Monday, January 7, 2019

2000 Calbee Gold Signature Parrallels


The 2000 Calbee set seems to be one of the easiest Calbee sets to put together.  I'm not sure why, but Calbee cards from that year seem to have been produced in higher quantities than other years and you can find big piles of them on Yahoo Auctions for pretty cheap.  This was also the last year that Ichiro appeared in a Calbee set, which probably stoked a lot of interest in it as he was rumored to be going to the majors, which might explain why so many were purchased back in the day.

Due to its easy availability this was also one of the first Calbee sets I was able to complete, basically through bulk purchases of lots.  Among my piles I have a few with gold signatures printed on the front, like Tony Fernandez and Shinya Miyamoto in the above picture.

I assumed these were insert cards, but I'm not totally sure as they seem to have also been issued in sets as mail in prizes.  They might have been both?  Sports Card Magazine doesn't mention them in their 2000 Calbee listing, and the usually thorough Calbee Collector also doesn't mention them in his write up about 2000 Calbee.  Looking at Yahoo Auction listings it seems Calbee issued similar parallels for the 1998 and 1999 sets as well.  Google searches just get me a gaggle of ads for irrelevant Calbee stuff.

Anyway, if these were just given out as mail in prizes....that is pretty awesome.  But I also kind of wonder how I came to have several random singles mixed in with the lots I have purchased over the years.....


4 comments:

  1. Tony Fernandez played in Japan? Very cool.

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    1. Yeah, he did! I actually saw him play here in 2000, a game between the Lions and the Blue Wave. It was my only time to see Ichiro play in Japan, but I was more excited about seeing Fernandez since I'm from Ontario and he was hugely popular back in his Blue Jays days (he was my best friend's favorite player in the late 80s before he was traded to San Diego)

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  2. I was under the impression they were available as a mail in premium. You could actually get all the parallels for a Series in one shot. I got a nearly complete 1999 Series Four gold parallel set in a trade in a card shop in Tokyo back in 2013.

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    1. Yes, I've seen the boxed sets that you could get by mail order. But I've also seen a lot of singles floating around, making me wonder if they were also inserted in packs. I have no idea. Great find with that 99 set (even without the Marines cards!)

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