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!

Star Cards without the Sparkles

 

Sparkles are missing!

There is an interesting notice that was posted on Calbee's website about a month ago which I only just noticed. As usual they issued a 24 card "Star Card" subset with Series 1 this year.  Those are commonly called "Kira kira" cards in Japanese since they have a sparkly finish on them which will reflect a pattern when you hold them up to the light.  They've been adding that to the Star Cards for many years now, but this year some of the Star Cards were accidentally distributed without the glittery finish on them (as illustrated in the above image.  No sparkles on the cards on the left, cards on the left are sparkly as intended).

According to the notice, anyone who received a Star Card without the sparkles can send in their sparkle-less Star Card and have it replaced with a Sparkly Star Card.

This got me excited and I scoured my collection to see if I had pulled any of those sparkle-free Star Cards.  Much to my delight I discovered that I had!  My copy of Go-Matsumoto's Star Card (S-23) is distinctively lacking in sparkles!  Here it is next to a Daiki Sekine card that has sparkles for comparison:

These sparkle-free Star Cards seem to be legit rarities.  The Matsumoto is the only one I have out of more than a dozen Star Cards I've pulled.  I perused the Yahoo Auctions listings for 2024 Star Cards and of the many available I wasn't able to discern any that didn't have sparkles on them (though its hard to tell from a lot of the photos).  

This is a big difference from the regular card of Hiromi Ito that erroneously listed him as 176 metres in height.  For a couple of weeks there those were getting bid up like crazy on Yahoo Auctions.  Since that initial hype-induced boom interest in those has evaporated and of the many available on Yahoo Auctions right now not a single one has a bid on it.  I just pulled one from a newly released pack (its possible to discern from the expiry dates on the bags of chips they come with how recently a pack of Calbee cards was released) which this late in Series 1's run means they probably won't correct it.  In other words, its basically just a common card of a fairly average pitcher.    

Its the absence of sellers flogging these no-sparkle cards on Yahoo Auctions after they made such a huge deal about the Ito card that makes me think these are quite rare.  Otherwise you'd expect them to be hyped up like crazy by everyone who had one and wanted to pull a quick buck.  

Anyway, word to wise to anyone who finds one of these: You probably shouldn't take Calbee up on their offer to replace it with a corrected one!

Randy Bass's "True" Rookie Card

 

I picked this 1983 Calbee Randy Bass card up the other day.  He has five cards in that set (217, 330, 355, 478 and 561) which was his rookie year in NPB.  Back in the 80s Calbee sets would routinely contain more than one regular card of players.  Actually they did that in the 90s too (when I have time I need to try to figure out which year it was that they stopped doing that).  Anyway I already have some of the other ones, but this one had eluded me for several years. 

This one is his first card in the set (#217) which I think counts as his true NPB rookie card among the five in my book (though since he played in MLB and had several American cards before that and it doesn't seem to be recognized as a rookie card among Japanese collectors).  

I'm actively collecting the 1983 set and outside of the hyper rare short printed series I have more than half of it complete so this is a nice addition.  

Its also a nice addition to my "cards with bat boys/girls in bizarre uniforms visible in the background" collection.  The horizontal red/white/blue stripes on them are pretty cool.  NPB teams in the 70s and 80s had some very eye-catching uniforms for them, including some bright yellow ones noticable on a few cards from the 70s.  These days they are a lot more toned down, and the way Calbee crops their photos you can't really see anything in the background anyway.  But in the 70s and 80s these were a nice detail that showed up on a few cards.

Opening a box of 1979 Yamakatsu

 

A few weeks ago I made a pretty good score on Yahoo Auctions: an unopened box of 1979 Yamakatsu packs.

The 1979 Yamakatsu set is, according to the Engel guide, one of the rarest Yamakatsu sets and was one I didn’t have many cards from until picking this up. Its one of the two mini sized card sets alongside the 1980 set.

Judging from previous auctions on Prestige these boxes seem to go for 300 to 400 bucks when they come up for sale, but this one flew under the radar (something that almost never happens these days) so I lucked out and got it for way less than that (about 80 bucks including shipping). Having it fall into my lap like that I decided what the hell, lets open it up. The box has 50 three card packs so I figured this would get me a decent way to the full set of 128 cards.

When you open the box up there are three albums that come with it. 

These are neat and contain a checklist of the set, but are kind of useless since they were designed to have the cards pasted in them which I am definitely not doing.

Under that are the packs! 

Each individual pack is stapled shut.  These would have been extremely easy to search had there been any valuable chase cards in them as all you have to do is pry the staple open, look at the cards, then bend the staples back.  I don't think anyone bothered doing that to these, but word to the wise if you ever see individual packs of these for sale online.

I had two opening options: rip the paper or gently remove the staples and preserve the pack.  I opted for the latter.

Lovely cards! Here is Isao Harimoto!

And Sadaharu Oh:

And.....oh yeah, this happened with two of the packs. Very frustrating to get doubles in a pack with so few cards.  Fortunately I didn't get any with triples, though that might have been neat.

Three of the packs came in a little plastic baggy.  These ones had winner cards (regular cards with a stamp on the back) which could be redeemed for one of the three albums. Otherwise they are just normal packs.

It was a lot of fun opening the packs though I didn't get quite as close to completing the set as I would have liked.  I got 76 different cards out of 128 total, so I am still 52 shy of completing the set.

The cards I still need to complete the set are:

3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 35, 38, 40, 45, 46, 49, 53, 56, 57, 62, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 108, 110, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127

Error Bag Has been Corrected

 

As detailed in my previous post error card mania has hit Japan due to Hiromi Ito's Calbee card listing him at 176 metres in height (roughly half the height of the Empire State Building for American readers still using the ancient imperial measurement system).  

A bit less attention has been paid to Calbee's other error, which was on its bags of chips.  On the back it explains the Lucky Card promotion in a green box on the upper left corner.  They made a mistake in the spelling of "Lucky" in katakana.  It should say ラッキー but instead they wrote ラッキ.  

They corrected the error on the bags and since about a week ago bags with the correct spelling started showing up on store shelves.  In the above photo I've put both versions (with the error circled in blue, the bag in the foreground is the corrected version).

What I'm curious about is if the corrected bags also contain corrected copies of the Ito card or not.  Frustratingly I've only been able to buy a few bags of the new ones since they have been selling pretty well and most stores sell out shortly after getting them in. I haven't pulled an Ito card from the new bags so I'm not sure.  Looking at Yahoo Auctions listings there are a huge number of the error cards still listed for ridiculous prices (one would think the sheer number of them available would be a signal to collectors that these are not particularly rare, yet they seem to still be attracting bids) but no sign of any corrected version yet.  This might however just be because nobody has bothered to put copies of the corrected versions up since presumably they are just common cards though.  I'm not sure.

Anyway, I've decided to keep a single error bag in unopened condition (cards and chips both included) just as a memento!