Worst Wax Box Break Ever: Japanese Humidity Edition

The above image I think nicely illustrates the reason why sports card makers in Japan never distributed cards in wax packs with gum.

My recently revived interest in opening junk wax when I can find it led me to another purchase on Yahoo Auctions, a full box of 1991-1992 O-Pee-Chee Hockey.

I'm mainly a baseball card guy, but as a Canadian hockey is my number 2 and seeing this selling cheaply (1,000 Yen, about 10$) I couldn't resist.

When it finally arrived in the mail I was super eager to open it up and look for Gretzkys and Roys and Yzermans.  But the second I opened the box up I realized the seller had failed to disclose a significant flaw.

Oh dear.  Every single one of the 36 packs in it looked like this:

For those who have never been to Japan, let me explain a little bit about the climate here. Its humid.  like REALLY humid.  The summers here are brutally hot and the air is so thick with moisture you could cut it with a knife.  My home country has no equivalent. 

Coming from a non-humid country living in a hyper-humid one means that I've had to get used to a lot of things that I'm not used to - mold growing on everything, having to be way more careful about how you deal with food, etc.  

But until receiving these cards it had never occurred to me that yeah, that same humidity will wreak havoc on a piece of 30 year old gum.  In Canada old OPC gum just gets hard over time so you don't have to worry much about it.  

In Japan it melts.  

So anyway, I started opening packs hoping that the melted gum would only have stained the top card on each pack.  No such luck!

AAARGH!!!  These packs have 7 cards each in them and on average the melted gum had seeped through the top 4-5 cards, leaving only 2-3 undamaged ones per pack.  In some all seven cards were stained!  

I was a bit critical of the experience of opening my 1991 OPC Premier baseball card box a couple weeks ago on the grounds that towards the end I was getting a bit tired of getting more Kirk Dressendorfer doubles. But OPC Premier had the  (at the time) underappreciated benefit of not having been distributed with gum in the packs.  

Now I think I have discovered the absolute  worst junk wax box opening experience out there.  When at the end of opening the box you are left with a massive pile of crap, including most of the cards in the box, lying in a huge gum stained mess on the sofa next to you....

Yeah, this sucked.  Right up there with spending 3.5 million dollars on a case of rare Pokemon cards that turns out to be full of G.I. Joe cards. albeit without the loss of 3.5 million dollars.  All that I could do was throw almost everything right into the garbage, which is....not nice.  

The Other Time Topps Made a Japanese Set

 

I had about a 6 month stretch in the latter half of 2021 where I stepped back from the hobby since work was so busy (I mentioned the reason for this in a post last summer, if anyone is interested everything worked out well for me in the career department in the end).

When I came back a few weeks ago, I had a hell of a time trying to catch up on what was going on.  Topps was releasing a Japanese set?  Oh, then Topps lost the MLB license and might not produce baseball cards anymore?  Then Topps got bought by some company called Fanatics which had scuppered Topps' licensing deal and now they are going to use Topps to keep making cards?  

That certainly escalated, and then sort of de-escalated, quickly.

Anyway, about Topps' NPB set I've taken a look at the reviews, particularly Dave's, and have decided to give it a pass.  "Meh, boring" seems to be the critical consensus that has formed about the set, and I have to say that I agree.  I say this while hoping that Topps will continue making NPB cards (much as I hope they continue to make MLB cards) but its just.....not THESE kind of cards.  Its a bit awkward to ask, especially with all the shenanigans you've been dealing with recently but please, Topps, make better NPB cards.

Anyway, while I haven't picked up any of the new Topps Japanese cards, I did coincidentally recently pick up some old Topps Japanese cards.  In 2003 Topps teamed up with Japanese company Kanebo (which had previously issued NPB sets in 1993 and 1994) to produce and sell a Topps set in Japan.  

The 2003 Topps/Kanebo set featured MLB players rather than NPB ones, though it has a lot of Japanese MLB players featured in it.  I found a near complete set of the first series on Yahoo Auctions (53 out of 55 cards) and decided to snag it. 

