2025 Calbee First Bag

 

I bought my first bag of 2025 Calbee baseball chips yesterday after what felt like the longest wait ever.

Actually, it didn't just feel like the longest wait, it was the longest wait.  For reasons that are only known to Calbee they postponed the release of this year's set until May 5th.  

I've been buying these things for over twenty years now and this is the first time I can remember then not scheduling the release date to roughly coincide with the start of the season in late March or early April.   In 2023 I had a lot of trouble finding bags in stores in April but that was because Japan's WBC win made them sell out, not because they hadn't been released yet.

I have to say that I absolutely hate the May release date and hope it is a one off thing.  It makes no sense - the first month of the season is when fans are at their "I want to buy baseball cards now" peak.  April for those in the baseball card business should be like December for those in the toy business.  

Anyway, the set is pretty much the same as last year, which isn't saying much.  A pathetic 60 regular player cards just isn't anywhere near enough.  The checklists which normally are the only cards that have interesting photos on them this year have cheaply animated images of team mascots on them.  

On the plus side the Title Holder subset has a much nicer design this year than in recent years. But that is about the only nice thing I can say.  This is what I got from my first bag:

Baystars mascot and Dragons infielder Kaito Muramatsu - who was hitting about .140 this year before going on the DL.  Not an exciting player to be devoting a full 20% of the Dragons cards in this set to and providing the perfect illustration of how frustrating these stupid 60 card sets are.

The backs of the cards feature a remarkable innovation - they moved the card number from the top upper right corner of the card to the bottom left of it.  This is about as radical a change as you can expect at Calbee these days.

I think all this laziness and descending quality of Calbee cards is probably the result of them trying to cut corners to save costs in an inflationary economy, but this hasn't prevented them from raising the cost of the bags of chips a bit again this year, which makes it even harder to stomach.  

Bleh. Anyway, I'll try to piece the set together bag by bag with my kids again, on the plus side I think my duaghter might like the mascot cards so they've got that going for them!

1979 Calbees?

 

I picked up a pile of 1979 Calbees the other day which has got me thinking about whether they might be a realistic set build. I have, with these new ones, more than a hundred 1979s which is usually about the point at which I make the move from dabbling to set building.

There are two things that have held me back on committing to this set. The first is that it is confusing as hell. It was released in 12 series of differing sizes, and none of the cards are numbered so keeping track of them is a nightmare.  The card fronts all look the same too, just having a photo and nothing else, which adds to the confusion. Having organized them into a binder I've figured out how to distinguish them from the card backs, but the lack of numbers is a real pain in the ass when it comes to searching  for cards you need.

The other stumbling block is that two of the series (Red Helmets and CL Championship Series) are short printed and quite expensive. I think they were only released in Hiroshima, though I'm not certain. I don't have any cards from either and they only occasionally come up for sale on Yahoo Auctions, always at high prices.

Another minor point against them is that the photos on most cards are a bit more boring than the ones from other 1970s Calbee sets. Its not as bad as contemporary sets, but there are way more boring posed shots and head and shoulders profiles in this one, which makes it less interesting to me.

On the other hand, this set was issued in an interesting way that has always intrigued me. Most of the series (and most of the cards I have) feature players who received the most votes in a given month from fans. So one series would have the top vote getters from April, another from May, etc etc. Its kind of cool.

I think this one belongs in my "soft" set in progress category - I'll pick up cards I need for it when I find a deal and don't have anything else exciting to spend my monthly card budget on, but otherwise its on the backburner.

Surprsing Jackpot

 

With the new season here I'm back into baseball card collecting.  But I have no cards to buy in stores - stupid Calbee has delayed release of its set until May for some reason this year.  So I'm left to browsing Yahoo Auctions for older cards.

Last week I came across an intriguing listing from a seller who doesn't specialize in baseball cards.  It was the above pictured lot, advertised as "junk" cards from the 1990s.  The above was the only photo of the baseball cards that I had to go on, but the written description noted that it included:

1987 Calbee: 15 cards

1988 Calbee: 9 cards

1990 Lotte Gum: 30 cards

1991 Calbee: 27 cards

1994 Calbee: 134 cards

1995 Calbee: 5 cards

1994 Takara Yakult Swallows team set

I was particularly intrigued in the 1994 Calbee.  That is a fairly tough set to find cards for and is one of the few Calbee sets from the 90s (along with the 1992 and 1993 sets) that I don't have too many cards from, so this seemed like it might be a good chance to pick up a starter lot for that year.  But all I had to go on, other than the number, was this image of the stack:

So yeah, its got Hideki Matsui on top which is the key card from the set so that is good.  But what about the condition of the cards?  Matsui (and the 1995 Ichiro next to him) look OK, but that is no guarantee that all the cards in that stack will look nice, and usually when a seller describes something as "junk" they mean there is something wrong with it. 

