Collecting the 1986 Calbee Set

 I have been so obsessed over the past couple of years with trying to finish my 1987 Calbee set (92% of the way there!!) that it kind of escaped my attention that I am also closing in on that set's predecessor: 1986 Calbee.  So I thought I would do a little post on how that project is going since I have started to really get earnest about knocking this one off the wantlist and I might even complete it before I finish the 87s.

From the Calbee mini card era of the 1980s, the 1986 set is probably the easiest to complete (unless you count the 55 card first series of 1990 Calbee as a set on its own).  At 250 cards it is significantly smaller than the 1985 set (465 cards) or the 1987 set (382 cards) that flank it in the Calbee catalogue. It is also super helpful that, unlike those sets, the 1986 set does not have any short printed series, so all the cards are about equally as hard (or easy) to find.

Design wise the set is basically the same as all the others from the 80s and not much need be said about that.  The set is sort of notable for having one of the earliest hot rookie cards in the Japanese hobby, featuring the rookie card of Kazuhiro Kiyohara.  Sports Card Magazine identifies card 81 in the set as his official rookie, but he actually has several regular cards in the set, this one is #97:

 There is a really interesting parallel between the Kiyohara rookie and the other hot rookie card of 1986, Jose Canseco.  I remember when Canseco's 86 Donruss reached a high water mark of 100$ in Beckett and was probably the most popular card in the hobby around 1990 or so.  Kiyohara's rookie card reached a similar peak (8000 Yen).

Canseco of course had his career sidelined by injury and his well known use of performance enhancing drugs.  Despite putting up impressive career numbers (462 home runs, 1 ball bounced off of head to give opposing team home run) these kept him out of the hall of fame and he is basically an outcast in the baseball world today, a perennial weirdo who is probably just as well known for not being able to beat Danny Bonaduce in a celebrity boxing match as he is for being baseball's first 40/40 man.

Kiyohara is something close to a Japanese equivalent of Canseco.  Like Canseco Kiyohara was a power hitting superstar in the late 80s - 90s who had a mix of injuries and drug problems sideline him in the latter half of his career.  And despite finishing with even more impressive numbers than Canseco - being a member of both the 500 home run and 2000 hit clubs - he hasn't been inducted into the Japanese baseball hall of fame and may never be.  In 2016 he made headlines by being arrested and convicted of drug possession.  Since that he has basically been shunned by the baseball world, even having his high school bat removed from an exhibit covering the history of the Koshien tournament.

So the 1986 Calbee Kiyohara rookie is about as prized today as a 1986 Donruss Canseco - kind of a neat throwback card but not one anybody pays serious money for anymore.  Which is a big win for those of us putting this set together on a budget!!!

As with any set from the mid-late 80s, my favorite cards are always those of Randy Bass in one of those awesome 80s Tigers batting helmets!!!

My set is actually quite well along, I have 180 out of the 250 cards, which leaves me just 70 to go.  I added a few of those last week and am scouring Yahoo Auctions to get some more to scratch off my checklist!

Fun Fact: The B-52s video for Roam has Sumo Menko in it!

Quick post with a fun fact that I just randomly discovered: the video for the hit song "Roam" by the B-52s has sumo menko in it.

I absolutely love that song and remember it getting heavy airplay when I was a teenager in the early 1990s.  I hadn't seen the video in decades and was just watching it when I noticed a bunch of sumo menko in the background which I thought was really neat.  They appear really prominently from 2:39 in the video when 8 of them are in a kind of artistic background arrangement while Fred Schneider dances in front of them.  They also appear a bit later in the video among a bunch of other random stuff.

I'm not sure who the wrestlers are that are depicted, maybe SumoMenkoMan might be able to identify them?

Even if you aren't a sumo fan, its worth checking it out because you can never get enough of Roam.

Yamakatsu DX cards are pretty cool

 I got something new in the mail the other day:  4 of the big sized Yamakatsu DX cards from the 70s.You can read up a bit more about these sets on Dave's post here from a few years ago.  As you can see from the above photo, with some 1979 Yamakatsu cards for reference, they are pretty huge.

 I particularly like the above one of Kintetsu's Shimamoto Kohei.  The fact that his uniform is almost the exact same color as the bleachers, which are almost the exact same color as the sky, gives it a kind of cool look.  I am also a huge fan of cards with pictures that show a lot of the stadium in the background, which this card does well.

This card of Chunichi's Yazawa Kenichi, a member of the 2000 hit club, is also pretty cool.  I note that there are several different Yamakatsu cards of several different Chunichi players spread across several different sets which feature them batting in front of the same green netting.  I'm not sure why but it kind of works as a backdrop.

 The other two cards feature my least favorite aspect of some Yamakatsu cards from the 70s: the background having been cropped out and replaced with a boring blue (or sometimes green) backdrop.  I have no idea why Yamakatsu did this (seems about 1 in 5 or so of their cards from this era feature this) but it give the cards a very boring and generic feeling. It reminds me a bit of the 1958 Topps set which did the same, resulting in a truly boring set.

Otherwise though I think these are pretty cool cards.  Of course they are a double edged sword:  on the one hand they are great display pieces (at least the ones without the boring blue background) given their size.  On the other hand they are a huge pain to store!  I've already dinged the corners on two of them!