The set uses the design of the 2002 American Topps set on the front, but with Japanese text on the card backs.  They issued a larger second set of 110 cards that was based on the 2003 Topps design and looks completely different.

The near-set I bought also included a wrapper that the cards came in (above).  This brought back some nice memories for me.  My wife and I got married in 2003 when this set came out and I remember one day that summer popping into a Family Mart convenience store near our apartment (we were living in Himeji at the time, very close to its famous castle) and I saw packs of these on the shelf.  I had one of those "What are you doing in Japan?" moments which I get when I unexpectedly come across something familiar from back home (like a pack of Topps baseball cards) in a setting where I wouldn't normally expect to find it.  I always like those moments, so the memory stuck with me. 

I bought one pack, took it home and I remember getting an Albert Pujols out of it which I thought was pretty cool. There were only 3 cards in the pack though, which seemed kind of stingy to me so I didn't buy anymore and I think they disappeared from stores within a few weeks so even if I had wanted to get more I couldn't have.  

At some point in the past 19 years, those three cards I pulled got lost in all my stuff (I probably still have them in a box somewhere but who knows) and I had forgotten completely about them.  Then when I saw this big pile of them up for auction it rekindled memories of a much younger, handsomer, less bothered by nagging back and knee-pain, newlywed version of myself stumbling across the existence of this set. I just knew that I had to complete the mission that guy had started all those years ago.  So I bought it.

I think it was a great buy actually, these cards are quite hard to come by in lots like that.  There are usually a few random singles up for sale on Yahoo Auctions but no more than that.  I don't think these were big sellers back in 2003, perhaps everyone had that same "what, only 3 cards?" reaction I had and stopped buying them after the first pack.  So today they are hard to come by (which is also the case with the second set).  Now I'm just two cards short of finishing the sucker though!  I'll try to track those last two down by the end of this year (the only collecting goal I've set for myself so far this year).  

Stuff on Cards: Players Modelling Bad Behavior for Kids

 

The above is card #480 from the 1974 Calbee set. Its from the "ON" series which features various pictures of Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima.

According to the back, the photo is not from 1974 but rather from 1960, early on in both player's careers.  

This one came up for auction last week and I put a few bids on it but got totally blown out of the water, it ended up selling for 36,501 Yen (about $350 US), way over my budget.  This is further evidence that the price of cards has exploded here like they have in the US, a couple of years ago this would probably have been a $50 card.

I really just wanted it for my "weird stuff on cards" collection because this one is a doozy.  I mean this is pretty in your face stuff in terms of having a card blatantly depict players modelling bad behavior for children on a product that was meant for children.  Hey kids, look at how cool Shigeo Nagashima is when he smokes cigarettes!  I mean, I get that this card is old and views about smoking have changed a lot over the past 50 years but I think even in 1974 it should have been obvious that maybe this wasn't a great image to be showing kids.  It makes me wonder if Calbee had been producing cards during the PED era if they would have made a topical subset showing candid behind the scenes images of players injecting each other with human growth hormone or something like that.  

The card is interesting also because it makes Sadaharu Oh look pretty subservient.  It reminds me of a quote by Hiromitsu Ochiai, who was a bit of a renegade player (that I talked about in my previous post). Early in his playing days he quit his university team because he hated the way that junior players were expected to light the cigarettes of senior players and basically dote on them.  As he explained: "If I'd wanted to be a nightclub hostess, I'd have gone to work on the Ginza" (quoted  in You Gotta Have Wa).  Oh came up a year after Nagashima and it would seem from this card that he was expected to perform nightclub hostess related activities for Nagashima as a result, despite not working in Ginza.  Ochiai wouldn't have gone for that at all.

Out of curiousity, does anyone know of any other examples of cards (in the US, or anywhere, any sport) depicting players modelling bad behavior for kids?

