good opportunity to fill that void. So this will be my first box-break post. And unlike most box breaks this one will serve the purpose of actually figuring out a bit more about what is in this set.
To begin, this is what the box looks like:
Open it up and you've got 30 packs of cards with 2 cards per pack for 60 total.
There are 3 prizes that also come with the box. One is a little album that can hold 14 cards. The other two are giant erasers shaped like trains. There are 3 cards randomly inserted in packs which have a little red stamp on the back entitling anyone who pulls them to claim one of these prizes from the store where they bought them.
Then comes the fun part, opening the packs! As an added service to posterity, I have decided not to video myself opening the packs and will simply cut to the chase.
I got 60 cards, consisting of 37 different cards and 23 doubles. Since no checklist exists I have no idea how close this gets me to the set, but at least we now know there are no fewer than 37 cards in the set.
These are the cards I got:
This is what the backs of some of the cards look like (note the one in the lower right, which has the red prize stamp on it):
These are not just cards of random passenger trains. All of them are long distance sleeper trains (called "Blue Trains" since the first one was Blue, but over the years they came in a variety of colors). These trains have since been replaced by the Shinkansen, the last of them retired in 2015, but in the late 1970s when the Shinkansen network was a lot more limited they were at the peak of their popularity. Each card depicts a different train which ran a different route and the back features each trains logo (which appears on a plate on the front of the engine). Some train lines appear on more than one card (three of the ones I got appear on two different cards). The cards aren't numbered but I think it makes sense to create a checklist based on the train names, so here goes in alphabetical order
(the ones with a (2) after the name appear on two cards with different photos)
I really like these cards, the photography on some of them is really great and makes me want to go on a train trip.
I really wish there were more sets out there like this from that period. As I said above, these are just long distance sleeper trains, which represent a tiny fraction of the overall variety of passenger trains in Japan. There were a lot (and still are a lot) of local commuter trains done up in very vibrant colors which would have looked great on cards, but it seems such cards were never produced.
Anyway, there you go internet, your first stab at a checklist for the Yamakatsu Blue Train set. I might try to pick up another box if I can find one cheap and break it open to see if I get closer to a set. I'll update this checklist if I do!