In my experience on Yahoo Auctions lots like these are a roll of the dice.  I've bought some in the past where the cards turned out to be fine. On the other hand I've also had experiences where I've spent a lot on a big lot of old Calbees based on grainy photos and on receiving them disocvered that every card in the lot had writing or glue stains on the backs.  One time I even bought a lot of cards where every card in the photo looked like they were in penny sleeves but actually turned out to have been laminated.  That was frustrating.

In other words "Buyer beware" applies in Japan as well.

Despite that I decided "What the hell,I've hardly bought any cards in the past 6 months so I can splurge a bit" and I put a bid on it. 

I ended up winning the auction for 7750 Yen (about 55$ US).  Even for just the 1994 Calbees that would be a steal if they turned out to be in nice shape.

Would it pay off?  Several anxious and exciting days of waiting by the mailbox ensued.

Yesterday they finally arrived and I got a big surprise when I went through those 1994 Calbees.

To explain my surprise I must digress slightly.  The 1994 Calbee set consists of 144 cards.  But that year they also issued a famous 36 card regional set known as the Hokkaido/Sanyo/Kyushu set that was only sold in those areas (which you can read more about on Dave's blog here).  That set is much rarer than the regular 1994 set and common cards from it usually sell for 5-10$ each (just perusing Yahoo Auctions listings right now and there are only a handful available, starting from about that price range).  It was the first Calbee set to feature color backs and in addition to the 36 regular cards there are three cards of Ichiro Suzuki (#37 to 39) which don't seem to have been distributed in packs and nobody seems to know how they were distributed.   The Ichiros are incredibly rare (like maybe only a few dozen legit copies exist of each) and the market is flooded with forgeries of them.  

Anyway, when I got the cards in the mail and started going through the stack of 1994 Calbees I was amazed to discover that most of them (about 70 out of 134) were cards from that rare regional issue rather than the regular set.  And all of the cards (not just the 1994s) were in pack fresh mint condition!

Until yesterday I only had one card from the 1994 regional set which Dave gave me when he visited Nagoya a few years back (he lucked into a pile of them at one point too).  The pile I got yesterday had 33 out of 36 cards in the set so I am now only 3 cards shy of completing it (not including the Ichiros).  They all went straight into a nice binder!

I got pretty much all the key cards from the 36 - there are three Hideki Matsui cards and cards of Hideo Nomo and Shinjo among others.

In addition to the regionals I also got a decent pile from the regular 1994 set.  All of them were from the first two series (cards #1 to 72) and I noticed when adding them to my previoiusly owned 1994s that I don't have any from the upper two series (cards #73 to 144).  I'm not sure if this is just coincidence or if the higher numbers are rarer than the lower ones, Yahoo Auctions listings at the moment suggest there are more of the lower number ones available for sale, but also that there isn't much of a price premium for the higher numbers.  Anyway, I now have most of the first two series of that set complete (just 10 cards missing) too. 

The 1994 Takara Swallows team set is pretty cool too.  It had been opened but all the cards were there and nice and minty.

The other thing I was excited about were the 30 cards from the 1990 Lotte Gum set.  I'm about 20 cards short of completing that (out of 120 cards in the set) and was hoping that I'd get at least a few.  The cards were all in nice shape but I was disappointed to discover that none of the twenty I need were in it. There were a couple of 1991 Calbees that I needed but the cards from the other years were mostly doubles too.

As a bonus the lot also came with a pile of about 150 mint Calbee soccer cards from the early 90s (1992-93 and 1993 sets).  I've never collected soccer cards but these might get me interested and were nice to get.

So this turned out to be a nice purchase.  Every once in a while it pays to roll the dice like this!

What is happening here.

 

Takashi Yamaguchi is either giving an unidentified Braves player a back massage, or subduing him until the police arrive following a violent outburst or using chest compressions trying to resuscitate him following a heart attack only he hasn't yet noticed that he needs to turn him over to do that.

I"m not sure which, but I like cards like this with oddball photos.  This one gets bonus points for having a kei truck in the shot too, something you rarely see on baseball cards these days.  Also there are very few cards which feature pictures of one player sitting on another.