For reference, here is some other oddball stuff  that has appeared on vintage Japanese cards:

Beer

Destroyers

Kimonos

Vintage Cars

Oden Shops

1985: The Year Calbee's Lotte Orions Embargo Fell

 

One weird thing about Japanese baseball card history is that for a 12 year stretch between 1973 and 1984 the main baseball card maker (Calbee) and the corporate owner of one team (Lotte, owner of the Orions, now the Marines) had a feud of some sort so severe that Calbee didn't produce any cards of any Orions players.

The result is that for that entire period - spanning the entirety of Calbee's golden age of the 1970s and the first half of the mini card era of the 1980s - no Orions player features on any Calbee baseball card (except the odd one who gets a cameo on the card of a player from another team).  

In the US this would be the equivalent of Topps having had a feud with the owners of the Chicago Cubs and not producing any cards of Cubs players between 1952 and 1963.  That would have been weird if it had happened, right?

I really want to know more about the details of this feud but there is very little about it out there.  The main explanation given is that the main line of business for both Calbee and Lotte (then and also now) was not baseball cards or baseball teams, but rather producing snacks.  This meant that they were competitors in their main business and Calbee, not wanting to give Lotte a  backdoor form of free advertising on their cards, refused to make cards featuring Orions players. (Edited to add: as per the discussion in the comments by twycchang, the cause of the feud seems to have originated from the Lotte side rather than the Calbee side, rendering a bit of the discussion in the next paragraph redundant, but overall the fact that these two companies were in a feud remains the same). 

While its easy to see the logic at work there, this explanation has always fell a bit short to me.  This was not solely a rational business decision, it feels like there must have been some level of personal animosity or just sheer spite involved in that move.  I mean the amount of "free advertising" Lotte would have received by having Orions players pictured on cards would have been pretty minimal on the one hand, while the benefit to Calbee of featuring Lotte players (and thus attracting fans of Lotte players to buy their chips) surely would have outweighed whatever slight advantage Lotte would have obtained.  There must be a bit more to this story than we know about, but what that is would just be speculation on my part.

Equally interesting is the question of why, in 1985, Calbee's embargo on Orions players came to an end.  Unlike the question of why it existed in the first place, my Japanese language Google searches do not turn up any theories about this.  Both companies were still competitors at the time, so the purported rationale (no free advertising) would seem to have still made sense if that were the actual reason for it.  I was curious if maybe there was a change in leadership in Calbee that explained the shift, but there wasn't - company founder Takashi Matsuo was still the head of the company and wouldn't retire until 1987 (at which point his son took over).  Its a bit of a mystery that I'm curious about - why did Calbee and Lotte suddenly make up with each other after such a long and seemingly spiteful feud?

Anyway, the result of the end of the feud was that the 1985 Calbee set was the first in history to feature Orions players.  There were some really important players who thus had their first Calbee card that year.  Notable among them were Hiromitsu Ochiai, probably the best player in NPB during the 1980s who won a remarkable three triple crowns.  He had played his first game in 1979 but it wasn't until 1985 that Calbee collectors got a card of him.  Japanese collectors consider his first card in the set (71) to be his "rookie card", though he actually appeared on cards in Takara sets before 1985. He also appears on a few other cards in other series.

Hall of fame pitcher Choji Murata also has his "rookie card" in this set even though he made his debut in 1968 and was nearing the end of his career in 1985 (and like Ochiai had appeared in Takara and also Yamakatsu sets previously).  He is very famous in Japan for having been the first pitcher to undergo Tommy John surgery (edited to note: he may have been the second), and then making a very dramatic comeback in his career afterwards.

Michiyo Arito is another notable Orion who debuted in the 85 Calbee set. Unlike Murata and Ochiai he isn't in the hall of fame, but he is a member of the Meikyukai with more than 2,000 career hits.  His biggest claim to fame, at least in English language sources, is his appearance as the antagonist in the stories of other players.  He seems to have been a kind of hard headed traditionalist who just plain didn't get along with other people. Towards the end of his playing days he took over as Orions manager and famously decided to trade away Ochiai - by far the best player in the game who had just won the triple crown - because he didn't approve of his independent attitude.  The great Leron Lee, who played 11 years with Lotte as Arito's team mate (and set the career batting average record in NPB) also had some scathing things to say about his managerial style and personality (cited in Robert Whiting's book You Gotta Have Wa).  He was a disastrous manager and the team finished last place in 2 out of his 3 seasons as manager (and only second to last in the other).

