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

50% Vintage Japanese Beauties, 50% mid-grade 1988 Donruss

 

A very interesting lot is up for auction on Yahoo right now.  Its about 350 cards.  

The good news: roughly half of them are lovely vintage Calbee cards from the 1970s and 1980s.  My favorite kind of baseball card and exactly the sort of thing I like to browse for and bid on.

The bad news: the other half is 1988 Donruss cards.  More specifically, 1988 Donruss cards with dinged corners.

What an odd pairing.  I'm not sure if my desire to own more vintage Calbees outweighs my desire to not own more 1988 Donruss cards (and a slightly stronger desire to not own more 1988 Donruss cards with dinged corners).  

Well, its not really a dilemma as the Donruss would be going straight into the cardboard recycling bin on arrival if I did win this lot, so I'd really just be bidding for whatever I think the Calbees are worth.  I more just find it amusing that lots like this exist with such odd combinations.  

Isao Harimoto Menko

 

Its been ages since I've been able to pick up some nice vintage menkos due to the price explosion taking  most of them out of my range recently.  I did however manage to make one score the other day, a lot containing three Isao Harimoto cards.  I've written about Harimoto before, he is one of my all time favorite Japanese players so I'm always on the lookout for cards of his.  

This lot had three of his cards, including his rookie card from the 1959 JCM 30b set (on the left in the above picture).  The other two are from the 1960 JCM 86 and 1961 JCM 12d sets.  I didn't have a rookie card of his in my collection yet so I was quite happy to add that one!

You might have noticed that this is my first post in several months.  The blog is still alive and I'm still fine, during the baseball off season I sometimes drift off into other hobbies and put the baseball card collection on hold.  At the moment I'm building a model railway with my son which is taking up all my free time.  Once the spring arrives though I'll probably start posting on here more again.

Also, I quit Twitter about a month ago.  Just too much weird stuff for my taste and I sort of decided "You know, I think just keeping the blog is enough for me."

Its not just the photos, Calbee's promotions also suck

 

(Cracks knuckles) OK, sorry, I know I've been doing a lot of complaining about Japanese card sets as of late but I have a bit more to do.  We had some disappointment at our house this week which I'd like to talk about. 

Over the course of this year's baseball season, I've been collecting the Calbee set one bag at a time with my two kids.  Its been fun, though their enthusiasm sort of waned a bit as the season went on.

This week though I think it finally fell off a cliff.

One irritating thing about Calbee sets these days that I hadn't ever really paid much attention to before is that the "Lucky Cards" are insanely hard to pull.  My son got one in June from a bag of Series 1 which made him very excited.  I thought that was really cool, but we blew threw dozens and dozens of bags of Series 2 Chips without hitting one.  The guys who rip open cases of them suggest that the Lucky Cards are seeded  at a rate of about 1 per 150 bags.  Which is kind of weird given that the prizes you get (like a crummy plastic album that only holds 48 cards) aren't exactly valuable. 

My son however really wanted a Series 2 Lucky card because the promotion said it was redeemable for a special set of cards of the team of your choice and he wanted the Dragons one.  Not having pulled one form a pack, I went on Yahoo Auctions and bought one from a re-seller for 1500 Yen.  I then sort of surreptitiously slipped it into a pack that I pretended I was opening for my son, handed it to him and let him pull it out.  

That was so great!

When you pull a Lucky Card, you have to cut out a little tab on them, glue it to a postcard and mail it to Calbee.  Then they'll send you the prize.  For Series 1 we got a crummy little album.  But we were excited for the Series 2 prize since special cards were certain to be way better than that.

So we waited a whole month and finally they arrived on Wednesday!

My son opened the envelope and out plopped......a stack of cards that was mostly regular Dragons cards from the base set which are available in packs. There were 8 cards total, 6 were just the regular Dragons cards.  Only 2 of them were from the Star Card subset with gold embossed signatures.  

"I already have these" he said in disappointment, and just dumped them on the table and walked off.

This kind of laziness on the part of the makers of Japanese baseball card sets has really been pissing me off this month.  Last week my son opened a box of 2022 Topps NPB that is so bad they more or less forgot to put anything on the card backs, and now this.  

What particularly annoys me is that Calbee used to have really great Lucky Card promotions.  The first time I tried putting a set together bag by bag was in 2004.  The Lucky Cards were way easier to pull back then, I probably bought about 100 bags that year and I ended up getting 8 Lucky Cards, so it was about a 1:12 ratio rather than a 1:150 ratio like today and you could reasonably feel a bit of excitement that these were things you could expect to pull every once in a while (as opposed to almost never now).

And the prizes you could redeem them for were actually really awesome.  This is what I got from the Series 2 Lucky Cards:

A whole boxed set of cards that were not available in packs!  24 cards in total.  

Granted that to get these you had to send in three Lucky Card tabs rather than one, but given how much easier they were to find it was still way easier to get one of these than it is to get a 2022 team set of just 8 cards, most of which are just cards from the regular base set anyway.  Also, bags of Calbee chips cost about 60 Yen each in 2004 but are about 100 Yen today.

I really think Calbee is shooting itself in the foot by cheaping out so badly on these Lucky Card promotions.  My son was so excited when he pulled that first one back in June.  If they'd have made that pay off by actually sending him something fun like a card set similar to what they did in 2004 he'd probably have kept that enthusiasm level up.  But instead he's been burned twice with a lousy album that isn't even big enough to fit the set into, and now a pile of cards that are mostly worthless doubles to him. This crap isn't how you turn kids into lifelong collectors of your product, its how you encourage them to find other things to do.  Which is probably for the best I guess.