This is cared #135 from the 1977 Calbee set (or I should say one of the 1977 Calbee sets, the one with the star borders on the back that makes it easy to confuse with the 1975-76-77 set).  I picked it up the other day mainly on the strength of the photo.   

Yamaguchi had a short-but-decent career mostly as a relief pitcher between 1975 and 1982 (50-43, 3.18 career ERA) and won a few honors in that time (ROY, Nippon Series MVP, All Star).

I'm curious who the guy he is sitting on is.  

Bleh

 

Your team sucking can make you collect less, which can make you blog less about baseball cards if that is your thing.

I haven't been posting on here much for the past few months.  Normally such lapses are due to me being busy, but while I have been busy this current lapse has been due to a lack of motivation caused by this year's final incarnation of the Tatsunami era Dragons.  

Over the summer as the 2024 season which just concluded wore on it became apparent that the Dragons, despite showing some promise in the first two weeks of the season, were well on their way to yet another last place finish.  Its just really frustrating watching a lousy team lose game after game after game.  And that feeling of frustration can really drain you of enthusiasm. 

I've put up with this lousy team for quite a few years now but somehow the accumulated agro of being a fan of theirs for so long just reached a kind of breaking point for me mid-season.  As a result this was the first season in three years that I didn't bring my kids to the Dome to see a game, which I feel pretty bummed about.  But why bother when they are just going to lose (half the fun for kids is watching the post-game celebration when they win).

This kind of "bleh" feeling the Dragons gave me seeped into my collecting habits.  If I'm not motivated to watch baseball, it logically follows that I'm not motivated to buy little pieces of cardboard with baseball players on them.  At the start of the year I had planned on buying a box or two of either Epoch or BBM's set with all the hits already taken like I did in 2023 which was great fun.  But by the time those started showing up on Yahoo Auctions mid-season (why do they release them so late in the year????)  the Dragons were doing awful and I just thought "Meh, pass".

It also didn't help that the Calbee set this year was pretty miserable and only consisted of 120 cards in 2 series.  I was flipping through some sets from the 00s last night and reminiscing about how nice it was when Calbee sets had about 300 or so regular cards and some decent photography.  

Despite that, collecting the 2024 Calbee set was the only bright spot.  My daughter really likes opening the bags with me so we'd sit on the sofa after dinner and each eat a bag of chips while checking off the checklist to see if we got someone we needed.  That is just the purest form of joy that baseball card collecting offers, so the year wasn't a complete write off (my son who is now 10 wasn't as interested as he was a couple of years ago, but I suspect he'll regain his interest later in life like I did).  

Anyway the immense fun I had with that didn't rub off on the rest of my collecting activities which for the most part were dormant this year.  What spare time I've had has mostly been devoted to other hobbies rather than chasing down old Calbees that I need like usual.

One bright spot is that Tatsunami will no longer be manager of the Dragons next year.  Its not fair to lay all the blame for the team sucking on his shoulders of course (though in 3 straight seasons under him they finished dead last in all of them), but at the same time it does give some hope that things might be done differently next year in a way that might rekindle my enthusiasm for the game and my collection. 

 From past experience I know that this is just a temporary "bleh" feeling (I was a Montreal Expos fan in their final years so this is nothing in comparison) and when the spring returns I'll go nuts with anticipation for baseball like I do every year.  I hope 2025 will be a better year in which the Dragons don't suck too bad, Calbee goes back to releasing 3 Series with a decent number of cards and the other makers start releasing their sets at a time that makes sense.  If at least 2 of these things happen I'll probably be collecting and posting a lot more than I have in 2024!

Worst Snack-Card Combo Ever

 

I was at my local AEON supermarket yesterday looking in vain for bags of Series 2 Calbee baseball chips (they had them for a few days, but sold out quick) when I noticed another baseball related thing in the snack section.  They had a big display of packs of the above "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection 2024", produced by Bandai-Namco.  I hadn't heard of them before nor was I expecting them, but the artwork on the bags caught my eye.

These were bags of snacks though I couldn't tell what kind just by looking at the bag or feeling it.  I would later notice on getting it home that the tiny little orange box of text on the front which you have to squint to make out is where it identifies what kind of snack it contains (more on this below).  I was only interested in the card anyway, which was attached to the back, similar to how Calbee cards are attached to bags of chips.

They were more expensive than Calbee chips (168 Yen versus 108 Yen) and only had one card rather than Calbee's two, but I decided to give them a try and threw one in my shopping basket. 