Speaking of which, Leron Lee is probably the biggest  victim of the Calbee-Lotte feud since it encompassed almost his entire career in Japan.  For reasons that I don't understand he is the only big Orions star who Calbee didn't give a card in the 1985 set.  In fact they never gave him a card at all - he played until 1987 but doesn't feature in the 1986 or 1987 Calbee sets either despite being a regular (and productive) player right up until his last season.  His brother Leon, who played for other teams, has lots of cards in 1980s Calbee sets but for some reason they never bothered to make one of Leron, which is a massive historical injustice to one of the best players in NPB during that time frame.  I don't know why that happenned - in Whiting's book it is noted that Leron wasn't very well treated by Lotte fans despite being such a great player for them, which may have something to do with it -  but I think it stinks.

Schrödinger's Junk Wax Box

In the 1930s physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with his famous hypothetical cat in a box who could be either dead or alive at the same time.  I don't pretend to understand much about quantum mechanics, but I think his point was to ridicule an idea in the field at the time which stated that subatomic particles could exist in different states of being simultaneously until someone actually took a look at them, at which point they'd have to choose one state and stick to it.  If this was true, then a cat stuck inside a box which nobody could see whose life was dependent on a subatomic particle being in one state of existence rather than the other would be both alive and dead since the particle itself would exist in both one state and the other at the same time.  

Got that?  Well, in all honesty I don't either, but the gist of it is that intelligent people were toying with the question of whether something can be two things at once until someone actually sees them, in which case they can only be one thing.  

This may seem an odd way of prefacing a blog post about a full box of 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier that I recently picked up on Yahoo Auctions but bear with me, my reasons will soon be apparent.  

I was very excited to buy this box.  I stumbled onto it kind of at random and won it for 1,000 Yen, about 10$ US.  

I remember back in 1991 packs of O-Pee-Chee Premier were - very briefly - the most heavily anticipated thing in the baseball card world. The previous year's hockey release had been a massive success, I remember packs of that disappearing from shelves in seconds and single cards from the set being highly sought after at shows that year.

Everyone thought the baseball set, which is identical in design, would repeat that success.  It came out a bit later than the other releases that year, and I remember that in the first Beckett to come out with them listed the prices were extremely high - the Frank Thomas was like 15$, way more than his cards in any other set that year up to that time.  It looked like it would be a huge hit.

But then, suddenly, it wasn't.  O-Pee-Chee predictably ran the presses overtime and made way more of these than it did for the previous year's hockey set.  When this became obvious just a few weeks after its release, demand for it tanked almost instantly.  I think the second or third issue of Beckett after its release was one of those ones where every card in the set was listed with a black downward arrow next to it.  It got so bad that a few issues later Beckett stopped listing them altogether (I might be wrong on some details here, I don't have my old Becketts anymore and am just piecing this together from 30 year old memories).   And when 1992 O-Pee-Chee Premier came out, nobody paid much attention.

The result is that this is just another junk wax set which there are still enough unopened wax boxes of out there that even a guy all the way in Japan can find them cheap (well, its actually hard to find them here but still, I did find one cheap).  

Anyway, how does all this relate to the cat in the box I started out with?  It relates to this weird idea that a thing can have two states of existence at the same time so long as nobody is looking at it.

The thing in question is the cards inside an unopened box of junk wax era baseball cards.  The two competing states of existence are 1) having value and 2) not having value.  

I have a lot of trouble getting my head around this.  When I pulled the trigger on this box, I was genuinely excited about it.  It took a few days for them to arrive in the mail over the holidays and every day I was out there checking the mailbox.  That is how excited I was.

But why was I so excited?  I hate 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier.  If someone came up to me and asked me "Hey, I have a 5,000 card box full of O-Pee-Chee Premier cards, stars included, you want it for free?" I would say "Not in a million years."