With the season over (from the perspective of a last place Dragons fan anyway) we've got a few months off now.  I'll give the 2023 Calbees a try when Series 1 comes out, but I'm not holding out much hope that the kids will be into it like they were this year.  And I'm putting most of the blame for that on Calbee's shoulders.  

1947 JRM 30 Menkos

 

For the first time in a very long time I was able to add some new vintage menko to my collection. These cards are from the set that Engel catalogues as JRM 30 and dates to 1947.  They are identifiable mainly by the little diamond with a triple K in it, and also by the way the text is contained in curved rectangles on the sides.

Engel has catalogued twenty cards in this set, which he rates an R4 (fewer than 10 known copies of each card in existence), so its possible there are more.  As you can see, I have eight of them, including some HOFers like Shigeru Chiba and Fujio Fujimura.

One thing I like about the set is that though crude the artwork is far superior to the photography in contemporary Calbee sets.  You've got players in a variety of poses, doing a variety of things against a variety of backgrounds.  Quite refreshing compared to the monotony of all photos on modern Calbee cards being more or less carbon copies of each other.  

The people who made this set were doing so in a Japan that was economically devastated, suffering from widespread malnutrition and whose cities had just been reduced to rubble by a massive bomber campaign just two years earlier.  If they could make an interesting set in those conditions, Calbee today really has no excuses.

Anyway, the reason I haven't added many vintage menko to my collection these days is simply that the explosion in prices in the US card market has spread to Japan and I've been priced out of the market on most of the stuff that comes up on Yahoo Auctions for the past 18 months or so.  Its been frustrating because there has been a lot of stuff come up for sale that I would have been able to snap up back in 2020, but which these days easily sell for 5 times more than what they used to, sometimes more.  These ones somehow slipped through the cracks and didn't get much attention, so I was able to pay 2020 prices for them.  This might be the last addition to my menko collection for a while, barring either a complete collapse in the market or me winning a lottery (which is a particular long shot since I don't buy lottery tickets).

Also, since I mentioned Engel's guide I should mention that he recently put out a 3rd edition which I recently purchased.  If you collect vintage Japanese cards I'd say it is worth picking up the new edition, he's added a fair number of new cards to it (and if you don't have the old edition you absolutely should get it). 

2022 Topps NPB Sucks, Don't Ever Buy It

 

There is no stronger motivation to return to blogging after a couple of months hiatus than the desire to complain about something.  Fortuitously the purchase of a box of 2022 Topps NPB has provided me with a very good opportunity to validate that hypothesis.

It was my son's birthday this week and having almost completed the Calbee set this year one bag of chips at a time together I thought I'd get him a box of cards we could rip and try to put the set together in one go.  I found boxes of both Topps and BBM on Yahoo Auctions and decided to give the Topps one a try.  I picked it up almost a month ago and set it aside until the big day.

My son had fun opening the packs.  That is almost the only nice thing that I can say about this set.  I could say the same about packs of 1991 Donruss or pretty much any other set for that matter so....yeah.

This set just sucks so bad I don't know where to start.  So I'll start with the box itself.  That is an ugly, unimaginatively designed box.  The packs inside, which I don't have a photo of handy, are even more boring to look at.  I remember what Topps boxes were like in the 80s - very colorful designs with pictures of cards of the stars on them.  They made you really want to buy the packs.  To further entice you they even made the boxes themselves out of cards, which was an ingenious idea.  

2022 Topps NPB basically looks like a carton of cigarettes sold in a country with very strict plain packaging laws.  I almost expected to see a giant warning about lung cancer with a scary picture of a damaged lung on the side.  This is just as god awful a package design as you can get.

But what about the cards themselves?  Well....

They almost exactly copied the 2022 MLB Topps design except that they didn't put the team logo where the team logo is supposed to go.  Kind of dull but not awful.  I give them points for having slightly better photography than Calbee, which is not a high standard.

The backs though just make my blood boil:

What the F is this?  Is this a joke?  This is a joke right?  Tell me this is a joke.  This can't not be a joke, so it must be a joke. 

My favorite part of the joke is where they could only fit two lines of stats (2021 and career) at the very bottom because they needed to devote the rest of the card back to....nothing!  Literally empty space with nothing but a tiny team logo taking up about 15% of it.  

This is so gratuitously awful I almost have to ask if mischievous vandals might have broken into the Topps offices and replaced whatever the real design for the card backs was with this....this....this.....this..... (voice from the guy sitting next to me as I type this: "Tomfoolery"?) TOMFOOLERY, yes, thank you.

Oh and you know what the insert cards are?  These same garbage cards but with different colored borders!  And a retro throwback subset using the 1958 Topps design, perhaps chosen because that is the dullest one that could be copied with the least amount of effort possible.  No autographed cards or anything like that of course.

This set just sucks so bad I actually feel kind of guilty about having insulted my first born child by having made a gift of these to him.  I hope one day when he is old enough to appreciate how bad these cards are that he will forgive me.  

Anyway, I guess I got what I paid for.  This set was released last month with a suggested retail price of 13,200 Yen per box.  I paid 8,000 for this one on Yahoo Auctions, and there are plenty available to be had at around that price.  Word seems to be getting around about how much these suck.  Good.  I hope this post will contribute to that.  Be forewarned: 2022 Topps NPB is the worst set of baseball cards I've seen in......I don't know how long but a while.

For Christmas, I'll be getting my son a box of 2022 BBM.