From Bandai Namco's home page for the set I gather these were just released a couple of days ago, so I give them credit with getting them on the shelves of my local store on schedule (this is me throwing shade on Calbee BTW).  The set has 36 cards.  I don't know why they are called "Deforme" cards, I have no idea what that word means.

Anyway, I got home and opened mine up to see who I got.  Baystars Taiki Sekine:

This is what the backs look like.

I'm not a huge fan of caricature cards, but these seem pretty decent.  From the pictures on the website the set as a whole looks quite colorful which I like.   

I was thinking I might buy some of these for my kids, but I noticed for some absolutely bizarre reason that the packs are recommended for consumers "15 years and over".  WTF?  These are cartoon baseball cards, but kids aren't supposed to buy them?

This restriction made a bit more sense to me when I opened up the snack and discovered, to my horror, that it contained this:

Kaki no tane!

If you've never been to Japan you may be unfamiliar with these.  They are a crunchy snack made of rice that come with a bitter flavor that makes them almost inedible to me.  Its kind of difficult to describe in words, but they just make your mouth feel awful, similar to what you feel when you stuff pure wasabi into it (albeit a bit milder).  You often see them in little dishes mixed up with peanuts at bars for patrons to nibble at while drinking beer.  Eating them is a mild form of torture and I've never met anyone who actually eats these when they aren't drunk.

For some reason Bandai-Namco decided to sell their baseball cards with bags of pure Kaki no Tane, not even mixed up with peanuts to dull their horrid effect.  Gag.  

So I've decided not to buy any of these for my kids, and won't be buying any more for myself either, which is kind of a shame as, like I said, the cards themselves (and the packages) are kind of neat.  There is another grocery store I can hit up for Calbee Series 2 and I think I'll stick with that, for all the complaints I have about Calbee at least the chips are edible and my kids like them.  

1952 Calbee / Matsuo

 

In 1952 and 1953 Calbee produced a small number of baseball card sets that were distributed with its snack products.   These are so old that back then Calbee wasn't even called Calbee yet.  The company, identified on the card backs, was still called the Matsuo Ryoshoku Kogyou Corporation (Matsuo Food Industry Corporation) rather than Calbee. The Engel guide (in describing set JF62a) notes this confusion, stating:

 "The Calbee Company was originally called the Matsuo Company.  Apparently the name change occurred around the time these cards were being produced."    

This seems to be slightly inaccurate.  Its correct that today's Calbee was called Matsuo when these cards were produced, but the company actually changed its name a couple of years later, in 1955.  In 1952 and 1953 when these cards were produced the name "Calbee" (which appears on some of them) was merely the name of a product produced by Matsuo, not the name of the company itself. 

Anyway, that nitpicking aside, these cards are quite hard to find and only rarely come up for sale on Yahoo Auctions or elsewhere.  For many years as a Calbee collector I have wanted at least one for my collection, but every time I'd find one for auction I would inevitably get outbid on them, year after year.

Last week that losing streak finally came to an end and I won an auction for one!  It features Mainichi Orions pitcher Takeshi Nomura (listed as Kiyoshi Nomura in Engel, but his Japanese wikipedia page lists him as Takeshi.  From the same source it seems that when he joined the Senators in 1946 his name was listed as Kiyoshi, but after that season he changed it to Takeshi and thus would have been Takeshi when this card came out if I'm not mistaken).  Nomura had a satisfyingly mathematically average career - finishing with a 73-73 record  mainly compiled between 1950 and 1956 (plus a few games in 1946).  Between 1950 and 1952 he was a pretty dominant starter for the Orions, including an 18-4 record in 1950, but his career fell off pretty rapidly after that brief period of dominance (which fell right when these cards were produced).  

The card back is a bit interesting.  The text in blue ink describes a redemption in which you can send in a specific combination of 10 cards that you collect (consisting of one manager, one pitcher, one catcher, four infielders and three outfielders) and in return they will send you a prize - either a glove, a bat or a French doll.  

The red ink part seems to contain an update on the redemption as it differs from what the blue ink says.  Instead of a glove, bat or French doll, it says you can get a glove, a French doll, a harmonica or a fountain pen.  The company must have run out of bats and stumbled across a supply of harmonicas and fountain pens at some point during the sale of these. 

Some of the Calbee sets from this time period are pretty plain to look at, with promotional ads taking up most of the card fronts on some (JF63a and Jf63b in particular) but I quite liked the look of this Nomura card which is why I decided to put in a bid that was serious enough to actually win it!