So there is this weird paradox going on.  Here is a question and response between a fictional interviewer and me on the subject:

Q: "Do you want O-Pee-Chee Premier cards? 

A:NO!!!!

Q: "Do you want an unopened box of O-Pee-Chee Premier cards?"

A: OH YES!!! That makes me so excited!!!

Q: "Because you want the box or something?"

A: No, because I want to rip it open and see those cards SO MUCH!

Q: "But you just said you don't want O-Pee-Chee Premier cards."

A: "Yes, that is right, I hate them."

Just run this test on yourself.  Look at the below photo.  You want that, right?  Not because you want the pack, but because you want to open it up to see what is inside, right?

Now look at this photo, of the above pack after being opened.

Ugh, Jose Offerman.  You immediately do not want these anymore, right?  And that would be the case even if it was Ken Griffey Jr. on the front, right?

In other words, while these cards are in the pack they seem to simultaneously both have value and also have no value at all to you.  You see the pack and you want to open it to get the cards, which means the cards themselves have value to you.  But at the same time, these cards have no value to you because they are useless junk wax cards that you hate and just don't want the hassle of owning.

Well, by "you" in the above paragraph I really mean "me" but I suspect there are a lot of others out there who know this feeling.  We want junk wax cards only when we can't see them because they are inside a wax pack.  As soon as we open that pack, they become loose junk wax cards that we don't want.  Logically we should therefore keep them in the wax pack, but we don't want the wax pack to remain intact, we want to open it to get the cards we don't want.

The only way of resolving this logical paradox is to recognize that when we buy a box of junk wax we aren't really buying a box of junk wax.  We are paying for the experience of opening a box of junk wax, which retains some value to us.  For a couple of hours I enjoyed pretending it was 1991 again and I was excitedly opening the first box of O-Pee-Chee Premier baseball cards of the year.  

Well, actually its an exaggeration to say I enjoyed it for a couple of hours.  The first few packs were fun, but a wax box of a 132 card set isn't the same experience as a wax box of a 792 card set.  You get a lot of doubles.  Mostly of Kirk Dressendorfer, Juan Bell and Gary Scott who are in that set for some reason.  And with each new Dressendorfer, it slowly becomes less an enjoyable experience of opening wax packs and more an unenjoyable experience of being the owner of more and more Kirk Dressendorfer 1991 O-Pee- Chee Premier cards.  But for the first 1/3rd or so of the opening, I was getting the experience I paid for and enjoying it.

Since then, I've been stuck with a bunch of 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier cards that I didn't really want, even though I really really wanted them. 

Happy New Year

 Hi everyone.  Been a while since I posted, hope you are well.

Thought I`d do a little one of those year end wrap up type posts that are so popular among bloggers at that time when we put new calendars on the wall. 

2021 was a quiet year on the blog - just 25 posts all year, and none since August.  That is way off 2020`s blistering pace of blog output.  Work is mostly to blame, I have been too busy to devote much time to the hobby or blogging about it.  It looks like this will continue until about February, after which I should be able to get back to blogging again. 

Even if it hadn`t been for work, I`m not sure I would have much to post about anyway, at least in terms of picking up neat new things.  The market here has gone crazy and I`m just not able to buy cool old menko and other cards the way I used to, even just 12 months ago.  Prices are through the roof and they`ve gotten to the point where I`ve had to declare "I`m out" on a lot of stuff I used to be able to collect.  

So for 2022 I`m basically keeping my expectations modest.  The menko collection probably isn`t going to get many new additions, but I`ll keep plugging away at my old Calbee sets.  The prices on those have gone up a fair bit too, but not as much as the old menko have so they are still within reach.  And I`ll keep an eye out for whatever else tickles my fancy.

That is about it for now.  I`ll leave you with this random weird thing I found. Someone on Yahoo Auctions has a decent 1962 Topps Stan Musial card for sale here.  I just love the way they spell his name in Japanese.  If you can read that katakana across the top it says "Stan Museum". Probably just a typo, but it has a poetic ring to it.